Reason and Lovelessness : Essays, Encounters, Reviews 1980-2017 9781925377279, 9781925377262

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Reason & Lovelessness Essays, encounters, reviews 198o–2o17

Barry Hill

This wonderful, mysterious and compelling collection of essays prompts us to consider Barry Hill’s unusual place in Australian letters…The essays are like jewels in a necklace, each glistening with its own beauty but together making something of greater elegance. —Tom Griffiths, Introduction

Reason & Lovelessness

for Rod Moss

Reason & Lovelessness Essays, encounters, reviews 198o–2o17

Barry Hill

Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, Encounters, Reviews, 1980–2017 © Copyright 2018 Barry Hill All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. Monash University Publishing Matheson Library and Information Services Building 40 Exhibition Walk Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.publishing.monash.edu Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought. Monash University Publishing titles pass through a rigorous process of independent peer review. www.publishing.monash.edu/books/rl-9781925377262.html ISBN: 978-1-925377-26-2 (pb) ISBN: 978-1-925377-27-9 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-925377-66-8 (ePub) Series: Literary Studies Design: Les Thomas Cover design: Joe Hill Cover image: Rod Moss, Camp Dogs (1991) National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Creator: Title:

Hill, Barry, 1943- author. Reason and lovelessness : essays, encounters, reviews 1980 - 2017 / Barry Hill. ISBN: 9781925377262 (paperback) Subjects: Australian essays. Literature--History and criticism. Anthologies. Australia--Literary collections.

A L S O BY BA R RY H I L L The Schools (1977) A Rim of Blue: Stories (1978) Near the Refinery; a novella (1980) Headlocks and Other Stories (1983) The Best Picture; a novel (1988) Raft: Poems 1983–1990 (1990) Sitting-In (1991) Ghosting William Buckley; a poem (1993) The Rock: Travelling to Uluru (1997) The Inland Sea: Poems (2001) Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002) The Enduring Rip: A History of Queenscliff (2004) The War Sonnets (2007) Necessity: Poems 1996–2006 (2007) Four Lines East (2007) As We Draw Ourselves (2008) Lines for Birds (2011) Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (2012) Peacemongers (2014) Grass Hut Work: Poems (2016)

Heaven and earth are heartless treating creatures like straw dogs. Sages are heartless also they treat people like straw dogs.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

To cease working in shadow with the light against us no longer concerned with the fate of any particular element thrashing to merge from swaddling cloths since the problem is to love all without loss of edge from particular the uses of to general the uses of to work in the naked light with elation extreme elation

Nathaniel Tarn, The Beautiful Contradictions

C ON T EN T S Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii Imprint and Copyright Information. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv Also by Barry Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Opening Stanzas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix by Tom Griffiths

Part 1: Close to Bones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Dark Star. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Letter to My Father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 William Buckley, Imagination, Hope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 The Mood We Are In: circa Australia Day 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Shooting Season: Robert Manne’s New Ground. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Rai Gaita’s Mont Blanc: A New Poem Imagined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Stepping Out with Fay Zwicky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Brecht’s Song. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Part 2: Inland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Holding Landscapes: John Wolseley’s Mapping into Australia. . . . . . . 141 Through Larapinta Land: Baldwin Spencer’s Glass Case. . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Notes On Terra Nullius: Travelling North. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Welcome Dance, Entrance of Strangers: On Reading Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Maggots and Mysticism: On W.E.H. Stanner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Crossing Cultures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

Greg Dening’s Cannibalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Translating Love into Landscape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

Part 3: Naked Art Making. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Brushes with the Body: On Lucian Freud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Getting to Grips with Naked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262 Rod Moss Naked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Naked Flame: Being Implicated by D.H. Lawrence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Loving Roughneck: John Berger’s Hopeful Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Wild Pilgrim: Meeting Ko Un . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316 Dogs and Grog: New Writing in Alice Springs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

Part 4: Reason and Lovelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353 Hannah Arendt’s Dire Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Orwell’s Fraternal Glances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Ezra Pound: The Tragic Orientalist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Moonlight Among Stones: Meredith McKinney’s Pillow Book. . . . . . . 397 Reason and Lovelessness: Deep Resistance at the Tokyo Trial . . . . . . . 405 The SS and Flaubert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 The Uses and Abuses of Humiliation: Rabindranath Tagore’s Management of Defeat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432 Poems that Kill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446 Human Smoke, Bared Throats. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464 On the Edge of a Cliff: Meeting the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477

Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489

I N T ROD UC T ION Tom Griffiths

This wonderful, mysterious and compelling collection of essays prompts us to consider Barry Hill’s unusual place in Australian letters. How might we reach towards some holistic understanding of such a versatile and wideranging writer? He is a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, journalist, historian and biographer who has published ten poetry collections, four works of fiction, numerous works for radio, a libretti, a pioneering piece of book-length reportage on education, an innovative contribution to labour history, a crosscultural exploration of Central Australia, an award-winning local history, and two monumental works of historical scholarship: the acclaimed biography of T.G.H. Strehlow, Broken Song (2002), and a traveller’s meditation on war and pacifism, Peacemongers (2014). Poetry is his natural medium yet he has also devoted himself to decade-long research quests that result in 6-700 page books of footnoted prose. The essays in this volume are the seeds of that immense creativity, written out of personal and political moments along the larger journeys, and to see them gathered here is to discern, perhaps for the first time, the tides and currents of a whole oeuvre. These essays were mostly written in the twenty-first century and a number are brand new, but some come from the 1980s and some from the 1990s, so together they span four decades. The opening piece, ‘Dark Star’, is the product of a 1982 article and a 2017 retrospect, a fitting introduction because it thus brackets the whole period of writing represented in this collection. The essays are like jewels in a necklace, each glistening with its own beauty but together making something of greater elegance. By way of introducing them, I am going to sketch the landscape of ideas from which they sprang. Barry Hill was born in 1943 at the mouth of the Yarra River where it languidly enters Port Phillip Bay, where the lava plain meets the silt and sand

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of the port of Melbourne. He went to school in neighbouring Williamstown, caught lizards and fished for crabs at the back beach, swam with the lifesaving club, read everything he could get his hands on – and, from his late teenage years, watched the paddocks of stones, swamps and thistles that had been his childhood playground transform into a giant petrochemical complex. His father, Neville Hill, who worked for the railways and later as an organiser for the metal unions, quietly inspired his son, his only child, with a radical socialist humanism. Neville, who had left school at 14, was a serious reader (his union subscribed to the literary magazine Overland); occasionally he would send Barry to the Newport Library to ask for a good novel. Barry remembers with deep affection the strength, warmth and manliness of his parents’ lounge room, where boilermakers, blacksmiths and fitters would gather for a yarn, fill the armchairs and talk of intractable problems, of overseas war and local industry, of Communism and Capitalism. These men would admire the lad’s captured lizards and sometimes bring a book for him. The culture and conversations of the men later became the subject of Barry’s history of the longest factory occupation in Australian history, Sitting In (1991), which tells of the struggle for shorter working hours at the Union Carbide plant in Altona in 1979–80. It is the story of his father’s finest hour. In his twenties, after graduating from Melbourne University in arts and education, Barry taught in high schools before going to England where he worked as a journalist and educational psychologist, completed a Master of Arts in London and joined the staff of the Times Educational Supplement. He relished journalism ‘as a training ground for independence’ and was drawn to ‘literary people who’d knocked around a bit’ rather than those working in the relative security of academia. He says he wanted a job where you could be sacked. As his Australian self-consciousness began to fall away, he came to admire the freedom of those English writers who seemed to carry their knowledge in personal, integrated ways, with a ‘wholeness of voice’ un­affected by fragmenting, academic requirements. The best books, he felt, were written from outside the universities. When he came back to Australia as education

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editor at the Age, he found he was still fluent in the conversation of his home country but was now more confident thanks to what he calls ‘the finishing school of London’. But he’d now ‘read too many books’ to fit easily into the lounge-room talk of his father’s union mates. When he borrowed Arthur Miller’s Plays from the Newport Library he found that the last borrower had been his younger self, nine years before. His first book, The Schools (1977), was celebrated by education histor­ ian Stephen Murray-Smith as ‘the best bit of reportage we’ve had’. It was treasured praise, for Murray-Smith edited Overland, which Barry had read as a boy and where he was to have his first published essay. (Stephen would have regarded Barry’s father – a thoughtful working man – as an ideal subscriber, for he always asked his writers to imagine their reader as ‘the hospital matron at Port Hedland’.) The Schools was Barry’s swansong to his job at the Age for he was now embracing the full independence of the writing life by moving to the small coastal town of Queenscliff, which is perched on a spit of land, almost an island, where Port Phillip Bay meets the sea. With this decision in 1975 he completed a migration around the western shores of the bay from its source to its mouth, from the northern entry of the river where he was born, to the southern jaws of the Rip, the tumultuous stretch of water surging between the Heads. In his commissioned history of the borough of Queenscliffe, The Enduring Rip (2004), Barry beautifully described the two domains of sea that meet here: the mass of water that comes in and out of the bay as a tide, and the heave and swell that has come all the way up from the Antarctic. ‘The two seas in the act of meeting and exchange create a turbulence as dangerous as anywhere in the world.’ It is possible, he says, to see the bay’s water flow upwards as it exerts its will to escape over the southern swell. Barry has seen it, for he sees everything from here. From the pier where the cormorants roost at dusk, he can watch and decipher the choreography of the pilot boats and container ships as they move through the Rip. He takes pleasure in the persistence of some of the old maritime rhythms that sustain his town.

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This is where we need to begin when tracking the course of Barry Hill’s imagination: here at the coast, by the Bay, sniffing the sea air. For years he swam between the piers at the front beach. When the new ferry berth was planned and threatened to silt up the foreshore, Barry went to the court hearings and ‘spoke for the beach’. Like the historian Greg Dening, about whom he writes brilliantly here, Barry walks his beaches, relishing their liminality. He was ‘finding ways of seeing which are not dominated by the intellectual requirements of formal institutions.’ Queenscliff gave him an anchorage; it delivered freedom as well as stability to his writing life. His history of the town is elegiac, especially about the fishermen, cold and poor, eking out a living in their couta boats. And it is from this edge of the continent that he launched – in a great Australian tradition – a quest in search of the inland sea. The red heart of Central Australia was to capture him for many years, and it still calls. It was a local beachcomber who led him there. That man was William Buckley, the ‘wild white man’ who escaped the British convict settlement at Sorrento in 1803 and walked the sandy shore of Port Phillip Bay across the silts of the Yarra mouth and onto the lava plain, arriving at the headland where Queenscliff would later develop. From there, Buckley looked back across the Rip at the settlement from which he had escaped and, unlike his fellow escapees, decided not to return to his own civil­ isation. He surrendered himself to his new life, to ‘sea and sky, dune and salt lake’. Soon he was taken into the society of the Wathaurung people, accepted as one of their own returned from the dead, a ‘jump up whitefellow’. Barry became fascinated by this man who inhabited his country generations earl­ ier and who had made a crossing into Aboriginal culture – a Crusoe and a Caliban on this distant shore. He spent ten years writing a book-length poem, Ghosting William Buckley, and he wrote history of his life too. Barry perceived that ‘The frontier that Buckley knew was the frontier where the white man did the assimilating. This makes him, potentially, the most important of our pioneers.’ Buckley walked back into the British world in 1835, thirty-two years after his escape, when settlers from Van Diemen’s Land colonised the Yarra – xii –

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mouth. The beachcomber became a go-between, a translator and an uneasy mediator, but he became renowned mostly for his silence, which many col­ onists distrusted and saw as a deep cultural betrayal. But Barry wrote with sympathy about Buckley’s silence for, having been brought up in a small, reticent, working-class household, he is familiar with reserve. Buckley’s silence arose from his cross-cultural predicament, but perhaps it also drew on his experience of Aboriginality. The quest to understand William Buckley, to hear the poetics to which his assimilating exposed him, was to lead Barry Hill to T.G.H. Strehlow. Strehlow was another translator across cultures, the collector and inter­ preter of the world’s great treasure trove of Aboriginal song. Like Buckley, his was a ‘great crossing’. He was born at Hermannsburg in Central Australia in 1908, the son of the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow. He grew up with Aboriginal people and learned their language, for he was ‘cradled in Aranda’. His book, Songs of Central Australia, published in 1971, was the culmination of a lifetime’s work and has been described by Barry as ‘a huge, marvellous astonishing gift of a book’. ‘Culturally speaking’, argues Hill, ‘Songs is Australia’s book of Genesis. It contains words of sacred beginnings.’ He compares Strehlow’s Songs to a great delta, ‘to one of those stunning aerial photographs of Central Australia; all bone and membrane and blood­ stream of pale green spirit of matter that survived the inland sea.’ Strehlow enabled him to make parallel journeys into both the radiant landscape and its literature. Barry’s encounter with Central Australia is one of the great experiences of his life – to be compared, perhaps, with his upbringing in labour traditions, falling in love, becoming a father or discovering Buddhism. It was a seduction by beauty and an encounter with ‘the other’. Poetry seemed to come out of the ground. Yet crossing into Aboriginal culture, he observes, ‘is next to impossible’. He wrote a wonderful book about that impossibility – called The Rock: Travelling to Uluru – where he reveals the challenges of the Centre through actual, personal, complex encounters. He wanted to write something ‘more morally grounded in this place’ than Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, – xiii –

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which he found weighted ‘with English condescensions’. Barry is always brave in sharing his innocence and confusion with the reader, making a theatre of his thinking. In The Rock, his southern sensibilities and romanticism, his ‘notebook and never-ending ignorance’, meet something huge and imperv­ ious. Writing his great biography of Ted Strehlow, Broken Song, enabled him to enter that world indirectly, ‘via texts, and the texts about texts’. His essay in this collection, ‘Crossing Cultures’, explains his quest superbly: ‘I could stop dreaming about adoption by some personal guide into the Dreaming. Here was the richness I wanted anyway – in the treasure trove of Strehlow’s work, and the story I might tell about its making, a telling premised, not upon a fantasy of crossing, but upon a fully acknowledged European consciousness in Australia.’ Broken Song is one of the great works about Australia, itself a marvellous astonishing gift of a book, one that repays reading again and again. It is by a poet about poetry, by a man who understands how a father can have a powerful afterlife for a son, by a biographer open to spirituality, by an Australian seeking to deepen his sense of belonging, and by an independent scholar who will follow thought anywhere and sees that ‘in the world run by professionals … categories can be studious lies’. It refuses to observe disciplinary protocols that restrain examination of personal psychology and the religious imagin­ ation; thus it glows with a golden disobedience. And it is about that vital issue at the heart of life and identity in this place: how might Aboriginal history, culture and language enter into the ‘fully acknowledged’ consciousness of Australians? As a Lutheran pastor, Carl Strehlow was instructed to enter the native language in order to enter the soul of a people, and this became the mission of the son, too. Ted Strehlow placed the religion and poetry of the Aranda on a spiritual and literary level with other cultures: ‘in Songs’, explains Hill, ‘Aboriginal life breathes in the company of Greek and Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Hebraic utterance’. Whereas the great anthropological collaboration of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen observed Aranda ceremonies as outsiders,

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‘Strehlow took us inside’, offering ‘a kind of initiation into Aboriginal country’. His was a primarily literary endeavour and he ‘sought reconciliation by means of poetry’. For more than a decade Barry travelled back and forth from coast to Centre, from the Rip to the inland sea, from Queenscliff to Alice, on his own literary endeavour, writing love poems from the heart (The Inland Sea) and spinning his own great Song book from the desert texts and spinifex. Strehlow’s life and mission ended in tragedy and shame, and disentangling the story and the evidence from that disaster became part of the compelling saga. After years of being steeped in things Australian, Barry was propelled into another decade-long project by the warmongering of the new millennium. The Twin Towers, the bombing of Iraq and Australia’s military complicity in ‘the forever war’ disturbed him profoundly. Essays on these events effectively bookend this collection: ‘The Mood We Are In, circa Australia Day 2004’, his Alfred Deakin prize-winning essay written as the dismal reign of John Howard lengthened, the wicked legacy of Tampa deepened and the consequences of Australia following America into Iraq became despairingly clear; and ‘Human Smoke, Bared Throats’, a brilliant, savage analysis of the damning Chilcot Report, the British public inquiry into the nation’s involvement in the Iraq War. Here we see a man sick at heart about being Australian in the twenty-first century, struggling to find hope amidst the despair. For consolation and guidance, he looked East. Alongside his interest in Aboriginality, Barry had long carried another kind of spirituality. He ‘came to Buddhism late and slowly’, happening upon it in the 1970s. He is attracted to its psychology of mind and to the fact that he doesn’t have to mention a god. He recalls reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen and how it ‘hit me between the eyes’ and challenged ‘the dualistic thinking that was part of my DNA’. He was drawn to the integration of mind and body, the holism, the interdependency of all things, the lack of regard for ego, the practical teaching about loving kindness, the mindfulness of the suffering of others – and the pacifism. There was also the quest for ‘inner disarmament’.

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He believes that ultimately Buddhism ‘may prove more enduring as a moral foundation for global resistance on behalf of others than the secular humanism culturally bound to the West.’ He made a habit of meditation, learned Tibetan practice, went on retreats, and then turned to Zen Buddhism. The East opened up to his curiosity and he visited Japan often, and sat on his mat in a Japanese house on the edge of the forest in Kyoto, where he wrote his poems, Grass Hut Work. Now he is teaching himself to read Chinese characters, a daily discipline. But he also claims to be ‘a lazy Buddhist’ and remembers the advice of the Zen poet and ecologist Gary Snyder about meditation. ‘Don’t do too much of it: someone has to grow the tomatoes.’ Peacemongers is a meditation on war, peace, philosophy and the history of the twentieth century. It might have been sub-titled ‘A History of Bombing’. It is profound and playful, attentive to breath, light, colour, smell, day and night, intention and dream, clarity and darkness, often surprising and funny and sometimes shocking. Barry’s journey is in the footsteps of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and Nobel Laureate, whose travels take him (and Barry) also to Japan. Tagore perceived the connections between the nation state, militarism, racism and global criminality and foresaw the proclivity of colonial powers to bomb civilians. Although Tagore died in 1941, Barry imagines him sitting on the judicial bench of the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo in 1946 alongside the dissenting Indian judge Rabhabinod Pal whose judgement defied the trial’s triumphalism. Justice Pal challenged the idea that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the human­ itarian motives of ending the war. ‘Future generations will judge this dire decision’, he declared. It is from Pal’s dissenting judgement, which was not published in full in Tokyo, that Barry draws the title of this collection of essays and it is through him (and Tagore and Gandhi) that he explores the meanings of ‘Reason’ and of ‘Lovelessness’. On his Eastern odyssey, Barry is also following his father who was an activist in the Australian Peace Movement, went to several peace conferences in Japan in the 1970s and 80s and once met the Buddhist monk Nichidatsu Fujii. Fujii was renowned for building peace pagodas, first at Hiroshima and – xvi –

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Nagasaki and then around the world. During the Vietnam War, when the Americans wanted to extend the airstrip in Tokyo for military purposes, Mr Fujii built a pagoda symbolising peace, a little Buddhist temple, on the airstrip. Astonishingly, the pagoda was allowed to stay – and, at the end of Peacemongers while awaiting his plane home, Barry unexpectedly finds himself taken inside it. In another temple on his travels, standing beside an altar to Gandhi and among photos of the atomic blasts of 1945 and pictures of Mr Fujii, Barry feels the warm, affirming presence of his late father and is moved with admiration for his years of campaigning: ‘What an internationalist he was!’ Neville Hill was proud to have met such a famous Buddhist and drew strength from Mr Fujii in his political work. Thus Peacemongers brings together the two ‘speech streams’ in Barry’s life: the enduring one from his father, and the other that flows from his poetry and spiritual passions. And the book comes home to Queenscliff, which may seem a refuge but for its military history: a fort that bizarrely boasts of ordering the first Allied shots fired in anger in the First and Second World Wars, shots fired across the bows of ships hoping, like the tide, to escape the Bay, and an island from where ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, plays its part in the wars we are still in. Thus Australia’s eagerness to be a deputy sheriff of the south, to tether its history and destiny to overseas wars, has shaped the place from which Barry writes subversively of peace. These essays enable us to map the contours of Barry Hill’s thinking and writing over these decades and to glimpse his style. Essays are his natural form: they are think-pieces, meditations, experiments, testing-grounds for ideas – and of himself. He reads deeply, with sympathy and insight, and he does not seek to resolve so much as to open up richness and complexity. Many of these essays are biographical and engage his interest in desire and dreams, psychology and psychoanalysis: he cheekily declares a dear friend ‘a suitable case for treatment’. These are conversations and collaborations, warm, personal and revelatory. They are poems wanting to be prose and prose wanting to be poems, exploring the beautifully thin membrane between genres.

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Early in his writing life, he felt that he faced an aesthetic choice: to be lean and spare or ‘to keep fearlessly speaking clearly’. He remembers talking to Helen Garner about this and admires the sheerness of her writing. But Barry found that he didn’t want to limit himself to that sparseness, and so ‘fullness’ won over economy. He wanted to stay there and write to it. He chose flowing open candour, a rare voice in Australia. He quotes D.H. Lawrence: ‘thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.’ The warmth, the fearlessness, the risk-taking, the centredness: one sees how Buddhism infiltrates his style. Barry dramatises the process of research, of looking, searching, feeling one’s way towards insight and understanding. It is a whole-body commitment, not confined to libraries, yet libraries and archives are themselves the most sensual of places. Barry steps out with his subjects, companionably. Of Fay Zwicky, he decides: ‘best walk out with her a while’. It is a sympathetic commitment to fall into step with her, learn her rhythm. With Gaita, he takes a slow walk up the mountain. He likes Gary Snyder’s word ‘Riprap’ to describe the physical reality of the path underfoot, and invokes Ruskin’s respect for ‘the shape of the ground’. He reveals Gaita questing against the mountain and painter John Wolseley going into the landscape like a ‘burrowing animal’ and producing sketches that are sequential vignettes of a walk. And Barry came to know William Buckley through walking their shared coastline. When he was reading about ‘the wild white man’, he was bushwalking, training hard in karate, going to Buddhist retreats, and feeling his way into ‘endurance, warriorship physical and mental, nakedness or sheerness of self’. And when he began his pilgrimages to the Centre, he ‘walked as much as possible’ and his first poems there ‘came from a sense of that country’s pulsing beneath my feet.’ Barry even recalls that the American literary critic R.P. Blackmur once likened the act of criticism to walking. Walking is a way of being in place, a process of knowing and an act of respect. And as a counterpoint in his life there is meditation on his mat, and even sitting in, that act of rebellious occupation refined by his father, where resistance to movement can also be transformative. – xviii –

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Barry Hill is a remarkable presence in Australian writing. He is delightfully impossible to categorise. I think of David Malouf, Judith Wright and Les Murray as companion voices, for they too are writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and brilliant essayists steeped in European literature who are profoundly interested in Aboriginality. Hill is a truly learned man, a deep reader excited by international traditions in literature, religion, art, philosophy and history, a confident Australianist whose writing life has moved decisively towards Asia and the universal in recent years. He often refers to the explorer Ernest Giles who also made repeated journeys to the Centre and who, at his lonely camp in the Musgraves, read Byron at breakfast. Barry Hill reads any number of poets at breakfast, along with writers and thinkers who can be found in the world’s garden of poetry and its pressing matters: the last time I was in his kitchen I could see, within reach, books by Bill Gammage, Jacqueline Rose, Fay Zwicky, Philippe Descola, Michel Houellebecq, Paul Celan, Nathaniel Tarn, Jack London, Ian Wedde, John Coetzee – each of them there to be read, reread or reviewed in a life where he walks his beaches, seeks the riprap of earthy reality and wrestles his words into and out of history and country with exhilarating open-endedness.

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PART 1 CLOSE TO BONES

DA R K S TA R A love affair is not delicate nor clean, but it is an eye opener! Christina Stead to Thistle Harris, 6 April 1942

‘I rarely feel calm and good’, Christina Stead wrote to a friend in 1967, just five years before she came back to face the old music in Australia: the cultural cringing she scorned; the family oppression and animus she’d long fled from; the ‘raw, fresh and unhistorical society’. Her garrulous letters of this period are, however, calmer than they’d ever been: less flighty, impressionistic, less strained in their praise and courtesies towards others – less self-conscious, I suppose, than they were before her literary reputation built its solid foundations. But there was still that unfinished novel around her neck which was to be called I’ll Die Laughing – one of her several ironic titles, which was published posthumously in 1986. She saw it as ‘full of anguish’. It would take a lot more work. She knew what she wanted to say. But that would involve ‘cutting down the excitement and drama and conflict.’ Even as we read this promise to herself, it sounds unlikely. It was a leftwing novel about Hollywood. It was set in the thirties and she had begun to write it in the ominous, disgusting era of Senator McCarthy. How could it not be full of anguish? It was not in Stead’s nature – literary or personal – to write something as composed, as latently pastoral in its grim mood, as the great political novel of that period, The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling. Stead was not a liberal intelligence. She did not yearn for what was calm and good. She was a kind of double agent for what was true to each thing and every thing: calm and good in spots of time, cruel and alive in others, and the task of writing was akin to the task of being itself: with its derring-do, its courageous ventures into arenas of desire, ambivalence, and dispassionate witnessing – of all others, as well as of Eros, and one’s self.

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She was however a forbidding writer of dense texts. Her novels were hard to finish. The freedom the text, and its characters, sought, was seldom realised. Great promise was there, a welter of it. But the air of full movement was not enabling enough to draw one on. And when one did, it was for the autobiographical glimpses of the writer, the person so much aware of the ambiguities of freedom – free in the way an intelligent, recently widowed woman is free, even if she is sad and lonely and fading, as Christina Stead felt herself to be and mostly was when she came back to Australia after the death of her Communist/Banker/Writer/Jewish husband, Bill Blake (né Blech), to whom she had been coupled for almost four decades. I wished I’d met her younger, Patrick White remarked, which is what you would expect the old hatchet to say. One imagines the fading gleam of one flinty novelist facing the gleam of the other as the sun went down over their cocktails. Our best writers have not been the kindly ones. By the time she came back to her country, Australia was learning the ironic lessons of it being lucky. Gutless until the last, we were fighting another atrocious war for Empire, the American one, while trying to manage our bad faith, guilt, and so on. The same with personal relationships: divorce without responsibility was to be legalised, and love was to be spoken of as candidly as war. Yet tact was still required: realities could be mysteriously hidden. For example, how was one to understand the word that had got out about Stead having had an ‘open marriage’? Adultery had not been her theme, but ‘women’s desire’ had, evidently. From early in her union with Blake, she flaunted her interest in men. Men were more interesting than ‘desperately married women’. In her conspicuously autobiographical novel For Love Alone (1944), her heroine was ‘half mad with love’, especially when she was thinking ‘it does not die in marriage, it is not over once and for all’. Yet there is the short story ‘A Harmless Affair’ (another ironic title, and written much later) where the female protagonist, a woman akin to herself, is rather coy: she thinks of lovemaking as ‘night business’ and is keen to get dressed in the morning as quickly as possible. Stead’s narratives often skipped along, fuelled with ambivalence.

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This at least is the reading of Stead’s biographer, the late and admirable Hazel Rowley, who was in her writing candid and admiring of the free spirits of her subjects (such as the libertines Sartre and de Beauvoir) and in her life, boldly fraternising with and amorous of African-American society during the years when she was involved in her biography of the black, Communist novelist, Richard Wright. Some writing, it seems to me, demands that genre distinctions be set alight and rendered as ash so that we can fully occupy the true amorous ground of the various tellings, whether they be fiction or not. ‘I believe last night I dreamed about every eligible man I have ever known’, Stead wrote to Blake in 1942. She named names and added: ‘ – all very nice, affectionate, friendly to me, no sex.’ But the dreaming was the thing: it was as real as the fictional counterparts of the men she could not get out of her mind, men with powerful bodies and Nietzschean free spirits. Stead embraced the allure of the tellings themselves, which she indulged with her collection of puppets. ‘Even the Kama Sutra knows’, she wrote to a friend in 1967, that men who tell stories are among ‘the most attractive to women’. Consider what went into the puppet she called Tom. There was ‘the hero of the Rumanian ballad who had his heart torn from his breast’, and ‘the Transylvanian man who slowly turned to stone as he looked at himself in the mirror’, and ‘the Clown of folklore, that personage of dubious sex.’ She recounts the risks and damages of ancient ‘horseplay’, and the ‘sun-worship of Scandinavian scenes’ where ‘women sit in a circle and in which Tom, with a rose in his ear, crosses the sacred circle, a glass is smashed, blood falls etc’. Tom was born of bad things, bad fairies and witches. ‘In fact,’ Stead confesses, ‘though Tom was a real man, someone I knew quite well and who confided in me (all those stories!), he became, I suppose with all this legend, something of a puppet.’ But when push came to shove, Stead came down on the side of life. ‘I am opposed to inventing in life’, she told Thistle Harris back in 1942. ‘Life is so strange and we know it so little, that nothing is needed in that direction …’ And at the very same time, life outside fiction never quite lived up to her

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expectations, which had long made her ‘fretful’. That, and, probably, her reticence towards physical desire itself. My reading about the puppets came on the heels of revisiting Hazel Rowley’s biography of Stead. The book fell open at the Age article I’d written about Stead on the occasion of her 80th birthday. I met her for the first and only time in September 1982 and the encounter has always loomed ambiguously in my memory, a source of arousal, consternation and, I suppose, shame. It was an honour to meet her. I felt I was in the presence of someone rather great. I have reason to think that Stead enjoyed the meeting also and I have often wondered if she registered the moment between us when the man who had come to meet her and to transcribe her was bursting to tell her of what was still cascading in himself. But like a dumb puppet, he was too beside himself to speak. Rowley, at least, thought it was a good meeting. She wrote that the writer brightened up Stead’s day and that they found each other charming. We sat in the sunroom. Her sister’s African violets were in bloom. Christina Stead found a shawl, because the radiator had to give its plug to the tape recorder. She is an exquisitely frail woman these days, and not at all like those plump, sporty shots of her with her husband, taken on cosmopolitan jaunts. Her fingers in the morning light were translucent and coral pink, like the bow of her blouse. But when she spoke, the frailty disappeared. Her features sharpened, and the New York timbres of her voice deepened. When she got up to pour Vermouth, her step, in the fawn slacks with the black kid pumps, had a snap to it; one could imagine her clicking her heels as she left the room – cocktails, ole. For all her sadness and loneliness, the old lady put on a lovely show for the youngish man. As you do when you are having the first drink of the day. Mind you, I already felt a political kinship with Stead. My father in Melbourne was an organiser of the metal workers union to which her brother Gilbert be­longed in Sydney. It’s easy to imagine socialists like them featuring in Stead’s early book, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), that vitalist novel of the twenties, where men and women seek to forge their freedoms by ‘the recognition – 6 –

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of necessity’, as Marx would have said. The writing in it was brilliantly, youthfully excessive. Its dominant virtue was, as her friend and literary executor Ron Geering judged, its ‘reckless sincerity’. She’s been staying with her relatives lately, my father told me, in the early years of her return. Ever met her? ‘Evidently she’s pretty progressive.’ Progressive, but not idealist. That was the thing about the other great autobiographical novel, The Man Who Loved Children (1940). Stead was proud of its ‘intelligent ferocity’, and the way in which ‘the frightful desire in it’ gave it its strength, and even what some might think its ‘inhumanity’. Good novels ‘must have errors of taste and style’. The Times Literary Supplement described her as a ‘kind of dark star among novelists’. So eventually, when The Age commanded, I made my way up to that louche capital, Sydney. Then, to reach Christina Stead, I took the train down the south coast of New South Wales as far as the great industrial complex of Wollongong, full of fire and iron and dust and authenticity. It is a formidable journey. The deep blue ocean all the way, with the Satanic mills to come. The train travels on an escarpment that is as beautiful as nakedness can be. You set off, of course, from Central Station, which has always made me feel I am beginning a journey from some grander metropolis, Rome’s Termini, for instance, or even Grand Central in New York, where the beginnings of journeys are themselves adventurous and mysterious. I didn’t know, as I got to the platform and wandered along the train, what was in store or what I might be looking for. I only knew, to tell the truth, that my second marriage was as good as over and that something would have to be done about that some time soon. Once the train started, I went from dog box to dog box, glancing in. ‘I cannot avoid the melodramatic situations in life’, Stead wrote, back in the middle of her journey, when she was 40. I was a year short of 40 myself. I settled into the window seat facing a honey coloured woman sitting with a girl in a short denim skirt. She was about thirty and her kid was 13,

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I’d say, and between them they had a wicker basket. The mother reached into the basket and gave me a peep at the neck of a bottle. She showed enough to reveal that it was chilled and white. She raised a lovely eyebrow of inquiry and I reached out to take the glass she produced from a tea towel. This is very good, I said, as if I was an insufferable wine-buff. Her black eyes glistened but she was not drunk. Her neat, plump body seemed to say: we are just on a little trip together. I don’t usually smoke, I said, but would you like one? A deliriously willing smile. I passed her one of the joints I had filed into the top pocket of my navy blue jacket. I was also wearing fawn slacks and newly polished, tan shoes. Blue checked, button-down shirt. Who would have expected Mister Square to be so well equipped? I’m all dolled up, I know, I said. But I am going to visit a queen. A fresh bread stick came out of the basket, along with a small, pottery terrine of duck paté. Are you French? She laughed. Pearly white were her teeth, in a wide mouth. No lipstick was needed for the full lips. It was hard not to look out the window to escape from such beauty and sureness. She had tucked a hibiscus into her long, heavy, black hair, just above the ear which was furthest from the window. Tahiti? No, she said. Do you come from Samoa? No no no, she said. Oh well, I am trying. Oh you are trying, she said. The bottle came towards me once more. We have plenty here, she said, indicating the tea-towel, a red and white check like Arafat’s head gear. I don’t mind if I do, madam.

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She liked the parody and I lit her another joint. The ocean ran alongside us, with its falling cliffs of foam and ravishing cobalt. I feel like Captain Cook lost on the Pacific, I said, inanely. She was looking out the window. As a navigator, I went on, I lust to know from where you come. I can imagine, she said, turning back to me. We carried on towards whatever was ahead of us. No rush. No words wasted. As if guided by the stars invisibly overhead. They had been visiting friends in Cronulla. Sharks, I said. Lots, she said. I used to surf there once, when I was up in Sydney playing water-polo. A swimmer, hey, she said, dryly. You might laugh, I said. I was in California a few years ago, and the black women I was hanging out with subscribed to pinup magazines for girls. The centrefolds were Aussie blokes in their budgies and whatnot. Whatnot, she laughed. Whatnots, we laughed, stoned at last. As the train slowed and made speed again, you could have sworn it was about to pull in at the Satanic mills any minute. But time was plentiful, just as it can be when life is full. We went through a tunnel and were pleased to see each other reappear out of the darkness. In the next tunnel I reached out and put my hand on her knee, and kept it there until day came back. When her face was suddenly lit, her smile was something that could have fallen from a palm tree. You have to be Maori, I said. I have to be Maori, she said, winsomely. – 9 –

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The train clattered and surged on its tracks, and the whistle hooting its way into the carriage, tapering to a scream. As the light broke in I realised the scream was not the train’s. It was the girl with us. At some stage she had slid into the window seat beside her mother and leaned out. Her screaming lasted for the length of the tunnel before she pulled her head in. You’ll fucking kill yourself, her mother said, and slapped the back of the girl’s thighs as she coiled back into her seat. What if I fuckin do, her mother was told. Look, her mother said to me, we might as well finish this. Have the dregs. Ignore the little bitch. She always does this. We were quiet for a while. Thirroul moved past us. I told the Maori about Lawrence and Frieda. I told her about the wave that dumped him, and the painting of them in the surf together, where his hat had flown off and Frieda bobs around, unsinkable in the deep blue. I used the expression, aggressive familiarity – DHL’s description of the Australian manner. I said that the great writer I was going to meet had written a novel almost as good as Lawrence’s Kangaroo. She giggled. Oh yeah, what was it called? Joey in the Pouch? Seven Poor Men of Sydney, I said. Poor men, she said. Seven of them … hard times. But it’s not just about being poor. ‘Everyone is a fountain of passion’, Christina Stead thought, when she was creating her characters. I thought my fellow traveller brightened at this, but she added: I don’t read much. I’m dyslexic. I’m sorry to hear that, I said. I don’t know why you should be. Not everyone spends their life with their face in books. We travelled a while on our separate tracks. I had a husband once, she said, who used to surf at Coromandel. I knew it! You are a Kiwi.

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Men always think they know, she said. It’s their aggressive familiarity. You’re all talk, she said. I bet you’re a softie. Oh, I just remembered. What? She said, with a crushing touch of boredom. Look. I’d found the flask of whiskey in the overnight bag. Oh, she laughed, this is the beginning of the end. You’re brilliant. I know, I said, prepared to say anything. Any minute we would be there. But it took ages. I could not tell if it was the grass or the whiskey that slowed things up. The hardest part, as the train lurched and swayed, was getting the address right: I thought I had it by memory, but kept having to check with her before writing it down. The time we fixed for our rendezvous was 9 p.m. I knew I’d be tired, just as I knew that if I did turn up it would mark the end of my marriage. My wife used to say that if I played around she did not want to know about it. I lived with that until my freedom rendered me a reformed man. No more affairs, I had decided, by the time it was too late. Now what was to stop me from taking everything that came my way? My new friend’s stop was two before Wollongong and she kissed me on the mouth as she left. Her name was Arataki. See you, she said, and the girl sprang out ahead of her. She had the high buttocks and calf muscles of her mother. Next morning, the man Christina Stead found waiting for her was de­hydrated and drained in every way. Wasted. He feared the perspicacious woman of the world would see through him like papier mâché. When he got back to Victoria, he would receive a post-card. After reading one of his stories, A Bold Headline, she would write to him: ‘I had in my mind the tall, dark, upstanding, silent, viewing man I saw when I came out of the – 11 –

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room to meet you …’ This was one of Stead’s gifts: her mind could go to and fro from life to fiction, each realm as feathered and sharp as the other. He should have told her everything. He should have poured himself out, risking everything. We had drinks and an hour’s recorded conversation before going out to lunch, and it was the most pleasant of meetings. One must say this because Christina Stead is not renowned for giving interviewers an easy time. If anyone goes so far as to think her expatriotism involved a rejection of Australia, or that her work might be read as a feminist tract, or that she has ever written just for publication or money rather than the joy of it, she will bite his head off. In general, interviewers have met a pellucid mind resisting any single interpretation of her work, insisting that analysis be set aside to allow the novels to speak for themselves … Some of these indiscretions I managed to avoid, but I found the point where we could have started only towards the end of the lunch. She had described herself as an atheist, and to the question as to whether she had ever not been one, she said: ‘No, Never.’ Then later, very quietly and almost out of the blue, she said: ‘I’m a believer in love. That’s really my religion. Why, I don’t know. I think it has some thing to do with creativity.’ So how does one bring a life to bear on a manifold body of work? How to use one to elucidate the other? Lately Christina Stead has been reading autobiographies – Gide’s, Stanley Burnshaw’s, and the books by her two friends, Nugget Coombs and Patrick White. I mentioned ‘The Age’ review of ‘Flaws in the Glass’ which recommended that readers start with the biography, if they had not tackled the novels. What did she think of that? ‘Oh’, she said, ‘I don’t read reviews of my own work, because I know, and they don’t, frankly, for the most part. But I’m not being rude and I know reviewers have to do five or six books a week, poor things. – 12 –

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‘But if reviewers want to have access (to White) they should start with ‘The Aunt’s Story’, something like that. This, the autobiography, is the last thing they should read … This is his farewell, his sorrow, and everything that people would not understand unless they had read the whole life. ‘Several times people have written to me, publishers and so on, saying, ‘will I write my autobiography?’ So I invariably write back saying that I have written my biography in all of my books. And this is true.’ Did the idea attract her at all, perhaps, telling her story another way, since she so loved telling stories? ‘I’d hate to’, she said. Choosing another form for the telling, perhaps? ‘I couldn’t. I’m not interested in myself. Because I write fluently, when I’m writing, and I don’t think about myself. I think about the character. Well, I don’t think, frankly’, she chuckled. ‘You don’t think’ ‘I don’t think’. ‘You sense the character and …’ ‘Look, I’m extremely interested in persons, people. This is partly because I was brought up by a scientist, who looked at everything except himself, in a fairly scientific way. And also because I was brought up in a crowd of people, a big family, in which there was too much to do to sit and think of yourself. All the other kids were younger than me. There was a lot to do. The others needed looking after’. In ‘For Love Alone’ (1944), the story of a Sydney girl who sailed away to London, leaving the fold of brothers and sisters and her father, there is a tall man prone to laughing and shouting and speaking of himself as beautiful, who had ‘thick hair of pale, burning gold’. Teresa is a yearning, sensual creature and in London she ends in an unhappy wrangle with the emotionally craven, pseudointellectual, Jonathan Crow. Then she meets Quick, the businessman she will marry, and who will show her the world. Even more pointed is ‘The Man Who loved Children’, which is her masterpiece, and one of the great books of this century. It is set near Washington, but the domestic details are lifted from her childhood in Watson’s Bay, Sydney.

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If ‘For Love Alone’ turns out to be a reasonably happy story (give or take what the author calls, towards the end, ‘loving mendacity’), this is a saga of love gone wrong. The burden of anguish falls on the stepdaughter, Louisa, the all-seeing eldest child who has already decided to be an artist. Caught between the harridan furies of her stepmother, and the loving, strutting talk of her father, a naturalist and socialist, she takes extreme action – on behalf of herself, and her brothers and sisters who had been subjected to such oblivious cruelty. In the book, the girl is responsible for her stepmother’s death, and there is no escaping the resulting storm. All the reader can do is be borne aloft, like the author, on the release and self-acceptance which upheavals can bring. In an interview on the ABC a couple of years ago, Christina Stead said that while of course she had not tried to kill her stepmother, she has thought a lot about it. Finally, Louisa walks away – off into her own life, leaving her father, Sam, standing. By this time we have come, almost, to love the man, but consider his pickle: he knows so much, he has read everything, he can talk so reasonably, but it is as if he can no longer learn. When the American critic Randall Jarrell came to write his introduction to the novel, he observed: ‘There is an abject reality about the woman, Henny (the stepmother), an abject ideality about the man, Sam: he is so idealistically, hypocritically, transcendentally masculine that a male reader worries, ‘Ought I to be a man?’ So with some of this in mind, I was keen to talk about ‘thinking’, and how it fits, or doesn’t, into certain ways of being. Why, in ‘Seven Poor Men of Sydney’ composed before she was 30, and which is as much about economic survival as love, there is brilliant passage after brilliant passage of philosophical and political talk … so many ideas in the book! ‘Yes, but those people really talked that way. Those people were like that.’ Were they? ‘Of course. Well, I didn’t invent it’. And there was no exasperation with the pure intellectuality of some kinds of men? ‘No, I have no dislike of any men at all’. I still have a clear image of our lunch table: the white cloth, the white wine in its stainless steel bucket, the napkin Stead had hardly touched, because she – 14 –

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was not eating much at this stage of her life: she drank instead, and the doctors were already finding she was wasting away. When did you first read Nietzsche? I asked. ‘Ah, now you’ve struck the right chord. When I was at high school. I knew ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ by heart, I assure you. I had an exceptionally good memory. She went on to say how, years later, when she was in Basel with her husband, he had found her a German edition of the book. She did not read much German, but still she knew the work by heart … Suddenly she looked away from me and into the distance. She began to recite. ‘It is night. Now all dashing fountains speak louder. My heart is a dashing fountain. It is night. Let all songs of the loving ones awake. My heart is also the song of a loving one.’ I’d taken a taxi out to the edge of what looked like a swamp and Arataki opened the door into a half-lit room. Fish glowed in water tanks, swimming around with full stomachs, their lips agape. Leopard skin lounge chairs and a settee with a spring spouting out of a cushion at the end. Cane chairs with broken slats in their seats marched into the open kitchen where pasta lolled in a pot of luke-warm water. Not hungry, I had to say, and we stood, hugging and fondling. We sat on the couch for a time. She found her Jim Beam. Incredibly sweet. You’ll ply me with Southern Comfort next. She put on Joplin and hollered. I found Blonde on Blonde and put on ‘Just Like A Woman’, remembering a bedroom in London where I wept because I was leaving my first wife. The house reached away into darkness, and the humidity of the night seemed set to last. What was your first wife’s name? I was asked. I don’t remember no more, I said, because just then I did not recall having ever mentioned my first wife. You’re funny, she said, as if I was wondering if we’d thrown the Tarot cards and I’d got the Hanged Man. I heard something drop in the next room. That your husband? I whispered. Don’t have one, she said, – 15 –

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but I have a boyfriend: he might come round, he might not, she said. Depends on what you want. I want you, I said. You’re a good man, she lied, and led me to the bed. My boyfriend comes, she said, when we find the right girl. We were naked, and kissing like parrots, but I pulled away to draw breath. Girl? Ok, woman. A working girl. They come as a job. They don’t mind. She said the prostitutes don’t mind being tied up, that they liked it in all kinds of ways. She explained in detail, and when I murmured something vague I found that a dildo had appeared from nowhere. The sheets were black satin and the creamy spotty thing seemed to give off light in the dark. Not my thing, I said. Not my thing, she twittered, a dusky bird dropping down, out of sight. The hibiscus was in a vase by the bed, with the clock and a glass of stale water. She had rolled me over and I was stretched out like the woman in Bonnard’s Siesta. Sure? she said, as she popped back up. Sure. The last one we had was pregnant, she said. Sounds fantastic. You snooty? Nup, just drunk, and worn out. Sorry. Kiss me, she said. The bottle at our lunch table was nearly empty; I knew we should not get another; I wanted to tell Christina Stead that only last night my marriage had finally ended in the arms of a beautiful and cruel mother. I wanted to say that I had almost absolutely surrendered to a puppet master or mistress, whatever. Listen to my story, I wanted to say, flowers and flames are lighting up and pouring in and out of each like waters that have broken their banks. – 16 –

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‘The floor began to talk’, Stead was telling me. It said, ‘Oh. All those heavy things on me, the dressing table and the bed and this case’. The door would say, ‘oh they open and shut me and I could creak.’ Stead paused. ‘I couldn’t speak this English, but I knew it, I knew the language’. ‘And the little corner cabinet with shelves, it said, my shelves don’t fit … I don’t know why everybody was complaining.’ They all felt oppressed, I said. ‘They all felt oppressed, yes.’ Arataki told me to keep kissing her and I did, even though my lips were numbed by dope and by drink. Hers were still bounteous, nibbly and sucky, her body squirming even when I was hardly touching her as she said again and again that I should surrender to all that she had or anyone else had to offer. Then there was the smashing of glass. It came from the gloom of the next room, into which we could see through the bi-folds as we lay on the bed. A violent smashing, followed by tinkling, the sounds of which hung in the air. No light went on. We lay still. A sea breeze wafted in. You could hear the frogs outside, but you could only just hear the yelps of her daughter as she ploughed through the reeds to the dunes. The waves crashed in relentlessly. It was night, and it was night, over the land and far out to sea. I don’t know how I got home, I wanted to say to Christina Stead. For I had lingered, disgustingly stayed, on the sheen of the black bed. Some species of wicked self-respect made me finish the night-business with the mother. Only then was I gone. And here I am now and here is my heart, I would have said, as I put the dead thing on the tablecloth so she could inspect it. In interviews since returning to Australia, Christina Stead has stressed the habits of mind she learnt from her father, the naturalist. It is a way of emphasising

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her objectivity. I do not judge or criticize, she is saying, I set things down as they are, as we might be observed if we were fish in a bowl. This is an interesting view, but rather misleading. It does not embrace, for instance, her social passions, her interest in poor people, those whose lives have been constricted by the economic order; anymore than it takes account of the wit with which she has portrayed the world of high finance. It does not, in short, take account of her sardonic power, an angle of vision inseparable from her cutting edge. That her criticism is not polemical, is one thing (an imputation which makes her rightly contemptuous). But to insist that her art has no ‘point of view’ is another. And yet, at the same time, it is true that characters in her novels express many points of view, and that across the span of a few hundred pages, the reader experiences multiple views in all their richness. Her work is made of people striving to be true to themselves and it is this – the author’s balancing act of distributing justice – that makes one remember her claim to be a naturalist. Ecologically speaking, she displays the branches of the human tree, in all their horror and glory. She accepts. It dawned upon me later that this was the atmosphere while we were in the sunroom: an air of acceptance, which continued for the time we spent at lunch. Her intelligence was not necessarily accepting, oh no: and intelligence is not like that. But in her being grace resides in an equanimity, in a composure that seems to belong to her knowing things as wholes. She accepts because she has entered the world, in a way that a naturalist need not, but which she, as a living creature, has – ever since feeling compassion for the furniture. It has nothing to do with sentimentality, or pity. It has everything to do with being able to see harshly, from the inside-out. Maybe that is what she meant by love. Her heart is still a dashing fountain. The postcard had two thick-set Toucans on it – a woodcut by Lionel Lindsay. Their cruel beaks were to die for. She wrote that I was a novelist ‘by inborn gift and way of viewing’, and that if I ever wrote a novel, and if it was – 18 –

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like the stories, especially the one about swimming against the tide, she would be its advocate, if I would allow. To this day I don’t know the full inside-out of what drove me to want to spill my beans, and have even less of an idea how she would have responded. I have read letters where she was sardonic about people who said too much too early in an encounter; she had even developed routines for putting people at ease after they had, to her delight, exposed themselves. And I can’t honestly claim that the shame I speak of now substantially existed or fully inhabited me at the time, as distinct from being a disturbing event in the philandering life of a young man who I would not be interested in meeting today. I can only imagine the horror of that lunch if I’d said enough for her to want to dissect me there and then. A critic in New York once praised Stead’s style for its malice towards butterflies. But it was an effusive communication, typed on both sides and in the margins. It was as big a normal post-card as can be, and it was late coming, she said, because she had been to Canberra where many old friends gave her a birthday party, which she managed to enjoy. She died only months after the party. She drank heavily until the end, and I wish I’d told her that I had a vision of writing: that it be done in the spirit of one’s best talking at three in the morning. Or talking on a night train, let’s say, fearless talking all the way until mind and heart are splashed by morning light … I imagine she would have liked that idea – better by far than Mark Twain’s advice that before we set out to write at all the pen should be warmed up in hell.

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L E T T ER T O M Y FAT H ER Election eve, 2007 Dear Neville, I know you weren’t that keen on poetry – apart from Henry Lawson’s ‘Faces in the Street’ – but here’s a short poem I wrote a couple of years ago. I’d been looking at the black and white snap that shows us standing at your grave, huddled there in the winter light out on the flats near the Altona petro‐chemical complex. It was a big mob of unionists and peace workers, but you can’t see the Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament’s Sam Goldbloom, who gave the oration from the centre of the pack. I haven’t read this poem to any of your mates, living or dead, but I’ll type it again for you now. It’s the first poem in my new book, Necessity, which has an epigraph from a great Californian poet, George Oppen, a leftist, a modernist who worked on the docks in San Francisco. The book, which has a lot of you in it, is worth getting for Oppen’s lines alone: There is the one word Which one must Define for oneself, the word Us. Here is the poem about your present suffering, even though you died fifteen years ago. It’s called ‘Old Photo: The Union Buries …’ Forgive me my use of the third person: in my heart, I was writing the poem directly to you. A solid pack around his grave. Good steel to a magnet, the sky leaden with the warmth, somehow, of common ground. I did not know them all

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but the bulk of them knew me. Their leader told them of his bookish son and of his grandchildren gathered – see, near my elbow on the lava plain on the hard crust of The Flats near thistles, stone walls, Carbon Black and the cracker’s flame leaping where the cranes once flew over a lad’s lizard‐hunting days. That was the time of solid stories, of organising rather than mourning. This group, with family in it, is resolution. I remember stupidly thinking, the clay’s so sticky no union man could turn in it. This was written about a year before the bastards got really serious about their new laws for unions and workplaces. Bad enough then, worse now. ‘You wouldn’t read about it,’ I can hear you saying. ‘Bloody murder.’ Well, we did read about it, and it boils down to murder. If you were around now you – union organiser or not – you could have trouble getting into the worksite. The blokes would have to meet you outside the gate. Break that rule and we’d be visiting you in prison. How did it happen? As you used to say it might happen – pretty much as Jack London set out in his prophetic novel, The Iron Heel, published in 1908. The corporations got their way. Corporate power managed, after years of subtle and not‐so‐subtle manoeuvring, to get the workforce it wanted. In the United States, they managed it by the start of the twentieth century; here, they are clinching it for the twenty‐first. Now our country – which we like to think has a unique egalitarian tradition – is battling not to be redesigned to fit a trade agreement with America that makes us about as independent of their economic interests as – 21 –

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Hawai‘i. Shocking things have become givens: work shifts increasingly make the old family life impossible; more women are in the workforce but at the lowest rates of pay; the same with young people. Everything is more modern than you knew, but fewer and fewer people are being skilled for it. Australia has a skills shortage, would you believe? And strikes are, in effect, banned. In the culture at large, there’s an attitude to workers’ actions that would throw you back to the 1920s, when your father was accused of being a Wobbly. The mass media subtext is that unions are subversive. Of what? The economy, stupid. You know the argument – I won’t punish you by repeating it. What you wouldn’t know, though, is how many corporate chiefs, and those who keep smearing unions and the very idea of working people having the right to use their power, are earning millions these days. Millions a year! You died in the early 1980s, just as a slogan fell to earth: ‘Greed is good’. This is still the atmosphere in which Australian workers are supposed to ‘negotiate’ what are called their ‘individual workplace agreements’. These agreements are as individual as a cigarette in a packet. I can see you lighting one up. You’re in our kitchen at home, that little weatherboard Housing Commis­ sion place into which you and Mum proudly moved soon after the war, and the clay soil of which you both turned into the humus that yielded the nicest garden in the street. You smoke one cigarette, butt it out, and light another. The back door is open to the breeze; the tea in the teapot has gone cold and is thick with tannin. It’s ten years since Mum died and you are missing her badly. You keep the house spick and span in her honour. The door is open for any of your old mates who might walk in. ‘G’day Nev.’ ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ And they scrape their boots on the back step and come in. Men from the railways, dockyards, from the petrochemical works, from the power house. Fitters, electricians, welders, toolmakers. They have come off the job, or they might be on their way to a shift. They have come to say

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hello – they miss you now you’re retired. They want to know what you think about various ‘developments’ in their jobs. A dispute is brewing: what do you reckon about this and this …? Towards the end of your life, you were a Commonwealth Bank of industrial wisdom. Today – I’ll spit this out – what can we say when the guts seems to have gone out of people’s confidence to organise collectively? And when the terms of public debate about these issues are such that once you deal with the slanderous references to ‘union bosses’ – the glib and sinister media shorthand for the thuggery, corruption and stupidity of the men and women elected to represent working people – you then have to argue the case for the basic rights to action. Your life’s work wasted – and your father’s, too. In everything I say to you now, to you both, I can feel my breath shortening. I write to you with a kind of sick hope. You gave me such strength to dissent in the name of common decency and justice. At the same time, so many of us feel it’s a losing battle, and that the ideas which were once an effective weaponry have lost their edge, and may even be strangely harmful, I’m not sure why. As it happened, in the year leading up to the passing of the IR legislation (disgustingly called ‘WorkChoices’), I was out of the country, living in Rome. If I’d been here I would not have been able to stand your pain. The Left in Italy is still strong – useless a lot of the time, but strong, and often corrupt. But that’s Italy. We cursed the unions when the trains stopped running, yet praised them for still existing in their confident ways. One day I watched a couple of railway workers walk along the track beside the train. Solid middle‐aged men in their prime – like you when you worked for the Victorian Railways. They had that physical ease of tradesmen who are not driven like slaves – a clock was ticking as they walked beside our stationary train, but the clock was well out of sight. They wore smart navy‐blue denim work pants, with an emerald green lining on the trouser pocket. They seemed to be light on their feet, as you were when you rode a bike to work – a short ride to the erecting shop

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where you worked as a blacksmith and then a welder. A man with the light step of a good footballer, cricketer and boxer. When I was a kid, you used to let me feel your shoulders and biceps. Your arms were made for hammers. And you had the heart that could endure a furnace when it was close to hand. From Rome, I’d ring up mates who would tell me how the campaign to destroy the union movement was progressing. Their voices rang with incredulity. Was it possible to be living through an epoch of such historical defeat? The flat was a short walk from the Protestant Cemetery. It has the tomb of Shelley, who wrote the best of the angry poems against the crushing of working‐class people, and who scandalously declared himself a democrat, philanthropist, atheist. And the grave of Gramsci, the bravest of the Italian communists, who Mussolini locked up in 1926, sealing the fascist defeat of all legal opposition. Gramsci –‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ – then had all the time in the world to apply his great stoical intelligence to thinking and writing about matters collective, including that heroic moment when Italian workers took over their factories. You were never a communist, of course – you thought that the party tended to be authoritarian and was full of ‘yes men’. Besides, you thought – not without some vanity – that your militancy was more effective if you belonged to no party. I’m now thinking of you as an older man; you’d done your time with the railways and stepped up from being the secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, Newport Branch, to being a full‐time organiser for the office in the city. From blue to white collar in middle age – going off to work in a suit for the first time in your life, leaving Mum at home wondering what might become of her now that you were, in your prime, working in an office where there were ‘other women’. You remained as true to her as she was to you, no matter how long the strike or how arduous the picket line or how many meetings kept you out at night. That was something both of us knew. How

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solid Mum was going to be no matter what. I remember you saying when the Crimes Act was passed: ‘This could mean some of us could be put in gaol.’ And the feeling was that, even in gaol, the struggle would go on. For every good union man, there was a loyal woman at his side. That was the model: solidarity existed inside and outside, whatever might happen. From your graveside, we could see where one of the highlights of your life took place – the Union Carbide plant in Altona. That sit‐in – the longest in Australian history, as it turned out – was an event very largely led by you. The petrochemical complex was our wicked political landscape; some of those companies belonged to the IG Farben cartel that backed Nazism and made the gas for Hitler’s death camps. After the war, much of its know‐ how and capital migrated to America, where it thrived and began its march back across the rest of the world. When your union’s dispute with the company began in 1982, Union Carbide was not yet notorious for its industrial accident in Bhopal, India, where thousands died or were injured, never to be compensated. Your dispute could well have been about health and safety; there was already evidence of risk from a toxic complex being so close to settlements. But it was about shorter working hours, a battle for a thirty‐five‐hour week. It sounds utopian now, but was not (and you will be pleased to know that workers in France still have their thirty‐five‐hour week). It was simply the last of the major campaigns for shorter hours, argued on the principles that had inspired the Chartists more than a hundred years earlier. Your campaign was a direct continuation of the winning of the ‘eight‐hour day’ back in 1856. And that, remember – the bastards today would want us to forget it – sprang from the simple human truth that life is most worth living when we have a decent time to rest and play as well as work (as in ‘toil’). The vision back then, as with your last big campaign, was that bosses with their machines did not own time. Time – what we make of it – rests on what all of us decide together. You shone during that dispute – no, you helped many others shine. No one who went down to that picket line, no one who came to the fence to pass

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supplies over it to the workers inside, failed to realise this. Collective effort has a zest to it that the present culture wants us to suppress. Every nuance of the present culture is designed to channel this sense of empowerment into other things – sport, pop concerts, fire‐fighting. The sit‐in lasted nine weeks. During that time, the battle to sustain morale inside the plant was hard. But the men, as well as their families, and most of the union leadership outside of the dispute, held on. In the end, the unions did not win outright. They lasted until their case was heard in the court, at which point they were awarded a thirty‐eight hour week, a substantial victory at the time. The way the system worked meant this could be a benchmark for other cases, other situations. It also meant that collective action did not dissipate political resolve. No one could say a factory could not be taken over again if the cause demanded it. That’s unimaginable now. It’s important to say that in your mind such disputes were not ideologically driven. Yes, you had a firm view of the class set‐up, but indignation about that did not drive you. It was the structural backdrop to your organic sense of what might need to be done by particular unionists at particular times. You were not so much a class warrior as an open‐minded strategist. That’s why many of the bosses liked you – the tenor of you, your courtesy and sense of principle. You and a boss often liked each other out of mutual respect. Oddly enough, it was younger fellas like me who got on your goat, banging on about workers’ control. You did not speak in those terms. You didn’t get carried away with any notion that Capital should reconstruct itself with a mind to the rights of Labour. You didn’t seem to get round to reading about the experiments in industrial democracy in Scandinavia, any more than you got excited about the so‐called Tito model of workers’ control in Yugoslavia. When we had that decade of ‘workplace reform’ in the 1980s, when many of us were excited about some kind of civilised challenge to the ‘managerial prerogative’ – that left you cold too. I accused you of being stuffy, unimaginative, bound for defeat. You lit another cigarette. If I vamped up the discussion, spinning into sociology, you

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would hear me out and say, ‘Tell you the truth, Baz, some of what you are saying is a bit over my head.’ And so you, skilfully, Socratically, quietened me down – as you could some of the union blokes who landed in the kitchen, all hot under the collar. ‘Just a tick, just a tick,’ I can hear you saying to a couple of the ETU blokes (those who the ALP would now automatically expel, and this without a murmur from the ACTU). The young Trots loved you, and you appreciated that. Some of the best reports of the sit‐in appeared in Direct Action. You had the knack of reporting how things were going, without betraying the confidence of the men inside and without inflaming things with a falsely ideological report of the actual state of play. I suppose that’s what raises my hackles – that you were decently strong, so reasonable and committed, an approach that seems to have got the union movement nowhere. The IR laws are ruthlessly indifferent to the compact men like you made with industry – the productivity worth talking about. How many times, I wonder, did I hear you talking the details of what would improve productivity, and how better conditions might contribute to it? Countless times. You wouldn’t like this way of putting it, but you were part of the whole system. Men and women like you deserve better than what late capitalism has triumphantly delivered. The cynicism of corporate strategies is an insult to you as a citizen. It makes me feel I want to protect you and everything you stood for, as well as fight for something else – I’m not sure what – on your behalf. Remember the story you told about your own father, Percy? Percy – white haired, big‐bellied as I remember him, a gold watch in the fob pocket of his waistcoat, a flower in his lapel to please the ladies in the office of the Sheetmetal Workers’ Union at the Trades Hall, Melbourne. As a young man, a young father to you, he had been blacklisted for trying to start his union in the 1920s. These were the days before the factory was utterly modernised by time‐ and motion studies – ‘Taylorism’ (or ‘Fordism’, as Gramsci called it). Percy – 27 –

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was working away at his bench in a little factory in South Melbourne when he looked up to find an inspector standing beside him. In the palm of his hand, the inspector had a watch. Percy went on with his work for a few minutes. Then he looked across and said, ‘I say, what’s that you’ve got there?’ ‘Nothing much,’ said the inspector, ‘don’t let me disturb you.’ He had been observing with concentration Percy’s movements around the bench. ‘Oh, I see,’ said Percy, ‘it’s a watch. It looks like a beauty.’ ‘It is,’ the man had to agree. ‘You know,’ said Percy, ‘I’ve always wanted a watch like that. Mind if I have a look for a tick?’ He saw the inspector hesitate. He added, ‘I’ve heard a lot about those timepieces and I just want to check on something about them.’ ‘Oh, all right,’ said the inspector, and handed it over. Percy put the watch neatly on the bench and, bringing his hammer down, smashed it to pieces. Sacked again! His blacklist blacker. You were a stay‐at‐home who managed to live the life of an internationalist. Even the other day, when you came to me in an Indian temple, my clearest impressions were connected to those decades of routine at home. Back from the railway workshop at 4.30 p.m., home all weekend too; a few beers at the local on Saturday night, watching World of Sport on Sunday morning, mending the mower in the afternoon, sitting on a wooden box against the bike shed, sending me down to the local library to get what you called ‘a good novel’. A man who had left school at fourteen but who was a good reader, a subscriber to the Australasian Book Club, not to mention Overland (posted to the Newport Branch of the AEU, which was our place, thank you very much). A man of simple needs who groaned when he had to go into the city. My old man, the fixed point, I used to think, when little did I know that you were inseparable from events in other parts of the world, events to which we are all bound, like it or not. ‘Stand here,’ you told me once, when we were in a crowd at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, and I did. I joined the queue that slowly approached the – 28 –

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huge black man at the edge of the stage. ‘You’ll remember this,’ you said, and I knew I would as my fingers slipped into the big, warm, dark brown and pink hand of Paul Robeson. And in case I forgot, you bought the record of that wonderful event, when Robeson spoke of being with Welsh miners and workers in Russia (a nation that had welcomed his son into an unsegregated school) and then he sang Water Boy, and Old Man River, and of course Joe Hill, the name I would one day choose for my son. One cold night, years later, I was walking past the Melbourne Town Hall and there you were, out on the footpath in a thin plastic raincoat, your head damp from a recent shower. ‘Neville! What are you doing here?’ ‘It’s clear enough,’ you smiled, pleased to see me. There were half a dozen others with you. They stood close to each other, as if around a campfire, keeping warm by handing out the leaflets. HANDS OFF TIMOR. INDONESIA OUT. Guilt pricked me on the spot. And pride – that you were there, despite the smallness of the cause. This was in 1979. We chatted a while and I passed on, wondering how long Mum was going to have to keep your dinner hot. You were dead by the time the Timor cause became fashionable. You won’t believe me when I say that the Coalition government sent in troops to support their move to independence. You will believe me, though, when I hasten to add that both parties – Labor as well as the Coalition – did next to nothing to check the killings by the Indonesian militia. That day at the Palais, I remember now, had been organised by the Peace Movement. It was Hiroshima Day. ‘They didn’t have to do it.’ That’s what you always said. The Yanks could have won the war without dropping the atomic bomb. They had firebombed at least sixty cities, razing them to the ground, demolishing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Japan was beaten. I don’t even have to imagine what you would be saying about the bombing of Iraq and all that has followed. I know it in my bones. The blood from your heart flows in me and nourishes my political marrow. – 29 –

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And that’s how you appeared to me a few months ago, when I was in that temple in Rajgir in India, the one people come to through the bamboo forest, where the Buddha and his disciples had many meetings. The temple was vast, with no obvious place to sit. Just a bare tiled floor. The altar had been attended to, but that was all. A low wooden fence marked it off from visitors, leaving half the place divided into significant space and dead space, like an unused gymnasium. I drifted around the walls, looking at the woodcuts and the calligraphy that expressed the connection with the patrons in Japan. Then I felt you there: silent, invisible, but definitely there, as if you had come up behind me. There were many pictures of a Japanese monk with a wide brow and huge ears. You had big ears, as well as a noble forehead like his, especially as your hair receded, but your smile could not match that of the monk, whose mouth was ready for watermelon. At first I did not recognise him, although the face was intimately familiar. On the wall nearby there were large photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic blasts of 1945. The pictures curled at the edges, and the images – the skeletal dome, the charred bodies, the figure almost incinerated with the bicycle – had faded, just as they had, for a generation or so, begun to slip over the horizon into history. Or so it seemed. Now it made sense, my double memory. The monk was Nichidatsu Fujii. You’d met him in Tokyo in 1984, a visit that coincided with his hundredth birthday. A deep encounter – I could tell from your tone. Remember the story you told me about him? The Americans wanted to extend the airstrip in Tokyo so it could take their largest military planes. Fujii built a pagoda, a little Buddhist temple on the airstrip. It seemed a cute gesture, a mere symbol of resistance to war machines, and if it happened today they would rip it down. But this one pagoda stayed. A victory for the peace activists – one of many successes for the Nihonzan Myohoji order, of which Mr Fujii was the founder. Thereafter you carried Mr Fujii in you. You did not speak of him a lot, but Fujii was there inside you, like a mentor. And the fact that Fujii was so – 30 –

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loved in Japan gave you extra strength during the years you devoted to the peace movement in Australia. Not that your innerness was spiritual – not consciously, at least. You did not have a monkish disposition, although your natural shyness was compatible with a contemplative life. Your deeper self was directed outwards – which was the reason, I suppose, that you often cited the deeds of Gandhi; the deeds rather than his self‐struggle – his political sense, his imperatives for action. Fujii was all action without Gandhi’s mortifications. As I stood in the temple, I could see the joy in Mr Fujii’s face. A youthful vigour. In an odd way, I was conscious of your dapperness – how all your campaigning kept you young. Sometimes you were the sad man whose wife had died too young. But more often you burned for what had to be done to stop people killing each other. Fujii’s face, as I gazed at it, brought you into the temple. You came closer and stood by my side; we were shoulder to shoulder. What an internationalist you were! And I realised that the story you told me of Fujii included something you never actually described: the face‐to‐face meeting, with that utterly Buddhist smile of Fujii’s entering your heart. I think Japan, that most reticent yet passionate of places, did that for you, even though it was India which crucially helped. After all, it was after that journey, remember, that I first saw you weep. You’d come back from Russia. Yes, once upon a time you had travelled to the Holy Land and back. In the Soviet Union you felt that you had seen the future that worked (a claim we argued about a lot). Your union delegation was shown all manner of success, from the latest in tractor factories to the greatest achievements in mass education. The tears came with an image from Moscow on the screen: lovely kids in fur hats and red scarves playing in the snowy ground of their kindergarten, and you had to rush to the bathroom. I’m not trying to embarrass you. Mum and I sat dumbfounded in the lounge room. No explanation when you came back in. Just more slides. But a couple of days later you spoke to me resentfully. ‘If it wasn’t for you and your mother,’ you said, ‘I would give myself over to helping those people.’ – 31 –

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Those people were not the Russians, I was relieved to be told. You meant the women and children you’d seen in Bombay, on the stopover to Moscow. The union men had taken you into the slums, along the streets where women and girls in cages were for sale. ‘I would go back there,’ you said. ‘That’s what I would do!’ I remember thinking, ‘Why blame me? You could have changed your own life!’ Besides, if you’d told Mum, she might have gone with you. She was just as selfless as you, as I’m sure you realise. Now I realise that what you were saying was there is a depth of compassion that no amount of political struggle can appease – even in the days when political struggle on behalf of others was commonplace in Australia. That’s another thing you took for granted which is unimaginable now. Maybe you stepped up to me in the temple so that I would understand. There we stood, together in Mr Fujii’s Japanese temple, in India. None of us is alone, finally. Is that what you were doing in Vietnam, putting your selfless‐self deliberately at risk? To Hanoi you went, with another deputation and at the height of the American bombing. There was camaraderie in that – stumbling out of bed at 2 a.m. and heading towards the air‐raid shelter as the B52s came over. You told jokes about it. Those members of the Victorian Socialist Left who had to get their pants on first were lucky to come back at all. You risked your life in that war because you opposed war. The hot northerlies blow across your grave. Iraq? Do you know about the war we are caught up in now? I feel you stir. What are you signalling? That we must keep speaking out for peace and against war? That we must stick it out in the face of the American war machine? I read a statistic the other day, buried in the middle pages of the national newspaper. Guess how many American soldiers have killed themselves after coming back from the war? Twice as many as have died in it, so far. As for the huge number of civilians who are dead, you would have anticipated that. You had a radar system for what was pitiless.

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These days we have what is called a ‘war against terror’ … Now you’re lighting another cigarette. ‘Most terrorism,’ I can hear you saying, ‘is spawned in the Pentagon’. ‘That’s a bit simple,’ I reply. ‘Not when you look at what causes what.’ ‘Do you know that we have been undergoing a federal election campaign?’ ‘Oh yeah.’ ‘Labor is going to pull out of the war.’ ‘Watch how they keep fitting in with the Yanks.’ ‘Labor says it’s going to tear up the IR legislation. There is perhaps some hope in that.’ ‘Let’s wait,’ I can hear you say, ‘see how much of it they change.’ ‘At least Labor doesn’t think the world should be run mainly for big business.’ ‘They like to think they don’t. We’ll see.’

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W I L L I A M BUCK L E Y, I M AGI N AT ION, HOPE The bones of his story

The first settlement in Port Phillip Bay was at Sullivans Bay, now Sorrento, in October 1803 when Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins unloaded 303 convicts from the Calcutta. They had gone again by 30 January 1804, sailing south to what would become Hobart Town. In that time 27 convicts escaped, most of them eventually limping back into camp, preferring it to starvation or the phobia of ‘cannibals’. Buckley, aged 23, absconded on Christmas Eve 1803, along with at least four others: William Marmon, William McAllenan, James Taylor and William Vosper. They headed north without a map, in the vague direction of Sydney – ‘China Travelling’ as escaping was sometimes called. They had a gun, an iron kettle and plenty of stolen provisions. Marmon was the first to turn back. By the time the others reached the northern end of the bay and crossed the Yarra they had thrown away the kettle. McAllenan staggered back into camp mid-January, handing in the stolen gun. He said Buckley and the others had headed on to the mountains west of Port Phillip, which seems to have been true.1 Buckley and the others walked around the western side of the bay, climbed the You Yangs, came down to Corio Bay and pressed on to the northern end of Swan Bay. From there they had the extraordinary experience of observing the camp from which they had escaped some weeks before. Their nerve failed. Preferring captivity to the wilderness, they lit a fire, hoping to attract the attention of Collins’s camp. A boat set off from the other side: they watched it come towards them halfway across the bay and then turn back. 1

M. Tipping, Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and their Settlement in Australia, South Yarra, 1988, pp.92–96. The fullest contemporary account of Buckley is the classic study by Craig Robertson to which I am much in debt: Buckley’s Hope: The Story of Australia’s Wild White Man, Melbourne 1980.

W illiam B uckley, I magination , H ope

At that point Taylor and Vosper decided to walk back. Buckley made the momentous decision to remain free. Left alone, and experiencing, as he recounted, ‘the most severe mental suffering for several hours’, he then pursued his ‘solitary journey’.2 He travelling west, hugging the coast where there were shellfish and succulents. In one account he went as far as Cape Otway and then turned back, increasingly exhausted, until he was back on the shores of Port Phillip Bay at Indented Head, where he was taken in by natives, the tribe that was to be his for the rest of his time in the area.3 A year might have passed – Buckley is often vague about time. In another account, he came back as far as Barwon Heads, finally collapsing near the swamp where he was discovered by two native women. Overjoyed, they called their men, who helped him back to camp. They started a big cooking fire which Buckley feared was preparation for eating him. But it was a celebration at finding him with the spear of their late kinsman, Murrangurk, whose grave Buckley had passed some days before. Since Buckley’s pale skin made him a spirit returned from the dead, he was declared to be Murrangurk. So, after falling down semi-conscious, he rose to a new life, happily received into the country of the Wathaurong.4 At this point of fully journeying into the ‘wilderness’ (when wilderness is untamed country as well as untamed natives) the legend of William Buckley begins. At this point he becomes the Wild White Man, Australia’s own Robinson Crusoe, as John Morgan, an impecunious Hobart journalist called him in 1852, when Buckley agreed to sit down with him and tell his true story. At the time Buckley was 72 years of age and poor: he had been pensioned off in Hobart Town, and had as much reason to help Morgan tell a ripping yarn as Morgan had reason to cash in on the vogue for Defoe-styled myths. Morgan made it clear in his preface that he was elaborating on what Buckley had told him, if only because Buckley ‘could neither read nor write’. Elaboration it was, 2

John Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Melbourne, 1967, p.88.

4

Morgan, 1967, pp.20–3.

3

J.H. Wedge, ‘Narrative of William Buckley’, in J. Morgan, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Canberra, 1979, p.166.

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considering that Buckley had, seventeen years earlier, told another man he trusted that his wandering life had had ‘no interesting events’.5 That said, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley is still probably the most convincing account of how he survived, physically. His new relatives taught him to hunt and to fish. They spared him their frequent and bloody clan battles, which were mainly over women. On two different occasions over those years they presented him with a young wife – solace that he accepted, he says, though his time with the first girl was short. They were sufficiently attached to him to be upset when he wandered away from their camp, yet accommodating of his need to be alone for weeks or months at a time. They gave him the shelter of their society and the freedom to wander in their country. They did not expect him to be versed in all their ceremonies (since he was, to all intents and purposes, a spirit), so he was spared the responsibilities of secret sacred knowledge. The upshot was that since he obviously had the common sense to fit into native proceedings and often to make himself useful as well – his six foot six inch frame must have added to his dimension as spirit – for the next 32 years he survived, and perhaps even flourished as a black man, a native of the region who spoke the language of the tribe. Indeed, he became perfect in it, according to one of his reports, and in so doing forgot his own. He entered Aboriginal culture at a more practical level than any other white man in early Australian history. The frontier that Buckley knew was the frontier where the white man did the assimilating. This makes him, potentially, the most important of our pioneers. It makes sense to believe Morgan’s account of Buckley’s topography. He wandered between Port Phillip Heads and the Otways, and sometimes as far inland as the You Yangs. But his main country seems to have been along the Barwon and around Breamlea, where he set traps for fish and eels. The precise cave and the hollow trees that have been the narrow concern of some historians6 are neither here nor there when one remembers that he had joined a 5 6

Wedge, 1979, p. 166.

C.M. Tudehope, ‘William Buckley’, Victorian Historical Magazine, May 1962, pp.219–25.

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nomadic people: but there is no reason to doubt, considering the attractions of the site, that he was fond of the area around Buckley Falls, where food was plentiful and the caves were more congenial than the one facing the ocean winds at Point Lonsdale. Morgan’s account is, however, a strange one in a crucial respect: on Aboriginal religion, Morgan cites Buckley’s opinion that the Aborigines had none.7 More specifically, that they had no belief in a Supreme Being, which was central to the Judaeo-Christian concept of religion at that time. Anything short of that was categorised as heathen superstition and thus dismissible. This attitude would persist for the best part of the century, until such time as ethnographers began to think more tolerantly of cultural difference. So, it is more than likely that the Morgan/Buckley view simply mirrored contemporary frames of reference. And yet it is still strange that Buckley was so emphatic with Morgan. In all his time with the Wathaurong – inhabiting their language, and therefore being intimate with their myths and songs – he must have realised the depth of native spirituality, the resonance of their links with the habitat, the local flora and fauna as well as sites of special significance. The Morgan account is illuminated by Aboriginal place names that Buckley provided: how could Buckley know them without knowing something of their meaning and significance? Why did none of this seep into the Morgan account? In another, earlier report on the native religion, Buckley said he knew the place of the imaginary being who was ‘the author of all the songs’, and of another being who ‘had charge of the Pole or Pillar by which the sky is propped’.8 These two claims – one pointing to a myth about the origins of language, the other indicating the stories that told of the links between the earth and the creation beings that were the sky creatures – go to the heart of what, today, we would call the Dreaming. On this evidence alone, Buckley knew more about the Aboriginal religion than he was prepared to tell Morgan, or Morgan was interested in writing down. Either that, or Buckley was, in his 7 8

Morgan, 1967, pp.44–5.

G. Langhorne, ‘Reminiscences of William Buckley’, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Canberra, 1978, p.191.

