Rebecca Starford, managing editor of Kill Your Darlings, writes back to Geordie Williamson’s Long View essay on Australian rural writing and wonders: what does this trend of privileging the rural story say about our culture more generally?
Geordie Williamson’s ‘Our Common Ground’ is an erudite and engaging essay on rural Australian life represented in literature. But I was surprised to find myself quoted within it, and the implication that I do not appreciate this literary tradition.
‘I can only claim to have read three of the books on the list – Silvey, Flanagan and McGahan. But I already see the same patterns in selection evidenced in recent Miles Franklin shortlists – masculine novels that disproportionately focus on events from the past (are we so fearful of examining contemporary Australian society?) as well as bush settings.’
My comments on the 2012 National Year of Reading’s recommended reading list can be found, in full, in the Liticism post Geordie quotes. They’re neither radical nor particularly original – the debate about the underrepresentation of women in Australian literary prizes has been raging for the last year or so. In the case of the National Year of Reading list, only one woman writer featured; seven were men.
I took issue with the National Year of Reading’s lofty claim to be the arbiter of ‘what it is to be Australian’. I don’t think anyone can argue that a list including only one woman articulates the genuine Australian experience. Nor can a list that has virtually no ethnic representation (with the exception of indigenous Australians).
I have an interest in such questions about Australian literature: I’m an editor and publisher. I’m also a member of the Stella Prize committee, a group dedicated to establishing a prize celebrating Australian women’s writing, as well as initiating research into national reading habits and trends based around gender.
In my comments to Liticism blogger Bethanie Blanchard, I also made note that many of the National Year of Reading texts are set in the past and/or the bush. ‘What do we miss when we mount arguments about the state of contemporary Australian literature,’ Williamson went on to ask in ‘Our Common Ground’, ‘without recourse to its foundation texts?’
I couldn’t agree more with these sentiments – a literary critic must be immersed in the literature he or she aspires to critique. But what does this trend of privileging the rural story say about our literary culture more generally, a genre that has 200 years of masculine, Anglo and heterosexual parameters?
I’m not lambasting our rich vein of bush writing, mind you, and Williamson’s inspiring analysis of some of our finest literary practitioners should send any discerning reader running to their local bookshop. As it happens, I have read a great number of novels located in the bush. I’m a huge admirer of Thea Astley, David Malouf, Kylie Tennant, Elizabeth Jolley, Xavier Herbert, just to name a few (I will never claim to be a fan of Patrick White). Going further back, I count the wickedly subversive 19th-century novelist and short-story writer Barbara Baynton (the subject of my thesis at university) and Rolf Boldrewood two of my favourite writers of all time.
What my comments urged for was a greater degree of reflection about the implications of these lists and prizes, and how they shape our literary culture. With 89% percent of our population living in urban areas, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world – so it’s not odd to wonder, is it, why so many of these award-winning novels are located in the bush?
Williamson cites the dangers of polarity is this debate, how easily nuance and complexity is lost. I agree with his assertion that the embedded and unexamined assumption that literature from the bush is ‘inevitably conservative, exclusionary and passé’ denies the intricate relationship between the division of rural and urban Australia.
Yet it’s the issues behind this discussion that are most revealing and interest me most. As many of us would agree, much cultural debate in this country is bereft of nuance and complexity – it doesn’t matter if it’s about a price on carbon or football codes. Conversations about the sensitive subject of our national literary tradition are unlikely to be any different.
Increasingly, I’m aware of this apparent fear of examining contemporary social and cultural issues in Australian fiction, and how this trepidation is evidenced in the awards system. The best historical fiction, as we all know, casts a sceptical and interpretive light onto events of the past, often illuminating the contemporary human condition. But are we so nostalgic for the past that it turns our gaze from more recent social wrongs?
We’re not so keen on reading about such squeamish contemporary domestic issues – where are the prize-winning works about the Stolen Generations, the Forgotten Australians, the federal intervention in the Northern Territory, asylum seekers, internment camps, mining and destructive climate change? We’re happy to sing the praises of a novel like The Secret River (and well-deserving it is) but something nearer to our own experiences, to our own time and place, causes us to shy away.
There are some novels that buck this trend, of course. Look at the phenomenal success, both critically and commercially, of a novel like The Slap. Here was a novel of our time that spoke to a particular reader of a particular milieu, the crass bourgeoisie stewing in their own ennui. Occasionally, other suburban novels, like Steven Carroll’s superb The Time We Have Taken, have been given the nod by the Miles Franklin judges. But look carefully at the subject matter of these novels – how deep do they analyse contemporary Australian society, how unflinching is their gaze? And even The Time We Have Taken is set in the past …
Williamson claims a personal interest in bush writing: he grew up on a farm near Grenfell, a small town in NSW, the birthplace of Henry Lawson, the granddaddy of the bush tradition. I was born in Melbourne in the mid 1980s, and I grew up in Williamstown, a small suburb in the west of Melbourne (a town where, incidentally, 19th-century novelist and journalist Ada Cambridge lived for two decades). Like Williamson, my own experiences have informed my taste in literature. I enjoy many Australian novels with a rural setting, have studied and in turn appreciated their literary precursors; but I would like to see the narrow definition of the Australian experience broadened – and more of my world represented in our national literature.
