Commentary

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.

I was always going to be a novelist. At the age of six, I wrote fiction about a Willie Wagtail, whose best friend was an ant (even then I had a good grasp on relationships). Several years later I had moved on to human protagonists, mainly young girls living at boarding school and excelling at ballet. I had no experience of either, but I had my dreams. As an adolescent I wrote stories about homelessness and drug addiction, once again from vicarious experience. Then I went to university to do a literature degree and realised that great Australian novelists were serious, learned and (then) mostly male. I still wanted to write my novel, but I decided to live a bit first.

I suppose our lives gain intensity through meetings with remarkable men and women. Occasionally, we encounter certain people whose rich inner lives mesmerise us and make us feel awkward and uneasy and out of place. Mr Manoly Lascaris had such an impact: he decentred people, made them lose confidence, made them feel physically uncomfortable, through his silence, his mundane chatter, his eccentric wisdom and the strange way he had of transforming domesticity into an exercise of virtue.

First, though, comes respect and the need to open yourself to your subject. The dialogues recorded in my book Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (2008) are about thoughts underlying, or succeeding, particular events; they present the story of someone’s life at peak moments of mental realisation. The book is neither a biography nor a journalistic account of events and episodes. It records thoughts, ideas and conclusions in retrospect, as the culmination of the act of living and the art of thinking.

One of the National Library’s newest treasures, and probably its most significant acquisition in the past twelve months, is a small theatre playbill printed in Sydney and dated 30 July 1796. At 211 years old, it is the earliest surviving document printed in Australia. The playbill was presented by the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, to the then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, at a ceremony held at Parliament House on 12 September 2007. It advertises performances of three plays at the ‘Theatre, Sydney’: Jane Shore; The Wapping Landlady; and The Miraculous Cure.

John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Senator Bronwyn Bishop (imagine it!) – that is the John Button Australia knows. His achievements have been many and they are exemplary.

Every biography holds at least three stories, all of which, though very different, are closely linked. First of all, of course, there is the story told on the page – the story of someone’s life. Just below that is the story that consists of bits left over, all those awkward jagged pieces of raw or irrelevant data that have been eliminated. Some rejected from the beginning, others taken out at the last minute after much thought. But pervading the whole, though they may not be directly part of it, are the experiences and opin­ions of the people who provided so much of the information, whose life stories are invested in the final book.

In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.

‘Poetically we dwell …’ Heidegger wonderfully essayed, borrowing a phrase from Hölderlin. The phrase has been in me for a long time, feeding notions of how poetry might be inseparable from a form of life. When I was writing books connected with Aboriginal culture, the poetry seemed to come out of the ground, almost literally. There, in the performance of sacred song, with each step and syllable, a poetic existence was acted out, and all in the open air, a singing of the body in the public place. The ground and the body were painted, but there was no writing to speak of. The poem was voiced from the Dreaming, the poetic key to reality, as W.F. Stanner put it. Everything was vitally connected with everything else.

Lately, I have found myself taken up with a poetic dwelling that belongs indoors or, if not inside, then along a set of thresholds, and with such refinements and thorough literariness, that it presents a whole other illustration of Heidegger’s maxim. For it seems that a thorough-going model of poetic dwelling can be found not just on the ceremonial grounds of the archaic, but in the exquisite routines of the pre-medieval court in Japan, or more particularly, in the world of the shining prince of eleventh-century Kyoto, where, for a hundred years or so, women excelled in the most passionate brushwork, writing their Japanese freely in the tremulous air, you might say – air left to them by the men whose official duties and exclusive rights to formal education obliged them to inhabit the Chinese language.   

For decades the Bulletin had lurched from one prediction to another of its decline or demise. ‘The Bulletin is a clever youth,’ its co-founder, J.F. Archibald, famously predicted. ‘It will become a dull old man.’ In 1946 a ‘Letter to Tom Collins: Demise of the Bulletin’, by the philologist Sidney J. Baker, appeared in Meanjin. In 1961 the Bulletin unknowingly published Gwen Harwood’s sonnets which contained an acrostic, ‘so long bulletin’.

The execution, when it finally came, was swift. On 24 January 2008, staff were told the magazine would cease publication immediately. A bloodless press release followed. There was no poetry, no clever literary hoax, not even the dignity of one more issue to farewell the readers.