Commentary

On-air banter. It’s a staple of radio and television shows seeking to project a friendly, accessible image. Think of the chats between Steve and Tracy on Today, and Mel and Kochie (and, increasingly, their viewers) on Sunrise. Chats between news, sports and weather presenters are routine. It helps if the weather presenter is gorgeous, zany or eccentric, such as Tim Bailey on Channel Ten’s 5 p.m. news in Sydney or the semi-retired Willard Scott on the NBC Today show. (There was never any evident warmth or banter between Channel Nine’s Brian Henderson and Alan Wilkie, one of the few actual meteorologists on air.) The presenters are meant to seem ‘just like us’ as they yarn about their weekends, their birthdays and their children. Some of the chats, particularly between radio hosts, are designed to personalise and promote interest in what’s coming up on the next programme.

One of the phrases used by the Swedish Academy to describe J.M. Coetzee, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is ‘scrupulous doubter’. In his novels, memoirs, essays, lectures and academic criticism, Coetzee conveys the uncertainty and complexity of lived experience with extraordinary precision and, sometimes, with a clarity that is almost unbearable. Coetzee’s work is triumphant confirmation of the allegiance owed by literature to nothing except the truth of the human condition. His art succeeds despite, or rather because of, the fact that it is so alive to all the problems of form and content standing in its way. His prose communicates difficulty, dissonance and doubt without itself being any of these things.

In his Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa writes that ‘the defining characteristic of the literary vocation may be that those who possess it experience the exercise of their craft as its own best reward, much superior to anything they might gain from the fruits of their labours’. Coetzee himself has written that the ‘feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not emerged, that lies somewhere down the end of the road’.

The other day, in a stairwell within the National Library of Australia, I opened a door, expecting it to lead to a corridor and a suite of offices. Instead, I found myself inside a dimly lit room filled with rows of book-laden shelves. As I looked for the exit, I saw a man removing a book from the bottom shelf. Another man walked past me carrying books and said hello. It was like a scene from Being John Malkovich, surreal and delightful, and it characterises my last few months at the National Library, where I have been curating a two-part exhibition, In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–2000 (the first part, which deals with the processes of colonisation, opened on 9 October 2003 and will close on 26 January 2004, and the second, focusing on modern life, will open next August).

Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven’t thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist’s role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity.

Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his Durack Range, which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses.

The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the Dead Heart was then to be found in Russell Drysdale’s inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen’s Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira’s delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan’s own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.

At the outset, I acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose ancestral land Queensland’s first university stands.

It is now approaching eight years since I retired from the Bench. In the time since then, I have effectively ceased to be a lawyer. Consequently, I do not feel qualified to offer any really worthwhile professional advice to those of you who are setting out on legal careers.

The most I can do is to urge you to be true to your own personal principles and to the ethical standards which are essential to the proper practice and administration of law in this country. That having been said, I venture to share a few thoughts with you about the nation, which will be increasingly reliant on the leadership of people like yourselves as it passes through its third half-century.

The year 1937 was the centenary of the death of modern Russia’s first great poet, Alexander Pushkin. Celebration was mandatory in the USSR, and it wasn’t a good year to ignore the dictates of Stalin’s bureaucrats. So the Soviet satirist Mikhail Zoschenko takes us into a grim but determined apartment block in Moscow, past a slap-dash artistic rendering of the great poet wreathed in pine branches, into a room where the tenants are gathered and a slightly flustered youngish man is preparing to speak. There is a general doziness and smell of old onions.

This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of Australian Book Review. Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived and thrived, through changes of editor (though not very often) and of editorial policy (though not very much); through changes of appearance, ownership, sponsorship and affiliation.

The Underside of the fish is just as tasty as its upper flanks. Life is also like that. And leadership is not just a matter of will, power and grandeur not just like A.D Hope’s image of such power when he writes in ‘Pyramis’:

Primo Levi, in two interviews given almost twenty years ago*, set a standard of critical sympathy that is not only exemplary, but peculiarly apt to the fraught debate about the post-September 11 world and the USA’s place and reputation within it.