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.

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).

In 1890, at the age of forty-four, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba – accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager – decided to become a photographer. There is no record of his ever receiving any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the confines of his local community with his camera.

In 1975 Corkhill’s daughter offered the National Library his collection of glass plate negatives, which had dwindled over the intervening decades to about 1000 in number. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through Corkhill’s eyes, he, too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.

Is anti-Americanism one of the last respectable prejudices in Australia, or are cries of anti-Americanism a way of silencing reasonable criticism? At the risk of being injured while straddling the fence, I will argue that, although the Bush administration has often behaved like an imperial bully-boy, the US has become the whipping boy for the anxieties of many nations and people. A broad anti-Americanism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due to the resentment many feel about US power and the policies of this administration. Although I sympathise with many of its critics, the associated slide of many Australians into anti-Americanism is unfortunate. Presidents come and go, but America’s importance in our world and imaginations is much greater. Besides, the US is far too diverse to hate.

There cannot be many literate people left in the world today who have not heard of the appalling looting of the Iraq National Museum earlier this year. This followed the evacuation of the building on April 8 by museum personnel who had been safeguarding the site (in some cases sleeping there) up until that point. What ensued was a nightmare of cultural carnage involving an unknown number of looters who, according to Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos (head of the Joint Inter-Agency Coordination Group investigating the looting of the museum), made off with approximately 13,500 objects.