Commentary

Authenticity is a prized but rare commodity in politics. Few politicians are credited with having it to begin with; it is even more difficult to maintain during a political career. Part of the problem is that when politicians seek to understand and please the amorphous public, they generally turn to pollsters and advisers who end up scripting their words, campaigns and governing strategies. These gurus will even inform them what food is most appropriate (sandwiches with regular mustard, not Dijon, as one of Obama’s aides told him during a visit to a diner in southern Illinois). Public appearances are selected based on voter resonance, though sometimes with jarring results, as with the appearance of then New South Wales premier, the urbane non-motorist Bob Carr, at the opening of a drag-car racing track. Male politicians are told to wear earthy colours to appear more manly. Those who end up on a television debate are advised to keep away the frowns and scowls, even when their opponents twist the truth.

In The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of the nine Philip Roth novels in which Nathan Zuckerman plays a major role, the young Zuckerman uses a family squabble over an inheritance as the basis for a short story. His father is appalled. Why would Nathan depict his own family in such an unflattering light, perpetuate negative Jewish stereotypes, and give ammunition to anti-Semites? ‘You are not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it’s the truth,’ his father despairs. ‘But I did write it,’ Nathan replies. ‘I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story.’

Traditionally, there has been an almost physical force, like a law of gravitation, making Australian literature’s visibility in the United States an elusive phenomenon. This is not, contrary to received opinion, because Australian literature did not meet world standards. It is hard to conceive of Christopher Brennan, Joseph Furphy, and John Shaw Neilson not meeting ‘world standards’. What does this mean, anyway? It seems to indicate not just that the work is of merit but that it is aware of wider literary and cultural conversations. Brennan and Furphy’s overt intertextualities show their enmeshment with global literary developments. Neilson’s cosmopolitanism, as Helen Hewson has shown, is there, but is admittedly more difficult to discern. Yet Neilson’s poetry makes demands that show that pure poetry can be as indicative of sophistication as heavily allusive verse, as in ‘Song Be Delicate’:

Becoming a resurrectionist, a digger-up of dead bodies, was not a conscious career choice for me. Yet, along with two colleagues, I find myself accused of just that. We occupy this position because we have recently edited and published two previously unpublished works by Sir Walter Scott: The Siege of Malta and Bizarro (Edinburgh University Press, edited by J.H. Alexander, Judy King and Graham Tulloch, £45 hb). The appearance of our edition provoked a storm in a tea- cup in Britain, beginning with the Scotsman’s weekend edition, Scotland on Sunday, and spreading from there to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times. The storm died down quickly, but the issues remain.

John Reed would have relished it. He could have stood in Times Square in mid-October and watched as the neon newsflash chronicled the fall of capitalism as we know it. And felt the tremor. The difference now is that the ripple effect of seismic events spreads almost instantly. As Wall Street gyrated, banks in Iceland collapsed, and British police departments and local councils faced billion-dollar losses because their investments in Iceland had suddenly gone sour. British bobbies investing in Icelandic banks? Why on earth? That’s a wisdom-in-hindsight ques-tion, of course, but wisdom has been running so far behind delusion for decades that one wants to ask it anyway. Thomas Friedman began his New York Times column for October 19 by asking, ‘Who Knew? Who knew that Iceland was just a hedge fund with glaciers? Who knew?’ His repe-titions underscored the absurd face of the financial tragedy. The implications of the question – who is responsible? – reverberated around the world.

For the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, I was the professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. This is an annual appointment, open across the range of disciplines that lend themselves to the study of Australia, so that my predecessor, Jim Fox, was a member of the department of anthropology, and my successor, Iain Davidson, is now working in the depart- ment of archaeology. I joined a large and vigorous department of history, which has about fifty members.

Some months before I left, the head of department asked me to prepare a course guide for my first semester of teaching. To help me, he sent a copy of one of his own recent course guides. It was quite adequate: the lecture pro- gramme, reading list and assessment procedures were all set out. But to anyone teaching in an Australian university it looked decidedly scant, the sort of handout that might have passed muster twenty years ago, before university learning and teaching committees began to insist that generic skills and key learning outcomes be specified for all subjects.

It has been an extraordinary political war. Conventional wisdoms and long-standing assumptions have flown out the window. The final choice is remarkable: a young, ‘cool’ and detached African American who abjures commitment versus a decided, indeed hot-tempered, maverick whose entire essence is commitment. Long gone is the ‘inevitable candidate’ whose gender is now represented on the opposition ticket, as a vice-presidential candidate no one came close to predicting.

I hesitated before deciding to see Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at La Boite in Brisbane this year. Revivals, even under ideal circumstances, can be chancy. The author, Ray Lawler, had reservations about the presentation of his signature work in the round, and so did I. More than fifty years had passed since he wrote it and since I saw it performed behind a conventional proscenium arch in Brisbane, with Lawler himself playing Barney. A story about manual cane-cutters would seem to my children as remote in time and place as one about stokers on a steamboat would have to me, when I first saw the play. Then, there were few, if any, mechanical cane harvesters. There was still plenty of work for rural, manual workers. These were hard, strong men who bankrolled themselves in the season in order to take their leisure afterwards in the big smoke: not just cane-cutters but also shearers, drovers, fencers, fruit pickers and contract miners in Mount Isa and Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill and other distant places.