Letters - March 2006

Walk the path Dear Editor, I was stimulated by Tamas Pataki’s essay ‘Against Religion’ (ABR, February 2006). That monotheistic God is a product of infantile separation anxiety is a familiar and plausible view. Pataki’s observation that ‘religious identity easily becomes an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression’ also rang true for me. Likewise his remark that ‘bullying is an inseparable feature of monotheism’. Yet the essay was entitled ‘Against Religion’. I’d be interested to hear what Pataki has to say about faiths that don’t fit the monotheistic mould. Are they just as delusional and dangerous to liberality and the rule of law? I’m thinking of religions that stem from the Vedic root (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism). Take Theravada Buddhism. I believe it teaches that one’s role in life, rather than fretting over God, is to liberate oneself from the negative conditioning of the mind that causes one to broil in all the addictions of the material world. It teaches that happiness can be achieved here and now, in the moment. One achieves it by spiritual practice, and no amount of appealing to Buddha or to saintly people or to God can subvert the impersonal laws that occasion suffering and happiness. I know there are popular forms of Buddhist practice that make use of a ‘non-corporeal attachment figure’ as a spur to meditation and behavioural change. In these, the Buddha or a saint stands parallel to Jesus in Christian practice: a being that may be asked to intervene in one’s life. However, my understanding is that this is expressly against the teachings of the Buddha, who warned repeatedly against deifying his memory and personality. He said that everyone must walk the path himself, and that no one can be carried on anyone’s back. Therefore it would seem that Buddhism advocates independence and a rational acceptance of personal responsibility. Furthermore, it is pluralistic in outlook and does not advocate the domination of unbelievers or consign them to hell. Certainly, all the Vedic creeds contain complex metaphysics. But whether this is evidence of delusion is debatable. John Charalambous, Glenrowan, Vic. Fanatics and their followers Dear Editor, Your essay ‘Against Religion’, by Tamas Pataki, is so relevant in today’s climate of religious fanatics and their chanting followers that I just hope it finds a larger audience. The contemporary world is like the Middle Ages revisited, and one wonders about the process of human evolution. Or has it just stalled? I hope that the readers of ABR will spread the news about this essay. John Hay, Bellingen, NSW Against Freud Dear Editor, Tamas Pataki’s ‘Against Religion’ requires far more of a reply than a letter to the editor. A few brief comments must suffice. As a ‘liberal’ Protestant, I bow my head in shame at all the pain and suffering caused in the name of religion. In so much of what Pataki has written, I agree with those criticisms. However, while apologising to some of the readers, he nevertheless seeks to dismantle religion altogether. There is just one glint of revelation in paragraph five: ‘that (nearly) all religion is a disease born of fear and an untold misery for the human race.’ If only he had expanded on the nature of ‘nearly’. It would have spoiled his title and brought a welcome element of pluralism in a quiet but utterly dogmatic attack on religion. Paragraph six: ‘Religion springs from fear, conceit and cruelty.’ Would he please explain the ‘conceit and cruelty’ of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism; all these seem to do enough damage without the help of religion. Are these quasi-religions; and what, by comparison, is atheistic materialism? Is this latter somehow quite self-evident? Pataki’s attachment to Freud is remarkable, especially with Freud’s love of myth to explain things, e.g. Oedipus. Pataki doesn’t seem to need any scientific authorities after Freud. Where are the current neurological investigators such as Oliver Sacks, Ramachandran and Matt Ridley? These and many others are leading where Freud may only have dreamed of going. Ian Scutt, Camberwell, Vic. Religion – an apologia Dear Editor, I cannot allow the La Trobe University Essay ‘Against Religion’ by philosopher Tamas Pataki to pass without comment. One of the attributes of a truly intellectual person, as distinct from a mere academic, is an openness to contemplate and discuss ideas, in a balanced and in-depth way, even if this leads to a conclusion not originally anticipated. If a writer is clearly seeking the truth of the matter under discussion, then one does not expect to find in an essay gratuitous references to the views of supposed authoritative