Rebecca Starford is the associate publisher at Affirm Press and managing editor of Kill Your Darlings. She was part of our Critical Failure panel on book reviewing in 2010, which you can watch online.
When the University of Melbourne’s undergraduate course in Australian literature was not offered last year, there was an uproar – not just from the literary community, but from the students themselves, who organised their own Australian literature study group. The university was quick to reassure appalled onlookers that the subject was only resting; it is back on the syllabus this year.
This year, the university is dismantling its Australian history undergraduate program – and dramatically cutting back its Australian studies program overall. The Sunday Age recently reported that the teaching staff for the university’s Australian Centre will be cut back from 4.9 to one full-time position, a director. It ‘will effectively become a research-only centre, with postgraduate students and no undergraduate students’.
The student response has been noticeably non-existent. Which surprises no one: undergraduate Australian history has recently had the lowest enrolment of all subjects at the University of Melbourne.
La Trobe University has no undergraduate Australian history program either. Sydney University is also struggling to get numbers in first-year Australian history, compared with strong interest in American and European history subjects.
‘Schools killed Australian history,’ wrote Christopher Bantick (former head of history at Trinity Grammar in Kew) in the Age yesterday. He said it has been reduced to ‘a brain-deadening subject where nothing happens.’
Anna Clark, who interviewed 250 history teachers, students and curriculum officials from around Australia for her book History’s Children, agrees. ‘‘There is a real turn-off that comes out of school education when it comes to national history … It didn’t matter what school they went to or what region they grew up in, kids I spoke with said Australian history was often dull and repetitive,’ she told the Australian.
‘In Grade 6 you sort of study the same things as Year 10 … It’s just like you do the same thing over and over and over again,’ said one typical Year 12 boy.
Marilyn Lake, president of the Australian Historical Association, agrees that kids are put off the subject by learning it at school. She is critical of the way history has been taught, particularly the increased focus on military history over the past 15 years. More money has been spent on educating children in military history than any other field of history in Australia, she says.
She believes this was a deliberative initiative by the Howard government to ‘literally … change the subject’, moving away from the much-debated history wars and 19th-century massacres of indigenous people to the 20th-century wars fought by the Anzacs and their descendants.
‘The line run about Australia having proved its values and identity in war is related to the fact that we now seem to be always at war. In other words, this [has] normalised war.’
But while Lake is concerned that the dominance of military history in our schools is putting students off the subject, Clark found in her research that the Anzac legend is the one area of Australian history kids warm to. The most hated topics were indigenous history, because of the repetitive the way it is taught, and Federation, which even one teacher confessed was ‘sort of mind-blowingly dull’.
The future for teaching Australian history, Lake told ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra last week, is folding it into global history rather than teaching it as a stand-alone subject. At La Trobe University, where she is chair of the School of Historical and European Studies, one undergraduate subject that has gained rather than lost enrolments in 2012 is Global Migration Stories, which incorporates a good deal of Australian history. The subject, which is four years old, is an example, she says, of the need to think in new ways when it comes to teaching Australian history.
Trevor Burnard, head of the school of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, concurs that students are ‘less interested in exploring Australian identity and more interested in exploring Australia in the wider world’.
Lake is hopeful about the future of teaching Australian history in schools, and the new national history curriculum, currently in development. ‘From what I’ve seen of it, I think it looks very progressive and exciting to me.’
And as for Australian history in universities, she says students do come back to it later, after an undergraduate gap year – in second and third years, and when they’re doing their honours.
The Wheeler Centre’s Australian Literature 101 series launches this Thursday, with Ramona Koval talking to Wheeler Centre director Michael Williams about Watkin Tench: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. This free event will be at the Wheeler Centre from 5.30pm. Bookings are recommended.
Watkin Tench was one of the texts featured in last year’s popular Must-Read Histories event, which you can now watch online.
Portable patriotism. (Source: Stephen Barnett/Flickr)
Today, ideas of national identity, patriotism, community and equity come to the fore in the Australian imagination (sharing real estate with flags and barbeques, perhaps). Drawing on events held during the past year, we’ve put together a list of viewing recommendations for your public holiday.
Prior to the arrival of Captain Cook and cohort, Australia’s indigenous population carefully managed their environment, making use of fire to rejuvenate the land and manipulate the movement of fauna, historian Bill Gammage explained.
