Commentary
It’s usually said that Australians are uninterested in the metaphysical. Where in America the lines between the secular and religious are notoriously blurred, not least in their politicians or sporting heroes invoking God on almost every conceivable occasion, Australians by contrast are held to be a godless lot, their mythologies entirely secular in form and meaning. God is rarely publicly invoked, except by ministers of religion whose particular business it is duly to do so.
... (read more)On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work.
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The question is probably all wrong. How can an American – well, an Egyptian-born American, if hyphenate we must – pronounce life on Australia? I came to the Antipodes late in my life, drawn to the Pacific, that great wink of eternity, Melville called it, drawn to horizons more than to origins. I made friends and became in Australia a wintry celebrant.
... (read more)Jackson's Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime place by Daryl Tonkin and Carolyn Landon
I first heard of Martin Boyd at a dinner party in the Cotswolds in the early 1980s. At the time I was adapting a novel by Rosamond Lehmann for the BBC, an enterprise with unexpected hazards, as Rosamond was very much alive and keen to be involved in the process. I had just begun my account of driving to the studio with Rosamond – a formidable and still beautiful woman, who relied on God to solve her parking problems – when the guest of honour, sitting opposite me, interrupted.
... (read more)During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as a black one.
... (read more)The last thing a highbrow hack needs is to find himself in a sustained bout of controversy with a blockbusting writer from the other side of the tracks. A few weeks ago at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I found myself a participant in a discussion about reviewing (and whether the critic was a friend or a foe) which rapidly turned into a sustained accusation on the part of the bestselling novelist Bryce Courtenay that I and the chairman of the panel, Professor Peter Pierce of James Cook University, were literary snobs with no conception of any popular genres in general and no apprehension of the critical injustices (and personal pain) which Courtenay in particular was subjected to by us and all our ilk.
... (read more)A player of the calibre of John McEnroe constantly thrills his audience with strokes so perfectly timed that they appear effortless and lethal – and it is this combination which regularly amazes spectators. They may at times sense that what contributes so effectively to this timing is an early preparation of his strokes. He seems always already ready. It is, I suspect, only on fewer occasions that an admiring audience can see, and appreciate, what lies behind that: an ability, seemingly an uncanny one, to anticipate the play of the opponent. So uncanny sometimes that spectators come close to laughing, embarrassingly, at the supposed ‘luck’ of the player – to manage even to ‘get the racket at’ some extremely difficult or unexpected shot by the opponent, but then perchance to hit it for a winner. But the wise audience ‘knows’ that only the exceptional player has such ‘luck’ and has it so often. It is uncanny.
... (read more)I opened up my last issue of ABR to see my photograph. It’s there because I was mentioned at a conference at La Trobe as evidence of an ascendant antiintellectualism. I suspect my new reputation as a villain on the black hat side of the Culture Wars has a lot to do with my play, Dead White Males, or, more accurately, the fact that the play proved popular with audiences. Dead White Males satirised the dominant theology of the humanities, variously called postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, social constructionism or what you will.
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The Australian literary scene has always been more depressing that it is lively, especially when critics and writers are quick to display their battle scars in public places where oftentimes the debate hardly rises above fawning or fighting. The walking wounded are encouraged to endure. This is about the only encouragement extant. I remember the Simpson episode, not O.J. but Bart, who arrived in Australia for a kick up the bum. Perhaps the emulation of Britain has reached such an unconscious proportion that no ground can be explored beyond the grid bounded by Grub Street and Fleet Street, where youngsters need to be caned for reasons more prurient than wise, and where small ponds become the breeding pools for goldfish pretending to be piranhas dishing up more of the same stew. Thus, British writing, apart from its internationalists, hath come to this sad pass. Or where, given the brashness of being itself a young nation unused to finesse, Australia’s grand ideals end up as populist opinion – a talkback republic of letters irrelevant to its real enemies.
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