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inability to relate one abstract thing to another, especially obtuse. This possibility certainly fits the picture given of him by white settlers like John Pascoe Fawkner who called him ‘a lump of clay’. But this diminishment of Buckley flies in the face of more interesting facts. Buckley walked back into white society on Sunday, 6 July 1835, at Indented Head, when he decided to make himself known to the three white men and five natives from New South Wales, who occupied John Batman’s staging camp for the rapacious Port Phillip Association. Batman had come from Tasmania, where he had made himself popular with Governor Arthur during his savage solution to the native problem. Not wanting to replicate the Tasmanian experience, he had already drawn up treaties, hoping to clinch the native land peacefully; and this he had done by July, with his notorious deal of blankets and beads for the spiritual inheritance of the Kulin people, along with tracts of land around Geelong, even though no clans from that area were present in the fraudulent signing ceremony.9 Andrew Todd, the settler who was Batman’s scribe, captured the moment of Buckley’s return, when the bearded giant in possum skins – barely recognisable as a white man – carrying spear and waddy, if the early paintings are to be believed, walked into their camp. Clad the same as the Native, he seemed highly pleased to see us. We brought him a piece of bread, which he eat (sic) very heartily, and told us immediately what it was. He also informed us that he has been above 20 years in the Country, during which time he had been with the Natives … He then told us that his name was Wm Buckley – having there (sic) following marks on his arm …10

It was a poignant moment. The man had forgotten his own language, which came rushing back only when the word ‘bread’ was spoken – this was how he told it to Morgan. But still his tongue did not fully loosen; it would 9 10

The most detailed account of Batman’s tactics is in A.H. Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines, Malmsbury, Vic. 1987, esp. pp.99–106.

A. Todd, Andrew alias William Todd (John Batman’s recorder) and his Indented Head journal, 1835, p.1. Brown, ed., Geelong, 1989, p.31.

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be some days before he was fluent again in his native English. He sat quietly in the white man’s camp, a strange figure of dejection, if the sketch of him by Batman’s surveyor, John Holder Wedge, is anything to go by. His future was now very uncertain. Buckley said he was a soldier who had been shipwrecked off Port Phillip Heads. Two days later, when he felt safer, he told them a slightly more accurate story. He was a convict who had been transported for ‘selling Stolen Property’ and that ‘Him and three others had bolted from the ship’, the name of which he could not remember, when it was in Western Port Bay. But that was no truer than the story he told Wedge, which was that he ‘was transported for mutiny, he with six others having turned to shoot the Duke of Kent at Gibraltar’.11 Buckley’s romancing abilities were already impressive. (The connection he did have with that mutiny was that six men involved in it had been shipped on the Calcutta, and one of them was named James Taylor, though not the Taylor he had escaped with).12 In fact, Buckley had been tried and convicted in 1802 at the Sussex Summer Assizes (along with his fellow runaway William Marmon) for burglary. They had broken into the shop of a Mr Cave of Warnham and stolen two pieces of Irish cloth. Their death sentences were commuted to transportation for life. Buckley was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of a farmer at Langton. By trade a bricklayer, he had learnt to read by the age of 15 – though Morgan and others have emphasised his illiteracy – and served as a soldier, at first in the Cheshire Militia and then in the 4th or King’s Own Regiment of Foot in Holland. He served reasonably well, was wounded in the right hand, but still had his strength and skills as a bricklayer to be a useful man in a new land.13 He was desperate, it emerged, to receive a pardon for his crimes, having served such a time now in the colony. That remained to be seen: Wedge penned a letter for Buckley that went off with Batman to Governor Arthur. In 11

Todd, 1989, pp.31 and 35.

13

Tipping, 1988, p.260.

12

Tipping, 1988, p.315.

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the meantime Buckley settled for several months into the camp at Indented Head, as content as his Wathaurong friends to be there. From the start the local natives had been singing and dancing with the New South Wales men in Batman’s party. They went ‘Cangaroo hunting’ during the day, and sang and danced at night. They loved the white man’s bread and potatoes, and before long 90 men, women, and children had gathered at the camp. They were most appreciative when Batman, on his return from Tasmania with more provisions, as well as Buckley’s pardon, put them on a daily donation of boiled wheat and potatoes. This did not stop them, however, keeping a sharp eye out for more scissors and tomahawks, and becoming restless at the thought of their new-found food running out. Buckley calmed them down, on one occasion persuading them to return to their hunting grounds until more supplies arrived.14 The natives sat with Wedge and he wrote down their names, thus making the first white attempt in Victoria to record one of the difficult and beautiful Aboriginal languages. He listed the names of 76 individuals. Across one page he drew a line and wrote: ‘The above families belong to this Ground, where we are on’ – an extraordinary phrasing for the period because it suggested that the white man had glimpsed the depth of Aboriginal belonging to place.15 Wedge learnt that Buckley knew no ‘principal chief ’ of the kind that Batman claimed to have made a treaty with, and decided that (as he wrote to a friend) ‘this is a secret that must, I suppose, be kept to ourselves or it may effect the deed of conveyance’.16 Wedge, through Buckley, made an agreement with the Wathaurong that in return for use of their land, provisions of food and other items would continue to be made – an agreement that was never kept. When Batman began to make plans for final departure, the natives were restless again. A ‘boy’ warned them that plans of murder were afoot (as Buckley had done earlier). Todd then made a diary entry that erases the humanity of all previous references to singing and friendliness, and gives 14

Todd, 1989, pp.35–57.

16

Campbell, 1987, p.101.

15

Todd, 1989, pp.59–60.

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the lie to the respectable view among even distinguished local historians that at this time ‘the Port Phillip Association’s pacific racial policy largely prevailed’.17 ‘We told them’, Todd let out in his record, ‘that if they attempted to do any thing of the kind we should shoot every man, woman and child of them’. With this incipient threat of genocide Batman’s party sailed away. Buckley, now invaluable as go-between, went up to the Yarra with Batman, where he was put to work as a translator: for £50 a year and rations he became one of the first public servants in ‘Victoria’. Buckley as Robinson Crusoe

What kind of story, then, is William Buckley’s? How does it arouse – or not arouse – our imaginations? Already, of course, it has a classic myth structure, where the hero courageously embarks from his place of origin, ventures into a wilderness, faces trials of various kinds, and, in the end, comes home to a place that is as changed as himself. Departure. Journey. Return. That is the story as myth. In the thumbnail sketch above, I have picked my way through some facts in order to prick the imagination with regard to Buckley’s ordeals: his escape; his dwelling with the tribe; his return to a new and invidious life as go-between. How we answer that question ‘What kind of story is Buckley’s?’ depends on which section of the great circle we want to shine the light on. That, and on the time and place (Buckley’s as well as ours) of the recounting, and, I suggest, on how we see our relationships with Indigenous people. All narrative turns on the lathe of history, and the history in question is still in motion – hence the resonance of the Buckley story today. 17

Todd. 1989, p.55. The comment is made by P.L. Brown, Todd’s editor. It is important to stress that Brown was focussed on the official intentions of Batman’s parties, not the savage reflexes of convicts such as Todd. An analysis of murder on the frontier often comes down to a distinction between the formalities of British Law, as it was urged upon Governors in New Holland by the Colonial Office, and the conduct of what the 1837 House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines called ‘the dregs of our countrymen’. Those ‘dregs’ were often nudged in the direction of murder by their bosses in Port Phillip, as suggested by the depositions regarding the 1836 murder of Curacione on the Barwon and the revenge massacre on the Werribee river (Historical Records of Victoria, M. Cannon, ed., Melbourne, 1982, vol.2A, pp.55–60 and 43–50).

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In general the legend of Buckley has focussed on those 32 years in the wilderness, his Robinson Crusoe aspect. Its origins are in the founding myth of modern and romantic individualism written by Daniel Defoe in 1719.18 Defoe’s novel was loosely based on the actual experiences of the shipwrecked sailor Alexander Selkirk, and thus Crusoe claims in the preface that the story ‘though allegorical, is also historical’ – a slippery formulation that invites more poetic licence than fact.19 But actual or not, there is some mileage in the comparison of Buckley to Crusoe. If, on winter nights of lashing rain, we put ourselves out there, alone and exposed to the elements, we might think of Crusoe dragging himself ashore from his shipwreck and equally of Buckley huddled in one of his caves. How did they do it? Could we do it? We must imagine ourselves in a radical solitude, surviving without another of our kind to talk with, putting the nature of our individuality to the test in the most extreme way, and taking heart, perhaps, from the idea of managing our solitude well, of even learning to thrive in our private innerness rather than crack. But there the comparison ends, really, because all the important things Crusoe was or was meant to be, Buckley was not. And what Buckley might well have been – a cognisant, consanguine member of the Wathaurong tribe – Crusoe could never have been. We must bury Crusoe to discover Buckley. Crusoe survived for reasons that made his wilderness a very tame affair. From the beginning he had at his happy disposal all those items from the nearby shipwreck – the chest, the tools, the firearms, right down to the watch, the ledger, and the pen and ink. He had the material provisions for setting to work and keeping a record of his work, which he did. He built himself a house; he made a chair, a shovel, a grindstone. He dug a garden, and later, after growing his own food, he built an oven and then pots to cook and serve it. His toil, the dignity of his skilled labour, made him a perfect example of the 18 19

D. Defoe, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [1719], London, Adam and Charles Black, 1893. I. Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust. Don Quixote, Don Juan. Robinson Crusoe, Cambridge, 1996, p.149.

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Puritan work ethic. Crusoe’s time was well spent: it was time measured and marked off, as God meant it to be. Then too he had his Bible, which he fished out of a chest with tobacco and rum. He began reading after a bad dream, which reminded him of his ‘rebelliousness’ towards his father and his neglect of duty to Providence. The Bible commanded, ‘Call on me in this day of trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me’.20 Work was good for the soul as well as his industrious body, the inner nourishment that solitude required. Defoe’s point is that his hero will demonstrate something metaphysically fundamental to life, that ‘life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude’. Crusoe, like Defoe, believes that solitude ‘is not afflicting, while a man has the voice of his soul to speak to God, and to himself.21 So be it, one might think. Crusoe is alone for ever: happily self-redeemed by solitary work and Christian conscience. But the Crusoe myth is incomplete without the arrival of the Other. The other is a native black man, Friday, whose single footprint at first terrifies Crusoe as a Satanic sign, but whose presence, when they finally meet face to face, is another detail that confirms the model of self-fulfilling solitude. Friday becomes the ideal companion for a Crusoe: he is so because he is happy to be Crusoe’s servant, and he requires instruction, which Crusoe is more than happy to give. Crusoe teaches Friday English, though not in a way conducive to a full human relationship. ‘They kept a functional silence, broken only by an occasional ‘No, Friday’, or an abject ‘Yes, master’, add[ing] to the charms of the idyll. Man’s social nature seems to be satisfied by the righteous bestowal, or grateful receipt, of benevolent but not undemanding patronage’.22 What does the Australian Crusoe look like now? He is the most limited of Crusoes imaginable. He is anything but an industrious survivor of the wilderness: his work bears no comparison with Crusoe’s civilising labour – nor does it mark out time in any way that can be dutifully measured. Buckley’s 20 21

22

Defoe, 1893, p.109.

Watt, 1996, p.150

Watt, 1996, p 168.

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wandering – by Morgan’s account – is a wandering in time as well as space, precisely because he does not set about the self-improving task of making anything for himself. Fish traps and the odd construction of a brush hut are the best that Buckley can put against Crusoe (though he may have actually helped build larger, stronger huts than usual). All the more reason – the imaginer of Buckley might say here – to admire his management of solitude, since a man so adrift in time and space must surely have a harder task keeping his mind, not to mention his soul, in order. But the Buckley that Morgan presents is apparently unaware of the standards Crusoe has set. He wanders far and wide – often in isolation, in the times he had left the tribe – with next to nothing to say for or about himself. Admittedly he makes his appeal to Providence, echoing Crusoe, but there is no innerness to speak of. Morgan’s Buckley is a man alone on a promontory, a man crying out in the wind – such a presence inhabits his narrative as a haunting, elementary figure, but that is all. This Buckley is a psychologically impoverished Crusoe. Then there is the one absolute difference from Crusoe: Buckley had company. Buckley – even Morgan’s Buckley, straining to be Crusoe – is not a tale of solitude or radically isolated individualism, but rather a story of community on a day to day basis and of sociality writ large. There would have been no moment in Buckley’s thirty-two years when this was not the case. He was, he claims, often living alone, but even then he would have been in the sights of the Wathaurong, not only because they had a regard for him but because in their active notion of country there was no space, literally or metaphysically, for an individual to be ‘alone’. Buckley would have known that he could not trespass on certain areas. Wherever he went, he knew, and they knew, that the meanings of the country kept him company: he may not have known all the meanings but the social fact was that everywhere – on the flats and along the coast, by the sea and the lakes and the rivers – was animated by spiritual expressions of Wathaurong sociality. This absolute difference entails another one: that there was no room in the Buckley story for instructing. Leaving aside the slight inconvenience of having no Bible to hand, here was a situation where an unarmed Buckley was – 44 –

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rather outnumbered and unlikely to find ‘Fridays’ as servants. Admittedly, contemporary reports show some natives keen to please Buckley – Todd went so far as to remark ‘he is a complete terror to the natives’23 – but that is a world away from the early eighteenth century when an English novelist could construct a dream of imperial mastery. The simple fact – which Morgan’s chosen genre could not incorporate – was that Buckley’s Englishness had to engage with the Wathaurong on an even footing, and that the human outcome of that, its rich possibilities of understanding and cultural enlightenment both ways, was left by Morgan as a mystery. It is at this point where we might make sense of Morgan’s blanket statement that Buckley thought the Aborigines had no religion. The conventions of the time – as well as the Robinson Crusoe myth – made Morgan steer clear of any suggestion that not one but two religions were at issue. Buckley was to be seriously reproached by white settlers for not teaching natives the Christian religion, for not doing his duty as a civilised man. If, in fact, his ‘Fridays’ were very strong and self-respecting about their beliefs, he would not have been able to; and, if he had sympathetically travelled with their songs and stories, he might not have wished to. Not to have ‘wished’ to civilise them would have meant he had gone beyond the pale, become a savage. There is a more dubious aspect to Morgan’s account: his stress on Buckley’s absolute isolation from other white men for his entire 32 years along the coast. To read Morgan is to enter a myth in which Buckley is a figure of pure isolation, an exile whose fated destiny it was to thrive in Nature rather than Culture (the aspect that compelled Rousseau to make so much of Crusoe, forever planting the fable in the heart of Romanticism). But in Buckley’s earlier accounts to Wedge and George Langhorne he was not without some contact. In one account he met a fellow escapee and lived a while with the man and his Aboriginal girl, until the man’s ill-treatment of her drove Buckley away (and the man was subsequently killed by the natives).24 He knew that sealers were camped over on Western Port Bay but decided not 23

24

Todd, 1989, p.32.

Langhorne, 1979, pp.185–6.

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to approach them. In a Hobart obituary it is reported that he met white men who brought their shipwrecked boat ashore, before sailing off again.25 And – the decisive detail – when in 1835 Buckley finally made his decision to return to white society, camping a few miles away at the heads was a party of sealers who made their presence known by gunfire. This fact emerges from Todd’s camp notes.26 So, despite Morgan’s emphasis on Buckley as a victim of total isolation, Buckley himself had decided over many years to avoid the company of his kin. He was not so much marooned, like Crusoe, as a wilful escapee, and a freer man than we thought. Buckley effectively chose to be and remain a native, an idea which involves us in an ethnographic leap of the imagination – a leap resisted by Defoe and Morgan. Through thick and thin we are individuals defined by a different fabric of community. Try as we might to enter the essentials of Aboriginal society, it is not possible: linguistically, ethically, physically, metaphysically. It is all too different for the European Self to fully belong to. But Buckley travelled far enough towards Aboriginal culture to experience that difference, and there, in the firelight of the strangers, he made his home. We are referring here only to the body of Buckley’s experience, about which he could not speak any more than a man like Morgan could affirm it. Such reflective and self-reflective discourse had to await the age of anthropology, which is not to say that it did not – as an unspeakable experience – exist. Yet it is Buckley’s field of experience which pulses as an imaginative prospect, trying to reach, to touch, the unique qualities of aboriginal being. That is what the middle part of Buckley’s journey offers us – a continent of otherness to inhabit, anything but an island. Buckley as hero

Now what is happening to our imagination? If we liberate Buckley from Morgan’s ‘Crusoe’, Buckley stands up as a potential songman of Aboriginal culture. So we have to leave Buckley there, free standing, so to speak, among his 25

26

Hobart Town Daily Courier, 31 January 1856. Todd, 1989, p.29.

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clanspeople. And then we have to follow him into the final stage of his story: his return to white society and his problematic new life. Mythically, this is the narrative point of maximum arousal. It holds within it the central question as to whether the hero’s journey, or quest, has been worthwhile. Or to speak crudely: has he come back from his deep with the goods, and will those goods be visible to those who take him back in? Here, in our heart of hearts, we know how the Buckley story sits. The Return is the human fulcrum of the story, the universal narrative junction, both in myth and colonial history. In the here and now of Australia (not to mention downtown Geelong) its telling has long created a difficulty, for two reasons. It implicates a narrator in the evidence for the slaughter on the frontier. It obliges us to question some of the more respectable contemporary accounts of Buckley as a passive victim of circumstances, a dullard of the first rank. There is a story to be told where Buckley leaps off the page in his own right, a greater adventurer than any Robinson Crusoe. The clearest picture of Buckley as lumpen is from the squatter George Russell, who spotted the giant among the natives when he arrived at the Yarra settlement in 1836. His looks altogether were not in his favour. He had a shaggy head of black hair, a low forehead, shaggy overhanging eyebrows, which nearly concealed his small eyes, a short snub nose and his face very much marked by small pox, and was just such a man as one would suppose fit to commit burglary or a murder. Before being transported he had served his apprenticeship as a bricklayer and had been in the Army. He was a very ignorant, uneducated man. The Government expected that he might be useful in reconciling the native population to the settlers, but he was indolent, and never did much in that way.27

This is such a solid picture that it is hard to refute on its own terms: it closes down the imagination, as it is designed to. But then, out of the corner of the eye, Russell acknowledged other details about Buckley. When first sighted, he was ‘keeping up a conversation’ and ‘talking at a pitch’ with natives across 27

G. Russell, The Narrative of George Russell, P.L. Brown, ed., London, 1935, p.79.

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the river. Later, when Buckley was helping build the chimney of Batman’s house: ‘He seemed very pleased with his work and asked me if I did not think it was pretty good for a man who had lived thirty years with the blacks’. Didn’t Russell miss something? Buckley was teasing him – his banter played with the notion of what it was to be wild or tame, and a skilled worker back in civilisation. He was sporting with Russell as a member of the colonising audience. The counter picture – and the more telling one – comes from Captain Foster Fyans, who was appointed Geelong’s first Police Magistrate in 1837 (and Commissioner of Crown Lands for Portland pastoral district in 1840). The incident occurred in October 1837. By then the depth of Buckley’s feelings had become clear. There is no reason to doubt Morgan on this. Buckley knew that Batman’s treaties for the land were fraudulent – a ‘hoax’, as Morgan reports, ‘to possess the inheritance of the uncivilized natives of the forest’. He knew that the natives had ‘no chiefs claiming or possessing any superior right over the soil’,28 just as he knew that the treaty ceremony was a farce since it was conducted among men who did not speak each other’s language (the New South Wales men in contact with the Kulin people). The other man who knew this was Batman’s rival, John Pascoe Fawkner, who wasted no time telling the authorities. Fawkner bitterly envied Batman’s ‘monopolising’ of Buckley, who owed Batman his pardon. Fawkner in turn sought to befriend his own natives, such as the Yarra man, Derrimarte. In Fawkner’s terms he and Derrimarte one day ‘changed names’ – an expression that seemed to indicate some kind of ‘brotherly ritual’. It was Derrimarte who sounded the alarm about a plan among the natives to murder the whites, bringing Buckley into close contact with the fearful Fawkner. Fawkner later wrote, ‘Buckley declared that if he had his will he would spear Derrimarte for his giving the information’. It does not make sense that Buckley the peacemaker supported such an attack, but the very idea fed Fawkner’s view that Buckley was ‘more than half a savage’.29 28 29

Morgan, 1967, pp.87–88.

On Fawkner see works by C.P. Bitot especially J.P. Fawkner, Melbourne’s Missing Chronicle: Being the Journal of Preparations for Departure to and Proceedings at Port Philip by John Pascoe

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Already this to and fro of perceptions is rather complex: it requires some dramatic imagination to sense their various aspects. Everyone in the small settlement was playing a part for themselves and in the eyes of others. Once Buckley stepped onto the stage of the colonial settlement, he was an historical agent in his own right. As he told Morgan, ‘the policy I adopted was to seem to fall in with the views of the savages …’ He was referring to the tactful restraining of his friends from killing Batman’s men for food. At the same time, he was referring to the ‘seeming’ he would do on the other side, in order to ‘keep alive the good understanding’ which existed between the natives and the whites.30 For a time Buckley was even a producer of performances. In August 1835 he assembled 300 Aborigines from at least three tribes as the welcome party to ‘King John’ – Batman returning from Tasmania. As it happened, Fawkner arrived before Batman and was amazed at the extent to which whites were outnumbered by the lively blacks. In March 1836 Buckley managed the reception party for Governor Bourke. Buckley’s drollery is evident from Morgan’s report: ‘As good a parade as possible was, made to receive him, myself having the charge of about one hundred natives ranked up in a line, soldier fashion, and saluting him by putting their hands to their foreheads as I directed’.31 At the same time, on the domestic level, Buckley was seeming to fit in with the settler’s ‘civilising’ project. He went along to the first prayer meeting held by Fawkner in his new hut, and later heard the first sermon, preached by the Reverend Orton in April the following year: it was Buckley’s guidance which moved Orton’s thinking towards the mission station at Buntingdale. Orton thought Buckley ‘a man of thought and shrewdness’.32 Then there was the illuminating, heartfelt trek to the Geelong district with Joseph Gellibrand, the barrister and Port Phillip Association member

30 31 32

Fawkner, C.P. Billot, ed., Melbourne, 1982, pp.11, 21, 32 and 60, and The Life and Times of John Pascoe Fawkner, Melbourne, 1985, pp.112 and 119. Morgan, 1967, pp.88–90.

Morgan, 1967, p.30.

Campbell, 1987, p.165, and Historical Records of Victoria, 1982, vol.2A, p.81.

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who had come from Hobart Town to claim his land. On that journey in February 1836 Gellibrand wrote that he witnessed one of the most pleasing and affecting sights. There were three men, five women and about twelve children. Buckley dismounted and they were all clinging around him with tears of joy and delight running down their cheeks. It was truly an affecting sight and proved the affection which these people entertained for Buckley … Amongst the number was a little old man and an old woman one of his wives. Buckley told me this was his old friend with whom he had lived and associated for thirty years.33

Buckley had to greet his long lost friends and then part with them without betraying the hard-headedness of men like Gellibrand, who could express kind intentions towards the natives while stealing their livelihood. On that journey it became clear that the agreement made by Wedge had been broken: no provisions had been given to the natives, even as the sheep were overrunning their land. Gellibrand gave Buckley a blanket to give the old man, reaffirming that the provisions would be delivered. They travelled on, Buckley having ‘seemed’ to his former kin, while keeping up appearances as the white man’s guide. When they were in another part of his old country, he said that some of the land was his and that he would like to give it to one of the party, William Robertson, for his stamina and carrying the gear of the exhausted Gellibrand. (Robertson returned the favour when he subsidised the publication of Morgan’s account of Buckley’s life in 1852.) We glimpse a Buckley who knew the double part he was playing, and also sensed something of the authority he might have. This is the point. Within six months of his work as go-between, the historical reality was clear to Buckley, and he stepped forward with a proposal. It was that the colonisers make him ‘superintendent over the native tribes for the purpose of protecting them from aggression and also of acting as an interpreter in imparting to them not only the habits of civilisation but also of 33

J.T. Gellibrand, ‘Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip. January–February 1836’, in Letters from Victorian Pioneers, T.F. Bride, ed., Melbourne, 1983, p.20.

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communicating Religious Knowledge’. The phrasing is Gellibrand’s,34 treating Buckley with serious respect. I think we can put aside Buckley’s interest in mission work. He said he did not want land or sheep, but rather some authority in the matter of frontier work, proposing that he become, in effect, a Protector. Gellibrand explained to Buckley ‘the desire of the Association in every respect to meet his views’. Nothing came of this idea, but Buckley’s initiatives continued. In February 1836 he called 150 Aborigines from the Maribyrnong River to meet with Gellibrand about a particularly serious grievance. A shepherd had captured a young, married Aboriginal woman, tied her up for the night in his hut, and raped her. When the girl was returned to the tribe, her husband beat her, and now the tribe wanted the shepherd beaten. Through Buckley, Gellibrand reassured them that the man would be removed from the district and punished (which he was), and he commiserated with the poor woman about her situation – ‘I … tied round her neck a red silk handkerchief, which delighted her exceedingly’.35 A few weeks later members of the Bunurong tribe on the Mornington Peninsula carried a thirteen-year-old girl thirty miles to Buckley: she was one of four who had been shot in a dawn raid on her family’s camp. Buckley told Henry Batman about it, but John’s drunken brother refused to investigate. The natives arrived because ‘Buckley decided to confront the settlers with the evidence’ (my italics).36 In this confrontation he had the worried backing of Wedge, who feared that unless the Aborigines were protected there would be warfare. Warfare there was on the Werribee River that July 1836. A squatter, Franks, and his shepherd, Flinders, were clubbed to death in their huts, having adopted a policy of occupying Aboriginal land without even a gesture of gift-giving. Two revenge parties rode out, accompanied by New South Wales natives and some of those from Batman’s camp. Buckley was conspicuously absent. Wedge feared ‘a deluge of blood’ and wondered whether natives who speared 34

Gellibrand, 1983, p.16.

36

Campbell, 1987, p.161.

35

Gellibrand, 1983, p.29, and Campbell, 1987, p.149.

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sheep should be shipped off to Flinders Island. Gellibrand had no doubt that ‘many will be shot’ but thought it would put a stop to ‘this killing for bread’. The vigilantes rode down a group of eighty natives and fired away, ‘annihilating them’, in the triumphant words of Tasmania’s Cornwall Chronicle. Then the hush-up began. The Port Phillip Association’s man, James Simpson, turned a blind eye to the extent of the punishment inflicted (on the natives). When he later stated his reasons to Governor Arthur, the Governor heard him out and did not approve – ending, as Simpson put it, ‘that part of the play’.37 The official estimate was that ten Aborigines were killed. The ‘play’ was now entirely real. Not much imagination is required – if we choose to use it – to appreciate Buckley’s sense of predicament. It was only a few weeks after the Werribee massacre when Captain Foster Fyans called for his help. In addition, the colony was still mystified and agitated by the sudden disappearance of Gellibrand and George Hesse on their journey from Point Henry to Melbourne. Buckley had helped with the search party, but his contact with the natives was sabotaged: he went back to Melbourne in disgust, aware, it seems, that without him the search parties would fall into some kind of revenge, as they did.38 It was in this troubled atmosphere, where the role of go-between was conspicuously fraught, that Fyans wanted Buckley to come with him to Geelong to help set up his first administration in the area. Buckley kept Fyans waiting some days. I imagine the last thing he could stomach was to walk through the country of the massacre. He told Fyans that he needed no blanket and would not carry the damper and pork. ‘I can feed myself ’, he told Fyans, ‘you can do what you like’. And so they set off, Buckley having asserted himself with his native ways. Fyans was travelling with his ‘cortege of constables and twelve convicts’ and Buckley helped carry some gear at first. But after a night’s sleep at the Werribee River he did not want to get up, and further on was sulking and refusing to eat. When he did, he declined the pork and hacked into a tree with his tomahawk in search of grubs. Fyans waited while ‘the monster of a man’ ate. 37

38

Campbell, 1987, pp.170–2, and Historical Records of Victoria, 1982, vo1.2A, pp. 43–50. Morgan, 1967, pp.102–3.

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‘Well’, Fyans said, ‘Buckley, are you ready?’ ‘For what?’ ‘For Geelong.’ ‘No, no’, Buckley replied, ‘it is too far for me to pull away there.’ ‘Why, Buckley, you must come on with me.’39 But Buckley would not. Fyans and his party moved on to the Barwon River where he met up with the settler David Fisher. Fisher was hospitable, but the other Derwent manager, Frederick Taylor, who was to become notorious as a killer of natives, could not wait to tell Fyans where ‘neither a black nor a white man’ was to intrude on to the borders of the company’s land grab. The claim stretched as far as the eye could see, from the Barwon to Indented Head, and the ban, of course, was intended to completely dispossess the Wathaurong. Buckley eventually came in off the road to join Fyans; and he was there for the muster of local natives – ‘275 of all classes’ – near the Moorabool River. Fyans wanted to distribute blankets, clothing and provisions – but not tomahawks – which had been supplied by Governor Bourke. When there were not enough blankets to go round there was some ‘tumult’ among the natives. So, as Fyans recorded, ‘I ordered my two constables to load, and my ten convicts to fall in close to my hut’. Fyans and a constable patrolled with arms until the natives retired, ‘Buckley telling them to do so’. At the same time though, Fyans was not thanking Buckley for anything, least of all the possibility of having to shoot people because they wanted more blankets. Fyans said he did not have ‘the slightest trust in Buckley’.40 By the end of the year Buckley had resigned – quietly so, as La Trobe did not tell Gipps until three years later, and then with the kindly remark that ‘he could not be useful to the extent that might have been hoped’.41 By then La Trobe and Gipps, in their correspondence with each other, were frankly using 39 40 41

F. Fyans, Memoirs Recorded at Geelong. Victoria Australia by Captain Foster Fyans (1790–1870), P.L. Brown, ed., Geelong, 1986, pp.207–8. P.L. Brown in Fyans, 1986, pp.209–10. Morgan, 1967, p.107.

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the term ‘atrocity’. Buckley went to Hobart, looking to a life remote from what was becoming, in the words of one historian, a ‘field of murder’.42 Finally, what can we say about Buckley’s role on the frontier? Around Geelong, where he did most of his work, it seems there were no massacres. George Russell recollected that the local natives ‘were quieter in their habits and more easily reconciled to the white population than the tribes who inhabited the country more in the interior’. Perhaps this was due to the influence of Buckley. Barak of the Woiworung was a young boy when Buckley wanted his clan to meet Batman, and he seems to have remembered their meeting rather sharply. I never forgot Batman’s words. He said he was a good man. Batman said you must not kill the white man, nor steal his things. White man is good and will give you meat and sugar, but if you kill a white man he will shoot you like this, and Batman fired a gun. We all shivered with fright. Women watching in the scrub screamed and ran away. Batman said, ‘Don’t be frightened’ and then gave us meat and rations and we all went back to the camp.43

Buckley was there to pacify. He was both friend of the natives and a herald of their doom – foreshadowing the battle they had lost before they could even fight. By faithfully translating Batman, Buckley could not help but betray the long-term interests of those who had been his kin. No wonder he resigned rather speechlessly, without fanfare, hopelessly bowing off to go south, giving up the ghost of reconciliation. Is there anything more to be said about that defiant moment with Fyans? I have read it as Buckley asserting his identity almost as a black man, which is itself a rebellion in terms of colonial society. It was upstart behaviour, to say 42

43

J. Critchett, A ‘ distant field of murder’: Western District frontiers 1834–1848, Melbourne, 1990. Critchett’s phrase – ‘distant field of murder’ – refers to districts some distance from Melbourne and Geelong. Where most of the shootings occurred between 1835–1845. Estimates of death by shooting vary from 350 to at least 500, out of a Western District Aboriginal population estimated at 6,000 to 8,000 people. See Critchett, 1990, pp.68–85; M. Cannon, Who Killed the Koories?, Melbourne, 1990, p.50; and P.L. Brown in Russell, 1935, p.151.

Campbell, 1987, pp.141–2.

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the least, the kind of unruly colonial conduct that was to cause such heartburn among those who lamented the confusions in the Masters and Servants Act. It was, at least latently, dissenting behaviour, and Captain Foster Fyans, formerly of the King’s Own Regiment and Commandant of the troops on the penal settlement of Norfolk Island, rankled at it. In another situation, less isolated than the old Geelong Road, with more constables than convicts in his charge, Buckley would have been clamped in irons. Can we find any rebelliousness in Buckley’s past? E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class tells us that Macclesfield in Buckley’s native Cheshire was one of the seedbeds of resistance to established Church and State.44 Buckley may have been carrying the social memory of resistance. Closer to his Australian life, the men of the Calcutta were a fiery mix of offenders. They included the mutineers at Gibraltar and the radical, very literate Irishman, George Lee. At Sullivans Bay, Lee, like Buckley, was one of the few who had the privilege of living in his own hut outside of Collins’s camp. That privilege was abolished when Lee wrote scurrilous verse about the officers. Brought to account he retorted, ‘I would rather take to the bush and perish sooner than submit to the torture to please the tyrant, the ignorant brute placed over him as a slave driver’ – almost Jacobin words. Lee’s disappearance was reported at the same time as Buckley’s: in the same week Collins had taken serious measures to prevent an insurrection. It requires no great strength of the imagination, surely, to think that the giant twenty-three-yearold might have taken heart from those whose vitality fed on defiance.45 To speak out about any of that, if he had had it in him, would have been as impossible for Buckley as to sing the praises of the natives. Far easier to go along with the safest story of all: Robinson Crusoe, the romantic myth of the solitary individual who would look neither critically at his own society nor sympathetically at anyone who did not belong to it. Buckley died in Hobart Town on 30 January 1856, aged 76. A few days before, he had fallen under the wheels of a horse and cart while turning a 44 45

Rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1980, pp.461–2, 42n.

Tipping, 1988, pp.90–96.

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corner. The Tasmanian obituaries did not imply any simple mindedness or lack of awareness, but referred rather to the ‘celebrated William Buckley’.46 From the time of his arrival he had worked as the gatekeeper at the Female Factory, the woman’s prison, having come full circle, it might be said, in his mythic expressions of captivity. When he retired in 1850 he received a pension – which the press called a pittance – of £12 per annum, and to which the Victorian Government added the princely sum of £40. In 1840 he married a widow, Julia Eagers, a woman so much shorter than himself that in order to walk while holding hands they had to link them by a kerchief. A new prologue

Defoe created his Crusoe at a time when for Englishmen no other ‘civilisation’ existed. Morgan created his after a colonial society had nearly wiped out the indigenous culture. Today, we know this in our bones – especially if we live in the Aboriginal country that Buckley negotiated. We know it even when we do not want to speak about it. Only in very recent years have a few historians attempted to write fully about it; and as they have, the figure of Buckley has come walking into our camp again. That camp, I assume, is one that at least dreams of the possibility of shared singing and dancing – the best metaphor I know of cultural tolerance and understanding. As such, Buckley properly imagined, would be leader of the dance. In the light of the tragedy that has occurred it would have to begin mournfully, and that part of it would end when the descendants of the lost clans saw fit; and after that, perhaps, the dancing would be genuinely communal, a measure of the extent to which those shaped by a European imagination could manage to do what Buckley had done – endure a nakedness before clothing himself in another culture, all the better to survive, be enriched by difference, and gain something that quietly enlarges the soul in the telling.

46

Hobart Town Daily Courier, 31 January 1856.

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T H E MO OD W E A R E I N circa Australia Day 2004

But politics, like all of history, is concrete. (To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.) Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Wu-men comments: Tell me, did he preach, or not? If you open your mouth, you are astray. If you cannot speak, you are astray. Robert Aitkin

Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them, Of Eros and of dust Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’

I have a postcard from a shrink I know. As a friend, after a relaxed social conversation about the political situations we’re in, he took pity on me and sent, as his note says, ‘some ramblings on the future and staying hopeful.’ The

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picture shows three freeway signs: Depressed for No Reason, Depressed for A Good Reason, and Just Depressed, Don’t Want to Analyse. Down the road you can see Still Depressed, and a sign that says Un-Done. It would be good to get to some of the Un-Done. I didn’t have a topic for this lecture until I found myself surprisingly happy. This happened during the second cricket test in Adelaide, just before Christ­ mas, when the Indians were winning, and the Australians were losing. What was happening? I wanted Australia to lose because I had become fed up with the swagger, the surplus aggression, the lousy sportsmanship. Whereas the Indians were playing like their Lord Krishna, full of grace in body and mind. I knew this for a fact when a passionate woman I know, a great sports lover, removed Aaron Hamill from her fridge and put up Kumble. Meanwhile our commentators tried to keep up with them, at first declaring they did not have the will to win, then deciding that our heat must have suited them, and most of all going on oblivious to a whole tradition of warriorship that hinges on a deep metaphysic about the individual and fateful events. Their beauty did not come from the mangling we have let Capital make of Liberalism’s cult of individual endeavour. Once I had said ‘yes’ my thoughts ran on into Australia Day, when every image of our flag on the television made me queasy. By then, of course, cricket had come back into view with a vengeance, since the death of David Hookes outside that pub overnight produced yet another cricketing hero, and this only a few days after Steve Waugh got his award for Australian of the Year. The Hookes incident might equally well have had us reflecting on how it is that security guards have become ‘the stage managers’ of modernity,1 and the Waugh award should have had us noting how convenient it was for John Howard to have a cricketer who cares about the Indian poor at a time when Australia’s foreign aid has slipped towards zero. In this depression about Australia, sportsmen came into my mind again. With regard to the cult of grief made of the Bali bombing, we almost forgot, it seems to me, the 1

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Polity, 2004, p.104.

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Balinese who died, and, crucially, the remarks that the fiendish Amrozi made about his hatred forming after a stint with Australian construction workers in Malaysia. Amrozi was focused on the sexual depredations of our young men in Asia, especially Bali, and his feelings would be shared by our cricketers in our country towns if well-heeled Indonesians were rampaging through ‘their’ local girls. We live through round after round of ‘simultaneous shows of mass grief and triumphal nationalism’.2 But the real ache – the void and the shame – goes back to the war in Iraq when soldiers in our name followed the Americans into a battle that was, to begin with, slaughter. Why, only tonight – Australia Day – the ABC television reporter from Iraq, sending us a story about HMAS Melbourne, was pronouncing lieutenant ‘loo-tenant’. Where is our healthy distance from the mess? In Chicago there is a Muslim stand-up comic, Azhar Usman, with a spiel: ‘Look. Relax … I consider myself a very patriotic Muslim American. Which means that I would die for this country by blowing myself up in front of Dunken Donuts.’ At least Usman knows how to direct his black joke. In our jingoistic media circus you might kill for irony, except that irony, as Paul Fussell remarked, ‘is the attendant of hope, and the fuel of hope is innocence’.3 If we were ever innocent we are no longer that, not without abject self-delusion. But this is moving too quickly. I also said ‘yes’ to doing this lecture because of an Oedipal connection with Overland. I was reading it as a boy, when Noel Counihan was on the cover. Around 1956 – to name a pivotal date for the left – there it was on the desk with my father’s union books. A welder in the Victorian Railways, my father was secretary of the Newport branch of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the ‘Mindful Militants’ (as their excellent historian, Tom Sheridan, called them), and the union subscribed to Overland. I would browse while helping the old man, signing his letters ‘yours fraternally’, enter figures into the Arrears Book. They were the days when most workers belonged to a union, and when to be constantly in arrears with your union dues was as untoward 2 3

The phrase is Geoffrey Barker’s in ‘Playing at Patriot Games’, Australian Financial Review, 20 October 2003. The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, London, 1977, p.18.

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as it has become to be over your limit with the Visa card. They were days of necessary protest – industrial, political – but days also of hope. Overland, with its faith in social if not Socialist realisms, embodied much of that hope. Half the struggle about the Cold War was meant to keep that hope alive, even though, as we can now realise, much that that generation fought for has since been eroded, or reversed. Shameful enough that Stalinist Russia failed the Revolution: salt into wound of idealism has been the inexorable triumph of Corporate Capitalism, with its glittering vacuities. Back then though, I took in Overland with mother’s milk and malt biscuits, in a spirit of domestic safety and optimism fed by my father’s stamina as a left-wing humanist. Overland was ballast at a time when we thought we might, in the long run, keep making things get better. So it is an honour to be giving this lecture, for the above personal reasons, that included the admirable Stephen Murray-Smith addressing a meeting at our little Housing Commission home, some time in the fifties, when he was campaigning for the Communist Party. I was a kid then and vaguely remember an unusual amount of sober fluency had entered a room that seemed too small for him. Later, at Melbourne University, Stephen was one of my teachers in the Education Faculty; this when he was not preparing to reoccupy Erith Island as a family commune. I was first published in Overland – ‘A Letter from Athens’, in May 1968. I was on the way to London, incredibly relieved to be out of Menzies’ Australia, with the prospect at last of growing up. Stephen once quoted Richard Neville saying that once you were in London you revelled in not being Australian, until someone at the party said something pejorative, and then away you went, passionately defending the place, rediscovering your nationhood beneath your carefully cultivated cosmopolitan veneer. I was not homesick until I went to the English seaside, or found myself ecstatically struck by the Mediterranean light. But that homesickness was nothing compared to the sickness of heart about being an Australian now. How can we feel strong about this place when the institutions we thought designed to sustain and extend the best that has been thought and said are ruinously weak? – 60 –

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Look at the ABC. Here is an organ of national communications that should reflect, shape and transmit a healthy body politic. That is to say, it is our organ of communications, with a charter to be the lifeblood of our felt diversity, the wellspring of our pluralism, the heartbeat of our critical consciousness. All that. But what is it now? Emasculated, demoralised, morbid. ‘It is hardly worth saving,’ a veteran broadcaster said to me the other day. ‘All I am doing’, said another, ‘is bearing witness to its decline.’ These people are not just speaking about the decade of cuts. They are talking about a corporate culture systemically obtuse if not vandalistic towards the sensibility that creates the programs. There are two cultures in the ABC: the managerial and the intellectual/artistic. They seldom meet. The rot set in about twenty years ago when the obsession with ratings crept into the woodwork: subtly, then grossly the ABC began to model itself on commercial television and radio. I wrote about this at the time, as the Age’s radio critic, and I was still writing about it fifteen years later, by which time the style and content of what went to air had been steadily diluted.4 The latest act of vandalism was the erasure of The Listening Room, a program that broadcast and created art like no other. An historian of this period will have a record of an institution losing its intellectual nerve, all the time protesting that it can’t do this and that because of budget cuts, but really, not being able to do them because of a loss of faith in artistic freedoms and deep intellectuality. And once that goes, how can you sustain a critical culture? I’m not talking here about that anaemic concept of balance, which has done so much to dilute the ABC’s confidence in itself as a liberal-minded broadcaster. I mean ‘critical’ as intellectually courageous and radically open in its trusting application of cultural diversity: exactly the failing strength that goaded Senator Alston to 4

In an early column for the Age I praised a twelve-part series of Plato’s Republic, with all the dialogue spoken on air. In response I got a very happy call from its producer, Richard Connelly, who has since retired. Connelly’s subtext was clear: we need such a critical response because ‘inside this place’ it is getting harder and harder to get such programs up. That was in the early eighties. The dilution is across the board and inexorable as programs are made thinner and shorter and are promoted with less confidence in what they are or should be. In one city, for instance, a man employed from Sydney’s cash-for-comment station, 2UE, goes around telling arts broadcasters that the ‘art’ in their show should not be part of their advertising, as it ‘puts the punters off ’.

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attack the coverage of the Iraq war. This time the broadcaster fended off the attack, but only just. The ABC may well be doomed as a vital organ necessary to sustaining the critical culture of any healthy democracy.5 Year after year it absorbs body blows from both sides of politics. A few months before the last election I organised a small deputation to talk to Opposition Leader Beazley. The point was to discuss the centrality of the broadcaster to the health of our society. The little group had a top arts administrator (Hilary McPhee, former publisher and Chair of the Australia Council), a top scientist (Geoff Smith from the National Museum), a top broadcaster (Ramona Koval), a top historian (Ken Inglis, the ABC’s official historian) and a top cleric (Bishop Philip Huggins, from the Anglican diocese of Grafton). The approach to Beazley was made from the Diocese. Beazley did not reply: the deputation was palmed off to the Shadow Communications Minister. For the group Bishop Huggins tried again a few months later. Still nothing. Beazley could not or would not meet. After the election he told Phillip Adams over lunch that he would prefer to talk with people on a picket line than members of ‘the chattering classes’. Leave aside the fantasy image of 5

Senator Alston’s attack anticipated Blair’s attack on the BBC. His slanders were refuted, point by point, by the ABC inquiry, only to be reactivated by ABC management, the best outline of which was given by David Marr’s Media Watch (so we can take heart from that program’s precision and courage). But the dilution virus in ABC broadcasting is still the deathly thing, and it feels so irreversible that my shame is inseparable from my sense of impotence. In 1998, when many of us felt that Radio National was under threat as a network, I helped organise a very successful public meeting in Geelong. It was the biggest public meeting in Geelong for decades, with school principals, bishops, broadcasters, ABC board members, former state premiers, and opposition politicians on the platform. The event felt like the kind of public action that mattered. Around that time I thought that the Howard government and the ABC needed to know that it was not just left-liberal thinking that thought the network essential to our democracy, so I spent some time seeking signatures for a letter to the papers. Sir Zelman Cowen, Malcolm Fraser, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, Sir Rupert Hamer, an official from the CWA, and several others, were happy to support the letter that was published in the main papers. The letter made a strong point, and one felt usefully potent. But I must say that the experience of failing to get other signatures (for instance B.A. Santamaria, Dame Leonie Kramer, Henry Bosch) was acutely dispiriting. Each claimed to support the ABC, but shied away from such a public declaration. I remember putting the phone down with an uneasy sense of political realities. The thought also came to mind: when elites neglect to defend the institutions we need for a critical, liberal culture, that must be how Fascism starts. ‘We are a careless country,’ I heard Bruce Petty say on the radio. The Opposition politician on that Geelong platform was Chris Schacht, then Shadow Minister for Communications. From the mike I asked if Labor would commit to restoring the cuts. No, he said, they couldn’t without knowing the budget figure. When they got the budget figures, still no promises, any more than there are now, in 2004.

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Beazley on a picket line; Adams put it perfectly when he said that Beazley’s remark was both contemptible and contemptuous. We know what was besetting Beazley. The thought of not gaining office. Simple. All that mattered was gaining office. Hence the events that continue to sustain our great shame. Tampa, and all that followed. Labor knew, as it happened, that the photographs of children overboard were a stunt. It murmured, then went along with the lie. Everyone in this room knows the story, I hardly need go on. Labor lost the election out of moral cowardice. Many of us vowed never to vote for the rats again. I mourned that moment, but once my Green vote was cast, I felt strangely liberated. Yes, I had forsaken the fold, but all I had done really was vote with an international perspective. I had positioned myself with the left in Europe, where the social-democratic parties long ago revealed themselves to be bankrupt as agents for reform. So there was some pride to be had at joining ‘the world’, but potency did not come with it. Yes, the Greens have the best view of a desirable future, but deep down, they are not as optimistic as you might think, and they won’t win office in their own right. It’s one thing to believe, as I now do, that the Australian Labor Party had finally fulfilled its historical trajectory as a reformist party,6 another to feel that voting Green in Australia is practically enough. So voting Green set us free, but left us uneasily adrift, and it was in this state of limbo that we had to confront the American preparations for war, and the Australian government’s conga line that took us slavishly into battle behind the Americans. ‘Conga line’ – with its Coalition ‘suckholes’ – is now an historic phrase coined by the then backbencher Mark Latham. An obscenity, yes, but it would be nothing beside the one to come: the annihilation of Iraq’s conscript soldiers – ‘the pink mist’! – along with the civil society from which they came. Before the war we poured into the streets in that massive demonstration for peace, the gathering that linked millions of citizens around the world. That was good, 6

That is to say as a party able to seriously commit to or even articulate redistributive policies with regard to wealth and power. I don’t mean, simplistically, that it can no longer be a ‘socialist’ party (it never was). Rather, its policies over the past twenty years have either diluted our civic life or tried (and failed) to shore up what has been lost. In the larger scheme of things it has become a party of losing battles.

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wholesomely good, as one revived one’s sense of common decency as a citizen. But of course, the conga line remark, perfect though it was at the time, has been – well, if not erased, so relegated to history by the man who uttered it, that it has been removed in the way Stalinists used to airbrush official photographs. The new leader of the Labor Party, whose relaxed airs and larrikin aplomb might revitalise some feelings of hope, cut his teeth in office by washing out his mouth of any ‘anti-Americanism’, so called. More than that: as if to avoid any confusion, he emerged from a meeting with the US Ambassador to give a press conference standing beside the American flag.7 The American flag was on his left, our flag was on his right. The American, a man whose escorts had roughed up student peace activists in Perth a few months before, and who had tried to call then opposition leader Simon Crean to account for anti-Americanism, was nowhere to be seen because he did not have to be seen. Latham was doing the suckhole thing himself. But look, I don’t like speaking like this. I don’t like my own anger, as a matter of fact. Anger is corrosive and consuming: it has its place, but to live in it is damaging all round. Anger entails a will to power, which is an imposition on others, and on the precious interconnection of things. Soon after September 11, as we could see America panicking and becoming its worst self, I felt this: I had registered the attack on New York with horror, with an incredulity that lingers, but America’s King Kong response made me angry, and I cursed the fact that I might have little choice but to turn away from my quiet contemplative life. I was furious, and furious at my fury – a selfish response, I admit. But it also came out of basic Buddhist teachings about power. Back in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, the lucid D.T. Suzuki was writing: ‘Power is always arrogant, self-assertive, and exclusive, whereas love is self-humiliating, and all-comprehensive. Power represents destruction, even self-destruction, quite contrary to love’s creativeness. Loves dies and lives again, while power kills and is killed.’ 7

The background story is even more excruciating. The spot for the press had been picked before the flag was noticed, so Latham was faced with the option of lowering the flag before his appearance, or changing the venue. When Kerry O’Brien asked him, on the 7.30 Report, ‘Whose idea was the American flag?’ Latham bluffed his way onto other matters.

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‘It was Simone Weil’, Suzuki added, ‘who defined power as a force which transforms a person into a thing. I would like to define love as a force that transforms a thing into a person.’8 So none of this is new. In propositional terms, there is nothing new under the sun. But when Catholic Resistance meets Zen Buddhism at the Overland campfire Down Under, that’s a bit new, and possibly useful with regard to depression produced by a knot of anger, impotence, shame. The ALPs shamelessness and my shame are inseparable from the problem of national sovereignty in the globalised world of corporate America’s empire. That world, as we have come to haplessly know, is more than three quarters full of poor people who are getting poorer. They live on a planet currently at the ecological mercy of America, which devours more resources than any other country, and does most damage to the climate. If the present rate of climate change continues, 25 per cent of the planet’s species will be destroyed in the next fifty years.9 Shamelessly, America continues, and even more shamelessly Australia – ‘the world’s biggest per-capita polluter’ – follows.10 The details of our hypocrisy are plain to see, and you don’t have to read leftist publications to know about it. The point is: everyone knows about it, and most of us feel – realistically – that we can do nothing, as the Iron Heel of Corporate America treads where it wants. From its modus operandi we have inherited economic rationalism and the managerial culture that has gutted workplaces in less than half a lifetime, and as a result of which we have learnt a new language of loss. We don’t lose our jobs – our means of livelihood – we become ‘redundant’, and the notion of redundancy gets drummed into increasingly isolated individuals who are encouraged to ‘move on’ as safe structures are dismantled. ‘Redundancy’ shares its semantic space with rejects, wastrels, garbage, refuse; and what else are refugees but the refuse of history that has happened, we like to think, elsewhere?11 Of course some of the Enron men 8

9

10 11

D.T, Suzuki. ‘Love and Power’, in The Awakening of Zen, Shambela Books, Boston, 2000, pp.68–9. Guardian Weekly, 15–21 January 2004.

Sydney Morning Herald editorial, 13January 2004.

The phrasing is Zygmunt Bauman’s: Wasted Lives, p.12.

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are being ‘wasted’, too, as they are from some high places in the Australian corporate structure. We witness this from below, the garbage being cleared from the top so to speak, and we suddenly understand crowd scenes in Peter Booth paintings: impassively we gloat. Thus garbage from top to bottom really, so that the language of hope becomes a discourse about recycling, a trying to retrieve common decencies from systems made to make us reject them, and therefore each other. All this happens in the macro ways that are killing the planet, and in microscopic ways that can ruin a day. I just ‘lost the line’ to the Telstra lady supposed to help me with information. She hung up on me as I was trying to explain how Penguin Books, which did exist, and was in Melbourne, had changed its address. ‘Please don’t hang up,’ I was saying, as she did. A supervisor explained that I ‘lost’ the call because I had exceeded the time limit for each customer inquiry, and because I did not in the first place have the address of Penguin books! The supervisor took without apology another call in the middle of this explanation, and by the time she came back to me I decided to give up. Useless: I was talking into the wrong level of organisation, just as, when I tried to say hello to the monstrous Security Guard in the doorway of my local pub during the town’s music festival, and he wouldn’t and couldn’t reply to a basic courtesy, I fell into silence. The dumb hulk, the stranger at our door, was there, not simply because the festival has got too big (and therefore bureaucratic) for our town, but because civic insecurities had linked ‘us’ to the services of an insurance company with its headquarters in Paris. I say Paris because the Geelong company with whom I insured my house is, I discovered during a claim for a pane of glass, now in Paris. Everyone is doing their job according to someone or something distant and depersonalising, which applies – at another level of ‘local’ – to a State Labor government trying to run a transport system it does not own, a hospital system in hostage to corporatism, and a school system administered by a public service trembling from the redundancies that have happened to it; and this at a time when those with a moral career left in them are trying to inspire teachers to be more professional! Everywhere, it seems to me, and at

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every level, we have a sense of things being done to us by people like ourselves who have lost a good deal of control over their own behaviour so that as we go about our daily business, moving frenetically from one human point of contact to another, we need something decently communicative to happen! The other evening I had a sales-pitch call from the company that used to be the SEC. Again it came at dinner time, and again it was a young person, with a supervisor probably within earshot. I had already said ‘no’ to their special deals that had come in the mail, but this time I asked, as if I didn’t know, who owns the company, where is it situated? ‘Texas,’ came the reply. ‘Texas!’ I growled, ‘I hate Texas!’, and the chuckle I got on the other end, a deeply cognisant chuckle that became laughter, was worth its weight in gold. It doubled in weight when I realised that I was speaking to someone from the Indian subcontinent. Who knows, he may have been related to Tendulkar! Anyway, united we stood impotently against George Bush, but we’d lightened each other up. The laugh put us on the same network and in touch with each other in an implicitly hopeful way. In touch. I realise that my touch, my colouring of things here, is itself the result of being out of touch. Am I indulging a mood not uncommon to the solitary consciousness of writers, romantically inclined poets especially, whose structural isolation bespeaks morbid symptoms? Every morning, more offers of Viagra and penis enlargement; each day more bad news for the housebound – all a compound of impotence that just might not apply to those I know out there in workplaces, those out there doing good things. Let’s see. No loading the dice by reference to the academics I know, whose disillusionment with their places of learning and instruction knows no bounds. A simple focus on three close friends, one a unionist, the other a youth worker, the other a cleric in the Anglican Church. One is the secretary of the Meat Workers Union. Graham Bird and I went to school together, uni together, and during uni holidays worked with the butchers at the Newport abattoirs during the summer. After a stint of teaching, travelling, then teaching again, he joined the Meat Workers Union

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as assistant to the famous Wally Curran, under whose leadership the union was not only an effective guardian of its workers’ entitlements, but a decent prop to Hawke and then the Keating regime, for what they were worth. My mate has since stepped into Curran’s wild and militantly effective shoes; this at a time, however, when every force, internal and external, has been brought to bear to weaken unions. They have been so weakened I can feel my father turning and sitting up in his grave. His last hurrah, as a matter of fact, was to organise the longest sit-in in Australian industrial history, an event I wrote about before he died.12 The sit-in was crucial to a national award for a shorter working week: it was continuous with all that had been won since the 1890s, with the same Chartist thinking behind it. But it was a Pyrrhic victory, as just at that time the oil industry was restructuring and the whole culture of enterprise bargains, with new, coercive legislation, coming in. To aid and abet this process of dismantling the achievements of generations of union work, the common law has been brought into operation, and a regime of lock-outs, prosecutions designed to break the will and the funds of the unions has been proceeding apace for the past decade. The MUA dispute was one showdown where, despite our feeling that we won the battle against the men in the balaclavas, Corrigan and others won the structural battle hands down. The battle in the building industry is ongoing, and rearguard, as it is in the Meat Workers Union as each dispute is made by federal law to test its resources. Bird is not so depressed as to have given up hope. He fights each day in a sound state of mind that includes trust in Latham’s promise to remove the workplace agreements and let union organisers back on the job – elementary steps to check the ruination of strong unions. That said, Bird also knows that his working life will not make the union stronger. His stamina will hold lines, that’s all. The youth worker is John Embling, who runs the Families in Distress foundation in Footscray, with his partner Heather Pilcher. They have made a safe house for desperate kids and their families. John’s indomitable energies, his brilliant intuition and tact with kids and parents, his diplomatic 12

Sitting In, William Heinemann in association with the Left Book Club, Port Melbourne, 1991.

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intelligence with teachers, police, magistrates and clinicians, have created what he would call a mix of holding methods that have saved lives, literally, and restored many others. So this is an optimistic story; it need not feed my pessimism. Except that … this success was the result of such vocational selfsacrifice that it cannot reasonably be expected of all of us. As an exception to the rule, you can’t propose it as a general solution. Furthermore, during these years of effort the ‘underclass’ in Australia (a term Embling put into the public sphere well before the official policy makers) has increased, not decreased. ‘Fragmented lives’ (to use the title of his too-quickly dismissed little book) are now more, not less, common among young people. John and Heather do not regret their life choices: how could they when so many individual lives have been saved? But how would you feel, and how are we supposed to feel on their behalf, when the youth suicide rate has gone up, and the best social program for attending to it, the one so finely tuned by the work of Fiona Stanley (last year’s Australian of the Year) has received only lip service.13 Add Latham’s authoritarian, populist parent ‘training’ and the road for Embling’s thinking is even more uphill.14 My other friend is Philip Huggins, the Bishop involved in the lost cause to see Beazley. Now a Bishop in Melbourne, he flinches when I mention hopelessness as he is a Christian activist, of the firm belief that from good works a light of intrinsic worth emanates, and leads to more good works, and that thereby, as we help each other in the light of eternity, the world becomes and is a better place. Yet Philip also heads up Anglicare, the national lobby group currently campaigning against child poverty. He applies his vocation of love 13

14

Fiona Stanley diplomatically reported to the National Press Club last year that the Howard government had appointed a junior Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, but that was about all she had to report from her concentrated lobbying. At the time of writing, Latham’s rhetoric about the ladder of opportunity includes gestures about childcare, but shows no sign of having any real grip on either the psychology or the sociology of the problem. While writing this article I happened over coffee to remark upon this to Race Mathews, a former minister in the Whitlam government, and he said that ‘it was all there’ in the 1970s reports of the Children’s Commission and so on. The ‘all there’ stayed in the air because Labor, even then, could not and would not get its teeth into the issue. Embling spotted Latham coming a year ago, when he called him the Ariel Sharon of the Labor Party (Phillip Adams, Australian, 7–8 December 2002). He recently wrote to Latham, trying to engage with the thinking behind his utterances. Latham’s office sent back the form reply.

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to this, too, but that does not stop him being a realist, politically speaking. He knows that to remove child poverty requires redistributive policies as well as the bandaid ones, and that is still as utopian as it was when a Labor Prime Minister put a date on his abolition of child poverty. Philip knows, even as he prays – especially as he prays – that an Australian economy dominated by corporate thinking will no more remove poverty here than in America itself where a third of the people are poor, and 40 per cent of those people are children in poverty. It is a shame to keep coming back to America.15 I’m not the only one. Look at our cartoonists. Leunig said it all with his New Year drawing of the forlorn Australian couple saying to each other ‘Ah well, I suppose we’d better look and see what New Year Resolution America has made for us.’16 Bill Leak said it with unspeakable savagery on Australia Day weekend with a coloured illustration of Howard and Bush in bed, under the stars and stripes. Bush has a ten-gallon hat on, his six-gun swinging from the bedpost, his cowboy boots at the foot of the bed, and Howard is smooching up to him, saying ‘Trusting, caring, mutually satisfying.’ Bush replies, cigar in hand, ‘… and I’ll still respect you in the morning.’ The cartoon was called The State of the Union and appeared beside a leader about ‘Sweetening the US trade deal’. Why can’t more of us take a leaf out of the cartoonists’ book? A little selfrespect is called for. OK, we have the American bases here. Why do we need them? On whose terms, exactly, are they here? Have those terms changed in the past thirty years? What impact do they have on relationships we have with other people in other places? People and places we might need, in some longer run, more than we need the Americans, who have, all of their political 15

16

America is not the only exemplar of negative force in the world, as a glance at the Middle East will show. And here comes China marching over the horizon, a juggernaut of modernity we have hardly begun to consider. For now though, America just happens to be the force to which we are most harnessed.

Leunig has been astonished at the amount of hate mail he has received for his American cartoons. ‘As if ’, he says, ‘they were more patriotically American than they are Australian. Whereas, when I grew up, a jovial anti-Americanism was accepted. I’m sorry to see that lost.’ And yet, during the Iraq war, as his hate mail increased, a major exhibition of his etchings remained undisturbed at the US consulate in Melbourne – a sign of hope, perhaps, considering they were distributed throughout the building!

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life, only helped others when it has been in their own interests. What is the value of the American alliance?17 Does it make us safer, or more vulnerable? Do we want, as our best friend, a nation that will not ratify international agreements on war crimes? To seriously ask these questions, as they are sometimes mutedly asked in Defence and military circles, to articulate them so that they became part of the national debate would now require a revolution in Canberra and revive all we have been able to find out about the death of Allende in 1973, and the demise of Whitlam in 1975. But it would be good for our souls and our safety. I wish someone would form a ‘Go Home Yank’ party. It might be construed as an offence under the Crimes Act or the ASIO Bill, but it would show many poor people of the world that we are not lost to them, and might sustain a debate truly in the national interests. What’s at issue, after all, is a matter of applying what Orwell called ‘moral effort’ to that villain of history called Nationalism, a tribal notion of unity which hinges on power. All a necessary prelude to a Republic we might have without grandiosity. Embling wrote me a shouting letter the other day: ‘Repeat after me, Barry. It is only politics.’ He’s right, it is only politics. We can still love one another. The world is full of luminous things.18 We are still planting trees, and sometimes even saving them. But again, who, exactly, is ‘us’? It seemed to be us on the streets in protest against the war. But what happened to ‘us’ after the war, when the lies justifying it were clearly borne out? I stayed home, too, I must say; but by then I had a book of sonnets about the war, poems about the impotence and passivity of watching a war beamed into the lap from the other side of the world. Most of ‘us’ stayed home, and there we have remained as American and British voters have hounded their war-mongering governments into inquiries about their corrupt case for war. And the ‘us’, here in this

17 18

At the time of writing Latham has called for a Senate investigation into the details of our trade agreement with America. If it turns out to be a bad deal the question for Labor will be what it would do about it if it could. As Czeslaw Milosz could say after a lifetime of enduring the hell of modern political history. In A book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1996), he settles his painful account with ‘realism’ and the ‘objective’ by collecting poems either from or imbued with the Buddhist tradition.

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sentence, should be refined towards my generation who once held office, and whose record in using that power (in so far as political office in Australia constitutes power), is not impressive, and whose speechifying and soliloquising about what happened is on a continuum with Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ about the lost best minds of a generation. Still Un-done is the exploring of that. I suppose the ‘us’ should be broken down into the smaller local communities within which we have a say, kind of. On this matter I have been reaching out to friends. The shrink I mentioned before, Brian Stagoll, sent me his account of the local health groups he’s been involved in for twenty years. An affable round-up of what multicultural committees had managed to do, pragmatically, and for their morale, during these dark times. Heartening. I envy Brian’s involvement, and he reminded me, after all, that in my own town the most effective and the most rewarding political experiences have been the result of political actions that employed strategic manoeuvrings that assumed a continuity of personal relationships in community, not distancing polemical discourse. At another level, Hugh Stretton, one of our deepest, most constructive social analysts, tells me he has not entirely given up hope of there possibly being ‘a decent Social Democratic program’ – if, say, the right politician would act on the fact that, when asked, the Australian people are in favour of higher taxes for good things. And part of Hugh’s hope comes from his sense that, despite all the formal indicators of poverty and so on, we as a people still have ‘an optimism, and cheerfulness’, and ‘an easy relationship with each other’.19 Another friend, Ian Roberts, Chair of the Australia Day committee 19

Stretton is probably best known for Ideas for Australian Cities (The Author, North Adelaide, 1970), and his Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (CUP, 1976). His latest book. Economics: An Introduction (UNSW Press, 1999), a text book and a monumental construction against economic rationalism, has been allowed to slip out of sight. More recently he has written a paper for the United Nations on the inefficiencies of the international money market. His work in progress is Australia Fair. When he read this piece he wrote: ‘I well understand the pessimism. But share the value you accord your friends. If I’m (distantly, uncertainly, more by temperament than reason) more optimistic, it’s from old age. Even about the Americans. Not that they will improve, but they can. In the depth of the Great Depression Roosevelt hired young Jim Landis to create the Securities & Exchange Commission, the world’s strictest and best corporate regulator for a generation or so. About 1941 he hired an unknown young Canadian (J.K. Galbraith) as national price-controller, and got near-zero inflation through

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for Victoria, accepts my reasons for depression, and himself had ‘a cringing sick feeling’ about Australia Day – until he got some of the feedback. That included a Koori mate of his saying that some events really worked: ‘One was a casual stroll from the Town Hall to Fed Square of a thousand or so gypsy Aussies from Poland, Cambodia, India, etc. The second was an afternoonlong concert in Fed Square called “Voyages” which was a sort of World Music concert featuring Melbourne artists who had come from all over the globe … most of them never getting to perform in public or outside their own community.’ Roberts looks to the day when another ten thousand people, and more, fill our Square. Communitas. Humanist thought, even when it is homeless, always comes back to that, especially in the face of large-scale capitalism in its virulent forms. Communitas, to use the title of Paul Goodman’s great book of 1947, has a great tradition of affirmation even in America, where unions as we knew them were being defeated more than a century ago, the time when Jack London nailed things down with his prophetic novel of 1906, The Iron Heel. Paul Goodman said most of what one would still want to say: the sound of his love and intelligence creates hope – conceptually, emotionally – and yet, and yet, it now seems an even longer haul to create and sustain reciprocities from inside our Empire Cities. Richard Rorty, remember, has an essay that looks back on the present as a dark age of Depression, and imminent military dictatorship in America, ‘where the quality of owning, freezes you forever into the “I”’. It is 2004 by the time the Democratic Vista Party, an alliance of trade unions and churches, overthrows the generals. It is 2096 by the time citizens the war. His successors (with the Marshall plan, etc.) were not the worst. Bush is the worst – but many of his best critics are American. Ken Inglis always calls that country ‘the home of the best and the worst’. I also lived through the Attlee revolution, and taught along with Paul Stretton, Thomas Balogh and Christopher Hill. Balogh created the British Oil Corporation, which served the English people much better than our oil policy serves us. I knew both parties to Nugget Coombs’ meeting with Menzies the day after his election in 1949. Expecting a courteous dismissal (he was Labor’s Director General of Postwar Reconstruction) Nugget was offered the Reserve Bank or the Prime Minister’s department and for that and other reasons we got twenty years of full employment. And even under the present government I think all but our brutally poor are cheerful and easy with one another – and willing to vote for a bit more social democracy if either party would offer some. (That’s what about 60 per cent keep telling most of the polls.)’

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can look back incredulously on this era of vast greed and inequality! Down the road the sign says Still Depressed. But I have not given up hope, not really. Despair is a sin against our humanity.20 And how could one commit that sin when Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Xanana Gusmao did not give up hope? But I can’t help noticing that even John Berger set his last novel in a rubbish dump, and cast a dog into the role of his main protagonist. Garbage and modernity again. I was at a Buddhist retreat the other day, and a woman who once worked for Community Aid Abroad (another outfit that helps keep grassroots work alive and hopeful) told me she went to India with a group of Aboriginal people and witnessed their joy at meeting a tribe there to which they felt kin. She also witnessed their grief at the spectacle of people in Calcutta who lived among the garbage. They felt, almost instantly, as if they should do something: they should come back to Australia and raise money from Aboriginal communities to help the poorest of the poor in India. That spirit can’t help but give one hope. Perhaps we need reminding how deep communality is in Aboriginal culture. That knowledge comes and goes in me, even though my sense of belonging to this country, of loving it in the way that might inform a decent intelligent nationalism, needs to take it in. I took it in afresh recently when alone in a flat in Canberra. The flat was owned by Alison French, the woman who curated the great Namatjira exhibition. I was in Canberra to read the work of the Buddhist poet Harold Stewart, a man who resolved his dismay at Australia by living a life of exile in Kyoto – and I say this to register, in passing, that the instinct to expatriate flight is currently very strong.21 But the flat: 20 21

Even Kafka said, ‘The fact of our living is in itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.’ Cited in Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organised System, Random House, New York, 1960, p.139.

On the way back from Canberra I bumped into Hilary McPhee, who had just been to India. I told her my topic, and mentioned Stewart in exile. ‘We just have to do that,’ she said, ‘we have to get away when we can. Everything is unravelling. This place has become good for “lifestyle”’. I’d forgotten what an enduring response this has been among people like us, and which was so well recounted by D.H. Lawrence in The Rainbow: ‘“Though we curse it we love it,” says Gerald. “We may,” said Birkin. “But it’s damnably uncomfortable love; like a love for an aged parent who suffers horribly from a complication of diseases, for which there is no hope …” “Yes”, said Gudrun slowly, “you love England immensely, immensely, Rupert.”’ It is Gudrun who finds a way through: ‘After all, a cottage in the Abruzzi, or wherever it

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it turned out to be a haven of respite and revival for me as a nationalist. For there, on the walls, were half a dozen small paintings from Central Australia. They were astonishingly strong and beautiful paintings straight out of the ground of the Centre – the centre as a radiant landscape, the centre as spirit, the centre as sacred ground of community. I felt as if I was in a temple, doing my own little dance of belonging, even though, as we all know, the deep work of reconciliation has not been done. It is one of the deadly Un-Dones with regard to the mood we are in. Another Un-Done is the business of tackling our depression with the right voice, the one that unifies our sense of those who suffer in the rest of the world with our contemplative privileges at home. Our divided selves can be depressing. Every day, here by the sea, in my garden in this small beautiful town, with a beloved woman, with grown children coming and going, I am both aghast at the nature of the world and its revolutionary needs, and attached to this volume of Tang poet in exile. Grounded in privilege I keep having to work with the two voices, the two speech streams in me, one from my father, the other that has flowed from my poetry and spiritual interests. My belonging here, this place in particular, the part that is intact, is nourished by my father’s voice. It is as if his sense of collectivism gives my body strength, as an Australian, and allows me to feel in my bones that there is something special about the Australian people, that the legend we have of ourselves as democratic, egalitarian, still lives in us, especially if we have the good fortune to be in workplaces that have not been too redesigned to weaken us. For it is the destruction of the unions as a political base, and the construction of jobs that squeeze and isolate individuals, which has done most, overall, to create the depression we are in.22 And all this I say loudly and in good health, as Walt Whitman might say, with the help of my father’s voice.

22

may be, isn’t a new world. No, the only thing to do with the world, is to see it through.’ Cited by Terry Eagleton, ‘The Novels of D.H. Lawrence’, in The Eagleton Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998, pp.22–3.

Up until about twelve years ago there was a strong movement for workplace change, supported by all sectors of industry, including government, and radically facilitated by the techniques of the late, brilliant social theorist, Fred Emery, who drew upon Norwegian work in industrial

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At the same time however, it inclines me into a leftist rhetoric that, while profoundly accurate about many things, makes me feel like it is four in the morning. Marxism is a powerful system for getting to grips with ourselves as ‘thinking subjects’,23 but when I try to do that for any period of time with the aid of Marxism I feel even more alienated by the concepts that are as ‘out there’ as a space shuttle. As to the other voice, the contemplative one, it wants to go quietly, more closely, more intimately. It wants to breathe differently, and to speak out of the right silence, the silence that consolidates moral fibre and spiritual clarity. And it wants not to be so invested in anger, even the anger provoked by impotence. And so on. The two modes, I was hoping, would marry in the course of this lecture, bringing into speech something that is simultaneously inner and civic as a bird song. Alas. I am part of a Romantic tradition thwarted since Keats lamented the hiatus between his individual sensibility and the social order, a movement of thought that led him to speak of self-consciousness as ‘the most hateful seeing of itself ’.24 At least, here, I have avoided Keats’s self-laceration, even if not all the dualisms. And yet – here I come around the block again: there is a fundamental confluence with my two voices under the heading of internationalism. The independent left, as Orwell so splendidly affirmed when he railed against fascism and communism, was internationalist in its compassion for all peoples. My father’s most ‘political’ strikes, those declared at the time to be treacherously against the national interests, were Buddhistic in their breadth of concern. As surprising as it might seem to secularists that have dominated the culture of our left literary magazines, Buddhism provides a tough reaching for the purposes of peacemaking and political opposition. In the long run it may prove more enduring as a moral foundation for global resistance on democracy. The optimism of that movement has evaporated since 1995, when the very successful workplace conference of 1992 was unsuccessfully reproduced. (For an overview see my ‘Our Yellow Brick Road’ in Penny Thomson & Kate Nash (eds), Designing the Future: Workplace Reform in Australia, Workplace Australia, Melbourne, 1991.)

23 Eagleton, The Eagleton Reader, passim, especially ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’. 24

Cited by Paul Hamilton in Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p.3.

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behalf of others than the secular humanism culturally bound to the West. After all, if we get our ecology of mind right, the ecology of the planet can only be better off, and that is really why, as a totalising system, Buddhism is better than Marxism: it is without Promethean delusions, and wants to work with the fire rather than steal it from Nature. My father, incidentally, when he was about my age, felt honoured to meet the Japanese monk Nichidatsu Fujii on his eightieth birthday. Mr Fujii was famous for his victory over the Americans. They had planned a military airstrip, and he built a temple on it. The Yanks could not afford to remove it. Battle over. Buddhism teaches that good spirits will be sustained by behaving well in the here and now. It sounds trite but it is not. It is hard work that only gets easier if you base it on a meditative practice that fosters mindful lack of regard for ego, and maximum alertness to the sufferings of others. And because the practice tries to overcome anxiety about an unknown future, it opens the way for surprises that, when they happen, you should not try too hard to make perfect sense of. Contemplativeness does not mean political quietism. The other day, for instance, I met a Zen monk from Argentina. His name is Augusto Alcalde, and he comes here a couple of times a year to teach at the Clifton Hill Zendo. He is deeply trained in Zen: twenty-five years of training with distinguished Chinese and American teachers in the monastic tradition. He no longer dresses as a monk and in Argentina he is a political activist. His statement that he has not wanted to leave Argentina for a better life for himself and his wife, although the dictators killed so many, including members of his family, is one of the great statements – one I would hope to aspire to if our society were to be ravaged by political evil. Alcalde is drawn to the Zapatistas, the Mexican movement that happens to think that, in global terms, the fourth world war has already begun. I asked him, how did he bring Zen and the Zapatistas’ thinking together? ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. Alcalde gives talks to meetings at the Victorian Trades Hall – down in the basement actually, where the old Labour College used to be. I heard him the other night quietly tell a small group of Trots and Greens and Anarchists how,

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in a poor country area of Argentina, a group of about five-hundred, including him, who do not like to be labelled and who avoid the usual power structures in favour of snail’s-pace direct democracy, run a garden, healthcare and other community services for about seven thousand people. ‘We don’t confront,’ Alcalde said, unless the timing is right for them. And if they were crushed, he seemed to be implying, ‘we still have what is our strength – our ways of relating to each other. This can never change.’ He spoke about energy being ‘kept in for the important things’, rather than always going out to ‘the road blocks’. I found this moving and confusing, and I am still thinking about it. He created in my mind the image of sheep in a fold, of creatures in retreat from previous slaughter. Of necessity, humanism was in retreat: it had to look after itself. He said: ‘Every victory is built on a thousand defeats.’ This spoken with great charm and patience and – dare I say it – bemusement, in the face of history. He also said: ‘The wind blows the dust into the corners of the room. We are dust.’ Alcalde’s Zen has made an impression among younger green activists, and, I believe, there is even a meditation group that comes together in the basement of the Electrical Trades Union. Yes, a contemplative group downstairs, with the ‘sparkies’. ‘Gawd strike me pink’, I can hear my old man saying, on his way out to a picket line that would now be illegal.