The appearance of European colonialism planted the seed of today’s reconciliation debates. We explored this debate – covering treaty, social justice and opportunity – in our Not Sorry Enough discussion. Larissa Behrendt discussed the challenges of overcoming indigenous disadvantage, while Sarah Maddison presented an argument for how mainstream Australia can move beyond white guilt.
A South Australian Corroboree (1864) by WR Thomas, from the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. (Source: WikiCommons)
Iconic storyteller Thomas Keneally presented his take on early nationhood and Australia’s regional racism in his Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation in December. Race and Aboriginal politics were amongst the myriad topics addressed in a marathon two-hour interview between Paul Keating and Robert Manne, with some of Keating’s sentiments echoing Manne’s earlier polemic regarding our national political complacency. Also cautioning against complacency, Susan Mitchell spoke of the potential disaster of a Tony Abbott victory.
We held many discussions on the state of our democracy. We asked whether it was broken, dumbed down or going nowhere fast, and for how long we might remain the lucky country. Tim Soutphommasane presented his case for why progressives should embrace National Service, and one of our Intelligence Squared debates focussed on the question of whether our soldiers should be in Afghanistan.
In a series of events, we paid tribute to our country’s literary heritage, whilst writerly alumni of the University of Melbourne’s Janet Clarke Hall celebrated their colleagues. As for contemporary literature, the 21 titles comprising the 2011 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist provide a compelling picture of our nation’s writers today.
Finally, in our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series we explored the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Doubtless, many such stories are being shared as you read this.
In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.
It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.
‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’
In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.
‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.
He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.
Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.
It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.
Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.
The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).
Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.
Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).
Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’
Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)
This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.
The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.
The year in Australian politics was one characterised by tumult, indifference and a degree of soul searching – but there were big changes, too. Julia Gillard succeeded in introducing the controversial carbon tax, which some argued in our Intelligence Squared debate would have questionable effect on climate change. Facing off against record growth in emissions, the bills' passing marked a legislative defeat for climate change denial and earned Gillard a place in Atlantic’s top 50 Brave Thinkers of 2011.
Leadership
While the PM fended off suggestions of internal party dissent (and the niggling threat of a Rudd challenge), and grappled with the challenges of a minority government, the broader question of leadership took the spotlight this year. In her Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, Christine Nixon argued that Gillard is a progressive, consultative leader who has been wrongly judged against an outdated model.
Speakers debating the proposition that ‘Both Major Parties are Failing the Australian People’ lamented a lack of ‘real policy debate’ and questioned the ability of Labor and the Coalition to ‘govern for all, but also to govern for the national interest’. And Susan Mitchell courted the ire of the Opposition and its supporters when she criticised Tony Abbott’s ‘narrow worldview’ and ‘political opportunism’.
In one of our biggest events this year, Paul Keating blamed John Howard for throwing Australia’s moral compass overboard, whilst recounting the reforms of his own government and reiterating key concepts of his vision. On his party’s current woes, he offered: ‘Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story.’
Oration
Keating was speaking to promote After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches. Former Keating speechwriter Don Watson appeared in a separate event earlier in the year, amongst other things explaining his relationship with his former boss.
You may recall the Keating-Watson disagreement over whose words were spoken by Keating in the 1992 Redfern speech; it was among many favourite speeches reread at our Unaccustomed As I Am event in July. (Elsewhere, some wondered whether Gillard’s woes in the polls were linked to her scripted speech style).
Polls
Speaking of the polls, we invited a formidable political brains trust to examine the effect of the news cycle and polling on the political process in our Greasy Polls Talking Point event. Their assessment somewhat echoed the earlier observations of Lindsay Tanner, who lamented the behaviour of the media and described parliamentary question time as ‘performance art for the six o'clock news’.
Who we are
Amidst the political back-and-forth, we continued to examine our changing national identity. Our So Who The Bloody Hell Are We? series turned the lens on blokes, the quarter-acre block and the fair go. Judith Brett talked about the relationship between city and country, while Guy Rundle explored the essentialist, adversarial racial politics emerging from a crisis of identity in the West.
Finally, Thomas Keneally finished our year of Lunchbox/Soapbox polemics with a presentation about twentieth century White Australia’s relationship with its Aboriginal and Asian ‘others’.
(Click to watch video.)
“This year two thirds of all world growth has come out of the developing economies. And we think we can have a debate about the circumstances of someone’s birth and their complexion and how they look. I mean, it’s sick, sick, sick. It’s truly sick.” Paul Keating’s recent conversation with Robert Manne at the Melbourne Recital Centre revealed a man still passionate about the value of conviction politics. It also allowed a born political storyteller space to tell his stories – and there were several major themes.
