Commentary

Fourteen Nobel Literature Laureates – along with Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic and renowned playwright, and Jiri Grusa, acclaimed Czech writer and President of International PEN – have urged Senior General Than Shwe of the Burmese Military Junta to release Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other imprisoned Burmese writers. These include 74-year-old editor U Win Tin, who is serving twenty years’ hard labour, and poet and journalist U Aung Myint, who was condemned to twenty-one years’ imprisonment. In a letter delivered to Burmese embassies in Bangkok, Berlin, London, New Delhi, Tokyo, Washington DC and other cities on April 13, Havel and the Laureates wrote:

Drew Forsythe chasing chooks was not enough. I vividly remembered those moments at the Parade Theatre in 1972. To anchor a scene in rural Australia, the director had given two lordly roosters a brief strut on stage, and Drew was only just managing to keep their strut to the desired brevity. I needed, however, to remember more. The play was The Taming of the Shrew, and the setting, quite radically for the time, was Padua via Mudgee. Hence the chooks. John Bell, if memory served me correctly, did the taming, and Drew certainly did the chasing, but was Robin Lovejoy the director? The taxi was rapidly nearing the Mosman home of Lovejoy’s widow, Patricia, who had offered his paintings, photographs and papers to the National Library. Graeme Powell, the National Library’s Manuscript Librarian, and I were to assess the collection, and at such moments context is important. I had consulted the Library’s biography files and found information on Lovejoy’s career as one of Australia’s leading directors of theatre and opera from the 1950s to the 1970s, but had not found any mention of a production of the Shrew.

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.

In a much-quoted passage at the end of the General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes remarked, with some whimsy, on the power of policy intellectuals like himself:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.

The city of Aveiro is compact yet important, with wealthy foundations in the industries of fisheries and salt. The bright white cobblestones of the town’s historical centre evoke its economic history: rock salt crystals with darker cobbled nautical motifs (anchors, rope, fishes). Tiled walls in blue (azulejos) are both practical in the salty air and signal sea. Broad salt pans nearby bless the air with a refreshing sea breeze, the Portuguese equivalent of the ‘Fremantle doctor’. The bright, white light is almost Western Australian in quality.

The National Library holds a vast array of items relating to Australian childhood. Within the general collection there is the literature itself, ranging from the first children’s book published in Australia (Charlotte Barton’s A Mother’s Offering to Her Children, 1841) through sundry omnibuses, to the latest work by Ursula Dubosarksy or Andy Griffiths – not to mention the glories of the John Ryan Comic Book Collection. This material is supplemented by biographies and autobiographies, and by a wide range of non-fiction publications documenting childhood in Australia. The Newspaper and Microform Collection is also a major resource in this area.

This vast amount of material is hugely amplified by holdings in the Library’s special collections. Among Oral History recordings are a great number of interviewees from all walks of life, who have given accounts of their childhood experiences. These range from Mary Gilmore’s recollections of the 1870s, through to the experiences of street kids in the 1990s. Likewise, the Library’s Folklore Collection incorporates children’s play songs and nursery rhymes. And the Oral History Collection includes Professor Fiona Stanley’s recent National Library Kenneth Myer Lecture on the subject of children’s rights and welfare.

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).