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SHO O T I NG SE A S ON Robert Manne’s New Ground

Robert Manne, Left Right Left: Political Essays 1977–2005 (2005)

There are at least three reasons why we left-leaning, right-thinking, middleclass readers value Robert Manne’s essays. Over the last twenty years he has – in books, as editor of Quadrant from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist – been writing with an uncommon lucidity. He is that rare combination of good scholar and good journalist. His style is transparently reasonable: his essays shine as models of speaking rationally. Intimate with this is Manne’s other virtue: the connections his reason has with morality, and the open way in which he elucidates, in essay after essay, from one year to the next, notions of common decency. Such values – the Kantian, humanistic values – do not usually need arguing. But Manne’s work has involved the necessary activation of them in the battles to which he has been drawn like a duck to water in the shooting season. Politically, he has always been a meteorologist, a spotter of bad ideological trends, the better to name them and to combat them as matters of history and political judgment. This combination of reason transparently applied and the values underpinning common decency gives another stamp to Manne’s essays: they display a militant degree of common sense. And of course, this trinity is profoundly friendly to ‘our’ sense of ourselves. In fact, Manne’s implicit construction of his audience is, even when he is reminding readers of moral axioms or the facts of history, a collusive one. Reading him seems to create in the mind a healthy space, one conductive to decent conversation, to the civilised discourse we like to affirm as democrats. Even as he offers correct­ ives, his is the correction our better selves like to have. No wonder The Age

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and the Sydney Morning Herald named the professor of politics our favourite public intellectual. I realise I am idealising the civic space that Manne’s style characteris­ tically fosters. He can be very stern. In this book, we have his famous crucifixions of the communist journalist Wilfred Burchett and the myth-loving historian Manning Clark. For historian Keith Windschuttle, Manne organised a whole book of people to destroy the case against Aboriginal slaughter in Tasmania. He confesses that, as an Australian-born son of German Jews who fled the Holocaust, his views can be ‘overdetermined’, which is to say that when he is most biographically driven to write on racism and refugees he is as loaded with need as with judgment. There is something rigid about Manne. But this does not detract from the third reason we value him. Few essayists in Australia have defined key contemporary issues so thoroughly, especially in the areas of war, refugees and Aborigines, the topics that dominate this important book. Here we have his landmark Quarterly Essay In Denial (2001), which documented the policy of the removal of Aboriginal children in the era of assimilation. I think that the essay deals crudely with the concept of assimilation, and applies a model of racism that oversimplifies many years of complicated relationships on the Australian frontier. It is nonetheless definitive and sits in the company of a sizzling forensic challenge to the judgment by Justice Maurice O’Loughlin in the Cubillo and Gunner case that there was no evidence for a policy of forcible removal. In Denial stakes out the ground in a way that makes it hard to imagine how a decent person could argue with it. Manne’s long essay is a long lament for humane accountability in relationships. The same can be said of his other Quarterly Essay, Sending Them Home (2004), which is about border protection policy since September 11. This essay, with its excruciating case studies and balanced policy analysis of a difficult national issue, also seems to stand complete, unanswerable. Reading it produces the grave pause that invites political action. Overall, then, what Manne does is shed practical light on burning issues by tabling authoritative

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documents for the historical record. Another paradox: he is a polemicist with a gift for producing classics. ‘Ours is a polemical culture,’ Raimond Gaita wrote recently. ‘We must think hard …’ Too true. We value Manne as an aid to what at school used to be called Clear Thinking. Except that polemic is not the best friend of the essay. To be polemical is, as we know, not to be ambivalent, nuanced or in flux with regard to ideas, values or the emergent aspects of one’s life. It is to be rather impatient for clarity, to be preoccupied with right and wrong at the expense of the deeper intelligence we might call sensibility. To be polemical is usually to write as if one knows exactly where one is culturally, historically and psychologically. Show me the polemicist who explores uncertainty. I don’t wish to be misunderstood here (as Manne says several times himself). His essays are not crucially underpinned by certitudes with regard to cultural change, values and history – although it has to be said that, with regard to the ‘counterculture’ that generated most of the culture wars, Manne oddly distances himself from the revolution of the 1960s. He creates the impression that he was there at the time but did not inhale. Still, the bold organising principle of this collection makes Manne anything but safe, since we are invited to witness his passage from his brief early moment on the left (when he opposed the Vietnam War) to the right and then to the left of politics. In a shapely biographical sketch, enough to make one envious of its political coherence, he owns up to various errors. He tells us, for instance, that the term ‘political correctness’, with which he once lashed the left with such relish, is now too cheap a label for him to use. He has come to think that his opposition to economic rationalism, which helped lead him away from his New Right colleagues on Quadrant, and which generated one of his most important books, might have been better left to economists. He confesses to coming late to our shameful Aboriginal history, even though he also now admits (at last) that the communists were the good friends of the Aboriginal cause back in the 1930s. Manne seems to say, almost, that he poured himself into Aboriginal issues as soon as the Cold War ended, substituting, so to

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speak, Australian racism for Stalinism as his bad object. All these concessions to fallibility – as if the public sphere needs to be a confessional, a construction with a Stalinist echo – Manne tables in this book, for his betterment and ours as his critical and nonetheless approving readers. Yet the retrospection is not entirely straightforward. While all the above is declared, Manne is not one to admit error as easily as his biographical pitch would suggest. In fact, he says that, on the key issues of refugees and war, it is not so much that he has moved from right to left as that ‘the culture has changed’. This is an unfortunate construction. It seems to imply that Manne thinks he has been right all along. For an essayist to give this impression (even if he feels it sometimes in private) is for him to be locked into the vice of polemicism. A key mentor for Manne was George Orwell, who tried to write with the full sensibility of the novelist and failed. But Orwell as an essayist succeeded marvellously because his pellucid prose was at one with his moral integrity and civic courage, a perfect vehicle for striking a blow for ‘democratic socialism’. And so with Manne, who essays on Orwell here, but unfortunately in a way that rather domesticates Orwell. He praises Orwell for being right about fascism and communism, and for defending both liberty and equality. He dismisses Orwell’s socialism because he judges ‘socialism’ as being entirely outdated. This is conventional wisdom and in keeping with what the right wanted to stress about Orwell during the Cold War. What Manne leaves out is Orwell’s radical internationalism, and the ways in which his thought pivoted on an opposition to imperialism in all its forms. Orwell thought that social justice at home could and should not happen unless there was social justice for those impoverished by colonialism. This thought is hardly out of date, indeed is very much in keeping with our present dilemma. Nor was Orwell without his flaws, some of which Manne has inherited, and which you can see at work whether he is arguing from the left or the right. Before going any further, Manne on the right should be praised for what he was not. His work did not have the paranoid twistings of Frank

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Knopfelmacher. Nor did it have the spiritual vanity of James McAuley, or the dark certainties of Vincent Buckley in the days of Catholic Action. Manne’s mental atmosphere was less extreme; he had more daylight in him even when most zealously putting the boot into the left. His zealotry excelled itself, of course, just after the Cold War ended. I could not read him without feeling he was slandering everyone on the left as a Stalinist. A triumphalist tone came with a tendency to use ‘left intellectual’ pejoratively, as Orwell did. I happened to agree with Manne about the communists who duck-shoved on Stalin. But I thought and still think that overall he was wrong about ‘the left’ because he never properly considered the industrial wing of the labour movement (another shortcoming of Orwell’s). Here, I should say I am writing with my own sense of over-determination, as my father was a militant unionist who rejected membership of the Communist Party. He did so for reasons Manne would have approved of, but during the Cold War he would not have uttered them to a Robert Manne because he did not want to feed the ideological hungers of a right that had nothing to say about the machinations of the US. The leftism of activist humanists like my father – a welder and blacksmith whose politics had been shaped on the factory floor, whose political sensibility was a matter of communal loyalty and class struggle through two generations – was not going to bow to polemic that diminished the sacrifices of so many workers, least of all at a time when plotters such as B.A. Santamaria were so obsessed with communism that they were prepared in the process to discredit a whole union movement. In this book, Manne has a eulogy to Santamaria in which he notes without qualm that the arrival of the Democratic Labor Party kept the ALP out of office for two decades. It would have been good, in the context of Manne’s stocktaking about his own movement from right to left, if he had reflected on this as a matter of longer-term political judgment. If Labor had governed a few times between 1950 and 1972, Australia would probably be a less conservative and reactionary place than it is now.

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Manne’s other blind spot – taking this book as a whole – is the US. It was most apparent in the debate over Pol Pot, when Manne, having rightly attacked the leftists who were slow to recognise the killings, went on to declare ‘wholly irrational’ the idea that ruin from the massive US bombing may have helped the Khmer Rouge take control. That was then. Today, to speak of a blind spot about the US might seem odd in the light of Manne’s recent opposition to the war in Iraq. He is trenchantly critical of the neo-conservatives; of the lies about the war – here and in the US. He is agonised by the torture Australia effectively condones in the wake of the US dismissal of the Geneva Conventions. As a patriotic Australian, he deplores the Howard government’s subservience of foreign policy to the White House. And so on. All this is clear from his recent writings in response to September 11, the ‘war on terror’ and the pre-emptive attack by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. What more, one might ask, could we want? My point simply is that the left has long had many profound things to say about the US. They can be said intelligently without even being ‘Anti-American’ in the cheap sense. But Manne has not begun to speak of them, and I can’t help feeling that some residue of his once having been a Cold War warrior will not allow him to run the risk of sounding ‘anti-American’. Our intellectuals will never be free until they don’t give a damn about that. It should be obvious by now that I do not think of Manne as of the left. Perhaps, after his remark about the culture changing around him, nor does he, even though the title of his book seems to murmur a wish to be of the ‘left’ that once so ostracised him. Certainly, in his pieces on the culture wars – on pornography, feminism, parenthood, euthanasia – he is not speaking from the left but rather as a conservatively worried husband and father from the Melbourne suburbs (another reason to be liked by Age readers). In itself, not being of the left does not categorically matter, but it does make it easier to understand why Manne has yet to write directly about the unions (which he says he supports), the media, the Greens, the environment, let alone the poor of the world. It is not that he is without a world perspective – far from it: his

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defence of Middle-Eastern refugees is partly based on the political horrors they have been through, which the policies endorsed by relaxed and comfortable Australian leaders callously ignore. While Manne is attuned to the agonised mess of contemporary politics in this world, there are areas naturally connected to his interests at which he has yet to arrive; when or if he does, he will find a very useful body of leftist thought waiting for him. I hope he goes there. Meanwhile, he remains a liberal democrat with a brave, clear heart, a man who, at present, is writing without an agenda. He is invaluable. And if I have given the impression that all of this book is concerned with the big issues of conscience, I must correct it by saying that Manne’s journalism on the leading public figures of our day is astute and witty. He nailed Hanson with Howard in the wings, and rightly predicted that Hanson on her own would not last. He got a bullseye with Latham before his downfall. Is there a better tag for Keating than ‘half Manning Clark, half Milton Friedman’? Sometimes, of course, he does not nail so much as encounter, and goes away thinking, as he did with Noel Pearson, face to face with the social ruin of Aboriginal communities on Cape York. On Aborigines, Manne may well be travelling away from leftist thought on welfare, and it would indeed be ironic if on this issue he ended up again in the company of the right. The Pearson piece made me hope for more by Manne where he shares his processes of thinking. Manne is, as a deep Australianist, writing with a love of this country that I sometimes feel I am losing. He tells us he has always had this love because, early on as a migrant, he realised the unique value of British institutions that have been leavened by egalitarianism in this wide brown land. Despite the present climate of war, mendacity and xenophobia, Manne is keeping faith with the idea of Australia as a decent democracy. He is liberal in the best sense, which creates hope.

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R A I G A I TA’ S MO N T B L A N C A New Poem Imagined

The battle with the Alps: as useful as work and as uplifting as religion. From the membership card of the Italian Alpine Club

That’s what bothers me most. I can’t endure seeing my suffering being reduced – being generalized – (à la Kierkegaard): it’s as if it were being stolen from me. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

In my first thirty years of life I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles … Today I’m back at Cold Mountain: I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears. Han-Shan, Cold Mountain Poems (translated by Gary Snyder)

1

Here is a poem I dedicated to my good friend Rai Gaita. It was written after he took me to the site of his old house, the day before the premiére viewing of Romulus, My Father in Castlemaine. It’s called ‘Reading on the Darkening Plain.’ In the dusk of the plains he held his hands together palms up each open hand the page of the book – ‘I would read until there was no more light.’

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Then he’d leave the veranda go inside to light the lamp breathe the fumes of kerosene that singey smell that was weak heat and light for the reading and waiting. Eventually, across the plains, he heard the crackling of the motorbike. The father’s head down over the handlebars the son’s still over the last page on the road to truth … Then the soup. Night closed in. The dog warmed him. Outside, the moon, mother of clouds, drifted. Now, a father, a husband he dwells on the plains once more reading among boulders – books as solid as deeds, good as stone. The house is beautifully lit inside and out. A wood fire roars. Under the moonless sky of the stone country one word virtuously contests the other – the other word, the lunar one, sails in under the bedclothes, reconnecting the sentences of the day. The latest book cracks along its spine.1 A sorrowful poem, manifestly: Rai’s sorrow, and that of the beautiful bare place, as we stood in the dusk that afternoon, and the sorrow that belongs 1

Barry Hill, As We Draw Ourselves, Parkville: Five Islands Press, 2008, p.87.

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to the film and to the book that led to it, the book itself, having come from Rai’s eulogy to his father, which was interlaced, we now all know, with a complicated yearning and unresolved grief for his mother. I was happy to have written a poem that could stand without saying too much. It’s one of those poems that rests with the mood of things, and therefore not the kind of poem that could possibly do justice to the concerns that inhabit Rai’s work. All I can try to offer – in the interests of love and clarity, those ancient mistresses of philosophers and poets – is a sketch-map towards such a poem. A rough sketch, necessarily, ‘only a few hints,’ as Whitman wrote in ‘When I Read the Book’ – ‘a few diffused faint clews and indirections.’2 The intimation of the poem has been with me for some time, for reasons I should explain, not the least of which is the poetic qualities of Rai’s work, as he has told me more than once he would have liked to have been a poet. Suffice to say the poem would seek to explore notions of philosophical embodiment – intellectual, moral, spiritual – a poem that bridges memoir and philosophical discourse, and which conveys what is not quite sayable otherwise because it has a music of its own. But first let me say a few things about my sense of affinity with the physicality of Rai’s lifework. For one thing, the men in it are men like my father and my uncles. They are strong, talking, working men. They sit in singlets, smoking slowly. They roll their own. They use the same tobacco – Havelock in the green tin. It is impossible for a boy to be around them without soaking up their physical ease in the world, and picking up the respect they have for skilled manual work, for know-how, for modest work as well as modest enough talk. They are, even when they have good wives, men who can be imagined without women. They can from time to time speak chauvinistically. But this is not to say that they can actually do without women. With women they are decorous, watchful, secretly needful, and maybe, when their pride and sense of security is acutely threatened, explosive. 2

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, New York: Norton, 1973, p.8.

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The physicality of Rai’s Chekhovian scenes goes further. There is the landscape, obviously, and his romantic sense of its connection with the soul-states of the men and women who find themselves in it, or on it, or not of it. A similar landscape was a presence to me growing up on the lava plains on the suburban edge of Melbourne, with its dryness and hard ground and hard light. When my mother left my father I stood on that ground under a clear night sky, hating my father for his stupidity. I can still remember the electricity in my body, the bolts of grief that gave me such strength. When I was about forty, the same power came back into my body when my wife and I found ourselves dealing with the Family Court over the custody of our kids. I took up karate. I know that decision kept me and possibly other people safe. When you are full of grief you need something hard, physically hard, to contend with. It’s either that or lay down and die. With regard to his own anguish as a boy Rai has until recently been strikingly reticent. He wrote his first memoir in the classic mode, letting the tragic events speak, almost, for themselves. The mode deepened our horror, aroused our anguish on his behalf, obliging us to imagine the details of the boy’s experience, especially with regard to his experience of maternal love, its sexual complexity and waywardness. Rai’s classic mode also suited his emotional need to continue to embrace his mother indirectly, to forgive her, if forgiveness was needed, in the light of his father’s compassion for her. This narrative instinct also served to block, potentially, the readers who would judge her harshly. That was the first book. In the second book, After Romulus, Rai is more declared about the felt experience of his own suffering. He makes a case for his mercurial mother under the heading of what he calls her ‘romanticism.’ He draws us into some aspects of how he was implicated in her physical presence. Eros enters, who had been absent in the first book, creating what I have always felt to be a blurry puritanical atmosphere. The new realism is sharp in the excruciating chapter called ‘An Unassuageable Longing,’ where he mentions being, in one poignantly intimate section, ‘excited, frightened, resentful’

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(and then in another refrain, ‘disturbed, anxious, hostile’). Overall, he says, the best way for us to understand his state of survival during the ‘tragic’ events of his early life is to think of the gruelling and deadly fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Foreman, with his terrifying strength, pounded Ali for eight rounds. Ali faced up to him in the first round and came out of that afraid for his life. He survived the fight by taking untold punishment until Foreman tired: then a few telling blows by Ali brought him down. And once he had grown up, Rai tells us, he realised that he had instinctively adopted a psychological and spiritual version of what Ali had done: ‘when I was pounded by one traumatically painful event after another, I lay against the ropes.’ ‘In characteristic fashion,’ Rai goes on, ‘Ali made light of his achievement, calling his enforced strategy of lying against the ropes ‘rope a dope.’ For me it has become a morally and spiritually emblematic way of dealing with fear and suffering.’3 After the Family Court period of my life, I wrote a Buddhistic novel called The Best Picture. Its epigraph is from Wittgenstein: ‘the human body is the best picture of the human soul.’ There is a page that applies the idea of truth tables to the method of self-cancellation practised in Buddhism. On the page, it was something of a conceit, but I was by then sick of trying to think everything through, of working things out in the head. Ideas, as such, can drive you mad; and anyway, they issue from speakers who have lives lived in bodies, with hearts that beat, more or less. This brings me to another affinity with Rai’s work. It goes without saying that he is the most refined of thinkers, subtle, quiet and deeply thorough – Wittgensteinian, in some ways, but with a feeling tone that has always reminded me of G.E. Moore. We could argue about this, nuancing Rai’s place in British philosophy that all too often was conducted by men in the most disembodied ways. The best, however, were always more than the inane talking heads, the Jumpers of Stoppard’s play of that name. Wittgenstein, who was to be haunted by the suicides of two brothers, could find himself utterly desperately physical: he wrote parts of the 3

Rai Gaita, After Romulus, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2011, pp.220–21.

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Tractatus in the trenches; he left elevated cogitations at Cambridge to teach children in a village school; he went off to live stoically in the ice and snow of a fiord. Moore bound his ethics into the primal bonds of friendship, a kind of creaturely position, socially speaking. What I want to stress is that sooner or later Rai’s ideas come to rest in examples that are physical in that they involve what people enact. We are familiar with his golden examples of goodness, which essentially pertain to our capacity for exercising compassion without condescension. In After Romulus, Rai indicates, explicitly for the first time, how his experiences as a young man shaped his ethical philosophising, its style and content, thereafter.4 At the age of sixteen, with his childhood traumas still resounding, he took a job in a mental asylum. He tells of the nun whose unqualified love towards the patients filled him with wonder. He tells of the handful of psychiatrists who acted in the light of what they called the inalienable dignity of human beings, even those who had lost their minds. In due course, Rai would replicate and amplify examples of the good enacted in concentration camps or among the destitute of Calcutta, each case involving a meditation, on his part, on how one might deliver goodness to those who have been abandoned (a word he seems not to use, but which the poem will have to flesh out), or who in their hearts had something essentially sacred violated; namely, the expectation that, as Simone Weil puts it, passionately cited by Rai, ‘good and not evil would not be done’ to them. Overall, good deeds are appraised less in terms of what their agents valued at the time than worthy of witness because they were a wonder to behold and seemed to embody a mystery at their heart. Of course, Rai knows the Christian teachings on love; he was after all educated at a Catholic boarding school. He notes that the West’s history of saints has done much for the language of love, but because he insists on a secular account, the wonder remains a double mystery, you might say. To this continuously mysterious sphere, where love knows no bounds, as it were, he names what he calls morality as renunciation. By contrast, apparently, he also names another and more 4 Gaita, After Romulus, p.49.

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naturalistic notion of morality as assertion.5 Here we meet the cardinal and sometimes heroic virtues of integrity, courage, nobility, and honour as they are harnessed by the concept of character. This notion of character, which is as enduring as a boulder, is no mere construct of the intellect either. As with the ethics of renunciation, it emerges as a code palpably installed in Rai as a boy sympathetically immersed in the life-stream of his father. Thus, to encounter Rai’s ethics is to meet a position tenaciously held, a life affirmed and defended and which, in its golden instances, remains mysterious. As well dispossess the philosopher of these ideas as wrestle a bone from a dog. A philosopher’s dog, obviously, a benighted creature deserving of admission to a higher place, a heaven, of sorts, whatever Gaita would like to call it. I’m calling him Gaita now, the better to assert some creative distance. The poem has to work out the personal from the impersonal. And vice versa. Come – this is the way of dealing with what’s sacred and violated … And then there is the enduring physicality of the man. At regular intervals, it seems to me, he illustrates this while doing philosophy, almost as if he must interrupt the flow of abstraction. There is, for one thing, his skillful mending of old cars and the driving of them recklessly. For another, and crucially, there is the instructive and expressive business of his rock climbing. In Victoria, Tasmania, and New Zealand, where, as he told us in The Philosopher’s Dog, he experienced something he describes as a vision: ‘Through a break in the clouds, across the valley, I saw a mountain of dramatic nobility, trailing a snow plume. Her name was Mount Christina. Moved almost to tears by her beauty, I resolved I would become a mountaineer.’6 5 Gaita, After Romulus, p.70. 6

Rai Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2002, p.142.

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Astonishingly, no mention is made of the fact that the mountain shares the name of Gaita’s mother. But there it was: the purely wondrous thing, inviting renunciation, and worthy of the assertion of heroic virtues. Gaita went to England to do his doctorate, where he went climbing in Scotland and the Alps. Eventually he realised he’d have to make a choice between mountaineering and philosophy. He could not be fully serious in both professions. One love had to surrender to the other. Yes, there is an extraordinary sweetness about this choice. And even more so if you feel they need not be apart, that they have long been together – of necessity. The mind-heart leaps. Instantly the philosophy becomes heroicised, just as the mountaineering takes on an intellectual, if not positively literary aspect – which in Europe it has long had. But with Gaita the choice was not an idle one, no mere abstraction. For years he had been mountain climbing, and the passion for that arduous activity had been coterminous with his mental work. The hard climbing did not come before the ‘hard thinking’ – to use one of his favourite phrases. For his definitive years in philosophy they climbed together. Not only that: they are still together, imaginatively. Much is still both absolute and precarious, as it is both classic and romantic. Something of the new poem now looks us in the face. With regard to philosophy, the mountain helps define what is serious. The imagined poem itself must give expression to diligence and risk, to the stamina and self-exposure of extended philosophising. Paul Klee once described drawing as taking an idea for a walk. Philosophy done with courage is taking an idea up onto a rock face. It can’t not be a test of character, and, of necessity, an anguished one for a young man who has to contend with his father’s ‘madness’ and his mother’s ‘badness.’ The poem will hurl these categories like lightning bolts at a cliff: the young man takes himself into the mountains because he has to find a place to put a sorrow that is grief-riddled with remorse. He must do something with it, he knows not what – perhaps a sky-burial for his mother, or for himself. Perhaps an assault on the mountain? There is test after test,

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self-affirming and self-punishing. What ever happens is philosophical. And totally embodied. That is to say, what ever becomes of the thinking, it is done with an ice pick. Leave hard feelings back down there. Hammer your pitons in high on the rock face. In case you think I am exaggerating, here is a passage from After Romulus, in which Gaita reveals himself to be hanging by a rope in shifting weathers. I am not going to analyse it: the poem will simply put it out as a kind of natural object, with all the allusion to physical stress it employs. My mother’s failure to understand this aspect of my father’s moral identity was not, therefore, reason to think that she was morally slack, ‘a characterless woman.’ But even someone who takes the Socratic perspective has only occasionally a full understanding of what is revealed to him from it. His sense of the reality of good and evil waxes and wanes. That is partly why remorse feels like a bewildered remembrance as much as a shocked realisation that anything in the world could have the kind of importance that wrongdoing can when its nature is fully exposed. Plato tells us that philosophers, by which he means lovers of wisdom, are clinging in recollection to what they have seen.7

The poem became inevitable the day I fell in upon Gaita in London, about six years ago. I had been living in Rome and had spent time in the Alps. He was alone in the Bloomsbury flat, missing his wife, as I have never known a man so lovingly to miss a wife from whom he was not estranged. The upshot was that I ended up cooking for him! Meanwhile, he had something special to show me, which few others had seen. On his tiny TV we sat down and watched the final cut of Romulus. He was restless all the way through. The 7 Gaita, After Romulus, pp.186–87.

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intensity of the film, seen small, is immense. The forces in it want to break out. My first thought, afterwards, was that I had seen a Russian film. I mentioned Chekhov – thinking of characters that wait in slow time in vast bare places for their fates to unfold. The film also reminded me of the furious Shakespearean stories of Stanislaw Lvov, especially his version of Macbeth. After a while we settled down to look at the book I had with me. He lit up. It was a big illustrated book of that superlative place, that quintessentially sublime site, which he knew like the back of his hand. Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe, towers above Chamonix, a village first settled in the fifteenth century by wintry monks. Mont Blanc has a tilting, round summit, like the heave of a shoulder into the sky rather than what you would call a peak. Several glaciers descend from it, grinding down between forest and escarpment, trees that have crashed and rocks that have become rubble. Out from the hulk of Mont Blanc, among a world of snowfields, ice walls, ridges and precipices, are the Aiguilles, the sheer, red granite needles that shoot up from valley and glacier. Taken together, the white mammoth and the ecstatic spires, you are face to face with the absolute. Such is the presence of the absolute it’s impossible not to find yourself contending with several questions. Is there a God? What is my value? How am I here? What is the mountain? (This last question I phrase as a koan, a Zen riddle designed to help get beyond the suffering that is endemic to dualistic thinking). A few weeks previously, no climber myself, I’d gone up one of those needles by cable car. It was the Aiguille du Midi, which has a viewing platform that feels level with the lazy white hump of Mont Blanc, innocently lit on that mid-winter afternoon. I stepped to the edge of the platform and looked down. – 95 –

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Later, that night, as the sun left the mountain and its terrible weight seemed to slip into the unconscious, I tried to tell my diary what had happened. Down I had wished to go. All the way down, and with a snow-dive out over the valley, before falling like a stone to my death. Such was my swoon, the bliss of the fall. I described that long instant in full, and sent it to Gaita. That’s how I felt! he exclaimed, as soon as we met. He’d been thrilled to hear I was going to Chamonix, where he’d spent so many years climbing up and scrambling around, making a life on those needles and out on the steep slopes you can see along the valley. Not climbing mountain peaks, I should add. He has always eschewed the competitive collection of peaks in favour of the pleasure of reaching the zones that had long ravished him from a distance. Climbing to inhabit Beauty, you might say, while keeping a foothold amid Terror. Physically philosophising the Sublime. From up there you can see how the world was made! he said. And you will be able to walk on La Mer de Glace! (the glacier that comes down into the village one peak away from Mont Blanc). Start climbing with its terrible white shoulder over your shoulder. The Sea of Ice below you the ice-pick in your frozen hand and with each step a secular hymn: Father, Mother, Fall. Climb until you are frost. Gain in crystal weight … – 96 –

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2

La Mer de Glace is receding these days, but when Shelley arrived in the summer of 1816, in tow with his beloved Mary, who was carrying an early draft of her novel, Frankenstein – it’s on the glacier that her creature pleads for the help and understanding that is not given to him – the glacier came right up to the road. Shelley felt the sea of ice was all the time expanding – ‘inexplicably dreadful’ – and that one day the whole world might become a mass of frost. He was in a frenetic state, overloaded with much that had not found its way into his writing. Back in London he had abandoned his first wife Harriet, along with his two daughters. In due course Harriet would drown herself. He and Mary had eloped with their child, little William, along with Claire, Mary’s eighteen-year-old stepsister, who was pregnant to Byron while being loved by Shelley. Shelley, forever idealistic about what was possible in relationships, tended to look skyward. On the way to Chamonix he wrote The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. As they came across France the villages seemed to be still smouldering from the Napoleonic wars. The world had been turned upside down and it only remained for the courageous in love to strike out for their own lives. Closer to the Alps, they glimpsed the peaks, and shuddered. To Mary the mountains seemed to increase in height and beauty – ‘higher one would think than the safety of God would permit.’ At the Hotel de Ville de Londres, right at the edge of the glacier, the three of them plus the one on the way, slept. As if this was not scandal enough Shelley added to it when he signed the hotel register. Under the ‘occupation’ column he wrote, in Greek, Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist. Shelley, once face to face with the mountain – its sheer mass and cruel simplicity – could think of nothing else: ‘I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these ariel summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of exstatic wonder, not unallied to madness.’ He was filled with awe; at the limits of his own intelligence; at the massive, impersonal forces. His great poem, Mont Blanc,

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which recounts the layers of geological chaos, is a kind of warding off of madness as it enacts a heroic confrontation between sensitive mind and brutal matter: For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales! Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears, – still, snowy, and serene –8 Shelley asserted what no other English traveller dared to put into print: the mountain confirmed the non-existence of God. All it could affirm was ‘The secret strength of things / Which governs thought.’9 And that is the thing, I feel, the secret strength of the things that takes someone onto the actual mountain – upon which, by the way, Shelley seems not to have actually stepped, although in a cultural sense he never really left. By the time Gaita arrived a century and a half after Shelley’s revolutionary times, the poet was all the vogue again. The Pursuit, Richard Holmes’ passionate biography of Shelley (from which I have been plundering) was published in 1974.10 I bet some of Gaita’s young contemporaries had it tucked away in their tents: Shelley’s radical idealism suited their era, as did the poet’s everlasting faith in love. South of the Alps, Shelley settled a while in Rome, where he delivered his generation’s greatest translation of Plato’s Symposium, that timeless discourse on love, on the notion of our yearning to meet our other halves, a dreaming of love that entails the One. Need I go on? Not here, but the poem will go on, as it must. Reading Gaita, you can’t miss his tender references to Plato; even when he is arguing against him he seems to be extending a hand, a muscular arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam, towards a transcendental 8

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs Shelley, Vol. 2., London: Edward Moxon, 1847, III, ll. 9–13, 232.

9 Shelley, Complete Works, V, ll. 13–14, 234. 10

Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974. The main citations are at 342, 339, 327, 334–35.

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love which he continues to insist is not religious. The poem might give some body to this riddle in Gaita. The Hotel de Ville de Londres has gone now. The philosopher’s generation of climbers, those around Shelley’s age I mean, camped in a field down along the way. They were there all summer, without facilities. A whole field of youngsters hell-bent on putting themselves to the test, and living communally while loving the mountain to bits. By the end of their stay the place was a quagmire, if not a cesspit. And overhead – the sound of choppers, as it was in Vietnam. At the end of each day they swung on down to collect the wounded and sometimes even the dead the mountain had claimed. Come the next morning, and everyone was collecting their gear to partner up and go out again. It was incredible, Gaita told me. It was like a war-zone. Soldiers of the mountain, the daredevil fit young men. The poem, as it climbs, will have to pause on obdurate, reckless pride as well as courage. One day, on the high slopes, having worked his way around an avalanche, the weather started to close in. We will have to turn back, his partner said, looking at the storm clouds racing towards them. They were on a traverse to the Aiguille du Midi. The other climber was relatively new to the game: fear was building like the storm. They could signal for help, a helicopter could pick them up from where they were. Oh, no, Gaita insisted, that would be too embarrassing! Shelley, just a few days before arriving in Chamonix, was boating with Byron on a lake in Switzerland. He was usually fine in a boat talking his head off until ‘the ladies’ brains whizzed with giddiness about idealism.’ But on this day Shelley’s talk became unsettled, as the boat they were on began to sink. ‘My companion, an excellent swimmer, took off his coat, I did the same,’ Shelley recalled, ‘and we sat with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to be swamped.’ Shelley knew that Byron knew he could not swim. But the last thing he was going to do was signal any need for help: ‘I felt in this near prospect of death a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered though but

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subordinately … I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, but I was overcome with humiliation …’ I told this story to Gaita and he laughed. He said that, once, he had almost agreed to a helicopter rescue from a hut near the peak of Mount Cook. He had two cracked ribs, which was going to make it difficult to leap crevasses on the way down. As it happened, a small plane was scheduled to deliver supplies when the blizzard passed: he and his partner hitched a ride back. ‘That,’ he told me, ‘didn’t count as a rescue.’ And it was also because no one easily called it a rescue as the chopper came to deliver supplies: they were just using it to get a lift back. This is the thing: mountains exist to test one’s capacity for humiliation. They bear witness to the secret strength of things that govern not just thought but feelings – especially feelings that are too painful to express, and the full expression of which might trigger an avalanche in the self. The mountain is there to pit oneself against, the better to secure oneself, after a fashion. If you survive the mountain you can survive anything, even if you have done so by lying against the ropes. Not for nothing have great mountains in ancient cultures been named Mother. The Mountain calls and wholeheartedly you go; you give yourself to it on pain of death. Death in the arms of the mountain may be what you desire. Death-in-life, and life-in-death is what great White Mountains are. But I am going too quickly, I know, and too romantically for my own good. The poem must not be allowed to go overboard here. The whole experience of taking one’s sorrow to the mountain also entails leaving many things behind: the hearth, the sapping human-creature comforts, the succour of mothers and wives. The slow walk up towards the mountain solicits the classic mode. Each step outwards is a new step, a kind of glad start, to use Wittgenstein’s lovely phrase. You are walking into freshness; the physicality of the world is sharp, sharpened, as each step is individually valued, as you move in the direction of self-sufficiency and contact with something much bigger than the self.

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Gary Snyder, the Zen poet-ecologist who trained his mind and body in mountains, has a fine word for the physical reality of the path underfoot. Riprap. It’s a Rocky Mountain term for a cobble of stone laid on steep, slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains. It is the full physical reality of the path as you go into the mountain wanting to leave your ego behind. And as you do you start to discard some of your own self-talk; its all too familiar grammar shifts as you go. Being up there, out there, with Nature lying all around, solicits the new grammar. Snyder goes on, citing Thoreau: ‘The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge, Gramatica parda, tawny grammar, a kind of mother-wit derived from that … leopard … ’ The leopard was ‘this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society.’11 The point is that you are, in a Zen sense, not homeless, not abandoned, precisely because what you have is the whole universe. A man might become something else on a mountain. One with no argument with Nature, even his own nature, riddled as it is with madness, loss, fear or both. Of the wind, you might say. Breathing and all seeing of the world as it is – all around. Zen Master Dogen asks: ‘Are you going to try to improve yourself or are you going to let the universe improve you?’ Come back to Chamonix, and the inevitability, or not, of the mountain tending one in the classic mode, whatever the knot of self-anguish. John Ruskin, the great critic who was often mad, found solace at Chamonix. The place made him feel sane when it allowed him, an ethical being through and through, to escape from his parents who persecuted him with their moralising. Ruskin needed to live near a mountain that healed. As a young man, while lying on a mossy rock in the valley of Chamonix, when he had born witness to the storm clouds breaking over the mountain, giving birth to that famous passage about the thunder, the cloud cloven by the ava­lanche, the white stream emerging like slow lightning, the Aiguilles breaking through, the 11

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, New York: North Point Press, 1990, p.83.

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spire of ice, the dome of snow and so on – a celebrated passage in which ‘a celestial city’ is revealed to him, ‘clothed with the peace of God.’ But it was much more than that. It could ‘turn the human soul from gazing upon itself.’12 And it did so, he came to realise, because ‘the stones of Chamonix,’ the geology of it all, the mountains themselves, their ‘violent muscular action’ on the body of the earth – their spirit was a constant saying of ‘I live forever.’13 And so with Ruskin’s reverence for the truths of all things there: moss, lichen, birds, trees – ‘the pine is trained to need nothing, and to endure everything.’14 He loved clouds second only to rocks: ‘Our whole happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live in the cloud.’ Even when he himself felt ‘as unstable as water,’15 Ruskin knew that realism was the basic intention of Romantic art – a project that dissolved the dichotomy between the romantic and classic. Ruskin wanted truth and accuracy in drawing, respect for the detailed facts in nature, including their animate inter-relationships: see the ‘socialised’ nature of the tree, its powers of accommodation to other trees; and plants, how plants ‘helped’ the other, thus ‘intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness.’16 The Alps were not-self yet alive, a truth that artists could render by acts of the imagination, the spiritual encounter of the human spirit with matter, as witnessed in the greatest painters, most notably Ruskin’s hero, Turner, whose active engagement with the Alpine topography was unsurpassed. This because power in art depends on a basic principle: ‘to describe rightly what we call an ideal thing, depends on its being thus, to [the artist], not an ideal but a real thing.’17 12 13

John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961, p.19.

John Ruskin, Ruskin Today, chosen and annotated by Kenneth Clark, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, pp.104–105.

14 Ruskin, Ruskin Today, pp.92, 97.

15 Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, p.147. 16 Ruskin, Ruskin Today, p.109. 17

Quoted in Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, p.17.

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What does this sound like? I think it sounds very like a philosopher we know placing the notion of goodness in the embodied world. Ruskin’s power as a critic drew from a great painter’s imaginative engagement with the mountain. As does Gaita’s power as an ethicist: its natural terms of appraisal are strikingly symmetrical with those summonsed by the mountain. They are the terms he adopted in his first remarks about the ravishing mountains to be climbed, when he was shaping his romanticism about nature into the classic mode, hailing the mountain as worthy of reverence in its own right, deserving of our gratitude, soliciting our best selves and so on.18 Furthermore, the poem will feel entitled to place these terms of appraisal beside Gaita’s most elevated and abstract philosophical arguments for absolute good. In this light, the poem will relish the preface to the second edition of Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, written long after the doctorate done in the physical company of the Alps, but where the morality itself strikes the keynotes which have already been brought to the mountain. Thus, it too is worthy of reverence because it is a gift, like life itself, and so inspiring of awe, mystery, beauty that it makes sense to speak of the sacred, whether one is religious or not. It is revelatory. One might wonder at its goodness, so to speak; one is drawn to it beyond reason, you might almost think of it as something that can be loved. There it is. In all its uniqueness – out there as a guide, yet a strange guide it is that puts obstacles in our way and then suggests ways around them. But this is its way. To live a fully examined life in its presence requires an ethic of renunciation. At the same time – and as it can be on the mountain – one calls into play an ethic of assertion, which upholds the virtues of autonomy, integrity, courage, nobility, honour and flourishing or self-realisation. And so on. Everything is complex, interwoven, all mind-heart. And this form, I am thinking of it as a kind of double living thing – call it morality/ mountain, mountain/morality – which can be as intractable as the remorse that is proper when one violates a person/creature/thing’s pristine nature. And 18

See Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, pp.149–53.

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this double thing is as sublime, say, as justice. ‘I try to reclaim the wondrousness of it for philosophical reflection,’ Gaita writes, referring to the notion of justice applied to Eichmann, and as he does you can feel him positioning himself, as so often, in the pure air of the Alps.19 Conceptually, maybe what I have just proposed will be enough to drive some philosophers mad. Well and good. They might set off with the poem. 3

On one climb, back then, Rai had to stay the night on a ledge high up on an aiguille. An eagle might have been comfortable on it – a rock face that looked out on the approaching storm, and which then received, in the course of the night, the bolts of lightning. Kahkkkkk, Rai goes, hitting the air with his knife hand. The lightning struck the rock in line with their heads. Eventually the storm passed, and they hung there, until the sun came up. But what did you do all night? How did you pass the time? We talked. What about? He laughed. Life and death, of course. ‘Mountaineering is degraded,’ we read in The Philosopher’s Dog, ‘unless the prospect of death is lucidly accepted.’ The chapter is called ‘Sacred Places.’20 I am calling him Rai again now, because his writing in After Romulus is a summons to intimacy. The poem must embrace him accordingly. The need for, in the end, a plain healing poem, became freshly apparent to me when I came to the several passages in what I would call Rai’s Mother Book. There are several painfully revealing statements, cris de coeur, I can’t get out of my head. My friend has, with the hardiness of a rock climber, not foolhardiness, I hope, prodded me to worry for him. 19

Rai Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2004, pp.xv–xvii.

20 Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, p.144.

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The first comes after a passage that paints a startlingly primitive image – a passage that seems to invite us to feel that Rai had a kind of primal relationship with the mountain. He gives us an image of himself as a desolate creature of the wild, as much abandoned to the icy wastes as Frankenstein’s creature. It is a passage which, consciously or unconsciously I do not know, can only be fully imagined to a background howl of grief. Only then, are we expected to experience relief. In 1974, filthy, having lived for two months in a tent in Chamonix where I was mountaineering, I turned up unannounced at her front door in Homburg. I fell in love within seconds of our meeting. Though I had not seen her since I left Germany in 1950 and my skin had been so darkened by the sun reflecting off the snow and ice that I was often mistaken as an Indian, she recognised me straight away. ‘Raimond!’ she exclaimed, ‘What a surprise!’21

This woman is his mother’s sister, Maria. They have kept in touch ever since. Then the statement that jolts: ‘I fear her death because I know that I will again experience the death of my mother, and the numbness will not protect me from the pain as it did, to some degree, when my mother died.’ (‘Fog always, and the snow faded from the Alps,’ Ruskin cripplingly lamented, at ‘his loss of faith in nature.’) The second statement from Rai comes a few pages later; it is, in part: ‘My longing becomes, painfully, more intense as memory fades …’ The chapter ‘An Unassuageable Longing’ offers no solace, psychologically speaking. No resolution of whatever is there by way of guilt, remorse, anger, grief: the alpine wastelands stretch ahead. The poem would treat this chapter as a passage of writing – a traverse, a climb, a fall, a riprap progression, an application of tawny grammar that has no progression as the philosopher who is a poet unacknowledged to himself lets time pass, makes nothing happen. We can only stand on the edge with Rai, not quite knowing how 21 Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog, p.214.

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to broach his predicament, except perhaps to press on with the poem that encompasses as much as it can. In the poem you will come to a koan carved into a rock. ‘Before your mother and father met, show me your original face. What is your original face?’ Snyder’s teacher would say: ‘Don’t explain it to me. Don’t give me a philosophical interpretation of it. Don’t talk about it that way at all. Show it to me.’ Here the poem might have to start again, or at least move into a new section I would want to call Native Sutra, the creation of which I would see as a gift-offering to a friend who so needs us to attend to his never-ending anguish over the events and losses of his childhood, and to the struggle it has been to find the right categories to do justice to each of his parents, as well as the ambivalences and ambiguities of his own sufferings. In After Romulus he is so naked about this need that it is natural to think, I think, of him as perhaps a suitable case for treatment. In After Romulus he tells us that his dear friend, Anne Manne, draws his attention to the ‘distancing nature’ of his philosophical mode, especially with regard to his ability to tap into a fully open, and possibly remedial contemplation of his mother as a source of his suffering. Many readers and viewers of the Romulus memoir, Rai reports, have looked for his wounds. Rai’s response to Manne is to recount how he never doubted his mother’s love, any more than he was unaware of the solace provided by her sensual presence. He says that he has had no ‘anger or resentment to vent,’ his ‘chronic melancholia and yearning’ notwithstanding. He goes further: even if such feelings existed in his ‘unconscious,’ he insists, they would have showed up in his writing.22 But this is a classic form of denial. At the risk of impertinence, I feel that the first session of any consultation where even the smartest of philosophers undertook to do some emotional work as distinct from more thinking would expose it as such. Rai’s construction also stands as a reminder of the tenacity with which he eschews the figure of Freud or anybody in 22 Gaita, After Romulus, pp.221–23.

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the healing wake of Freud. Yet who am I to say? No more than a caring friend. And when the potential therapeutic subject is possessed of uncommon clarity, honesty and courage, by what criteria should another order of consciousness be asserted, or insisted upon, even in the name of someone’s best interests? Still, it seems to me that what also comes through these passages – and which might be helpfully elucidated with the right pitch in the right poem, crampons and all – is a heightened awareness of someone not being able to endure his suffering reduced, in the manner Roland Bathes described in his posthumously published book about the loss of his mother.23 Barthes defends his own totalisations, even to the point of clinging to his suffering. Anything but have it stolen from him. Well and good then, the poem has to work with the climber’s absolute sense of totality, of possession and self-possession, and his reluctance to cancel one thing into another, his insistence on all that the mountain is and must remain even as everything, with the living and dying all around, keeps on changing. To my mind, an exemplary method for sustaining this sense of reality is offered by Zen Buddhism, especially the formulations of Zen Master Dogen, an alpine thinker if ever there was one. Zen is also marvellously compatible with what I would call Rai’s naturalism, his low-key appreciation of nature, its creatures and landscapes in various forms. Herein lies a realm of solace, he has often told us: in an outward direction from the self, rather than from within. The poem, with Dogen, can have its Platonic/Socratic dimensions – throwing its lines out to such a figure as Rai, one who believes as much in loving kindness as the Buddha, even if he seems lacking in kindness towards his own self. But the poem is also compelled, as naturalistically as Ruskin, we might say, to be responsible to its own traverses. It has to be let do its rope tricks in the ice and snow, the better that they be experienced for the tricks that they are, acts of rarified mind, and mind only, worthy of silence. The world in its beauty and strength, and with the secret strength of its things that governs thought, is as 23

See epigraph from Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, New York: Hill and Wang, 2010, p.71.

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it is. Rai often writes in this spirit of hard acceptance. His mode is an aspect of his wondrous gratitude for the preciousness of life. Then, sooner or later, the poem will come back to the hut, where we – myself as a poet and friend, the reader and maybe the poem’s subject – will make the tea, then taste the tea.24 The poem can’t keep saying. You and the mountain can’t keep climbing. Having refined distinctions treat them like snow plumes. You just need to go out each day face the weather for a good time be strong in the rain come back into the kitchen taste the tea taste the rain. Meanwhile, the poem would have had to make its own riprap, its ground for a creation dance on the mountain. ‘The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night,’ as Dogen says in the 24

For those interested in this apparent aphorism, in the Lankavatara Sutra, sometimes considered the holy grail of Zen, there are two key teachings. One is that ‘that everything we perceive as being real is nothing but the perceptions of our own minds.’ The other is that ‘the knowledge of this is something that must be realised and experienced for oneself and cannot be expressed in words.’ In the words of Chinese Zen masters these two teachings became known as ‘have a cup of tea’ and ‘taste the tea.’ The Lankavatara Sutra: A Zen Text, translation and commentary by Red Pine, Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012, pp.3–17.

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Mountains and Water Sūtra, a supreme teaching text for being at home in the whole universe. There is no time to go on about this here, and if I did it would sound as if the poem was out to push Rai Gaita so far East many would not recognise him, and he might not even recognise himself. Just let me say, though, that Dogen’s Sūtra, a discourse on process, has it that ‘the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes;’25 and that ‘if you doubt mountains walking, you do not know your own walking.’26

25 Snyder, Practice of the Wild, p.103.

26 Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985, pp.97–9.

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S T E P P I NG OU T W I T H FAY Z W ICK Y The Lyre in the Pawnshop: Essays on Literature and Survival, 1974–1984 (1986)

Fay Zwicky’s essays, written over ten years for different audiences, ranging in focus from the general to the particular, are an unusual kind of collection in this country – not, it must be said, because they bring to bear ‘standards of comparison’ from her European and Jewish heritage (this rather culturallycringing point is made by her friend A.D. Hope in his preface), but rather because as a collection it is more idiomatically open than usual, and certainly more so than the work that men have turned out of the academy during the last hundred years. Here we find a woman contending not only with her conflicting roles as a poet, teacher, scholar, citizen, but as a person at issue, as most of us are, with herself – a woman walking (as R.P. Blackmur once likened the act of criticism to walking), while aware that what she is doing requires a constant intricate shifting and catching of balance, neither being done very well, necessarily. But we can say that the movement is admirable, and instructive and unfinished just as it is – partly as a result of her swaggering open-necked gait – defensive, reckless and cranky, if not perverse: brilliant, beautiful cantankerous Fay Zwicky. Finger wagging, clearly, will do no good. Best walk out with her a while, the better to gauge her resistances as well as her measure, to demure as well as welcome the Song of Myself that she is, implicitly, singing. The quotations below are lifted from the clothes line of her own fiction (Hostages, 1984), the one assumption being, of course, that creative work is really the beginning and endpoint. Essays sit between.

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Art and virtue bellyached away in my garbled imagination. The winner was anybody’s guess.

In her introduction Zwicky makes it plain that she is not interested in ‘disinterested motives’ if indeed there is such a thing. Her cards run out on the table like this: We live in an age where humanistic values are disintegrating, ‘of shaken belief and scepticism’ – witness the cults of action, the avoidance of value judgments, the moral indecisiveness and egoism that go under the guise of selfexpression and maybe creativity; witness, most of all, the everyday corruption of language, that otherwise healing, unifying vehicle which helps us define ourselves and our relationship with others. Another way of couching this is to say – still paraphrasing – that we exist in an impasse between religious constructs and ethical relativism. There is more to life than this. There is commitment. We must be responsible before something or to something, be it society, humanity, or our own conscience. Once again, therefore, it is the language of the tribe which manifests this responsibility, and our uses of that language, our integrity with it, will surely reflect our regard for our deepest selves as well as the way we are with each other. Zwicky wants room for quiet conviction, for honour, duty and piety – for that ‘reverence that accords life meaning in terms of debt to something.’ Now this is a paraphrase and it needs to be a lengthy one if we are to appreciate the luggage Zwicky thinks essential for her critical excursions. If it all sounds preachy rather than a preparation for the delicate tasks of meeting artists on their own terms, then that’s too bad in her book. If it sounds, socially and philosophically speaking, hackneyed and almost hectoring, then that is a pity. They are truths which must be affirmed. Another declaration sets the scene: ‘The difference between the learner-as-teacher and teacher-as-teacher defines my own love of writers vulnerable to experience like Tolstoy, Whitman, Melville and D.H. Lawrence as opposed to my

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guarded respect for writers who seem to have been born old, like Ibsen, Sartre, Kierkegaard and Strindberg’. It’s after such a dualistic but nonetheless lucid and valorous proclamation that we move out over the local paddock, in search, one might say, of worth. Women are different, I said to myself, a perfectionist where love was concerned, but my mother could surely have done better than Henry …

‘If there is a vision of love in Australian fiction’, Zwicky writes in her important essay, ‘Speeches and Silences’, ‘it is etched in the acid of what love is not. The “withheld self ” mentioned by Lawrence is the norm rather than the exception’. (Thesis writers – go.) The fiction Zwicky has in mind is the preserve and product of men, who seem not to have experienced love, who ‘write plausibly about the continual presence of fear, a fear generated by the realization that everything decays, deteriorates and dies’, and who rise ‘not to poems that construct and elucidate desire, affection, closeness, fondness, tenderness, loving identification, certainty, delight, excitement, bliss, rest, to name but a few.’ Yes, she goes on to say, it is ‘misleadingly crude to set out such a catalogue’ (like walking in cow pats, I felt as I read it) but the point is the general absence of ‘speech that calls up two flesh and blood human beings who act in relation to each other. A poetry, in fact, that shows the richness and fullness of the animated imagination engaged in dialogue outside the Self ’. Here she is thinking of Randolph Stow. She speaks of his conflict ‘between the spiritual integrity of a creative silence and the suspect exercise of secular asceticism’. She credits his poetry with this tension, only to go on and use him as an example of emotional retreat, evasiveness – an almost self-indulgent sacrifice of feeling to the desert. ‘This love affair with place rather than people seems to me to be very much an affair of men rather than of women,’ she writes at her tart, analytical peak. No question here as to whether Knowledge or Virtue wins: Virtue wins hands down.

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Later on Zwicky returns to this sad matter of men and their lack of emotional – ‘towardness’, we might say. ‘The Mother of Narcissus’ is a brilliant piece of lay psychoanalysis on the occasion of four autobiographical essays, Hal Porter’s, Donald Horne’s, Clive James’ and H.H. Richardson’s. The focus is upon the mode in which men are able to discourse upon their shaping emotional development; more particularly, upon how they have resolved their relationships with that primal source of their dependence and tenderness, their mothers. In Zwicky’s judgment Hal Porter comes off best – ‘through the creative act the son was able to share in the joy of what he and his mother brought to life between them, to give back that which was alive in her – joy, interest, humour, and understanding.’ By comparison the other candidates do not mature well; as they muse on the primal spring they tend to resort to self-denigrations or jocular deflections or coldness – ‘the lineaments of wooden masculinity’. And herewith endeth, I felt, the first crushing lesson on Australian men. I kept my face impassive, looked rigidly ahead at the music which I didn’t see … I had begun to learn how not to please.

Zwicky deals with many Australian writers in these essays – Viidikas, Dawe, White, Brennan, Murray (as well as Plath, Celan, Hardy in others) – and her method is rather similar to her treatment of Stow: certainly, a sensitive regard is paid to the artist’s executive skills, the work is approached on its own terms, but these terms are Zwicky’s own by the time we are done. There is only one piece, really, where she gives full local praise, and that is to Rosemary Dobson. This piece is called, significantly, ‘Reclusive Grace’. Zwicky admires the way so many of the poems embody in language what it means to balance, and sometimes resolve, ‘those feelings of restlessness and disquiet without being strenuous, moralistic or manipulative’. She finds two poems particularly acceptable – one because it suggests the intensity of the threatening

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complexity of the roles of mother/poet; the other because it so well explores ‘the illusion of separateness so ambiguously desired by the artist who also knows that her fate is inextricably tied to the needs of others.’ ‘A truthful voice, refining itself into a wisdom’, Zwicky says of Dobson. So. Here we have, on the one hand, what appears to be a neo-feminist critique of the masculine idiom, while on the other, the highest praise is reserved for a female poet who domesticates her anguish with almost Oriental composure. What is going on here? His heart is wrung by the little roll of white flesh bulging over the elasticized waist of her green pyjamas. In what way is a humanist education relevant to this?

It seems to me that there are two factors working through Zwicky’s discoursing, one of them the outcome of the contemporary inclinations she says she is opposing or resisting, the other the result of the kind of humanism she seems to be dependent upon. The clue to the first comes from her candid love of Whitman and Lawrence, neither of whom, unfortunately, she specifically essays upon here, though she refers to Whitman frequently. She turns to these writers because they are open to experience, and that term, ‘open’, strikes the Sixties key. Her true passionate focus throughout this book is that highly contemporary creature, that small, hungry, shivering thing, that nihilist to the core, that everything and nothing – the Self. Zwicky is preoccupied with the Self – how writers manage or don’t manage it, how its literary existence fits or doesn’t accord with its metaphysical emptiness, while it also … also what? Well, she will not say, and perhaps there is no reason why she should in critical essays; but she is a sleuth with respect to the ontological and sensual oscillations of others. Now she does not suggest that it behoves a serious artist to adopt what is loosely called the confessional mode: she is too sophisticated

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as a critic as well as too much of a literary imagination to affirm that, and some of her finest critical distinctions are drawn in this area, distinctions that are, we should also notice, not reflexively Eliotesque or Audenesque, either; she does not favour that English customs official, Mister Objective Correlative. No, what she most values, if her use of Whitman is the best guide, is the Self constructed with a deal of artifice, an artfully embracing and inclusive Self, if you like, one that at least seems to wear its passion as well as its intellect on its sleeve, the better to remain open to ‘experience’. I am summarising rather crudely here – by way of suggesting the tendency of her own most passionate personal preferences to run against the literary sources of her moral evaluations. As a Humanist she seems to be a Trillingite. It is to Lionel Trilling, the ghost of Mathew Arnold, to whom she refers and defers most, especially when we need to be reminded of the artistic inconceivability of ‘raw’ experience and the local and social necessity of civilising restraints. Beyond this Trilling did not, as we know, feel much compelled to define his basis of valuation – but then, he did not go in for the heavy moralising that Zwicky does. My feeling is that it would be very much in keeping with her own gall to define her humanism as did R.P. Blackmur, a critic who tried to steer clear of Trilling’s pieties; ‘Bourgeois humanism (the treasure of residual reason in live relation to the madness of the senses…’). ‘Madness of the senses’ … Is it too much to expect criticism to be as alive to that as it is to residual reason? Raging, I leaned with nonchalant contempt on the table.

Perhaps it’s simply better to say that what drives Zwicky’s passion for judgment and implicit prescription is a yearning for richness of diction as well as of Self. So what would she think of a major Australian poet who is as erudite and as committed and as intellectually quirky as herself; not only that, who is as invested in the idea of making a communal as well as a spiritual connection with his audience? What about Les Murray? – 11 5 –

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‘Language or Speech? A Colonial Dilemma’ is an important essay. How well does the self-proclaimed vernacular poet connect with his readers? Is he speaking with or writing at his audience? The obvious model is once again Whitman, whose allusive and alluding Self included his audience. Not so Murray, Zwicky thinks, whose linguistic and spiritual manoeuvres exclude a genuinely populist embrace. She refers to his ‘vatic’ inclinations, and goes on, rather shrewdly, to cite Tocqueville on the colonial writer’s tendency, in the absence of a confident relationship with place and people, towards vanity of erudition and a passion for general ideas. But what is the objectionable general idea that so possesses Murray? What is his unique imposition? Zwicky cites Wilfred Sheed’s comment on Evelyn Waugh; ‘He found God where he could … but he shouldn’t have tried to name Him.’ I find this a mean and potentially sectarian point. And it is an odd stricture to come from a critic calling for a passion of commitment, openness and some male courage with respect to naming. The war had a lot to answer for and I wanted a Father who carved.

This collection includes an absorbing interview with another poet, a woman as passionate as Zwicky herself – Denise Levertov. Poetry, politics, ethics interest both women. At one point Levertov, talking about her opposition to the Vietnam war, says how she used to go along with Ho Chi Minh’s statement, ‘Nothing is more precious than freedom’ – until as the war went on she realised that peace and mercy were more important. ‘I’ve come to a more pacifist position because I feel that it’s almost impossible to avoid acting like those whom you’re struggling against.’ Zwicky’s militant, multi-faced cutlass work throughout this book is her bid for authority, and the lack of peace and sometimes mercy may well be the result of the form she is using (the tried and true, distancing academic essay) as well as the sources of authority in the literary culture that have shaped her, and which she wishes to honour while opposing. The teacher and the critic in her is, in other words, complex- ridden, while the woman and poet seem to be – 116 –

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trying to get out. As conventional essays they have served their purpose well but now that they are collected we can see how a more flexible form might better serve the poet – the fuller, more generous knower in Zwicky. Maybe next time? The proper aim of essays: to tap the locus of authority in the achieved poet – assuming here that the achieved poet is an infinitely more desirable prospect than the sound-minded Humanist. Anyway (and meanwhile) here we have an excellent Australian critic’s ‘job of work’, as Blackmur might have said: ‘the formal discourse of an amateur’, discourse built upon love and knowledge (even if the two contend). And the University of WA have produced a very handsome volume most inexpensively. Why can’t this also happen on the east coast?

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BR E CH T ’ S S ONG Be ahead of all parting … Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, XIII

The other day I came across that painting of you I did when I was fifteen. You would remember it, if you could bear to be alive. I remember how overwrought I was when I did it – the portrait, I mean, not my rush to betray you. I was trembling. I was flushed with Fauvist influences, I believed that opposite colours were the key to true feeling, and I set you down feverishly, with a face made of patches of green and yellow and blue. Your hair is ginger and is cropped on top, as if you have been groomed for an institution. And a full lower lip – pale yellow – like your nose and egg-shaped cheek. Starkly, you look straight ahead, your eyes wide open so no one could see in. The old man told me – no, he asked me first – as he lit another cigarette: did I have any idea of what can happen to women your age? He had me there. How would I know? I was looking out over the sea. We’d gone for a drive and reached the foreshore near the Life Saving Club. The car had slowed to a halt and he’d pulled the brake on. We’d left you cleaning up after tea; washing the dishes and stacking them, putting them away, wiping the bench and scrubbing the bench – which you did with a lemon, its juice making the timber a lovely pale blonde and as spotless as the path you scrubbed regularly, working your way from the back door to the front gate. Probably we’d find you there when we got back – looking along the street for us, broom in hand and smiling at our return, having had no choice evidently but to knock yourself out. Sit down, Mum, please. In a minute, you’d say. They were long minutes. And if you did sit you were on the edge of your seat, ever ready to leap up …

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Remember that? Days when I had tears in my eyes as I tried to save you from yourself. That was the thing, it was all for you. My anguish, the painting, the rush to my father, it was all for you, you doing so much for us. My father and I gazed at the horizon. The wind was off-shore, the sea a receding gathering of wrinkles. I think he thought he could see what might be coming towards us out of our near and pedestrian future. Some talking might help. In essence, talking was peace-making; it brought out the best in a person. Eventually he went on. Many women, most women, he told me, had difficulties at a stage of life. This was their change of life. I was watching a little yacht far out and yearned to be on it. He let the trance-inducing phrase hang in the air. You, he continued – speaking of you, my mother – used to be ok in the garden and good in the kitchen. You were a do-er, which not every woman was. But now you over-heated like your new pressure cooker. We both had a grin at that, but I had a picture of you flushed as you stood at the stove and flushed when you served the dinner and when you sat with us, trying to eat what you had served yourself. I was not enjoying my food either. My father masticated methodically. I don’t know, I’m not hungry, must be that medicine, you said. It was a cherry-red linctus. The bottle sat inside the cupboard, along with the Asprin and vitamins. Then, as if you had it planned, you’d say something silly. For example, you had no idea how much salt you had put in the casserole. I just don’t know, you said casually, as if the question was unreasonable. And the old man would say, gawd strike me pink, woman, and you would say, eventually, that you did not know because the mixture made you woozy, if it was the mixture, and before long he would be saying you were just bloody cantankerous. You had stood up by then and put your plate in the dishwater, not even rinsing it at first. He left his plate on the bench and went into the next room with the paper. A cantankerous woman, or, when teatime had become like this for

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months, a cantankerous bitch. I suppose there is no getting away from these details that are behind the painting, mum, but anger with you was not what I wanted to portray, I hope you realised that. It was something else, which I felt in my guts. Often I sat down to dinner with what I came to know as an acidic stomach. Did you have that? It is a successful, wretched painting in every way. Of course, it did not end there, due to my father’s powers of reason. It was best to talk about things when matters had calmed down. Each person at the table, or you at the bench, him at the table. If I was the one in trouble I sat at the table for as long as I could stand it and then I would stand near the door that led to my bedroom; I could get that far without being called back as long as reconciliation was in the air. From the other side of the kitchen I could start to position my father though the wrong end of my telescope. The longer he talked the smaller he became until, near the end, he was a pin-head. I noticed that you did not seem to be doing that. You sat at the bench, looking at him at an angle once you had managed to dry your tears. The tears did not come from abuse on his part. They just seemed to come from what you were hearing between the lines; you would start to speak, then shake your head in frustration, as if you were trying pull something out of a jar. We knew that he had a kind heart and that he believed in fairness. All we had to do was nod at fairness as he practiced it, and we were free to go. Looking at the portrait today, I can see the painters who had me by the throat. Munch, he was there, somewhere, even though I never heard you scream: you never lost control, you were a woman who sobbed quietly. You were a silent weeping woman. Picasso – any number of Picassos, those women with faces elongated with sorrow and which he painted effortlessly, as if it took nothing out of him, as if they meant nothing to him, when they were everything. I was also Vincent Van Gogh. You saw me go off to the old quarry with my box of paints and masonite board, and you were there when I came back almost as red in the face as you could be yourself, having set myself up at noon, where I painted into the light, half-blinded by the slabs of quartz that

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caught the sun and were facing me. Despite your protests I left without a hat: it was the sun at Arles which would beat down on me and which I would not retreat from until the end of the day, when I’d return to walls of my home with its rooms painted green, orange and blue, heraldic in their joy in the heat. The northerly blew me home and I had to lie down when I got in as you rushed about with the calamine lotion. You’ve got sunstroke! you said, when the headache and the shivering started, and I said I did not, the sun has sconned me, that’s all – happy with that, very happy, and relieved I still had two ears. For I had reached the age of wondering which girl might deserve an ear, if things kept going from bad to worse. You’re a stupid boy, you said, in the tone of voice the old man used when he said cantankerous. Yes, I was a stupid boy, Mum, and I am sorry. But you could be stupid, too, as the old man had to tell you, when I was smitten by that girl who lived in the Crescent. I went around to her place, once, which you’d heard about, and there was a commotion in our kitchen. I was standing by the linen press in the hallway and could hear you both, you sobbing and the old man hissing at you. Jesus Christ, Mavis, he said. He did not go to a bloody brothel! You meant well. And you needn’t have worried, anyway. That girl was so pretty, too good for me, and when she did go out with a boy, her mother was driving the station wagon, and the boyfriend sat in the back right through the film at the drive-in. It was a pity you didn’t get things into proportion then; it might have prepared you for my next carelessness. Later on – no need to tick off the years, it’s the same wave of events – you found my artwork. You must have looked in drawers, or found my sketchbook, I’m not sure now, and the old man was not initially involved in your distress. On a day when he was at work, I found you rigid and miserable in the kitchen, too upset to spit out the news.

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Those drawings. What drawings!? You know what I’m talking about. No I don’t, I lied. Yes, for the first time I lied to you. You know damn well! And I did, too. You were talking about what was in my medium size sketchbook. I had not started life classes yet. I was just doing smallish drawings of the girl I was in love with. She’d come to our place and I’d drawn her naked – a lousy drawing, actually – and we had gone to bed in the time that we still had while you were out. As I stood in the kitchen, playing the film back in my head. Your distress made everything in it seem pornographic. I’m going to marry her, mum. I am. We plan to get married. My shrillness, and what you took in, calmed you, just as what I had said had startled me. But I did marry her, as you know, and look what happened to that marriage. Years later, when I brought another girl home – ok, woman – to meet you, and this was the one who’d make you a grandmother, you were a kind of deterrence. She was gamin and olive-skinned, with long, springy legs, and she’d been bouncing around to Maria Muldour’s Midnight at the Oasis when you found a way to deliver me a ferocious aside, don’t hurt this one. As if the failure of the first marriage was all my fault, when really, as my first fiancé told you herself, much that was wrong with me was connected with you. Remember when she balled you out for your possessiveness, blaming my needful tantrums with her, on your dominion? She said some crook things to your mother, my father said, irked because my fiancé was a private school lass who looked down on you. The incident was buried. We – you, me, the old man, me and my first bride to be – put it down to her pre-nuptial nerves, plus the fact that she was a middle-class sourpuss, and not much more than a girl when I married her, just as I was a boy until – well, until I became a father, I suppose, when I was 36, which was the age Nick, in Tender is the Night, discovered he could no longer water-ski on one leg because he had passed his prime.

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The old man had to have his say. Regarding the occasion of nude drawings and my love-making at home, he said: don’t soil your own nest. It was a golden rule I should apply for the rest of my life, he said, standing in my bedroom door. Then, satisfied with his wisdom, he left me alone. All he didn’t do, evidently, was inspect my sheets, which you must have had occasion to do more than once. But you don’t have to apologise for anything, Mum. I want you to know that. You grew up in a little joint too. We drove past it once: it was a tiny wooden cottage in a side street near a gas works. You lived there between the wars – with your parents, two brothers and a twin sister. It had a window in the front, and a broken looking door beside it. You go in there, you said, and down the hallway past the bedrooms to the kitchen at the back. I don’t think you told me how many bedrooms, so I imagine sister had to share with sister and brother with brother, no one having any privacy unless or until they left home, each suffocating the other until then. After this introduction to your life, my father drove us on. We headed to the ferry and the iron chains that clanked us to the other side of the river where our place was – a mansion compared to yours, built by the Housing Commission on the lava plain after the war, among the scotch thistles and stone walls, where I used to catch lizards and snakes, but nothing like the python that occupied your narrow hallway. At night it filled the passage, its head so big you could hardly get around it, even when you were trying to get out the back. All a girl could do was freeze, hoping that the head of the snake would cease being the face of her father, who that evening had come home late, too drunk to want his dinner, which your mother had left on the table to go cold. I know this story because it was given to me by your twin sister, whose suddsy bath I shared when she was melon-pregnant. The old man plonked me in as contribution, he told me years later, to my sex education, and I have a kind of foamy, painterly memory of my situation from about the age of three: it blurs into a sense of – 123 –

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you as naked as your twin sister, the one who told me about the snake in the knowledge that I would be left with the impression – more than she could say – that in the space you grew up in dreams were shared, inter-penetrating each other. You didn’t or wouldn’t tell me that; your sister could because her powers of expression left yours for dead: she was the one that went to school regularly, when you were kept home to help your mother with the housework; she was one who learned to read and to write. Oh, you learned to write, I know that: I could read your shopping lists, they were fine, your letters also, even if they were only punctuated with commas as if you wrote them short of breath, perhaps even panting there in our kitchen, sitting on the stool near the sink, where you read Truth. Your twin sister left home when she was a single woman, leaving you with your mother. She joined the army, was made a corporeal and she found her man, a smart Captain in the Engineering Battalion who she married: he was a communist, and she joined the Party also, and the bookshelf they had was more self-improving than the one we had at home. You married a decent, nice-looking chap with a reliable job as a blacksmith in the railways. Your sister envied you for having the first child, and she surpassed you in smart dressing and envied you again when the nerves of her man, not yours, shattered after the war; and then again when her first-born became a drinker as your two brothers were drinkers by the time they grew up and left their cottage, which was to be emptied by the death of your parents before I was born. Your brothers soldiered on: one left and came back from Tobruk; the other, who had the gammy leg, became a tailor then a rouse-about cook. The ex-soldier, Jack, had a broken nose and what you called a cheeky grin. George, the younger brother, your favourite, with his big leather boot, was as shy as yourself. On the side, my father mentioned how George liked to sit in a room with his leg as far as possible out of sight. George came and went from our place, staying weeks at a time in the off-season and then clearing off after borrowing money from my father. Months later he’d come back, lurching out of the taxi onto our nature strip, his Gladstone bag stuffed with mutton-birds. Or he’d fall out broke, having lost his wages at two-up. Jack died

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of a heart attack in his car on the way to Bendigo and the paper said he had a case of beer in his boot. George also died young – bronchially so, expiring in phlegm; we would hear him coughing on the back verandah, sitting up on the fold-down bed that had been made for him. To the last he kept his shock of thick black Brylcreamed hair and had remained a bachelor. He’d been handsome and sad, rather like Rock Hudson, you used to say. Your brothers were smokers galore, as you were disposed to be, albeit secretly, as you did not want to annoy my father. You loved those brothers more than you could say. You loved them more than your sister: she loved them less because they were drinkers and they thought her a nark. You were feuding with your sister when they died and nothing she could say broke into your isolation in grief. When you coughed you knew you could be either of them: the sound of coughing was a death-rattle; everyone in our Housing Commission house knew that: the plaster walls were like cardboard, breathing went into them and through them, especially on still summer nights. It was a hot day when the cop came to the front door to tell you about the car found out on the road. The cop was speaking in a dreadful hush at the step. Then you came in and walked past me into your bedroom where you shut the door. I had never known you to shut that door. You and the old man slept year after year with the door slightly ajar, the better to hear your own child, I suppose, making sure he was sleeping soundly with his wheeze-box in the match box Housing Commission house. If it was not for my father’s barrel-chest and his best and fairest footballer’s lungs, the whole joint might have sounded asthmatic. The door was open that day, however. It was a bright day in early spring, and I’d come in from the school sports. I still remember the two-toned Safari jacket I was wearing, and how I still felt in my shorts and new runners, which had served me well in several events: it was one of those days when I’d bounced back into the house, a spring in my step as I passed your door on the way to my room. The late afternoon splashed in through your window and spilled over the flowery eiderdown on the double bed; the bed itself was in bloom like the garden beds outside, which you and the old man had

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cultivated all around the place, making our place the prettiest in the street. You were wearing one of your cotton dresses, without an apron over it, for some reason; blues, fresh blues, as in a painting by Monet, as you were bending on the far side of the bed, fiddling with something on the floor. It was a long, concentrated movement: you stooped – back down, bottle in hand, having taken a swig out of it, before it was returned to its place under the bed. A gun went off in my head. How could I have been so stupid! I was fifteen, that’s how I could be so stupid. A simple love of my mother made me blind to her. I could see the flagon of sherry in moon-shadow under our lemon tree. The first night I found it I had a swig from it, put it back, and went inside. It did not sit well in a belly full of beer and it was gone the next morning. My mates said – the next time we had a session – going home to hit the sweet sherry, Bazil? With a bit of luck, I’d say. This was a funny dream. I must have found it half a dozen times and each time had something to drink from the flagon before going to bed. I think I imagined that I had struck a deal with some neighbour, probably the bloke called Midge, who worked at the abattoirs and was forever in strife with his loud wife. Came the day, though, when the flagon was not there, although a few weeks later I found it empty in the long grass at the back of the garage. Now our eyes met, and I can still feel, mum, the moment when you dropped your gaze. I walked on past your door into my room. After a while I came out and found you fussing in the kitchen. Why? Why Mum? Thus spoke the little prick in his white shorts. You were looking away. Then you had your face down over the sink. I went away. Back to my room. My father had been cutting the lawns. He’d come home from work and was doing jobs while you were hitting the piss. Terms of abuse rose in my gullet. Then, thank goodness, they subsided. I calmed down. I went out to my father.

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I have just seen mum drinking. She keeps the bottle under your bed. She’s upset, I added. (At least I reported that, accurately). I don’t remember voices raised in anger or tearfulness rising or falling as the dusk fell. The air cooled and the perfect evening arrived. It fell gently onto the front and back lawns, caressing the roses and hydrangeas. No one said goodnight to anybody, my mother and my father went into the same room to act like a contentedly sleeping couple. I was in the next room, with my books and drawings and radio. The walls were flimsy, as I say: you could hear through them like seeing through her slips hanging on the clothesline. I put the radio on, expecting to be told to turn it off, as happened the night my grandfather, my father’s father, had died. I kept the music low and waited for the talk-back. I still remembered the night the station took a call from a Dero: through his slurred speech I felt, for the first time, what it might be like to be what was then called ‘down and out’. Homeless, forsaken, ashamed at merely existing. Through the speakers you could smell the grog on his breath. It took me aback, and I welled-up listening to him: my first experience of feeling for a stranger. It now reminds me of the poignant news I had about my mother’s beloved younger brother. We’d not seen him for months and I was pleased to spot him sitting on the footpath with his bad leg, the big boot, straight out at peak hour, a nuisance to some people hurrying for their train. Saw Georgie today, Mum, in the city. Where was he? She snapped. Outside Young and Jackson’s. Sitting in the footpath with his back against the wall. My father used to say my mother was still mourning for her brothers. That she was still so upset at her loss that she could not talk about it. He said that she came from a family where things were never discussed and where regrets, recriminations, resentments were held for a long time. The feuds she had with her twin sister were a product of that: my mother took her brothers’

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side, no matter what they had been up to. She was the ever-forgiving one, he said, as if such a virtue might be a source of a man’s pity, or exasperation and possibly scorn, although at the time – this riddled period in our family’s life – he sought to convey to me his pity for her, and something of his wonder that he had married such a kind woman; but of course it’s hard to imagine my father falling for a woman whose powers of love were not inseparable from a shyness comparable to his own, a modesty and a docility that he rose up against in himself. He said my mother forgave her mother for making a housemaid of her, and that she was inclined to overlook her father for his drinking – although the details of that were never told to me; a silence enveloped his name, which I can’t even recall as I write this. He died long, long before my time, as far in time from me as my mother was in space in the hours and days and weeks after I reported on her. On another occasion, I was congratulated by my father even though, again, I did not want to hear what he had to say: I looked at the cracks in the concrete floor of the garage, where he had tracked me down. It was the morning after. That was a good thing you did last night, protecting your mother, he said. The cracks were there because, he’d once confessed, he had not done a good job laying the concrete. It was the time of the beer strike, a few years or so before I shamed my mother. The old man was drinking in the backyard with George. All they had was wine, which neither was really used to. When it was dark they came in to get away from the mosquitoes. After the wine they were drinking port. Much later, I could hear the row when it started in the kitchen. There was a sugaredup roar I had never heard before. Then the sound of the footballer’s quick-step but my mother was ahead of him as the door burst open. I’d been lying in the dark, listening. Nothing like this had happened before. I was on my back with the radio turned down when the light went on and mum burst into the room with my father after her. – 128 –

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I jumped up to meet her and in that instant got between her and my father. Together we fell back on my bed and I had my arms around her as I turned sideways so I could kick my father as he loomed over us. He came to a halt. Get out! Get out! We were yelling at the same time. He listed, and sneered, directing the sneer at his only son. And left. As I write this I connect it to a sneer of my own. His sneer said: you bloody little mother’s boy. My sneer said: see, this kick makes up for my not playing footy hard enough! Yes, he said next morning. It was a good thing, protecting your mother. I acted very badly. I’ve told your mother that. It’s no excuse, but the bloody beer strike had a lot to do with it. He was demoralised and rather ashamed of himself, I could tell. No one spoke of the incident again. Where’s Mum? It was another glorious late afternoon – in the same spring – when I found my father in the kitchen, sitting at the table with an ashtray overflowing. No sign of her, he said. The hours unfolded. My body went cold. Every room in the house had expanded in its emptiness of you. As my father lit one cigarette after another, steadying himself with wisdoms he pretended were for me, my heart raced and raged. Women in this time of life, he said, sometimes feel they find another bloke. He blew smoke into the air. Why should I care? My mother was not my wife. She was his wife and he had driven her away, which served him right. If my mother did find herself – what an expression! – with another man, what kind of woman was she? As a woman, who was she? These thoughts were a soiling of my mind. And I could not tell if my father was expressing concern or letting her go. He left the house to make some telephone calls. When he came back I didn’t ask who he’d rung. – 1 29 –

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I went to a party. We had boiled eggs and I said I was going out because it was Friday night and to his astonishment I left him there, still in the kitchen, glued to his chair and the unforgiving laminex table. At the party I drank a bottle of Barossa Pearl. I stalked around, flirting with the girls and bumping into the other boys. I didn’t tell any mates that my mother had abandoned the family home, and I did not rise to any remarks about flagons and lemon trees. I hoped someone would take a swing at me because I had the strength of a football team to fight back. I could have killed someone. Then I came home, found my father to be asleep and went to bed and to sleep myself. No tears. Nor were there any when you came back home. I watched this very carefully. My father put his arms loosely around you and kissed you – on the forehead, I think, maybe your cheek also. You stood in his arms with your coat on – stock still, as if relieved, but expressionless. Maybe you still had sleeping pills in your system, something like that. You must have greeted me, and vice versa, but I can’t find a memory of that. No tears and no expressions of love. This all took place in the kitchen, and I only remember stepping outside to leave you both alone. For all I know you went to lie down. Maybe you went to the bedroom together, I don’t know, it was late morning, I think. But maybe you were able to comfort each other, even though it was coming on lunch-time and it was a working day. I wonder where I would have gone to? Can’t remember that, either. I probably went to the football ground and ran around it. It’s possible I was saving you the embarrassment of apologising to me. My father managed to tell me that you were pleased to be home; yes, he said that, as if you could not utter a word. Of course you were pleased, how could you not be? I was pleased, how could I not be (so why say it)? The silences we practiced evening after evening eating at that table, in the days before television, had a buried eloquence to them. In the silences we might pop up with news, something to laugh at, some contentment, of sorts. No one could deny the steady state of our humdrum happiness. Despite what I am writing about

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now I did not at the time have any complaints. We had a cat which we called Puss, and I dare say it was happy enough too. That’s how years of our lives together passed, and it is what made me say to my father, that the house we lived in was in my opinion, the best house in the world. He laughed. Glad you think so son. It’s a sign of happiness. I must have been about 8. I’m sure he’d have told you what I had blurted out, me being as house-proud as you were in those days. And here you were once more, having reached your front gate and the garden within, the shrubs and young trees you’d planted in the iron, clay soil, the weatherboards painted a gloss-white, and which would need painting again before too long. I imagine, I hope, that you were joyful to see it, and that as you walked up the path, even if my father and I had not been sweeping it of late, that it felt infinitely familiar to you, that the path had in its own way brought you home and back to your future. The old feet, not as swollen as they would become, delivered you through the side gate kind out of nowhere, or out of space, as if you had travelled across the city alone, although someone must have dropped you off – a taxi, perhaps, or aunt Rose who had a license to drive, after all, just as she had a spare room in her boarding house near Albert Park Lake. Rose had thrown Jack over by then. Not enough trust between them, my father confided to me. She managed the dining room of a flash pub nearby, to which you and I had been occasionally. There were white tablecloths in a huge empty dining room. We didn’t have to pay for our drinks, and Rose was going to take a bit off the bill. She was a generous person, you and her laughed a lot, and sitting with you at the white tablecloth as Rose came and went, serving us, was one of the happiest times I had with you. Lightheartedness at table. The feeling of being out. A treat together. As it was when I was a little kid and sick and on a holiday in a ‘dry climate’, so on doctor’s orders we stayed up on the Murray in winter, when we slept together in a sleep-out, cuddling and giggling because it was so cold and I had trouble pronouncing the word comfortable. Or when I was older acting the goat: on swot-vacs, when I was high on coffee and charged in and out of my room to tell you what was what in my books, testing my memory and capacity to make you laugh, which was – 131 –

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the kind of thing we did without thinking when the old man was out, being stupid without getting over-excited, as he used to call it. Rose and you had that kind of spirit when you were together. Rose liked the old man so I suppose she was a help to you in talking about him, if you did, or had to, or could when you arrived that weekend not knowing how long you were going to stay. Rose, although she had only been a common-law wife to Jackie, was now like a divorced woman, a divorcee, they used to say, she would have listened to what you were trying to say without adding to the escapade that had led you to her door; she’d have understood what it had taken for you to cart yourself across the city to her, to come as far afield as you had, reaching the lake after dark, when it lay under a starry sky as studded with the lights as that painting I was always showing you. Mum, when you got to Rosie’s place that night, did you look up? Did you see that spread of light, could you take in the spirit of the lake under the glittering, liquid sky? Oh I hope you did, mum, at least for a second, before you returned to dutiful earth. Rose has knocked around a bit, my father used to say, appreciatively. She has a bit of go in her; and she was a decent woman. He did not seem to mind that Rose had dumped Jack. So I, too, have always had a soft spot for Rose. How could I not? She gave you shelter and she brought you home. She knew that unlike herself, perhaps, you were a woman happiest when she was in her home. Home was where you tended the joys of life. Home was where your duties, those labours of love of me and my father, lay. They were nowhere else. Home was the garden of your loving, most flourishing self. Home was where you were, once upon a time, most free. At her place Rose must have heard in your words, even when you choked on them, the stirrings of your freedom as you had to work out what to do with it. Tireless and tense. An overwrought woman. Over-wrought and overdevoted. Yes, that was the key to the portrait – though I could not have said so at the time. The painting was instead of saying, but somehow, I must say now, I had portrayed a woman who loved too much.