In classic Keating gladiatorial form, the former Prime Minister reiterated his belief that, were the federal electoral cycle four years rather than three years, he would have beaten John Howard in 1996. “I just needed more time,” he told Robert Manne. Keating blames a Royal Commission involving Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia that took up most of 1995 – at the time he called the commission a political stunt. “By the time I got on to Howard, I had him a blithering wreck … He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. If I’d had another year I would have done to him what I did every other day, was tread on him. He never got on top of him in the polls … and I would have massacred him in 1996 if I’d had another year, but I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time.”
On the issue of illegal refugees, Keating berated the ALP for not having the courage of its convictions. “One of the primary duties of a Prime Minister is to protect a country from prejudice,” he says. At the time of Tampa, Keating recalls having advised the then Labor leader and opposition leader Kim Beazley that the ALP couldn’t hope to outflank Howard’s conservative reaction: “The Labor Party should have stood its ground.” This leads Manne onto the topic of the Labor Party’s mixed fortunes since Keating. He asks, has Labor lost its way? “Labor hasn’t lost its soul, but it has lost its story,” Keating replies. “This is another transition. This is perhaps the biggest transition in 300 years. This is the transition to the establishment of China’s position of primacy again in the international system. A change in the way the world works, from West to East. And … here we are, a primary exporter to this.” The Labor Party, he adds, should be “constructing a story of transition”. The transition “should also be a cultural one”, he says, and thus Keating comes to the tagline that made the papers the next day: Australia should derive its security in Asia, not from Asia.
This is Keating’s biggest theme, one he returns to repeatedly in the course of the conversation. The rise of China is the great story of our generation. “All great states claim strategic space. And if you don’t give it to them they take it.” Keating warns that refusing to accord China the strategic space it demands may lead to catastrophic results. “Accommodating China a new construct is … the most important thing facing Australia.”
Keating concludes his Wheeler Centre appearance with another classic aphorism that summed up his political fortunes: “You don’t necessarily give the public back what the public wants. You give them what the public needs. If you give them too much of it they get sick of you.”
(Click to watch video.)
Historian Bill Gammage’s recent Lunchbox/Soapbox event was subtitled ‘How Aborigines made Australia’. In the course of his address, Gammage gave the audience a bird’s eye overview of what central Melbourne would have looked like when Batman and co first arrived in 1835, using eyewitness accounts of the time.
North of the Yarra, the land was ‘park-like’, ‘open grassy forest, rising into low hills’. But it was not all the same. Imagine a line from the bottom of Swanston Street to Flagstaff Hill. Southwest, hill and valley were grassy with scattered trees. Northeast was eucalypt woodland, open but with dense forest patches. One patch east of Swanston Street and south of Bourke Street perhaps shielded a dance ground, while at Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens open forest suddenly gave way to ‘dense gum forest’, mostly manna gum. Hilltops varied. Flagstaff Hill was ‘covered with a beautiful grassy surface … [It] had the appearance of a large lawn’. Batman’s Hill (Southern Cross Station) was grassy but topped by sheoaks.
A creek down Elizabeth Street separated two hills, ‘rising and picturesque eminences … on the verge of a beautiful park’, one cresting east at Spring Street, the other west at William Street, each burnt differently. ‘The Eastern Hill was a gum and wattle tree forest, and the Western Hill was so clothed with sheoaks as to give it the appearance of a primeval park’. Both were ‘lightly wooded’, which means regular fire, the west topped with mushrooms, the east with a grass clearing between the Museum and Parliament House. Along the river stood tea-tree patches, as you’d expect of a shallow stream choked with debris and flooding easily, but the patches alternated with grass, which you wouldn’t expect.
All this, Gammage argued, was to promote grass and suppress tea-tree to encourage animals such as kangaroos to feed, and all of it was a landscape managed by just a few families. Gammage’s book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, systematically outlines for the first time how the Australia European settlers found from 1788 on was not a wilderness but in fact a continental-sized garden carefully tended by Aboriginal Australians in a mosaic pattern to maximise its natural abundance.
The State Library of Victoria is asking Victorians to help choose a book that describes the Victorian experience and can represent the state in the 2012 National Year of Reading ‘Our Story’ program.
Using reader voting, ‘Our Story’ will select one book from each Australian state and territory to form the reading list for Australia’s biggest book group. An independent selection committee in each state and territory has created a shortlist of six titles which readers can vote for to determine the book which best represents their region.
The aim, according to State Library director Debra Rosenfeldt, is “to create a collection of books that together describe the Australian experience … Ultimately we hope these eight books will give thousands of readers a greater depth of understanding about what it means to be Australian.”
Votes, which begin today, can be registered online at abc.net.au/yearofreading or at participating libraries and bookshops. Voting continues until 6 January 2012.