scholars, selected to bolster the writer’s arguments. Religion is essentially an experiential subject, and whereas Pataki finds the writings of the atheist Sigmund Freud accommodating to his own views, I am prepared to ‘toss my hat into the ring’ with an equally eminent authority, the psychologist Carl Jung, who famously replied, ‘I do not believe. I know!’, when his views on the existence of a deity were sought. M. Scott Peck, in his useful book, People of the Lie, warns against the insidious arguments of those who would persuade their audience by the means of selective quotations. I look forward to ABR’s publishing an essay with a contrarian view to that expressed by Tamas Pataki. Graeme Wilson, Camberwell, Vic. If we don’t do it, who will? Dear Editor, Sincere thanks to those who wrote in with encouragement and advice for the anthology of Australian literature that many of us are hoping to see. The broad support for the idea raises the question of why we don’t currently have such a thing. Ken Goodwin, who has been there before, sensibly asks for Australian literature, like Opera Australia or the Australian Ballet, to be maintained as part of our cultural good (Letters, ABR, February 2006). But who pays? Goodwin notes the real and growing interest in India. The same is true of China, and other less populous places. We are not used to factoring such contemporary audiences into consideration of our literature. In Australian Humanities Review (December 2005), Ken Gelder describes ‘the idea of a representative Australian literary anthology’ as ‘fanciful’ from one perspective and warns against the slide into cultural diplomacy, where projecting the ‘national’ becomes a way of attracting cash. Yet if we don’t represent ourselves, who will? The question is how best to do it. Any anthology – the word derives from Greek for garland of flowers – is necessarily a miscellany, however well arranged, and therefore provisional. It grows from the work of others, such as the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Peter Kirkpatrick, the current president, reassures us that Australian literature is not as fugitive as might be feared (Letters, ABR, February 2006). ASAL is renewing itself: like opera and ballet, literature needs its advocates. In ‘Going Global’, an essay in Meanjin last year, Kerryn Goldsworthy chronicled the decline of ASAL’s Parody Night as Australian literary studies diversified to the point where ‘there were almost no texts left that most of the audience could be assumed to have read’. Parody Night was retrieved at ASAL 2005 by the reprise of two classic parodies from earlier decades – Brian Matthews of Lawson, and Ken Stewart of Brennan – but also by Kirkpatrick himself, who showed by reading his ‘Bucolic Plague, or, This Eco-Lodge My Prison’ to laughter and applause that there are new kinds of common ground. All of which suggests that the time for a fresh anthological investigation may have come. Nicholas Jose, Adelaide, SA Science and subjectivity at ADB Dear Editor, There is nothing mysterious or conspiratorial, as Paul Brunton seems to imply (ABR, February 2006), about the way names are chosen for inclusion in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). When the regular volumes are being planned, each state working party is allocated a number of places roughly corresponding to the relative size of its population during that period. As the lists are being drawn up, rough checks for occupation, gender and ethnicity are applied, mainly as a guide to the relevance of the collection as a whole to the evolving story of the Australian people, but also as a check for blind spots in the selection process. Many variables are involved in making decisions, though, with the less obvious candidates, there is probably more subjectivity than science. People’s lives and achievements do not conform to neat criteria or patterns. Some die too young, which affects their reputation; others outlive their contemporaries and the halo of longevity. For some, there is a lovingly tended and documented reputation. Others, especially without family to revere their achievement, are elusive to the point where it is simply not possible to produce a verified 750-word entry. But most of these normal criteria did not apply to selection for the ADB Supplement, 1580–1980, where we were simply working from a list of names thrown up over the years, or suggested by readers and reviewers, or by those who came to seminars we held on the project. The list was sifted for the obvious omissions: people unusual enough to make an interesting entry, or others who appeared to fill a gap opened in the main volumes by the direction of recent research. Because the usual