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On the day you fell down, the day when you were, perish the thought, having a break from the house, we were up in the You Yangs, heading towards the granite boulders at the top. He reached you first, but could not help you up. We sat beside you until you could pretend to have merely lost your breath. The diagnosis would reveal a condition that could never improve: it could only get worse. Your lungs were incurable. You had to rest, and over-exertions would kill you. Just as well you had given up the fags and only smoked on special occasions; not so good that you had a husband who was a chimney for the whole of his life, rendering you, as they say now, a passive smoker. You went onto a black mixture in the cupboard; it sat beside the sticky red one, the woozy effects of which had abated since the disappearance of sherry. The pills in the cupboard were enough to stock a chemist shop, and those puffers had just come onto the market, but they were tricky to use, when you were already short of breath: I watch you try to time the in-breath, but co-ordination was doomed from the start, as it was when you were riding a bike, or trying to ride a bike with rigid arms and a vice-like grip, your whole being so inflexible with nervous tension that I’ll never forget the day you rode, inexorably, into the side of a bus as it turned into its parking bay. No amount of my calling out could get you to change direction. Your depression (although no one used the word those day) consolidated when you were intercepted at the till in our supermarket. Such fuss over, of all things, a packet of cigarettes. I bet you couldn’t bear to take the money out of housekeeping. You had lost a whole fortnight’s wages once, and walked up and down from home to the rent office without any luck. You stood in the phone box ringing the bus company to no avail, and you were crying when the old man came home from work. That was embarrassment enough; and he was tender with you, I saw that. Same with the shoplifting – to use the criminal term. It was hush-hush. I was told to shop at the other grocer further along the street. I don’t know what he said to you about the drinking, he didn’t tell me; nor did he suggest what I should say to you. If I said anything, if I put a gentle hand on you, I don’t remember it. When someone is embarrassed you can make a kind of joke about it. But

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there is nothing to say to someone’s shame. Or if there was something, I did not know what it was. I have days when I don’t know what to think or say about my own shame. Who is to say, for instance, that I did not in the end deserve to have my children taken from my own house – yes, by the same woman you told me not to hurt! Anyway. You had come down in the world. From being a respectable workingclass woman, a good housewife, a devoted wife and mother, now you were in your own eyes and maybe in the eyes of the neighbours, tainted, a fallen woman. One who had fled the fold, seen the lights, yet found herself even more alone than before and so had come home, we hoped, without having been crushed by self-reproach. And you were sick, uncomplainingly lacking stamina, wrung out, limp and lost, degraded, having damaged all sense of what you had been once before your grievous change of life, and to which you had returned no matter what. I read, years after we buried you, a son’s book about his mother called A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. It’s the story of a low-born Austrian woman who had, before she killed herself, a period in her life when she had a clear, if self-distancing, view of herself. But after years away her health drove her to slink back to her own village where she was once more a peasant. The women in her village played a game based on the stations of a woman’s life: Tired/Exhausted/ Sick/ Dying/ Dead. It was the common trajectory of a woman’s life in that time and place, when the weight of the word, peasant, assigned an extra shroud to anyone who could no more escape their fate than housewives in our Housing Commission estate. At your funeral I’d done my best to see you raised in the eyes of others in all your particularity, your individuality (to use a word less common than it is now) and with a regard for whatever spiritual dimension you felt for life. With this in mind I invited an Anglican minister, a friend I’d got to know down the coast. My father paused when I suggested the cleric, but then he agreed. My father also had little sense of your religious beliefs, whatever they might have been; no one was saying you were Christian, I was just venturing to think that you had a spiritual sense of some kind, which had to be respected: I’d seen

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you light up with Tarot cards, and you were interested when I threw the I Ching and turned up ‘Abysmal’ twice in a row. You laughed gently, I seem to remember, and my father snorted and went back to his paper. In any case, he’d already invited a union work-mate, a well-known Communist to do the honours, and that man, a playboy you despised because he’d walked out on his working-class wife, painted a picture of you as a political heroine, a woman ennobled by her devotion to her husband’s union causes. Your dutifulness, the self-sacrifice, was held up as exemplary and innocuous to yourself. I hated my father for arranging that burial by polemic, and I remain resentful to this day. The vicar, a man who’d never met you, was a kind, ineffectual presence. No one cared for what he had to say. In your last years, you had, it is true, some experience of getting out and about. In London, I got those holiday snaps from Yarrawonga, the Gold Coast, Fiji, and whatnot. A happy face loomed in the shade of brightly striped umbrellas. There you were, exotically located, smiling into the camera, as if to say, look, I am taking a rest. I took note: I’d had to go overseas for you to start looking after your health. Lucky for you, I had no plans to come back; and I would not have told you if I had, as it would have built up false hope, and disguised the fact that I had to be away because I felt smothered at home because of … well, everything, just about: the scale of my room, our house with porous walls, the garden, its cracked clay ground in summer, the dog shit on the buffalo grass, the creepy leaves of the Datura Lilly, which cast its scent in the direction of the stunted lemon tree, all that left me so little room to breathe with prospects. Apart, we were united; together, in that house, love fell feebly short. My father, he was learning also. When I did come back from overseas, ruined by marriage, I felt, we were candidly, intimately, embroiled. He insisted, when I reproached him for his stick-in-the-mud manner in all things except Socialism, that he used to hold your hand when you were in bed together: this was a defensive confession on his part as he discovered I had a bee in my bonnet about that frozen moment of your homecoming; for his not showing more of the love he had for you; for not believing in touch, for not

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even signing a Christmas or birthday card with love, having wrapped your present in newspaper and dropped it into your lap as he walked to his chair in the front room. I suppose he told himself that his lack of demonstrativeness gave his devotion the right touch of manly pride, or something. Now that I was back, and talking, he withstood the garrulous account of my domestic life in London, and he was forbearing about having to give something away about himself: I appreciate the conversation, he said after one of our sessions. I could also see, when I came back, that as you brought yourself to enjoy life without me, you and my father were closer to each other than before, even if he still seemed not to touch you, nor you him, if it comes to that. To the day he died he found it impossible to write the word love on any gift of any kind. I was, by then, as you could probably tell, an addict for touch: after my two marriages the old man seemed to think it was all I cared about even though he declared it to be just sex: this when I was heartbroken over a woman whose mind and pluck and professional prowess I adored: a woman equal to me in every way, and probably superior when it came to the courage to seize her freedom when she had to. Such messes I wanted to spare you, mum, even if I did like telling the old man that he’d lived a life of playing it safe, of backing himself only when he had a safety-net, when his most comfortable net, nest, his nursery, was you: the lounge of life he had made of life through you, and which you had made for him while living so barely yourself. Would you protest at my saying this? I wonder and wonder – but see: inside myself I mix the paint as furiously as I did when I was fifteen. But you were getting your own outings, right to the last. My father tried to tell me, just quietly, that your health was not good enough for you to join the bowling club. Bullshit. That you did not have the skills for the game; he had never seen you catch a ball, for instance. Bullshit. The ball is not in the air at a bowling green, I sneered at him. Nor was he sure how you’d go when you went away with the other women – he did not say team mates, which was surprising since he was such a collectivist in his own life – as they would be doing their things which you had never expressed interest in. I said you’d be

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having a good time, keeping company, making merry. I nearly said that even if you got pissed every night, it would be still just making merry, which was the term she used for his beery singing. Your father has a hearty laugh, you said, lovingly. I was unimpressed. I’d seen him on a train once after a pub crawl on a Victorian Railways holiday: he leaned out of our dog box and said, as a young woman went past, O what a beautiful maiden. You were sitting right there and I was so mortified that I couldn’t look at him for days. Besides, you were a beautiful maiden, there was a photograph at home to prove it, as my father damn-well knew. Imagine the incident the other way round. It is unimaginable. My father, like my fucking self, was so full of shit when he was possessive. It took a lot – too much – for him not to be possessive. Here is my next painting. You have the happiest smile I’ve ever seen. You are in your bowling gear. The perky hat. There’s a swirl of white, like a flock of gulls taking off, as you come dashing around the corner of the Newport Bowling Club. So pleased to see me, us. The picture was taken when we – me and the wife that made of you a grandmother – called in on you unexpectedly. You were alight, in flight, heading towards us and an arms-around greeting. Fully out of yourself, fully alive, free, I would say, so free that you were demanding of a portrait: of a woman who had, not so long before she came to an end, taken a new lease on life. The painting is streaks of weightless movement, strokes that dragged the blues down into foamy water, water that splinters the light, and the rainbow that emanates, as pigment does from fruit, from flowers, from the honey eaters in them; it would be a happiness painting par excellence – part Bonnard’s peachy bathrooms, the silks of Degas’ race-tracks, Chagall’s dream of flying – all things that keep us afloat if we give our loves a chance. Right at the end, that was what I meant to do: give you another chance. I tabled optimism, that’s all. I said, you would learn to speak again. It had been a minor stroke … Your speech will come back, Mum. – 137 –

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You were leaning up against pillows in the hospital bed. You’d been there for two days. You had, no doubt about it, played a busy part bringing the stroke on yourself. Still unstoppable in dutifulness, hell-bent on duty, no matter what. You did not know how to stop and would not stop. Until you came to that stop, which you must have wanted, it has to be said; you wished an ending upon yourself. No. Not an ending. You wished your own ending. And yet still I had to blab: they’ll teach you to speak again, Mum. You looked at me. I had never seen you roll your eyes before. Your head sought to swivel with those pale blue, watery eyes in your puffy face. But the neck was stiff and the pain between your shoulder blades would not permit you to turn, for the last time, away from your son. There you were, frozen between duty and a micro-gesture of freedom. Nor did I say that I would teach you to speak. That look sealed my lips as much as yours. It did not even occur to me to make the offer, and these days I am left, still, with Brecht’s song about his mother: Oh, why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.

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PART 2 INLAND

HOL DI NG L A N D S CA PE S John Wolseley’s Mapping into Australia

All great painters, of whatever school, have been great only in their rendering of what they had seen and felt from early childhood … John Ruskin

It is very much easier to give vent to the romantic by speech than to get it all the way down from the brain to the fingers’ ends, and then squeeze it out upon the canvas. Samuel Palmer

Perhaps I’ll always be an English painter (conditioning dies hard), but I can at least be a disgusting English painter. John Wolseley

Objects no longer confront us. Rather, relationships surround us. John Berger

It is perhaps strange to describe Australia’s deepest painter of the land, an artist who has come to know this habitat like no artist before him, as a neoRomantic Englishman abroad. When you think of John Wolseley’s great ‘landscape’ work – especially his creations out of Central Australia, whether his symphonic dune studies in the Simpson Desert, or his topographic rhapsodies at Gosse’s Bluff, paintings that cultivated in us a sense of dwelling here, just as we were coming to Aboriginal painting – it may even sound perverse.

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They are so uniquely Australian: they can be of no other place. Yet the truth is that Wolseley was a mature, conventionally trained English artist when he arrived here in 1976, at the age of 38, and the matter of Englishness, and all that it might mean, is not something he entirely eschews, even as he proclaims himself an Australian and an Australian artist. The point came home to me the other day when I got him on his mobile, and found that he was still out bush, in the desert of far western Victoria, sitting by the edge of Lake Tyrrell. He had been out there for three weeks, camping around the great Salt Lake, which, some say, was named by the Aborigines as the place in which they could see the map of the night sky. I think the reception is so clear, he said, because of the Salt Lake. He sounded even more buoyant than usual, thanks to the time he had spent alone, except that alone is not the right word. ‘I am never alone,’ a Buddhist monk once said to me, pointing to the sky and the trees. Wolseley, a compulsive naturalist since he was a boy, is never alone either. We chatted awhile, and he happened to mention that he had had his head in a wonderful book. It was Leslie’s famous biography of John Constable. I tried, for a moment, to imagine a Constable view of an Australian Salt Lake. It did not happen. For a second I thought of Ernest Giles, in the middle of his explorations of Central Australia, reading Byron over breakfast. That deceptive incongruity was easier to manage. Wolseley was re-reading the book, of course: he is a voracious reader, and there is little about that moment in English painting with which he is not familiar. The moment when a vivacious passionate naturalism took complete possession of picture making, and when, with all the simplicity of Wordsworth at his best, Constable’s oil sketches were made to be psychologically and pictorially true by virtue of their being specifically English. ‘Nature is the fountain’s head,’ Constable wrote, ‘the source from which all originality must spring.’ And Constable had to say how he became a landscape painter: ‘Still I should paint my own places best … I associate my

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‘careless boyhood’ to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter (and I am grateful).’ As the idea of Constable shimmered over the Salt Lake, I asked: ‘What have you been working on?’ In general, I knew: habitat creations, I would call them. It was the detail of his reply that clinched it. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I have been doing the salt crystals. Marvellous!’ And this instantly hurled me – how could it not – back to William Blake’s seeing the world in a grain of sand, and his proclamation for the Romantic movement, that art be based on PARTICULARS. ‘What’s been impressing you about the Constable?’ I asked. ‘How, towards the end of his life,’ Wolseley said, ‘he became more and more immersed in geology.’ It is impossible to be with him without being aware of a fact that he does little to disguise: namely, that he is an upper-class English gentleman prone to all manner of antics that playfully fit the stereotype of the brilliant and eccentric artist, albeit an artist who has, in his case, forsaken an estate in Somerset that has been in the family since the fifteenth century. For a long time in our conversations we hardly mentioned that. There were too many local particulars to focus on. So we have been talking about the grain of the work that arises from his camping expeditions. We have been preoccupied with the natural elements which he employs with his drawing and painting; and the ways in which he arrives at a point when all these things go together to make a picture – not, it must be said, a picture that is a view of the countryside: he has long since done away with all that in favour of aerial views that constitute maps, or maps with drawing and painting of various kinds on them. We have been talking about Chinese and Japanese painting – since his use of wash, his calligraphic marks (those he draws, and those that are rubbings from burnt scrub), and Wolseley’s organisation of space, can be strikingly Oriental. The Oriental aspects come up at surprising moments. A few weeks before I spoke to him out at Lake Tyrrell, he pinned a new work to the wall of his – 143 –

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studio in St Kilda. Its main sheet was an ensemble of pale washes – colour patches like pools and clouds – upon which he had made marks from the burnt landscape, and across which he had drawn foliage and the fences he wished to connect with the mystical lyrics of John Shaw Neilson, who once laboured along the border of Victoria and South Australia. Wolseley had also placed a few three-dimensional mallee gums, and, not far from the centre of the picture, a little dam, figuratively rendered. A tree was reflected in its golden water. You can’t look at some of Wolseley’s new work for very long before wondering how on earth it is holding together as a picture. The feeling is both unsettling and thrilling: that the picture is on such an edge of dissolution. At one point I covered up some of the fence line which wanders across the picture. ‘What would you have without these?’ He paused, and gave a Taoist reply. ‘The uncarved block,’ he said. At the moment Wolseley’s name for the work is Camel Gate, border track, Scorpion Springs. He proceeded to talk vividly about all the events that had been making the work so far: the puddling of the pigment overnight, the visitations of ants and bees and birds onto the paper, which, as usual, was grubby and torn in places, made as scruffy by the happenstance of the camp site as a happy camper becomes gloriously unwashed. Wolseley’s works speak of being in situ. Talking takes place in front of his work, just as it does by a camp fire. Below the main sheet he began to put up three more panels, rectangular sheets from his notebook. They dovetailed into the main drawing, but also composed a wide three-dimensional fence, in the middle of which was a gate. The gate had swung open, and led the eye in under a canopy. The foliage was the greyish green of the Australian bush, but was somehow fresher, brighter. The general effect was almost picturesque, the kind of excellent watercolour sketch Englishmen had perfected over three hundred years, initially

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because they were trying to make pictures like the Italians, and then because they developed a love affair with their own place, a love that flowered, as we know, from a complicated dance with romantic poetry. This, said Wolseley, pointing to the gate and its bower, leads the eye in to here. It helps one enter the area above, as if you are being led into a Persian garden, or a paradise. One needs something for the viewer to come into this place. As so often happens between us, something is said, and it is followed by happy silence on both sides. But there was something I could not stop myself from saying. ‘That gate,’ I said, ‘I have seen it before. It’s the gate that opens to a path at Nettlecombe Park. It’s the first path you come to when you step out of the manor house, and turn right, up past the Kings Wood.’ He looked at me, bemused. I was talking about his place in Somerset. ‘It’s the path,’ I went on, ‘that becomes the sheep track, with bracken on one side, and the stream down below. You go along that path and then you come to your tree.’ I was referring to the tree he used to call, when he was young, the Elbow Tree. It is a huge beech, with a Tolkienish presence by the stream. As a little boy full of loss he spent hours in it. ‘Do you think so?’ he laughed. ‘That is very interesting. Funny how some things might come back to one.’ It turned out that Samuel Palmer had long been a painter of central importance to Wolseley. This emerged in the form of an exclamation: I was going to London, there was a major exhibition of Palmer at the British Museum; did he want me to get him a catalogue? ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he cried, and added: ‘Do you know, there was a time when people used to mistake some of my paintings for a Palmer. Especially my barns! I still have a painting of peach blossom that is unmistakeably Palmer. I could have earned a living faking Palmers!’

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Samuel Palmer, in 1824, saw William Blake’s pastoral woodcuts as ‘little corners of paradise’. Palmer’s Christian mystic vision illuminated his age, and was in turn a source of nourishment to those painters who sought to resurrect their own spirits and the spirit of England after the Great War; Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, to name a few of the neo-Romantics who had profoundly rendered the English landscape, its barns included, by the time Wolseley was a young man. ‘Old Warner Allen told me, “go and see Palmer’s barns”,’ Wolseley remembered. Wolseley describes Warner as one of the last of the pre-Raphaelites. His own father, a talented painter ruined by drink, whose fate is crucial to my sense of Wolseley’s whole relationship with place, his place back there, and his new place-making here, was a distant cousin of Ruskin. Wolseley went off to see Palmer’s barns, in all their luminously tangible glory – graphic masterpieces of the watercolour medium, which Wolseley had also mastered early. And he went on down into Kent, to Shoreham, where Palmer lived for those miraculous few years that produced his most memorable paintings. Into Kent is the operative word here, the key to Palmer’s spiritual outlook and artistic practice. Palmer produced pictures with views, he did what was long called ‘landscapes’; but the key to them was his level of immersion. Young Wolseley had good reasons for going down into Kent. He had to visit Shoreham because he was as saturated in poetry as Palmer: in the Romantics that every schoolboy knew, obviously; and in John Clare as well as James Thomson, whose The Seasons was the poem that most inspired Clare. Clare can still trip off Wolseley’s tongue: Tis Nature’s beauty that inspires My heart with raptures not its own And she’s a Faith that never tires How could I call myself alone.

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As Wolseley reinvokes his youthful pilgrimage, he’s compelled to tell me the girl whom he loved at the time was called Eve, and his painterly memory has it that they enjoyed themselves in an open field – Wolseley dressed in a shepherd’s smock and Eve dressed as Botticelli’s Primavera. Later they went across into Surrey, to visit the house of John Evelyn, the great writer on forests, where they lay down under one of the great elms the writer had celebrated. And they tickled for some of the trout in Evelyn’s pond, since all this nature study was of a kind: one lovely thing connected with the other – of a place, of a state of mind that belongs there, and which one has found, or made. When you look at the early paintings by Samuel Palmer you get an instant sense of wellbeing. His paintings seem to cradle you. They have warmth and firmness and what movement they have is minimal and gentle, like a lullaby. The colours do their settling work as well: russets and golds, the leaf browns and corn yellows are all earth-bound with a sense of summer harvest and autumn so that the paintings are as rounded in their embrace, as rich and as nourishing, as any lines written by Keats. In fact, it is the sense of the line in a Palmer painting, its fullness and obvious rhyme, that draws you in like the poems written in the heyday of Romanticism. The pictures are made of curves and convergences. Hills and flocks of sheep; valleys and leaning trees – great trees with billowing foliage, clouds of leaves; and figures in a landscape who are at one with the flock, or the shade of a tree, or the peaceful course of a stream – all conspire to envelope you. Glance at one of these Palmers and you feel safe, secured by the depths of the scene, nurtured by its glow. With Palmer, the feeling was the thing. ‘Must get this feeling,’ he would tell himself, before he noted much else. The feeling was to be, essentially, numinous. On the surface they are works of daylight, but they carry night within them. Palmer had a philosophy of twilight, those telling thresholds at dawn and dusk. He believed that twilight intimated the reality of the spirit. – 147 –

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His shadows were more than an absence of light: they were as richly rendered as velvet was by Titian. Palmer was ‘embalming the darkness’ – to use Keats again, the phrase cited by the poet Geoffrey Grigson in his wonderful and early book on Palmer, written just after the Second World War, a copy of which Wolseley has long treasured. Palmer’s tangible religious vision offers itself as a primary experience – primary as in childish or primitive or innocent – the meanings of his subjects emerge from the landscape. Yes, there is the harvest, with figures bowed into their labours. There is the becalmed village, with its Church spire arising. There is the side of the hill, with the shepherd in contemplation. Peace reigns. The world is as it should be. Or was. The pastoral idyll speaks for itself because Palmer was doing Virgil with an English feeling into which he was inducted by William Blake, whom he met in 1824, when he was nineteen, and Blake, an ailing sixty-seven, was sitting up in bed ‘like one of the Antique patriarchs/or a dying Michael Angelo’ as he worked on drawings from Dante. Blake was ‘a man without a mask’, Palmer thought, who generated ‘an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal’. ‘To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter.’ Thereafter, with Palmer, the only painting of any worth, the only art to which it was worth dedicating a life, was one that trembled with Blake’s ‘double vision’: of Nature worthy of record by devoted precision, and of Nature imagined as spirit. And this – ideally speaking – was to be best done by an artist humbling the self, ‘even as a little child’. Today, the miracle of early Palmer is that we can look at his paintings and – with an eye long divested of Christian yearnings – feel this to be the case. They might be ‘furnished wombs’ as John Berger once scornfully remarked, but this is to miss the point. Palmer created places from which it feels good to have begun. ‘When I look at Samuel Palmer,’ Wolseley exclaims, ‘it’s all happening!’ We are standing in his studio in St Kilda, where he has pulled from various folders work done when he was young.

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He is talking about ‘the mixture of being enclosed with all his shimmering textures. And not only the hills, the clouds, too: you are inside them, you are inside the weather.’ Palmer’s celebration of profusion, Nature’s bounty is not the least of this holding. Wolseley speaks of the way the early Palmers ‘are saturated with humus, are of the very earth’. When, in one of our conversations, I want to temper this view by stressing Palmer’s pious Christianity, Wolseley says, ‘No, I do not think so’ – and speaks of the cider festivals to which whole villages would succumb in harvest time: festivals in the pagan sense, joyous, cider-foaming days and nights of revelry that had taken root in that countryside before anyone had a Christian God. Wolseley will look at a Palmer church spire in the middle distance and hear the bell sound over the gleaning Held, but he also hears the revelry near the cider press, with its earth squash and scent of appley passions. ‘An Appetite, a feeling and, a love,’ as Wordsworth famously wrote, by Tintern Abbey. Landscape: a way of orienting to home, to what we have, what we have lost, to what might be regained. In Palmer’s Sketchbook of 1824 Wolseley admires eaves, singular trees, the thick-nibbed middle distances. Palmer’s easy relationship between drawing and what is written on the page, the spontaneity of each – these also sit well. Scenes marked down – marked up – as natural announcements: Nature’s announcements making themselves felt as texture, God or no God. Or Gaia, Wosleley prefers to say today. ‘The fact of the matter was that so many of the great Christian poets have been celebrating Gaia, the richness and the power of the Earth to produce all this. Gerard Manly Hopkins conveyed the same thing. His most wonderful poems are all about the Earth. His ecstatic fire for it …’ Wolseley is also much taken by Palmer’s freeness with ink and paint, the way ‘splotches’ have been used as starting points. He is harking back to the moment when Alexander Cozens, fifty years before Palmer, made his precociously modern remarks about taking ‘the BLOT’ as a point of departure: ‘Possess your mind strongly with a subject … and with the swiftest hand

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make all possible variety of shapes and strokes upon your paper.’ And so on, with the student exploiting the smaller accidental shapes while on the whole preserving ‘the spirit of the blot as much as possible.’ Now he is holding up some of his own work, done in the late 1950s. He shows me a watercolour sketch of Tintern Abbey. And a middle distance landscape of farm buildings, framed by trees. ‘It’s enclosed, it has a sense of dwelling deep in wooded stuff, a little bird there, which when I painted it was in a halo of light, and it has a glint of a stream that does not exist, and which is clearly pinched from Samuel Palmer. And the cows and the barn … no, in fact these stables – the Cop floor – was where they kept the apples!’ He shows me a sketch of a beech tree that is also a moth: one metamorphosing into the other. It has a wild, expressionist energy. It is a reminder, actually, of a turn some Neo-Romantic painting has taken in the twentieth century. ‘I’m quite sure that in my own way, the thing that affected me was the tumescence, the explosive ripeness of the summer, the spring and summer in England. This is a luminous beech tree. And this moth – is pretty Samuel Palmerish!’ Then he is holding a landscape with wispy figures: ‘Those are frolicking shepherdesses and here is a Samuel Palmer moon!’ The vitality is different with the next one. A Grasshopper, a sketch that would become a painting. This is a grasshopper turning into a mandolin. And here is someone playing it, and this is Eve sitting here, and here are some swallows.’ Now another drawing of a tree. ‘Palmer’s sonorousness,’ Wolseley says. ‘This is actually a copper beech – a great big voluminous tree, copper coloured, so that the darkness of it … As with Palmer we are talking about inscape, going in – withinness all the time, as opposed to the scenic view going away. This one also has the sense of a poplar tree, shimmering … I was obviously interested in the primary shapes within foliage … so this tree here is all one tone, the only thing you can see is this tiny bit of foliage against the sky. You get that in Palmer a lot – you get mass, pregnant with some inner thing, and these funny twiddly bits, often leaves against a moon. I’ve written here: “Very dark, very dark, very dark.’’’ – 1 50 –

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Wolseley chuckles ironically at his overdone references to the dark. But you need to know something of his English story to appreciate what is light and what is dark, really. The Nettlecombe estate is 300 acres tucked into the depths of Somerset, a settlement that occupies a combe which abuts Exmoor. Its records go back to the Domesday Book, and family records begin in 1304. The 32-room manor house, with its Elizabethan facade, was built rather late, compared to the family’s Norman chapel which stands beside it, and inside which, in the western crypt, lie the bodies of two of the de Raleghs, knights returned from the Crusades. Behind the church there is a set of stables built around an eighteenth-century courtyard, and behind that a terrace of cottages that have long been the work places and dwellings of the smithy, the carpenter, and so on. Further up the slope is the walled garden of the Aboretum, constructed in the 1820s, in which are planted exotic trees from the New World – although not, Wolseley regrets to say, Australasia. Just over the way is the lovely two-storeyed house that was once the Head Gardener’s Cottage. Here, from 1945, Wolseley was brought up, as the estate was never to be its old self after the war. These buildings are slightly to the north-west of the manor house. To the west, if you walk up directly behind it, you are on a path that goes for about a half a mile along the edge of Kings Wood, whose trees, oaks mainly, were planted to honour the restoration of Charles II. They are still standing, and when I was there, in winter, their tortured shapes seemed to be protesting as the sun sank on a clear afternoon in fires out over the Atlantic. One of the trees is said to be the oldest and tallest oak tree in England, a fact you can appreciate by the time you get to the road at the top. From there, to the west, there is a great field of cauliflowers, arable land as far as you can see because every other landowner except Wolseley has cut down most of their big trees. The forest remaining, in fact, is only in large patches at Nettlecombe, a fact to which I can attest, having attempted on one of my walks to enter it, only to – 1 51 –

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flee quickly as shots rang out and a pheasant flew into the air from beneath my feet. There are no deer, these days, in the forest, but there are dogs, and men with guns, permitted to hunt in the old way. From the road you can look north across the Bristol Channel into Wales, and imagine walking with your Claude glass up the Wye, a copy of Gilpin in your hip pocket, hunting for views that have just the right mix of the tame and the wild. To the east you can see the next line of hills, the Quantocks, just over the ridge of which are the villages of Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, where Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote the Lyrical Ballads. One day, from a high footpath on the eastern side, I took in the manor house. There it nested in its oval clearing, the architectural adornment of the park. You look over and down into the green fields, over the heads of the nervy, black-faced sheep, and down onto what was called ‘the gentleman’s seat’ when the landscape architect of the day set the building in the company of waterway and garden, green slope and forest. All so natural yet a triumph of artifice. This comes home when you take the view in from the other direction, by standing at the main entrance looking out. The green fields rise, soft clefts with them; the path eases its way up into the wood (the path with the gate I remembered). It is so cultivated and beautiful, so neatly right that it is uncanny: making no sense until you are told that once, long ago up there in a green cleft, a village once stood. Or did until 1755, when Sir John Trevelyan succeeded Sir George Trevelyan (the wastrel of the family, not one of the scientifically inclined or an agricultural or aesthetic improver), and decided to extend the parkland. Still, the view from the entrance, that prospect, was only one dimension of what I felt was crucial to Wolseley’s English landscape. The other was an experience of closure. When John Claudius Loudon visited Nettlecombe Park on his 1834 travels in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, he noted the roundedness of the countryside, its winding valleys with sloping sides, its richly wooded valleys. On reaching the house, he exclaimed at its charm because

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the house was situated ‘“on a bottom” so that the scenery on every side is looked up to, instead of being looked over, the effect of which, united with the immense masses of wood, is romantic in a very high degree’. A romantic density of enclosure, you might say, of embeddedness. How might a man paint himself out of this? On the wall in one of the cottages I found an early painting by Wolseley. It was a tilted view of a field, a thick oil painting made of oval shapes, lines of energy that went round and round. It seemed to cut into the land with a fury of feeling. ‘I had been ploughing all day,’ he told me. I was sleeping in a Byronic nook at the end of the library, in what is still called the Long Room, which is on the second storey of the stables. A beautifully proportioned space with a low ceiling, it is occupied by an oak table that seemed to me to be the length of Cook’s Endeavour. The books have been in this room since 1939, when Wolseley’s father, in preparation for the war, moved them from the manor house. Hitherto the Long Room was the one to which the tenant farmers came to pay their rents to the squire, and where they would linger, using the room as a village hall, communing in the way of characters in a Thomas Hardy novel; men with round vowels and scowls, shy smiles and suspicions, which they would take with them out into the rain, the likes of whom I had already seen between the deep hedges on the road to Combe (to where the village had been moved), and who hid their faces under hats and in high collars, trudging in twilight, their dogs on a firm leash trotting ahead of them. All of Hardy was stacked there, and other nineteenthcentury novelists, although it was not big on poetry – apart from Rossetti, and Ruskin and Marvell, their complete works and first editions – as the library, or what is left of it, has been going for centuries. Most of it is oriented less to interior worlds than chronicles of history – the history of Scotland and its estates, and books of travel since the seventeenth century from places as dark as Africa and as snow-white as the poles, not to mention Persia and India and the Americas. I began to make a list. I started to travel away from the room, but then I stopped, as travel of all kinds takes time, it can take a life. Suffice to

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say no one could grow up with such a library and feel for a minute that their life could come to fruition by remaining at home. I lay under a small oil painting of a lovely woman approaching middle age. It was Wolseley’s mother, done by his father, a competent tonal painter. Nearby, higher above me, was a seventeenth-century portrait of another woman, clearly another Trevelyan. Outside the nook, other figures occupied the walls, especially over the mantelpiece at the end of the room. Like the books the paintings were property, heirlooms. It was dusty and cobwebby, the furniture here and there. At the window at the end of the room a sheet of double glazing had fallen inwards, leaning against the bookcase while half attached to the window. The broken and the intact were joined by cobwebs in glittering light. I took a photo, hoping the image through the lens would say something about the impossible mix of things, whether we think we have an art to organise it all or not. One newish thing was a pleasure to see. Above a shelf cluttered with dusty eighteenth-century porcelain, there was a photograph. Silvery desert oaks walking across a plain in Central Australia. The traveller had left; then he had come back to leave a sign at the gentleman’s seat, before going off again. I should say at this point that on the increasingly rare occasions when Wolseley does return, he, too, usually stays in the Long Room, which is part of the quarters of his second son (the first is a wine-grower in Australia). The family has not used the manor house since the end of the Second World War. Nettelcombe Court has twice been a school. Now it is occupied by the Field Studies Council, an educational charity, which operates it as a residential Field Centre, bringing teachers and students of ecology to the place, season by season. One day, Wolseley showed me Henry Vaughan’s lovely, optimistic essay, The Praise and Happiness of the Country Life. ‘He that lives in his own fields and habitation,’ Vaughan wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, ‘which God hath given him, enjoys true Peace.’ It is a most comforting line in an essay that speaks of peace on land securely held. Vaughan praises the kind and

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respectful relationships to be found in the solitude and retreat in the countryside over and against the ‘dissimulation, dangerous reservedness … ridiculous affection … grosse calumnie’ to be found in ‘Towns and Courts’. ‘The Country is healthful,’ Vaughan expounded, and the countryman is happy with his fishing and hunting and fowling, his planting and dressing of orchards, flowers and herbs – work that could be accompanied by some ‘merry song’ as he climbed up to the fresh hills, or descended ‘into the bosome of the valleys, and the fragrent, deawy meadows, to heare the musick of birds, the murmurs of Bees, the falling of springs …’ Well might Wolseley wish, at one level, to wax like Vaughan. When he was five the idyll that he might have been in, and which many a nostalgic impulse among the English aristocracy has long been compelled to create, vanished once and for all. His mother committed suicide. In a fit of depression that seems to have run in the family, she jumped over a cliff, leaving behind her two daughters, aged two and three, her only son John, and a husband from whom she seems to have been estranged. A first governess was employed to look after the children. She was soon replaced by another, and another. By the time Wolseley was sixteen he had known twenty-eight governesses, none of whom had pleased his father, especially if they had taken a shine to the children. ‘My greatest comfort,’ Wolseley says emphatically, ‘was in the countryside itself, in the valleys and bosomy hills of Nettlecombe.’ The word ‘bosomy’ hangs, almost playfully, in the air. And he goes on: ‘I felt as a child that I was within it, I was within these hills, I used to have dreams which were pseudo-erotic, I was in the bosoms of these hills, being enclosed by a mother.’ He laughs. ‘I’m sure there was some search for some mothering enclosure.’ He would enter all the countryside had to offer – its dense woodland, its valleys winding away into shadows a safe distance from home, the feeling of space in a sky over fields, the shelter to be had in caves, hollow trees, haylofts, barns. ‘I spent all my days as a boy wandering among ponds in fields and forests. I’d spend three hours in one spot staring at a lizard, so I got to know

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about grass snakes … And I would escape to our Deer Park, once a wonderful oak forest that had the biggest oak trees in England – or I did before my great grandfather cut a lot of them down. It was sixty acres of bracken with deer still wandering through it. In its midst it had little islands of grass, species of grass that had been there since medieval times. I would go looking for these islands, looking for these hidden areas of sward. When I was sent to school, my whole sense of life was of getting back to being alone and wandering around.’ He had a constant companion during those years. The Natural History of Selborne, by the Reverend Gilbert White, was first published in 1789. White inspired the ordinary Englishman to open his eyes to what was alive around him in wood and river, pond and field. His astute observations of all manner of creatures – sometimes registered with a mind to the scientist, with whom he might consult, but more often than not, reported in a plain, descriptive prose that was to become a genre of English literature – was an instant success. Part of its charm was due to White’s device of making each of his short chapters a letter to one Thomas Pennant, Esq; and the way in which all the observa­tions, reported over time through different seasons, were the results of living lovingly in one place. The parish of Selbourne flowered in the reader’s mind, as God intended all of nature to do. Wolseley came to it when he was sixteen and felt it to be an ‘El Dorado’. He would seldom go into the countryside without it, and he could not, like any sensitive young naturalist who paused to take a note of what he had seen, fail to be impressed by White’s indelible pen pictures. Instinctively, then, he had found solace in his countryside; to be sought out as a retreat and for what could be gained – learned – there. He healed by walking and looking and sleeping out, by drawing and finding out, by ranging far and wide and going to ground. ‘Landscapes’, for Wolseley, would never simply be a scene, a prospect, a view. They would be a whole life, a complete holding, of one kind or another. They would be orientations that pointed forwards and backwards. ‘All great painters,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘have been great only in their rendering of what they had seen and felt from early childhood …’

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His father, a product of the Slade School, hated Wolseley’s early works. He declared them, as he drank the proceeds of the estate, lightweight, disorderly, worthless. And he would bang on about Ruskin – usually homilies about goodness and experience. Wolseley speaks of this as if he blocked his father out. And yet, through these childhood years, he was, each summer, up in Scotland with his father, hunting and fishing. In his harsh, bantering company there was stone beneath his feet, raptors in the skies above. And the book that he had in his pocket then was Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, the 1653 classic that waxed lyrical about contemplation while extolling the joys of otter slaughter, and which, while celebrating the omnivorous fish of the sea and rivers that so satisfied men’s appetite, took pains to show how fishing was an art reliant upon close observation of local habitat. When he was about eighteen, Wolseley took to Walton’s discourse sufficiently to be writing his own little essays on fishing – some of the first things he ever wrote. He does not say what his father thought of them. Nor does he acknowledge any debt to his father for introducing him to hard country, a manly wilderness compared to the folds of the south. In retrospect, the tramping in Scotland looks like an ideal preparation for Central Australia, a matter of one early landscape abetting the other. Still, as the father blustered and drank, the Family Trust prevailed: Wolseley was persuaded that the property would go completely to ruin unless he legally divested his father. The litigation dragged on for a wretched three years. At the end of it Wolseley was landlord of his father, and the heir to a dilapidated group of buildings and a huge debt. He continued to live in the Head Gardener’s Cottage. His father came and went for the next five years, a spectacle of dissolution. He died in 1967, aged eighty-three. Wolseley, who had started at an agricultural college, had now finished art school and was painting full-time. In this parricidal period of his life, Wolseley joined the twentieth century’s Romantic Revival, sometimes called the Counter Culture, which, after the revolts in Paris in May, 1968, burst over many an English field and gasworks.

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How, in retrospect, to key that moment into the consciousness of landscape? It seemed crucial that one go ‘back to the land’. It was imperative to live, as Shelley once recklessly advocated, lovingly together. Wolseley was already, as Vaughan had recommended, on his own land. He would invite others down to live and play, create, love and be there: they would, in the Utopian parlance of the time, have happenings. And they would work: they would make their lives together on the land and in art. A photograph of the period shows Wolseley standing with members of the Nettlecombe Commune of Artists and Farmers. They are lounging, these friendly-looking young people, among the stables of the old Nettlecombe Court, with their children and a donkey and one fat pig, and all within a stone’s throw of The Pleasure Grounds, as the Arboretum was sometimes called. In the photograph Wolseley, tall and goodlooking with a shock of blond hair, is standing with two ripe melons. Painters and printmakers, musicians and poets converged. Sticky George, the music group, lived in. Adrian Henri, Nell Dunn and Edna O’Brien organised poetry readings, which everyone loved. Festivals were harvested like happenings. Christopher Logue came to stay and declared the Trevelyan’s library the loveliest in England. Loveliest, love – there was, perhaps too much love around. In 1966, the year before his father died, Wolseley had simplified some things by marrying. By the early seventies he and his first wife, the botanist Pat Wolseley, had added two boys to the commune. Wolseley was doing landscapes of lush Somerset, and into it he would place a road sign. In one, finished in 1970, the fields, the landscape, are as solid a tapestry as anything Palmer had painted: they made a charming scene, aggressively ruined – surely? – by the sign. Of course not: the sign was a way of pointing things up, it rightly relativised what might otherwise have been a version of the picturesque; and it indicated that one had left landscape painting and taken a stand as a conceptual artist. In fact, Wolseley would be calling himself a conceptual artist for the rest of the decade. There is a photograph of the painting which makes the point at another level. In the background, the countryside itself; in the foreground, Wolseley turning away and towards the scene and the painting

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being held by a young woman in the middle distance. The photograph makes the painting look as if it is meant to be talking to itself, muttering at the sign which has been stabbed in its belly. Wolseley did not get stuck in his Palmer period. For ten or fifteen years he was also travelling and working away from Nettlecombe. He learnt printmaking with the English modernist Stanley William Hayter at Studio 7 in Paris, and at Birgit Skiold’s Print workshop in London. For a time this brought out the abstractionist in him. He was also working in oils and acrylics, painting thickly and with a tendency towards the angular. He had expressionist tendencies, rather akin to early Graham Sutherland once he had evolved from his Samuel Palmer period: the Sutherland drawn to the coves and hills of Pembrokeshire, immersed in intersecting patterns of natural shapes, and whose notebook recorded ‘the enveloping quality of the earth, which can create here, a mysterious space limit, a womb-like enclosure’. Sutherland would never lose the significance of the human figure, and he would distort it, like Francis Bacon. Wolseley’s work would hardly admit the figure, any more than he would solicit the great domain of light. In this period, the darling of London – David Hockney – was the most intelligent and self-conscious of picture makers, but Wolseley stepped away from those fey stylisations. You could say, really, that despite the success of his solo exhibitions as a conceptual artist, and his international reputation as a printmaker, he had no clear style that was his own, unless it was his insistence, gathered from Hayter’s printmaking lessons, that one must work ‘through the medium’. ‘He encouraged students to work without preliminary sketches, to “destroy” their plates, while taking proofs from time to time. The idea was to break down any fear of acids, tools, or experimentations, and to release unforseen images.’ It was perhaps a clue as to how one might travel out and into a new place. Wolseley lived for a time in Malta and the Spanish Pyrenees, from where he sent back those sketchy reports we call postcards. When these took the form of etchings, he had an important work, Postcards from the Pyrenees (1974), even if it did come with a touch of POP, after the manner of Peter

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Blake’s postcards. The beauty and strength of Wolseley’s sprang from each card’s exquisite offering from nature: a pig in grass, a locust stripping a blossom, a congregation of beetles on twigs. They were a reminder of how much of a naturalist he had become, how attentive he could be to living things. In the little scenes on the cards – snow fall, snow on the boughs of a pine tree, water rushing between rocks – you could see his love of textures, and of miniatures. And there are the smart, semiotic ones that showed him as up to date as anyone else: the road crash near the cow sign, the road sign abutting the snow drift, a sign that indicated a slippery road ahead. As texts, the postcards might belong to the same family as Gilbert White’s economical letters to Thomas Pennant, Esq. As messages they are reminiscent of another inveterate naturalist and eccentric traveller abroad, Edward Lear, whose books Wolseley loved as a boy. ‘Verily, this coming to England is Hell,’ Lear felt, the more he travelled and turned his back on the English. Lear, a bird-lover like Wolseley, drew vigorously, had a strange and unhappy childhood, and looked for gentleness and tranquillity. His description of his state of mind in 1867 might have fitted Wolseley a hundred years later: ‘I am very dimbemisted-cloud-besquashed as to plans.’ Wolseley was burdened with the responsibilities of Nettlecombe. By the end of the winter of 1976 a pile of practicalities put him in the slough of despond. ‘Got up at 10.20, couldn’t face the day of tasks,’ he told his diary, and made a list: he had to see about the turf in the paddock (‘if Allen sells cottage’), the cost of a cesspit, a road, a fallen tree, a fire hydrant, slates, stump holes. All required inspection and tramping out to see. ‘So it goes on. No one will remember HOW or WHY. But it is always like this here. Something to do with property. Something to do with me … Must stay away in Australia for a year.’ The next day he was on the plane to Singapore. From there he flew down to Australia. But let us not go too fast. A couple of years later he was back again, on a visit, and he found himself speaking in public about the English countryside. It took the form of a letter to the local paper. – 16 0 –

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I have just returned from two and a half years work in Borneo and Australia and feel, as others have before me, that absence from the English landscape gives one a heightened picture of the things one loves about it. And I would say one of those things is particularly embodied in the area around Combe Sydenham – an intimate unchanged landscape of steep combs and narrow lanes – is a quality of not being made for crowds. It is small scale – yes, I know I have just come from Ayers Rock – but it is, compared with most European landscapes, extraordinarily small scale and vulnerable. It has always been the haunt of many country-lovers, who know and love its secrets, often returning year after year. They are the kind of people who find things out for themselves …

Here you can feel, in the flow of such prose, the old desire to work his way back into the folds of England. Yet no reader could have known what he had been through before coming to say all this – the various little divorces that he had painfully negotiated inside himself – any more than they could be expected to have a sense of what had taken their place within him in Australia, how he had been, in effect, making a new marriage by finding a new way of rendering a new country as landscape and habitat. About two weeks after arriving in the new country Wolseley was in the forest near Lorne, a resort town on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. ‘The surfaces in the wood,’ he told his journal, ‘were extraordinary.’ There is the feeling with that kind of bush and a lot of Australian landscape that it is made of some kind of material, the quality of something near metal, or near leather. Ribbons of bark which isn’t bark, but leather hanging from the branches. And grass trees, hundreds of thin strands nearer to nylon bristle than leaf – nearer to washing up brushes than plants. In fact the leaves of some plants seem nearer to cloth or leather, often some flocked material from the unifying coating of dust or earth. The eucalypt leaves so varied, dry

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and brittle – seemingly are made of parchment painted with greeny blue, or pink. This is unlike the standard response of an Englishman to the Australian bush. There is no trepidation at its formlessness, no awe – like D. H. Lawrence’s alarm – at its soulless grey, its silences. Nor is there any supercilious exclamation – at its curiosities, its antipodean reversals, its strange or absent aesthetic. Rather, Wolseley is looking at the ground microscopically, seeing the earth litter with all the grainy tactility Patrick White applied to descriptions of feelings. Before long he was living near the forests some hundreds of kilometres to the east of Melbourne, in Gippsland, an undulating district of high rainfall. Gippsland’s lushness, its melody of hill and valley, felt enough like Somerset to Wolseley; he was happy to have arrived, and he settled in a little town called Churchill, out from which, in the Heartbreak Hills, he found an abandoned farmhouse that was the perfect place to work. It was a ruin, and it was secluded. As soon as his van turned off the Gippsland Highway he delighted in ‘the soft edges overhung with wattle branches fringed with manes of the lichens of this mountain-mist country … a turn of the wheel and then a muffled turfy weaving in and out of Blanket Leaf bush and Sassafras and my van, a white mole invisible from the road burrows through a maze of Snowy Daisy Bush and then comes to rest in a secret world – “a map of Ireland” – a carpet of grass closely nibbled by rabbits.’ All this was sensation, in which he revelled. When he came to ‘the view’ he did the reverse of standing back to make a picturesque distancing landscape. ‘I roll on the turf and prop my chin on my arms and peer down the valley below – on a mosaic of tree tops as compact as moss.’ The scrub and tree ferns bordering my clearing are on the rim of the hill top, so that though there is a sense of it being a forest clearing – once a soldier settler’s garden – there are wonderful vignettes through the branches. Unlikely spatial planes. The huge ring barked trunks of the original forest randomly spearing grassy hillocks, which swell – 162 –

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though the gaps in the foreground tracery of foliage – like illustrations to a Book of Hours.

Or, one might add, like a Blake woodcut, or an early Samuel Palmer. In Gippsland Wolseley camped in the forest alone, propping in his tent or campervan. Days would be spent walking about, sitting and looking and drawing. And writing – into his journal, or on his drawings. What he was doing, really, was marking out his patch, observing flora and fauna in the quiet concrete spirit of Gilbert White, treating the environs of his campsite as his parish. His notes are letters to himself, almost. They are ruminations and, in certain frames of mind, little devotions: they express praise for what he has come upon, and they add to the praise by drawing an item exploratively. There is a charming page from his sketchbook that shows the baby fronds of a fern, with their whimsical curl, and a section of the trunk. The writing across the page says: This morning walked down forestry track north, very interesting unfolding fern to be drawn as you go down to first crossing of creek, also fungus on branch. A closed sketch sometimes became a painting. He worked in oils. He applied the paint rather flatly, enhancing the pattern. In one picture he has made a dance of the fern fronds, they spring up vigorously, silhouetted against a blue sky. The trunks of the ferns are black, and they sprout like palm trees, making the close-up view feel like a large-scale forest. The impression is both wild and ornate, and you half expect to see one of Gauguin’s Tahitian women in the recesses of undergrowth. Would that he could come upon such a figure – that is the feeling that inhabits some of Wolseley’s journal entries at the time; but it was not that likely in this work, which he called, with a bantering reference to home and father: Waterfall near Allambee, or John Ruskin, where are you? Wolseley hung these hybrid little paintings in the farmhouse, on the 1930s rural Australian wallpaper. He had, initially, been musing on the wallpaper itself, to the point where he felt it to be an ‘obsession’, since it reminded him of the curtains he used to gaze at as a child, gazing and gazing until one part became an elephant, another a bird. That was one thing: the wallpapers – 16 3 –

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took him back, and yet, once the paintings were hanging there in the present, in ‘the ruined house’, he was prompted to wonder ‘whether this highly specialised activity of painting small paintings has lost its point. Perhaps,’ he went on, ‘the “small oil painting” has lost much of its impact because of its over indulgent habit of resting above ugly sofas, and for being part of a platitudinous conversation in a billion tasteful sitting rooms.’ He started to draw on the wallpaper, adding to the ruin; a decorative delinquent, you might say. He drew the girl on the swing from the eighteenthcentury painting by Fragonard. Upon the prim 30s decor of rustic Australia there she was – rococo, decadent – done in crimson and green and blue crayon. Wolseley’s lovely lines for the swing, as fluent as anything by Brett Whiteley, linked her to the painting of birds, and to the figure of the girl in the hammock, Sari Anderson kicking her shoes off. The swishy ensemble is visible from the ground where a bacchanalian boy reclines looking up at the girls’ legs. Wolseley’s comment, perhaps, on heedless, hedonistic Australia of the late 70s. But there was more going on than that. Wolseley set to at the wall – scribbling, drawing freely so that rocks and ferns and hills and trees appeared, many taking their cues from rips in the paper, cracks in the wall, blemishes of plaster – all as if he had the freedom of the Blot in mind. And why stop there? ‘I’ve ripped,’ he would say, a touch confessionally, ‘the wallpaper, drawn angry shapes, chiselled into the flesh of the plaster down to the ribs of lath.’ Now he had layers of marks. They showed one mood, then another, some conscious, some less so. It all showed – he was clear about this – that the new landscape didn’t fit into the small rectangles of the picture frame anymore – ‘not as it did when I was an English gent painting copses and meadows in Somerset. Perhaps I’ll always be an English painter (conditioning dies hard), but I can at least be a disgusting English painter.’ He kicked a hole in the wall. ‘Just above the skirting board and the view through to the outside of the house – of the plants and the rocks – looked much more interesting than my bijou little oil.’ Now he had layers, inside and out. The old art – good and ‘self-conscious’ and falsely ‘pure’, was inside. The

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real work was outside. He had made an angry mess getting there. But now he was somewhere else, at least for that moment. In his first full exhibition in Australia, shown at Realities in 1978, these wallpaper works seemed to say it all. In his journal he drafted an invitation to it. You are cordially invited to an opening of a Showing of tree ferns, woods, the edges of wainscotry, of marks on day dreamed wallpaper of Tasman Flax lilies of the enclosed and the open of an endless uninterrupted land of loneliness and a pillow, a wall a caress and an arm curled round a sleeping face He hung the little landscapes on the wallpaper – the defaced and decorated patterns with their effortless juxtaposition of European art with the Australian vernacular – and put a frame around it all. The effect was complex, witty, conceptual and painterly – a wonderful arrival. It showed him as the master of several domains. And the hole through the wall? He painted it into the bottom of one frame. It was painted in detail, realistically, and with relish. The lath of the wallpaper, its tattered edges, framed the gaze, making a peephole for what was prom­ised outside: the wood, the stone, the earth, with each twig and blade of dry Australian grass. It is, admittedly, a representation of a hole, and, in its total context of helping to frame what he had done with this simulacrum of process, its conceit is clear. But it was more than that, as we can now see, and as he seemed to be beginning to acknowledge. He had painted his looking glass into the new country. But he had not yet left England, he had yet to wean himself from Nettlecombe. In these years he had a recurring dream. It was one that filled him with ‘great anxiety’, ‘a desperate sense of insecurity’. He was back on the estate, his father ‘very much alive – quite young and sprightly’. ‘They’, which was something like the National Parks Committee, wanted to take – 16 5 –

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Nettlecombe from father and son. In the dream the son says, ‘hurtfully to the father’, ‘I sometimes think that what we have both done to this place is a whole waste of time’. When he writes the dream into his journal, Wolseley says that that was how he remembered his father: ‘looking just hurt, angry-eyed’. And: ‘I think towards this dream and I must have this sense that I was going to win.’ It was something I must fight for in very much the same way as I always fought for not selling Nettlecombe, which made me devote so much of my life to keeping it, gave me power to do with it what I wanted. (Now this is a responsibility I wonder about. How much of all this was a responsibility to blind inner needs of mine. And how perhaps I should have gone away from it all much earlier.) I also thought of the landscape as something that I loved. And I realise now, as I write, that the quality of that had the same quality as the lustful affection and sheer looking forward to bits of the landscape that I love here. Was it where I got away from my father? Was it where I felt I could still be with my mother? Or did I go to trees, hollows, find secret grassy patches in the middle of the great bracken wilderness, as a mother?

The dream was a compound of unresolved feelings: guilt at the divestment of his father, yearning for what they might have done together. Except that now that he, the son, was here in the new country, the landscape was psychically split in him: a flight from the father and an escape back to the mother. An object of lust and affection, and a source of anxious misery … In his journal Wolseley wondered – in the way that we do when we are fed up with our own agonies – if he should write a novel about ‘a lonely figure’ in Australia. His protagonist cherishes the idea of an English girl coming out to see him: back home, in England, she is of ‘the rustic life’, is ‘warm, cosy, motherly’. But when she arrives she is not like that at all! This sad idea for the novel, he says finally ‘is probably not unconnected with all these things.’ After the exhibition of his Gippsland simulacra, his sense of division did not abate. He was still an Englishman, albeit a messy and rankling one, in – 16 6 –

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Australia. His sense of division would not go away. He made a sporting reference to the English landscape painter whose transition had been smooth – John Glover, Constable’s rival. A painting Wolseley did in Leongatha declares: ‘These trees were not there when John Glover came to Australia, but they were there when I did.’ A few days later he was content to observe an echidna, its quills noted with the affection of Gilbert White for the nest of a harvest mouse. The very next day, though, he would tell himself, ‘I am more than anything else a conceptual artist,’ only to add hastily, ‘I am also a mystic of Proust, remembering, and Tom Roberts.’ Which, with Tom Roberts tossed in, did not clarify much at all. Yet it indicated the kind of muttering he had to do if he was to make sense of being in Australia. Perhaps nature itself could answer his questions. Here he is in the depths of Gippsland. I think really what I am trying to say is that really I don’t know why I am here, or I don’t think the spoonbill does either. All I know is that I am here, and the unfolding present seems so right and real. As I walked to the dam to get some water to make some tea in the last rays of the sun it was this quality of being here at that moment which was so important. And I felt a kinship with the spoonbill flying away over the distant hill. He and I were part of the same thing; the moment of reality on a summer evening (and the valley was part of a bigger movement).

‘The bigger movement’ was already flourishing in his thought and practice. The thought involved several spheres of awareness. Metaphysically, it was to be found in his Taoist epiphany with the bird flying over the water. Scientifically, it was in the ways in which his life as a naturalist fitted the tenets of Gaia, where everything on the planet is known and seen and felt to be the one living, interdependent organism. Wolseley swam early and easily into this pool of thought, just as his fieldwork led him to the great ideas and observations of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. And he had John Ruskin. For how could he not, considering Ruskin’s sustained, unforgettable discourse – in his Modern Painters – on ‘the laws of the earth’, which was premised on the – 167 –

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grand proposition that the ground is to the landscape painter what the naked human body is to the historical. Ruskin’s scrambling in the Alps, his geolog­ ical passions, his excellent, graphic renditions of rocks and strata, a naturalism dynamically informed by a whole engagement with a site, this is a Ruskin designed for modernity. ‘Be a plain topographer if you possibly can,’ Ruskin advised, ‘if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet; go on quietly with your hard camp work, and the spirit will come to you in the camp …’ The spirit of which Ruskin spoke was imagination itself, that transform­ ative faculty with which his greatest of artists, namely J.M.W. Turner, engaged with Nature. But – Ruskin’s point – only by virtue of knowing and respecting the facts of the earth, ‘the shape of the ground’, could this happen. Ruskin, standing in Turner’s shoes, saw that the great painter composed a scene from different perspectives, each of which was true. He noted with approval the way Turner moved around a site in order to capture its truth, and how he tilted things to enhance their reality in nature. He saw, too, that the painter’s freedom in a place involved a trust in his process of working: ‘I never lose an accident,’ as Turner once said. The imagination of all great artists, Ruskin was saying, was ‘a brooding and a wandering … dream gifted’. The ‘manly power of it’ depended on ‘retentive and submissive faculties’, a ‘Freedom which consists in deep and soft consent of individual helpfulness’. I don’t mean that Wolseley arrived in Australia as a Ruskinite. Rather I wish to suggest that so much of what came to him naturally sprang from the harmonies of practice and discourse – the English Romantic densities – embodied by Ruskin. To the great tradition of English painting Ruskin marr­ ied the spirit of science with all that Coleridge had said about the imagination, and he did so in a way that made his teachings portable. New arrivals before Wolseley had used science, too. Nineteenth-century men – von Guerard, Chevalier and Martens – trekked into the bush under the sway of Alexander von Humboldt whom they regarded as ‘the father of physical geography’. In fact, they often reached their painterly ‘prospects’ by travelling with scientific expeditions. Yet here a unique aspect of Wolseley – 168 –

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emerges. The views painted by nineteenth-century men could not help but illustrate, one way or the other, the land in the process of being invaded, settled, possessed and imperialistically proclaimed. They were painters of the colonial earth. Wolseley, who arrived at Australia’s post-colonial moment, was creating a practice that moved across a new kind of Australian ground. His seminal new work was happening, now, all of the time. While communing with spoonbills, he kept up his journal and his sketchbook, where the writing and his drawing spoke to each other in the lucidly literate ways that would soon become the template for his approach to topographic space. And, with an equal naturalness, his sketchbook included maps, or what he called ‘mappy things’. They showed his camp sites, and aspects of the parish his perambulations had covered. The maps confirmed – to his quiet self in the bush – the spot where he had found refuge, and was able to learn and see things. The maps showed how he had circumscribed himself in his remote place; and they gave him room to plan and play freely with what he might do next in the place, which he had all to himself. For some time they remained, these sketchy maps, alone in the journal. They were not yet works in themselves, not yet. That came in 1976–77, when he was camping at Dingo Creek Road in Gippsland, tucked up in the Heartbreak Hills, on the southern slopes of the Strzelecki Ranges. There he did a breakthrough work, the one that signalled his uniquely creative arrival in the new country. He would drive the van up through the bracken and park at the top of the hill. ‘So you had the strange feeling of being secret and in the landscape, even though you were on the top of a bit of mountain. I always felt that this place had a resonance with the secret places in the deer park. This one has “the map of Ireland thing,” where in the deer park there were areas of sward or grass land encroached on all sides by bracken.’ And it had a pool of water from which he made the tea. ‘Ah is that a tea-leaf in the cup? No it’s a tadpole. It was deliciously scented, damp country.’ In Camp at Dingo Creek Road (1977), the main sheet is a torn-looking rectangle – a shape as irregular as a piece from a jigsaw. Three sheets keep it – 169 –

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company, each manifestly smaller pages from a notebook, the larger of them as ragged as the big sheet. Everything is done in pencil and a light wash – no highlights of colour or line. The four sheets sit together as quietly as birds on an undisturbed pond. Instantly you think: this is not an artwork that has been made, as art, so much as the result – contingent, casual, operational – of work which has arisen from a natural setting. On the main sheet it is the bird’s-eye view of a tent that catches your attention. It is fully three-dimensional, painted in a blue green wash. Its guy ropes stake out a little square of energy which commands the clearing. Nearby, at the edge of the clearing and comically out of scale, a stick figure swings in a hammock. The tripod for the campfire is to the ‘north’ of the tent, a little blue dam of water to the ‘south’, except that no compass direction is given. The whole image is both accurate orientation, and schema. ‘Here I camped,’ the sketch wants to announce, ‘take a walk out from here’ – and the oval shape of the clearing gives way on each side to suggestions of contour lines, trees, and foliage of various kinds. On the northern edge, you can see tree ferns. On the southern, the clearing falls away, down to a creek bed. Once this becomes clear, it’s obvious that the three smaller drawings illustrate the creek bed. Wolseley speaks of ‘describing my walk around the camp – walking all the way round. I did a lot of footsteps all the time, to show my walk.’ At the same time there are details nature designed to stop the eye. He points to the closely cropped grass, either side of the path: ‘It’s pretty Samuel Palmer really. You are in dense undergrowth and you are going into a pretty dense path. Graham Sutherland did lots of drawings of going through a path like this.’ The reference to Sutherland seems to lead him on: ‘I’d say I have tilted it up. I’ve tilted the land up – making it a little three-dimensional. And you could argue that it doesn’t work. It takes you a long time to think it’s a path going away, even though it is receding … But looking at the peeling bark, which does not happen in England! This is a tree everlasting frothing, a bit like Samuel Palmer frothing blossom. See the blossom on the end here?’

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He speaks of ‘doing little vignettes – of movement through a piece of country. These are sequential vignettes of a walk. But it’s not a scene, it’s a going into the landscape like a burrowing animal.’ Wolseley does not want to say that he has done a map but Camp at Dingo Creek Road was the most ‘mappy thing’ he had done. It is a work that puts the sketch to work as an aid to walking. It’s a work that does away with the picture frame, as forcefully as kicking a hole in the papered wall of his farmhouse. The mappy thing shows that he had in effect gone out through that hole in the wall, entering the new country as Alice had gone through her looking glass. Artistically, his father would have hated him for it, but the fact of the pictorial matter was that it constituted his way of making himself at home in the new habitat. Not long after Walk Around Dingo Creek, Wolseley went to Central Australia, as every Englishman new to the country must. From Alice Springs he was soon out at Papunya where he saw his first Aboriginal painting. It was by a man called Clifford Possum, who had carried his work up from the riverbed to show it on the back of a ute. It was explained to Wolseley that the painting was nothing less than a map of sacred ground. And the symbols used in the painting were, because of their secret and totemic power, almost constitutive of that sacred ground. The painting was a work of art, certainly: an act of creation that resulted in an object of contemplation. But that was less than half the story of the painting itself, since its making and its visual elements were actions akin to ritual performance. To paint was a double act: to represent, and to commemorate spiritually. To paint was to be in the map, body and soul. Of Australian Aboriginal painting it was possible to say – in a way that the European romantics had never been able to say truthfully – that inner and outer forms of meeting were in natural accord, that the landscape was profoundly at one with the self, that it was, cosmically speaking, the Self. As a religious vision it was as unified as anything dreamed by William Blake and Samuel Palmer. And it was as topographically imagined as anything extolled by Ruskin.

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Wolseley did what we all do when faced with the power and beauty of Central Australia. He became a student of the ‘other culture’, travelling into its country. He was taking notes from Nancy Munn’s classic study of Walpiri iconography, a book that gives one a sense of being able to read the signs in Aboriginal painting. He was making himself a student of other sign systems, but all the time he was making his own camps in the place, letting the Aboriginal presence co-exist with his own. One early camp was at Emily Gap, in Alice Springs, where it is impossible to be without feeling the power of a rock that stands in the middle of the gap in the range. Intwailuka’s stone is a place of ancestral genesis. Wolseley was moved enough by the fact: at dusk one day he walked to the stone, ‘and looked up at the sacred cave and down to those paintings on the rock strata. The idea that this is where the leader of a totem associated with edible larvae came to life, is very powerful. It is an emergent force.’ He felt that, well enough, as one does in Central Australia. But there is more feeling expressed in his note on the silence about him. ‘I could hear the flame on my match as I lit my pipe.’ And on a flock of birds that flew past in the darkness: ‘Very fast whooshing sound like wind – and on the moths flying out of the shadows of the gorge, glistening in the light of the big moon’. Then, when he looked back to the sacred rock, and the way in which it sat ‘just inside the perimeter of the broken line of the ranges’, he thought he would next day do a watercolour of it! By which he meant: he would paint a conventional – it is tempting to say, picturesque, since he had seen the rock framed in a certain way – picture of the scene. He is still an Englishman orienting to the new place. Faced with the rock strata of the gorge, he could exclaim: ‘This is etching country!’ Yet still he did not quite know what he was doing in Australia, let alone Central Australia. His two boys came on a visit from England and went with him to the Centre, even as their father was telling his diary that he was ‘spiritually if not tangibly giving up the home I’ve struggled for …’ Nor was he yet sure about his love-life, and how it was supposed to fit, or not fit, into the needs of a nomadic artist who must work and paint in different places. In the summer of 1979 he had finished The Wanderer by Knut Hamsun, and that did – 172 –

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not help much. He was however, working on what he called the BIG FINKE MAP. And that would help a very great deal. The last camp Wolseley made on his first visit to Central Australia was down in Palm Valley, which he reached in the most prosaic way by getting aboard the Billy King’s Tours coach, and getting off at the lush end of the valley. There, among the palms, he set up camp. After a week there he made a crucial, defining entry in his journal. You just can’t paint corners here. Fixed perspective is out. I think I might get the rhythm and vastness by doing a sort of physical map. There are no major features a la Constable, nor dramatic silhouettes. Its quality for me is to do with a repetition of exquisite detail and of subtle convolutions of land surface. To get this one must almost feel it tactily. I shall stick together some 25 rectangles of paper, to get a feeling of ‘Grid’. I shall draw each rising of ground from one angle and then walk over it and around it, and so on to the next one, and on and on and on – chinking of a loose 3/4 bird’s-eye view and explain how each movement folds into the next one. Then so as to give the whole a sort of armature, and also to describe the special quality of time: in this wandering I will punctuate it by describing and marking the night camps, and I will trace my footsteps by a red line, and draw each butterfly and beer can as I come to it like those explorers whose maps describe only what they see as it unfolds … a sort of Klee line going for a walk, but on to the Rock and sand and up spinifex and then on to the paper …

Everything was converging now, to secure his open way. His mappy things had destroyed the picture frame, releasing himself and the activity of painting into the country – and flouting the aesthetics of his father. The sketchbook, page by page, would help compose the big pictures, living demonstrations of his connections to the ground. On that ground he was going to draw all manner of particulars, from birds and lizards to beer cans – authentic proof of a journey. And that journeying – his movement through real space as well as that of the picture – was always going to be as poignant as what he had been admiring – 173 –

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in Aboriginal painting, its crossing of country as intricately and as interconnected as a bee’s work in a flower or its hive. Sweetness, that would often be the thing: his annotations would pollinate images. And images would do their own speaking, often in untidy ways, which he continued to value as he travelled. The movement, really, would never be incoherent. Art is never that, however makeshift. In fact, his larger pictures would become, in crucial ways, discursive, exploratory and aesthetically harmonious texts. They had old-fashioned aspects to them. But in more ways than one they were modern movements into freshly revealed places: they approached what Mallarmé called the orphic explanation of the Earth – with rhythms that were ‘impersonal and alive’, and which could line up with ‘that equation of a dream, an Ode’.

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T H ROUGH L A R A P I N TA L A N D Baldwin Spencer’s Glass Case

Of course after so very short a visit one’s opinion is worth little more than a conjecture; but it is as difficult not to form some opinion as it is to form a correct judgement … (Charles Darwin in Australia, January 29, 1836)

Spencer’s Narrative

Baldwin Spencer’s biographers, Mulvaney and Calaby (1985, p. 115), claim that Through Larapinta Land, the narrative of the Horn Expedition (Spencer 1896, Part 1), ranks among the few distinguished works of literature in the history of Australian exploration. This is a large claim, and one that places Spencer in a literary as much as a social context, which is as it should be. What I want to do here is table the considerations that warrant the claim, while at the same time suggesting that like all literary productions, the work is distinguished by certain disabilities, especially with regard to the story it tells (or rather does not tell) of Indigenous people. As a traveller’s tale it bears critical comparison with Giles; and as an exercise in popular science, which Spencer also intended it to be, it is a poor relative to that avuncular text of the age, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin 1936). I am not expecting Spencer to live up to the reputation of the great man: it would be absurd as well as unfair to compare an imperial architect of nineteenth century thought to one of its colonial artisans. I am, however, extending an invitation to critically read Through Larapinta Land in the appropriate company. When Spencer set off he already had literary landmarks that helped map, for better and worse, his encounter with central Australia and its inhabitants. But before the qualms – an appreciation of his achievement.

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Firstly, there is the bracing way in which it inspires one with a clear and comprehensive sense of the landscape, the country that had to be traversed. They were not exploring new country, Spencer points out, almost by way of lamenting their relative lack of adventure. But because the Expedition did go over the ground made familiar either by Gosse, Giles or Tietkens (not to mention the earlier penetrations of Sturt and Stuart), it was able to do so under a descriptive schema that brought a certain geographical order to the country. Thus the regions that the narrative presents to the armchair traveller and budding naturalist of central Australia: we start out on the Lower Steppes, the country between Oodnadatta and the James Range, move to the Higher Steppes of the Gill and Levi Ranges, and then (on Spencer’s side trip to the Rock) down into the Desert Country. When Spencer returns to the main party in the MacDonnell Ranges, they are in the Higher Steppes again, though by this time the general sub-regional categories have served their purpose: they have become the conceptual ground upon which to mark local differences of flora, fauna, geology and so on. Secondly, there is the quality of those descriptions, the way in which the narrative gives us such a vivid picture of the life forms that flourished in the desert, so called. Many passages suggest, at least in microcosm, an ecological sense of the place. When they had crossed the gibber plains and reached the grassy country of the Finke, Spencer wrote (1896, Part 1, p. 28): Many animals remain under shelter during the heat of the day; along the grassy flats kangaroos may be seen feeding, and on the Porcupine sandhills the Rat-kangaroos Bettongia lesueuri are constantly dodging in and out amongst the tussocks. The Jew lizard Amphibolurus barbatus is often seen sunning itself, and other allied species dart into their holes when disturbed. There is a great contrast in this respect between different lizards, and it is the Skinks which appear to be the most susceptible to heat. One day in summer, out amongst the hot sand in the bed of the Finke … the blacks came up with a number of lizards, and amongst them, a fine specimen of Tiliqua occipitalis. Having my hands – 176 –

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full of specimens, I asked a blackfellow to look after it and not to let it escape, when to my surprise he simply put it down on the hot sand. It was perfectly alive when put down, having been captured in its hole, and when placed on the ground it began to travel at some rate, but after going five yards, its movements became slower and before ten yards had been traversed they ceased and the animal was quite dead – simply apparently baked to death by contact with the hot sand.

There is much of this kind of thing in the narrative: pellucid, intellectually curious description of fauna that becomes, in its recounting, inseparable from other observations about nature and human kind. The further we go, the greater the number of life forms that come under Spencer’s daylight scrutiny. Insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, all manner of creatures, small and great, come under the microscope of his trained eye. The pleasure that one gets from this is profound, precisely because of the exhilarating breadth of the narrator’s supremely well-informed interests. Clouds, rainfall, weather, rocks – all is indeed of interest, in the here and now of the journey, and of course, by reference to the long history to be read in the fossils of things, in the origins of life that once existed in the ancient mountains and the old bed of the inland sea. To travel in Spencer’s Larapinta Land is in effect to move through the country with some of the best scientific understanding that could be brought into the place at the time. It was – and to some extent still is – to be transported through the country by Western Culture as defined by its Science. And this, of course, is integral to its achievement as literature, as a rich landmark in the terrain of the white man’s literary productions out of central Australia. There is another major credit to be given to the narrative in general: its ‘featuring’ (an apt term for custodians of museums) of the Indigenous population. The character of the ethnology that informed the Horn Expedition Reports we will come to later: here it must be said that in some fundamental ways central Australian Aboriginal culture was powerfully recognised for the first time. Spencer’s narrative collates observations about dress, ceremonies, social organisation – though none of this, it is important to note, is presented – 17 7 –

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as absolutely authoritative, which is as it should have been considering the visitors’ strangeness to the place, and their ignorance of Aboriginal languages. ‘The question of the possession of land is a more difficult one’ (than the poss­ ession of individual objects), writes Spencer, with creditable honesty. (This is still early in the trip: they have not even reached the Finke.) Then, a few camps further on, when they reach a protrusion called Castle Hill, Spencer (1896, Part 1, p. 50) makes one of the few observations that is profoundly comprehending of Aboriginal culture: The blacks have a rather curious myth to account for the origin of the pillar. They say that in what they call the Alcheringa (or as Mr Gillen appropriately renders it the ‘dream times’), a certain noted warrior journeyed to the east and killing with his big stone knife all the men, he seized the women and brought them back with him to his own country. Camping for the night on this spot he and the women were transformed into stone, and it is his body which now forms the pillar, whilst the women were fashioned into the fantastic peaks grouped together to form what is now known as Castle Hill, a mile away to the north.

It is, of course, a ‘curious’ myth only if you are outside it, which Spencer clearly was. But the essential connection between Aboriginal belief, and a sacred sense of country is made in that reference to ‘and it is his body that now forms the pillar’. And what Spencer’s general reader might have been grateful for, assuming they were interested in the fundamental connections between place and human settlement, was the reference to the Alcheringa. This is the first mention of ‘dream times’ in European writings about central Australia. It deepens the otherwise flimsy literary conceit and courtesy Spencer paid to the indigenous people when he called his narrative Through Larapinta Land, after what he took to be the native people’s name for the country of the Finke. Spencer as a Traveller

When Spencer first arrived in Melbourne, only nine years before the Horn Expedition, he found the scenery dull and monotonous; ‘simple eternal gum – 178 –

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trees’. He thought the birds did not sing as musically as their English counterparts. He lamented the provincial nature of the culture, the people’s obsession with horse racing, and the untoward relationships between master and servants. (He preferred the servants to better know their place, as in the old country.) Still, as he adjusted to the Colony’s cultural milieu, he saw the possibility of a bright future. This because of the independence and self-reliance of the Australian bushman, some of whose skills he had himself been acquiring on naturalist excursions to King Island and the mountains of Victoria (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, pp. 73–74). In Through Larapinta Land, however, Spencer does anything but boast of his bushmanship. In the first few pages he is concerned to do something else; slow up the reader’s entry into the country. We have been given the geographical structure of the trip, the eminent members of the party have been listed (each with their specialism designed to segment the field), and then we are told: … it must also be remembered that travelling is often slow and tedious and from a collector’s point of view a camel is the most unsatisfactory of beasts … A camel has a peculiar way of its own of getting up, which is bad enough and when done slowly; but when it is in a hurry, then you have to be very careful not to get an ugly bump or fall. The moment you are in your seat behind the hump, or perhaps before you are there, he rises with a jerk half way up on his hinder legs, throwing you forwards; before you have time to recover your balance up go the front legs half way, then it rises completely on its hind legs and finally on its front legs – a fourfold movement of a most disagreeable nature …

And so on – a burlesque that starts on the third page of Spencer’s narrative, and continues. The space given to it rather suggests that even though we have started out we are going nowhere. Structurally, it sits in the place that Darwin gave to his account of falling out of, or trying to get in, his hammock – a ludicrous episode (his terms) that beset his first days on the Beagle, and a humiliation only capped by the seasickness which would flatten – 179 –

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him as far as the Bay of Biscay (Darwin 1988, p. 10). With Darwin we read the initial disdain of the gentleman, a man born to leisure, for the sheer physicality of travel (a pose that wears off as he becomes an intrepid traveller, especially on land in South America). Spencer is signalling, in his selfimproving way, that their trip was not without its hardships (that he in turn would also over­come most uncomplainingly). Spencer is also striking a pose with respect to the Australian Outback, advertising himself, you might say, as something less than a complete bushman: as a British new chum, no less. Don’t mistake me, Spencer seems to be saying between the lines, as another Giles. All of which strikes distancing notes from the country he is about to travel through. It sets up few expectations of engagement with the landscape – engagement of the kind, say, that Giles went in for when he came to write his journals of exploration through the same country only 20 years before. Giles, recall, was travelling with his scientific brief for Baron Von Mueller. At the same time, Giles was the kind of man who read Byron for breakfast and then saddled his horses. Giles brought a poetic sensibility to the Centre. Here he is waxing fully (Giles 1875, pp. 76-77): … the last two or three miles having been open and beautifully green. From the top of this ridge we had before us a most charming piece of country, red ridges of the most extraordinary shape and appearance tossed up in all directions, with the slopes of the sandy soil from whence they seemed to spring rising gently, and covered with verdure like a green carpet up to their feet. The slopes are most beautifully clothed with grass, herbs and flowers of the most varied hues, throwing a magic charm over the entire scene. Vast bare rocks – ‘Piled on rocks stupendous hurled Like fragments of an earlier world.’ – appeared everywhere; but the main tier of ranges, for which I had been steering, was several miles further to the west. But thinking that water – the scarcest of Nature’s gifts – must surely exist in such a lovely region as this, it was more with the keen and critical eye of the explorer in search of

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that element, than of the ‘admirer of Nature in her wildest grace’ that I surveyed the scene.