The list of eight winning titles and the start of Australia’s biggest book group for the National Year of Reading will be announced on 14 February 2012, at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. After that, existing book groups, new groups and individual readers can go online and register as a member of ‘Our Story’, joining in the discussion about the books the nation has chosen.
The Victorian program is coordinated by the State Library of Victoria in collaboration with the Public Libraries Victoria Network.
Our Story Victorian shortlist:
Bearbrass, Robyn Annear, Black Ink
Sold, Brendan Gullifer, Sleepers
Well Done Those Men, Barry Heard, Scribe
Unpolished Gem, Alice Pung, Black Ink
Radical Melbourne, Jeff & Jill Sparrow, Vulgar Press
The Comfort of Water, Maya Ward, Transit Lounge
Detail of an image of Kalgoorlie’s super-pit gold mine (the biggest man-made hole in the world) courtesy Kate Raynes-Goldie/Flickr
Journalist Paul Cleary has warned that Australia’s mining boom can’t last forever. Speaking at last week’s Lunchbox/Soapbox at the Wheeler Centre, the author of Too Much Luck warned that the end of the boom may be closer than it commonly believed and that if the gains aren’t saved and spent wisely the mining boom may eventually leave us worse off.
In his address, Cleary said that the conventional wisdom that the boom has no end date is mistaken. He quoted figures from Geoscience Australia, which has estimated that, on current rates of production, Australia can continue to produce diamonds for another 20 years. Gold production can continue for another 30 years, while silver, lead and zinc production can continue for another 45 years on current levels. Similarly, iron ore production will continue for another 70 years, but Paul Cleary adds the caveat that, as many companies are planning to drastically raise production levels in forthcoming years, iron ore reserves may only last us half that time. The government estimates our reserves of natural gas will last another 63 years on current production levels, although some companies, Cleary adds, are planning on tripling production rates.
Cleary calls for higher tax levels and spending the revenue on infrastructure as well as “polyproofing” these savings to avoid “generational theft”.
(Click to watch video.)
Julian Burnside has written on the High Court’s decision overturning the government’s Malaysian solution on the ABC’s The Drum. Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote:
In the past 15 years, most boat arrivals have been Afghan Hazaras fleeing the Taliban, Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein, Iranians fleeing the theocracy in that country, and Tamils fleeing genocide in Sri Lanka. Not surprisingly, a very high percentage (approximately 80-95 per cent) of boat people ultimately establish an entitlement to protection. […]
It is therefore difficult to assume that anything done by Australia will make any appreciable difference to the arrival rate of boat people.
If things are left as they are, Australia will continue to face the following problems associated with the present system: needless infliction of mental harm on detainees and damage to Australia’s reputation as a nation which cares about human rights. And don’t forget the huge cost: mandatory detention costs us about $1 billion a year.
There is simply no merit in the idea of detaining people indefinitely just because they have arrived in Australia by boat. Asylum seekers also arrive by air: typically they arrive on short-term visas such as business, tourist or student visas. Once in Australia, they apply for asylum. Once their initial visa expires, they are given a bridging visa pending assessment of their claim for asylum. This may take years, but they remain in the community while it happens. Most of these asylum claims fail on the merits (only about 20 per cent succeed). By contrast, about 80-90 per cent of boat arrivals ultimately succeed in their claim for asylum, but they are detained during the entire process.
The arrival rate of asylum seekers who come by air is two or three times greater than the arrival rate of boat people.
A question inevitably arises: what is the justification for detaining boat people indefinitely, at vast expense, when most of them will ultimately succeed in their claim for protection but will be damaged more or less severely by the process? To this question, it seems that the only genuine answer is an appeal to political advantage.
“It’s been pretty pathetic all the way through,” said Tasmanian writer Geoffrey Dean, who passed away last week at the age of 80 after half a century of writing short stories. Dean was describing how unrewarding his literary career has proven to be in an ABC television interview promoting the release of a selection of his best short stories, Mysteries, Myths & Miracles by Gininderra Press. As an Australian short story specialist, making ends meet was always going to be a challenge for Dean, who worked in a variety of jobs as a result, including farmer, news cameraman, circus employee and used furniture salesman among them. He claimed these experiences enriched his writing.
Here’s a review of his short story collection, The Literary Lunch.
On his blog, Dean introduced himself to readers in this way: “I’ve published heaps of stories and won heaps of prizes and had heaps of acclaim throughout the fifty or so years that I’ve been writing short stories. I would like to say that I’ve also earned heaps of money and gained heaps of readers outside of my home state of Tasmania. But no, the strait is too wide to send across the message that good things happen in the quiet backwaters of this wonderful country. The little poem I wrote to myself last year sums it up quite well I think: In this long drought, a few drops of rain here and there, but never enough to moisten the soil and grow my literary garden.
