HEAT

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, the Weekend Australian editorial devoted considerable time to savaging the dominant 1970s model of indigenous development, most closely associated with Nugget Coombs: a ‘neo-pastoralist dream [that was] philosophically flawed, a fatal fusion of romanticism and Marxism’. Helen Hughes, in an excerpt from Lands of Shame in the same newspaper, echoes the sentiment, labelling the re-creation of remote communities ‘reverse racism’. Hughes writes: ‘a few courageous leaders are demanding an end to welfare dependence, but their voices are drowned out by articulate élites.’ Enter Noel Pearson, whom the paper’s editorial applauds, along with John Howard. The Australian also published an edited version of the fifty-page article ‘White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for a Radical Centre’ that appears in Griffith Review 16.   ‘White Guilt’ puts flesh on Pearson’s well-known objection to welfare and his emphasis on individual indigenous ‘responsibility’. He looks to early black-American models of liberation, including those of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, for inspiration. It will surprise no one to learn that Pearson favours Washington’s approach, in which ‘blacks should secure their constitutional rights through their own moral and economic advancement’, over Du Bois’s call for ‘ceaseless agitation’. Pearson firmly believes that public policy should encourage the most disadvantaged people in society to change the way they think about themselves, rather than the way the majority thinks about them. While acknowledging that racism originates at a systemic level, Pearson argues that it is a ‘terrible thing to encourage victims … to see themselves as victims’. The consciousness of Bill Cosby, he suggests, would be a good role model. Pearson draws extensively on the black American Shelby Steele, who argues that white guilt, in the form of affirmative action, for example, erodes black agency by making blacks feel helpless: ‘agency’, Steele believes, ‘is what makes us fully human.’

As with most issues of HEAT, The Persistent Rabbit is consistently excellent. Still, there are degrees of excellence. Compare the essay by Barry Hill with those by Chris Andrews and Stuart Cooke. Hill’s discussion of Ezra Pound’s Orientalism is proof (which these days we need) that scholarly rigour need not be obscure and, conversely, that accessibility doesn’t equal dumbing down. Plus, Hill writes majestically and, when appropriate, with sardonic wit or bluntness. Andrews and Cooke have both written fascinating, commendable essays, Andrews on the Argentinean novelist César Aira, and Cooke on two Mapuche (indigenous Chilean) poets, Leonel Lienlaf and Paulo Huirimilla. But in contrast to Hill’s essay, their pieces are less alive, less complete, less exhilarating.   In this issue, the fiction resonates more powerfully than the poetry (although the poetry is uniformly solid, the best of it potent and playful). Michelle Moo’s ‘New Gold Mountain’ is a taut satire of colliding voices set in a colonial goldfield, Mireille Juchau offers a beautifully observed story about a girl and her family, and Julia Sutton delivers a sharply funny tale about an artist who is, or isn’t, being threatened by a terrorist. Best of all is Barbara Brooks’s poignant ‘fictional memoir’ about the narrator’s grandfather, a veteran of colonial India lost in his memories. 

As with most literary journals, Heat 21 is a curate’s egg. Notably, Without A Paddle shines when in analytical-critical, essayistic mode. The poetry and fiction are rather more prosaic, with a few exceptions: Ken Bolton in fine form; Michael Hofmann’s beautifully spare poetry. Hofmann’s poem prefaces an extended interview with the poet and German-English translator; his responses are humble, full of sly humour.

The key theme of HEAT 19 is death. In 224 pages, a collection of Australian writers and academics pay homage to the departed in a range of essays, poems and short stories. The journal opens with Judith Beveridge’s moving and personal tribute to the poet Dorothy Porter. According to Beveridge, ‘Dot’ (as she was known to her friends) was a ‘consummate professional and her public performances were unfailingly polished’. However, Porter ‘also had a very fragile side, vulnerable to the pain of exclusion and rejection’. The title of Beveridge’s piece is ‘Trapper’s Way’, which is the name for a strip of land in the New South Wales suburb of Avalon where Beveridge once lived with Porter.

In an excellent essay on the poetics of art criticism in this issue, Robert Nelson writes of the nature of rapturous poetic perception: ‘Suddenly the world is larger, more meaningful … one reality gives onto another and the world is seen as an extension of the ways that you might imagine it.’ HEAT consistently provides its readers with opportunities for such aesthetic insights.

Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox with a subscription form.

The idea that literary journals gain something by being yoked to a single theme seems to me one of the mildly dubious aspects of the enterprise. I suspect the tendency grows from a fear of disorder – ‘the anarchy of randomness’, as Adam Phillips puts it. But if these organs do require some unifying concept, it should ideally be a determination on the part of their contributors not to be herded into acquiescence with any one position. The true pleasure to be had from their pages is the jostle of selfhoods, the dust and din of competing subjectivities, rather than a communal reinforcement of, or opposition to, the status quo. As with any muster, it is the breakaways that provide the best exercise.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.