The next day Giles speaks of the night air as ‘cool and deliciously laden with the scented exhalations from shrubs and flowers. The odour of almonds was most intense, reminding me of the perfumes of the wattle blooms of the eastern and more fertile portions of the continent’. What we have in effect is a sensual and imaginative address to the physical reality he was in; it represents, in literary terms, an involvement with the landscape. Spencer’s prose was not without a sense of beauty. Through Larapinta Land is in this regard written to please: there are several memorable scenic reflections, once the trip gets going, once the camels (and flies!) are adjusted to, you might say. One runs: In the desolate gibber country near the Macumba the effect was really beautiful. Away to the east the land rose to flat-topped, terraced ranges. In the foreground were white-blue salt bushes, with pale, light blue patches of low herbage and still lighter tufts of grass amongst them, standing out in strong contrast to the purple-brown gibbers. The country was crossed by dark lines of mulga, marking the creek beds and streaking away up to the hills, which stood out sharply against a cold steel-blue sky, melting above into salmon-pink and this into deep ultra marine. In the west was a rich after-glow, against which the stony plains and hills looked dark purple, with the mulga branches standing out sharp and thin against the sky. (Spencer 1896, Part 1, p. 17).

Spencer’s biographers cite this passage and remark how the arid waste lands stirred his romantic artistry, which indeed seems to be the case, especially if one allows for the listings of colours available in the artist’s paint box that he had long abandoned in favour of the biologist’s pen. But there is quite another dimension to Spencer’s lyrical outburst. It turns out to be nothing of the kind. The above passage is preceded by remarks designed to take everything away from what has been admired (Ibid., p. 17): – 181 –

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Travelling over this country during daytime, with its dried up creeks and stony gibber plains, there is little which looks picturesque; but at sundown the scene becomes quite changed, and it is hard to believe that the picturesque appearance is due simply to atmospheric conditions (my italics).

On the one hand, it seems to me, we have a traveller compelled to grapple with the mysterious presence of beautiful and awesome places in central Australia. On the other we have a man conspicuously intent on stripping from it that power, the better to tell us what it really is, without the light! Just as his narrative begins by understating the gusto with which the bushman might grapple with the physical realities of the region, he manages, with his dispassionate visual response, to neutralise its aesthetic power. It is tempting to say here that on both counts – with regard to his own place in the landscape, and with respect to its grandeur – he naturalised things, which is to say that he makes a show of himself putting things in their place. The general point is that the wonder of reading Giles, who had constantly to make sense of the new, and who, in the process made such a good open fist of it as a passionate, imaginative, brave and wrong-headed writer, is quite unlike the admiration appropriate to Spencer’s descriptive command of the area. Giles of necessity is drawing our attention to the movement and process of discovery. Spencer is con­ducting us through the geographical categories that have been confirmed as a result of the journey. We might say that the explorer and the naturalist issue different invitations to the general reader: the former beckons the adventurer out of the armchair into the open field of experience: the latter urges the reader into the study where the maps are, or still further ‘indoors’ to that temple of knowledge called the museum. Spencer’s Intellectual Precursors

Most literary endeavours have their precursors, the best of which influences work of the day. When Baldwin Spencer inherited the invidious task of coordinating the findings of his fellow scientists on the Horn Expedition, he first – 182 –

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of all looked to the publications that issued from the great ocean voyage of the Challenger in 1872, which yielded 50 massive authoritative volumes published over 20 years (Cowan 1960). One of the four naturalists on the voyage was H. N. Moseley, later to become his teacher at Oxford. Spencer greatly admired Moseley’s erudition and breadth; he thought Moseley knew, not only so much that had to be known about the natural world, but a very great deal about anthropology, as much as the famous E. B. Tylor (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, p. 50). Three years after the Challenger returned, Moseley published his Notes by a Naturalist, An account of Observations. ‘Moseley was not a Darwin nor a Wallace,’ as a later editor of the volume was to observe (Moseley 1944, p. ix), ‘but he possessed in common with these great thinkers and generalisers the gift of accurate observation, and the ability to interpret what he saw.’ Moseley himself wrote: ‘Man seems to be almost the only mammal that collects and stores uneatable objects.’ This was at Tenerife, in the early stage of the journey that was so often in the wake of the Beagle. At Tenerife Moseley admired the beauty of the women, as Darwin had; and at Tenerife he began to let his trained eye wander far and wide, possessing everything he could by way of observation. Thereafter his text collects, as if they were specimens themselves, all manner of things – from sharks to sea urchins, to humming birds, spiders, ants and wild goats, with vegetation, topography and clouds remarked upon along the way. When Moseley stopped in Australia, marsupials, the platypus, the natives, all these were his interests, as they had been Darwin’s. But he was less for­ tunate than his mentor. He never saw a kangaroo (though he reproduced an Aboriginal cave painting of one), nor a platypus, though a black man (whose tracking skills reminded him of a Tamil) showed him the duck-like prints in the mud (Moseley 1944, p. 228). He did see a native camp on the Upper Yarra River. It was a hop farm run by a mission station. Moseley noted the reluctance with which the natives tilled the soil. He declared them lazy, while cognisant that they were less so when they played cricket. From the point of view of a naturalist he lamented the passing of their tribal state. In some of

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the high gum trees there were still the climbing notches cut by the stone axes. ‘Now that the blacks are gone they remind one of fossil foot-prints of extinct animals,’ he wrote (Ibid., p. 224). There are nice touches in Moseley’s sketchy notes on Australia that suggest a willing Englishman in friendly encounter with the vernacular of the place. On an excursion out of Melbourne he met the bush in no uncertain terms: ‘We had some difficulty in finding our way … to the best camping place, and then in finding the water hole and leading the horses to it. We set fire to a great fallen log, made tea in a billy, a simple tin pot with a wire handle, the universal Australian camp teapot, and had hardly lain down to sleep under our tent before it came onto rain heavily. It continued to rain all the next day’ (Ibid., p. 223). In New South Wales, however, he was made more comfortable, socially and physically. He stayed at Camden Park with the Macarthurs, as Darwin had done. No black’s camp or mission station on that 10,000 acres. After dinner he went possum shooting in the moonlight. The slaughter, with the terrified animal frozen against the tree, was called ‘mooning’ the possum. It frustrated Moseley that even a dead possum strived to hang upside down out of reach. He also shot native cats, the fruit-eating bats colonists called Flying Foxes, and bush wallabies. There is relish in these pages, the relish of man acting in the spirit, not simply of the detached collector of specimens, but of a one entitled to be Lord of his Manor, master of life and death. He also notes (Ibid., p. 239), ‘as a naturalist’, by which he seems to signal his dispassionate interest, that it was a pity that ‘matters were not in the same condition as in the days of Captain Cook, and the colonists replaced by the race which they have ousted and destroyed, a race far more interesting and original from an anthropological point of view.’ The morality of this last remark was ambiguous. But then, so too was the whole business of living in a liberal colony in transition. The point here is that this kind of writing, with its blend of scientific precision, naive anecdote, and opinion shaped by cultural necessity – the obligation to say what one thought, to opine, even if the observer’s thoughts were impressionist and wrong – was

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the genre that helped determine Through Larapinta Land as much as the travelling itself. And behind Moseley, of course, was the great mentor, Charles Darwin, whose Voyage of the Beagle was the scientific travel book of the age. First published in 1839, and worked up from the fairly expansive diaries of the voyage, diaries which in turn were often written up weeks after events initially recorded in his note books, Voyage became a best seller. It shows us the Naturalist in traditional as well as incipiently new mode. The traditional mode was that of the virtuoso, a gentleman of science, the Renaissance scholar and collector of natural and cultural wonders in the world (Gascoigne 1994, pp. 58–62). In this Darwin was the descendant of men like Sir Joseph Banks, an aristocratic man of letters whose formal training in science was limited, a custodian of what might be called ‘polite knowledge’ as distinct from expertise hard won by professional dedication. Incipiently new in Darwin’s journal was the latter, the notion of specialist scholarship, with its promise of science as a profession. Darwin’s own expertise in geology and zoology foreshadows the professionalism that men like Spencer would eventually embody. In Darwin’s time an Enlightenment breadth of concern was still possible, and it was this eighteenth-century air, with its trust in speculative reason, that blows through his narrative. The naturalist was a philosopher at large, you might say. ‘Natural history … is very suitable to a clergyman,’ Darwin’s father told him when the young man sought permission to join the Beagle (Railing 1979, pp. 17–32). Father still hoped his son would join the Church, that Darwin might be ordained, so to speak, to wander in the fields of the Lord. Indeed, Darwin’s vivid display of observations of clouds, frogs, butterflies, beetles, spiders was a homage to nature expressing his own religious awe. In narrative terms, it was precisely this enthusiasm for a plein air catalogue of interests, a dance of concerns that was in turn mimicked, bowerbird fashion, by the likes of Moseley in his tourist flights from object to object, just as it was by Spencer, right down to his practical interest in ants (cf. Spencer 1896, Part 1, p. 29 and Darwin 1936, p. 425). With Darwin speculations about Nature grow in grandeur and contentiousness as his narrative progresses, which is

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also to say as he learnt to write in the conceptual links between his shaping observations, a process he was very conscious of doing from notes made in the field. Even today it is impossible not to be charmed by the narrative skills of an unassuming young man who had a keen eye for the beauty of the world, a compassionate heart, and a developing, open intelligence keen to display its insatiable curiosity about the dynamic pattern of things, large and small. Consequently the Voyage of the Beagle is an exhilarating blend of two domains that later science would seek to keep apart: the subjective and the objective, its humanistic blend of science and lyricism. In years to come it is precisely that personal element that would be written out of scientific proceedings by respectable professionals like Baldwin Spencer – a development that had important ramifications for the narrative significance of Indigenous people. On board the Beagle were three young natives from the end of the earth itself. The summer before, in Tierra del Fuego, Captain King had one of his boats stolen by the cunning savages. In retaliation he had taken the culprits’ families as hostages. As an experiment, King decided to take them back to England to see if they could be taught ‘English … the plainer truths of Christianity … and the use of common tools’. Now they were back on board destined for repatriation (Desmond and Moore 1993, p. 106). Darwin keenly observed these ‘savages’, as indeed he observed everything else. During his worst bouts of sickness it was young Jemmy Button who most often came to his side and murmured, ‘Poor Fellow, Poor Fellow’. Darwin felt this to be the boys ‘natural’ compassion; he had the wit not to put it down to Christian ethics, especially considering the fact that Jemmy sometimes smiled on the other side of his hand. With regard to the tenyear-old girl, Fuegia Basket, Darwin saw that she ‘was very quick on learning anything, especially languages’ (Darwin 1936, pp. 197–98). This she showed in picking up some Portuguese and Spanish, when left on shore for only a short time at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and in her knowledge of English. Darwin added: ‘Although all three could both speak and understand a good deal of English, it was singularly difficult to obtain much

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information from them concerning the habits of their countrymen …’ This he put down to their difficulty in understanding what he called ‘the simplest alternative … whether a thing is black or white.’ It is an interesting observation on Darwin’s part, which today we would explore by reference to linguistic differences between cultures rather than cognitive difference based on race. Significantly, however, Darwin does not take this step in his speculations: nor does he take the discussion in a dogmatic direction about fixed differences between races. In fact, what is interesting about most of his observations about indigenous peoples is his environmental refrain, his alertness to the ways in which people differ due to their circumstances. The openness with which he took reflective stock of human difference, including his alertness to his own, and his own culture’s ignorance of the language of other people, was an enlightened stance for the times. When it came to the political predicament of indigenous peoples, Darwin nevertheless seems to have been a fatalist. While he abhorred slavery, he did not oppose Empire. Out on the grass lands of Argentina, on the plains where he camped and noted a ‘death-like stillness’, he found the Spanish had a standing army under General Rosa. The army was for the precise purpose of ‘exterminating’ the gauchos. (Darwin 1936, pp. 98 ff.). The term is Darwin’s, and it is used, shockingly, over and over again as he describes the relentlessness with which this war was conducted in order to possess the land for estates of cattle. His compassion and admiration for the gauchos were clear enough, and in due course he is glad to report, since leaving South America, that the war of extermination failed, but this, too, is reported with a certain equanimity. In the Journal there follows a long speculation on exterminations in another context – by reference to the disappearance of species from whole continents, and on how ‘profoundly ignorant we are about the conditions of existence of every animal’, or what he calls later in the same paragraph, ‘the economy of nature’. A brooding pessimism seems sometimes to invade Darwin’s narrative, a mood touched by an almost fatalistic acquiescence to ignorance in the face of the natural history.

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Darwin and Australia

Darwin arrived in Australia in the parched summer of 1836. He immediately registered dismay of the kind that Moseley and Spencer would duly echo: about vegetation, aridity, the social mores of the colony. It was while travelling inland from Bathurst, after noting the woods that had ‘a desolate and untidy appearance’, that he met his first Aborigines (Darwin 1936, pp. 417–18): At sunset a party of a score of the black aborigines passed by, each carrying in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons. By giving a leading young man a shilling, they were easily detained, and threw their spears for my amusement. They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English; their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses, and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.

As Darwin developed his thinking towards the vehicle to be called Social Darwinism – the ideology that had the conventional minds of the Horn Expedition in thrall – much would depend on the ethical valuations built into notions of higher and lower (Butcher 1989, 1994). He is already attuned to the issue. In the Journal he carefully uses the phrase ‘some few degrees higher’. In his diary, however, he also wrote: ‘some few degrees higher in civilization, or more correctly, a few lower in barbarism, than the Fuegians’ (Darwin – 18 8 –

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1988, p. 398). At the very least, the modification suggests some ambivalence in Darwin about the absolutes on the scale of civilisation: at best, perhaps, it suggests that the Enlightenment man sensed that our common humanity demanded a more generous phrasing. In the years between the publication of the Journal and his writing of the Diaries, Darwin had been struggling with the issue of higher and lower. His focus was sharpened by correspondence with the botanist Joseph Hooker about Australian flora, and their relative hardiness compared to some English species. In summary Hooker argues for the rejection of higher/lower as a criterion of species classification, in favour of morphological differentiations. For a time Darwin agreed, but finally returned to the overriding criteria of the survival principle (Butcher 1994, p. 167). Ironically, in the Diary entry, where the judgmental phrasing is most extreme, there is no development of the idea of survival of the fittest. But in the Journal, in the passages that immediately follow, there is. Darwin (1936, p. 418) reflects on the decreasing numbers of Aborigines. ‘It must be owing to the drinking of Spirits,’ he writes, ‘to European diseases … and to the gradual extinction of the wild animals.’ Then, after considering other places of Empire (the Americas, Polynesia and the Cape of Good Hope), he says: ‘Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal … The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals – the stronger always exploiting the weaker’. This is the same ideologically coloured fatalism as before, and there is food enough, clearly, for all the Social Darwinists in the world. But still we should attend to the other thing in Darwin’s passage. Its particularity, its concrete alertness to the people before his eyes. His narrative does deliver to us the actual vitality and living presence of indigenous people; and this is the case whether it be the good looking women in the Canary Islands, his first port of all, the homecoming people in Tierra del Fuego; or the spear throwing Australians. To this extent, therefore, a ribbon of tolerance runs through the Voyage of the Beagle. Admittedly, a large ambiguity informs what Darwin is saying – 18 9 –

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about large scale questions of survival, but this it seems to me is a blessing, precisely because it allows room for some description of the meetings that took place. In this way the Beagle is an invitingly open narrative compared to Through Larapinta Land with its sealed social certainties. Spencer’s Darwinism

Spencer himself had no need to be expansive about his Darwinism. This was done for him by Horn, in the Introduction, and then by Professor Stirling in the fourth volume on Anthropology. Horn (1896, p. ix) told ‘civilized’ readers of the time: The Central Australian aborigine is the living representative of a stone age, who still fashions his spear heads and knives from flint or sandstone and performs the most daring surgical operations with them. His origin and history are lost in the gloomy mists of the past. He has no written records, and few oral traditions. In appearance he is a naked, hirsute savage, with a type of features occasionally pronouncedly Jewish. He is by nature light-hearted, merry and prone to laughter, a splendid mimic, supple-jointed, with an unerring hand that works in perfect unison with his eye, which is as keen as that of an eagle. He has never been known to wash. He has no private ownership of land, except as regards that which is not over carefully concealed about his person. He cultivates nothing, but lives entirely on the spoils of the chase … … He is a keen observer and knows the habits and changes of form of every variety of animal or vegetable life in his country. Religious belief he has none, but is excessively superstitious, living in constant dread of an Evil Spirit which is supposed to lurk round his camp at night. He has no gratitude except that of the anticipatory order, and is as treacherous as Judas. He has no traditions and yet continues to practise with scrupulous exactness a number of hideous customs and ceremonies which have been handed from his fathers, and of the origin or reason of which he knows nothing … – 19 0 –

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Spencer’s narrative was, quite literally, framed by racist dogma, the ‘Science’ that so neatly rationalised colonialism. Stirling’s work, the quality of which he himself doubted, was filled with rudimentary sketches of Aboriginal social life, their material means of production, description of body decoration and some ceremonies, along with a systematic devaluation of Aboriginal religion, language, and mental abilities. In effect, what we have with the Horn Report’s anthropology is the naturalist’s view of the external trappings of a culture – cultural life objectified as a part of Nature, while the culture itself is relegated to the fossil heap of History. As we travel with Spencer, Through Larapinta Land, sometimes this is explicit, sometimes not. It is explicit when he makes remarks about the mental disposition of ‘black boys’, his condescending term for the grown men who were his guides, helpers, and informants, and upon whom the expedition crucially depended for its many specimens. The narrative acknowledges the debt while at the same time mouthing Darwinian platitudes about the inferior mental abilities of the natives. It is less explicit, more a matter of Spencer’s political reticence, when it comes to the social plight of Aborigines whose estates had in recent years been invaded by pastoralists. Like Darwin on the grass lands of Argentina, Spencer had come into a frontier where indigenous people were being forcefully dispossessed. Massacres had already occurred. At crucial points along the trail – Tempe Downs, Glen Helen – Spencer mixed with the early settlers and would have partaken first hand of the frontier culture that sought, with its mixture of courage, desperation and fear, to justify such slaughter. But on these matters the narrative is silent. Through Larapinta Land generally evades the essential political question of white settlement on Aboriginal land. It was only in the context of indicting the work of the Hermannsburg mission, with all its Germanic commitment to a faith that had long ceased to warm his own heart, that Spencer ventures a moral view (Spencer 1896, Part 1, p. 111). … In contact with the white man the aborigine is doomed to disappear: it is far better that as much as possible he should be left in his – 191 –

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native state and that no attempt should be made either to cause him to lose faith in the strict tribal rules, or to teach him abstract ideas which are utterly beyond the comprehension of an Australian Aborigine.

This, obviously, is a lordly and well-meaning statement. We might read it today as a philanthropic corrective to the callous fatalism that social Darwinism condoned. It anticipates the outlook Spencer would enact when he became Northern Territory Protector of Aborigines twenty years later. And yet, expressed here, in the broad expanse of the narrative of Through Larapinta Land, it does look like a strange out­crop, a kind of Chambers Pillar of secular liberal tolerance in the white man’s desert of indifference to the inner life, to the full and often sacred subjectivity of the Aborigines. An Impersonal Narrative

If there is one word I would use to characterise Through Larapinta Land it is impersonal. Gesture though Spencer does towards the informalities that might make the reader feel at ease with gentlemen scientists in the Outback, he fails throughout to draw us towards the camp fire, or into the physical grandeur of the country, or to register in any way the richness of human experience that lies in the first encounter of one culture with another – the complex human drama of such an event when it is well described, as it regularly has been since Cortes invaded the New World. Spencer’s published narrative is too invested in the form and content of cultural management to do any of this: its stylishness, its polished prose and surface fluency is a doubleglazing between the conventions of respectable presentation and what ever happened ‘in the field’. That is why diaries, fresher, less formal writing, are tellingly supplementary of his narrative. They also suggest the process by which he gained his knowledge of the natural and human environment, something which the worked-up public product did not. He kept three little notebooks (the smallest is only six by three inches). To the brief notes he added drawings and placed occasional specimens of – 19 2 –

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flora: the spines of the little books still have grit and organic matter in them. For the contemporary researcher these material traces of the centre are redolent enough. There is more. One page, otherwise blank, has a specimen of human hair taped into it. It is labelled, ‘lock of child’s hair (female)’. The heart stops a moment at the event of turning a page in human life a century after the act of collection. Who was the girl? Under what circumstances was a part of her hair transported from her head to the hands of the visiting stranger? What became of her? If only Spencer had thought to mention this episode on his journey through the centre, to note it as occurrence, if not the girl’s name. Much of the diary is in pencil; the signs are as delible, in their own way, as Aboriginal markings on a tree. While most of the entries are curt, their very informality is suggestive of work in progress (or on the back of a camel). The fine little drawings of frogs, fish, lizards, in their sketchiness, are illustrative of the makeshift business of gaining and recording knowledge in the field. Compared to the narrative, the diary gives the clearest sense of the travelling: camp sites are numbered and named all the way. Landscape descriptions tend to be more candid. ‘Country passed through most miserable,’ Spencer wrote, with his touch for uncomplaining understatement when they were in gibber country. No painting of pretty pictures here; just the bones of dour recognition. At the better watered places, where they stayed longest, his smallest notebook came into its own; it is illuminated not only by insects and animals but human hands as well – the genesis of his study of Gesture language that would feature in Stirling’s volume on Anthropology. From the start Spencer was writing down Aboriginal words. One day out of Adelaide we read: ‘Locust, native name Indilja’ and on the same page there is a little sketch of an amera, a throwing stick, along with words for kangaroo, wallaby and emu. It is, however, a very primitive note, in that the Aboriginal language is not named, or its location identified. Spencer also observed the strips of human hair worn by the natives and noted that they were worn when people were in mourning. A week later he is writing rudimentary things about ceremonies, including this entry: – 193 –

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Harry gave us an account of rough native implement found by side of O-creek. That’s for cutting body in circumcision. One made of glass bottle with very sharp edge used for shaving hair only.

Harry will be mentioned a lot in the diary, along with his friend, Peter, another Aboriginal Spencer thought fit to name, as well as specify as ‘black’. Thereafter Harry and Peter will help with all manner of things, and their frequent reference by name creates a very different atmosphere to that of the narrative with its lofty reference to blackboys. By the time they reach the Finke, they are joined by Tom, and it is at Henbury Station, where they camped on 27 May, that Spencer spent the day at the black’s camp. Harry, Peter and Thomas seem to have been go-betweens, so he was able to learn about people’s country, body decoration, and the ‘gesture language’. The latter was easier to get at than what was spoken. With regard to Aboriginal language, Spencer had already expressed frustration: ‘difficult to ascertain names of tribes,’ he wrote, before noting what was evidently more straightforward: ‘Some had Jewish cast of face’ (an entry which is a sharp reminder of the racist categories that disgraced the Report’s anthropology). The point to be made here is that the diary, as distinct from the narrative, conveys at least something of the particular social reality between the white visitors and the country’s Aboriginal inhabitants. It is perhaps too strong to say that the diary suggests a ‘relationship’ between Spencer and his Aboriginal associates. But exchanges of certain kinds are at least evident. One kind of exchange was straightforward. When Spencer was at ‘the black’s camp’ at the Olgas he wrote: Blacks were very frightened at first but were reassured by Johnny cakes, fat, sugar and a few lucifers. Gave black my sheath knife for his gear – chignon and basket. Latter evidently precious.

In the Narrative the same event is vividly expanded, allowing Spencer to recount many of his observations about body decoration and head gear. In fact Spencer’s descriptive detail somewhat masks the stark nature of the encounter, – 194 –

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especially when we are told the Aboriginal’s real name, Lungkartiktukuana, as Spencer records it at the Olgas. The man must have been Pitjantjatjara as Lungkata is Pitjantjatjara for the Sleepy Lizard, an important story in the area. Spencer seems unaware of that meaning; indeed he has not registered any difference between these people and the Aranda he will come to focus on. In any case, the brute nature of what Spencer wanted to say is clear from both accounts: that the white men anxiously, if not adventurously, encountered savages, outwitted them, and got something from them. Spencer’s reference to the ‘precious’ basket sounds innocuous, but later on in the trip he was to be the recipient of churingas, the value of which were just becoming known to white men on the frontier. Secret hiding places were found and the objects plundered, often with the help of Aborigines seeking trade. The Aboriginal go-between put himself in great danger, but it was only when one was killed in vengeance for his sacrilege – some months after Spencer got back to Melbourne – that the nature of the white man’s offence was fully considered. While on the Horn Expedition, Spencer happily received and solicited the stolen goods, while well knowing their cultural importance. In his notebook, the red one, which he started in Alice Springs, when he was writing down what Frank Gillen told him, he recorded: Sacred Stones. ‘Choorinya’ – generally in various ways. Greatly prized. Handed down from generation to generation. No lubra sees them. Hidden in spots known only to few men of tribe. Lubra goes to one of these would be killed. Strengthen man who has it and makes him invisible to enemies. Kaidatcha always has one of these in outfit. Till he strikes blow and then he places it between his teeth. In battle carried by chief many older men.

So that is one thing. Spencer’s knowing sense of trespass and half conceded sense of plunder are not apparent in the narrative, the sub-text of which assumes the right of gentlemen of science to collect what ever they liked, or to use his biographers’ vivid phrase, to ‘rape tribal lore in the name of science’ – 195 –

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(Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, p. 127). What the diary also has, and the narrative does not, is a bald acknowledgement that the natives lived in a culture full of significant if not sacred meanings. While there is only one ‘dreamtime’ story in the narrative, there are several in the little red book. What a wonderfully different story Spencer would have told of his expedition if he had seen fit to place some Aboriginal narrative in his passage in the country, rather than deleting it, or bracketing it, like material that had found its way into the wrong specimen box. The diary illustrates another kind of exchange that the narrative does not. Between May 24 and May 26, when they were between Chambers Pillar and Henbury Station, Spencer records what Harry told him: Long time ago MacDonnell black fell come along my country – fight. M fella got his shield and spear same as any country, but no big bugger boomerang only little bugger. My country throw him my bigger boomerang, breaking his ass over end back along their country. [Spencer adds:] Harry’s account of fight between his tribe and the MacDonnell.

We are not told, or rather Spencer did not write it to inform himself in the diary, how it came about that Harry was telling that story, or how many other stories like it, he or his friends told. Darwin, we might recall, was full of praise about indigenous skill with new languages, but to read Spencer’s narrative you would hardly know the extent to which Aboriginal life had entered the English speaking world. Spencer’s lack of recounting on these matters rather creates the impression that the natives were either still rooted in their own brute language, or, in so far as they could converse freely with the visitors, kept a respectful silence befitting of a servant class. Forms of propriety dominated. The informal exchanges – the easier human exchanges between the races – remain unnoted, unstudied, and perhaps even unobserved. Harry’s anecdote is left out of the narrative, just as the possibilities of full human relationship with Aborigines were neglected by the urbane, nineteenth-century gentleman who passed through the native’s

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country oblivious to the powers of Aboriginal adaptation to change, to evidence of their ways of survival. The Collector’s Display

I have been treating Through Larapinta. Land as a narrative because it is called one. But the description is dubious if by narrative we think of a recounting that has a certain momentum through time, space, ideas. This is what Through Larapinta Land is not. Its tempo is peripatetic, its trajectory circuitous, its level of abstraction rudimentary. It is not a journey of ideas. Rather I would call it, ‘Notes of a Naturalist in central Australia’, or rather, A Report on Notes of a Naturalist in central Australia. This perhaps pins the text’s static quality, its lack of directional rhythm, the absence of which accentuates the peculiar aloofness of the narrator. All of which is borne out by its ending, that point in most narratives where all that has gone before is thrown into relief. ‘It will be,’ writes Spencer on the last page, ‘many years before the recollection of our stay at Alice Springs fades from our memory, for it came as a pleasant ending to an Expedition, which had carried us into parts of the continent remote from the usual beaten tracks. Looking back upon our Expedition a few scenes stand out prominently.’ A fragmentary list of scenes follows, each of them designated with clichés. The writing here is poor, the stance already nostalgic, and oddly perfunctory. In effect Spencer brings his narrative to a dwindling curatorial close. Another way of putting this is to say that there was never enough ‘story’ in it, that it had too little drama. Not so with The Voyage of the Beagle, which comes to its memorable close when Darwin makes three bold, narrative moves. Hyman (1974, pp. 15–17) has a splendid discussion of the dramatic qualities of Darwin’s conceptions and narrative. There is Darwin’s magisterial summary statement about slavery, where he indicts England’s record of it, and anguishes: ‘Picture yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children … being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder’ (Darwin 1936, p. 481). The empathetic moral here is of the consanguinity of all things, of all creatures in – 19 7 –

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Nature: the notion of ‘every one members of another’, to use St Paul’s words. If Spencer had expressed anything like this in central Australia we would have had altogether a more human narrative. Then Darwin muses on the wonders of the world he has seen – ‘the varied productions of the God of Nature’ – as he theatrically puts it, thus evoking dramas of fact as well as perception. He has indeed seen many spectacular things. Yet the image that keeps coming back to him is that of the empty plains of Patagonia. Without water, trees, mountains, supporting only dwarf plants, without habitations, ‘wretched and useless’. Why should they hold his memory? He answers: ‘I can scarcely answer these feelings, but I suppose it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination’ (my italics). And that is what is lacking in Spencer’s notes: imagination; or much appeal to our imagination. The last sentence of the Beagle begins: ‘Travelling ought also to teach him (the naturalist) distrust …’ Darwin is talking about the moral lessons to be had from travel, a matter hardly reflected upon by Spencer. Through Larapinta Land fails to engage our powers of imagining our connectedness with all living things and places, including our human gift for imagining others, which is the basis of all moral quandary. To state its literary limitations metaphorically: rather than place central Australia at the living heart of our culture, it dissects that heart at a remove from the complexities of social experience, as an exhibit to be clinically displayed in that receptacle beloved of nineteenth century gentlemen, the glass case. References

Butcher, B. W., 1989. ‘Adding stones to the Greek pile?’ Charles Darwin’s use of Australian resources 1837–1882. Historical Records of Australian Science 8(1): 1–14. Butcher, B. W., 1994. Darwinism, social Darwinism and the Australian Aborigine. PhD thesis. Deakin University: Geelong. Cowan, R.. C., 1960. Frontiers of the sea. The story of oceano-graphic explorations. Gollancz: London. Darwin, C., 1936. The Voyage of the Beagle. Everyman: London. Darwin, C., 1988. Charles Darwin’s Beagle diary ed by R. D. Keynes. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Desmond, A. and Moore, J., 1993. Darwin. Michael Joseph: London.

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T hrough L arapinta L and Gascoigne, J., 1994. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment. Useful knowledge and polite culture. Cambridge University Press: Sydney. Giles, E., 1875. Geographic travels in central Australia from 1872 to 1874. McCarron Bird and Co: London. Hyman, S. E., 1974. The tangled bank. Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as imaginative writers. Atheneum: London. Moseley, H. N., 1944. Notes by a naturalist during the voyage of HMS ‘Challenger’. Laurie: London. Mulvaney, D. J. and Calaby. J. H., 1985. ‘So much that is new’: Baldwin Spencer 1860–1929. Melbourne University Press: Melbourne. Railing, C., 1979. The voyages of Charles Darwin. His auto­biographical writings selected and arranged by Christopher Ralling. BBC: London. Spencer, B. (ed), 1896. Report on the work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to central Australia, 4 vols. Melville, Mullin and Slade: Melbourne. Spencer, B., 1894. Diaries of the Horn Expedition. Mss, Archives Museum of Victoria: Melbourne.

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NO T E S ON T ER R A N U L L I U S Travelling North

Judith Wright: We Call For a Treaty (1987) Ralph Folds: Whitefella School (1987)

Darwin, Federal Election Night

A striking thing about Judith Wright’s sadly neglected book, apart from the passion and studious cogency, is its optimism. It chronicles in a campaign.

ing way the work of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee from its inception in 1978, when it appeared that just about everything else had failed to achieve fundamental rights for Australian blacks, to 1983. It is imbued with white rationalism, Enlightenment stances generally – it’s an example par excellence of altruistic liberal idealism. How odd it is to read in a place like this – a city where a white-collar dole-bludging mentality reigns. This is a public service town. To read the local paper you would think that everyone thought the rest of the country owed them a living. Darwin – a Canberra gone troppo. The case for the treaty is of course premised upon a firm historical sense, as a well as a legal capacity for biting the bullet. But in this town a black man, much favoured by the locals, is standing on an anti-Land Rights platform; and while there has been an attempt to smear the ALP candidate as a trendy leftist, which suggests that reactionary whites might have the semblance of a social memory, that’s about it: the rest of the public discussion seems to go on as if the basic issues have been settled once and for all – what remains is to keep up the subsidies from the Feds, and keep a check on land rights while the mineral explorations and the mining go on. Consumerist contemporaneity – ‘Progress’, ‘Development’ – as a fait accompli.

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The case for the treaty can be tracked back to some rock-bottom opportunism on the part of good old Captain Cook. The Crown said colonies could be acquired either by ‘conquest’ or ‘discovery or settlement’ where no inhabitants were held to have rights in land – the principle of terra nullius. So since there was no black resistance the land was claimed by the principle of terra nullius, was it not? All of this has been much challenged since, of course, by books about the actual resistance, and books like Wright’s, which trace legal moves here and overseas. Indians in Canada seem to have made general progress both with the principle of a treaty and land claims, whereas here the general failure was signed and delivered when the Hawke Government proved to be like previous Coalition governments in bowing to ‘the States’ (Conservative Premiers acting as joeys to Development cowboys). Hence the crying need for the treaty, argues Wright – a reuniting bottom line. But it’s an idea. My problem is getting a sense of the ground any active liberalism can now be based on after so much Canberra treachery and in the present mental climate of Economic ‘Realism’ At All Costs. The other very prominent black man here is Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the Chairman of the very active Lands Council. Is the treaty a goer for him? In his regular newspaper column he refers to it – Makarrata – all right, but it comes across as a loose polemical aside, like waving a palm frond over the top of a hard hat. The Road to Katherine

The figure bandied about is that black people in these parts already have rights to forty-five percent of the land. The counter point is to note that most of this land is of the poorest quality, and to bear in mind yet again that what has been won has been resisted as long as possible by government lawyers and mining companies. Still, it’s in this landscape – off this straight road with fires burning freely on the verge – that the Aborigines live, increasingly resident in places they have chosen for themselves – on the out-stations, or home settlements – 2 01 –

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as they are sometimes called. The voluntary move to the outstations – out of paternalistic white clutches and towards options that are best lumped under the ambiguous heading of Self Help – is the major development of the Eighties, treaty or no treaty. We pass World War Two airstrips and there, on the ruined tarmac, is an old station-wagon out of which those black women in their print dresses must have climbed – wandering along in search of something. We pass a crocodile farm. Then the Aussat satellite disc, its whiteness facing the sheer blue sky with defiant clinical vacancy. Then four black men by the road up ahead – gangly, grubby and hungry-looking, gesturing towards the lift they won’t get. Savannah and savannah and savannah. Kakadu too far away. The kind of scrub that kills the imagination. Soon we’ll come to the film-set replica of the We of the Never-Never house – the mock-up pioneering relic that celebrates the Chinese cook and breeds of bull. There are enormous brown hawks in the sky wheeling and gliding and behaving like crows. Katherine

Pronounced Kather-ine (as in whine). Slim Dusty is King; and the man in the video shop says that out on the settlements the big favourites are Westerns and Kung Fu movies. As for the ghetto-blasters, well, the tapes that go into them are changing; since the satellite brought Southern TV, and Countdown became more popular than Dr Who, there is an explosive demand for top 40 tapes. We’re short-changed in the local pub. As if the barmen saw straight through my pack and into what I was reading. Maybe you should only sport such books with moleskin covers. Kununurra

A few months ago, such members of the Treaty committee as Nugget Coombs were up here at the glorious green gateway to the failed Ord Scheme for a conference on the effects of mining and tourism on Aboriginal Culture. The – 202 –

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local paper, The Kimberley Echo, ‘reported’ on it with racist captions and an editorial about the ‘white fleas’ who live off the backs of the black fella. Breakfast with the editor, James O’Kenny. Half the day gone by 8, as Mr O’Kenny rises at ‘picaninni time’. Since he’s the local real estate agent, how come he’s a newspaper man as well? ‘Ah well, there used to be another paper, The Forum or something, run by a couple of lesbian Communists, and it sickened everyone around here with its attitude to law and order. It wanted to win the black fella over for its own purposes, Communism probably. Anyway. It self-destructed. One of our policemen said to me, ‘Why don’t you start a paper…?’’ O’Kenny thinks the East Kimberley has a good future for the white man – a place for slow steady growth, unlike Darwin with all its troubles and dependence on Canberra. Not so long ago, they say, the publican here saw fit to chain a black person to the bar, in order to show the tourists what an Aborigine looked like. Halls Creek

And here, it seems, is the whole black community standing around in the main street – men, women and children, long-legged and facially evasive, loitering on the red earth. Posing for a Drysdale picture; images of Soweto in their heads …? The thing to remember, and the fact that must haunt the O’Kennys of the world, is that black people here outnumber whites by about three to one. Halls Creek High is about ninety percent black, but that is not to say a great deal is done about it in pedagogic terms. It’s only at the instigation of the Kimberley Language Centre here that a bilingual program has been introduced: other than that, I’m told, the curriculum proceeds not much differently from the old Assimilation days, when blacks were supposed to move on the graduated path towards yielding their own heritage up to the European one. This is the great strength of Ralph Folds’ powerful, lucid and surely definitive little book – definitive of the mess we have made of black schooling. Because he’s talking about more progressive policies than the WA Government has even dreamed of. In the Pitjantjat-jara schools in SA what looked like – 203 –

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enlightened policies – bilingual work, black content in the curriculum, Aboriginal aides in the schools – have failed because no one has realised the contradiction between the white school as an institution and the social structure of Aboriginal life. Folds’ analysis of black resistance to formal schooling is brilliant, and should go down in the annals of the best educational literature. The symptom of educational failure is stark and tragic: glue sniffing. Up here, it’s not glue sniffing, as yet, though there is consternation in the black communities about the arrival of the horrific drink kava, already creating havoc in Arnhem Land. So far the kava has been kept out, while the white man’s grog, of course, flows on. The local pub still has its animal bar. No one is going to stop a white fella drinking there, if you want to drink in a bare room with nothing more throwable than an ashtray and bars on the glassless window: and no one is going to stop – officially – a black person wandering into where the white folk drink. I’m having a talk with Mac Micking, an old stockman who ties his trousers with a rope and says he knew Mary Durack’s father, when Alice, a buxom black woman in a tangerine dress, comes waltzing in. She approaches a table of black women about ‘going home’ and they seem to give her the push. Later she takes hold of Mac as he comes back from the lavatory, and in a nice way he manages to get away. As we’re talking she arrives beside us, plonk on to the bar stool. Ahhh, she says, I’m not gunna vote for that Hawke fella again, he’s fuckin finished with me, he’s a bastard. Yeah? She waves and splutters. How come? He’s sold us out with land rights. Fuck him, he’s finished by me. I try, through the noise and on the crest of another beer, to defend the indefensible by saying that still, Hawke’s better than the other lot: with the other lot, you wouldn’t get a mention of a treaty or anything like that. Ahh, she says, and slides her hand inside my shirt, Give us a kiss.

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Derby

This God-forsaken place on the miserable mud flats of King Sound – a town where the rich are famous for their cockroach races on Boxing Day, and where, if BHP goes ahead with its wet-dredging for heavy metals, a poisonous dust will blow through the town whenever the wind is in the north-west – is our main destination. And a good thing too, since we are at the Aboriginal Hostel where the ABC has been running a radio workshop for black people, introducing them to radio skills as well as the whole idea of their own community station for the Kimberley, a station that could help with the kinds of things that schools have generally failed at: keeping the local languages strong. If radio did get going – thanks to Aussat, the white man’s star that could help the black man’s dreaming – it would be part of many other self-help activities we have seen on the way: art shops, construction companies, earthmoving outfits, health and legal services. There’s an unwritten history in all this endeavour, though Southerners have started to read some of the good stories about black people taking over the old pastoral properties. Treaties, then, and intelligent schooling, have to be conceived in this larger context. So with Wright’s book being the indispensable historical document it is, while also reading a bit like some United Nations manifesto drafted during the bombing of Cambodia, maybe in the larger context there is hope. I don’t claim to know. One reads such a book while driving through ranges aglow with mineral and spiritual goods; and sets it down in the air-conditioned motel room to the radio news that among the secondary students of WA the latest educationally approved venture is going well: the buying of shares on the stock exchange. Who said Development was a dirty word? Broome

The Ocean. Magnificent Cable Beach, so called because a telegraph once linked Australia to Java from here. What an open sea it is, and an endless stretch of sand, and aren’t they four camels coming along it? Heat hazes, mirages. Is this Lord MacAlpine, who has bought the local airstrip and a lot of – 205 –

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the beach front, arriving with his friend Margaret Thatcher? What time frame does one put ‘progress’ in up here? There is a lot of more obvious black activity here in multi-racial Broome. A strong music scene – the local group Scrap Metal will back Midnight Oil on their next national tour. Peter Yu, formerly of the now disbanded NAC – (its shifting attitudes towards the treaty idea are well tracked by Wright – as if to quietly admit; yes, this is the white book on the idea, not the black one) is now not so much in politics as media productions. He has the outfit, he’s in touch with Peter Weir, and he has the script for the big film about the turn of the century one-man guerrilla warrior Pigeon (about whom Ion Idriess once wrote a book). Everything Yu is quoted as saying in Wright’s book is sophisticated, and militant. A pleasure to meet this dark Chinese-looking man in his thirties. He has a healthy suspicion of me, but when I ask: well, what is the overall position with respect to political organisation, strategies? he has no need to be careful. ‘There’s a void,’ he says, ‘a real void.’

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W E L C OM E DA NCE , EN T R A NCE OF S T R A NGER S On Reading Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia

In the heart of the heart of the country lies a huge, marvellous, astonishing gift of a book – a gem, a jewel in the lotus – T. G. H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (Angus & Robertson). Astoni­shingly neglected too, all things considered. It was published in 1971 and is now tragically out of print and seems forgotten, even though it is the great source book of the poetic lore of the region, the text that most extensively tables, with the authority of the Torah, the ancient poetry, the timeless utterance of what we now understand as our desert garden, Milton’s ‘wilderness of sweets’. Songs is nothing less than a sustained celebration of those central delights, a book of teachings and expressions, a demonstration of ecstatic weavings of life larger than any book can possibly be – enough to change a life, in fact, as it was Strehlow’s life, that cranky, mysterious anthropologist whose unresolved story is part of the text’s mantric hum. In years to come Songs may be seen as a manifestation of many things (Strehlow’s foibles and confusions included, which I’ll come to), most notably of the country’s spiritual breath, of the love-sounds from the ground, and the aching and shouting and crooning and laughter that waters all understandings of living in the country. In signif­ icance and impact Songs approaches natural phenomena. As with any big book, its power is accumulative, a product of body weight as well as pulse. But its central energy comes from the perspective that Strehlow articulated in his earlier work, Aranda Traditions. Speaking about that most ‘potent emotional attitude expressed in the Central Australian native’s love of homeland’, he said: ‘Mountains and creeks and springs and waterholes are to him, not merely interesting or beautiful scenic features in which his eyes may take a passing delight: they are the handiwork of ancestors

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from whom he himself has descended, and he sees recorded in the surrounding landscape the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings whom he reveres: beings who for a brief space may take on human shape once more: beings, many of whom he has known in his own experience as his fathers and grandfathers and brothers and sisters. The whole countryside is his living age-old family tree.’ (My italics.) So when you start in on this big growth of a book, this proliferation of the family tree (roots in blooded earth, branches in night skies of eternity, its trunk in the clear light of the everyday …) you don’t get the poems at first, you get their music. You get the basic tonal pattern of the sounds that have so long belonged to the earth, and patterns that belong (in all senses of that term) to the kangaroo, the honey ant, to the fire and so on. Strehlow documents phonetic change caused by chanting and the shifting stress accents that govern the song and which always dynamically interweave with the lyrics, one seldom dominating the other, each, more often than not, receiving the same attention as the other. By the time we reach the second part of the book, Language and Verse Structure, Strehlow has drummed the musicology of the songs into us. An early poem is five couplets of the Ankota Song, which describes the Ankota ancestor at a sacred ceremony: I am red like burning fire I am covered with a glowing red down I am red like burning fire I am gleaming red, glistening with ochre I am red like burning fire Red is the hollow in which I am lying A tjurunga is standing upon my head: Red is the hollow in which I am lying.

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The poem is, as Strehlow points out, vivid, and its power is obtained by the simple device of repetition that in each stanza pushes forward the description of the figure in eagle down. The technique, which is as old as the Hebrew psalms and the Gilgamesh Epic, is open to subtle variations when adjective and noun are played with, and when synonyms are employed down the page (so to speak). In the Aranda what also moves songs slowly forward is rhyme, as with the eagle song, where the birds circling over the MacDonnell Ranges can be sensed, even in a cumbersome looking translation: One above the other we are hovering in the air Both of us are hovering in the air Off the edge of the mountain bluff we are hovering in the air Near the jagged mountain edge we are hovering in the air. With some ti-tree verses we have: Let the little ti-tree bushes intertwine their branch tips Let the little ti-tree bushes sprout blossom clusters on their branch tips! Let the little ti-tree bushes spread their bushy crested tips; Let the little ti-tree bushes sprout blossom clusters on their branch tips Let the little ti-tree bushes raise high the foreheads of their branches; Let the little ti-tree bushes sit fast and avert their faces. Strehlow comments: ‘From an examination of these couplets it is clear that we find in the Central Australian songs not merely the balance of rhythms but also balance of thought’. Yes, indeed. And an interanimation of thought as well. Even after a few couplets you sense that everything in the landscape is in dialogue with everything else. The eagle-downed ancestor is in communion with rocks that might tell the story as well. In the eagle poem an ancestor voice oversees the country and is in total communion with it. It comes as no surprise to be told by Strehlow that these ti-tree bushes are really mythical

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alknarintja women, who may not leave their homes, and who must always avert their faces from all men. Even at this early stage of reading Songs the thought occurs to one that if everything is vitally interconnected then the whole world is a poem, an enchantment simply awaiting notation, or indication. This process is not a matter of Art so much as the simple arts of record, of pointing and not pointing, as the case may be. A poem is a coda of the seamless web of things, that may be named or not named, depending on the way we have cast ourselves in the greater song. Thus Strehlow is at pains to show us – in the context of describing the formal devices of Aranda poetry (its grammar and poetic diction as well as its musicology) – what lies between the lines and behind them, what is deliberately masked by the poem; or, to put this another way, what might be spiritually latent in a song’s manifest carnality. Take the marvellous Bandicoot Song of Ilbalintja. Strehlow lays it out in ten sets of couplets, beginning with the description of the sacred soak from which the ancestor people emerge, the place that is the navel of ‘Sire Karora’, a supreme ancestor, through to events that involve the birth of the sun, (since Ilbalintja is also a sun-totem site) until the meeting with the chief […] and the verses of ‘the final catastrophe’ (as Strehlow calls them). The latter are the couplets that invoke the ancestral powers previously sung. Such verses typically conclude a song cycle, or the last narrative incidents of a myth. They are designed to put to rest or to lay to rest (‘gunama, pushy down, push into the ground’) the ancestors. In the case of the bandicoot song the story concludes with nothing less than a great flood of sweet ntjuimabna, the dark nectar of honeysuckle blossom, which descends upon the totemic site from the east. Like a river it roars across the plains sweeping Karora and all of his sons back into the depths of the soak: Their sweet dark juice is flowing forth; From the centre of the chalice it is flowing forth From the slender pistil it is flowing forth; The sweet dark juice is flowing forth – 210 –

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[and later] Let our sweet sap encircle them with rings; Let the flood of nectar encircle them with rings! Let our sweet sap ooze from the ground; Let our dark honey ooze from the ground! [and ending with] Let the flood of our nectar encircle them with rings Let our sweet sap encircle them with rings! A better example, incidentally, of the effectiveness of repetition, parallelism and paraphrase is hard to find, but the point here is to also draw attention to the elliptical cryptic nature of the verse itself, which was, Strehlow is at pains to show, often designed for secrecy. This for practical and fundamental rel­ igious reasons. The practical reason was that songs were embedded in religious ritual, in spiritual practice that was at the time more important than narrative explicitness. Initiated elders would recount the sacred myths anyway, and the poetry need not be burdened with the whole story; it could allude, refer indefinitely, leap and dart in narrative terms. It was after all being enacted in the sacred place by the descendants of those who composed the verses, namely the timeless ancestors. The religious aspect of naming is at the root of the secrecy. The taboo could be against naming the ancestor, or the totem site. The caution is an archaic spiritual premise for many cultures, as we know, and Strehlow makes the most of Frazer’s Golden Bough to place the people of Central Australia in the company of the ancient Jews, Egyptians and Norwegians. Accordingly, the taboo might mean that a song’s metre and syllable could be rendered so as to mask a name, if it was there in the song: and if it was not explicitly there its presence was understood, at least by initiates. And so we – people like us, that is – might move through the bandicoot song with limited access to the soak that was the sacred soak, the sun-totem, and the name of […], the – 211 –

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bandicoot chief. For in the story, it is only when they throw the tjurunga at an animal resembling a bandicoot and they break its leg that it turns out to be the local bandicoot chief called […]. After the final catastrophe, he becomes their ceremonial chief, Strehlow also tells us, and adds: ‘This verse was regarded as the private property of my informant Gura, whose secret name was [the secret name omitted above], since he was looked upon as the reincarnation of this ancestor.’ I am trying to convey the fecundity of Strehlow’s book, its depth and scope as well as its mysteries. (All anthropology is perhaps a mystery, since it can’t name everything either, least of all the metaphysical assumptions of ‘strangers’ who have entered into the process of describing the ‘other’ changing culture …) As you keep reading Songs the marvel is that its fertility increases. After the upstream expositions of forms, we come to Subject Matter and Themes where the poetry fans out as never before, and becomes, as you move through its four hundred pages, the great delta, the beauty of which is akin to one of those stunning aerial photographs of Central Australia; all bone and membrane and bloodstream of pale green spirit of matter that survived the inland sea. The Song of the Kwalba Chief of Tera is one of the glories. We come to it after the charms (to do with sickness and health, vengeance, control of the weather etc.), songs for the increase of totemic ancestors, plants and animals, the commemorative and initiation songs. Tera, which is entered under Strehlow’s most expansive and seductive section, Songs of Human Beauty and Love Charms, is eighty-eight verses long in his version and runs for sixteen pages. But something of its power and beauty can be gained from extracts, and without, I suggest, its mythological narrative gloss. It begins: Let me descend from my very own home, – Let me, Antjiroba descend from it! Let me descend from my very own home, – Let me, the dark chested wallaby, descend from it! – 21 2 –

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Against the ghost gum he rubs it, against yonder ghost gum; It is the tjilara that he is rubbing, the soft (or red) tjilara. The dense foliage is streaming in the breeze, the dense foliage streams in the breeze; The slender-stemmed tree is streaming in the breeze, the slenderstemmed tree streams in the breeze. Upon the ground where I used to sit let me set my feet! Upon the powdered soil let me set my feet! With fire heated soil he covers himself With a short stick he throws it over himself. The great sire, brandishing his short stick, At his soft-soiled home scatters ash in all directions. The kwalba (chief) has wound his penis around himself, – The great sire is tied up, his penis is tied up. Later we have: She shall belong to the kwalba, – Mine alone she shall be! She shall belong to the kwalba, she shall belong to the kwalba; Mine alone she shall be, yes, mine alone she shall be! Gripping her by the throat, I would raise her up, – To be my very own I would raise her up; The bell bird relentlessly rouses her; The dark chested one relentlessly rouses her. The bell bird fills her with madness, The dark chested one fills her with madness. – 213 –

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Her desires he encloses with a fence, – With the thicket he encloses her as with a fence. Her desires are shut in by a fence, – a thicket shuts her in like a fence. Piercing her very navel, let it tear open a wound! While she is at her soft-soiled home, let it tear open a wound … The bell bird fills her with madness. The dark-chested one fills her with madness. Until we get: The njibantibanta woman is bringing all her chattels to his home; Advancing with dancing steps, she is bringing all her chattels to his home … Having gathered food, let me give way to my passion! Let me, the maiden, give way to my passion! The crested rock pigeons Are coming near at hand. The crested rock pigeons are cooing plaintively. These sharp-crested pigeons Move about in every rocky height. The crested rock pigeons Have fine, clear eyes. Upon good ground let me set my feet, – Upon firm hard ground let me set my feet! And much later ending with: – 214 –

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The great sire, proud and handsome Burns a fiery yellow. I am a married man, a truly married man: I am full of joy in my wife. I am full of love for my wife; I am a married man, a truly married man. In any language this is clearly a bracing song of yearning and lust, wooing and seduction, consummation and marriage. Its events are both brutal and delicate, its manner frank and subtle. Even without any mythological explication, we can see its narrative cunning: it calls upon a metamorphosis (from wallaby to bellbird) and swings easily from third to first person, with the first person voice varying, from man to woman and back to the man again in the logic of its resolution. It is a song that begins with a lament to aloneness and ends with a cele­bration of union, a marriage manifoldly made according to the lore, by virtue of sacred things being what they are. In the next long love-charm, The Song of Kulurba, we have: In the deepest lakes of their bodies they are churning with passion In the depths of their fertile wombs they are churning with passion In their chalices of nectar they are churning with passion In their innermost fastness they are churning with passion. Which brings Strehlow to note, in ways that are as revealing of him as they are of anything else: ‘Pmobuntja normally means ‘serpent-lake’, i.e. a pool of water deep … a fit home for a mythical water serpent. Here the deepest recesses of the female are also envisaged. These according to the Aranda view, are fountains of the inexhaustible fluid which pour from them during menst­ ruation and on occasions of sexual excitement … Such women, when sexually aroused, resembled serpent lakes when whipped up by a storm.’

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Strehlow could be a laborious man in sexual matters. After the Malbanka song, where the black man wields a blazing firebrand to magical effect, he notes: ‘The woman sees this firebrand while she is asleep. She grasps this in her sleep, and the firebrand enters into her through her navel. The woman thinks – Whatever has come to me? – (Whatever) has entered my body (Whatever) has struck me like lightning? She can think only of one man when she rises. ‘O, that is the man who has sung charms over me!’ Upon thinking it, she proceeds to weep as well. Soon she departs and goes to lie with that man.’ Enough! The poems keep coming, along with the variety of pregnant notations about music, language, sense. Songs of Homelands follow, then songs about Man’s Twin Souls, Death and the Sky Dwellers, where the poetry reaches cosmic heights, and where we meet black notions of ‘Paradise’ as well as the Bird of Death. Thereafter the book begins to wind down: Semi-Sacred Songs; Songs Sung at Folk Dances; and finally, since this can be the most chauvinistic of books, the Women’s Songs. In his Final Summary Strehlow reworks, with typical rotundity, his refrains about poetry, culture, and the future. His last sentence is: ‘It is my belief that when the strong web of Australian verse comes to be woven, probably some of its strands will be found to be poetic threads spun on the Stone Age hair spindles of Central Australia.’ So there you are, Strehlow the Magnificent, we might say, the great white anthropologist who has brought a culture of dance, song and sandpainting down to us in tablets of stone; or the written body of a culture brought in from the desert by the Inkata, the white man who had become a great elder of the desert, a proclaimed and perhaps self-proclaimed Moses in his delivery. Now, having wished the book back into general circulation (why can’t we republish an abridged edition, at least, as A. P. Elkin suggested in 1975?) because of the native gifts it carries, I want to worry it as a white man’s book, to attend to the text’s curious manoeuvres, tensions, and flaws. To return to the poetry, Strehlow’s sense of it and his proclamations about it. It has to be said that he is not much of a poet himself. Even from the above it is clear that he has a penchant for high-blown nineteenth century – 216 –

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English diction. He points out that the Arunta from which he is working is often employing ‘archaic, and poetic diction’, so one can see how this imposes a difficulty for translation. But this is a problem that can be surmounted without sounding like Rossetti, a thought that does not seem to have occurred to Strehlow whose idea of what modern poetry has been about, in terms of diction, extends no further than Yeats. When he cites The Seafarer one wishes he had used Pound. The anthropologist might have realised that contemporary rigor with rhythm and diction need not detract from the character of the original at all. On the contrary, the ancient poem might get new power. Strehlow’s lack of poetic tact goes further. Germanic polymath though he was, it’s obvious from that grandiose closing sentence that he is not a man to pay many respects to the work of his contemporaries, even when they have already made contributions to the field in ways that he is calling for. On the matter of white Australian poets spinning from the ‘Stone-Age hair spindles’ Strehlow may be excused for not being prescient about the work of Les Murray, who would break out with his Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle in 1974, only three years after the publication of Songs; but he should not get off so lightly for his studious obliteration of the Jindyworobaks who hailed from his native Adelaide. Even less should he be forgiven for his slight acknowledgement of the major poetic translations of other anthropo­logists, most notably the achievement of Ronald Berndt’s Djanggawul, published six years before. Berndt’s superiority in poetic terms was confirmed with the publication of Love Songs From Arnhem Land (co-authored with Catherine Berndt), which arrived only four years after Strehlow’s great prescription. Admittedly, Songs is the vaster work, but the Berndts’ is poetically finer and more focused as a contribution to our culture. To put this another way, in the presentations of the former there is never too much of the white anthropologists, whereas in Songs we become very conscious of how much there is of Strehlow. Paradoxically, a central problem of the text of Songs is this: it is a monumental homage to Aboriginal culture that is rhetorically premised on incipiently paternalistic arguments. Most generally, the book’s aim is to place the Australian poetry on the map of ‘world literature’. With this in – 217 –

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mind we are told, time and again, how this form or that content is comparable with ancient poetry in Hebrew or Greek or Old Norse or Old Englishand all of these when Strehlow is into his most erudite stride. Now of course the thrust of the argument is laudable enough, but only after one has repressed the question: why shouldn’t the Australian poetry be on the world map, how could it be anywhere else?! The more one encounters Strehlow’s argument, the more defensive and anachronistic it starts to sound, especially when he moves to an explication of the mores it contains. Take the extended discussion that accompanies the Songs of Beauty and Love Charms. He begins by warning us of the frankness and ‘violence’ to come – its ‘caveman’ aspect – while at the same time reminding us that we should not rush to judgement about Aboriginal sexuality. After all, he says, our own ways are not entirely known, and in so far as they are, they are riddled with double standards, and social problems such as prostitution and illegitimacy etc. We are then presented with the love songs – the diction of which on Strehlow’s part, is both frank and coy, as we have seen. What follows is then a very worried discussion about ‘spirituality’. There is none says Strehlow, just as there is nothing we should call a ‘lyric’ in Australian verse. But his worries about ‘spirituality’ are surely overridden by the whole religious dimension in most of the songs he writes of; and the denial of the ‘lyric’ surely needs revision when you consider some of the exquisite poetic interludes – the cooing pigeons I have mentioned. Strehlow is talking about too many things at once here. Put most neutrally, he is discussing the artistic forms that allow for the expressive powers of individuals in a culture. This is a bigger question than matters of sexuality and frankness and the Christian tradition of ‘love’. But these matters dominate him in ways that are compulsively defensive of Aboriginal ways, rather as if he felt there to be a reading public out there, one sitting in some dock of judgement with regard to black culture, black art. In fact, one detects something of a struggle within the anthropologist himself. Theo’s worrying, sermonising tone recalls his memoir of his missionary father, Carl Strehlow, of

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the Lutheran Mission in Hermannsburg. ‘His clerical conscience’, Strehlow wrote of his father, would not permit him to openly admit his deep respect for Aboriginal culture and the creative Aboriginal mind: the best he could do was restrain from condemning its ‘paganism’. And so in a way with Strehlow. In many ways he openly praises the ‘primitive’ in its own terms, while at the same time viewing it through the eclectic lens of European culture. The very weight of his Germanic text hardly serves to liberate the light-footed desert songs he is so formally celebrating. So a great irony of this great book is that it serves black voices while indirectly and unwillingly somewhat demeaning them. Here Songs, written by a man born in 1908 and who died in 1978, stands as yet another transitional text in the complicated history of race relations in this country. And you could go further and say that Strehlow’s loving appropriation of the black poetry was an act of supreme paternalism. And belated paternalism, as we know, can make for puzzling contradictions. For soon after the publication of Songs we had Strehlow’s strange opposition to the general political formation of land councils in Central Australia, even though his magnum opus was the text, par excellence, of Aboriginal land rights. You don’t get that paradox in the text itself, but what you do get is an acute awareness of the complicated ‘responsibilities’ of white people against the darker seams of Northern Territory history, riddled as it is by racism and sexism, slaughter and hypocrisy. Songs begins, for instance, with the travels of Baldwin Spencer, the Darwinian anthropologist who wrote of the tribes without knowing their language, and who was utterly under the ideological sway of Sir James Frazer’s armchair imperialisms; and his friend and colleague, the dour Alice Springs postmaster F. J. Gillen, who was to become famous for his attempts to bring a notorious killer of blacks to justice. That killer was W. H. Willshire. Willshire was Officer-in-Charge of the feared Interior Patrol on the Northern Territory throughout the 1880s, and much moved to vengeance after any incident where whites happened to suffer at the hands of blacks. Gillen thought

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Willshire’s methods were ‘sheer bloody murder’ and had him charged with murder in 1891. Willshire was acquitted. Subsequently, he dispelled all doubts anyone might have about his racist credo by publishing a booklet, The Land of the Dawning: being Facts Gleaned from the Cannibals in the Australian Stone Age – an obscenity of a tract, as murderously disposed towards ‘black demons’ as it was salacious towards ‘pretty black girls’. Bear in mind here that the contemp­ orary ‘debate’ over the killings of blacks in Capricornia often turned upon questions of ‘justification’. The whites who had been killed had been too kind to the blacks, it was said. But, it was said in return, the whites had meddled with the black women. Either way, homicide pivoted upon the unspoken fate of the ‘gins’. The wings of the Bird of Death shadowed an understanding of black sexuality the invading culture did not have, and had trouble wishing to find. Willshire looms large in Songs, and one feels that he does because some kind of complex troubled clerical conscience survived in Strehlow. That is why, I think, so much of Theodore’s extensive and erudite discuss­ ion reads so oddly today – even though it is redeemed overall by the relative nakedness of the black verse. It’s as if the text embodies Strehlow’s inner struggle so representative of white men when cohabiting with the ‘primitive’: the tension between desire and disapproval, between the all-embracing logic of social intercourse, and a fear of the loss of ‘civilised’ taboos. Overall though, the songs themselves win through. As they must. Because they are there – thanks to the monumental writing down by Theodore. It is perhaps unavoid­ able that his style of writing down and around that material served also to close it down, seal it off. The European musings of Songs is far from being an open text. Yet its physical presence, its force, and dignity brings to mind an image from Baldwin Spencer’s pioneering photography – that shot which has been titled Aranda Welcoming Dance, Entrance of the Strangers. Looking at the Grecian warriors in that picture, the word that comes to mind is heroic. Heroically, albeit as an eccentric scribe, Strehlow erected his book as a welcoming monu­ment to the image of that heroism.

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M AG G O T S A N D M Y S T IC I S M On W.E.H. Stanner

Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett (eds), An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia (2009)

Mandarin, Romantic, Mystic – these unnecessarily loaded terms press in as soon as you start to think about the extraordinary resonance of the Aboriginal work of W.E.H. Stanner. In An Appreciation of Difference – a collection of essays that is both brilliantly indispensable and deeply timid – the terms are neither historically grasped nor outwardly owned; but they are there, all the way through this working out of what Stanner should mean for us now, in this anguished historical moment of ‘intervention’. Of course, ‘intervention’ is another term that loads the dice, and which calls for as much self-examination as it does of them, our Aboriginal subjects/objects with whom most of us have failed, for one reason or another, to form personal relationships. For yearn as we might for what Stanner modestly called his ‘dusty encounter’ with them, most of us, including anthropologists these days, languish in libraries, ‘desiccated’ (another Stannerism) by the conceits of theory, polemical his­ tory, defensive politics, and our unwritten autobiographies – which is to say, without having articulated the intellectual and spiritual formations that determine a construction of Aboriginal lives. The great silence these days, despite a generation of reflexivity a la mode, pertains to the inner self and its interventions with regard to ‘them’. The result is untold cautions, creepy forms of self-interest and disguise. ‘The trouble is our motives are mixed’, as Stanner wrote in 1958. ‘We are concerned with our own reputations as much as, if not a little more than, the Aborigines’ position.’ It is to Stanner’s credit that his own utterances still offer so much. Look­ ing back through that treasure trove of essays, White Man Got No Dreaming,

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which was first published in 1979, after his famous Boyer Lectures of 1968, and which did so much to educate if not shame the nation; and after, too, the land rights legislation in the Northern Territory, in the shaping of which Stanner played a crucial role, what keeps coming through is his steely refusal to oversimplify. In ‘Caliban Discovered’ (1962) – which, by the way, happens to fall open at the loveliest black and white photographs of young Aboriginal women, as noble as Stanner’s penportrait of his favourite informant, Durmugam, the killer of four men – he writes of the ‘complicated warps of outlook’ that have informed our written history. ‘They were visions of Caliban, of The Noble Savage, of the Comic Savage, or the Orphan or Relict of Progress, of Primal or Protozoan Man, of The Last of His Tribe, of The Ward of Chancery, and of The Reluctant European.’ This rather gothic list is instructive enough, especially considering that Stanner went on say that these categories overlap and get mixed up, and then ‘braid their way’ through our history ‘rather like the inland rivers that flow, disappear, and emerge again in what seemed like waterless country’. And as they continue to do in the tough country of the present moment. So much of the present debate arising from Helen Hughes or Noel Pearson or Peter Sutton, to name the obvious actors, is a wrestling with these categories, passionately if not feverishly. In fact, part of the tragedy of the moment is that the categories seem to operate with a kind of viral simultaneity. No single mind seems to be healthy and strong enough to resist one or other warp. He or she invariably begins with disclaimers, declarations and positioning statements of various kinds, but soon enough they fall foul of an old billabong. Hence, as I say, the great value of this book about Stanner and the validity of his shine: Stanner the pellucid, you might say, who remains our contemporary, even though he started his smallish amount of field work back in the 1930s, colonial times in which he was so enmeshed he rued the fact later. Even in the 1950s, as he carried on with fieldwork, he was, he confessed, part of the great silence. It took him thirty years to say so – a salutary reminder, perhaps, as to how hard it is, even for the brightest anthropologists, to identify their own situations and responses to them. – 222 –

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To be more specific: these essays are lovingly, insightfully introduced by Mick Dodson and then organised in four sections. ‘Diverse Fields’ (Part 1) deals with Stanner’s rugged war service, his experiences of decolonising policy in Africa, the foundation years at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, and his productive time as a ‘reluctant bureaucrat’ on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. ‘In Pursuit of Transcendent Values’ (Part 2) tackles Stanner’s powerfully conceived work on Aboriginal religion. ‘Land and People’ (Part 3) considers his thinking on ecology, land use and territorial organisation, along with his work on the Woodward Royal Commission. The book closes with three essays on Stanner as ‘A Public Intellectual’, especially his thoughts on our narrative histories, and Aboriginal futures according to principles of self-determination (from which he never wavered). None of the essays work as critique. At most they seek to qualify or extend what Stanner wrote or did. For example, Ian Keen wishes that Stanner’s take on Aboriginal religion had done more with its embeddedness in the politics of social structure. On territorial organisation, Nicolas Peterson laments that ‘Stanner’s sociology and ecology needed to be more sophisticated’. With regard to the great Australian silence Anne Curthoys reminds us that some important 19th century history was not so; nor was some important nonacademic history written in Stanner’s time. And on that silence itself, Tim Rowse splendidly contextualises Stanner among other Boyer lecturers, most of whom, Geoffrey Blainey excepted, tended to speak teleologically, as if they had come to the microphone at an historical point that constituted progress, whereas the key point about Stanner, his abiding emotional and intellectual aspect, was his ‘studied uncertainty.’ This stance was not merely a psychological state. What could be more rationally considered than the following: ‘The social situation of many Abori­ gines will change with rapidity over the next decade. Many will die wealthy, in possession of money or other assets for which their traditional law provides no disposal procedure. There will be conflicts of interest between Aborigines which may be insoluble unless their own doctrine of what I have termed rights, duties, liabilities and immunities can be developed. ‘The Aboriginal – 223 –

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problem’ thus goes beyond the ‘retention of their traditional lifestyle’: there is a problem of development as well as one of preservation.’ Here speaks Stanner the empiricist, the scientist who had a fecund sense of the fieldwork that could and should be done, for pure and applied reasons. All this, then, is grist to a necessary appreciation of Stanner’s life and work, bearing in mind, I hope, that he was not the only man of his gener­ ation to both dissect, protect, and champion traditional Aboriginal culture, as well worry about the lives yet to be lived. His light should not be used to obscure the life-works of A.P. Elkin and T.G.H. Strehlow, both men of religious convictions inseparable from their great efforts: the pity of this book is that they are sidelined. Which brings me to the timidity to which I referred at the beginning. Scholars agree that Stanner’s work on Aboriginal religion is deep and nuanced. It’s also famous for some of the aphorisms it has added to our understanding – the notion that the Dreaming was ‘the poetic key’ to Aboriginal life: and that Aboriginal life was regarded as ‘a joyous thing with maggots at the centre’. But the profound paradox of An Appreciation of Difference is its inclination to treat Stanner’s Aboriginal religion as problematic. Melinda Hinkson, one of the book’s eloquent editors, mentions Stanner’s mysticism, and the feeling you get is that the term is a stick with which to beat a theosophist. Overall, the rather undefined term ‘transcendence’ is used to deal more tolerantly with Stanner’s spiritual bent. Peter Sutton’s essay, created from a deep reading of and a friendship with Stanner, and which pulsates at the centre of the collection, gets closer than anyone to Stanner’s full sensibility, only to abandon the inquiry on the steps of the temple, so to speak. Sutton writes of ‘the veiled core, which lay, and properly so, beyond the reach of anthropology’. I suppose, considering the intellectual roots of anthropology, it makes some sense to take this disciplinary position. But it does not make a whole sense if a full understanding of Stanner is to be properly broached. Aboriginal religion (an account of) is one thing: the consciousness of its analyst is another, and yet part of the same thing. I wish that Sutton, whose own intellectual formation once owed much to a full-blooded transcendentalism, – 224 –

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had written further into his intuitions about Stanner’s religious imagination. It would have made an important difference to the atmosphere of a book where Stanner’s deepest psychology is left as unfathomable. Since Stanner advanced a subtle and powerful explanatory poetic of the Dreaming, this neglect of his own poetics is even more lamentable. Yet the astonishing and wonderful thing about An Appreciation of Difference is that it also contains the greatest of clues to Stanner’s inner life’s symbiosis with Aboriginal religion. Hinkson turns up with a poem written by Stanner himself. It’s an epic poem called ‘From Kimul to Blunder Bay’, which Stanner wrote about his arduous Fitzmaurice expeditions in 1958, when he was looking for the superlative rock art that seemed to him to illustrate so much that was grand and vital about Aboriginal High Culture. Even a few stanzas of this is enough to show how Stanner responded to what he called ‘the Dreaming in its outward show/Timelessly under no meridian/A groundless locus of the merging O/that locked the first coordinates of Man’. So much more could have been written out of this clue to Stanner’s mysticism, so called. Such an approach would also have honoured Stanner’s unexplored literary depths. Instead we get only four stanzas from an eight-page typescript! Oh for the next book of essays on Stanner, one with the courage to go beyond the maggot of secularism which lies at the heart of a self-protective Australian academy.

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CRO S SI NG C U LT U R E S If crossing means overcoming difference, arriving at some point of identity, making a whole new home in the other culture, this, with regard to Aboriginal culture, is next to impossible. That’s been my feeling on reflection. Four things resonate. I’ve reflected on anthropologist Peter Sutton’s tearful, radical paper at a conference in Perth two years ago about the work of those two pioneers in Aboriginal anthropology, Catherine and Ronald Berndt. Tearful because Sutton had made so many friends in the Wik language, and was now overwhelmed by the number of funerals he had had to attend. His grief was also anger at his profession’s denial of what it is about Aboriginal culture that may incline it to tragedy. I also think of the Alice Springs man I know who had taken it upon himself to be initiated as a black man. After this surrender of his body, he was part of the clan, which could now make all manner of demands upon him, so much so that he had to move house and ban his new relatives from the vicinity of his home. I think of Nugget Coombs’ utopian optimism. Tim Rowse’s biography of him (reviewed in Meanjin 1/2003) has enough in it to suggest that Coombs walked around Aboriginal Australia as if he were visiting incipient Rousseau-istic communes. Hence so much failure in Aboriginal policy since the 1970s. And I think of Geoffrey Bardon’s immersion at Papunya, and how it ended with his breakdown. James Bardon, his brother, resumed the interior of this story in his great Australian novel Revolution By Night, a book designed to convey a swirl of incommensurables. We may enter the other, yes, but only via the dream, the unconscious, nighttime enactments of exotic signs. You might reach the other side, yes, but how do you safely get back? I don’t have a thesis here, but these are some of the connections that came up. I suppose they did because they shadow the history of my own expectations, disappointments, happinesses and discoveries, a few of which I was aware of at the time, but not all of which I am clear about even now. How could I be, without devoting as much time to self-analysis as I did to following

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the footsteps of William Buckley for my poem (1993) and T.G.H. Strehlow for my biographical study Broken Song (2002)? On the face of it, they are both exemplary cases of successful crossings. That is why we are drawn to them. Buckley lived thirty-two years with the Wathaurung people, Strehlow a lifetime in association with the Aranda. Each immersed himself in Aboriginal language. Each travelled extensively; they were with the people in their own country, they entered the landscape of the other. And both developed their own stories, their own mythology, of connectedness with that country, and all that it meant to the indigenous people with whom they had become so intimate. Buckley, we know, settled with Aboriginal women. He probably had children by them. Strehlow did not, but he translated Aboriginal song under the heading of Desire. These are great crossings – rich and instructive. Both Buckley and Strehlow found themselves desperate defenders of their indigenous affiliations: Buckley as a go-between on the frontier of the sheep run that would destroy his clan; Strehlow, self-declared as the last of the Aranda, on the front line of modern Aboriginal politics, which he saw as a mess. What happened next? Buckley, faced with the tragedy of white invasion, fled to Hobart, to live a quiet life as a white man, to be a gatekeeper at the women’s prison, the convict escapee come full circle, almost. Strehlow, in agony over his internal contradictions as the one who possessed the truth about Aranda culture, dropped dead in a seizure of recriminations. Strehlow always said he was writing out of the sunset of Aranda culture. From beginning to end you could say he was doom-laden. I didn’t know any of this when I started. I mean, if I knew the endings, it was only at a superficial level: the endings did not draw me on. They only emerged in all their thick descriptiveness when I was well down my own track. To start with, what did I think I was doing? Well, with Buckley my imagination was engaged one winter night in Queenscliff, where I have lived since 1975. It was raining, and cold outside, and my bedside book was Craig Robertson’s wonderfully grounded story of Buckley (1980), who had lived in a cave not far from Queenscliff. That was all. How he must have gloried, I felt, in the summers along that beautiful coast! – 2 27 –

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He must have come to a point where he was of sea and sky, dune and salt lake. And yet he also had the warmth of the Wathaurung people, who found his waning body and declared him a spirit returned from the dead, their dead. I spent about ten years on the Buckley poem. I was going towards Aboriginal culture, but equally I was deepening my sense of inhabiting my own place, which was once their place. In this period I was bushwalking a lot, training hard in karate, and going to Buddhist retreats. Endurance, warriorship physical and mental, nakedness, or sheerness of self – these active interests breathed into the idea of Buckley. The forms of life to which I aspired, and was in part realising, informed my creation of Buckley. And this at the time was a literary freedom being exercised: I was constructing Buckley on the page, as distinct from reconstructing him out of the historical evidence. I’m talking about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, even though the latter is also a construction. I have recently engaged with the non-fictional portrayal of Buckley for the history of Queenscliff I have been commissioned to write, and in an essay written for the Geelong Art Gallery’s major retrospective of the visual record of his story. Buckley the poem led to Strehlow. The question – what forms did Buckley enter when he sang their song? – was answered by the discovery, in the Deakin University Library, of Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia. This was a marvel, a revelation, but its power did not sink in until by chance I was invited to Alice Springs to write about the new Aboriginal radio station. There, at the base of the MacDonnell Ranges, were two thousand Aboriginal people in a red-dust party, wild and happy and sad all at once. A vast crystal sky. Dusk. Twilight stars falling into your face, and then, as the sun struck the top of the range you found yourself weeping for no sensible reason. For the next twelve years I went back to the centre whenever I could. Out from Alice Springs I travelled into it by bus, by truck, by car. And I walked as much as possible: back-packing in the Ormiston Gorge; sleeping alone up along the Finke, near Hermannsburg. The first poems I wrote out of the centre came from a sense of that country’s pulsing beneath my feet.