“But then my main motivation wasn’t to be famous, or get rich. Both fame and money frighten me somewhat. I write short stories because I like them. I like reading a good short story and I enjoy above all other literary pursuits to write them. They suit my temperament. I like to get in and get out before the story looses [sic] its excitement. If I can’t write a story with a sense of excitement, then how can I expect a reader to be excited when reading it. The fact is I have a need to tell stories. I’ve been writing stories ever since I learnt to write. It’s probably a deep-seated neurosis, but hell, who cares, it keeps me happy.
“I find now it takes too long to publish a story in the conventional way today. It can take up to four or five years to battle your way through the heaps of pink slips that say: The editor regrets … and blah, blah, blah … It’s all too much hassle for someone at my age. I haven’t got the time or the patience to persist in the hard-copy world so I pass them into cyberspace, in the hope that they will be read immediately by someone somewhere who appreciates them before the virtual ink dries and the paper curls at the corners.”
Read more at a tribute page published by Roaring Forties Press.
(Click to watch video.)
The Wheeler Centre recently hosted an event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’, on Ruth Park. Today, as we publish the video/podcast, Marion Halligan reminds us we must preserve the legacy of Ruth Park, and other pioneers of Australian writing.
“One boiling day I was writing in my garret when the murderer knocked on the door below.”
This is the opening sentence of Ruth Park’s second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx. She goes on to describe the murderers who lived in the vicinity, including “the rabbity women who had done in their newborns but got off on a plea of insanity. In those days of the second World War it was widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads.” It’s a bit of a worry for the pregnant Ruth. “I was outa me mind,” the women say. “All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles.”
The murderer knocking at the door runs a few girls but is mainly an enforcer, the most feared underworld figure in Sydney. He has come to inquire, courteously, if Ruth’s landlady can put a few stitches in the torn lining of his coat pocket.
This keeps you turning the pages. It is full of energy, is funny, and wonderfully black – like a lot of Park’s writing. She began as a journalist and was on her way from New Zealand to a job in San Francisco when the bombing of Pearl Harbour put a stop to Pacific travel. So she went to Sydney instead and married D’Arcy Niland, another writer. They resolved they would make their livings by writing, a near-impossible task then, as it is today. But they managed it, by putting their heads down and just doing it. Not for them the luxury of sitting in despair in front of a blank sheet or suffering the anguish of writer’s block. Park sat at the ironing board, with children underfoot, at the kitchen table with the onions and the carrots, churning out anything and everything. Articles, plays, radio scripts (more than 5000), serials, children’s programs. When, after the war, the Sydney Morning Herald offered a £2000 prize for a novel, Park knew she had two subjects: journalism and the slums of Surry Hills where she was living. She was afraid she might be sued for libel if she wrote about journalism, so that left the slums.
When The Harp in the South (1948) won the prize it was a scandal. I was a small child at the time, and I remember it. The problem seemed to be a woman writing about such things, and one from New Zealand at that. Drunkenness, wife beatings, abortions, prostitution, sly grog, all the life of the streets about her, not from a judgmental point of view but as an inmate, the details intimate, comical, forgivable. Slums? said authorities, there are no slums in Sydney, and then proceeded to clear them away and move people out west, which filled her with guilt. The priest of her church preached a sermon against the novel, saying that the Virgin Mary in her lifetime would never have stooped to write a book of any kind, let alone one published in the Herald.
Park made her dream of living by writing a reality. The Harp in the South has never been out of print. She has won a Miles Franklin and an Age Book of the Year for non-fiction. The Muddle Headed Wombat was a long running and beloved radio serial. Playing Beattie Bow has been devoured by generations of children, in print and on screen.
Park was 93 when she died in 2010. She spent her life spellbinding her readers with her story-telling. We need to make sure we are the grateful heirs of her legacy, something we are not always good at in this country. When writers get old we tend to forget them, and when they die they pass from our consciousness. Park showed us our world as it was, and we must not forget either the writer or her subjects.
The next event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’ is on Marcus Clarke, 16 August.
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries ago — as well as its poor relationship with the indigenous population now. How can we redress injustice and convert our awareness of the past into a productive force?
The challenge, Maddison says, is an adaptive one — and it won’t be overcome without a painful and uncomfortable process of introspection. But, she continues, “by taking account of past injustice in this work, we may have the opportunity to experience ourselves as truly moral, rather than as defensive and anxious about the past”.
At stake is also the authenticity of our national identity, or “diminishing the gap between the values people stand for, and the reality they face”. In other words, we must reconcile our closely held idea of the fair go with our racist past.
(Click to watch video.)
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Do you believe that guilt, evasiveness and awkwardness surrounding our past hinders progress on indigenous issues?