demographic constraints were not relevant, we tried to correct for the undoubted under-representation in the earlier volumes of women, Aborigines and figures of local significance who had missed out in competition with more widely known and recognised names. It is unfortunate that nursing, teaching and social work were, for many years, the only occupations through which women could win any kind of public recognition, and that often it was confined to the community in which they worked, so they may seem over-represented in the Supplement, as minor politicians were over-represented in earlier volumes. Paul Brunton is in fact reflecting the traditional bias of those early volumes in considering the work of the stock and station agent more worthy than that of the cookery teacher. Beverley Kingston, Chair, NSW ADB Working Party Getting the facts right Dear Editor, Richard Johnstone is obviously a skimmer, not advisable when you’re reviewing two books at the same time and you end up confusing the contents, as he has done in his review of Noeline Brown’s Longterm Memoir and my Much Love, Jac X (ABR, February 2006). Margaret Fink and I are good friends of thirty years’ standing. She has never ‘kept me waiting’ nor made me feel ‘hurt and resentful’, as Johnstone reports, and there is no such implication anywhere in my book. However, in her book, Ms Brown relates exactly such an incident happening to her (see page 156). A trivial error to some, but not to me. I may be a shallow ‘self-confessed luvvie’, but I loathe sloppy work, especially from an academic. It is no excuse to say that Noeline’s memoir and mine are similar. They are clearly not. Our careers have had very different trajectories. In more than forty years, we’ve worked together in only one production, and, though on good terms, we seldom mix socially. Furthermore, while my dander’s up (as it was when I read another academic’s unfair hatchet job on Michael Craig’s beautiful memoir, The Littlest Giant, in the September 2005 issue of ABR), let me say it often puzzles me why some reviewers insist on reviewing the book they wish they’d read instead of the one they actually did read, and, in Johnstone’s case, not very thoroughly. I did not set out to write an historical reference book, but rather a collection of personal and professional recollections, to be read as a story, which is precisely why I insisted on having no index. Even so, there is a comprehensive list of my work at the back, and detailed impressions of that work throughout, which ought to suffice for such a memoir. I give Johnstone’s review an F. Jacki Weaver, Camperdown, NSW Forgiving the neophyte Dear Editor, There is an unintended irony in Paul de Serville’s review of my book on the life and times of Hubert Wilkins, The Last Explorer (ABR, December 2005–January 2006). Despite his astounding achievements, Wilkins was regularly dismissed by contemporaries such as Douglas Mawson as a self-taught amateur and eccentric – this despite his recognition by some of the world’s leading scientific academies and the prescience of much of his work. It is not surprising, there-fore, that my biography of Wilkins is similarly dismissed as the work of a quirky amateur. Paul de Serville is unconvinced by the detailed source notes, and must appeal to an unnamed ‘authoritative biographer’ for confirmation. Said authority merely repeats the same old easy dismissal of this overlooked figure in Australian and world exploration. I can accept being relegated to a mere shadow of a much earlier biography of Wilkins by the British aviator John Grierson, even if the work was dismissed by Wilkins’s family and friends as inaccurate. However, I am disappointed to be accused of mere paraphrase (of what I am not sure). Innuendo is not becoming. Paul de Servillle claims I presumptuously narrate the story myself (though the personal pronoun makes two brief appearances, at the beginning and the end) rather than allowing Wilkins’s own voice to be heard. Yet, at a rough count, there are around 200 quotations from Wilkins’s copious writings, and dozens more from the many witnesses to his remarkable life. Much more and I would become an editor of his collected works, surely? It is true this is my first written biography, although there’s a long track record of historical documentaries that have been viewed all over the world. Forgive me the neophyte effort. Perhaps an uncomfortable reminder that Australia’s ‘professional’ historians have singularly failed to consider Wilkins’s life before? The remainder bins are full of biographies of far less significant characters, as Paul de Serville may know. Simon Nasht, Avalon, NSW

Walk the path

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