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The contract to write The Rock: Travelling to Uluru (1994) was mainly a way of getting paid for more travelling. Crossing the country was half the point; and part of that plan was to write something more morally grounded in this place than Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1989), that product of late-Empire metropolitan culture: I wrote The Rock partly as a response to the enormous weight of Chatwin’s English condescensions. The real task, I hoped, was to be the business of trying to understand Aboriginal culture by meeting Aboriginal people. Fat chance. Of course that happened, a bit: I met some memorable, powerful, knowledgeable people, some of them interested in helping me. In another kind of overview, one not burdened by the reified term ‘Culture’, I might speak of these meetings in their particularity: after all, the epiphanies of personal encounter eventually become the sum total of cultural exchange, or lack of it. I did learn about listening, about silence, and layers of silence, characteristics of the white Australian idiom, as we know from Henry Lawson, among others, and as I knew anyway, having been brought up in a small, reticent working-class household. With these Aboriginal encounters there was another layer to that silence. This was instructive, intriguing, mysterious, strange, uncanny. I was at home and not at home with it. I was probably most at home when I was easiest with myself; when I was happy to sit on the steps of tacit Aboriginal presence. Overall, therefore, I was a mere visitor, an outsider, and one who found their languages beyond my powers to learn. And I hated the whole business of being the intruder, of taking up people’s time with my notebook and never-ending ignorance. I’d have gone to live in Alice Springs but I still had parenting to do down south. Always the visitor, then, always therefore book-dependent, primarily. The most important single thing said to me then came from the most knowledgeable bushman in central Australia, Peter Latz, who grew up, rather like Strehlow, in both cultures up on the Hermannsburg mission. Latz drew six or seven concentric circles in the dust of his floor. You will only get this far, he said, pointing to the outside of the circle. As for offering one’s body for

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initiation the better to reach an inner circle, forget it! I was never tempted, but if I had been, Latz’s profound scorn for the idea would have stopped me. So in a way I had two journeys happening. One was my own experience of the landscape, a white man absorbing the tough radiance of the centre. The other was the parallel encounter with the vast literature of the place, most of it as Romantic as the Byron Giles read for breakfast. And in the figure of Strehlow these streams came together. Via Strehlow, I could accept the fact that my knowledge quest could only be appeased indirectly: via the texts, and the texts about texts. I could stop dreaming about adoption by some personal guide into the Dreaming. Here was the richness I wanted anyway – in the treasure trove of Strehlow’s work, and the story I might tell about its making, a telling premised, not upon a fantasy of crossing, but upon a fully acknowledged European consciousness in Australia. Looking back, I think this is what allowed me to stay with Strehlow’s misery for so long: that his own oeuvre provided such evidence of ambiv­ alence that it could only be resolved in the direction of being what he was to begin with – the son of a Christian missionary. As a translator Strehlow sang the praises of Aranda poetics, and his work was in part a love affair with the primitive. But he also imposed biblical and classical structures upon Aranda poetry and language. As a friend of the Aborigine, which he truly was in brave ways early on in his life, he said much about the intrinsic virtue of Aboriginal difference (communal values and so on). But he did so while secretly thinking of himself as a black missionary. That is the point. He made a crossing. He was able to do so – elaborately, marvellously – because in himself he had hardly moved. He did not need to because his home was the universalising religion of Christianity. I was surprised when I came to this insight about Strehlow, but it was the kind of surprise that comes, perhaps, to travellers who feel they have come home to what they can confidently assert with or without the presence of strangers. Is it possible that in this age of viral tourism, we should eschew the metaphor of journey? Might deeper wisdom reside in contemplations at home?

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GR E G DEN I NG ’ S CA N N I BA L I S M Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (2004)

Greg Dening is unique among Australia’s finest historians. He has combined history with ethnology and both with theology, thus weaving a range of intellectual and spiritual concerns that make his narrative interests vitally, morally present. His field has been the Pacific, its ancient settlements by adventurous, religious people in great canoes and the more recent history with Europeans, the savage strangers who began to arrive on the native islands 300 years ago. Beach Crossings, a beautifully produced book, is both intellectual memoir and narrative return to the 18th century, especially to the Marquesas. It tells of Dening’s departure from the Jesuits at the age of 36, his embarkation upon anthropology, archaeology and linguistics at Harvard, his arrival on the shores of social theory at the virgin La Trobe University and his later encampment at the University of Melbourne, where, as Professor of History, he began his Socratic work of inducting the young into a whole style of cross-cultural thinking that is fecund today. That, then, intuitionally, was a beachhead for cross-disciplinary work. It placed, as Dening might say, the post-colonial mind on the beach, ready for all manner of encounter with difference. In Dening’s unique parlance, the ‘beach’ is liminal, a threshold, the place for transformational crossings – towards and away from the Stranger in the Other, towards and away from the Stranger in the Self. ‘From a beach’, he writes, ‘things loom – it is possible to see beyond one’s horizons. Beaches breed expansiveness. My beaches do anyway.’ Self-conscious conceptualisation is Dening’s trademark, as is his epigrammatic style, a manner so daintily constrained that it can arouse hostility

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among peers and seems at odds with his underlying, terrible theme, which is nothing less than human sacrifice in the Pacific scheme of things. As you read Beach Crossings, cannibalism slowly fills the mind and you can’t help wondering if its distinctive style indicates some truth about that ultimate horror. But what kind of truth? Herman Melville (a pilot light to Dening’s historical imagination) thought that truths ranged from ‘one delirious throb at the centre of the All’ (Redburn), to a sense of nothingness in ‘the colourless, all colour of the atheism’ (Moby Dick). Beach Crossings sits between these two points, but the precise nature of its ambiguity was not clear to me until another historian, Hugh Stretton, told me his grandmother’s story about cannibalism. Stretton’s great-grandfather was Captain William Norman of the steam sloop Victoria, which the Victorian government sent off to the Maori wars in New Zealand. While patrolling the east coast of the South Island, Norman made contact with the people at the head of a beautiful bay. As they were peaceful he and his crew sat down to feast with them. It was a splendid feast and much good meat was eaten. But then the human knuckle-bones were spotted in the bottom of the cooking pot. As soon as he could, Captain Norman drew his crew to their feet. He gave them an instruction: to sing a hymn, his favourite militant Christian hymn – in which he had instructed them at sea. This the crew did. Soon they returned to their ship where Captain Norman called for buckets of salt water. He commanded each man to drink the salt water until they vomited into the sea. At the same time he read the burial service from The Book of Common Prayer. The service lasted until all human flesh had been expelled from the men’s bodies. Beach Crossings might be read as a burial service for all those who were killed as part of a culture’s commitment to sacrifice. Dening’s style is not so much a conceit as a tremulous patina of mourning. He writes – or compassionates, to use Melville’s expression in Typee – of all ‘the little people’, the ‘commoners’, the lower class and now nameless people, who died in this way. When these people were brought back to be cooked, they were already half slaughtered. By mouths

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and genitals they were hung by hooks, like fish hauled up on the beach. The warriors who brought them had been on ‘fishing’ expeditions. ‘What is it to be eaten?’ Dening asks, almost transgressionally, in the middle of his book. The answer is never direct. ‘Be mysterious,’ he keeps saying, after Gauguin. And a cross-cultural ambivalence is sustained because of the essential connection, so well understood by Christians, between sacrifice, communion, and the sacramental. So as you read Beach Crossings, two exclamations seep into the ear. One says, ‘the horror, the horror’. The other says, ‘the wonder, the wonder’. The latter is there when we meditate on the system created by the island people to appease the gods. The former is there at the spectacle of their system, breaking down under the fatal impact of our arrival as Strangers, we who narcissistically denied our correspondences with the ‘savage’, and who so corrupted island life that, in the case of the Marquesans, sacrificial rites gave way to orgies of suicide. But there is nothing glibly relativist about Dening’s sweeping narrative. The keys to it rest with the particulars of individual lives. There is the London missionary man, William Pascoe Crook, deposited on the beach in the Marquesas and soon without his trousers and more at ease in a native woman’s skirt. Crook gets so close to horror that he is riddled by spiritual torment. There is the sailor Edward Robarts, the first of the beachcombers who would have a ‘royal bride’, umpteen adventures as a various go-between, and who would eventually write his Narrative – ‘anything to raise the wind for an honest morsel’, as a sailor would say. And there is the islander Joseph Kabris, who made it as far as France, sporting his tattoos, ‘wrapped in images’. Beach Crossings stitches these lives together as marvellously as a novel. In each case, especially with missionary Crook, there is a dark hint of personal identification on the part of the author. It is all very intriguing, and Dening en­ joys telling us that some of his best students found him ‘elusive’. Here he is both elusive and performatively naked, in an almost pre-Freudian way. I read Beach Crossings as a brave attempt to minister to our – everyone’s – dark innocence.

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T R A NSL AT I NG L OV E I N T O L A N D S CA PE Translation is choice, interpretation, an assertion of taste, a betrayal of answers to one’s needs, one’s envies. A.K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva

With a title such as ‘Translating Love into Landscape’ you will want to ask, ‘What kind of love?’ So says my host at the University in Chennai. I had been there for five minutes and she’d asked me to lecture on – well, anything. The answer is: the love that pertains to Eros, to Agape, to Philia, to Philopatria. That is to say, carnal love, altruistic love, fraternal love and love of fatherland, the home place. And there is another one: devotional love, the love that arises from religious passion. All these are my focus, because I have had the good fortune of having made a study of a man and his work where they all come together. The nature of translation is also my topic, as you can see from the epigraph to this talk. It is by your great scholar of the poetry of Southern India, A.K. Ramanujan, who was also a poet in his own right.1 I had just begun to read his stunning book, Speaking of Siva, when I first visited Madras, early last year. With these translations of the 10th century saints, I fell in love. I was ravished by their directness, their immediacy, the way in which they so economically spoke to the heart – the same qualities, I later discovered, that drew Ramanujan to them. I had also been profoundly struck by Ramanujan’s aphor­ istic sentence about the task of translation. In particular, I was taken by the language of love he had used there – how translation is a matter of assertion of taste, of needs, of envies. In Ramanujan’s book translation takes place under 1

A.K. Ramanujan. Uncollected Poems and Prose, edited by Molly Daniels- Ramanujan and Keith Harrison, Oxford India, 2005.

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the heading of desire. The same can be said for the other item in Ramanujan’s sentence: ‘interpretation’. For interpretation is a matter of intellectual passion that must enter the object of desire before any translation can take place. It is almost as if, really, the juxtaposition of translation and love is a tautology. Certainly this is the case with regard to the devotional beings Ramanujan has translated. Their vacana – the sayings of saints which Ramanujan has shaped as poems thanks to his affection and command of modern poetic forms – become inseparable from the worship of Shiva. And the saints’ sense of Siva, remember, is bound up with what I would call a burning sense of landscape. Virasaiva was the militant, heroic faith in Shiva, their supreme god. It is not possible to read Speaking of Siva without being conscious of this, whether it be Basanna’s refrain about ‘my lord the meeting of the rivers’, or Mahadeviyakka’s prayer to Shiva ‘white as jasmin’, or Allama’s ‘O Lord of Caves’. Ramanujan was to praise the way in which the ‘object’ was enacted in these poems, and I am suggesting that that object was the landscape.2 The thing is, the enactment is effortless. It is so because this is a case where translation – the business of converting one thing into another, or converting an original into something else resembling it, all this in good faith (another measure of love, by the way) – is hardly necessary. The devotional speech is so direct, so unmediated, so insistent on the identity between the world and the ecstatic speaker that there is no distance to cross. The world is there. The words are here. The speaker, in his or her devotional state, has merely to name things in a certain way and the act is done. The world is one when place is incorporated devotionally. All this I had burning in my mind thanks to Ramanujan and his saints. But my state of arousal was manifold because what Ramanujan had been saying of translation, and the kind of words he had been translating, had an intimate connection with the work I have been engaged in for the last ten years. I shall now speak about this project which is a quintessentially 2

Ibid., p. 46.

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Australian study. Not only that. For those whose object of study is postcolonialism it affords an opportunity to lay out a life that is a case, par excellence, of love gone wrong. The translation I am concerned with is the greatest act of translation to have taken place in Australia. It probably had more to say about the spirit of Australia, past and present and future, than anything else ever published. It was also an act of world significance. For it involved the translation of one of the oldest surviving bodies of poetry in the world and was done with a mind to placing Australian poetry in the company of world literature. Finally – and this is my last explicit reference to our title (the details will soon speak for themselves), the translation of which I speak invoked all the species of love listed above. In fact as a literal and historical phenomenon, to travel any distance with it at all, one needs the horses Eros, Agape, Philia and Philopatria harnessed in the chariot for the whole passionate way. The great work I am talking about is Songs of Central Australia by Theodor George Henry Strehlow. It was published in 1971 by the Australian publisher, Angus and Robertson, in Sydney. It was nearly 800 pages long, had a small print run and sold for $70, a lot in those days. Today it is a rare book and out of print; you would have to pay anything up to $5000 for a second-hand copy. That is because from the moment it saw the light of day it was recognised as a treasure, because of its immense depth and authority on matters pertaining to the songs of the Aranda people in Central Australia. The great book tabled for the first time long runs of song in Aranda and English, along with a great deal of the music. Even today it is impossible to open the book without catching your breath: at the majestic completeness of such songs, most of them sacred songs that are not sung today; at their beauty and power; at their depth as an integral part of a passionate, animistic culture rooted in a sacred sense of Country, the fertility of which was sustained by rituals that had songs at their centre. Songs of Central Australia was, then, instantly recognised as the major scholarly and creative work out of the centre of a continent settled by the British as recently as 1788, in the period the East India Company was

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inventing Calcutta. Songs of Central Australia carried the art of the songs and, within that, much of the ancient lore that had belonged to the region for at least 30 thousand years (to name the earliest datings of human habitation in the Centre). To put this another way – using a cultural marker – Songs of Central Australia is a book that stands with the beauty of the Song of Songs and with the authority of the Torah. It is the monumental tribal text, modernised for us by translation. My book, Broken Song, is about the making of that book.3 Writing it was my way of travelling in the Centre, and making my own journey of understanding in Aboriginal culture. It was also my way of approaching ancient poetry and the contemporary issue of translation. I wrote my book as a poet and as an historian, one discipline camping with the other. For these reasons the book took a long while to complete: from start to finish about ten years in the travelling and research and thinking and feeling; with the intense part of the writing – about five years. It was a project to which I surrendered, as one must, to the Country called Central Australia. First I wrote a shortish book to get ready for my long book. That book is called The Rock: Travelling to Uluru. I wrote poems all through those years coming and going to the Centre (I live on the southern coast of Australia). Many of them were love poems; they included an account of my marriage that took place on the ancient Finke River, in Central Australia, as well as poems to the radiant power of the desert itself. Those poems were published as The Inland Sea, and they draw upon Songs of Central Australia as much as the Biblical Song of Songs. So you can see that in my own work, I have been involved in various ways with translating love into landscape. Now I want to tell you the story of Theodor George Henry Strehlow. This is a short version of a longish life, as he was born in 1908 and died in 1978, which is to say he straddled at least 3 epochs in Australian history. Strehlow’s troubled life went from the early days of the Centre as a colonial frontier, when Aborigines were often the victims of white settlement, to the middle 3

Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, (Knopf), 2001.

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period around the time of World War Two, when white governments adopted the welfare policy of seeking to ‘assimilate’ the black people by subtle and not so subtle forms of coercion, to the modern period of Aboriginal empowerment in the Land Rights struggles of the 1970s. In the first two stages Strehlow was a brave friend of the Aboriginal people. His personal tragedy was that by the modern political period of the 1970s he had become a reactionary figure. All this is part of my story too, the post-colonial aspect, if you like, although I happen to think that we need much more than post-colonial studies to get to grips with the life and work of a man like Strehlow. Strehlow – Theo as he was called as a boy, Ted when he had grown up – was born on the Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia, about 90 kilometres from Alice Springs. He was the fifth son of Freida and Carl Strehlow, the mission couple who had been labouring in the wilderness of the Centre since the 1890s running the German Lutheran mission that was one of the first while settlements on Aranda tribal land. The mission work was of course the labour of love aimed at converting the ‘black heathen’ to Christianity. And to do this the Lutherans were unique among missionaries. They believed in learning the native tongue. In fact, they respected the Aboriginal languages, and recognised that they were spoken by people with a spiritual life as alive as their own (an attitude rare among both English missionaries and scholars of the time). Pastor Carl Strehlow was much loved by his Aboriginal flock. He was also much admired by his own people in Germany, for over the years he sent them German translations of many songs and myths of the Aranda. Pastor Carl was among the first ethnographers in Australia, and young Theo saw his father at work – sitting down attentively and respectfully with the old men of the tribe, in intimate trust with them as they told the Christian, many of their religious secrets. For most of his time at the mission, Theo was the only white boy in the community. This was because around 1911 his parents had taken their other children back to Germany, and left them there to be educated. Theo was brought back to the mission where he had been speaking Aranda since

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infancy: as his mother had Aranda housekeepers, you could say that Theo had been cradled in Aranda. His other tongue was English, and by the time he reached puberty he was learning Latin and Greek from his father. (I am reminded again of Ramanujan, who spoke of his own three formative languages: English, which was for ‘upstairs’, and inseparable from his father’s library; Tamil, which was ‘downstairs’ and connected with ‘bedroom’ and ‘childhood’; and Kannada: which pointed him to ‘outside’).4 Theo was 14 when his father died – tragically, unexpectedly. With his mother, he had to leave the desert to go south. He was educated at the Lutheran college, in Adelaide, and at the University of Adelaide, where he excelled in English and Classics. By 1932 he had graduated with honours only to find himself unemployed. He wanted to be an academic, but this was the Great Depression. He accepted a study grant to go back to Central Australia. He did not want to go back, particularly. He was still grieving for his father, who had died there. He had miserable memories of the heat, the dust, the flies. But the grant was to make a formal study of Aranda, and no one else in Australia was better equipped to do so. (Yes, as late as 1932, a century and a half after white settlement, the first formal study of a native tongue was to be done. The colonial structure of such resistance is familiar to Indian scholars: one only has to recall William Carey’s passion for translation, which was pitted against the Imperial philistinism of Lord McCauley who thought there was more knowledge to be had from an English schoolboy’s primer than all the Oriental languages translated together). In April 1932 Theo found himself back home. He opened up his father’s records of Aranda language and belief. He realised that as a boy, he had not known much of the language, despite his loving ear for it. He resolved to, as he memorably noted in his diary, ‘get back into the language’. It is a telling phrase that instantly invokes the passionate activity of translation. It is assertive, it gives off need, and it even suggests the envy in which he might have 4

Ramanujan, pp.43, 60.

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already held his father’s achievements. And to do this he set off on the first of his long journeys, into the desert. With an Aboriginal man Tom Ljonga, his ‘camel boy’, he started on the long walks out from the mission into the scrub, across dry plains, in rocky and sandy country, all the while meeting the old men who were masters of their tongue. He began to record the songs. And the myth stories of which the songs sang. And the Aboriginal comments on such stories and songs. And the music that went with the songs. By 1935 Strehlow had travelled 7000 miles, over half of them by camel. He had become a bushman. He was very proud of that. In these years he collected the basis of Songs of Central Australia, to which he was to add for the next twenty years. His main text was finished by 1952, but not published, as I said, until 1971, one result of which was that in some of its attitudes and style, and certainly in aspects of its translation, it was dated by the time it came out. But to come back to love and landscape. To collect the songs Strehlow sat down with the knowledgeable Aboriginal men, the elders, the ‘men of high degree’ as they are sometimes called. And the men would convey to him: ‘we do not wish to sing unless we go to the ceremonial place; we do not wish to sing without making contact with our tjurunga’. The tjurunga were the carved boards and stones that contained the ancestor spirits of which the songs sang. They were the most precious things that could be owned by an Aranda man. They were his life blood, in a literal sense. They were proof of ownership of the dreaming places, the sites of animistic belief that gave life and meaning to Country. Strehlow obliged, He went to the sacred places. But there the evidence of tragedy often awaited him and the Aboriginal men. For there was, in that colonial period (as well as later) a trade in the tjurunga, and Strehlow would often get to the sacred cave only to find that it had been plundered. But at other times he would make camp, the men would reveal their sacred objects, and sing for him and he would, painstakingly, verse by verse, write things down. A good day’s work could produce in him a kind of ecstasy. Here he is in 1935:

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‘The old men started chanting tonight … they sang lustily. It was wonderful to hear the chanting again … their heads and bodies shaking rhythmically, chanting with the enthusiasm that made them forget age and weakness and become young again … a break wind of boughs, a moon dipping through white fleecy clouds, a rising and falling of the chant melody like the breathing that gives us life.’5 ‘The breathing that gives us life’ as Strehlow so vividly put it. Songs that had the breath of life. Songs with the fundamentals of the breath in them, we might say, thinking of the Vedas. Strehlow was not thinking of Indian philosophy, but he was implicated in matters as fundamental. So now let me give you a small indication of the Aboriginal song to which he gave his life and his love. Small is an understatement. The songs run on for pages, they were sung over hours, and sometimes over days and nights. The songs told of ancestor beings who crossed the country, and the songs themselves, in their duration and the breath they consumed, involved ceremonial feats often connected with fertility rites. At the risk of misrepresenting their true nature, here are some snippets, no more than that: I am red like burning fire I am covered with a glowing red down I am red like burning fire I am gleaming red glistening with ochre I am red like burning fire Red is the hollow in which I am lying A tjurunga is standing upon my head: Red is the hollow in which I am lying. This is from the ‘Ankota Song’. The song is, as Strehlow points out, vivid, and its power is obtained by the simple device of repetition that in each stanza pushes forward the description of the figure in eagle down. The technique, which is as old as the Hebrew psalms and the Gilgamesh epic, is open to subtle 5

Hill, p.170.

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variations. In the Aranda what also moves songs slowly forward is rhyme, as with the eagle song, where the birds circling over the MacDonnell Ranges can be sensed. One above the other we are hovering in the air Both of us are hovering in the air Off the edge of the mountain bluff we are hovering in the air Near the jagged mountain edge we are hovering in the air. With some ti-tree verses we have: Let the little ti-tree bushes intertwine their branch tips. Let the little ti-tree bushes sprout blossom clusters on their branch tips! Let the little ti-tree bushes spread their bushy crested tips; Let the little ti-tree bushes sprout blossom clusters on their branch tips. Let the little ti-tree bushes raise high the foreheads of their branches. Let the little ti-tree bushes sit fast and avert their faces. Aboriginal songs sing of place, the better to celebrate and invoke and enact the spirits of creation. You might say, here, that the songs directly generate ancient genesis. The songs are not, in the final analysis, matters to be translated (though of course here they have been translated). Rather, in their many acts of naming they constitute the sacred nature of place. (In this respect they are great sayings of the place; they are the vacana of those whose lives are directly invested in the sacred nature of their place. I would go so far as to suggest that the Aboriginal singer has a Virasaiva relationship with his or her mythic ancestors known as the Dreaming.) Back to Strehlow’s story. In 1936 he became the first Patrol Officer for Central Australia. This meant he worked for the Protector of Aborigines, a role that combined the roles of policeman, health officer and social worker. He had an area to cover that was the size of Rajasthan. He did this diligently, and became, in all sorts of ways, a friend of the Aboriginal people at a time when they were being subjected to terrible economic and sexual exploitation. It was – 2 42 –

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a time when many Aboriginal people in the Centre were starving. He was at odds with powerful pastoralists and with the Government that employed him. Official authorities did not like the way he defended Aboriginal religious rights, or the way he extolled their priests with communitarian values (think of Ramanujan’s affection for the ‘fiercely democratic’ aspects of the vacana). There was another side to his work as a translator. He was translating the New Testament into Aranda. In this he was continuing some of his father’s as well as contributing to the ongoing work of the Hermannsburg Mission. It was his night work, so to speak, what he called ‘a labour of love’. He was still a Christian, if a complicated one having a love affair with all that was ‘primitive’ or savage in Aranda culture. And such a project meant, of course, that he was translating both ways: with the songs, from the Aranda into English; with the Christian scripture, from the Greek and German into Aranda. Such was the manifold nature of his field of translation. You could say here that being with the songs he had made of himself a Caliban figure. But he was not Shakespeare’s Caliban. He was Luther’s Caliban because, cutting across all his post-colonial embrace of the tribal songs, he was translating the Christian text with militant colonialist intent. On the one hand, he was at one with the black man; on the other, at one with the white missionary. Well, then, what kind of translator was he? Regarding the songs, there are six points to make, and each in its different way pertains to matters of interpretation, taste, needs and envies. Strehlow was highly influenced by ancient Hebrew poetry. In particular he adopted the poetic form called parallelism. This, as Ramanujan has pointed out, was common to traditional poetry in Finnish, Chinese and Vedic work, as well as Hebrew. Strehlow’s own diction tended towards that of the English Romantic. Or to be more precise, he was closer to the Georgian poets in England than he was to anything that came after Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (although he loved Eliot). Ramanujan, by contrast, valued the anti-romantic lack of ‘flamboyance’

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in the work he translated; and his own poetry drew from the modernism of Pound, among others. Strehlow’s translations were caught up in his personal needs to resolve matters of sexual desire with regard to the carnalities of a primitive culture. You can see this need working underground in his translations. Another need was on the surface: to make of Aboriginal song, poems that looked good in the company of classical world literatures. This anxiety to ‘promote’ tribal song into literature colours all that I have said above. Strehlow was in turn compelled to argue a case that in Aboriginal song, which he had turned into poetry for the page, the word was more important than the music and the dance. Strehlow never addressed the implications of what he had done by translating an oral culture into a written one. How does his story end? Tragically. Wretchedly. For by the end of his life Strehlow was so possessive of his archive that he found himself in dispute with all the public bodies that had funded all of his expeditions. He felt sidelined by the Federal Governments that supported Aboriginal claims to Land Rights (even though, back in the thirties he had been among the first to propose Aboriginal land and religious rights). He was angry and envious regarding the new breed of anthropologists who lacked his biographical connection with Aboriginal culture. He was paranoid about losing all that he had in his collect­ ion. At one point he even threatened to burn it all rather than surrender it to a public institution. In this state of mind he did something entirely self-destructive. Secretly, he sold a large number of secret-sacred photographs to Stern magazine in Germany. He needed the money. He had retired from the University of Adelaide and felt under siege. The photographs revealed senior Aboriginal men – the knowledgeable men of the sacred songs – in ceremonial dress meant only for spiritual initiates. It was betrayal enough that Strehlow sold them to a faraway place such as Germany. The betrayal was magnified in May 1978 when they turned up on the cover of a popular magazine in Australia.

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Overnight, Strehlow’s reputation as a responsible anthropologist fell into pieces. So did he. He was disgraced, a lifetime’s loving care in translation was shattered. A few months later, on the day he was about to open an exhib­ ition of his life’s work, he collapsed. He died almost instantly, and in the act of showing the guests a beautiful bridal headdress made of the tail tips of the ingkaia, the rabbit-eared bandicoot, or the bilby. ‘Ingkaia’, he said, as he passed away, mouthing the name of a marsupial that is now almost extinct. Such was his end. An operatic one, to a life lived rather operatically, once you realise how romantic Strehlow was from beginning to end. How should my version of his story end here, today in Madras? Perhaps by returning to Australian poetry today, which has a love relationship with the Aboriginal sense of Country. We should remember that at the end of his great book Strehlow looked to the day when Australian verse might be woven ‘on the poetic threads spun on Stone Age hair spindles of Australian verse.’ Of course we would use different terms today, and I am not implying that the only Australian poetry of worth is born of Aboriginal influence. But the ecological power of Strehlow’s vision stands.

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PART 3 NAKED ART MAKING

BRU SH E S W I T H T H E BODY On Lucian Freud

William Feaver, Lucian Freud (2007) Bruce Bernard and David Dawson, photographers, Freud at Work: Lucian Freud in Conversation with Sebastian Smee (2007) Lucian Freud (with an introduction by Sebastian Smee), Lucian Freud 1996–2005 (2005)

Most people I know don’t much like the work of Lucian Freud. Mention his name and their faces become pruney. When this happens they’re not thinking of his portraits of his fellow painters, the two other greats of late 20th-century British art, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, both of whom thought highly of Freud. They don’t know the extent of Freud’s portraiture, in which he has explored with the fecundity of Picasso, or his masterful etchings and selfportraits as deep as Rembrandt’s. Nor do they know that Freud’s exquisitely observed and tender studies of his mother have few comparisons, or that when it comes to the human figure, which he considers to be an extension of his portraiture, he can be inspired by a lusciously tangible tree painted by Constable, one of his favourite artists. They don’t know Freud as a man of nature, of plants, trees, horses, dogs. What they have felt is all oddity and edge. A stark-eyed woman (it was Freud’s first wife) is holding a kitten by the throat. There she is again, with one of her breasts lolling from her dressing gown as a dog sprawls in her lap. And see that man on the couch, his genitals grotesque as he holds a black rat. Or the pregnant woman, her loins incomparably exposed only days from giving birth. The discussion slips quickly into one about permissible and bearable limits, as if the topic is a new French film that has live sex. Who needs it? Who

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wants art to be in your face? For Freud’s pictures are very much in our faces. They are often close-ups or huge, making disturbing dramas by virtue of their proximity. And what about that thing we paid a fortune for in Canberra? They mean Freud’s huge work, After Cezanne (1999–2000), which shows a naked couple on a tatty mattress with a chair turned over as a third person, also naked, enters the room. Cezanne’s own painting was a steamy little study of a threesome; wonderful. The Freud is sour, enigmatic and ungainly in its composition. ‘He has no safety net of manner,’ Auerbach once wrote, full of admiration. But this virtue is lost in the general feeling that what Freud does is too full of brutal exposures, too naked by half. Part of the trouble is that in this country we have not seen enough of Freud to put him in perspective. He turns 86 in December and he has been painting significant works since the end of World War Two. There is a lot to consider. And we have to contend with the breaking news stories from the auctions (in May, his 1995 nude, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, sold for a record $US36 million), along with the culture’s compulsive tabloid spasms about nakedness. Add to this the image of the artist as a celebrity, and difficulty of discourse is compounded. To have been a beloved grandson of Sigmund Freud, and to have painted the Queen (as he did in 2001) can’t help but put the work in a distorting light. The other difficulty is phenomenological. As soon as you say anything about Freud you are up against two things that feel as if they are worlds apart: the experience of living through the eye, and the sense of inhabiting a material body. The first experience seems to belong quite naturally to Freud’s exquisite early work, the famous paintings of what has been called his Flemish period, when he did portraits of spectacular clarity and objectivity which, as if to mirror our visual amazement, also feature the eyes of his subjects with a glassy, microscopic accuracy. You cannot look at them without wondering about the act of looking itself, and without feeling, somehow, removed from the subject, as if the painterly object before your gaze is the result of some act

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of removal, or detachment or even cruelty. The intensities of the image and its making do not warm one. As if to accentuate this feeling, in 1954, his nerves in tune with the Cold War, Freud published an essay, ‘Thoughts on Painting’, in Encounter magazine. Looking was surveillance, he writes: The subject must be kept under closest observation; if this is done, day and night, the subject, he, she or it, will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible.

In a similar vein, 10 years later, with the world still under a nuclear shadow, Freud wrote of how, ‘having the end in sight’, the artist gained such ‘supreme control and daring of his existence that he will (in Nietzsche’s words) create conditions under which ‘a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places into the sun’.’ In Freud’s later work there is that sense of the artist dragging horrors into the cold light of day. The work is also freer, having broken away from tight, hairline studies done with the sable brush, works so detailed, so linear that Freud felt he was constricting himself, as well as the ‘forms’ that needed ‘liberating’. In the later works the power of scrutiny is there, the all-over gaze, but it has warmed. If the early work is glass, the late work is clay. This is the now famous Freud-of-the-flesh and the naked body, bodies that belong to intimates, from friends and spouses, to sons and daughters, especially daughters. ‘My work,’ he famously declared, ‘is entirely autobiographical. It’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.’ It is also the Freud of the monumental, carnivalesque body of, for instance, Sue Tilley, the model for the Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, and of Leigh Bowery, the transgressional expatriate Australian performance artist with a back like the Torso Belvedere, who flaunted every centimetre of himself for Freud as if to prove how our bodies might fully, truly occupy space if shamelessness permitted. Freud’s great studies of nakedness and mortality make a welter of paint as flesh. It’s impossible to look at them without the experience of our own – 2 51 –

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mass, weight, the bone beneath the skin and the flesh over bones that inhabit rooms before they are lowered into graves. The bodies are as tangible as fruit in bowls, albeit overripe or blotchy or bruised-looking even when fresh. One can almost smell them. As part of nature they are part of us, the viewers. They are worthy of our touch. In fact, we can hardly look without invoking some knowledge of touch. Hence their intimacy: the fact that our compulsively pleasurable looking – what Freud’s grandfather called scopophilia – is ultimately derived from touching. Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) was the seminal work that sought to bind us from infancy to a foundational carnality, of a seeing under the heading of desire. Such looking was ‘the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitement was aroused’ when it ‘encourages the development of beauty in the sexual object’. To which he added: ‘The progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilisation keeps sexual curiosity awake.’ But what if – as the work of the grandson was to do – everything is revealed and displayed, beauty, so-called, be damned? What if truth rather than beauty was shown, the truth of everything that could be seen? And it’s easier to let beauty back into the room if we think of what Robert Hughes said about Freud’s naked bodies, that they ‘bypass decorum while fiercely preserving respect’. Freud’s work has taken us to a relentlessly lit place where others are as naked as we might bear to be with ourselves. As we were born is as we will leave this earth: naked, tangible until the last – and unidealised, courageously real, at one with the reality of the world. John Donne wrote of ‘the feeling brain’, a synesthetic notion. After Freud we can say ‘the feeling eye’. And standing before his late work we keep feeling a sensate question: how much can I bear to be seeing? Freud has always intended to discomfort, to render things ungrammat­ ically. Partly this was determined by his interesting times. His family left Berlin when he was 10 to escape the rise of Nazism, and he grew up in England, a privileged, prickly, isolate youth; a tensely attractive young man during the

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war and afterwards, desired and admired by the Horizon magazine crowd (some of Orwell’s ‘pansy Left’). In a cultural climate of ‘unsheltered-ness’ Freud resolves to be his own man and is. He goes to one art school and accidentally burns it down. He goes to another and declines to be taught by a master teacher of drawing. He scoots off to another, in the countryside, where he paints as he wants. In the country he can at least ride horses. Freud speaks of his own ‘fraughtness’. He knows the work of his grandfather, who joked with him without his false teeth and gave him a copy of The Arabian Nights, but he is not into analysis – ‘The life cycle is too short.’ He paints against the grain and lives for himself. Lawrence Gowing, critic and friend, spoke of a coiled-up vigilance, a force, ‘fly, perceptive, lithe, with a hint of menace’. And Gowing was the first to link Freud’s manner to his art. ‘Freud’s view of a subject was marked from the first by a serpentine litheness in the ready, rapid way in which an object was confronted, the object of intellectual curiosity or sociable advantage or desire – it was apt then to be all of them at once.’ All this was well before Freud was doing the Soho dens with Bacon, enjoying a card game, a drink and a biff. The urban myth of Freud has naturally died down over the years. It now survives in its studio form, you might say, powerfully illustrated recently in Freud at Work, with photographs by Bruce Bernard, an old friend, and David Dawson, Freud’s long-time studio assistant. A perfect book for the colour supplements: instant access granted to the kingdom and the cave of the bohem­ ian celebrity artist; the wild one dressed like a tramp, standing at his easel with the very posh, with his models in revealing poses. Kitsch images of a fecund libertarianism. You half expect to turn the page and see a gallery of Freud’s children, the many offspring of many women in a ‘sexual history’ that Hughes fell to saying was ‘long and labyrinthine’. But the pictures are so much more than that. They are as magnif­ icently informal (Freud at play with a young fox, one sharp muzzle close to the other; or deeply at ease beside his horse), as they are studied. Great

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paintings are photographed in the company of each other, sometimes with the artist and model. These photographs cunningly conjure the legacy of artist-model studio paintings, the great tradition of self-awareness known to Rodin, Manet, Courbet, Picasso, just as they present Freud’s worksite raw: the sea of bare boards that rises into so many paintings, the tatty chair, the piles of used rags on the floor and up the walls, the soiled flotsam of a painter’s toil, tossed aside like offal in an abattoir. Freud works on several paintings at once, by day and night. In every photograph his furious concentration is palpable, his energy that of an eel at night. It took Freud about 15 years to move from truths of optics to truths of flesh, from the clinical and sometimes cynical gaze to – what should it be called, exactly, except to say that some notion of realism must come into it? Freud’s figures beg for responses as tactfully artistic, as deeply, historically painterly as they are intimate. And not only intimate: as vigorously messy – as risky and as regressive – as the studio itself. Rather say, the artist-in-his-studio: I’m thinking of the shot of him bare-chested on what seems to be a sticky summer night in London. Swivelling with brush in hand, nostrils fuelled by paint, as if he is off on the lead concentrate in the Cremnitz white, the artist turns about himself and his subject like some creature on heat. ‘I shall die painting,’ Freud has said. And: ‘What do I ask of a painting?’ he asks. ‘To astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.’ Thus he goads the critic to enter his stream of vicissitudes, the swirl of Thanatos and Eros, which complicate everything unless they are fully acknowledged. Such was the charge of Freud’s total physicality – the life in the painting, the painting in the life – that Gowing felt it a ‘desperate duty to shake the critical language until it gasps, massage and kiss the prostrate faculties until with a shudder they draw a groaning breath and tell how precious is the awareness that this kind of painting, straight from the thing itself, can supply’. Gowing’s lust for a critical language points to the muscular prose that was to come in book-length studies by Hughes (Lucian Freud: Paintings,

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1989) and Bruce Bernard (Lucian Freud, 1996), each of whom tried to rise to Freud’s physicalities, but without agreeing on the basics: how one should place Freud’s early work in the company of the cynical realism of the Weimar republic, for instance; or the connection between his interest in disturbance and surrealism; or the relative roots of his realism even with regard to Courbet and Cezanne, let alone Velasquez and Ingres. Hughes, who declared Freud to be ‘the greatest living realist painter’, wants us to celebrate ‘the humanity that Freud’s art so alertly hunts from the body’s cover’. But Hughes ends abruptly, as if he knows no simple reference to ‘humanity’ will do. Bernard wonders if Freud might have ‘exhausted the possibilities of realist portrait and figure painting’. He wants us to be perhaps most grateful for Freud showing us ‘how certain human beings London looked at felt in the second half of the 20th century’ – an invitation to a deep social history of the painting that no-one has got near to doing. Bernard is alive to Freud pushing our sensibility to its limits – how, with his male bodies, the frankest in the history of art, ‘the body’s sense of touch is demon­strated with an extraordinary sense of skill that defies complete analysis’. Freud is ‘a painter with more carnal understanding than any in history, with his pictures thereby effecting contracts between the viewer and viewed that are sometimes too close for comfort in a way we should be grateful for’. These are various inadequate taperings-off of criticism. Art history itself, the painter’s own intimate history, the nuances of relationship between artist and his subject, (the ‘concourse’ that produces his ‘elation’, as Freud has sharply put it), these are stimuli as much as roadblocks before any critic speaks of a particular painting. Criticism is always more than art history or theory. Deep criticism is a kind of poem to the painting, or at least prose that delineates the poem that is trying to surface from the analysis, to speak to the painting’s silence. Freud’s art is so undeniably real that it stirs the poem, like it or not, openly manageable or not. William Feaver has been writing the longest and hardest about Freud. His catalogue for the Tate retrospective in 2002, Lucian Freud, a grand production

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with three interesting conversations conducted with the artist between 1992 and 2007, a further demonstration of friendship, access, trust. Overall, however, its text is a let-down after the catalogue, indulging Feaver’s worst tendencies: the in-house, collusive tone; the snobberies. In their low moments Feaver and Freud might snigger at a lower-class sitter, and Feaver, in a spasm of imperial spite, sneers at the Australian Leigh Bowery’s conceit in wishing to be immortalised by the painter. You can’t escape the feeling that Feaver is a biographer-in-waiting on the death of the artist – a sincere position, we might say, for the historically tough critic. But the poem stirring Feaver is not a tough poem. When it comes to body talk he tends to be breathy, almost coy, and his paragraphs can drift in search of firmly articulated thought. But on some matters his dinner party tendencies deliver goods that have weight, most significantly with regard to Freud’s sense of timelessness in portraiture. On this Feaver is invaluable. Here he begins with an anecdote of the painter at a funeral. Freud is amazed at the way the face of the corpse has been painted, at the work that went into it, the heavy brushwork, the impasto, the care. He exclaims to the widow: ‘You could not have done more for him.’ Feaver tells the story in the context of Freud’s 1954 remarks about how a painting ‘must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life’. Feaver puts this in the company of what Sigmund Freud said about mourning, how it ‘loves to preoccupy itself with the deceased, to elaborate his memory and preserve it for the longest possible time’. And so, Feaver wants to suggest, with Freud’s portraits: the work that goes into them acts to sustain life, putting us on the cusp of mourning. Crucially, Feaver highlights the book Freud has loved for most of his life: Geschichte Aegyptens (1936), a collection of realistic encaustic portraits that had adorned mummies. Freud did early and late paintings of this book, where the timeless faces look up from their pages. He loves the way they have no names: ‘They’re human before Egyptian in a way.’ It’s a remark that places his portraits in an impersonal space that radically qualifies his sweepingly – 2 56 –

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benign claim that all his work is ‘autobiographical’. It also, almost incidentally, draws attention to the present tendency to reveal the names of various subjects, despite the limited information in the titles. Such knowledge, as Gowing pointed out, can alter our attitude to a work the way ‘gossip columns do’: it can detract from ‘the inherent life of the painting’. Paradoxically, for all Feaver’s Egyptian talk, he is a beaver for dropping names. In 1970, soon after the death of Freud’s father Ernst, his mother Lucie attempted suicide. Her sister found her and brought her back to life. Freud says, in his typically complicated way: Even though my mother had amazing health and was really very Fine, she pretended she was very ill. She was just terribly depressed to still be alive when she’d made the decision. I started painting her, because she’d lost interest in everything, including me. Before then, I always avoided her because she was so intuitive that I felt my privacy was rather threatened by her … Since she wasn’t interested in me, I had a good model. But then, I did it to cheer her up, to give her something to do.

Freud’s mother lived for another 19 years and for at least 10 of those he painted her. Each morning he collected her from her flat in St John’s Wood, took her to breakfast, then drove her to his studio in Holland Park. There she sat or lay for him as he painted her hands and face and often the paisley dress – the fabric needs mention because he gave as much loving care to every leaf of the pattern as if painting were an embalming process. The painting of her was passing time, claiming time, at once making it and killing it. His mother is not nameless, obviously, her presence is utterly individualised. But she occupies the picture in a kind of timeless way. Like so many of his subjects she is in a silence we come to share as we might in a crypt. The last work of his mother was done after she had died. In the years he was painting his mother to death, so to speak, he was bringing forth his most naked female bodies. He painted the mother of one of his children in a foetal position, for all the world aching with misery. In another painting he put the same woman in the presence of his mother, – 2 57 –

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each oblivious of the other. He painted his mother’s grand-daughters more nakedly than any father has dared to do, breaching, I feel, the decorum of which Hughes spoke. Perhaps the prone presence of the mother empowered the son with some permission to transgress. And, towards the end of this period with his mother he did the pregnant woman who most candidly confronts us with our beginning: Naked Portrait 11 (1980–1), a sexual exposure as explicit as Courbet’s once infamous close-up, The Origin of the World. Considering Freud always worked on more than one picture at once, one must imagine his mother coming and going from a studio of figures as prone as herself – figures undressed while she was dressed, but just as passively subject to her son’s huge concentration. The passivity of the naked figures need not entail their subjugation, however. More often than not Freud’s subjects are asleep. Because the sitting sessions are so long (an average of 80 hours per subject) the painter has taken a chivalrous pity on them. But their dormancy is also an aid: he says he gets energy from them as they sleep. Vitally naked they are, though, for two reasons integral to the grand achievement: Freud’s plastic command of their bodies – all that he was prepared to do with flesh and bone, torso and limbs (‘the head is another limb’). The bodies are as moulded as painted so as to be made anew. Simultaneously, they are vitalised by Freud’s love of shamelessness. Despite what Hughes said about decorum, Freud has always desired to put sitters under a brutal light of exposure. He has wanted all the ‘information’ to be there, whatever it might be. When, quite early on in his life, he first saw Courbet’s The Bathers, with its large, semi-naked woman running into the woods, it was its shamelessness he most admired and feared he could never emulate. As a teacher he once urged his students to brace themselves and face reality by painting themselves naked. This he did to and for himself, eventually, in 1993, producing the astonishing Painter Working, Reflection, a full-frontal self-portrait in laceless boots, waving his palette knife, a study packed with irony and pathos. Shamelessness had by then transcended Eros. It was a means to a greater truth transmitted by his bodies, his presences, his assortment of angular – 2 58 –

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persons. Their atmosphere has always struck me as being something generated strangely after the phenomenon of desire. Perhaps that is the key to their ambiguous aura of melancholy. Torso by torso they have as much strength, a kind of implacable vigour, as anything by Michelangelo or Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke, who was Rodin’s secretary, might have felt compelled to bring angels into the presence of Freud’s bodies. But Freud keeps angels at bay. His subjects occupy an unconsoling threshold often closer to death than life. We relate to each presence as we might to someone in a nursing home. At the same time they are there before us, as glossy as a new delivery in a labour ward. Furthermore – this is the imprimatur, his cultural stamp, really, his long trajectory since the 1930s – they are emphatically material bodies, presences that seem to deny the viewer a sense of a spiritual dimension. This is the true nature of their listlessness, surely. It is why they are so depressing when we feel them to be mirrors of ourselves, and why many people feel they must turn away from them. The body is all there is, just like Freud’s leather chair, on which so many have posed with their eyes turned away from the light of our gaze, while being just as unengaged, apparently, with whatever light that is in them. This is the power and the mystery of Freud’s portraits – so acutely, intimately, warmly, coldly, impersonally dead and becoming, a becoming inherent in the commonplace gravity of the secular. Freud’s morbidities – think how he started out with those paintings of dead birds, fish and monkeys – make him a maestro of materialism. The valour of facing that is a kind of shamelessness hard to avoid, for painter and viewer. Sebastian Smee, a former art critic with The Australian, is the latest critic to be granted access to Freud’s studio. As with Feaver, a friendship coexists with the criticism. In fact, Freud reached out to the young critic eight years ago, after reading a piece where Smee spoke of the quality of Freud’s attention as ‘a natural extension of some true yet awkward form of love … a very odd, idiosyncratic mode, you sometimes feel, but it’s tremendously generous and responsive, too’. This is a long way from the tone of Freud’s statements on surveillance, and I imagine the ageing painter warmed to it. – 2 59 –

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Smee’s introduction to Lucian Freud, 1996–2005 begins: Lucian Freud is the great amplifier of 20th-century figurative art. His pictures are infused with the most extraordinary sense of duration. He articulates the intimacy and sometimes the estrangement of a unique mode of paying attention to people.

True, and the notion of Freud paying attention reminds us of the similarly huge concentration of his grandfather, who pinned people to the couch as relentlessly as the painter holds his sitters in the studio. More recently, in the book of photographs, Freud at Work, Smee asked the painter if he felt ‘a kind of happiness when he was working’, or was it ‘more a question of being in the grip of something’. ‘I think,’ Freud replied: ‘it’s more that if I wasn’t working I’d feel a terrible waste of time, a sort of prize cunt. I suppose happy in a sense. Hopeful, really. But it’s only what I want to do … I try not to repeat myself.’ This is trust, with a touch of analysis interminable, at work between critic and painter. Smee’s critical tone owes a fair bit to it. Sometimes his acclamatory diction is too sweet for Freud (‘lovely’ and ‘gorgeous’, for instance), and I wish his publisher had not kept him to such a short book. But he writes as Riley Lee plays the shakuhachi; a prose that is light, deft, deep and close to the poems his sensibility embodies. Painting by painting, his pen pictures are as good as and sometimes better than, anything that has been done. This excellent and richly produced little study is a good place to begin one’s reading about Freud, working backwards to the earlier critics who had to recover from their various cultural shocks at the time. Smee is especially good on Freud as a realist painter, extending and qualifying Hughes. He reminds us that Freud is a realist without an agenda, or with no aim but to locate the individuality of each subject. Smee wants to say that Freud refuses to produce an image of ‘universal’ significance. In these respects Freud is akin to Courbet who – another affinity – applied his realism in theatrical ways. Realism as Theatre is the last of Smee’s chapters. It’s the necessary remin­der that as with other major realists (Velas­quez, Corot,

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Manet) so with Freud: ‘realism could often mean a quickening and intensifi­ cation of self-consciousness and artifice’. And, it must be added, wit and irony, which have been especially apparent in some of Freud’s latest paintings, such as The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2005), in which the model clings to the legs of the artist, a figure of mock subjugation, Freud’s sardonic riposte to those who would seal him in a male chauvinist box. For me, what Smee amplifies is Freud’s portraiture as a manifestation of nature rather than culture. ‘If you look at Chardin’s animals,’ the painter says, ‘they’re abso­lutely portraits.’ And at another moment: ‘I’m really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason.’ Smee gives an exquisite account of Double Portrait (1985), the famous picture of a woman with a sleeping whippet, one of the great paintings of the natural accord between humans and animals. Smee cites Georges Bataille’s theory of religion: The animal is not closed and inscrutable to us. The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me.

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GE T T I NG T O GR I P S W ITH NA K ED What is it to be naked? To others. And to ourselves. I suppose most of us know nakedness from various experiences of loving and being loved. Or from some childhood memory, perhaps going back to the moments of birth. Or from the experience of illness – a nakedness that comes from being helpless in the hands of others. Nakedness involves more than a sense of exposure, of being looked at. It’s a matter of being seen in ways tantamount to touch. It is being touched – lookingly – with penetration. When this is permitted, nakedness is an entry into a realm of trust. When it is not, nakedness is some kind of violation. Nakedness is inseparable from the sense of inhabiting a material body. Nakedness has weight. Gravity becomes us, in our bodies. We descend, maybe even condescend, to be touched – albeit with the careful pride of warmblooded creatures. Our nakedness can have the weight that we often feel is possessed by our erogenous parts – think of those explicit Japanese prints of lovers, where their genitals seem to have been swollen to a psychological significance for them and for us. At the same time, there is the metaphysical body, which looms within and beyond itself and has that ‘unbearable lightness of being’ of which Kundera wrote, offering us a phrase that even the secular took into themselves. Religious or not, it is the metaphysical body to which Rilke’s angels gravitate, a space that speaks of infinity. While Eros is unimaginable without the material body, desire can know no bounds. The temple that the body might be is open to the cosmos so that Eros is both carnal and divine, something that Western art has never really enacted as a unity. You have to look East. Is there anything more divinely at ease than those figures from the ancient temples of southern India? So free, so complete, so erotically celebratory of a sacred order.

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A few years ago a collection of these divine and earthly beings went on show in London. The works from the Chola dynasty could be encountered at that citadel of European art, the Royal Academy. Moving among them, it was impossible not to feel their beautiful truth, a truth and beauty with a depth of naturalness that so reconciled the physical and metaphysical body that nakedness ceased to matter. Nakedness – as in a rare exposure that tests or threatens the individual – falls away, becomes flotsam to the oceanic dance embodied by the figures. The West has never realised such unutterably carnal transcendence. This exhibition, small but ecstatic in its own right, was upstairs at the Academy. Downstairs at the same time, as it happened, was the monumental retrospective of Rodin. His fecund masterpiece, The Gates of Hell, was mounted in the courtyard, its naked figures writhing – like the progeny of Michelangelo – in all their glory. Inside, all manner of Rodin’s mastery of the body was on show, the figures of anguish and sheer beauty and explicit Eros; a treasure trove of nakedness. It was something to commemorate, yes, this apotheosis of Western consciousness of the body. But at the same time it was so riddled with anxiety that I found its overall impact oppressive. Better the reality of a snake pit. Each epoch, as with each individual in their time and place, must engage with nakedness in its own way. The means of that engagement come from the modalities of daily life, which might include the epiphanies that belong to extreme moments to do with mortality, relationships, art. To tell the truth (truth is inseparable from nakedness) I had not much thought about this before coming upon the work of Lucian Freud. For some years I have been working on a book of poems called Naked Clay, drawing from the work of the painter often described as the greatest living figurative artist, or realist, of the twentieth century. Looking back, my work with Lucian Freud started with my hardly knowing it – which is, come to think of it, how many of us live in our bodies, even when we are naked. I’d – 263 –

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opened up a big book on Freud and found myself astonished by the bodies he had painted – their fleshiness and scale, their angularities and intimacy, their gravity of nakedness, their incomparable candour, their implacable, tricky mortality. An early shock was generated by Naked Man with Rat, painted in 1978. He is a stocky, red-headed man lying back on a settee with his legs apart, his scrotum fully on show. One hand is near his head, and he is looking towards the ceiling in what might be a startled way; the other hand is at rest near his hip and in it is the rat – a ‘Japanese laboratory rat’, I have since read. From one side of the hand the head of the rat protrudes; from the other its tail, which drapes over the man’s thigh, almost touching his cock. The following year, Freud painted Naked Man with Friend, where the red-haired man appears again: the same settee and nakedness except that his cock is partly hidden by the trousered leg of the man stretched out beside him. Both men seem to have fallen asleep while posing. There is no rat. The picture exudes a warm yet unsettling atmosphere of trust – between the two sitters and, presumably, the painter. The sexuality of that warmth is emphasised, obviously, by the fact that one man is dressed and the other not. I don’t want to over-emphasise the sexual, however, which is what I realised as my gaze settled on the naked women Freud had painted in this same period. Instinctively, they were of greater interest to me: at the most general level, their nakedness unavoidably lives in the realm of desire. But this is misleading. Freud’s torsos of women – the necks and breasts and bellies – leap forth, along with the sense that these women are individuals in their own right; yet it is nakedness itself that seemed to be offered as a subject. Nakedness rather than sexuality, I mean. The power comes from what is singularly matter of fact, something given about how these figures are in their bodies. And what is true of the women is true of the men, which is a double lack: the feeling you get is that there is nothing to celebrate, and nothing to be anxious about – a double negative that produces a weird unease that we have come to this. – 264 –

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Freud’s naked figures have the monumental neutrality that belongs to certain kinds of truths of nature – less in the realm of art, you might say, than biology or zoology. Half a century ago, Kenneth Clarke, in his great study The Nude, enlivened us to Plato’s distinction between the Celestial and the Vulgar body, the one belonging to the world of ideal forms, the other to the vegetable kingdom. Freud’s bodies – most of the late work – usually exude a disinterest in beauty and occupy his studio as sweetly as a bunch of spongy suedes. That was the other thing that galvanised me: here was nakedness as humanely imperfect as what can be seen in a hospital ward; a nakedness with the tang of mortality, our communality. You can’t look at Freud without being instructed in layers and facets of nakedness. Instructed and provoked into an ongoing ambivalence about the matter of our bodies. He arrived at his radically naked, fleshy bodies after a long painterly journey. As a young man, he liked painting dead things – herons, monkeys, chickens – in a vaguely surrealist manner. The work was witty and cold. Technically, he could paint things with the finish of glass – his Flemish manner, as it was sometimes called. Everything was rendered exactly, the result of what Freud has called, in his rather chilling way, ‘surveillance’, a term that registers his huge powers of concentration, comparable to those of his grandfather Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis on the practice of wilful, relentless exposure. Lucian Freud did several masterful paintings of his first wife, Kitty: she did not have to be naked as the painter’s psychological penetration was so deep. But in one, Girl with Dog (1950), her breast is exposed in close proximity to a dog, which has its head in her lap. My poem goes, (in part): … Smart the dog that nabs the bend of the leg, the turn that offers calf and thigh the staunch hip under the downy gown, its plaited tassel dangling – 265 –

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from her lap to slightly-parted knees, and the rest-point of the dog’s muzzle: its muscular folds of flesh and bone – like her shoulder and collar-bone like the planes of her lips and cheeks, their lustre of dried-out seashells off-setting the glints and gleams: on fingernails, nostrils, nipple, along the pod of a lower lip, in pupils, swimmy rims (the four of them). Folds of its neck, folds of her gown. Her arch of foot a swollen flipper. A dog with the weight of a seal. Their waters warm and rhyme. Freud has long loved painting his figures in the company of his dogs, treating their bodies with the same regard as his human sitter, making ‘double portraits’. In the exquisite juxtaposition of 1985, his female subject in a grey dress is as relaxed as a cat asleep in a basket. Later on, the human bodies – men as well as women – will be naked with the animals, their warmth and smells together. ‘I’m really interested in people as animals,’ Freud has said. ‘Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason. Because I can see more. And it’s also exciting to see the forms repeating themselves right through the body, and often in the head as well. I like people to look as natural and physically at ease as animals, as Pluto, my whippet.’ We look at his double portraits and feel our nakedness domesticated in deep creaturely ways. A gift. By the same token, we know Freud has turned the tables on us, as did Degas when he explained how he did those candid revelations of women in their domestic interiors: ‘I show them deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals cleaning themselves.’ – 266 –

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One aspect of being naked is experiencing the question: what level of nature are we disposed towards? Very occasionally, Freud has led us outdoors, where we might – if we are lucky – experience our body-strength differently. Well almost, but Freud’s allusion to this dimension of nakedness can be palpable. One of my favourites is Naked Portrait Standing (2000). The girl is painted in his rough, late style, the paint almost pitted. Tangibility is the thing; its inspiration was an elm tree painted by Constable. Freud so loved the Constable study that one day he sat down before a tree and tried to render its bark. Impossible! For all his own skills as a realist, the tree defeated him, but you can feel its presence as soon as you try to describe the woman he planted on the bare boards of his studio, where: … in the room’s muffled glow, ignoring Constable’s sun on the stones he grows her thighs up from the floor muddies her shinbone, her loins, its leaf-litter, makes her belly caterpillar creamy her heart-space pale as a sheet, lets her strong arms, folded behind her branch in their own rough ways, mottles her face, ruddies its downward gaze under that thatch – wet and as stiffened as a haystack out from which her bark pupils stare. Her torso is a tree with a copse of saplings packed into it. Daphne on Floorboards

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Freud did not paint women fully naked until the late 1960s. No, this is not quite true: he did Naked Child Laughing in 1963, and the child was one of his daughters. ‘A waterfall of mirth,’ my poem goes, ‘has splashed her upper body white … She is naked spirit/clothed in happiness.’ ‘My work,’ Freud has famously declared, ‘is entirely autobiographical. It’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.’ I like this statement. It feels healthily ambiguous, at one with the sphere of nakedness we experience, surely, in our own families: body to body, unspoken, full of an ease we strive to accept with regard to each other’s company – whether we are looking at each other or not. But this kind of confirming domestic settlement about being naked only goes so far with Freud’s work, which seldom fails to be unsettling. His Naked Girl (1966) is a case in point. The critic Sebastian Smee gives a vivid and accepting description that I found my poem had to engage: On the face of it the picture couldn’t be simpler, less conceited: a girl lies down on a bed and the painter paints her. And yet the finished work is full of visceral contradictions. The girl’s pose is at once selfprotecting (legs together) and abandoned (her arms have fallen into place in the most natural, unselfconscious way). Her body is foreshortened, but also tipped up towards the viewer, since nothing anchors the bed she lies on in a flat, conventionally receding space. Her legs are cropped just before the knee and her pink fleshy sex, squeezed between her two thick sallow thighs, is exposed. Exposed yet not inviting in a salacious way – just there. It is what it is.

Two years later, Freud painted the same girl again. Against Smee’s sweet acceptance of the first study I had my own ‘visceral contradictions’ towards what seems to be a sacrificial offering. The poem is named after the painting, Naked Girl Asleep: Asleep – open to the night air – 2 68 –

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her hips aswivel, the feet could be nailed there. Do we bleed on her behalf or for ourselves alone on the night deck? Years pass. I can’t help standing both above and below her – naked as abalone, raised and slightly open on the painter’s mast. Innocence, innocence, and the grey green sheets she has been tossed on. I am of her flesh yet I want to scrape myself clean with a knife. By the 1970s, Freud was painting freely in his new way, making his grand equations between paint and flesh, moulding bodies to his touch, as if with clay. He wanted to break out of tight forms, and be as technically and emotionally free as his good friend Francis Bacon who was stripping bodies to a scream. He was by then also doing the great paintings of his mother, which he started in 1970. These works – tender and detailed, majestically composed – are a sustained homage that no other major painter has achieved with regard to his mother, a woman whose ‘insight’ into her son, Freud, had always felt to be oppressive and possessive. Of these paintings you might say, as Auden wrote in his poem about Sigmund Freud, that they ‘gave back to the son the mother’s richness of feeling’. – 2 69 –

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This is what we should always bear in mind about painting: it is always both a gift and a recovery of something. It is why the paintings of naked bodies touch us so deeply. Some kind of exchange is taking place, and it unsettles us even if we do not quite know what it is. Among the most powerful works of this period was Naked Portrait II (1980–81), where a pregnant woman candidly confronts us with the site of our own beginning – a sexual exposure as explicit as Courbet’s famous closeup, The Origin of the World. The Courbet, of course, is one of the great erotic works – at least to the male gaze. The picture shows only the belly, thighs and loins of the woman, her lips slightly open to her clitoris. The Origin flirts with being pornographic. Lacan once owned it and kept it behind a curtain, offering peep shows to those inclined. The Freud painting invites nothing like that. The woman is slumped, blotchy and a few days before giving birth. The painting simply presents a fact of life, as you might see it in a labour ward, or as a father might see it before the birth of his child. And deep down it can’t help but invoke those flickers of suppressed imagining of what one’s own mother might have looked like, transgressively witnessed. When it came to writing in response to Naked Portrait II, I found myself having to tease these components up and out from my memory and unconscious. It had to be a poem that confronted the focus of my own erotic gaze, while locating it with regard to the ‘origin of the world’. I have no idea whether the poem works or not. Suffice perhaps to say it’s called ‘Mercurial Awe’, and that today I’m not in the mood for citing it; and that in the poem I found that I had to settle, finally, for writing the word ‘cunt’. If he didn’t work all of the time, Freud told Sebastian Smee, he would feel like ‘a prize cunt’. The painter speaks like that, as I do often enough. The moral and artistic question provoked by Freud’s naked bodies is the extent to which we are obliged to be as frank as the paintings. Over the years I have been looking at Freud’s figures, I’ve felt that their blunt candour sometimes demanded an equally plain-speaking response.

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Perhaps I should say ‘shameless’. Freud himself has solicited the nerve to be shameless. It was the term he used when he first saw Courbet’s The Bathers, and felt he might never be able to be as shameless as the great French painter of large and sometimes sleeping women, their flesh rendered with painterly gusto. It was in the spirit of shamelessness he once urged his art students to paint themselves naked. This he did to and for himself, eventually – in 1993 – producing the astonishing Painter Working, Reflection, a full-frontal self-portrait of him waving his palette knife, well hung and standing in lace-less boots – a study packed with defiance and pathos. In skill and courage, it rivals anything done by the great self-portraitists, Rembrandt or Cezanne, Van Gogh, Munch or Picasso. And because it is so naked, it demonstrates that what Freud asks of others he is prepared to give of himself as no other painter has done. Overall, the grandeur of Freud consists in the invitation he keeps extending to us to keep looking fearlessly. Looking, at no matter what. When we do, I feel, shame falls away as something inimical to nature. Which not to say that all of Freud’s candours expel shame from the room. To my mind, the most naked of Freud’s bodies is the painting Portrait of Rose (1978–79). Rose is one of his daughters. She is lying back on the familiar settee, one hand shading her face, it seems, from the studio nightlight. Her muscular torso commands the picture, as do her strong legs, one bent up on the settee, the other stretched towards the viewer and the floor. You notice, first of all, every facet of her construction, the flesh treated with the patience with which Cezanne painted the stone of Mount Sainte-Victoire. And you can’t help noticing the sheet stretched between the toes of one foot and the other lower leg – a drape that creates a strange tension with the languid pose of the body. I mention these things because they are so fully present: they constitute the work of a great painter who has also composed a picture where his daughter’s loins are in full view. I have yet to meet a viewer – man or woman – who has not been jolted by the picture’s explicitness. Rose’s slit is done with ruddy application, perhaps with a hint of menstrual blood.

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It is possible to say that Freud has done no more than paint his daughter as he has painted every other thing hitherto – plants, dogs, horses, friends and acquaintances, the various women who have given him children, the rags he has used to wipe his brushes, the leather chair upon which so many have placed their naked behinds. These are objects before they are subjects in the material world, and Rose is one object among them who simply happens to be his daughter, and who was, as a matter of fact, delighted to be asked to sit for her father. ‘When Daddy asked me …’, she has explained, she didn’t hesitate to say ‘yes’. Daddy had painted so many other women. Daddy had not seen much of her since she was a small girl. Being his subject was a way of getting to know him. When the painting was done, they went on a wonderful holiday together in Brittany. I am paraphrasing from the gushy delivery you could hear in the headphones at the Tate, when Freud had his great retrospective in 2002. What the recording was doing, of course, was proving permission, and illustrating something of the culture that belongs to the studio of a serious painter: the working habits of truth-seeking, the project of endless scrutiny of all that draws him. ‘The painting is very much done with their co-operation,’ Freud has explained, speaking generally. ‘The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone’s face and it imperils the sitter’s self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body. We know our faces, after all. We see them every day, out there at large in the mirror or the photo. But we don’t scrutinize our bodies to the same degree, unless we are professional models, whom I don’t use, or extreme narcissists, whom I can’t use.’ For many years, Freud had four words painted on a door in his studio: URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST. As a coded manifesto, it fits with his antipathy to works and bodies in works that exude narcissism. Freud’s achievement in the sphere of naked is to have honoured all of our bodies

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with an urgent, robust and subtle concision of presence. In an earthly way, he makes us inescapable to ourselves without narcissism. No mean feat. I say this without having resolved my recoil at Freud having painted a daughter so exposed – and yet, at another level, how is that different from his grandfather’s analysis of his daughter, Anna – if the details had been so intrusive and then published? The fact simply is, though, that I cannot for the life of me imagine sustaining such a gaze with my daughter. Portrait of Rose (1978–79) made me want to challenge the imperial assumption that the gaze of the contemporary painter may be turned to anything he likes – leaving aside, we might say, whatever component of desire might or might not be present. The question that arises in us – By what right do we scrutinise what we claim to love (assuming love is the word)? – does not seem to arise with Lucian Freud. It was one of Freud’s most naked of subjects, the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery, who put the hard question in 1991: ‘When did you get the idea of working from your grown-up naked daughters?’ ‘When I started painting naked people.’ ‘It must make things, well, slightly extreme.’ ‘My naked daughters,’ Freud replied, ‘have nothing to be ashamed of.’ The slippage is plain to see. The issue pertains to the shame of the father, not the daughter. The Bowery works are one of Freud’s great achievements. As with the paintings of his mother, of the pregnant woman and of his daughter, there is nothing quite like them – as bold and as truly realised – in Western art. Freud found Bowery beautiful and that is what shows – with a body as impressive as the Torso Belvedere, which Michelangelo loved, and a skin painted with the lustre of satin. Bowery is the most naked of Freud’s men because he is not in slack, dormant repose, but a figure with generous springy proportions that he flaunts, dangling before the viewer as he must have done before the painter, and looking out at us as brazenly as did Manet’s Olympia, the prostitute making her presence so felt, such a breach of art’s decorum that the bourgeoisie had to banish her image from the salon. The fact that we now

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know Bowery – clubbers in London and New York knew at the time Freud was painting him – as a drag queen of the most provocative kind, famous for giving simulated bloody births on stage, for scatological performances as well as his bondage and space-age costumes, adds to the inescapably natural power of the portraits. Freud painted him for some years, most intimately in And the Bridegroom, done in 1993, not long before Bowery married one of Freud’s other models. The painting shows them lying down together, a very skinny naked woman beside a whale of a man, which makes you shudder at the thought of them coupling. ‘How did she come near him?’ my poem asks, not to mention the whole business of him climbing on top of her. The poem is called ‘Oiling Hercules’ and the painter, ‘self-soiled, oils his Hercules / forcing the ugly question up between the bare boards’. Speaking of ugliness – which our bare bodies have to live with in all manner of ways, especially as we age, or let ourselves slip, creating an argument with our bodies at different times of our lives, perhaps all our lives in some cases – Freud has magnificently transcended ugliness. The celebrated case is his subject, Sue Tilley, who is huge. And the great paintings of her are so fully addressed that they are another unprecedented achievement by Freud, as no other artist has taken such a subject upon himself. Admittedly there is an air of social condescension in Freud naming her in paintings as the ‘Benefits Supervisor’. But before long everyone in London knew her name as distinct from her social rank, and Freud was on record as revelling in painting her with all her blotches and contortions – ‘flesh without muscle’ which had ‘developed a different kind of texture through being such a weight-bearing thing’. The result is humbling. Stand awhile with the paintings of big Sue and you overcome the banality of her being ‘fat’. The fact of ‘fat’ gets lost in the fullness of her individual presence, the way she inhabits her body with such a power of acceptance, affirmation. Her individual and unique body, I mean – not some Rubenesque torso offered as a defiance of the Greek ideal, which she

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shows up as a kind of cock-eyed departure from reality. The paintings of her are straightforwardly, unapologetically there, as the woman in them is there in her own life. Maybe, at some deep level, her massive female figure resonates like those prehistoric fertility sculptures. But mainly the feeling generated by Freud is closer to the atmosphere that belongs to Rembrandt’s larger women, an addition to the history of Humanism. Once I got over the initial squirms of being with Tilley, I found I was writing poems which adopted what I imagined to be her voice – a mark of otherness that no other Freud painting had prompted. It’s a chirpy cognisant voice at one with itself in the artist’s studio and in tune with the magnanimity that Freud brings to his creaturely, human presences: …how should I place my whole weight the weight I am when glutinously askew from the afternoon, loosened for war’s end? How can one be at ease seen from three angles: no benefits there though he pays me, pays me fair … (Evening in the Studio, 1993)

For some time, actually, Magnanimity was the working title of my book. Lucian Freud is a late chapter in the long modern history of rendering the body naked in defiance of ideal forms. His bodies remind us that it takes some doing to appraise ourselves truthfully in public. We learned to do so via various causes celebres, well-known signposts in art history – the 1868 scandal over Manet’s Olympia, for example, which ushered in the direct gaze of the carnal lower orders – and the slow seepage of the sexually commonplace, such as Walter Sickert’s Camden Town series, in which plump naked tarts loll on beds in seedy rooms, the iron bedrails as much a statement of reality as the glimpse a painting might offer of the fully dressed gentleman caller. Sickert’s work is as psychologically frank as it is graphically – taking his cue from his mentor Degas, who painted in the shadow of Rodin at his most explicit. This

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point came home to me a couple of years after the Freud retrospective at the Tate, while I was still trying to code the arrival of his naked bodies, the journey they had made along the byways and highways of art history. The exhibition that soon followed Freud at the Tate was the judiciously provocative Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec: London & Paris 1870–1910. The ideal forms of Venus were very much on the minds of painters such as Sickert and Bonnard, referenced in various ways, the better to usurp them with more explicit realities. The quintessentially explicit items were provided by the sculptural forms of Rodin, most conspicuously with Iris, the fragment of a torso where the girl’s legs are wide open. The curators at the Tate put Iris at the centre of the exhibition. The torso functions, as a catalogue essay put it, almost like a ‘mute, de-anthropomorphised face’, and the fragmentation intensifies the ‘boldness and frankness of the female genitalia’. Sickert painted foreshortened women as if they were sculptural fragments, and his L’Affaire de Camden Town is a natural companion to Iris: as one of the curators remarks, it’s as if he has popped Iris into bed. But there is an important difference. Rodin names Iris a Messenger of the Gods, and there is no suggestion of a god in anything Sickert painted. His rooms are what they are: bare of belief, pregnant only with a kind of sour carnality. And so it can be with Freud. Most often, he leaves sex out of it, offering us figures whose sexual temperature is so low that we take a look and forget all about it – a depressing reminder of what our bodies might become, in their sad, due course. The sourness, then, is in the rooms Freud paints, the floors bare, the tap dripping in a stained sink. When Freud does sex, the atmosphere is no brighter: think of the big painting Australians now know at first hand, After Cezanne, which hangs in the National Gallery. The painting shows a naked threesome: a man and a women on a bed, awkwardly turned away from each other as a second woman enters the room carrying cups on a tray. Everything signals misery and estrangement and you can’t help feeling, apropos of the painting, that Freud has taken pleasure in its studied ugliness. In aesthetic terms, it is well and truly after Cezanne. The original that inspired Freud is a gem of mysterious erotic enthusiasm. – 276 –

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Perhaps what is most naked about his figures is their isolation from each other. One person’s body is usually turned away from the other. They seldom meet each other’s gazes – or the painter’s or ours either. It would be a relief to be able to say that Freud’s sitters are turned inwards. But that is not the feeling at all. Rather they seem to be asleep, and not just because the painter has given them permission to be so, since they must, on average, sit for a total of eighty hours. There is something abandoned about them, as if they have come to the end of the line … ‘The mirror is cracked / Dance has left the belly.’ In his great essay on Freud, Robert Hughes remarked that for all the naked presence confronting us in the master’s work ‘they (the paintings) bypass decorum while fiercely preserving respect’. True. It is what comes through after the registrations of gender and genitals have taken place and the larger truths start to seep in, truths that put his bodies out of the realm of desire. The terms ‘realist’ or ‘realism’ don’t easily summarise those truths, by the way. Freud has never had any realist program, as did Courbet. And, as Sebastian Smee has pointed out, there is a theatrical streak in his work that flouts realism. Freud himself speaks of ‘revelation’. ‘When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting: what will suit me and what won’t. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.’ As a result, and as Hughes points out, ‘The body is new every time.’ Found and refound as new, time after time, as it endures time, as we endure it for the course of our lives. I suppose, when all is said and done regarding nakedness, we all have a simple yearning that is a form of idealism: that we be comfortable being ‘as naked as a hand’. The phrase is another from Robert Hughes, and it is as lovely as it is apt. It could be taken as a way of saying that if we are not blessed with ideal forms we can at least rest easy in what we have when stripped bare. The remark fits some of Freud’s paintings. But not the oeuvre, which makes us run a gauntlet of restless feelings at odds with permissive attitudes towards ‘realism’. – 27 7 –

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Freud would hate this formulation, but his demanding works are teachings. They show us something of what is involved in the process of bypassing decorum. In Getting to Grips with Naked we are compelled to First look away. They are too naked. As when you make yourself see yourself in the bathroom mirror: The straight held gaze, the unforgiving scrutiny then the flick, the blur as the eye soldier crabs off making the worst photos preferable. How do they bear it endure such brutal looking? All the while knowing even settling into weary sleep is no shelter from his slow turning of their bodies on the wheel his handling of their clay? Nowhere to look. Nowhere to go. Even closing one’s eyes won’t do. The tap drips in the sink. The old washer of the self leaks into the pipe by the window the one near the lilac tree. Partly it’s the weight of oneself in that mirror, that’s the thing: – 278 –

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hard to imagine it rising from an oven: such gravity of flesh, no fast-forward glimpses of it flaking – the skin might as well be Cremnitz powdery on the spot. To confront the depth of white you have to mould a cold gaze, some idea of yourself, see yourself bare when you are not bare but made. Nakedness is nothing if not what we dare do with ourselves … In truth, by the end of the sitting their sleeping and expiring for him He has trowled them into anew life: edges, recesses, surfaces you can smooth with a butter knife. They are arrivals that glisten – strange blessings of sorts. We came onto this earth in essence slippery, the soul forever drying.

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ROD MO S S N A K E D No artist’s work is reducible to the independent truth. John Berger, Courbet and the Jura

As soon as you arrive in Alice Springs you are instantly aware of two things. There is the light that strips things naked. It’s a light that both hurts and illum­ inates. There is a glare, and yet objects are luminous. Close up, things seem magnified. In the distance, they seem stage-lit. The first poems I wrote out of the place were an attempt to talk about the way the country pulsated. I have always felt the pulsation was absolutely deep and as timeless as granite and, out of that, strongly erotic, as fecund as Aboriginal song. The second thing is nakedness of another kind. Inseparable from this pulsating landscape are the Aboriginal people. They make up a fifth of the population in the town of Alice Springs and they are, even though dressed in ‘our’ clothes, naked in a tragic way. There is no other word but tragic. Of course, not all Aboriginal people in Alice drift around the town bedraggled and drunk and begging and wounded. However, the dominant visual reality, on arrival, is one that confirms our sense that tragedy is the case. In Sydney or Melbourne we hear the statistics on health, poverty, mortality and substance abuse, so we think we might know something of the tragedy. But we don’t really, until we walk along the Todd River, or sit outside the super-markets, or stroll down the mall, or go near the casualty ward of the Alice Springs Hospital at night. Only then do you get your first sense of a pulsation inseparable from death and dying. This is not an easy thing to say. The last time I was at an opening of Rod Moss’s work was in Alice Springs four years ago, when the man doing the talking was Craig San Roque. The exhibition, larger and more representative than this, was called Where do you come from, Brother Boy? Craig is a

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Jungian therapist who had been working in town for about twenty years. Much good work has been done. But not enough good work to make much difference to the death and the damage in Alice and the region. In the thirty years I have been visiting the place, there has been little good news. So Craig’s talk was harrowing and unapologetic and many people in the room did not want to hear it. He was saying to the audience: Look, this is work that draws upon some of the archetypes about life and death. Like it or not, this work, out of the guts of Alice Springs, is about the living death all around you. Craig’s remarks had a profound truth. But they were not the whole truth – as we can see all around us in this exhibition. For one thing, Rod’s work has the creative pulse of the Centre’s landscape. He uses that light to illuminate a whole range of things, from rocks and waterholes to back lanes and petrol bowsers. The glare of the Centre’s light can produce lightness of being, a kind of gaiety of statement. And in keeping with that mood is the narrative content of many paintings – the scenes of kids at play, the family scenes, the groups out bush who are not at funerals. What comes though, at a glance, is the web of social life, its grittiness and awareness. The figures in these paintings are individuals living their lives strongly as agents. Rod’s social sense incorporates our sense of the tragic, but they do not represent Aboriginal people as pathetic, passive victims. There is something else going on. It’s crucial to say here that most of us living in metropolitan Australia can never know what is going on. Rod knows and his paintings know. But we can’t know, and it would be an outrageous extension of colonialism to think that we could, even if the painter is using some postmodern and post-colonial gestures to help us. A substantial virtue of Rod’s work is that it does not lull us into the conceit of knowing. Rather, they stage a scene that we are invited to interpret. And their importance lies in this: that the artist has not just made the scene up. The characters are real; the situations, posed and photographed

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though they are, are real. In this fact lies Rod’s unprecedented importance as a painter out of Alice Springs. For his work is a dramatisation of the lives of Aboriginal people he knows personally and who have trusted him not only to portray them naturalistically but also to stage recreations of their lives, including moments that show them sad, defeated, enraged, derelict. As scenes, Rod’s paintings invite the charge of voyeurism. Surely these paintings – some of them at least – exploit the tragedy? I’ve talked at some length to Rod about this possibility. In reply he says several things that go to the heart of the complexity of life in Alice Springs. He says, for one thing, that the man we see drunk on the ground in the painting Riverside Bottleshop is not uncomfortable with the portrayal of him. ‘So they don’t care’, I asked him one day, ‘or don’t they see themselves as we see them?’ ‘Not either / or’, Moss replied. ‘When the aggressive images have been reproduced, they’ve cut them out and carried them around in their wallet.’ I still don’t understand this matter. But it emerges from what Rod has to say that one of his regular subjects, Xavier Neal, is a long-time friend. Whole groups in most paintings are friends and have become so over many years of Rod’s non-judgmental contact with them, contact that has included an open door policy in his home, and all that can flow from that: good times out bush, as well as harrowing times at the jail house, at the town camp and at funerals. What I’m saying is that despite the theatrical quality of these works – and the clever and amusing way they reverse roles and play with concepts of the Other and so on – they arise from years of communal relationship: Rod’s family with the Aboriginal families, for better and for worse. And the power of this fact made sense when I sat down with some of the older women of Xavier’s family. What did they think of Xavier’s figure in these realist paintings? Yes, the women told me, they were embarrassed. But they were prepared to live with such paintings because it was Rod Moss who had made them. Rod arrived in Alice Springs in 1984. He’d trained as a painter at Caulfield Technical College, taught at Melbourne’s progressive secondary

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schools, and done a stint of teaching in the bush. He had not travelled far in life, except, one should add, his year on a Gurdjieff commune in America (he can still do the Sufi dancing and breathing, although the teachings, he will tell you, are a fair way behind him now). As a painter he fell in love with Central Australia, as so many do. He did not know what his work would be, except that he wanted to get away from what he calls ‘the Ainslie Roberts mystical Dreamtime kind of thing’. He speaks of his ‘in your face’ painting as an antidote to that kind of romanticisation. Or to put this another way, his is the kind of ‘dirty, ugly realism’ for which Courbet, his favourite Realist painter, became famous. The reference to Courbet is resonant in several ways, and not simply because his great paintings of rural life were condemned as ‘vulgar’ because they were matter of fact, and ‘stupid’ because they seemed to affirm a notion of innocence. Courbet’s key works could confound their political enemies because they so impassively yet enigmatically expressed the social dislocations in the French countryside after the failed revolution of Paris in 1848. The scenes that Courbet painted – a picture of work, the tableau of a funeral – disoriented the bourgeois and aesthetically-driven viewer with their lack of affect. But in actuality, Courbet was, in himself, full of social allegiance with his subjects. The ungainliness of his paintings was part of the point, which was to represent rural subjects to themselves in ways that employed pictorial conventions familiar to them while subverting those of the salon. All this at a time when rural revolt was being put down. It is a great distance from revolutionary nineteenth-century France to the present crisis in Central Australia. But I can imagine that, when historians come to contextualise Rod’s work, they will see that he fits into a poignant moment of its social history. For he started painting there ten years after the flush of optimism about the social health that would be ushered by the Land Rights Act of 1976. But this ‘revolution’, as we now know, failed, as education and community structures were neglected. What followed was the extension of rural poverty and misery, the results of which were increasingly obvious by

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the end of the 1980s. At that stage, when it was still assumed that land rights would directly translate into spiritual health, not a lot of people wanted to speak otherwise. But Rod’s paintings were doing so, not unlike Courbet’s enigmatic works after 1848, the paintings that challenged, as John Berger puts it, ‘the chosen ignorance of the cultured’. Rod’s realism /naturalism is both confrontational and intimate. The paintings are life size. The horizon is raised and tilted so that you can step into the scene. Everything is technicolour except the Aboriginal figures, which are invariably charcoal grey. Why? ‘I didn’t want to make them,’ he says, ‘at one with nature. Plus I wanted to be able to make with my finger that burnishing thing with the pencil, and rub the skin, to touch the skin. With the Xavier works I was fascinated with his skin. I could do that with the pencil – the slow touching – what I couldn’t do with the brush’. There is a nakedness here, the kind of nakedness which he could not help but contrast with his own. In Reconciliation Walk Over the Todd River (2003) there he is, pink and beige in all his white man’s flesh tones. Rod is in the middle of the road among the crowd of white marchers and he is almost touching hands with a naked black man walking the other way. The black man, Xavier, is conspicuously other but he offers his hand in response to Rod, whose figure he mirrors. ‘Can We Walk together’ says a banner in the crowd, and the message seems to be, ‘well, maybe, naked though we might be’. The painting holds one in abeyance, on the cusp of embracing hope. The painting stands as a gesture towards the idea of a nakedness with each other becoming socially potent. A later painting gets closer to the bone, digs into nakedness as the white man feels it. The Enigma of the White Man (1996–2008) shows two naked white men fighting, after the fashion of Courbet’s The Wrestlers (1853). The two figures are in fact one – Rod himself. He is in a ring of Aboriginal spectators who are fully clothed. It is the classic reversal: the white as the naked savage, the black as civilised spectator.