Can we rely on public institutions to lead the way on adapting to moral truth? If not, what’s the best way to address our nation’s brutal beginnings?
“The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry; it is intensely personal. It is not a statement of facts, it is not a cold, abstract argument, it is not an inflammatory harangue; it is a quiet talk, reflecting the personal likes and dislikes of the author. It never pretends to treat a subject exhaustively; it is brief, informal, modest.” So wrote Walter Murdoch, as quoted in an Imre Salusinszky profile published in The Australian that describes Murdoch as “Australia’s first public liberal intellectual”. Uncle to Keith Murdoch and great-uncle to Rupert, Walter Murdoch was a popular academic, journalist and broadcaster in Victoria and later in Western Australia – and a master of the familiar essay, a form that seems to have undergone a resurrection of sorts in the past decade or so.
Image via Murdoch University
Murdoch was invariably photographed with a pipe in his mouth. “To be without a pipe in your jowl,“ he wrote in the days before psychoanalysis was in vogue, "is to be the prey of a thousand petty distractions. The unsolved problem – of the differential calculus, or the butcher’s bill – is knocking at the door, and will be heard. Religion and patriotism, honour and duty and love, each is blowing its importunate bugle-call to your conscience. You must reform the world; or you must reform your neighbour; or, at the very least, you must dine. And so, poor soul, you are harried hither and thither, and have no rest. But put a pipe between your lips, and lo! At a whiff you pass to where, beyond these voices there is peace.”
The offspring of the medieval commplace book and named after the French noun for ‘attempt’, essays are far more than mere stabs in the dark. At their best, such as in the essays of Annie Dillard, they are an unforgettable fusion of poetry and pure thought. In the preface to his Collected Essays, Aldous Huxley noted three different types of essay: the personal and autobiographical, the objective and factual, and the abstract and universal. Many essays, including Murdoch’s, are combinations of the three.
Since his death in 1970, Walter Murdoch’s writing has been all but completely forgotten, which is curious because he is the Murdoch after whom the Western Australian university is named (and not his more famous nephew and great-nephew). The University of Western Australia has published a collection of Murdoch’s familiar essays, dubbed On Rabbits, Morality, Etc, that may well reverse this cultural amnesia.
Manning Clark is a giant of Australia’s cultural landscape. His impact and influence on our history and our way of understanding our history constitute a lasting legacy – which is exactly what Clark would have wished. In Mark McKenna’s new biography, An Eye for Eternity, the self-styled historian-sage emerges as a deeply complex man, riddled with obsessions that included Australia’s national identity and a more personal quest to be remembered.
Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading contemporary historians. Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark is his most ambitious project to date. Here, he discusses his work – its burdens and revelations – with Michael Cathcart, suggesting some of the material he uncovered appears to have been left by Clark for a posthumous biographer to find.
Cathcart and McKenna discuss Clark’s parents, his occasional stoushes with the academic establishment, his obsession with Australian national identity, his journey to becoming a public figure, his identification with Dostoevsky, his relationship with Patrick White, and his desire to ensure his own immortality.
(Click to watch video.)
(Click to watch video.)
According to writer Guy Rundle, in the last couple of years populist attacks on Islam, indigenous Australians, African immigrants and other groups have mutated. After 9/11 it was a triumphalist assertion of Western supremacy over other cultures. In the wake of Iraq, the 2008 crash, and China rising, the focus has become the ‘other’ – from the alleged essential violence of Islam, to immigrant barbarism, to the return of eugenic assessment of indigenous people. Where did this ‘new hate’ come from? And why has the ‘respectable Right’ been so silent about it?
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, has weighed in on a debate surrounding a proposed development of a house in the picturesque waterside suburb of Watsons Bay in Sydney’s east. Socceroo Mark Schwarzer, who paid over $10 million in 2009 for a house called Boongarre (also known as Stead House, Christina Stead’s childhood home), is planning a $3 million renovation, to which some local residents are opposed. The SMH report has all the relevant details, including this quote from Franzen: “Christina Stead gave the world one of the truly great novels of the 20th century, and although she moved the setting of it to America at the insistence of her American publisher, its heart is clearly in Watsons Bay'‘. Some Australian authors have already issued protestations, including Alex Miller and Nikki Gemmell. Franzen, who has previously tried to resurrect the reputations of novelists Paula Fox and William Gaddis, last year championed The Man Who Loved Children in the New York Times.
