Commentary

In her review of Arabella Edge’s The God of Spring (ABR, March 2006), Melinda Harvey asserts that the novel is ‘classifiable as “artist fiction”, that boom genre of literary fiction ...’ a genre that involves, she declares, ‘a kind of “painting by numbers”, which is why it’s not surprising that many of its best exponents, Edge included, are graduates of Creative Writing departments’. I am not interested in arguing with Harvey’s analysis of Edge’s novel: it is her casual dismissal of works by ‘graduates of Creative Writing departments’ that concerns me. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard similarly purse-lipped comments, variations on the ‘this author is a writing school graduate (sniff) – and it shows …’ theme, I’d be – well, I’d have a jingle in my pocket. I can only assume that such jaundiced remarks spring from some misapprehensions about, or perhaps a studied indifference to, what graduate writing programmes actually involve. As a graduate of one such programme – I was in fact one of Arabella’s MA classmates— I am glad to be given the opportunity to help dispel some common, but decidedly mistaken, notions.

Biographers like to start their versions of the life of Samuel Barclay Beckett by wondering if he left the womb on 13 May 1906, as his birth certificate indicates, or on Good Friday, April 13, as he claimed. This time the master of grim humour and existential doubt isn’t having a lend of us – it was black Friday – though his claim to memories before that passage are more doubtful. Nevertheless, for me, the Beckett myth is born with the story of when he was a boy growing up in Foxrock, outside Dublin, fearlessly climbing a sixty-foot fir tree in the family garden. Standing atop, with his arms spread wide, he launches himself into the sky like an Anglo-Fenian Icarus; apparently, he had always wondered if the lower branches would catch him. Finding that they did, more or less, this naturally became the ten-year-old’s favourite pastime. To his mother’s horror, he repeated this plummet over and over again, and he didn’t always injure himself.

The Sydney Morning Herald has been ‘Celebrating 175 Years’ all year. The words adorn every front page; the Herald ran a number of commemorative features to mark the actual anniversary on April 18; and The Big Picture: Diary of a Nation, consisting of essays by journalists and photographs from the Herald’s magnificent photographic library, has been published (see John Thompson’s review in the March issue).

After attaining a low-luminosity arts degree, I worked for a year as a handyman in my university’s Research School of Physical Sciences. This was in 1972, when the new particle accelerator was being installed in its massive concrete tower; its assembly made my humble handyman job one of the most intriguing and happy employments I have had. We bolted together the sandblasted steel pipes for the SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) coolant, first larding their joints with gaskets of white gunk. In a lofty workshop dominated by the monstrous ex-Krupps steel mill (a German war reparation), we hefted the odd magnetron on chainblocks that our master-craftsmen might more conveniently prepare it for installation. We crawled into the cavernous interior of the accelerator’s ‘tank’ to grind at weld-burrs until the steel surface had no tiny irregularity to which the fourteen million volts intended for the apparatus could distractingly zap. To this smooth surface we then applied a silver paint until we stood, spattered angels encompassed by our weird reflective heaven. We watched the precision tubes being installed through the centre of this tank by lanky experts from Wisconsin, knowing how, within these conduits, the particles were to be accelerated by that impressive voltage toward targets the size of my thumbnail in collisions that would explain the universe finely.

Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on other fronts – studying for a PhD on speech rhythms in an Aboriginal language, learning a new language (Russian being the latest) and, more recently, working on a set of prose translations from the Swiss-born French poet Philippe Jaccottet. I find there’s a wonderful sense of release and revelation in being guided by another’s voice, especially a voice as fluent, emotive and original as Jaccottet’s. My day job as a linguist with a speech-technology firm means that I also deal on a daily basis with language data – at times, two to three languages at once. I find I am a ‘globalist’ when it comes to language, and also, therefore, to poetry. I am just in love with the fact that each language brings with it a new horizon of experience; and each good poem does the same in miniature.

On December 7, the Australian parliament passed the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005. According to Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, the new legislation places ‘Australia in a strong position to prevent new and emerging threats and to stop terrorists carrying out their intended acts’.¹ Most controversially, the law introduces new sedition offences. But it also grants additional powers to the security services, most notably the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Of interest to me here are the provisions allowing the police to restrict the liberty of people who have neither been charged with an offence nor detained for questioning. The AFP may now apply to a court for control orders which could require a person to wear a tracking device, place them under house arrest, bar them from working in certain professions, or prohibit their use of the telephone or the Internet. A control order could be issued for twelve months at a time and would be renewable. Anybody contravening such an order risks a five-year jail sentence. The new law also provides a preventative detention régime. In conjunction with complementary state and territory legislation, the law allows the authorities to detain suspects for up to two weeks at a time.

The future of the Australian picture book would appear to be in very good hands. The most recently published writers include familiar names such as authors Hazel Edwards, Margaret Wild and Gary Crew, and author–illustrators Deborah Niland and Roland Harvey. What makes the latest offerings stand out, however, is the plethora of new and emerging authors and illustrators who are venturing into this genre. Such a combination of experienced and innovative approaches can only be good for Australian children’s literature.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the brave new world of Museum Expansion Incorporated. Do you have an overstuffed museum? Is it situated, perhaps, next to an urban area in need of a makeover: some rotting docklands, say, or an abandoned flour mill? Are you privy, alternatively, to plans for a combined retail/office/residential development in need of that one extra component to give it the ultimate lift? Then buttonhole a politician eager for a good news story for a change, generate a pile of capital works grant applications, and take out some philanthropists for a really long lunch. You are now free to commission an architect or two. Either young and keen, or old and eminent, it doesn’t much matter as long as they have a creative vision expansive enough to sustain an innovative piece of ‘destination’ architecture.

On Saturday, 3 December 2005, the day after Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore, David Marr contributed a major article, ‘Death of compassion’, to the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review section. A year earlier, Marr had made a welcome return to the SMH following his spell as host of Media Watch. He is always worth reading: informed by broad interests in the arts, politics and religion, an ongoing commitment to investigative journalism following his years at the National Times, and sometimes by moral outrage, Marr’s writings are some of the most elegant and insightful to grace Australia’s daily press.

This particular Saturday, I finished reading his piece feeling curiously frustrated. Marr explored public reaction to the execution, from the deliberately low-key strategy of the convicted drug runner’s legal team and supporters to the public campaign they ran to save him following his failed appeal for clemency. The article was based on a central premise: ‘roughly half the nation was happy to see him [Nguyen] swing.’ The evidence for this claim? ‘Talkback.’