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What’s going on there? ‘You could say’, Rod replies, ‘that the motive driving the fight within the self is having to resolve the conflict between animistic, pagan beliefs and Christianity. Or the anima/animus. Or the outsider/ artist quandary with community. I feel I occupy this liminal between Arrernte ‘believers’ and my own activity as having ‘faith in art’. Rod speaks of primitivising himself in the painting. It’s as if, having exposed his friends so much, he wanted to rebalance things with the gift of his own nakedness. At the same time, the painting suggests his own yearnings to ‘go native’ – a prospect he ‘toys with’, especially around initiation time, when he gets ‘pushed and pushed to go through’. ‘They push and push’, he says in his quiet meditative way. The initiated men say they can ‘tell him a lot more’ if he goes through. His fear is the extra levels of responsibility initiation would bring. ‘But I can’t imagine how much more responsible I can be to what I am.’ And: ‘I have worried about what more can impinge on my family if I went through ceremony. But it is there in my thinking. Sooner or later they’ll get me’. The pressure began a long time back, in the days of joy soon after his first daughter Ronja was born. One of his friends, Jude, asked Rod to take a photograph of Ronja in a coolamon. Rod was then ushered into his own bedroom because Jude wanted to talk ‘business’. ‘He started singing songs,’ Rod wrote in his diary at the time. ‘He was very worked up, relating how they cut boys but mostly demonstrating with his hands. Maybe I wasn’t expressing sufficient conviction. He unzipped his pants and showed me the cut head of his penis. It was a crude and open lateral incision, still looking sore. All the while he looked me straight in the eyes as he chanted softly in Arrernte and pumped his thighs. I was compelled by his deep engagement. He zipped his pants, removed his shirt and tied up his hair to dance. Old grey-haired me be do like this. He was breathless.

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All this unsettled me, removed a protective layer, and plunged me into deeper feelings that I didn’t feel equipped to deal with. Had the birth precipitated in him some wish to communicate his own deepest experience? Was he demonstrating that men’s initiation was of equal importance to procreation?’ That was about the time he started the painting first called Wrestlers in the Simpson Desert before it became The Enigma of the White Man. The explanations for the pushing kept deepening. ‘Just a few months ago a friend came to my house … “They see you naked,” the man said, of Rod’s friends and family. “You man. They smile, but they think you man. Naked man. No shame being naked. Proper man. Look, you saying; me man, full man. You got power in your mind.” He meant, I had power in my mind for painting, just as he has power because he has been initiated into country. “You not alone, here”, he said. “Just remember.” This blew me away.’ Rod told me this some years back, about the time the first edits of his diary were heading to the press to become The Hard Light of Day (2011). So far he has not taken up the invitation. Meanwhile he is still making the paintings that are revolutionary in the social life of Alice Springs, which has always struggled with its racist tendencies. As he sometimes says with a grin: he is probably the only unpaid white man in Alice Springs who has consistently chosen to befriend Aboriginal families on their terms. Of course the grin concedes that there must be a few others offering tolerant friendships without charge, just as it is true to say that Rod is now earning a living from his paintings. Still, his art arises from this extraordinary capacity for unromantic, forbearing acceptance, including a wide-eyed acceptance of himself, come what may. The Hard Light of Day was followed in 2013 by One Thousand Cuts. As the title suggests, there was more suffering to come. The book is harrowingly more of the same: deaths and murders and funerals, dereliction and suicide, along with more of Rod’s beautiful account of the palpitating country of Central Australia, in which he has found consolation and embedded himself

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as a benefactor, survivor, and gift-giver, when the gift is his kindness. That, and what seems to be his recurring enactment of nakedness. He painted The Anatomy Lesson the year before the publication of One Thousand Cuts. The book and the painting seem meant for each other. The painting is shocking because it goes further than nakedness. It represents an artist who has made an offering of his whole body. The body is, admittedly, a corpse, as dead as the figure painted by Rembrandt in 1632: the body, barely covered with a loin-cloth, is stretched in a posture of absolute surrender, akin to Christ on the Cross. Yet one pulls back from the temptation to make much of this thought. The painting is drained of anguish. It simply presents Rod’s body as it has been offered, body and soul, to the Aboriginal men he has befriended in their years of suffering. If you read One Thousand Cuts you will be able to put names to the men. And you will be struck by the presence of the man in the centre of the picture who seems to have his hand on Rod’s hand which is on his own heart. Somehow you can feel the warmth of hands into the body. The attention of the men around the body is similarly tangible. Any minute, you feel, each could be making tender contact with Rod’s hand on his heart. The Anatomy Lesson was first shown in Alice Springs at an exhibition called You. Me. Us. At the opening Rod and Craig performed a welcome ritual: they carried lit candles into the twilight gallery, commemorating the figures in the paintings and the book who had died by way of the thousand cuts. ‘The book bleeds with grief ’, as Kieran Finnane wrote in her review of the exhibition (which I did not see), and went on to say that nonetheless, most of the paintings portrayed children and young adults in high spirits, and that all things considered ‘there remains, from these records of vitality and warmth of bonds – between one and another and extended to the artist and his family – an impression of enduring strength.’ This is true enough, as it has always been with the body of Rod’s oeuvre as painting. But as writing, the dimensions of his nakedness, his negative expos­ ure, is more apparent. The precariousness of strength is the case. For Rod

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is unsparing of himself when the tragedy of the passing parade – of crime, suicides, deaths – wears him down. Rod’s ennui cannot always sustain that vitality and warmth of bonds. Intelligent compassion cannot always easily accept the knowingness with which so many people persist in self-neglect and apparent indifference to what they do to others. There is a comic, deadly absurdity in much that goes on, which rolls on, that must take its toll on the kindest witness. Out of the blue, a friend will declare love for him; or a man who wants him to come out bush for ceremony, might even kiss him on the mouth; others, women as well as men, will register the years he has kept on being around, seeing members of their family arrive on earth and depart from this earth. Rod Moss has come to be there all the time like an old tree, you might say, or something ‘teetering’, as he puts it, between ‘the beauty and the terror.’ (This painterly allusion to the Sublime is telling, and says much about the atmosphere in many of Rod’s paintings, the dramatic vistas of which accentuate the personal tragedies that litter his narrative, but I can’t go into that here). ‘They continue to die and I am still here’, Rod remarks, at three quarter time in One Thousand Cuts. ‘How do I draw from the void and relax in it?’ he asks on the last page. ‘Each day I measure myself. Each day I find the same small self. Others seem larger. More here.’ Acceptance and nakedness then, a nakedness that has, in Alice Springs, several deep layers. These include: the body in the pulsating space of the Centre; the social identity disrobed and communalised in the context of difference; the artist laid bare in the act of representation – thus divesting himself of much cultural power. The artist as an entity with a consciousness as sharp as a knife. Put these dimensions of nakedness together and what do you have? A brave, generous, intelligently self-conscious and loving individual – who is also an artist – enacting the ethic of reciprocity through thick and thin, in

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all weathers, even though he is not, like his Aboriginal friends, hard wired for all that because he does not ‘live in the buffeting wind, dust, with the ants, the vegetal perfumes, rain, campfire light, and the cramped proximity of relatives.’ There is no other painting (with the texts that have naturally arrived to explicate them) like this in Australia. Over the years, various writers, some of them famous, have written out of their relatively inside relationships with Aboriginal people. But no painter I know of. No-one else has so shared their living space and then dared to dramatise the truth, as well as their own mirr­ oring role in the shaping of that truth. I have to mention one other thing. It is a detail that qualifies what I said about tragedy, and one that is a reminder that there may be some grounds for hope. One family dominates Rod’s paintings: the Hayes family, who happen to live in the town camp nearest to his place. That was just by chance. Not by chance, however, the Hayes family have played a momentous role in the history of Alice Springs. For it was on behalf of the ‘Hayes Family and Others’ that the Central Lands Council mounted the Native Title Claim in Alice Springs, a case that was successful in the year 2000. Not that it made much difference to the quality of housing and water supply at White Gate, but no-one can deny the rightful sense of home ownership in that place. So we can now say, looking back on Rod’s work of three decades, that he was recording not simply daily events that are part of a tragic situation, but family events that flowed towards some promising political victories. Perhaps that’s the note I should end on: Rod Moss’s work has a strength of statement and involvement that goes well beyond itself. These bright, strong, complex paintings resonate backwards and forwards. Against all the odds, Rod has given ‘us and them’ history paintings about human continuities. This is where any aesthetic judgment should begin. The last words of One Thousand Cuts: ‘I reel back. Are these frail gestures occasions for love? How present, full and thick is my life? Where lie my most telling duties? How free am I?’

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Rod is forever silently murmuring to himself – Hamlet like, if you wish. But in his sense of exposure to the open air that imbues his work-with-hisfriends, he is I believe much closer to the spirit of infinite offerings to the Beloved which informs the poetry of Rumi – high, almost detached honouring, in the spirit of diurnal spiritual application. This essay was delivered as a speech at the opening of Big Countries; Small Histories at ARC Gallery in Melbourne in 2004. It has been adjusted since the publication of Moss’s Hard Light of Day (2011), and One Thousand Cuts (2013) publications that have ‘immensely pleased’ the White Gate mob, Rod says, feeling it to be ‘a terrific endorsement to see people hug a copy of the book to their chests and exclaim that the book fills their heads with memories, and that they don’t want to let go of the book’.

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NA K ED FL A ME

Being Implicated by D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems (1986)

‘Thought is not a trick or an exercise, or a set of dodges,’ D.H. Lawrence writes in one of his marvellous late poems, ‘thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.’ We should approach Lawrence with this declaration in mind, if only because many of his glib and fearful critics have over the years chosen to disparage as an essentially emotional badgerer, a writer so hot under the collar that he could not resist ramming ideas down other people’s throats; this rather than doing what aestheti­cally pleasing artists are supposed to do: show rather than tell, cultivate minds and hearts rather than cut through to them, please rather than disturb, pacify the senses rather than alert them to some kind of action (even inner action). This stock put-down of Lawrence rests on a systematic refusal to find evidence of the whole man wholly attending. Instead of looking to the balances in Lawrence’s work – that delicacy with which he writes with heart and mind – the stock critic will tell us that his great flaw was (apart from his mother love and sexual paranoia and the working-class spite), his exaltation of the Irrational, his celebration of pagan and dark gods at the expense of Reason. As it happens, there is evidence enough of balance in his best novels, but there is even more in this latest edition of the Selected Poems. The splendid thing about this little book is that we can read it through almost at a sitting and find Lawrence maturing towards it. A Nature poet – yes, he was that; and one awed and celebratory before the forces of Nature; but also a man who brought his intuitions to a unique synthesising depth, the poise of which the best poems convey to us.

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One way to illustrate this progress might be to compare some of the very early poems, written when he was a school teacher, in the years of his first love and before his coming-of-age marriage to Frieda, where he did, via nature, articulate some of his basic fears and ecstasies. I am not thinking here of lovely little exercises such as ‘Piano’, which plays a tune back to mother’s arms; nor of the equally succinct equation of the forces of Nature with domestic feeling, ‘Discord in Childhood’ – where Nature equates with the threat to infantile safety. I am thinking of those early poems – ‘Cherry Robbers’, ‘Cruelty and Love’, ‘Snap-Dragon’ – where images, similes and metaphors from Nature illustrate how love, for him, is a fearful unknown, a threat to his own soul as well as the loved one. The love swoon here is directly connected with some kind of death into Nature. As a swoon it is succumbed to: this is in the nature of swoons! But at the same time love’s risky oblivion invites another response: cruelty. With cherries hung round her ears Offering me her scarlet fruit: I will see If she has any tears … Or, if not cruelty, then rage, another fear response. These are all courtly poems in a late 19th Century tradition but their mannerly forms do not prevent us registering a wilder response lurking in the poet. The argument within the poems tends towards the black and white – life or death, submission or …? – and they are to this extent unresolved. What they do is move our senses towards the question of what kind of Nature the poet is really feeling his way to. In ‘Look We Have Come Through’ Lawrence is no longer the green young man. He has married Frieda and revelled in the feeling adventure of marriage – awed and fearful one minute, rapt in affirmations the next. These are marvellous poems, greatly candid compared with anything other English-speaking men were writing at the time. They seem at first glance to be poems of the human world, but they are as much Nature poems as anything he had done or would do.

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In fact they are so colloquial that they challenged certain definitions of poetry. Paradoxically though, they remain conventionally poetic by virtue of their references to the natural world – for it is space, wind, darkness, night, the seasons against which the man who has come through ultimately defines himself, for better and for worse. This is the point: no more death-swooning here in the great Romantic tradition: the man who has come through finds himself aroused in forces positive and negative: he is, in something more than a sacrificial way, encountering Nature: Come, you shall have your desire Since already I am implicated with you in your strange lust … This he says to, of all things, a rabbit! But it is in ‘The Rabbit Snared in the Night’ that we probably find the first full unification of what I would call Lawrence’s kingdoms of interest – the realm of the human, non-human and the creaturely. And it is in the animal poems that we find the best demonstration of the deep balance he sought in his life and found in his work. In the rabbit poem the key word is implicate. What always interests Lawrence, whether it be with the meetings between men and women, or man with Nature, is the exchange that takes place, or, as is often the case, the lack of exchange that follows the stark recognition of difference. The exchanges may or may not take place at the conscious level, but whatever happens the soul is in some ways implicated: it is so by virtue of our almost creaturely powers of attention – our psychic alertness, an alertness which of course incorporates the rational, since it is a natural part of us too. What we get in poem after poem, and especially in the animal poems, is a register of the encounter, of the dynamic uncertainty of the exchange. The poems strut, steal, bray, lumber, sit, soar in their instinctive identification with whatever creature is addressed. ‘Snake’ is probably Lawrence’s most famous poem – justly anthologised for decades, a poem for school students for many years now. And there it is,

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the snake, slithering down the page, line by line, the poem is the snake, thanks to Lawrence’s artistry and power of identification. And what is the subject matter of the poem? It is, of course, the man’s dialogue with himself in the face of this ‘lord of life’, this creature from the underworld. It is a meditation – a tense, serpentine reflection – upon what is proper, what is hon­ourable, when one meets such a noble agent of the animal kingdom, a snake. ‘The voice of my educa­tion said to me/He must be killed’ – and, weakly the man throws a log at it. And that is nowhere near good enough. It is disgusting. It is craven, a downright failure – worse than failure – a ‘pettiness’. The snake diminished man, when it might have …? There is a tendency, in some of Lawrence’s animal poems, to categorically undervalue human kind. This is not what I would call balance – though, when Lawrence referred generally to the ‘educated’ man he meant mechanical, industrialised man, who had by his definition lost touch with his body and its instincts. Still, even after taking this into account, is there not something rather melodramatic about the poet’s lament for the mountain lion? We appreciate its ‘gentle and dark faced’ beauty alright, and we too are filled with awe at its grace there in the remote mountains, but I am not sure that either the poem or Lawrence’s majestic sweep leads us to the judgmental lines: And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans And never miss them. The best poems tend to be where Lawrence is much closer to the pulse of the immediate encounter – the here and now of that ‘implicated’. So with ‘Man and Bat’ where the man comes into his room to find – ‘a disgusting bat, at mid-morning’ … ‘an impure frenzy’… ‘dithering with tiredness and haste and increasing delirium’. Whereupon the man is almost equally frenetic. Round and round they both go, as he tries to get rid of the bat. But it won’t go! Until he realises the obstacle:

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Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my hand-kerchief. Saying: Out, go out! Was the horror of white daylight in the window? The poet turns on the room light and still the bat won’t go. Who will drop to the floor now, man or bat? Around again the man goes, but not without some humour, not without some sage self-mockery: I admit a God in every crevice But not bats in my room Nor the god of bats, while the sun shines … So what we find, at the end of the poem, is a gently wry concession to the bat’s power. No grandiose indictment of man, nor shame in the face of the underworld either, but a witty reconciliation, if you like, between ‘other’ and ‘other’. It is Lawrence’s witty, tender flow outwards to creatures that makes us smile in wonder and sometimes laugh out loud as we go – responses that demonstrate his touch for that part of us that does see elephants or goats or tortoises as he does, that deeper knowing that he has miraculously managed to bring to the surface in an act of sympathy for creatures that are ‘not us’ (though of course, the anthropomorphism of some poems is one of their drawcards). We meet creatures with Lawrence and can’t help feeling that our humanity is heightened. The mistake would be, however, to talk about this in terms of ‘self knowledge’. That, to Lawrence, is humanist education cant-sentimental, craven. And it is to open up ‘the abyss of self-knowledge’ (‘Only Man’), the endless fall from the God that is merely the man’s God. From the animal poems onwards Lawrence is trying to point to something larger than that. Some of his most measured, inquiring poems are those that bring to the non human – the ‘it’ of the Cosmos – nothing less than the intelligence of a whole man wholly attending. Fish is where such alertness is well displayed. ‘Fish Oh Fish So little matters’ – – 295 –

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A poem begins, and we are swimming very quickly with the sense of fish, the un-touchable, otherness of fish. ‘Oh to be a fish,’ Lawrence goes on – elemental, water all round and free, ‘fish so utterly without misgivings’. And then the key lines: Loveless and so lively Born before God was love Or life knew loving Beautifully beforehand with it all … This is the poem in which Lawrence wonders and wonders, rather as we do when swimming underwater, at life before man; life before man thought of his god, life before we planted such notions as love in the world. And the dominant feeling is not one that hectors any polemical message, it is too mature a synthesis for that; the dominant emotion is a sacred awe for things as they are, for the mystery of Things in the World. Rising to the surface of every line in ‘Fish’ is Lawrence’s profundity of respect. And so we move from the youngish poet who rather conventionally put Nature to his own anguished purposes, to the lover seeking a maturity in his recogni­tion of forces and creatures that were implicated in his own flesh and blood, to an older wiser poet approaching death, whose work from ‘Fish’ onwards is a dynamic meditation on the awesome, insoluble and necessary unity of our lives with Nature: the fact that we are in our consciousness part of Nature, while Nature is part of us. Thus we are in the natural as well as the non-natural world and if we ‘think’ about it, might be tempted to yield to one rather than the other, to the ‘creative chaos of nature’ and disappear, or to the something else we conventionally call human. To this ‘Life’ question, ‘To Let Go or to Hold On?’, Lawrence says: Must we hold on? Or can we now let go? Or is it even possible we must do both? Doing both is really what all of his poems are about. – 29 6 –

L OV I NG ROUGH N E CK John Berger’s Hopeful Body

The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura of the storyteller … The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself. Walter Benjamin

Such a lover, that John Berger – the man who drew a cock and a cunt side by side in his novel G, which was about an Italian philanderer and dare-devil aviator circa 1900. It was a book that featured the hero as Desire, amorous of risk and immediacy, less bidding for immortality than burning time through his senses. A sizzling intellectual performance on Berger’s part, even if the narrator was archly self-conscious, and could not stop himself from pinpointing ‘experience’ he claimed to be ‘indescribable’. Another reckless claim was: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.’ As if G was a novel to possess all others. This was in 1972. Berger’s formula, which almost always mixes lyricism with structural analysis, and which had as many sign-posts in it as the fashionable landscape paintings of the time, was vitally interesting, often rejuvenating, even as we aged along with him. He was 90 last November. Most of us were young when we started to read him, and willingly learned how to code his misleading self-advertising – when advertising could be put to defiant uses. Think of Norman Mailer’s brilliance in his Advertisements of Myself in 1961, although it is out of tune with Berger to dwell on such a grossly American writer. Berger a decade later was also building on his earlier, punchy fictions, and when G was awarded the Booker Prize, his gesture was as good

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as anything that came off the bare boards of a painter’s studio. He eschewed the honouring, took the prize money, gave one half of it to the Black Panthers, and kept the rest for one of his own projects which would become The Seventh Man (1975), a prescient study of refugees. Both moves were to demonstrate the proper place of art in an unjust world. All this was when we were aroused by his Ways of Seeing, the book and the TV series that also arrived in 1972. It seemed to be what was so needed at the time; the necessary corrective to Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, its connoisseurship, so laudable, yet so out of our reach for reasons of taste, history and property – politics, in other words. In Ways of Seeing Berger had lodged the political into the eyeball. A painting of a nude, to use Clark’s term, showed what was incipiently an object, something with a price on it. Whereas to contemplate a naked figure was to admit something else: the subject’s humanity. Berger’s made his case vivid – radical – by reference to the naked female body. Ways of Seeing was our object/subject lesson in how we might inhabit art and its history so as to save ourselves from becoming slippery manifestations of market forces. Berger gave us – men and women – a new concept of what it was to be naked. If art was to fulfil its freedom-mission, we would have to change our vision, our lives, our relationship to our objects and to each other, men with women, and women to men, and so on. Art might even banish its objects and in its place put the creative processes of socialisation, liberation, self-making in a polis that pulsed with true being. Ways of Seeing was a sexy footnote to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. It enacted a new salon of ideas, but ideas that pertained to practice. This was a polemical work on Berger’s part. They were polemical times. One read in overalls, one had pigment on one’s collar, blood on one’s hands, potentially. Men and women were starting to wear each other’s clothes. There was no right or wrong angle with which to view things. Events were always on the move. Pound said make it new. Berger wanted it new and collective. As an art critic he took his bearings from socialist thinking of all kinds, as well as the event of the Russian Revolution. His first book of art criticism, done

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when he was young and writing for the New Statesman, he called Permanent Red (1960). Berger, then, was also a painter who lectured in drawing, and that activity, he stressed, was a matter of discovery and of applied love that was intimate with its subject: witness the marks of a Van Gogh drawing. Not for nothing was he the most popular painter in the world. Berger was soon going to write about photography. He had no fear that the camera would kill what it ‘shot’. He had the tempo of a futurist and the flair of a Picasso. His first book on that toreador of creation, The Success and Failure of Picasso, came out in 1965. The ‘Failure’ in that title was insistent as the ‘Permanent’ in the later title. Berger was nothing if not insistent, assertive, curious and sometimes even tentative but at all times in a posture of a willful man with a mission. He was forever arriving, it seemed, to talk, to commune, assert, and people were eager to receive him. Such intensity of talk. The deliberations in his voice, and the warmth of its thinking, which carried cogitation the length of the room, demanding attention. ‘If – Ramona … ’, I heard him say one morning, as I listened to the radio. He was in conversation with a woman to whom I was once married. I remembered our talks about Berger, and now here he was in my kitchen, a hundred kilometres from the ABC, and they were speaking to each other from the opposite sides of the world. ‘If ’, he said to her, ‘I was to take hold of your foot’. I can’t remember what the topic was, or if it was her foot or her shoe he coveted. It was arresting because he had, effortlessly, held the attention of his listener, and taken command of the topic, whatever it was becoming. That was the thing with Berger. By talking about one thing, he was holding an object in his hand, and turning it about for multiple inspections. You did not feel he was showing off, necessarily, so much as letting the mind have its free way in the observing and reasoning process. It was impossible not to be engaged because he was, to his quick, engaging. Whether he is talking to someone, or engaged in that privatising act called writing, Berger has the

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knack of socialising all manner of reflection or creative activity, doing so with generous gestures of trust, humour, hope. Even as hope dies in our hearts, he is able to find a phrase that restores it. In one of his most recent books, based on his trip to refugee camps in the Middle East, he comes up with the phrase undefeated despair. It sounds like an oxymoron, undefeated despair. An impossible proposition, as zany as taking hold of your interlocutor’s foot. But that’s what he could come up with. No wonder he sustained such regard. Essentially, in that early period he was working out his relationship with Romanticism. On the one side, the lyric: on the other, the totalising consciousness of Marxism. Or to put this diagrammatically, which he was fond of doing, many a piece might have used a structure like this: Self

Eros

Social structure

History

Art

Art objects

The artist

His-work-in-time

Before G was published, it was foreshadowed by a publicity note in his Selected Essays, also published in 1972. Berger was calling it a book about Don Juan, but apart from that, he said, disingenuously: ‘I do not know whether it will be eventually categorized as an essay, a novel, a treatise, or a description of a dream.’ Recently, it’s been called a picaresque novel, a classification that tends to dampen the sparks. G turned out to be a virtuoso attempt at realising a synthesis of many things, ‘a complex synchronic pattern’ as he called it, because ‘I see fields where others see chapters’. His aspiration was the key thing. The text was an exercise and display in what he also liked to call serendipity. G was always reaching for a special realisation in its telling, an upholding of complex vital forces, an eroticisation of narrative overall. Because of this adventurism Berger was bound to multiple irresolutions. As a result Self/Eros was never quite translated into social – 300 –

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structure and history, and vice versa. They lived in their separate spheres, just as we did while reading Berger. But the energy of G’s sexual aura did the work, as it did, I suppose, in Berger himself. The same vital thing could happen when Berger turned to painters. The early Selected has an exciting tension running through it. Cezanne is a central figure, the artist par excellence who had the clearest, rational sense of the art object’s making (when the art was painting). But this did not mean that Berger was a Cezanne-ite. Think of his notes to the Exhibition on Romanticism at the Tate in 1959. Berger is marvellous in praise of Constable’s landscapes, which were more constructed than people thought: ‘He just didn’t tear leaves out of nature. With Constable it was a matter of the extraordinary skill with which he painted landscape surfaces, comparable to Ruben’s skill in painting flesh.’ Berger goes on: ‘And landscape surfaces are of course a question of light. The light in a Constable masterpiece is like water dripping off a gunwale of a boat as it drives into the sea. It suggests the way the whole scene is surging through the day, dripping through sun and cloud. By contrast the light of most other landscape painters is either like a fountain, playing prettily up and down for no purpose, or like water running flatly out of a tap.’ Leaving aside the sweeping nature of the last claim, the image is magnificent and memorable. Romantic unto itself, you might say. Berger then turns to Cezanne’s renunciation of his own Romanticism in favour of ‘a logic and a clarity’ which favoured having more than one point of view as ‘undulations of forms are traced across a torso’ whatever the torso might be – a piece of fruit, say, a man in a chair, a mountain. Berger’s Romanticism managed to have it both ways: yes to Cezanne’s reconstructions of appearances, but not at the expense of the look and feel of light and water running off a boat driving into the sea. Temperamentally, Berger was always doing hand-stands that displayed his love of both dimensions of the look of things. In fact, you can feel the strain in his writing, which was designed to signal the value of both, each – the vital force, and the analytical work, involved in the idea of realising them together. – 3 01 –

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There are essays in the 1972 Selected which illustrate the addictive tensions that could be felt in his specifically political writings. The tension here is between Berger the leftist critic and adventurous novelist, and Berger the Marxist and would-be revolutionary. He never joined the Communist Party, but the heroism of Communist commitment occupied him. We met it early on, in his first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), which was about an émigré Hungarian painter who vanished soon after Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. Berger tells the story via the device of the painter’s journals, which he, as the narrator, finds in the painter’s abandoned London studio. The ethos of the telling was to say: sacrifice for the propagandist cause is everything. Stephen Spender, at Encounter, famously compared the book to a work by Goebbels: Berger’s publishers withdrew it from circulation. A similar revolutionary shadow-play on Berger’s part is in his essay on Victor Serge. This time the focus is on the actual life of Serge, the Belgian anarchist who served prison time in France and Spain before devoting himself to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Serge, who was one of the great writers of the revolution, a stylist who suffered the fate of Trotsky, believed that ‘the truth was something to be undergone.’ Berger thinks this enabled Serge to go on in ‘a rather special way’: Despite his very considerable intelligence and courage, Serge never proved himself a revolutionary leader. He was always, more or less among the rank and file. This may have been partly as a result of a reluctance to take any final responsibility of command (here his early anarchism corre­sponds with a temperamental weakness); but it was also the result of deliberate choice concerning the category of truth he sought. If the role of the proletariat was to be as historic as Marx had declared, it was the truth of their experience, between the possible and the impossible, which must be judged crucial, which must define the only proper meaning of social justice.

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to remain with the mass’, Berger demotes him to being invaluable as a mere witness to Revolution, a writer of value mainly according to his ‘testimony’. But Serge should be honoured for the greatness of his activist fiction. A major work, Birth of Our Power, is a trilogy of novels ranging from early anarchist life in Belgium and France, to his prison days in Barcelona, to his revolutionary times in Petrograd, and is written in the first person plural. It’s an exhilarating experience to read such a book, pure romance, in fact, with the self immersed in the collective action most of us dream of, and which Serge had experienced as a full dimension of his life. Berger had by then begun to make his own move towards a deeper authenticity. In 1962, he packed up and left London, turning his back on its styles and theft (when property is theft) and creations embedded in the art market. And the category of truth that he sought did not lie in Prague, where he consorted with the opposition to the Russian invasion in 1968, or with the post-coital stirrings of French students after their arousals at the Sorbonne, or in the jungles of Bolivia from where the corpse of ‘Che’ Guevara is an object/ subject of veneration in one of his yearning, nostalgic essays in the early Selected. The place he eventually burrowed into with the first person plural in mind was the picturesque landscape of Haute-Savoie. He would write and live among the truths of 20th century peasants: and it was from his lived experience of other lives on the slopes of the French Alps that he launched a new body of work. Reading him from then on – around 1980 – he became one’s model of continuous self-revival, consciousness-raising, collective narration, the poesis of solidarity – progressive history. Of course, Berger’s re-location, his transit to France in which he made an émigré of himself, was as Romantic as Gauguin going off to the South Seas. You could even say it had a Rousseau-istic dimension: he was off on an idyll, as his ex-friend Peter Fuller, the art critic who claimed to have seen though a reductive Marxism, sarcastically put it. From abroad, as an émigré, he started to put out little books that slipped into our metropolitan pockets. Poems, sketches, short essays – that was

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enough to make a pregnant book in his agile hands. I know people who adore some of those titles – And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) and Photocopies (1996). And he wrote that clutch of inimitable novels which sprang out of his life with the peasants, and which he grouped under the heading Into Their Labors, after the Biblical, ‘Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours’ (John 4:38). His pages smelt of hay and manure, clear night skies, birth and ruin, love and loss, milk and freshly slaughtered meat, even of cows that he saw in the spirit of Gandhi, as poems of pity. The stories served the lives of those enduring survivors, as he called the peasants, just as they enacted his own shrewd, rather Rilkerian change of life whereby his lyric gift could marry the passionate project of his politics. To a fault Berger managed to be didactic and poetic in the same instant. The experience of reading him could be like walking in and out of sun-showers in an Alpine meadow as storms gathered on the horizon. Romantic, Berger was being all along, but it was a romance designed to draw our attention to the way some people’s histories can provoke that of others towards extinction. His readers – us – were to bear witness to such late capitalist ‘progress’, as thousands of European peasants redundantly left their land under the regime of Europe’s ‘common market.’ Pig Earth (1979) was the first of the peasant novels. Naturally, as soon as one uses that phrase, the great renditions in Russian writing come to mind: Gorky above all. At the same time, so does the stock Marxist strictures about rebarbative peasants – all that went into Stalin and Mao’s murderous historic leaps. Berger, a disobedient Marxist in this realm, writes against the Great Leaders without naming them. Just as E.P. Thompson wrote to lift the enormous weight of condescension from the history of the English working class, it’s as if Berger set out to do the same for peasants the world over, French peasants, in particular. A Promethean project if ever there was one. Berger, who could be ethnographic when he wanted to be (another risky, intellectual move) itemises peasant attitudes to money, sharing, self-sufficiency – correcting their bad press – and puts in their place the dignified aspects of their simple but

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cognisant lives. He does so in two ways: didactically, with a sweeping essay at the end of the book. He knows it is an old-fashioned thing to do, but he does it because we need, he assumes, its understanding, even though the essay underestimates his second method, which was to tell empathetic stories of peasant lives. ‘A great story teller will be always rooted in the people’ Benjamin had opined, thinking of ‘the primary role which story telling played in the household of humanity.’ In this heroic mode, Berger’s stories become the treasures of Into Their Labours, starting with ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’, the novella that is the longest piece in Pig Earth, the virtues of which are sustained in the books that follow, Once in Europa (1987) and Lilac and Flag (1990). Of Pig Earth Susan Sontag said Berger was peerless: ‘not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. Less of a poet than Lawrence, he is more intelligent and citizenly – more noble.’ This was one good way to put it but we don’t need to tie ourselves in knots over Lawrence. Better to say that Berger’s peasant narratives seem rich and true: his protagonists might seem to do little more than be born, work, procreate and die, but the tact and Biblical dignity he awards them as they contend with the erosions of their old ways, and put their gnarled faces against the winds of change, are moving in the extreme. We come to know them in their elemental forms, as if he has disinterred them from the rhythms of the earth and put them on show as exemplars of common humanity. Time passes in these narratives, and Berger can skilfully speed time up as a device, rather as if he is speeding on his motor-bike, but it is not travelling to infinity. He is crafting the spaces that make narrative span moments and epochs. It’s the enormous empathy and concrete objectivity with which he renders his protagonists – sculpts them, really, that gives his prose of this period its universal appeal. ‘Don’t run away from anything’, said a Russian peasant proverb, ‘but don’t do anything.’ The very strange thing is that Berger could write prose that did not seem to do anything. But it was doing everything by virtue of its leaps of sympathy, accompanied by close observation, of all human beings

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as well as animals made wretched by their confinements. Think of Berger’s King, about a dog that lived at an urban rubbish dump; or his essay on the zoos; and his fable about the chained bear. Berger worked at this distribution of egalitarianism. Like a good Buddhist he valued all sentient beings. The writer meets the lives of others with his arduousness, you might say, as if he has himself worked as a stonecutter out on the open road. Indeed Courbet’s great painting of peasants toiling with picks and shovels is an emblematic painting for Berger. Cezanne defied social conventions by bringing peasants within the scandalised sight of the Academy, added to which, Berger tells us, they inhabited the high ground of the limestone region of Jura, not so far from where he and his peasant friends farmed. Similarly, Berger’s fiction of this period is never far from his sense of how the country had been painted – which is another way of saying that his fiction and his art criticism were often of a piece, a complex synchronic pattern, a field of considerations. The Berger field was grandly articulated on several fronts for six decades. In fiction, poetry, essays, photo-essays, for stage and cinema. Berger’s scope was already substantial by the time of Ways of Seeing, which was just as well, as the book was and is not without flaws. As much as Ways of Seeing opened us up to vistas of feminism and freedom with regard to what we look for, it did so at the expense of historical accuracy and justice (to Kenneth Clark), and our possible spiritual development. His socialist friend, Peter Fuller, in Seeing Through Berger, was right about this. Clark did speak to the politics embedded in paintings; he was attuned to the exploitation of peasants, just as he was to the convict system of transportation. It also happened that Berger’s rejection of the commodification of painting served to eclipse the rich traditional relations between truth and beauty. The ideologues of Ways of Seeing were the new philistines. Berger did not intend to serve the interests of Thatcher’s reductive pragmatism towards art schools and the education of artists, but that was the tendency of his aggressive atheistic stance. By the time Berger had rooted himself in France, the purposes of art needed to be reconsidered in the light of its earlier traditions of discourse, which was what Fuller set

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out to do when he released himself from Berger’s friendship (committing parricide, Berger bitterly remarked), underwent psychoanalysis, and began to re-read his Ruskin thoroughly and deliberately. Without falling into the lap of God, Fuller recovered Ruskin’s natural theology, along with Ruskin’s progressive social criticism. Fuller reminded us, as if Berger in his self-fashioned or maverick Marxism might well have needed reminding, that Ruskin had managed to affirm art practice which was at home with science, and the truth and the beauty of natural forms, as he was with humankind’s health and fullness of being. It was not just a matter of freedoms new or old. Art becomes us because we are religious beings as well as social and creaturely beings. Ruskin’s ‘Religion of Humanity’ was not something that should have been spurned by the consumers of Ways of Seeing. In retrospect, both Fuller and Berger shared too much ground for either of them to be clearing so much of their bathwater. Besides, for the last twenty years, Berger has been ruminating on beauty, repeatedly returning to love in its various forms, and not hesitating to use the term ‘transcendent’. His sources of hope are various and enduring, and he is not shy of creating passages that emanate with a sense of the sacred. And he can even speak well of ‘angels’, albeit not those who come down as ‘bureaucrats’ from on high, but as messages we bring towards ourselves when we are struck by pity and compassion. Ways of Seeing could not have been written without Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the English translation of which was published in 1969. Nor could Berger’s meta-remarks about narrative, which he had come to master, have done without Benjamin’s great essay, The Storyteller, which wove genres of story into an historical tapestry from prehistory to modernity. On the heels of Benjamin, Berger made of himself a storyteller of legendary resonance – magical, multi-medium-ed, as imagistic as he was literary, unique of heart and mind, yet essentially rooted in history, always ‘in the company of the past,’ as he put it. But I’m not going to search for Berger’s most intimate mentors. After all, one of his virtues as a thinker and a

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writer is that he is not the product of a university education. That is why many of us hung with him for so long. He stayed fresh. It is why he was so intent on looking, rather than finding more ‘words words’ to say what he thought. This characteristic of Berger was noted by the Manchester academic Lloyd Spencer when he sat with Berger to sort out the contents of his greatest single collection of art criticism, The Sense of Sight (1985). Berger did not want to rifle through articles, he wanted to look at the objects all over again. So in this greening way we travelled down river with him towards old age, not compelled to drag ourselves though the reeds of competitive cross-referencing and ‘theory.’ Admittedly, Berger could be ‘academic’ enough – see his use of Merleau-Ponty’s work on the organic phenomenology of perception – but he managed to carry that off more like a thoughtful artisan than a professor. He was of a stream that had epic proportions, which he directed with the skill of a craftsman, the morality of which he exalted as a storyteller who had come into his own as a righteous man – as Walter Benjamin might have said to convey Berger’s incomparable aura. His art criticism, or his writing that encompassed all that art was and could be, infused everything he wrote. That was the thing for which we will always be grateful. And here, obviously, my sense of his death is immanent. This writing is now pushing up against obituary. I began this essay in what turned out to be two weeks and two days before his death. He seems to have died the morning/evening when my wife and I were out to dinner for a wedding anniversary (we know from his writings how much Berger celebrated weddings). A few of his books were on the table. One was Sense of Sight (1985), a landmark collection on story telling, most memorably his essay, ‘White Bird’: soon after we met I gave my wife a poem based on it which has a spectacular sentence at the beginning. ‘The problem is that you can’t talk about aesthetics without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil’. I defy anyone to begin with such vaudeville and get to the point that Berger reaches in four pages. A performance that Houdini, or a writer of fairy tales, would have admired. Anyway, the upshot was that my wife set the

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poem to music and sang it beautifully for her album. Later, the other night, we finished our dinner and sat on the foreshore. We ate ice cream in the evening sea breeze. It was about then, I reckon, that Berger died at his place in Paris. That he was the writer ‘of our time’ became elementally clear after 9/11. Hold Everything Dear (2005) spoke to our distress at the prospect of the West’s endlessly mismanaging the lives of others. It was written out of Palestine. We’d had generations of post-colonial awareness under our belts, but to what effect? Our faces, our hearts, had become like damaged memories of what keeps happening. Even Berger was reduced, it seemed, to the bones of affirmation. A biographer might be able to show that his romanticism had, by then, been eroded by the experiences of defeat. Maybe his pride in resistance and loyalty to friends and comrades prevented him saying so openly. I imagined so. But then came From A to X: A Story In Letters (2008), that harrowing fable of resistance, where minimal acts among ruins are shown to serve love, endurance, courage, as the female protagonist in her ramshackle town exchanges notes with her insurgent lover who is still in prison. The tale is as gritty, as forward looking and almost as hopeless and bitter as Gramsci’s letters from prison. It is hard to imagine a text better turned to these never-ending war years. It was, quite literally, a text that led us towards the unspeakable dead ends of Syria, which were still to come. Berger was hanging on, obviously, to the poets of ruined places, Mahmoud Dawish in particular, whom he was translating until that poet’s end. Regarding his own poetry – a collected came out, at last, in 2014 – hopelessness was articulated in a poem of 2001, Seven Levels of Despair. It begins: To search each morning to find the scraps with which to survive another day. – which could describe my day as well as yours. The poem ends with lines that locate the speaker in the war zones that beset us intimately from far away. – 309 –

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The listening to a thousand promises which pass inexorably Beside you and yours. The example of those who resist being bombarded to dust. The weight of your own killed a weight which closes innocence for ever because they are so many. Three years later, the last dated poem, which seeks consolation for this epoch of political Ebola, is called October. It starts with a religious and epic appeal to the storyteller. Perhaps God resembles the story tellers loving the feeble more than the strong the victors less than the stricken. Either way in a weak late October the forest burns with the sunshine of the whole vanished summer.

Now, in 2017, we have these books, published last year as he was approaching 90, which cover the gamut of his achievements. They include well-known excellent things: the essays in Landscapes supplement those published in a similar volume, Portraits, and are the fruit of the archive work of Tom Overton, who has been cataloguing Berger’s archive for the British – 310 –

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Library. Confabulations is a little book containing quirky, free-range thinking like his earlier pocket books. It contains several gems and claims to feature his interest in language. Flying Skirts, an elegy to his second wife, Beverly, which he did with their son Yves, is slight but touching. Lapwing & Fox is a collection of conversations with his old friend, the artist and filmmaker, John Christie. Their exchanges took place between 2012 and 2014, with Christie in Essex and Berger by then in Paris. The book engages in many topics at once, many of them overlapping. A highlight for me includes a painting by Berger which he did in Livorno – ‘a legendary city, a city of survival’ – which he visited in 1947 (and where he set much of G). ‘Street Acrobat’ shows a boy upside down on a trapeze, a little crowd looking up at him. The figure clambering up onto the bar is almost clumsy with his lumpy weight aloft. But nonchalance wins the day as he performs with the trust of the village group below. The weight of the body is the thing. But all is quietly stated (if roughly drawn) and the picture appears in the context of an exchange Berger and Christie are having about the languid bodies painted by Modigliani, and his faces with their deceptively empty expressions, even though they also came across ‘like their own handwritten signatures’. Berger tries to explain the attraction he has had for Modigliani since he was fourteen. ‘He was sexy and he was also frontal, frank.’ Modigliani influenced the way he tried to paint, particularly portraits and nudes. ‘When Modigliani wanted to paint somebody he wanted to strip them. Whether man or woman. Whether portrait or nude. He wanted them stripped down to their bare skin. Without disguise. And in his fervour in doing this he stripped away everything that was circumstantial … He wanted his painted figures to be immaculate, spotless. In a very strange way (considering their lives) Fra Angelico was perhaps Modigliani’s soul mate.’ It’s Berger’s voice that lodges itself so deeply. Among the new books there is even one with a CD that indulges his intimate, slightly stagey warmth, as he reads Andrey Platonov’s story, A Sparrow’s Journey. Off and on the page the voice is his signature. It’s invariably seductive, which is what he always

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intended, needed and played upon – as he indicates with intimate encounters that are inseparable from the loved places of This Is Where We Meet (1997). In ‘Islington,’ there was the girl he knew at Art School, whose name he can hardly remember but who comes to flood his mind when he recovers their casual nights together during air raids and the code names they had for parts of each other’s bodies, including his ‘recidivist erections’ – which they called ‘London’ – and which became as urgent as ‘the damp fern smell of her sweat, her rounded knees, or the curly black hairs in her arse-hole.’ In ‘Krakow’, Berger remembers London again – during the air raids when ‘the bed was damp with spunk and tears’ and sleep came slowly after he and his friend, a man old enough to be his father, had ‘staunched’ each other’s ‘members’. Berger savours the word ‘staunched’. His diction is as frank as it is tender as he invokes various cities with their beloved ghosts because ‘the number of lives that enter our own is incalculable’. In This is Where We Meet Berger shows us something of the psychological determinants of the voice that sustained his writing. In ‘Lisboa’, he conjures his late mother, who, as they amble about the old city, has tart things to say about his ego. ‘Don’t show off!’ she’d tell him as a boy. ‘There’s nobody here to notice.’ When he was older he told her. ‘There are certain things which, to be repaired, require nothing short of a revolution’. ‘So you say, John,’ she replied. ‘Just write down what you find.’ ‘I’ll never know what I’ve found.’ ‘No, you’ll never know.’ ‘It takes courage to write,’ he says. ‘The courage will come. Write down what you find and do us the courtesy of noticing us.’ The thing was, as he points out in Confabulations, he had the habit of impertinence (the title of an essay). All of his life he ‘had the sensation of being an orphan’. Being shoved off to a cruel boarding school was defining: by the age of sixteen he’d run away from it to live independently in London. In the last two years of the war he joined the army where he refused the commission

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which was his right as a middle-class lad, preferring to muck in with the ranks of men for whom he would write letters home: a prime base for the demos of his story telling, we would say now. But it was from the age of four, he tells us, that the orphan in him become a ‘free-lance’, with the tricks of the trade of orphans, encountering others as if they were like him, surviving the shit of the world like him, exchanging winks, rejecting hierarchies: ‘Yes we are impertinent. And I guess that I approach and chat up readers in the same way.’ There is a wink somewhere in there, too. It is probably a bit too cute. But it rings true as a gesture of self-knowledge. His confession marks something else: the profound value of meeting, sociability, of audacious being. The theme is paramount in the late books. Encounters and meetings and – one wants to add – weddings. He loved weddings and conjured them whenever he could in novels and essays. You’d think the orphan had a yearning to marry the world. Flesh, with Berger, becomes a mode of nakedness. For flesh is something we can contemplate creased, being folded back, peeled away, even flayed towards a new layer, perhaps, of truly naked being. It sounds extreme, even masochistic, when couched like this. But it need not be. It’s generative. I’m alluding to the wonderful exchange between Berger and his daughter, Katya, in 1991. This family piece starts with Titian’s fleshy works seen as the paintings of an old man: it then considers the fur of animals a painter might want to ‘keep warm with his brushes’. The brush creates the world’s pelt. The Titian conversation leads to a series of visual translations: ‘a woman painted as if from the inside, and only clothed in her skin afterwards … Titian is making us believe in the palpitating life of what he paints … He copies, but he also knows where we place the life, the warmth the tenderness of his painted bodies. He works like Shakespeare … Finally the act of painting, continually repeated like fornication, becomes a body …’ Berger: ‘In La Mise au Tombeau, Christ’s body palpitates from the interior in the same way as Danae, but evoking pity instead of desire. Pity and desire are carnal. Both concern what has been born in the most immediate way imaginable. But lead us to a similar kind of touching.’ ‘And all painting,’ as Berger remarked to Christie, ‘is involved in making the intangible tangible.’ – 313 –

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And all writing, Berger might have gone on to say, is an amorous encounter with the body of language. This was his 1977 take on Roland Barthes, ‘who believes that a person’s language (the way that it is uniquely deployed around the centre of his consciousness) is, among other things, a projection of that person’s body.’ ‘Similarly,’ Barthes went on, ‘distinguished within the text, one might say that there are sexy sentences: disturbing by their very isolation, as if they possessed the promise which is made to us, the readers, by a linguistic practice, as if we were to seek them out by virtue of a pleasure which knows what it wants.’ The most suggestive and hopeful synchronic essay in Confabulations is Some Notes About Song, which is dedicated to a Spanish dancer. The text threatens to run all over the place. But it makes space for music and dance and spoken poetry in the spirit of Lorca’s duende, that quality/ resonance/ soul that makes a performance unforgettable, and which, as Lorca said, you need ‘the living flesh to interpret.’ The essay ropes in Berger’s painting of an iris as easily as it invokes the flurry of the flamenco dancer, and it takes in the gestures that ‘are the mothers of all the dances of the ages,’ and it goes on to rope in all manner of song, because ‘the essence of song is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic’. Finally, except there is no finally in Berger, ‘songs can express the inner experience of Being and Becoming at this historic moment … songs are selfcontained (and) put their arms around historic time.’ The reader might well use Jean Mohr’s photo essay to make a mural of Berger. There he is young – in black, a wide-stance, aggressive – and here growing old, his hair as white as snow. Berger can look at the camera, chatting up the lens, seemingly alone. But again he is to be seen in relationship – with all manner of others, fellow artists, peasant neighbours, the family in the rustic kitchen, with his beloved children and second wife, Beverly. Mohr’s fifty years of photographs bring out the talking and tenderness and warm flesh – the orphan always leaning forward, animated and touching … The photo essay – 314 –

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can’t help but be saying: look at the vitality of the man, such a short fellow also, little legs, long back, rather big, if not mulishly enduring head, for all the world like – it’s now possible to say – like the daemonic, fecund artist whose work he knew so well and sought to critically embrace: yes, Picasso. But this won’t quite do to finish on either. Berger was not, in the end, the great, graphic creative force, à la Picasso, even though they would have fitted the same coffin. He was the intellectual moral force, the living breathing speaking force, a voice to the end. In casting around to find the balance between his contrarian, freshening impulses, it makes sense to remember how sympathetic he was with the great Marxist art critic, Ernest Fischer. Berger had gone to visit Fischer on what turned out to be the day he died. Fischer told Berger of the several selves which made his writing, all present at the same time. ‘The two strongest are my violent, hot, extremist, romantic self and the other my distant, skeptical self ’, Fischer said. You can feel the pleasure of recognition in Berger, less than an hour before Fischer died. That was in 1972, the year, as I have suggested, Berger’s writing took off. But there is an essay closer to his own death which helps resolve the question of Berger’s weightings of selves. It was written in 2015, and in it he indulges his love of Poland, ‘where the people have lived through every conceivable kind of powershift’, and where one of his heroines, the anti-Leninist Communist Rosa Luxemburg, was born. In ‘A Gift for Rosa Luxemburg’ the gift is a set of painted matchboxes which signify various song birds, including sparrows. He cites a prison letter by Luxemburg. From her cell she waxes about ‘the arbour bird or also the garden mocker’, the one with ‘the clever habit of repeating each remark twice.’ Berger addresses her as he holds the collection of matchboxes. I can send it to you by writing, in this dark time, these pages. ‘I was, I am, I will be’, you said. You live in your example for us, Rosa. And here it is, I am sending it to your example.

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W I L D P I L GR I M Meeting Ko Un

Strong poets must live on the knife edge of death/life. Few have done so better than Ko Un, the Korean who has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize since 2002. He has long been the most famous poet in Korea, a man born, you might say, in the crawl of its abysmal oppressions and wars, but one who has made a vital, vocal, defiantly prolific self out of his miraculous survivals. A lean man aged 79, wiry and quick, he has a sad face in repose, but with a smile that can splash into yours like a glass of fresh water. He speaks in hushed tones, as if he is about to whisper a poem – perhaps because he has only one good lung or because he has been hard of hearing since he poured acid into his ears to drown out the sounds of war. The American poet, Gary Snyder, once remarked his style ‘outfoxes the Old Masters and the young poets both’. This is evocative enough, but not as instructive as Allen Ginsberg’s exclamation: ‘Ko Un is a magnificent poet, a combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.’ Among the first stories Ko Un tells, when speaking of his origins, is of the revelatory jolt poetry was to him as a schoolboy. Under the Japanese occupation, Korean was banned; children were given a Japanese name. Ko Un was studying his native language in secret when he discovered the poems of Han Ha-un, Korea’s leper-poet. ‘I read the whole collection straight through. There was a poem about his toes falling off in the evening, no eyebrows the next morning … The first feeling was not so much that I wanted to write like that so much as be like that person – that that person’s disease should become mine. And then I had the feeling that as I travelled around I should also be giving birth to poems.’

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‘On and on along the earthen path,’ Han Ha-un wrote, and Ko Un vowed that he would live accordingly. At that time a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. ‘The Emperor of Japan,’ he replied, and for this he was, as expected, punished. He also likes to tell of his father, whose affirmations lodged in his mind. When the Japanese appropriated the harvest, his father would say. ‘There is no rice today, but there will be rice tomorrow.’ ‘All through the colonial period he was a dreamer,’ says Ko Un. ‘And when the moon was full he went out to the dusty yard and started dancing. When I saw that, I wanted to become a man who dances.’ But the man who danced still had the war between the North and South to endure, and his son, whose mind was yet to dance, was tormented by it. Twentieth-century Korea is like Poland in this respect: a victim of colonisation, as well as murderous armies that marched to and fro across its countryside, razing memory with atrocities, and laying the ground for a modern literature conceived in trauma. Ko Un fled to the mountains, in the direction of the partisans. Twice the father managed to bring him back; on the third attempt the son managed to elude him. When the war ended in 1953 – bear in the mind that the present situation between North and South must still be called a ‘truce’ – Ko Un had to help clean up. He hauled corpses onto his back and carried them to their graves. Eventually, aged 20, he found himself out on the road again, walking in the footsteps of a Zen monk. The monk had his back to the young man, who was drawn to him as if to a magnet. Ko Un joined the temple under the famous monk Hyobong, ‘the master teacher who rescued me’. He lost touch with his parents. Ten years went by, during which Ko Un took orders as a monk and founded Korea’s first Buddhist newspaper (in which he published his first poems). One day his Master came into the temple to find Ko Un taking an axe to its lovely floor. Ko Un was shouting with fury: ‘No more Buddha. No more Buddha!’

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The Master put his head down to the floor. ‘Yes,’ he called, ‘No more Buddha; let’s have fun!’ This was giving him kind permission to be himself, but he knew he would have to choose between being a monk and a poet. His first book of poems,  Other Shore Sensibility, was published in 1960. Three years later, disillusioned with monastic life, he de-robed and set himself adrift. When I imagine him at this point, I think of his Zen poem about the mosquito: Why, I’m really alive Scratch scratch. Playful Ko Un, the poet who has learnt to dance, despite everything, or perhaps because of everything. But he was barely alive; he spent the rest of the decade vagrant and on the grog. He says he carried death on his back, the unshakable result of all that he had seen and lost during the war. He sailed south to the windswept island of Cheju, planning to throw himself into the sea, but got so drunk he passed out instead. He stayed on to start a charity school, and teach Korean and art, all the while remaining drunk as often as he could. ‘In Korean, the word for ‘drink’ is the same as the word for ‘Lord’. I am of the Lord. When a woman establishes a drinking house, the fortune teller usually says you are destined to live not in a house of water but in a house of fire.’ The gods were with him on the island, he felt, and they left him when he left the island. There was a year when the sight of trees and clouds made him weep. The next year he was subject to fits of uncontrollable laughter, which proved disconcerting, not least to himself. He speaks of this now not so much as a breakdown as a metaphysical crisis – as being overcome by the arbitrariness of words, even his own name. His condition fit the cultural crisis of the time, its nihilistic preoccupation with ‘Zero’, and the invidious task of starting life all over again, but he does not resist the suggestion that he was also driven by a compulsion to punish himself.

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‘I have suffered from self-torture and self-negation for a long time, like an illness. There was a long period when, if I sat looking at the sea, I wondered when I would be thrown into it. Looking at the bus coming and going, thinking I might go under it. Since the 1950s many people across the country have experienced death, not only me. In reality half of my age group were killed during the Korean War. So I was alive, and guilty that I survived their deaths. Finally, the word ‘death’ became the most fascinating word for me. Even when I didn’t feel very much like drinking wine, when I think of the word ‘death’, if I evoke that word, I feel like drinking. In short, when I recited the word ‘death’, I was the happiest!’ He attempted suicide for the last time in 1970, the year of what he calls his ‘turning point’. An epiphany flicked him out of the fire of destruction into the fire of creation. The occasion was the death of a young man called Chun Tae-il, the leader of the textile workers who were engaged in a bitter dispute. The strikers were the poor, sweated labour working and living in hovels in the centre of Old Seoul. Tae-il set fire to himself and perished – like the monk in the square in Saigon, at the height of the Vietnam War. ‘Tae-il tore me out of my tomb, my grave, and brought me back to life in this world. His self-offering was essentially a declaration that these poor sick kids were also human beings. I compared that to my own private, personal death wish. I had attempted suicide only for myself. But here was somebody who died, had offered himself, for the sake of all the others.’ Ko Un the poet-activist was born – in perfect time for the long battle for democracy in South Korea. In the mass struggle of protests, imprisonments, tortures and the slaughter of hundreds of students by government troops, Ko Un became one of the most celebrated dissenters. He was of the labour movement and of the student movement, and could cut a romantic figure on the dissenting stage – barefoot, dressed like a peasant farmer, and beating a drum (some see him as a poet with a shamanistic bent). ‘I used to speak out there,’ he says, pointing out the window. At our first meeting we were sitting in the plush tearoom of the Koreana Hotel, in the

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centre of Seoul, near the city square. He conjures the huge crowds he’d become famous for addressing. ‘I was always in the front line of demonstrations. What I needed then was liquor to give me the courage to be there, to play that role in a situation of violence. They thought I was someone who knew no fear.’ ‘What were you afraid of?’ ‘There was always the thought, ‘This time they are going to grab me, arrest me; they are going to torture me.’ Some people saw me and thought I was stepping up without any fear because of Zen, that through all those years of sitting I’d somehow risen above fear. That might have made me a little bit less frightened. But I had not lost all fear through that.’ A childhood anecdote illustrates the kind of connections he often makes in his pithy poems: the family is hungry, little Ko Un is with his aunt, waiting for his mother to come back from the mudflats, where she has been gathering seablite. Night has fallen and he is clinging to his aunt’s back under a starry sky. Then I noticed for the first time the stars in the night sky. The cosmic landscape struck me for the first time. Only I mistook the stars for fruit dangling from the sky. So I began to beg her to pick me some stars, weeping. That first error of mistaking stars for food was the vague beginning of a poet who would later sing the stars as a dream.

Ko Un’s poems are, it’s true, laden with sorrow. They are also full of irreverent play. They explode, like seed pods, with forward-looking narratives, each as vital as the life force Ko Un has come to exalt in himself. Sometimes all you need is two lines that could only have been written by a man with a deep insight into the lives of others. A man whistling as he cooks seaweed soup after his young wife has given birth From 1979 until 1989 he was imprisoned four times. Initially he was punished as an active office-holder of writers’ groups or human-rights outfits. In 1980 he was court-martialled for ‘conspiracy to incite civil war’ and sentenced to – 32 0 –

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20 years. Sitting in the dark in solitary confinement, he began to imagine all the faces that he had encountered in his life so far. The poem he would then write would include them all (as well as figures known to him from history and mythology). So began his epic project, Maninbo or Ten Thousand Lives – 30 volumes of what has been a marathon bestseller. Tears began to flow as he wrote the poem about his grandmother. Cow eyes those dull vacant eyes my grandmother’s eyes. My grandmother! The most sacred person in the world to me. A cow that has stopped grazing the fresh grass and is just standing there. But she is not my grandmother after all: rather, this world’s peace, dead and denied a tomb. The poems of this classic of twentieth-century Korean literature are gritty, colloquial, big-hearted pictures of the men and women who people Korea. When I suggest the spirit of Maninbo is akin to that of the Russian social realists, Ko Un is very pleased. He absolutely lights up when I recognise a second impulse enlivening his project: Maninbo was written in the spirit of a Bodhisattva (a Buddhist disciple devoted to the wellbeing of all sentient beings). He is standing up now, reaching across the table to take my hand. ‘You are the first person to mention these two projects! I feel as if the sky has cleared up today.’ Yet he will not, these days, describe himself as a Buddhist. I cite all the Buddhist work he has done – from Zen fictions to sutra commentaries – but he will not be religiously labelled. The same goes for politics, and who can blame him in the rebarbative Cold War cauldron of the two Koreas. – 321 –

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What he is protecting, I feel, is his sense of himself as a pilgrim, a traveller in all worlds. ‘My destiny rejects my belonging to anything,’ as he puts it. His novel The Little Pilgrim, another bestseller, and ‘the best expression of my own life’s progress’, is an adaptation of the mammoth Flower Garland Sutra. It tells of a boy who has adventures and undergoes spiritual instruction from one end of the Earth, the underworld, the sea and the sky, to the other. In the original, the text is a continuous cascade of superlatives, almost indigestible. In his fiction, Ko Un makes it a deceptively simple fable for all ages, in which the higher spiritual freedoms can only be reached via social justice. These days, Ko Un lets his writing do most of his political work. But he is renowned for his advocacy of reconciliation with North Korea. ‘My dream is to liberate the DMZ [the Korean Demilitarised Zone] from politics. Ecologically, it’s a wonderfully preserved system. When the DMZ is liberated it will become a great nature reserve.’ He attempted to have a meeting in 1989 with North Korean writers at Panmunjom, the borderline between the two Koreas, for which he was imprisoned for two months. There was much more travel to come. Kim Daijung, the liberal elected president in 1997 (who had been tried and sentenced with Ko Un years before), included the poet as a member of his first official visit to the North in 2000. Ko Un had his photo taken standing between Kim Dai-jung and the leader of the North, Kim Jong-Il. Since then he has thrown himself into the Korean Dictionary Project, rather like the one that helped bridge West and East Germany before the wall came down. Politics skews language on both sides of the DMZ, and what could be better for its health than for poets to be active in its care? ‘Taiwan and China are in the process of making a unified dictionary. So that when at last some unification happens in advance there will be some preparation for a unification of language – towards mutual understanding.’ What are the forces against that? The North? The US? Seoul? His answer seems to point the bone at his own government. ‘The most fearful American prisons,’ he says, ‘are not in America.’

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We could have talked all day and into the night. Most of the understandings that slowly passed between us were facilitated by the two people who often translate him into print: Brother Anthony of Taize, who teaches at Sogang University, and Ko Un’s beautiful wife, Lee Sangh-Wha, who is a Professor of English at Chung-Ang University. They married in 1983, soon after he was pardoned and released from prison. They have a daughter, who is now grown up, and they live a couple of hours south of Seoul, in the countryside. It’s a peaceful life these days, whatever you say about his incessant need to keep reading and writing, reading and writing; he’s been prolific: 152 titles in many genres, 76 of them poetry, with no sign of abatement. Of course, he is only as peaceful as a room packed with books can allow a man to be. The second time we meet I take a photograph of him grinning as he stands knee-deep in them. I love his poems about doing away with the damn things. ‘Throwing out books is a good thing,’ I say, alluding to the Zen teaching that wisdom is best deepened without grubbing for more concepts. ‘Yes!’ ‘As poets, when we throw out our books, what are we replacing them with?’ He laughs. ‘Not sure, more books!’ ‘Is it like giving up alcohol?’ ‘I have burnt books!’ If ever I write a long essay on you, the key word will be ‘wild’, I say. The word has been bandied around between the three of us, because Sangh-Wha has translated Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild into English. Ko Un is as quick as a flash. ‘The Buddha is wild,’ he says.

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D O GS A N D GRO G New Writing in Alice Springs

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Rod Moss’s Camp Dogs Acrylic on paper c. 1991 You see them standing as you are just standing adrift from others hurt showing. Take this one the biggest and closest. It has one ear or an ear that’s inexplicably dropped a deaf-to-the-call ear. The one next to it is snarling the way you did at your mongrel worst: when mum was on sherry drunk and menopausal; when that alley-cat wife got into your savings account on the way to the Family Court; when the next one blamed you – anyone but Hitler for her river of misery her step-father’s sobs.

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And there’s one at the back lean, with its leg up having a bone-dry piss with a moronic look you hope you never have as you come. The picture is a lure. It calls you in to growl and bark– yelp, really. Over the phone you told your wife made a whimper or two… The cats sprang from her sweet lap. What beasts we keep in studios of the self. Talk about our fucked-up dreaming.

Whimper, I meant to put whimper in – another dimension of feral, I suppose, like a dog dying without dignity. I don’t know how these dogs got under my skin. Maybe I don’t want to know. But each morning since I’ve been here, even after a good night’s sleep, I just have to drift into Rod’s Moss’s studio and sit with them. They are camp dogs, they belong to people at the White Gate Camp not so far from Rod’s house, here in Alice Springs. They are like most of the other dogs in Central Australia, as endemic, come to think of it, as the tawny, mangy dogs you see on the streets of Calcutta. Same gene pool, same dusty look, same lack of health, and sleepiness unless stood upon. A half-starved – 32 5 –

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sleep, that’s what it looks like during the daylight in Calcutta. They feed at night, eat the shit in the street, get into the rubbish bins, whereas these camp dogs get scraps thrown to them at the edge of the camp fire. The Antipodean dogs belong, to some extent, to the people sitting by the fire. They have been taken into the fold, have skin names, are carefully buried in the right direction when they die, as befits a decent treatment of a relative. What their particular hurts are, remains their own business, I suppose, part of the round of suffering that comes of living cheek by jowl in a community. In Calcutta you have to stop from time to time even if you are weeping in the street. You can be stone sober, which is almost always the case in India. The weeping seeps out when you either can’t take in any more suffering that is around you, or when something catches your eye and seems to wound like an arrow. More like a yelp, than a whimper, something heading in need of a howl. The last time I found myself in that state was one summer night a few years back, when the dog owned by the little boy next door had died. He came in with his father and when I gave his dad a drink I asked permission to show the lad the Buddhas around the house and garden. The boy listened, wholly attending, which is one of the beautiful things in the world, a boy preparing to be a man like that. By the time he went home he’d had an introduction to the Buddha, who seemed to interest him, and his father seemed happy with that, especially when I explained I was not seeking converts. We had another drink as the late sun streamed into the kitchen and before long they went home, leaving me lightheaded, happy – that something useful had been shown and said. It was much later, about three in the morning, my wife tells me, that I was found howling in the front room, on all fours, down on the Chinese mat with the moonlight striking the back of my neck. A howling had risen up. I remember giving it permission to release itself for all it was worth so as to get my wife’s suffering out of my mind. Her incurable chronic suffering and our sorrow for all the times she is bed-ridden ran through me and the rightness of the howling was undeniable. No doubt my surrender was prompted by the vast emptiness that can take hold in solitary drinking, driving one on to – 32 6 –

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oblivion, but apart from the undercurrent of lamentable self-pity, sorrow for her plight was the prime mover. I was, the next day, a little abashed, that the neighbours might have heard me, but a sense of satisfaction, of correctness, stayed with me at the time and has not left me since, which was about eight years ago. There’s no shame in howling your guts out, anymore than there is, I believe, in occasionally becoming legless or four-legged. These dogs, Rod’s dogs, which he painted quickly – delivering another ‘Aboriginal’ painting to this world in the heart of the heart of this country so unself-consciously that they came out just as they are – are camp dogs through and through. They are what they are, as everyone likes to say these days, when they are having trouble accepting the reality of something. They are like Samosa, the bitch that lives in his house at the moment, a lean, cleaner dog than the lot by the gal iron. She’s better fed, for one thing, a glutton at the bowl, and she is groomed each day by Rod’s teenage daughter. For that she stands still, with a proud look, as if she can see her coat get silkier and her tail relax into straightness, instead of curling under her arse as it so often does. She needs total attention before she can relax. It’s the only time she does not show the whites of her eyes, and it’s the best time to approach her as she’s least likely to snarl. The thing is she will snarl as soon as she looks at you, even though you have already made friends with her several times over in as many days. She will snarl or bark, especially if you have come in from outside. You might have said hello to her fifteen minutes before and that won’t stop her. She is pitiably nervous, hurt somewhere in the deeper reaches of herself. Mind you, this is not an unusual thing in the Territory. In the old days young pups were tossed into a hessian bag and given a good kicking: in the bag were some wellworn clothes from a blackfella, which guaranteed the pups would know who to attack when they grew up. Samosa seems to sense the world the other way round: she grew out of dust to be needfully suspicious of everyone. Misery without its object.

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(I would perhaps sound kinder towards her if I’d known the poor thing would be killed in a hit and run accident in the course of my writing this essay). Samosa has come in from Yuendumu, where she lived with more dogs than you can throw a stick at, although they have been counted in recent years, as a matter of fact. Rod’s partner, a striking woman called Gloria Morales, of Indian descent from Chile, has brought sweetness and light to every dog in the camp. There are photographs of her with twenty or thirty dogs in her truck, on the tray and in the cabin, because she has rounded them up during the day, feeding them, letting them frolic in the dam, brushing them down if they need it, giving them medical treatment if they need that. It is a daily routine that starts when Gloria has finished her day’s work at the art centre, and it has been her work since arriving a few years back at Yuendumu, when she consulted with the dogs owners and worked out a way of healing the sick dogs and compassionately putting a certain number of them down, once the owners understood that nothing else could be done for them. Since then the number of dogs at Yuendumu has stabilised and a happiness among them seems to reign. They interbreed, of course: part-dingo crosses with part-dingo, but from time to time there is a dog that is clearly closer to the pure dingo than most, and at the time of writing, a dingo pup, no, an adolescent, sleeps in Gloria’s bed each night. Down the bottom of the bed, Rod explains, which is where he tries to keep his feet. The dingo is out as the sun comes up, has jumped the fence other dogs can’t jump and headed off. Gloria finds it on the roof of her truck about eleven, waiting for a pat and something to eat. In dignity and prowess the dingo leaves the camp dogs for dead. The way that story came to me I was led to believe that the dingo pup has not been heard to howl. He goes off to howl. Then he comes back. He keeps the howl in him because he has not come to confuse his domestic sense of himself with anything else. He’s gloriously wild.

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I mention this by way of contrast to wild dogs further south from Yuendumu, around Mt Wedge. Different breeds, including the hybrid hunting dogs, have procreated to produce a feral pack so dangerous that no man goes out there without a gun. The man who told me that also told me something rather kind towards the dingoes out there. In a time of drought, when he was sleeping in a swag, he was woken before daybreak by a dingo licking his face for moisture. All he could spare the creature was a cup of water. But later that morning the dingo filled itself up with soak water that was pure brine. It ran yelping in agonised circles until it dropped dead. Right Love Who has written with right love about this hard light? It flicks pebbles, sharpens reeds, makes white eucalypt amorous for dance. In Hidden Valley – atomic clarity of dusk. They stand around not looking as we drive up. Kids with little salt lakes glinting on their upper lips. We are there to help. We will take your rubbish. Just bring as the sun sinks

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the bag of rattling cans that sound like the light. In Hidden Valley I got caught in the glare the amplifying net it cast each of us with pores open glances shooting past the whole camp under daytime stars. Then, back on the bitumen the nighttime slump the light no longer peeling off you, or them the conversation about them starting all over again. Staying here at Rod’s house is like being in a house of love. In every room there are his light-saturated paintings. He paints the ground of the centre in dancing colours. They are sanctifications of country. They glow in their own right. Ochres, brown and lemon-yellows that we see out there when the glare allows, the same colours that give their stamp to Aboriginal sand paintings, the paintings on paper, their body-paints for the old ceremonies. Rod writes that the country’s colour spectrum is like a digestive system. The other day I called them his Dreamings, and he seemed not to mind that, although his paintings don’t just feature Aboriginal people. They show us him, him and his children, his early and his later wives, his own parents, and other beloved friends who visit Alice or have stayed here whatever love arrangements might have been botched over the years. It is their palette and it is his palette: everyone’s palette, everyone’s country, his paintings are saying. Loving kindness informs every painting by Rod that I have seen, and to accompany that there is his writing, which is one of the clearest expressions

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of friendship with Aboriginal people that has been written out of this fraught place. In his two books, The Hard Light of Day and One Thousand Cuts, the paintings do a lot of the talking, just as the text talks back into the paintings. Hard Light of Day asks us to not to get carried away with art business as such. The epigraph is from Ortega y Gasset: ‘Art, all art, is a highly respectable matter, but it is superficial and frivolous, if it is compared with the terrible seriousness of life.’ It’s hard to argue with that, especially since the first photograph shows fourteen healthy young men, football players around 1985, when Rod arrived in town and first met people from the town camp at Hidden Valley, all of whom are now dead, killed by way of the grog. Oh, there are quick narrative deflections from this show-stopper – lesser details, such as the dog of an Aboriginal friend that was gratuitously shot by a passing bikie, and there will be many warm-hearted, amusing incidents in the narrative which pull you up for laughs just when you thought you were falling down. For instance, after reading that after a day helping his Aboriginal friends in the hospital ward, Rod spent a night feeling ‘meaningless and terrified, wishing it to be otherwise, anything else’, a couple of pages later he is telling us that most of the dogs have drolly apt names: ‘A miserable little black and white pup absolutely riddled with fleas, more fleas than fur, was called Flea. One with a stuttering yodel was called Flat Battery. Eric Neill had a grey-flecked thing that seemed to limp on every leg, a doozey of a dog which he called ‘It’ll do’. And there was Betterboy, a hairless brute with a broken baritone.’ Back in the eighties Rod was a new chum to the town, teaching art at the Centralian College while painting in his apartment on the East side of town. He was excited and flattered to be noticed by people who lived nearby at the White Gate camp, another rough settlement near his home. In due course he would try to learn the language and be laughed at, but affectionately. He was ever keen to be helpful, which came easily to him, as he is a man of unusual equanimity and generosity, of gentle spirit. He also had, since a kid growing up on the outskirts of Melbourne, a native attitude to running wild in the

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bush. But in Alice he slowly learned to set limits: yes, it was ok to let his first new friends, the young man Xavier and his wife Petrina, use the water from his front tap, but he needed them to respect doors when they were shut and night when he was asleep (he had moved to a house in a suburban street by then). Otherwise he would happily drive people to the shops, the prison, the hospital and in and out of town, if they were stuck. But he did not welcome anyone who came around when they were drunk. Consanguinity is the word I want to paint on the walls here. It was once used in early Australian anthropology. Ironically, in ‘the bad old days’ of colonial history, it had a currency, as if we might not always be strangers to each other. The Hard Light of Day has won hearts in recent years, not to mention the accolades of major literary prizes. From the start ordinary readers have felt that it expresses something extraordinary. A painter/writer, an ordinary Australian with no cross to bear or to convey, has been making pictures and offering words that enact a dimension of reconciliation that most of us might only dream of. If only we had the patience, the time, the tact, the strategic sense of self-effacement – in the company of what Aboriginal people have to offer. The Hard Light of Day draws us into a fold. Rod is candid about the new feelings he had as friendships evolved. ‘I was embraced with astonishing generosity. It’s hard to describe this viscerality. I was taken in to bodies, passed around – in a word, accommodated.’ He was being sheltered, rather like a stray dog. ‘I had never encountered this kind of physical affection as a natural, unaffected transaction. The cohesive energy of the camp was a given, greater than the stresses it endured. And it exercised a peculiar, addictive power over me.’ And so more generally, with the bush trips when everyone piled into the vehicle – women and kids, with dogs and guns and the men who wanted to hunt. You can hear the laughter rising up from the images Rod invokes; you can imagine the first of his daughters, Ronja, singing all the way, having been taken into Aboriginal arms from when she was a newborn. On the hunt, we are not spared the details of the killing, or the cooking the kangaroo, or the ritual eating of the intestines, and the drinking of blood. Ronja, thereafter a

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vegetarian, later wrote to her mother: ‘We drank blood which made us healthy and wrong’. The book is a tough and joyful read. It creates a chiarascuro of the mind. Pages of gruesome details are followed or rapidly interspersed with redemptive communalities. You can read, on one page, that women and children in one part of the country, at a particular site in the Dreaming, were ‘bashed to death’; and the bashings seem to be happening on every page, according to no particular code of honour. (Peter Sutton, in his Politics of Suffering, points out that the archaeology shows a high incidence of skulls struck from behind: mongrel acts aeons before grog). Then you can turn over the page where Rod is describing the painting he did of an initiation ceremony: how he rose early for several mornings in a row to get the shadows right, and he felt he had to take in each figure without the aid of the camera, and when he showed the painting to his venerable old friend, Arranye, the knowledgeable man wept with gratitude. The friendship with Arranye is pivotal: the old man trusted Rod with Dreaming stories and knowledge of sites, and Rod’s writing renders the textures of the country with a kind of double-love. But no grog, as I say. The text is a dry account. Rod has hardly had a drink since he was a young man. When he was a schoolteacher in the Mallee he had a wake-in-fright experience and gave it up. One needs to say this because so many of the intimate liaisons between white men and Aboriginal people have been via the shared umbilical cord of alcohol. This is not meant to detract from the quality of the relationships, necessarily. But one only has to try and imagine, say, the remarkably fertile liaisons of Geoffrey Bardon in the early days of Papunya, without the currency of grog with ‘his’ painters, and we have a different story. Rod’s is the different story: not a story about grog in Centralia, I hasten to add: his memoir concerns the small population he has come to know because of where he lives. His book strangely blooms precisely because it is so candidly intimate with the seriousness of those lives.

