Essays

Andrew Fuhrmann’s acclaimed Fellowship essay on the theatre of Patrick White closely examines these brilliant, problematic plays and draws on interview material with key directors closely associated with White.

Thirty years ago, I walked out of the railway station at Le Puy in the Auvergne region of the Massif Central of France, put most of my belongings in a locker at the station along with a note in schoolboy French explaining that I hoped to be back, and then walked over the horizon at sunset. I was embarked on my discovery of the Velay and the Gévaudan.

There’s no ASIO file on me, not even a mention in someone else’s file, according to my keyword search. It’s almost insulting, given that I spent several years in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and later, as a Soviet historian in the United States in the Cold War 1970s, was suspected of being soft on communism. My father, the radical Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick, had an ASIO file, of course. They even trailed him in the 1950s – or at least trailed someone they thought was him, a man of ‘repulsive appearance’ wearing a hat and an overcoat, neither of which he possessed. He would have been tickled both by the surveillance and the blunder. They had a file on my mother, Dorothy Fitzpatrick, too, although they got her middle name wrong. It wasn’t from her days of real left-wing activity in the 1930s, but from the 1950s, years that were among her most miserable and least political, when she was doing a teachers’ training course at Mercer House and then teaching at the Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. To ASIO she was an also-ran to suspected communists of more dominant personality like Gwenda Lloyd; probably they included her mainly because of her marriage to Brian. ‘Same views as her husband’, one informant reported, which hardly does justice to a natural contrarian.

In describing the enduring cultural impact of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – published fifty years ago and often nominated as the best spy novel ever written – a good place to start, strange though it may sound, is James Bond. John le Carré’s squalid yet subtle world of Cold War spies may appear antithetical to the glamorous fantasy of Bond. But it is clear from the last three Bond films, and especially the latest, Skyfall (2012), which of the two visions of espionage, Fleming’s or le Carré’s, is the more mature and compelling.

Wandering through the Mawson collection at the South Australian Museum one winter afternoon, I stare through the glass at the reconstruction of my great-grandfather, Douglas Mawson’s room in the hut, the sound of a moaning blizzard in my ears. The eerie sound of the wind coming through the installation, so familiar to Mawson and his men, is strangely alluring. There is something calming, almost hypnotic in its rhythm and repetition, as if I am literally being drawn into their world and their time. Yet I am also aware of its destructive force. John King Davis, who was captain of the Aurora on Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), 1911–14, likened it to ‘the shriek of a thousand angry witches’, its constancy keeping them ‘for a seeming eternity the pitiful, worn out impotent prisoners of hope’. Some entries in Mawson’s diary comprise only one written word, ‘blizzard’, followed by successive days of ‘ditto’.

To estimate the amount of waffle in a cultural policy document, try this patented test: (i) identify a given sentence or section; (ii) highlight the key terms; (iii) swap the key terms around. If it still makes as much sense, it’s waffle. Another way of saying this is that there are always two people responsible for cultural policy. The first is reasonable, knowledgeable, historically aware. The second is a nutbag, droning on about specious targets and unprovable effects. The first writes things like ‘government’s role in supporting culture is most visible in the major cultural organisations it funds’ (Creative Australia, p. 32) and ‘there is a need to nurture the most gifted and talented while providing for those who want to take pleasure from arts and culture’ (CA, 69). The second writes baloney like ‘the benefits of our cultural and creative assets must be maximised. Innovation across all industry sectors is essential to driving productivity growth, maintaining high standards of living and growing competitiveness in the global economy’ (CA, 92). Why can’t we just have the first person? Why does someone who sounds as if he has swallowed a Treasury manual with the words in the wrong order thwart the sense of all government intervention in the cultural sector?

A human body exposed to summer heat can be reduced to bones in nine days. First the flies and maggots feast on the body’s fluids. As the tissues decay, they feed on the whole body through orifices and wounds. Next the insects and predators gorge on the juicy maggots. Once the body has begun to decompose, in come the beetles that tuck in to the tougher flesh, skin, and ligaments. In Australia the intestines of herbivores are a delicacy for the dung beetle. Then moths and mites feed on fly eggs and hair. Meantime, the bacteria are busy, helping the body to decompose and recycling the nutrients. Is that, I wonder, what happened to our Brahman bull Angel?

‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1846. His title was ‘The Literati of New York City’; his topic was the discrepancy, as he saw it, between the critics’ private opinions of books and the polite reviews of them that appeared in print. Literary criticism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century, Poe argued, was essentially corrupt: a matter of back-scratching, currying favour, and chasing after influence, power, and money.

The morgue in Gunbalanya holds no more than half a dozen corpses – and, as usual, it was full. When the Old Man died in the wet season of 2012, they had to fly him to Darwin, only to discover that the morgue there was already overcrowded. So they moved him again, this time to Katherine, where they put him on ice until the funeral. The hot climate notwithstanding, things can move at glacial speed in the Northern Territory, where the wags tell you that NT stands for ‘Not today, not tomorrow’. The big departure had stalked and yet eluded the Old Man in recent years. Now he would wait six months for his burial. Only then would he be properly ‘finished up’, as they say in Gunbalanya, a place rich in many things: poverty, and euphemisms for death, among them.