Commentary

Those fortunate enough to hear Professor Liu Haiping speak on ‘Universities in a Changing China’ in Melbourne last month were given much food for thought. As Dean of the School of Foreign Studies at Nanjing University he has been at the centre of a period of rapid change in Chinese higher education.

I don’t suppose Rosemary Sorensen could have continued forever at ABR’s desk. All the same, I believe she has manoeuvred the journal into a liveliness other magazines lacked. It’s a cheerful thing to see the ABR flourishing, its covers in the public face in newsagents about the country: something that few other literary review journals have managed to do, outside their city of origin. Try, for example, to get a copy of Southerly, Westerly, Northern Perspective, Island, LiNQ or Imago across the counter anywhere outside their states of origin.

Long live who?

On a current affairs segment devoted to the events in Rwanda an Israeli doctor spoke with a great sense of purpose about the work he wad doing to save lives, especially those of Rwandan children. I feel so proud to be here, he told the interviewer, pointing out how the water he was providing to the patients could make all the difference between life and death. There was no denying his commitment, but there was something in his answers which subtly conflicted with his humanitarianism. Another interview followed with an African woman, an army nurse, who was forced to attend to the Rwandan refugees by virtue of her employment. When asked how she felt about the situation, she replied, with admirable precision, that it was horrible. This response clearly perplexed the interviewer. Of course, the crisis itself was ‘horrible’, but surely her role in it partook of the heroic. He tried again: Yes, but how do you feel? A long pause, and then her angry reply: I don’t want to talk about my personal feelings.

When I discovered that a novel set in my native Newfoundland had won the 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize, I was a little surprised. Newfoundland, isolated and little known outside Canada, seemed an unlikely setting for an acclaimed novel.

Asked to write about the notion of being a New Woman, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s peroration, delivered by Pamela Rabe in A Room of One’s Own: ‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’

A few years ago I found myself grouped with some other poets and given a label: ‘Generation of ‘68’. Like most tags it became after a while more a source of irritation than anything else. The description had been given by John Tranter to the inmates of his 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry, but before long had become a term of collective abuse as such labels tend to. One of the identified failings of this group of writers was their propensity for ‘game-playing’. So when Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray included poems by one of the ‘sixty-eighters’ in their anthology, The Younger Australian Poets, they prefaced Tranter’s pieces saying they had chosen things which, unlike most of his work, were not purely ‘language-game’ poems.

On a weekend when the Melbourne Age and the Australian could muster barely three book pages between them and only one review of a work of fiction, I went to an exhibition of Juan Davila’s recent work. The paintings were visceral, fierce, transgressive, shocking. Here was art disdainful of demands for beauty, art that took the notion of aesthetics into the dungeons of the mind. And it set me on edge.

Despite the protestations of my close friends I choose to regard myself as a normal person. Only at certain times of the year do I realise how tenuous are my links with the mundane world.

One of these trou­blesome occasions is when I prepare my income tax form.

In October 1993 I picked up a copy of Window, the ‘Weekly Hong Kong Newsmagazine with Exclusive Coverage of China’ and found in the Business and Finance section a Profile, ‘Bob Hawke’s Eagle Eye in Asia’. There was a photograph of the Eagle, who described himself as a ‘business commentator and facilitator of increased enmeshment in Asia’. This was certainly a confident label. Reading on I discovered that Hawke saw himself as ‘overwhelmingly responsible for the vision of Australia as part of Asia’. He told the reporter than in his first days as Prime Minister he had used the phrase, ‘our future lies in enmeshment with Asia’, a sentiment that was at first greeted sceptically, but now, Hawke claimed, ‘no one questions the wisdom and correctness of Hawke’s vision. No one.’ Emphatic stuff, claiming sole credit for long term shifts in opinion and cultural practice, while dismissing the doubters. If that was all there was to my theme, this would be a very brief history indeed.