We love soccer, and we love the Socceroos. Mark Schwarzer has distinguished himself many times on their behalf, and ours. But consider some of the details of Christina Stead’s life. Her father was a marine biologist and a pioneering conservationist – a man ahead of his time, though with a dark side, if The Man Who Loved Children is any indication. In 1928, at the age of 26, Stead went abroad. In the early 1930s, while working in a Parisian bank, Stead became involved with the great love of her life, William J. Blake, a writer himself, as well as a stockbroker and a Marxist political economist. He was a married man and he was Jewish, at a time of pervasive anti-Semitism. They didn’t marry until 1952, when he finally obtained a divorce from his first wife. Stead considered herself a Marxist although she never joined the Communist Party. As the fog of war descended on Europe, she moved with Blake to the US.
Throughout her remarkable life, Stead earned her living as a writer. She wrote 15 novels and many short stories. During the war, Stead taught writing at New York University. She also wrote for Hollywood, including a John Ford and John Wayne propaganda movie called They Were Expendable. But it was her 1940 novel, The Man Who Loved Children, a novel now often cited as among the greatest novels ever written, that would establish an enduring literary reputation. Based on her own childhood, the novel is one of the most heartrending depictions of family dysfunction ever committed to the page. At the insistence of her US publisher, Stead moved the setting of the novel from Sydney to turn-of-the-century Baltimore.
Many readers consider her 1946 novel, Letty Fox: Her Luck, to be just as good. Australia was the only country in the world to ban the book on grounds that it was salacious, although the Censorship Board noted “[t]he author has a powerful intellect… It is all the more regrettable that she should have used it injudiciously.” The ban was lifted in 1958.
Both novels were largely ignored at the time, but a 1965 reissue revived interest in The Man Who Loved Children. After her husband died of cancer in 1968, Stead returned to Sydney, where she lived until her death in 1983.
The Twitter handle of the campaign to stop the development is @savesteadhouse.
(Click to watch video.)
We love a sunburnt country – as long as it stays on the far side of a picket fence. We partition our wide brown land into lots of little subdivisions. We replace the sprawling menace of the Australian bush with the reassuring symmetry of the Hills Hoist. We mortgage ourselves to the hilt. And we call it the great Australian dream.
In our love/hate relationship with the suburbs, do we take for granted the open space and fresh air that others can only dream of? How much should our cities be planned, and how much should they be allowed to unfold organically? And is there such a thing as “bogans”, or are they merely the projected horror-fantasy of inner-city “elites”?
As part of our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series exploring Australia’s national identity, we trawl the nature strips and driveways of The Quarter Acre Block.
Image of a storm breaking over Robinson, an outstation near Borroloola in the Northern Territory’s Gulf country, by Peter Nihill via WikiCommons.
Publisher Simon & Schuster Australia has published a translation of Ted Prior’s Grug Learns to Read in Karrawa, an indigenous language from Australia’s Top End. The book – Grug Milidimba Nunga Read Imbigunji – has been translated by Ngingina. It’s been published with assistance from the Indigenous Literacy Project. The ILP will distribute the book among remote indigenous communities like Robinson (see image) and the nearby Borroloola on the McArthur River, where Karrawa is one of several languages spoken. Borroloola, a community of about 780, of which about 200 are not indigenous, is home to the Yanyuwa people.
According to the ILP website, “[i]n the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.” It’s commonly believed that at the time of European settlement there were between 350 and 750 indigenous languages spoken in what is now Australia. Today, 150 languages remain, of which all but 20 are endangered.
Karrawa is an alternate spelling of Garrwa. The National Indigenous Language Service estimated in 2004 that the language had between 40 and 200 speakers, although Crikey’s Fully Sic blogger on language matters, Piers Kelly, notes, “Calculating accurate speaker numbers is notoriously difficult.” He adds, “There is a new National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) report being compiled this year and it’s hoped that the figures will be more reliable.”
The Grug series of 25 kids' books was originally published by Hodder Headline Australia between 1979 and 1992, and have now been republished along with seven new titles.
(Click to watch video.)
Earlier this week we reported on a new campaign by Clubs Australia opposing proposed reforms to pokies venues. As part of the campaign, an ad depicted two Aussie blokes having a quiet beer and a quick flutter, agog at the idea of having a daily spend limit on the pokies habit. “It’s un-Australian,” gasps one in horror. Stoic, sports-loving, beer-drinking, emotion-hiding, hard-working, authority-bucking, laconic – this is the stereotype of Australian masculinity.
But does reality conform to the fantasy? All week we’ve been taking a good, hard look in the mirror of Australia’s national identity. In The Sentimental Bloke – the first in our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series of videos to be published over the next few days – Michael Cathcart, Craig Sherborne, Anne Summers and Craig Reucassel debate the finer points of the what it means to be a bloke in today’s Australia. Where are our templates of masculinity formed, and how true to life are they? How has the face of Australian fatherhood changed since decades past, and why? Do our nation’s traditionally ‘male’ pastimes and occupations still ring true? And will you be drinking beer or wine?
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