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Nor is Eros far away. Xavier and Petrina laugh with Rod about the sounds of their jiga-jig in the scrub near his house. Xavier is painted in a certain light. There’s a painting of him near the door leading to the bathroom, on the way to the studio and the dogs. As usual he’s bare-topped and listing, as he might be portrayed outside, say, the supermarket, or the police-station, or the Alice Springs Court. There is a sheen to his torso. Not that he is oiled up, so much as rendered with the silkiness you get with graphite. I like the way graphite simulates the skin, Rod told me years ago, after many renditions of Xavier and men like him. The soft oils in the graphite did the job the way acrylic did not. Graphite, its refined carbon, has the oils our flesh has. Xavier’s painting was shown with his permission. It might be an exhibition in Alice, or it could be a show down south: Xavier travelled thanks to Rod’s rendering of his blackness and waywardness, even when the latter had horrors attached to it. The horrors are stark in the book. One night Xavier, as his wife Petrina slept beside him, cut off her finger. She would not give him the dollars he wanted for grog. A minor episode, perhaps. It fitted with the time Rod looked out of his window and saw them each with large stones in their hands as they tried to knock each other out. On another night Petrina turned up at Rod’s place on all fours in the driveway, vomiting and crying. ‘Them mob at Hidden Valley been call me a dog. I not dog’, she wept. It hurts to know that in the one painting in which Petrina features, Raft, Xavier is stretched out halfconscious with his head in her caring lap. Nor does it feel much better to know that the figures are aligned as in Géricault’s great painting The Raft of Medusa (1819). But in what storm, exactly, have these people come adrift? Rod’s noble history paintings can only go so far. Petrina died, alcoholically, before his book came out, as did Xavier, drinking all the way, in and out of prison, and keeping, in the painter’s hands, his body-sheen until the end. There is one Moss painting where love does not come into it. There are no human figures, and the dogs are not the usual benign companions to the many activities you see in his paintings. You see a pack of them turning in a circle. You are looking down on them, and their fury could be part of a

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dust-storm, as they chase each other’s tails. No: they chase nothing. They are their own vortex, a force field on the bare ground, their growling palpable to the eye – yes, a blind, wild turning that is beyond nameable relationships – feral through and through. It’s gone from the house now, that painting. If it had hung here too long it would have put a house of love to ultimate tests. 2

When Petrina said she was being treated like a dog she was using the figure of speech that is common to our cultures. It’s the slight on dogs that almost any one of us can carelessly slip into. We say it when we feel as low as a dog might seem to be, when we are utterly demoralised as dogs can appear to be. When we are as low as some drinkers can get. When we are a lowly camp dog, as distinct from a frisky and free dingo, for instance, a species that comes from the north Asian wolf. Being treated like a dog might also mean being treated with less respect than even camp dogs get. Some dogs have been made kin but they are also bad dogs – disobedient, disruptive, ungrateful, feral, even self-destructive in their reckless ways. They seem to beg for the kicks they get. Dogs that deserve their punishment because they flout the rules of sociability. Outcast dogs, dogs who turned on themselves and others. Drunken dogs, you might say, but dogs that are still kin. Dogs that create a hell of a lot of grief all round. This risky slippage – from bad dog to drunk – is invited by the intricate ethnography of Dingo Makes Us Human by Deborah Bird Rose. In her book on Yarralin and the people at Victoria River Downs, Rose takes pains to recount how they have coded their lives according to their myth story of the original Dreaming dingo. This was the dingo that ‘made people human in the first place, who gave us our characteristic human shape, human brain and human culture.’ It is a dog that lives out bush, hunts for its own food, makes its own shelter etc. ‘Raw one, no fire, that’s bush dingo’ as a Yarralin man says. In other words, the dingo is not a camp dog; it is not dependent, it is not like a child – 335 –

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hanging around the camp for food, or an adolescent adrift, not to mention a fully-grown man who for whatever reason has no job and pays so little attention to his own country that he is neglecting his birth right and duty to what he is made of. On ‘the dependent–wild continuum’ this is where the Dreaming dingo lives. And was seen to live in the healthy web of things before the advent of grog.1 Thereafter what was wild, and what was dog, in the pejorative sense, took on new meanings. We are speaking structurally here. Before grog, the Dingo was part of a larger scheme that answered an unasked question: ‘What would human society be like if there were no women?’ Rose says: ‘The answer is that it would not be human. To be human then is to be neither totally dependent nor totally wild. Human culture requires that we engage with each other; the ideal is symmetrical interdependence.’ But as Bird keeps saying, this conception, which she found to be implicit and made to be explicit when the codes were tested in the dynamic web of relationships in the days before the flood of the white man’s fire-water … this conception was, well, to be conceived to be believed. It was before anything else that now dominates our minds. Fact is, the women are predominantly still ‘there’ – giving birth, cooking, tending children, and so on. This is the case in most Aboriginal communities today. It’s the men who have gone, not because they have gone bush, or anything as traditionally restorative as that. Most have strayed because they are enamoured of grog. But we know all this, and in the large scheme of things, when we come to Alice Springs, we know it acutely. Grief and morbidity hang in the air. The sentence above hangs in the air also. It misrepresents so much. Yet it is there, and all the words one might take to expound on its truth which is bound up in the melancholia endemic to Centralian history. 1

Dingo Makes Us Human, Deborah Bird Rose, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 175–179.

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Whenever I come back to the Centre the book that I can’t get out of my mind is Revolution By Night.2 It came out nearly three decades ago, but it feels new, timeless, actually. It registers like a dream. The author was James Bardon, the brother of Geoffrey of Papunya fame. Readers might know Geoffrey Bardon from his book that celebrated the Aboriginal painting he had much to do with at the time, a social experience that led him to the breakdown he has come to at the end of his book, The Art of the Western Desert, where we find him sitting up in bed, broken in heart and mind, in the Alice Springs hospital. In comes his brother, a solicitor from New South Wales who, in his book, takes up the troubled states that seem to have then inhabited Papunya as those first traditional paintings grew out of the earth into their hard light of day. But the night is the thing with this book. The night encloses the mind, suffocates it, much as it does in Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or his sequel to it, Death on the Installment Plan, novels that were hell-bent on turning the reader away from any enlightenment tendencies. Revolution By Night is grog-soaked, and death-ridden. It is written with the notion that ‘words disappear when they are used’, and in the utopian belief that ‘we shall make a Revolution by Night, where the poor and the afflicted can be clean’. Yet you might wake at night, ‘so everything can be seen, including the awful dogs in multitudes in a kick of smoke’ where ‘you enter your thoughts so as to find them by the touch of a word.’ Everything seems to take place all on the ground, with the writer looking at the world through the neck of a flagon. The men nearby are old men, ‘the black faces hunched in little circles’ doing their paintings. You are not meant to tell much difference between what they are making and painting and what is in their minds and hearts because all that has been there since time immemorial. ‘Words die as they speak … you become the person whispering at them …’ Whatever the white men are doing – the arts community fellow, or the 2

Local Consumption Publications, 1991.

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man on the horse who belongs to the past and the site of a massacre – they are doing so despite everything else. They sit in a dry wind, with the night all round them, crawling like the ants, like flies when the sun comes up. After a while it’s hard to tell the difference between this being their end or their beginning. The sound the book left me with is that of the night wind. And maybe the mournful sound of the curlew, which the Aranda regard as the bird of death. But there is murmuring to the paintings as they find their shape, and the sounds that break the night include the howling of dogs, and men, and sometimes children. To say ‘grog-soaked’ is to speak of a musical or painterly accessory, rather than dereliction. Grog-soaked goes with the ground that is being sung and re-presented. Sometime, perhaps soon, the old men might dance as the paintings command. But the reader can’t be sure of that. Whole passages in Revolution by Night are hard to follow. They belong to the dust storms. Pages become one, as you learn to decipher the drift of its thought and feeling. As a reader I felt I was being taught to trust what is inchoate in acts of creation, re-creation, restoration, restitution. It is too distancing of the book’s achievement to say the book generates life and the world as a swirl, even though that’s true. Better say, more soberly, that it presents a landscape that you want to map internally and externally, a landscape which is inseparable from cosmic ceremony and risk. You get a sense of everything being in it because the whole truth is that everything is related to everything else. Not surprisingly, the book has disappeared from view. Too difficult, too dark, too mysterious, I suspect, for the dying aspects of a reductive white culture. Considering the horrors that are implicit in the text, I am also inclined to say that Revolution by Night almost sets itself up to be suppressed as well as repressed – too arcane to be re-published and too close to the liquid night of identity. To say this much is, I realise, to bait lesser books. But for space reasons – and my own life’s reasons – I must leave it there for now. But I want to hold to the proposition that Revolution By Night is the most brilliant single book of

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the Centre’s daylight-dream-nightmare. We might hold it to our chests, as the White Gate mob do Rod’s books, as we might indeed with another new book, which has the redemptive clarity to be simply called Trouble. 4

The subtitle of Trouble is On Trial in Central Australia, and its cover is a Mike Gillam photograph of shards of broken glass on earth the colour of dried blood. The image made an instinctive impression on me because inwardly grog can suddenly smash day into night like a broken bottle. Trouble’s achievement is to dispassionately present the horrors of what can be revealed in a criminal court. Its author Kieran Finnane, who is a founding journalist on the Alice Springs News, established by her husband, editor Erwin Chlanda, has confronted the details of the violent crimes drunken Aboriginal men commit against their kin – their wives, brothers and cousins, loved ones in general. The accused sometimes remember their deeds, more or less. They can speak about them to lawyers and the bench, up to a very limited point. They seem to be ashamed, some of them. Solemnly in the court they appear before their families, witnesses, the general public, and journalists such as Kieran – anyone who might bear witness to their confessions. It’s startling that their defence lawyers seldom plead innocence for their clients for it seems to be a given at these hearings that the social crisis in Alice Springs has dimensions to it that are culturally degenerate in epic and tragic ways. The daynight drinking parties in the scrub outside town can become feral gatherings of wild men and women who drink such quantities of grog that the lawyers can barely believe what they are told. Of course, the legal fraternity are no strangers to drink, any more than the white population of the Territory, which has the highest per capita consumption of alcohol in the country, about one and a half times the national figure. But the issue to hand is black drinkers, their gatherings, the black party, which can’t seem to stop itself, any more than its revellers can remember the what or the when of events afterwards. It might have been a real party, at one stage, with everybody having a good time. But not for long. ‘Jealousing’, as it is called, ends with heads bashed in and fatally – 339 –

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haemorrhaging. Damaged ones are shoved into broken down cars, one after another, and die before help can be reached. No one notices a dead body in the back of a car, or no one is moved to intervene as a man dies at the hands of a pack. A test for the reader of Trouble is to be able to stomach such details without recoiling as Joseph Conrad meant us to do at ‘the horror, the horror’, which are the last words of his Heart of Darkness. It is then we can only summon the pity and the sorrow at the depth of the tragedy – that this is the reality among people who are not mad or bad in the ways we normally want of those terms. The guilty are not pathological, that is; they are not beyond the pale of the justice system, which is why their cases are being recounted in a book such as this. They are subjected to the justice system, which is what Trouble, so in tune with the transcript of the trials, seeks to show. They are subjected, and simultaneously treated, with the dignity of citizens whose conduct demands the application of the law, a law in some ways analogous to the Customary Law of their lives before the arrival of white culture and its grog, but which has in recent years been set aside by the courts, only to be employed in some sentencing. Trouble is alive to such post-colonial contradictions. The actual crime scenes attract a compound of criteria we might bring to bear to pass judgment, legal and otherwise. I push them up against each other because as lived experience they are so: the two Laws interpenetrate, as indeed they can be seen to be in the eyes of the court, which is so often confounded by what the accused, or the guilty, seem to so lack in understanding themselves. But – and here is the important thing – Kieran does not muddle them. She has spent weeks, months, sitting in court, and recounts the material at her fingertips in a way that is classically composed, judicious, impartial, lucid. Trouble is reporting in the liberal, Western mode at its best. It seeks to be compassionate, full of right love, you might say, but the love is conducted without falling into sentimentality, on the one hand, or into defensive historical polemic, on the other.

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Trouble works case by case, individual by individual as they encounter the system of justice. With one exception they are cases where the accused is Aboriginal. The exception is Kwementyaye Ryder’s case, the Aboriginal man who died at the hands of five young white men who came out of the casino drunk in the early hours of the morning. Everyone in town knew those boys, including Kieran’s son, Rainer, who had grown up with one of them; when the morning news came in I saw a fine young man in a state of shock at the breakfast table. The deceased was also much loved, and you can read about him when he was alive and well in Rod’s book. Some cases are closer to the bone than others. All along Kieran puts us in touch with concrete particulars; her text is pain-stakingly responsible to the facts. But not coldly so, as if to keep things at a distance. In court, she is attuned to the Aboriginal families she has come to know as a long time resident of Alice Springs. She registers their anguish, signs of emotional movement in the court, their utterances outside the court, when a judgment has seemed racist. Overall, she can take issue with such claims, having followed the judicious reasonings of the Bench. What comes through is the laborious nature of ‘rationality’, our culture’s Reason, as it manifests itself in the practice of the law. A lesser journalist would have slighted some of the asinine, legal goings-on. She would have taken issue with findings that seemed blind to what the southern press were declaring ‘racist’. She is not in sympathy with generalising accusations of racism, least of all when court business is used to cast a slur on Alice as a racist town. Of course, on that front, there are on-going events that can nourish such claims. But her feeling is that such generalisation misrepresents the town she knows and cares for. At the start of her book she writes, referring to me: ‘A friend of mine says that the town is so racist that when it’s not, it has to be remarked upon. Many agree with him. But….’ And she goes on with her account of some recent acknowledgments of local traditions, its sacred sites, sacred rocks and water places and trees and so on. In fact, many trees are among the more than 600 sacred sites mapped in the town. Such care can be botched by mishaps and

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ignorance, but the care is still there in official and unofficial circles, just as a host of good things happen in Alice, from all sorts of relationships, including creating families together, through to the countless sporting events to the many exhibitions of paintings by blacks and whites, many of whom Kieran has written about for her paper, creating a body of criticism as fine as her court reporting. I would sometimes say to her, as the manuscript progressed, what keeps you there? How do you inwardly contend with the horror? What’s the pull of the material? For the horrors she had brought me to face, perversely wanted me to say that grog can bring knowledge and delight as well as disaster: so that while drunken parties can degrade human affairs, their freedom and wildness, their departures from order and safe-keeping, might nonetheless embody some worthwhile truths of experience, especially the truths of suffering, whatever they might be. Almost to my horror I have sometimes found myself wondering about those drinking parties out bush, rather as if they are films I might be in. Trouble does not indulge in any such flights of a troubled, romantic imagination. Kieran is in her right mind when she is overridingly conscious of the plight of Aboriginal women in Central Australia. Women are by far the most common victims of Aboriginal violence, most of which is associated with grog. Leave aside the flesh and blood details: the statistics are horrific, and well known. Furthermore, the heavy drinking communities have often brought themselves into some kind of line only when the women there have taken charge. Kieran drinks little, is well-educated, has studied in Paris, can read Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes-Tropiques in French. Sad as she is about the cultural impasse that leads a small minority of Centralian Aboriginal people into the courts, she has not been drawn to enter or speculate about their world, or let its turmoils stir her own imagination. Elsewhere she has noted, however, the risks of being ‘hysterical’ about it all: it was an Aboriginal political figure who said that in a public forum, which is a nice reminder of the very traditional states of panic and fearfulness which belong to the Territory’s colonial history. And once you admit that to the mind, you realise there has been a whole lot of complicated howling going

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on for a long time. What I have been saying here and what she has written have to be viewed as part of the same sound system, ultimately a product of our compound states of anxiety, ambivalence, affection and arousal when familiarities are tested. ‘These stories,’ Kieran writes in Trouble, ‘had their own life, their own terrible attraction …’ In addition: as little as they might be understood and ‘struggled with blindly’; and even though the difference between her life and theirs is too great for her ‘empathy to be simply applied’, she sat it out in her ‘box-seat’ in the court. To do anything else would have been to fail her larger sense of responsibility to the town and the region’s reality. Trouble is a book of great poise, elegant out of professionalism and intellectual honesty. The reporting itself does not seek to make ‘sense’ of the horrors so much as table its components. It does not enter as, say, anthropologists are trained to do, the incommensurables of the Other. Rather, Trouble creates a refined space for others to make their ethnographic entry.3 She does not overreach into conjecture about alcoholism – how it is, for instance, that the wild ones seem to be acting out of a desperate bid for love from those they damage the most. This basic truth was laid out in some detail by two Australian anthropologists in the early eighties. These scholars were in turn alive to the earlier work of Gregory Bateson, who gave us the double-bind theory of human action, the object lesson in how we trap ourselves into dangerously futile rounds of behaviour, turning in circles like grievous dogs, no less, a fact that Rose latched onto when she was talking about humans and dingoes and grog.4 Rose’s dingo book sits well with Trouble, and Trouble is a book that spotlights the feral which has come as far as the court. 3 4

As does, for example, Rose with a grog murder case that unfolds among the Yarralin inhabitants, a process that involved complex negotiations with relatives who might have been too drunk or too cruel to help the deceased. Dingo Makes Us Human, 153–164.

Rose 182: The anthropologists were Maggie Brady and Kingsley Palmer, Alcohol in the Outback: Two Studies of Drinking, ANU, Darwin, 1984. Brady has diligently continued her grog work since then, essentially contending with the way official policies have, and as ‘culture’ has become reified in the academy, expressed shifting attitudes to grog among Aboriginal drinkers and their helpers. Indigenous Australia and Alcohol Policy: Meeting Difference with Indifference, UNSW Press, 2004. For Gregory Bateson’s double-bind, see Steps To An Ecology of Mind, Aronson, 1972, 271.

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This drinking town, its level of suffering, overt and covert, makes us find our place, and we can only do that with varying degrees of comfort, unless we are ourselves hiding away. 5

Everything here takes place in the ancient totemic landscape, which can be a source of reassuring authority to Aboriginal people, as well as a harbinger of danger if the knowledge pertaining to it is flouted. The country is energising and transporting, a unifying force for life; and it can be the source of mishap, damage, ruin: it has the double edge of grog, you might say. The living topography of the town includes the generative tales of two sisters, the travelling uninitiated boys, of euros, kangaroos, caterpillars and wild dogs. The dog story is most evident up on the range, where there are signs of the extended battle between a local dog and an interloper. They fought over a female, as the Dreaming guide to the town will tell you. There was a rape, but the narrative details of this event are still in the realm of the secret-sacred. Her cave is up on the range at the green patch called Alkwerrperetakeme. There are also outcrops formed by the intestines of the outsider, which the local dog wounded. The climax of the battle is marked by a hill just inside Heavitree Gap, where the intruder metamorphosed. But it is a profile of the range itself – the spot called Mt Gillen – which marks the dog most clearly. You can make out a jutting canine protrusion of Rose head, especially with the sun going down behind it. Then, up there in the dark, you can feel the dog among the stars. The most dramatic image of the dog can be found in a little book by Craig San Roque: it is the last drawing in the harrowing Long Weekend in Alice Springs, a graphic work in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir. In Long Weekend Joshua Santospirito has drawn from a text written by Craig in 2004 for his therapeutic colleagues. The upshot is a narrative as instructive and as hurtful as the books out of the European Holocaust and the Middle East. Difference is, the Australian book – 344 –

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is a slow burn, a droll melancholic seering as the narrator – Craig the Jungian therapist – draws us into the longueurs of Australian Gothic which are as much about us as about them.5 It starts with the figure of the therapist in his study. He has his doors open to the night and is looking out at a figure in his back yard (which is a short walk away from Rose place). It is a woman huddled near a small fire. She is one of many who come and go from the yard, with Rose permission. Over the years in Alice Springs he has cultivated such a sit-down place, where people can, providing they are not troublesome drinkers, meet and talk and sleep. A safe place. The woman is Manka Maru, a widow of a ‘good man who won an award and died of heart failure and alcoholism’. She has not spoken about her husband, she is enveloped by silence, and sometimes she takes out the photos she has in her plastic handbag. In the firelight she fondles the images of her husband and slips them back into her bag … In this way we are inducted into the depth of Craig’s broodings about ‘the loss of integrity in indigenous culture life’; the nature of peoples’ ‘peculiar kind of depression’; ‘the web of memory-systems developing too many gaps …’ A mournful, beautiful delicacy is deftly established in Long Weekend. We see one sad figure gently holding a white dog. We come to the wretched figure of a petrol sniffer – wildly violent at first, then taken off in an ambulance, then again with his face in a can, his face blacked out because ‘he has lost the ability to integrate his experience. Finally he is dead – ‘found on a cold morning, sitting up in the driver’s seat of an abandoned vehicle. For many the death of this man is a relief.’ And there, in another story, in the back seat of a car, is the body of a dog wrapped in a blanket. It’s been there for three days. Instantly, we can smell the death of a dog. The drawing of it is ample and simple, an emphatic dead 5

The illustrated version of ‘A Long Weekend in Alice Springs’ was published by SanKessto publications in 2013, the original essay in The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society, edited by Thomas Singer and Samuel L Kimbles, Brunner Routledge, Hove and NY, 2004.

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weight. But over the next few pages the dog is shown to have been listening to the man’s demise. ‘The animal, who is almost human, and is quietly dead in the back seat. It has lost its own sense of time … or time stands still as it remembers … ‘Sumeria’! Of all things, of all places! But yes …’ No need to go on anymore. Suffice to say that Craig, like any well-trained Jungian, knows the Ur mythologies all too well. He eats of them and dances with them. I would say that they are his Dreamings, except that when it comes to his presentation of self in the company of Aboriginal matters, the myths he reaches for are to be found in the classic texts of the ancient world. Archaic crimes are employed as universals that might engage the imagination across cultures, both as conceptual structures and layers of atavistic feeling. And so in Long Weekend one track leads us to the legendary Sumerian hero, King Gilgamesh and his part-animal companion Enkidu, a suggestive trope as the Iraq/Syria war raged in its reality. Far fetched? Well, it’s a leap on Craig’s part, no doubt about that. Craig a fecund, adventurous writer. There are dog stories in myths all over the world in many cultures and more recently, outside the frame of his graphic tale, which lands us in Iraq/Iran, Craig has been employing ancient Greek myths, staging them up on the MacDonnell Range just outside Alice Springs, putting Homeric tales and hymns to use with performances such as Persephone’s Dog, an adaptation, admittedly, as the dog in his version of the story is entirely benign, an instructive and protective travelling companion of Persephone who will end up happily married in Hades – an ambiguous tale played out on the range behind the one where Alice’s rapacious dog looks down on all. So our deep and real backdrop – dragging ‘real’ into the hard light of our days as well as theirs – can be seen in the tragic crimes that were dramatised by the likes of Aeschylus in the Oresteia, a generational family tale of matricide, parricide, revenge and vengeance, where parents are duped into eating their children, brothers kill brothers, and daughters are sacrificed to war … There is no end to death because the Furies, the ancient goddesses of revenge,

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are at large. They are only to be glimpsed, these destructive forces; they live beneath the earth, but you can hear them moan and whine, they sometimes bark like dogs, and their breath is foul, smelling of half-digested blood, and their own vomit, where they have eaten their prey for a second time. Upon this earth crimes continued without prospect of justice until Athena came into play – with the law, its courts, its deliberations that do not banish the Furies, but keep them at bay beneath the earth where they are transformed into the Kindly Ones, women rather than beasts.6 It’s important to add here that Craig is supra-conscious of his own psychic mix, or hybridity, you might say, the extent to which he is as mongrel as most Australians, inter-racially speaking.7 That is to say he has come to be at home with the experiences of displacement and dispossession. More precisely, while born in Australia his mind and emotional character was honed by psychotherapeutic training in London: he is the product of extreme Eurocentric innerness. After fourteen years of facing himself in these terms of self, he returned to his home place of Sydney, only to find himself practicing in Central Australia among our First People. More particularly, as he turned to work with them, he was once more made aware that his uncle Barrie Dexter was once Director of Aboriginal Affairs in the Holt-Gorton Government, and his father-in-law, W.C. Wentworth, was Dexter’s Minister. Craig feels this as a kind of psychic ancestry, making him complicit in the genesis of the traumas he has had to deal with. For as much as those white men in office cared for the welfare of Aboriginal people, they were among the architects of the on-going tragedy in Central Australia. (A proper complicated dog story that one). Craig’s other writing – the conventional papers for conferences, his contributions to professional journals or to colleagues in the front-line of the health services – are worthy of scrutiny because of the weight they give to ignorance. Our collective ignorance of each other’s instinctive hurts and 6 7

Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Martha C. Nussbaum, 2016, 1–10.

‘Who Speaks for Australia–In Defence of the Mongrel’; unpublished paper 2009.

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vicissitudes, members of a common humanity though we are, and equals in the eyes of the Law (as that story goes). Indeed he has gone so far as to suggest that what we now need on these tragic grounds of cultural encounter, where the ‘discipline of altruism’ is contending with such riddled state on ‘both sides, is ‘an ethnography of failure’ by which we might ‘diagnose our joint condition’. He proposes this as a strategy for hope. The image that arises out of one of Craig’s most seductive papers is seminal. It is of two men, one from each culture, sitting on the ground with each other. They meet because of their mutual interests as men of healing. Each knows something of the suffering in the country, the sickness and madness and addictions. How might their thoughts connect? Only time and trust can tell … Meanwhile, they are just two forms of consciousness in the same space. Side by side, each knowing the laws and myths that nourish the law. There is no rush to speak, to get anything done. There is time. The meeting runs on into other meetings. Patience comes naturally, out of tact and wisdom … There is more listening than talking. Mutually so. Within the limits of that knowledge/ignorance there is wry knowledge of each of the other. Friendship finds its shape. Talking takes place, along with drawing, sharing of dreams, ideas of painting … From this grandly human and humane picture, Craig enables the reader to feel that there is common ground because we are sitting together on the same ground.8 The general point is that it betokens the crisis in Central Australia for one side to be listening equally to the other. A few years ago Craig suggested an idea for a painting Rod might do. The result was Rod’s Interpretation of Dreams, which shows the great doctor Freud prone on his own couch talking 8

‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought’, Social Analysis, vol 50, 2006, 148–172. An earlier reflection on the culture’s encountering each other is ‘Coming To Terms With The Country; Some Incidents On First Meeting Aboriginal Locations and Aboriginal Thoughts’, Landmarks, ANZ Society of Jungian Analysis, 2000. The latest exercise in cross-cultural communing is ‘The Lemon Tree: A Conversation on Civilisation’, in Placing Psyche: Exploring Cultural Complexes in Australia, eds: Craig San Roque, Amanda Down, David Tracey, Spring Journal Books, New Orleans, 2011.

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to the Aboriginal elder who sits behind him with the notebook. Nice joke. Who is to say, the painting asks, whose knowledge is most worth writing down or knowing about? The black man looks gleefully receptive. Freud is less so. I found myself looking at his jaw and wondering about its state of decay from the painful cancer that was to be the end of him. He knew his death must be close when his dog refused to come near him, such was the smell of his rotting mouth. Craig’s essays are long-form prose designed to have us travelling towards the other culture as honestly as we are able. They establish a unique atmosphere of communing cross-cultural consciousness which we might perhaps enter. Or broach, as courageously as we dare. They are beautifully done, as you might expect of a novelist, or, say, an intrepid dreamer-reporter like Nicolas Rothwell, who told me once, when he had read the proof pages of Broken Song: ‘It’s all here, it’s all here.’ He meant: All that we dream and think and feel, the great poem of our being on this earth, can be found/glimpsed/experienced if we are open to all that Central Australia offers and has long had. He was making the appeal to the raw and the cooked imagination of which Craig’s Jungian practice is constituted, and which Craig seeks to put to use, not in order to make art, although he can write most artfully, but the better to help people who are in trouble with their consciousness. His premise seems to be that most of us need all the help we can get, especially when we are dealing intimately with the lives of others. I leave a space here. It is for the reader to imagine their own troubles of mind. This before they try to imagine the troubles possessed by others. ‘Trouble is’, a senior Warlpiri man, the late Andrew Spencer Japaljarri, said to Craig one day when they were sitting on the ground at Yuendumu, ‘We have no Dreaming for grog.’ There was a dreaming for the nectar that came from the sweet sap of the corkwood tree, and other sweet flora. But there was no Dreaming for the sugar/alcohol the white healers of addiction

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were on about? ‘And you’, Andrew went on, ‘the white people, have lost your Dreaming. Do you have a Dreaming for sugar?’9 Craig withdrew to think about this. His response to Japaljarri’s remark was to return to the Greek myths; namely, all that had been thought and said about the god of the grape, Dionysus. Much of the destructive aspect of this story is told in The Bacchae, the play by Euripides. Furthermore, Craig realised, whatever a project’s good intentions for the treatment for Aboriginal people, it was as much about settler Australians of European descent: ‘Dionysus’s tale is a revelation of the geological strata of our ambivalent national character – both the drunken and predatory ruthlessness, and also the compassionately restorative nature of the people of Europe.10 After some years Craig’s Sugar Man became a reality. In 1995 it was performed by a troupe of people mustered from Yuendumu, Hermannsburg and Alice Springs, black and white. The blacks included people from that eternally resurrected congregation, the Hermannsburg choir, and the whites included what some locals called the ‘ferals’ who lived in the bush – mainly young women. They played the Maenads in the Dionysian revels. As theatre, Sugar Man was I believe something of a success. Of course it was an audacity on the part of the white therapist – not destined to please the safer thinkers in town. Yet it was collaborative, an act of cross-cultural transmission and trust. And the intellectual and imaginative work Craig had put into Sugar Man was instructive: in his Tjukurrpa paper he had in effect revisited Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, that definitive essay on the life-affirming tensions between Apollo, the god of order and beauty, and Dionysus, the agent of intoxication, disorder and sexual transgression. This was new dark writing in several senses of that term – it enacted the primal sources of ruin, and while doing so affirmed subterranean impulses, embracing the risks of a loose consciousness, the kind of risks I was alluding to when I referred to 9

10

I am paraphrasing from ‘On Tjukurrpa, Painting Up, and Building Thought,’ op, cit, 153. Cited in Trouble, 22; for a lucid overview of Craig’s projects, which go beyond grog and its complexities, see Kieran Finnane’s ‘Persephone’s Picnic’, Griffith Review, 52, 2016.

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troubled Romanticism. Better say, in this context, my wish to go beyond the Protestant or Jewish ‘consciousness prone to repress or to misunderstand the Dionysiac side of life’.11 It pointed beyond language. It was meant to activate the ethical constraints on human desire, just as it celebrated the vital forces of the daemonic. It made a universal claim to everyone’s attention – us and them as lovers of all that the Centre might hold. It did not however, finally, offer itself as a healing myth for the addicted and the damaged. Craig heard that the Aboriginal audience were most impressed by what they had seen, not because the Sugar Man answered to their needs for a Dreaming story about grog. No. They were impressed with Sugar Man because of what it revealed to them about white men and women’s range of feeling. They had not credited us with such a gamut of feeling, or indeed, it seemed, with much feeling at all! 6

After a while I believe that words devoted to all these matters start to run into the sand. They seem to suffer a drought of thought because the rains won’t come into our lives … Most recently Craig has been sharpening his focus on the later dramas of the Oresteia. He has been prompted in part by Trouble, a text that compelled him to re-focus on the crimes and traumas as they encounter the law … that we might better know our own deep structure of feeling, perhaps, the better to bring justice into play, and to live in the presence of the Kindly Ones …12 Rod is still painting, incessantly. How else to survive in Alice, if not by creative work to help keep a self together? Not painting according to any program, but he seems to create in pendulum swings between images of swooning hope – children, black and white, holding stones that could be eggs, which he called ‘Notes Towards a New Poetics’, and images of heart-breaking

11 12

Dionysos in Exile: On the Repression of the Body and Emotion, Rafaele Lopez Pedraza, cited in San Roque’s ‘Who Speaks for the Australia – In Defence of the Mongrel’, 17.

The ceremonial work in progress is Electra: Arresting Orestes, a part of which was presented at the Alice Springs Writers Festival, May, 2017.

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thwartedness. A recent work shows a black man, his trousers slipping, trying to push a very big rock uphill – towards Heavitree Gap, actually. It’s just him and the boulder, no dog in sight: ‘Sisyphus’… Kieran is back at the coal-face of the Alice Springs News. She is paying her clear respects to events, while musing on words for the art that sees the light of day in Alice Springs … I might have made some progress on the word front. The last time I tried I fell toxically ill, I failed to deliver the essay I’d been commissioned to write. It felt like I’d gone under to the grievous, tragic field – like LeviStrauss, like T.G.H. Strehlow, like Geoffrey Bardon, like Peter Sutton in their times and places. I ended up feeling like Craig when he wrote: ‘I confess that I have been almost overtaken by the fluency of the grief, almost dismantled by the careless actions of European folly and the mindlessness of drunkenness. I wish that we could meet in a thoughtful water hole, like that in the Tjukurrpa, that would bind us together and lift us out of this pit’.13 Now there is that dead dog wrapped in the blanket, the one found in the back of the car. I can’t get it out of my mind. Without quite knowing what to think about the dog. It’s a weight in my consciousness, needing to be carried around. Look at me now I say to the loved one. Coming towards you I carry myself in my arms. O praise me as I praise you.

13

‘Coming To Terms With The Country’, Landmarks, 2000.

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PART 4 REASON AND LOVELESSNESS

H A N N A H A R EN D T ’ S DI R E L OV E Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1997)

This pregnant, allusive little book is about a momentous love affair that shakes one’s faith in several things at once. Hannah Arendt was one of the West’s pre-eminent social philosophers, the author of, among other things, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of her life’s work was the rational quest for reason in society: the struggle to sustain ethical action. Her intellectual power and her classical training out of the German school of philosophy enabled her to proudly write in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle and St Augustine, whose conception of love she made the topic of her doctoral thesis. That she was a woman, and a Jew (though a highly assimilated one) gave her work another depth. I think of her as a contemporary Spinoza, one whose heroic intellect was essentially embedded in a culture committed to ethical reason – the harmonies that might come from truth in beauty, and beauty in truth. Her presence seemed to inspire trust in wholeness of being. Alas. At the age of 18, when her beauty matched the undisputed power of her intellect at the University of Marburg in 1924, she fell in love with her teacher, Martin Heidegger, who was on the brink of publishing Being and Time, the book that would establish him as a great if problematic philosopher. Hannah Arendt was at the feet of a 35-year-old married man she saw as a ‘king of thought’. Their secret affair, which risked Heidegger’s academic career if discovered, lasted four years, until the great man (by then a professor) put an end to it, breaking Arendt’s heart. She moved to another town. She took another man. Then she married her first husband for the wrong reasons. But when Heidegger sought her out she was still there for him – inwardly.

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All this we know from her letters in later years, those she wrote after the war, by which time Heidegger’s sins were becoming known. He had been an active supporter of the Nazis, his denials of the fact were cunning lies, and when he had to account for himself with regard to the camps, he failed – defiantly so. This book is really about Arendt’s twists and turns in the arms of her Nazi. Her own record is clean – from 1930 when she left Germany, until 1950 when she met Heidegger again. And in 1950, the extent of Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazis had not emerged, but allegations had. Arendt met him with trepidation. She came away overcome with happiness, having believed his stories. Back in America she helped with his publications into English and generally vindicated his name. By 1969, most of the evidence against Heidegger was out. But in public, Arendt continued in her defence of the man, remaining as generous and loyal as she had as his young lover. In her tribute to him at 80 she relegated the key moral issue to a footnote. She merely found it ‘striking, and perhaps exasperating, that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human affairs, turned to tyrants and Fuehrers’. In private, however, the princess did have doubts about her king of thought. In 1946, she had written to Jaspers that Heidegger had, in effect, murdered his great teacher Husserl, when the latter was as a Jew banished from campus. She conceded that some ‘devil’ had once possessed Heidegger. She referred to his letters as showing ‘the same medley of genuineness and constant lying, or rather cowardice …’ And yet, and yet – her loyalty won out. Despite everything, she visited Heidegger until his death. More: this in turn involved reaching a modus vivendi with Heidegger’s wife, who had been a very active Nazi. At which point then, and at what level of herself, should the Princess of Reason have turned away? And since she did not, she trucked with cowardice and evil until the end, what should one say about her: on what basis judge her?

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ORW E L L’ S F R AT ER N A L GL A NCE S ‘… a constant bar-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness and richness combined with a fundamental ill-will – people who, one instinctively feels, without being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us so.’ Orwell in the Cotswold Sanatorium (1949)

‘Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.’ Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

We all have our own Orwell. To be mundane and intensely local: my Orwell was a loving, single father; a stoic with bad lungs; an incessant writer; a gardener; a randy chauvinist of the harmless kind; a gruff egoist; a fighter. And of course he was that beacon: a moral intelligence that gave political writing a literary form, and whose work has been so glibly pigeon-holed, especially today, when the most powerful forces in ‘the West’, as we rashly insist on calling it (as if people east of some Eden are aliens), folds its cards towards the right. That was when we began to re-read him, wasn’t it? Nothing to do with the centenary of his birth and the hype that would gloss and tame his life: everything to do with United States paranoia and omnipotence since September 11. When I found myself going back to him late last year, as the Americans were laying the ground for their war on Iraq, it was as an aid to my own inner voice and fears in the face of imperial mendacities. ‘Nationalistic loves and hates’, he wrote in May 1945, when Europeans stood among their own ruins, have to be struggled against, and that ‘is essentially a moral effort’. The

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bomb was about to be dropped on Japan; thereafter its cloud loomed over the world, and he was keeping that clear voice, as he had during the war, and before the war. No panic, the steadiness, the resolve; a pessimist who did not give up hope, and who was, even then, taking pains to address the young. Junior, a student magazine for which he wrote in 1945, ran a slightly perplexed bio note that said he had been ‘a schoolmaster, a civil servant in Burma and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He has written many novels and is a great lover of Dickens. He is a journalist, and has visited Europe during and since the War. Is careless about his clothes and rolls his own cigarettes.’ The last sentence is a reminder that Stephen Spender associated Orwell with Charlie Chaplin, Anthony Powell and Don Quixote – which says more about them than him. The bio note lets Orwell in – coughing and smoking and arranging his shaggy self at the table, perhaps ready to tell us what gave him hope, or at least to indicate, in his own complicated way, the thoughts that sustained him in times so akin to our own. Orwell was an international socialist, a battler for equalities at home, and justice for the wretched of the earth abroad. If he were alive today he would, like Frantz Fanon, know the hatreds of the colonised, and, like V.S. Naipaul, be sardonic about many new rulers of former colonies. But that would not make him an American imperialist, or a friend of a State apparatus vamped up on a permanent war footing. He would be out on the streets with S-11 and he would want a noose around the neck of Amrozi. He would want the smile wiped off the boy’s face, just as he wanted to run a bayonet into the guts of those Buddhist priests in colonial Burma, even though they wanted, like him, to kick the English out. Difficult Orwell. He would simplify and complicate at the same time. He made it hard for himself, and for everyone else who claimed to care for liberty, equality and fraternity. But accessible Orwell, because he dignified political polemic with such open-ness, cleansing it of religious faith, that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies within himself could be read in one movement. In the thirties, by balancing liberty and equality, Orwell was

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a guiding light between Stalinism and Fascism; he was both a conscience for leftists and a tiger against reaction. It was a position he upheld with the publication of Animal Farm, which the right wished to co-opt for the Cold War. He had pitched for equality by hoping for a working-class revolution in London during the war, and for a United States of Europe after the war. He pitched for liberty when he wrote in 1948 ‘the real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. And the fraternity – the common decency we might all share – was crucial to Orwell. This has been overlooked. Fraternity was as important to him as it was to that child of the French Revolution, Tom Paine. A great deal of Orwell may be read as an attempt to overcome, to correct for better and worse, his main obstacle to realising fraternity, namely his upper-class background, education and bearing. An abiding, private compulsion informed him, complicating feelings he made himself confess, and which appeared like clear water coming up from a dark plughole. In 1927 he abandoned his job – ‘the dirty work of Empire’ – as an Imperial policeman in Burma. Years later he was able to write: For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces – faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking) – haunted me intolerably. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.

For the next few years he lived hard in France and England taking rough jobs, slumming, getting about as a tramp. In 1939, with the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London he eschewed his family name, Eric Blair – as one historically vested on both sides of the family, in the British Empire. In 1935 he reported on working-class life in Northern England and came back declaring himself a socialist, or rather a would-be socialist, if he won the – 359 –

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battle against snobbery in himself. Then, no sooner had he expelled that statement on his road from Mandalay to Wigan, he hurled himself into battle in Spain fighting with the leftist militia. Direct action thrilled him: his jauntiness under fire got him that bullet in the throat. He was rightly proud of his leadership in the trenches. As the war turned against the Republicans, the Stalinists taught him all he knew about treachery and murder in politics. If they had arrested him, he remarked, they had reason to convict him as a Trotskyite. In The Road to Wigan Pier you read Orwell talking himself into socialism. In Spain events did that for him, an experience cemented when he got back to England, where Stalinists and fellow travellers colluded against his independent view of events – a failure of fraternity, intellectually speaking, that marked him forever. If you want the most open expression of Orwell’s yearning for fraternity, look at his description in Homage to Catalonia of workers’-controlled Barcelona, ‘which breathed the air of equality’. ‘Waiters and shop walkers looked you in the face and treated you as equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared …’ Not everything pleased him but he ‘recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for’. It is perhaps the only happy political passage he ever wrote. And it comes, remember, after the moment when he met a young, handsome, tough-looking young man wearing a leather cap. He had, Orwell declared to himself, ‘the face of a man who could commit murder and throw away his life for a friend’. Orwell had never taken such an immediate liking to anyone: they greeted each other – Italiano?/ No Ingles, Y tu? / Italiano – with the Italian gripping his hand very hard. Orwell: ‘Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again.’ ‘Needless to say’. The pessimist rushes in over the optimist in comradely intimacy. Such fraternal yearnings Orwell had carried to Spain from

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Northern England. It was there in the small things – where he did so not want to be called ‘Sir’ by the miners and their families, any more than he was happy with ‘Comrade’ (he already thought the Communists on the nose). It’s there in his political fastidiousness, where he is a critical presence at mass meetings, where the union crowd is sleepy, or, on the other hand, too alive to the Fascist slogans of Mosley. Orwell the hard man to please, despite his best will in the world. Most of all it was there in his physical recoil from the stench of poverty and of poor people, often filthy people, whose filth he rendered with Dickensian relish, while berating himself and people like himself who had been taught to think the working classes stank. This candour caused the predictable fuss, as we know: his publisher Victor Gollancz had to write a special preface to the Left Book Club’s edition of The Road to Wigan Pier, the better to put socialist readers right about Orwell’s good intentions, an attempt that largely failed. But today Orwell’s sniffiness, if that’s what it was, shows up as a struggle with the physicality of fraternity. Orwell knew he was writing with D.H. Lawrence breathing down his neck. Lawrence, he tells us, described the rolling snow-covered hills as ‘muscular’. ‘Not the simile that would have occurred to me,’ Orwell wrote, ‘more like a white dress with black piping running across.’ As if he knew how prim that was, he sounded off against the ‘proletarian’ attack on upper-class impotence, the effeteness, the unmanliness, so-called, aired in a Lawrence poem. In the wings you can hear Lawrence jeer; and in Orwell’s heart, I think, you can hear the beat that would agree, if class hackles on both sides could be quietened, to wrestling in front of the fire. Down the mines Orwell is stunned by the physical perfection of the tough little men, their hard bellies, their strong arms, and it is with the tenderness of Lawrence that he talks about miners washing, their facilities, or lack of facilities, for cleaning themselves. He had been struck by how the men worked naked, and by their extraordinary stamina, their embodiment of hard work. You can’t read these remarks by Orwell without being struck by what he says about himself later on, when he is describing his own lazy habits in Burma, when he

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allowed himself to be dressed by a Burmese boy, letting himself be handled intimately because the Burmese boy was not an English manservant and ‘not repulsive’. ‘I felt … almost as I felt towards a woman.’ And with regard to the warmth of union, Orwell’s one positive picture of Wigan was of what he called ‘the working-class interior’ – the hearth of the man who was employed. There ‘you breath a warm, decent deeply human atmosphere which it is not easy to find elsewhere.’ ‘Father’, in this picture, is sitting by the fire reading the racing results: ‘Mother’ is sewing, the children happy eating sweets, the dog lolling on the mat … it is winter evening after tea’. Orwell wanted so much to come in from the cold. But there he was, the tall, shy Etonian with his notebook, in a kind of compulsive mental exile, and not so surprising either when you realise how little attention he had paid to what enabled these communities to sustain their self-respect: their union, their chapel, the instructive Communist paper, the Daily Worker. Who was to know of Orwell’s need to connect? Orwell expressed this need in a famous passage in The Road to Wigan Pier. It is in that glimpse of one young working-class woman on her hands and knees in the cold gutter cleaning out her drain. He was passing up a horrible squalid alley when he saw her ‘and she looked up and caught my eye’. ‘How dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in at the gutter in a back-alley in Wigan,’ he reflected, ‘her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me she was thinking just the same thing as I was.’ This was his diary entry, which does not ensure its literal truth. When he came to expand on it for publication, he said that he saw the woman from a passing train, which bore him away through the monstrous scenery of slagheaps and slums; and he had changed his mind about the glance. She looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face for the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘it isn’t the same for them as it would – 3 62 –

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be for us.’ And that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

It is a complicated passage to contend with today. It is a reminder, for one thing, of the way his Wigan book largely neglected the toil of women: only a few miles from the mines there was an army of women enslaved to textile factories Orwell did not go near. And at another level, with regard to Orwell’s sympathy for women, there is no getting away from the consensus among those who knew him that he was something of a misogynist. Spender thought ‘he really rather despised women.’ But in the passage these matters are less important than the force of his remonstration with his middle-class readers – the ‘we’ who are so one-eyed about the poor. Orwell’s target was both callous middle-class ignorance, and the romanticism that placed the poor in another country of feeling. And it was romantic, too, to speak of an absolute identity of feeling between one individual and another – as he had done in his diary. So he expunged such wistfulness from his book, leaving his epiphany of fraternity in the air. Orwell used as many literary devices as Dickens: and like Dickens, whose ‘generous anger’ he famously appraised, he was prone to exaggerations, even distortions, that served the purpose of his larger truth at the time. That is why he enjoyed some of the work at the BBC during the war: having set his mind to write justifiable propaganda, his was a dab hand at it. We read him today for his performances of sincerity, even if they are not entirely authentic. By this I mean that the facts of his fiction became, in his literary hands, less important than the convincing character he had created with ‘Orwell’, the clear-speaking writer with an objective view of events, and a convincing imaginative grasp of what was inside the heads of others. It was his rare achievement to have created a voice which was, even though it was a creation partly separable from

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his biographical self, felt by the reader to be firm, strong, sincere and morally true in the way we are when we can identify with our best selves. Here he is in Morocco in the spring of 1939, where he went to recuperate from a bout of the consumption and finish his third novel, Coming Up for Air. His short essay Marrakech was written a couple of years after that masterpiece of anti-colonial literature, Shooting an Elephant, but it is just as vivid, and even more pungent politically. Its opening sentence – ‘As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it’ – is uttered by Orwell the passive spectator, but the reader is soon thrust into the details of the colonial situation. When you walk through a town like this – two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in – when you see how the people live, and still more easily how they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces – besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names?

Today this is a kind of set-piece, so much so that Western journalism hardly knows a way out of it. But it was not then, not in this tone of voice that put a spanner in the wheel of Somerset Maugham’s beloved rickshaw, and a bomb under E.M. Forster’s subtleties. Orwell confirms his picture with graphic details of poverty, of men and women as beasts of burden. They go past him with their brown skins that are ‘next door to invisible’, but, then, when he is close to a dusty column of Senegalese soldiers, ‘the blackest Negroes in Africa’, something else happens. As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of

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profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it. But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter two pence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. ‘How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?’ It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.

Naturally, with our self-adoring, post-colonial savvy we could put the boot into this passage. Yes, the passage is disconcerting today, just as it was radical then. But Orwell comes through, really, because he confessed his own colonial collusions – that ‘secret’ – and because he has voiced observations candid enough to be open to suspicion. For the question also arises: what if that Negro look was not as servile as he presumed, if the day of turning his gun in the direction of the white men was much closer than expected? The question is active in this passage because Orwell’s fraternal glance, he feels, has been denied by the other’s wretchedness. With the working-class woman his glance, however fictional, made a bond. Here connection is lost: the white man’s political conscience might as well be those scraps of paper – until, that is, white socialists cut the racist bonds of Empire. Or, as Orwell wrote – 365 –

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a few months later, in an even more wounding piece, Not Counting Niggers, ‘nothing is likely to save us except the emergence within the next two years of a real mass party whose first pledges are to refuse war and to right imperial injustice.’ Orwell was always trying to enter the minds of the oppressed without condescension, and when he failed, as he may have done here – he still wanted to make things uncomfortable for the ruling types like himself. After Wigan, he felt that a good working-class writer would do better than himself (even though when he delivered his BBC talk on proletarian writers he could not help sounding condescending). Fraternity, in this context, meant descent with a slummingly carnal aspect. Orwell let his 1936 fictional creation of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, do the talking. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself – to sink … It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the underground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.

This is like a shopping list for a porn shop Orwell could not let himself enter. Orwell was deeply drawn to those writers who seemed to have travelled some distance into the earthy, darker, pagan and perhaps even evil interiors of others. He dwelt on Joyce’s command of the demotic; and on Lawrence’s sympathetic ability to enter each creature, and to create equally sensitive characters with ‘the same kind of emotions’ so that ‘everyone can make contact with everyone else’, obliterating class boundaries. And he especially admired the early Henry Miller for the vitality of writing from the belly of a Europe where

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liberalism was collapsing. Miller was ‘a sort of Whitman amongst the corpses’, a man not ‘frightened’, when most novelists were frightened. Miller’s ideas lured Orwell to visit the louche American in Paris in 1936, when he was on his way to Spain. Envy the cockroaches: the two déclassé writers together; the two self-described ‘realists’ talking into their night, one protesting the necessity of activism, of wilful striving in the face of evil, the other spinning another tale of irresponsible futility. Lawrence must have come up, as Miller was with depth and intelligence shaping a book on the coalminer’s son who had travelled so far into the vicissitudes and metaphysics of Eros. As to carnality in literature and in life, Orwell, who had so warmed to Miller’s first book, must have mused on his own ventures into the brothels of Paris and Rangoon, and I hope he was not too reserved to speak up for Gordon Comstock. But I’m just imagining. According to one account, Miller said it was the act of an idiot to go to Spain. Orwell spoke of expiating the guilt of Burma. Then it was even more stupid to go, Miller thought, since Orwell had flogged himself as a tramp in Paris and London. They talked, it seems, without falling out, and at some stage Miller gave Orwell a corduroy jacket: better for fighting in than the suit Orwell was wearing. Orwell left next morning for Spain, travelling through the French countryside, and looking out the train window at the peasants in the fields as they gave their anti-Fascist salute, ‘like a guard of honour, greeting the train mile after mile’. The jacket, Miller told a friend, did not mean anything. He would have given it to Orwell if he had been going off to fight for Franco. The gift was an act of friendship and condescension. Orwell went off – with fraternal fervour for the sake of Spain and the rest of European democracy, but there must have been part of him that knew Miller was right. At a certain level of experience, if we are far enough down in it, there is ‘nothing to be done’. Or rather, we have to accept that those who chose not to act are not giving up, not necessarily. They may be brave enough to dive deep with the daimons of experience, they may be riding with Dionysus rather than Apollo. Orwell knew that there were registers of language more vital, and more

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attuned to the sacred and the profane, than his own. He admired Miller’s use of the American language, which had more life in it than the ‘less flexile and refined’ English. This was close to saying, really, that the distancing tones of his English fell short in some way, that his prose could be too cut-and-dried for its own good, and not allow for much uncertainty, or ambiguity, or permit much play of instinct. But later, when he had returned from Spain, Orwell could not bring himself to indulge Miller’s recent work. He reviewed Miller’s The Cosmological Eye in 1939, putting the boot in for all it was worth, condemning its abstractions, its vulgarities, the way Miller’s ‘shamelessness’ (once a literary virtue) had gone wrong. Orwell was being a prig and a dishonest one, too: he refuses to recognise Miller’s philosophical roots in Nietzsche; he mocks, pretending not to grasp the abstractions, and does not pause over a political utterance of Miller’s that might have been his own: I am against revolution because they always involve a return to the status quo. I am against the status quo both before and after revolutions. I don’t want to wear a black shirt or a red shirt. I want to wear the shirt that suits my taste. And I don’t want to salute like an automaton either. I prefer to shake hands when I meet someone I like.

This is radical, fraternal Orwell to a T, especially the business of being against the status quo before and after the revolution (they were the terms in which he would say that Animal Farm was a book about vigilance from below rather than an exclusive attack on Russia). But he rejected Miller, he finishes him off with all the upper-class condescension he could muster. Miller called it a ‘lefthanded attack’, which it was, and it came from the right-handed correctional officer in Orwell. Still, with Inside the Whale (1939), Orwell steadied himself with regard to Miller, and wrote one of his great ambivalent essays. The political dilemma was whether to act on public events or succumb to their deeper currents. The essay worried, like a dog at a bone, at the activist role Orwell had made for himself: it struggled with the notion that reality was most truthfully described from within, from ‘the passive attitude’ that entailed, politically speaking, a – 3 68 –

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stance of quietism. Inside the Whale tries to speak of the subterranean river that runs through history, the base current of politics, the elemental vicissitudes of dominance and servitude he would explore in Nineteen Eighty-Four – the givens of all power, one might say, the structures to which anyone but a vain wilful egoist must surrender. In the end, we do not so much come out of the whale as sense the struggle within Orwell as he feels the pull of the ghost-kingdom, the ‘great sluttish world’ beneath ambition. And that was the seduction of Miller’s style, the energetic egoistic voice that left Orwell feeling like an English shag on an English rock. Orwell refined what might be called a propositional style: an art of plain assertion that brooks no nuance. After all, if your prose is committed almost absolutely to plain propositions it is hard to avoid an excessive interest in contradictions, and a tendency to sound like a schoolmaster with a cane. You could say, I think, that Orwell’s famous style – the controlling lucidities from which we have gained so much – expresses his own limits on the front of fraternity insofar as fraternity aims to merge with the other, with the unknown, with that which is not entirely in one’s control. Not only that: his own statements about style, and the English language, distinctly complicate the identity of the persona he had made of himself as ‘Orwell’. Take the notion of transparency, which he extolled. There is that famous statement that has seduced me for so long: ‘… one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality. Good prose is like a window pane.’ Yes, but what was he getting at here? Before it conveys anything about prose it raises questions about Orwell. We are instantly reminded of Eric Blair’s decision, with the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, to write under the name of George Orwell. Blair was enigmatic about the name change, and said diffident things about not wanting his slumming to embarrass his parents, especially his father, once an Opium Officer in the Indian Colonial Service, who had disinherited his impecunious son after he resigned as a policeman. Young Eric’s revenge, perhaps, was his anti-colonial novel, Burmese Days. But he remained uneasy about the name change. Years later, in a venomous column about the Honours List that created new names – 3 69 –

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for aristocratic nonen­tities, he cited Tom Paine: ‘These people change their names so often that it is as hard to know them as it is to know thieves.’ You have to say, here, that Eric cannot ever have wished to erase his personality at all, as there is no voice more distinctive than the one in which he wrote his way through the thirties to the point of being able to declare, in 1945, that every line of his serious work had been written ‘directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism’. No proclamation could be less self-effacing because, by this time, Blair and Orwell were comfortably merged. The ‘transparent’ style was Orwell’s distinctive way of appearing in public, a literary equivalent to his own studiously down-beat style of dress; both were an invitation to see through to the man, to the common man; the one who is not a thief. Incidentally, here is Orwell in 1944 on the matter of dress. ‘I would like to see clothes-rationing continue till the moths have devoured the last dinner jacket and even undertakers have shed their top hats. I would not mind seeing the whole nation in dyed battledress for five years if by that one means one of the main breeding points of snobbery and envy could be eliminated.’ A transparent style was tied up with a conception of a language fit for a social democracy. It was clear of cant, it did not bully, it did not mystify, it said what it meant – all that. Transparency was a way of protecting what was of ultimate worth in the individual. And good prose was a means to this end for a precise reason: it kept its faith with an English language used by the common people. Orwell famously worried about the health of that language, its corruptions of sense and ethics, its declining vitality. Less well known was his romantic antidote: that its continued vitality would depend on its contact with manual workers and poets. Orwell asserted this in his worst essay, The English People, which he wrote on commission in 1944, and in which he made his celebrated statements about patriotism and common decency, and throughout which you can see propositions falling over themselves in an effort to sound consistent about the character of the English people. If any essay called out for a less transparent style it was this one, with its attempt to

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embrace so much ambiguity and ambivalence about the organic notion of ‘the people’: were they agents or victims of their own history? By the end of his life Orwell did not want the essay republished. It was as if he realised that his style was ill-equipped to penetrate the problem of false consciousness. Still, when he wrote it, he was above all asserting the claims of ordinary language over the jargon of functionaries. He was defending language that could convey, as a poet might, the truth of felt experience, to use the expression of his friend, the critic William Empson. Immediacy, directness, had intrinsic worth, so that in Orwell’s case for transparency, the enemy was abstraction born of the kind of theory others would impose on inviolate individuals. Orwell’s instinct was in keeping with parallel movements in poetry, philosophy and psychology. In philosophy, for instance, his friend Freddie Ayer had been famous since 1936 for his plain attack on metaphysics, in Language, Truth and Logic. The great confirmation of the worth of ordinary language would soon be demonstrated by the publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, a work that took for granted, in the spiritual life of the individual, the sacredness of what could not be said. At the same time, in a very English version of psychoanalysis, Winnicott was sewing the seeds of plain language concepts of child development as a foil to the bullying by theory of some therapies. In Orwell’s England, the cultural instinct to protect the inner-citadel (as Isaiah Berlin dubbed it) was strong. His trust in ordinary language was a way of leaving people alone (to paraphrase Wittgenstein’s remark about when conceptual analysis should stop); it was a civil libertarian’s manifestation of tact. And yet there is little that is subtle about his achievement overall. As a naturalistic novelist he was stilted, undeveloped; as a thinker he was more forthright than original; he was not a scholar in any field. He was a journalist who called himself a pamphleteer; a man of letters who refined a unique reportage, who wrote several mediocre novels and two classic satires, along with a handful of great essays. With regard to the latter, he was a writer who wrote mainly about other writers. More precisely, he essayed writers who had, like him, a polemical axe to grind. Furthermore, the writers about whom he

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wrote brilliantly were the ones closest to his heart and mind, so that his elucidation of them became an elucidation, of sorts, of himself as Blair/Orwell. His first book review described Melville as ‘a kind of ascetic voluptuary’. Of Kipling he remarked, ‘Few people who have criticised England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot,’ and went on to praise Kipling for knowing something about political responsibility. With Swift, Orwell aired his own intolerance for metaphysics, the smelly stupidities of human beings, and his anxiety about the total suppression of freedom. When he called Swift a ‘Tory Anarchist’ he used an expression he had applied to himself years earlier. With Dickens, Orwell seized the chance to say, with brazen falsity, that ‘a writer’s literary personality has little or nothing to do with his private character’ – a deflection from Blair if ever there was one. He criticised Dickens for having nothing political to say about poverty, and praised him for creating a readership that assumed ‘the idea of human brotherhood’. Put these essays together and you have a self-portrait that is partly confession, partly wish; a richer, more literary one than he could give of himself in The Road to Wigan Pier, because it located him in an artistic tradition that had more resonance than anything out of Grub Street. But he could, and did – this has to be said, too, if Orwell’s crystal voice is not to be idealised – argue straight up out of Grub Street. His tone is knowing, slightly bullying, haughty, whatever his fraternal yearnings, and he had a horrible habit of arguing with the social categories he wanted to overcome. He seldom pauses to express uncertainty – uncertainty in himself, I mean, as distinct from worldly statements about how unpredictable the world is, and how he had been wrong on many occasions, just like everyone else. In one of his many columns, As I Please, for the left independent paper Tribune, he wrote, ‘The everlasting snow which looks so virginal, is in fact distinctly grimy when you get close to it,’ and you want him to say more about his own grime, especially considering the glad start he had made about himself as a colonial policeman. The Swift essay was not enough. Most infuriatingly, considering the fresh air he brought to so much, he had a habit of denying that there was

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any difficult abstract topic to consider when, in fact, there was one. A few examples: he avoids the issue of literary value, and wants to put everything down to what lasts (on Shakespeare and Tolstoy). On any metaphysical topic he will take the tack of saying that its abstractions are hot air (on Sartre); with religious belief, he will patronise those who have faith (on Waugh), or insult the intelligence of sensibilities that asserted spiritual intuitions (on Eliot – with whom he was so extreme that he did not want the 1945 review of Four Quartets republished). Orwell did not believe in a life after death, thought religious propositions illogical and carried on as if that took care of all spiritual issues. He was, in a word, anti-intellectual, a weakness demonstrated time and again when he used ‘intellectual’ as a term of abuse. When his targets were Stalinists and fellow travellers he had a reasonable and ostensible reason for doing so. He developed a bad habit of ‘intellectual hunting’, as Alex Comfort put it, an accusation that infuriated Orwell at the time, but which did nothing to stop him. He was an incorrigible labeller, and a reductive, punitive one at that, especially when he resorted to the idea that because so-and-so was of the rentier class (had an independent income) they were bound to be corrupt in some way. Orwell’s worst tendencies would have qualified him as a radio jock! With the root issue of politics – the nature of power – he often speaks of it as a dualistic issue of bullying or not, even though he knew, as Hegel and Marx and Freud knew, that the full story of the master and the slave was a complicated dialectic. Admittedly, these simplifying ruses are partly due to the limitations of journalism, even literary journalism. As Orwell’s milieu it fostered shortcomings in him, so that his best work had to keep cracking its way through the pavement, which it did, especially after he knew he had written his masterpiece, Animal Farm, a fable that allowed him to fabricate and tell the truth at the same time. All this comes through as you re-read Orwell today: in me it produces a kind of exasperation, part reasonable, partly an unfair employment of hindsight. Dear George, I want to say, I wish you had gone into your own subterranean experiences, gone further down, loosened to your subterranean self; I wish

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you had stuck with some of the Wigan men, the good types you knew, the union men, the decent communists; I wish you had been able to do more gardening, had time to be closer to the earth, write more poems than prose, break the poems down, find the humus in them, speak them to yourself as you did Felix Randal, over and over again when you were on night watch in Spain, a poem that is rooted in Saxon and enlightened with some belief other than the common people you tried so hard to consistently and coherently like; I wish, since you had no Faith – though you had a religious sense of morality – that you had faced that abyss … squarely. One day, you waited, I know, for Camus to turn up at Deux Magots, but he was sick, you never met him, and seemed to avoid reading him … Dear George, you needed someone hard and moral like him, you needed Camus’s love of the abstract … just as you needed America and its wild energy … In 1940 the British army had retreated from Dunkirk. England seemed at Hitler’s mercy, if Hitler chose to act. The war, Orwell thought, was being fought without conviction and efficiency by the Tory government. If the people did not rise up and make their own Socialist government they would lose the war! ‘England is on the road to revolution,’ he wrote in January 1940, in an article for the Left News. He adopted the left slogan in Spain: the war and revolution are inseparable. ‘It may possibly be true that “the proletarian has no country”’, he wrote, a remark that embraces every coolie and Negro soldier. But what counted just then was the integrity of the British national feeling that its social order was rotten and should be changed. ‘A revolutionary had to be a patriot, and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.’ Orwell belonged to the Home Guard – a long way from where he would have been in the war if his health had permitted. He taught the men street fighting, and carried his machine-gun home to put under the bed, a move his wife did not like. the rifle hanging on the wall of the working class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. This in an article for an evening paper. Orwell wrote to a friend, ‘I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right then, let them. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall feel that the England I was taught to love long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting.’ In his head – 374 –

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were the popular uprisings in the Paris of 1793 and 1870, and in Madrid in 1936. His mood was sufficiently patriotic, messianic, punitive to speak of the austere fate that awaited his English people once they had had their uprising, and their socialist revolution, and then won the war against Hitler. A Left News reader asked the question: but how can the revolution happen without destroying democratic liberties? Orwell replied: It is not claimed by Socialists that the change over to a collectivist economy will make life happier, easier or even freer immediately. On the contrary, the transition may make life very nearly unbearable for a long period, perhaps for hundreds of years. There is a certain goal we have got to reach – cannot help reaching, ultimately – and the way to it may lead through some dreadful places. What socialists of, I should say, nearly all schools believe is that the destiny and therefore the true happiness of man lies in a society of pure communism, that is to say a society in which all human beings are more or less equal, in which economic motives have ceased to operate, in which men are governed by love and curiosity and not by greed and fear. This is our destiny and there is no escaping it; but how we reach it and how soon depends on ourselves. Socialism – centralised ownership of the means of production plus political democracy – is the necessary next step towards communism, just as capitalism was the necessary next step after feudalism. It is not itself the final objective and I think we ought to guard against assuming that as a system to live under it will be greatly preferable to democratic capitalism.

Orwell the Communist; and not just the Communist, but a kind of St Sebastian of the Reds, one prepared to suffer and let his children and grandchildren suffer for the necessary and inevitable good. I must say that when I read this, all those little booklets ‘written’ by Stalin himself came rushing back. The same mechanistic phrases, the same chilling, pedagogic tone – about which I used to argue, when I was growing up, with my Communist Party uncle and militant trade-union father, a fellow traveller, both good men, – 375 –

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the first who would have hated Orwell, the second who barely tolerated his aloofness from the union movement. The passage has not been published before, and if it had – in 1968 in the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters – Orwell’s reputation as a leftist would have loomed. As it stands it invites some ‘body snatching’ (to use Christopher Hitchens’s phrase) of Orwell by the Marxist left. But that would be a mistake, as this was a moment in Orwell’s political life that produced uncharacteristic jargon, as well as his famous essay The Lion and the Unicorn, which springs out of the ideas canvassed in the Left News. As social analysis it is semi-coherent. As a political proposal for a popular uprising with a socialist program that included the abolition of all private property and the ‘cruel’ suppression of any revolt, it solicits civil war. Orwell sounds cracked, as in English eccentric cracked. He was not doing rational analysis so much as dreaming a Delacroix canvas, one illuminated by the ideal of fraternity. It was an emotional plea, a rant. In fact, the term ‘rant’ puts the Left News articles and The Lion and the Unicorn in their right place, ancestrally. At this time Orwell wrote a crucial article that has not seen the light of day since: his introduction to British Pamphleteers. In this you can see why Orwell proudly called himself a pamphleteer: that kind of writer was his own man, he wrote for no party, he wrote with singleminded sincerity as rebel, to protest, content to write ‘footnotes’ or ‘marginal comments’ to ‘official history’. Right language for pamphlets worked like a Saxon’s axe. And – this is the crucial point – the pamphleteer was part of a tradition that did not come from any German philosopher, but from the radical soil of England herself. Orwell’s first citation is from the Leveller Winstanley, who was defeated. Orwell’s radical faith is undaunted. ‘The most encouraging fact about revolutionary activity is that, although it always fails, it always continues.’ You could still say, I suppose, that Orwell was a Marxist of sorts. He was certainly thinking as an historicist. But he also thought – sternly – that Marxists could not explain revolution because they lacked an account of motives. He would not reduce feelings for freedom to ‘superstructure’, for the same reason he would not sacrifice such fruits of the superstructure as poetry. – 376 –

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In any case, after the war, he did not want to republish his remarks on pamphlets, the Left News articles or The Lion and the Unicorn. He left no reasons for this, but since the raison d’être of his life’s work was to demonstrate the difference between art that is propaganda and propaganda that was not art, we can only assume he thought his essay fell short as art, and that the rest had served Blair’s purpose as propaganda. Orwell also knew that he had made a gross error of political judgement (one of many) about the English people rising up. His version of their consciousness failed him. And so between 1940 and 1942 his bubble of fraternity had expanded and burst, leaving him marooned, I think, ready for the good ship BBC, and then, when that was done (wasted years, he was to declare), all too ready for the arid polemic of the Cold War. At the end of the Second World War Orwell was, like most of his contemporaries, expecting an atomic war. One set of fears had replaced another, the second apocalyptic. In the midst of Europe’s ruins, and with another Hiroshima on the horizon, what could protect the ethical vitality of political utterance? Orwell, whose voice did not waver in this period, had several answers that he acted on. With Arthur Koestler and others he set about defending civil liberties. He wrote the policy for the Freedom Defence Committee. Anarchists were his serious friends. When three members of the editorial board of War Commentary got nine months imprisonment under the Defence Regulations, he signed a letter that said their trial involved ‘the teachings of Jesus, the philosophy of Peter Kropotkin, the politics of Tom Paine, the poetry of William Blake and the paintings of Van Gogh’. This was in May 1945, as the peace was signed in Paris. Orwell was still at war. Orwell’s other war, the one in which we were once instructed so well during the McCarthy period, was with those who thought the interests of the Soviet Union the most important thing in the world. In this Orwell gave no quarter, and in retrospect he was right about the issue, and the individuals in his sights. But he drew back from the argument, forcefully put by James Burnham, that America seize the moment with its bomb and make a pre-emptive attack on Russia. Nor did he support the banning of Communist – 37 7 –

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parties, quislings though they were; and although he rather agreed with Burnham’s portrait of the Communist type as ruthless, cynical etc., he did not think that fitted the Reds he knew. Orwell wanted democracies to keep their civil liberties, and to be more patient about the timing of any definitive war with Communism, if that war had to come. Against the apocalyptic, he was counselling a steely caution, not only to avoid an unnecessary war, but also to create time for some socialist model somewhere to be tried: hence his support for a United States of Europe. Early in 1945, with the ruins of the German cities still smoul­dering, the bodies in the camps freshly exposed, Orwell managed to find the strength to get himself to the Continent as a war correspondent. It was the worst of times for him, too, as his beloved wife, Eileen, with whom he had adopted their baby boy, Richard, died on an operating table. On hearing the news he returned briefly to London, made arrangements for his son, took his misery back to Europe. ‘In some of the eyes that met mine,’ he wrote from Cologne for the Observer, ‘I caught a sort of beaten defiance, which, if it meant anything, seemed to me to mean that these people are horribly ashamed of having lost the war.’ The thought was undeveloped but most of what he felt about Germany was given artistic shape in the insufficiently recognised essay Revenge Is Sour, which he wrote after a visit to a prisoner-of-war camp where his guide was ‘a little Viennese Jew’. Some former SS officers had been segregated. As they approached the group, Orwell writes, ‘the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a state of excitement.’ The guide kicks the deformed feet of one prostrate man and shouts, ‘Get up you swine.’ Orwell: ‘The prisoner scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily to attention. With the same air of working himself up into a fury – indeed he was almost dancing up and down as he spoke – the Jew told us the prisoner’s history.’ The racist stereotype of the ‘Jew’ is shocking enough; as if the man did not have a name. Orwell’s gaze is so withheld from him that, as other SS prisoners were humiliated, he speculates:

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I concluded that he wasn’t really enjoying it, that he was merely – like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing around a picture gallery – telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days when he was helpless.

We want to demand of Orwell: if in doubt, why not ask the man? But this turns out to be unnecessary. It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and, after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this scene, like much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates.

What has become, in Orwell’s manipulation of stereotype, of the notion of justice? And why conflate punishment with childish revenge? The answer is that he let it slip in order to make a more ruthless point for his time. This was that the hatred that informs the need for revenge is ‘pathetic and disgusting’, and that, once a war is over, no matter how terrible the war, or evil its perpetrators, the sadistic impulse must be resisted for the sake of our common humanity. What began as a perversely tuned anecdote becomes, as Orwell turns his gaze towards the triumphant victors, a moral tale for humanists. The ‘little Jew’, so-called, is embraced on a full reading, because now everything turns on the speculation that he was only telling himself he was enjoying his sadism. He was a man still caught up in the momentum created by monsters.

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Any minute, Orwell fraternally allows, he might stop. For we do cease to desire revenge, once ‘the sense of impotence is removed’. Orwell’s other call to reason’s connection with common decency was expressed through, of all people, the old fellow traveller Victor Gollancz, who published In Darkest Germany in 1945. ‘Brilliant journalism’, Orwell wrote, as it ‘intended to shock the public of this country into some kind of consciousness of the hunger, disease, chaos and lunatic mismanagement prevailing in the British zone’. Gollancz had come back with photographs of himself at the devastating scenes, a wise precaution against the charge of propaganda. ‘The now familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression,’ Orwell went on. ‘As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protective ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and requires bigger and bigger doses.’ The crisis for journalism, and for a polemicist such as himself, was put prophetically: ‘This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it’ (my emphasis). A new literary technique? I wish he had said more about that. Maybe this was the rumblings of the allegorical novel he still had in his guts, which was Nineteen Eight-Four. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing you had committed it, and without being able to avoid it … I was in a world where it was not possible to be good, and the double beating was a turning point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked than I had imagined … I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before.

This is the account, still hurtful to read today, of a life in a barracks, a prison where bullying and thought control (‘You are not thinking. Your brain doesn’t – 38 0 –

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sweat.’) ferociously exploit guilt in the powerless. It sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Smith in the hands of the thought police, but it is not: it is Orwell recalling his life at St Cyprians, in the essay Such, Such Were the Joys, which he finally revised on the threshold of entering his novel. At the age of eight he had been flung ‘like a goldfish into a full tank of pike’, into ‘a world of force and fraud and secrecy’. How did he survive? His answer is ambivalent and contorted. He distinguishes between self-disgust and self-dislike, and says he did not succumb to the latter. In other words, he lived with a bellyful of self-disgust. Furthermore, as a ‘physical specimen’ he was weakened by bad lungs, and would defend himself with a reckless courage, which in turn he doubted. And, he adds, he retained his sense of true feeling, which was ‘hatred’. Yet he did not rebel openly; or indeed intellectually: his mix of cunning resistance and servitude allowed him to wend a way through the years. Finally he had what he calls an instinct to survive, as young boys do with ‘their youthful bodies’ and ‘the sweetness of the physical world’. All this is a complex of feeling guaranteed to riddle a life in love and in politics, and especially a life that sought to reconcile the two. As you read this essay you think: it is good that Orwell can see this so clearly, and it sets you thinking about your own foundations of trust, or subservience or defiance with authority. The essay seems to hail the arrival of the writer’s self-knowing liberation. But then Orwell tells you he could not go near the school for decades, so that you read again and realise that the essay is still caught up in the same complex. He has named the components of his nightmare, but he has not, as Winnicott might have said to him, worked them through. Instead of doing that, he transposed the template of his early school days to the polis of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1947 Orwell left London and went to a remote island to write his dystopian tract. He said he wanted to get away from the grind of journalism. He wanted to be in the country. He did not want his baby boy to learn to walk in London. All this was true. He was also ill, and needed to rest, as much as he knew how. But his lungs were wrecked, and it was masochistic in the extreme to take them to a Scottish island, even in summer. It was self-punishing, too, to be so far from his amorous prospects, now that he was in his second year of – 381 –

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widowhood. The travel instructions he had to give to any interested woman – the desirable Sonia Brownell, for instance, whom he would eventually marry – would put the most loving mother off making such an arduous journey. Sonia did not come. Instead, Orwell’s sister came to live with him. His sister fought with women who did come. Dear Orwell, whom women did often want to love, seems to have retreated into a sense of the worthlessness of self as he ground away with the new book, the one he knew might be his last. He called it a ‘fantasy’ about the future. It was hard to write, he told his publisher Frederick Warburg, not because it was about his own torments, but because he had chosen to write a ‘naturalist novel’. Well, that was true enough. The naturalism made it harder to write because he had to translate his inner truths into objective correlatives. His demons were kept at bay by a device. This meant it must have been doubly hard, and even more English. Nineteen Eighty-Four (once to be titled The Last Man in Europe) is a demonstration exercise essay in fraternity by negation. Its terrifying coherence, inseparable from Orwell’s black and white lucidities, is formally applied in the narrative, so that the reading experience is Euclidian. It is narrative without fluidities, a system worked out, as if in the end Orwell’s rationalism got the better of him. But for all that, it is a tale not without hope. The hope lies, remember, in the warmth and endurance of the lower orders, the ‘proles’. The fraternal was placed to rescue Orwell from utter despair, but it was a kind of formulaic rescue. He was dying with tuberculosis when he finished this novel, and on his back in the sanatorium when he heard the voices described at the beginning of this essay. He was struck by their ‘fatuous self-confidence’ – then the ‘bahing’ upper-class laughter. It is a horrible passage. He seems to have felt that despite all his attempts at correcting himself, he had failed. ‘No wonder everyone hates us.’ As if he was still one of them. Then, almost as he wrote these words, he handed over his list. For years he had been making a list of crypto-communists, fellow travellers – those who might be traitors if the Cold War exploded. Compiling a list

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is understandable, what possessed him to give it to government? This was the time of the Berlin blockade. The West colluded in Moscow cover-ups of wartime atrocities against the Poles. The Soviets had subverted a democratic government in Prague. As he lay dying he had the stench of fraternal, so-called, complicities. He weakened and … but ‘it is not relevant that Orwell was very ill,’ says Davison, editor of the Collected Works: we should face the discomfort of fact. Orwell’s best friend in polemical defence, Christopher Hitchens, says we should not take the incident too seriously. Orwell was not a snitch; the notes are not developed, and often amusingly obvious – Orwell’s remark that Richard Crossman was ambitious, for instance, or that Spender had homosexual tendencies. Others express Orwell’s spite, as with Kingsley Martin, dubbed a ‘decayed liberal’. Orwell’s list also had ‘the element of a game’ about it, and he had done something similar about Fascists and their sympathisers before and during the war. The point was to weigh up people’s sincerity, and ‘treat each case individually’ (as he told Richard Rees who had helped him compile it). He told his contact in the Foreign Office that there were people ‘probably unreliably listed’ (my emphasis). Now that is disturbing, and morally dubious. In general, though, had he merely handed over the draft of a game? What was the mental atmosphere (a favourite phrases of his) of the action? There are three levels in it. He was in the mirror of Stalinist behaviour he despised. And he had resorted to type as a policeman. And he had, in a way, acted like a prefect who handed the late list to the headmaster. The Principal, in this case, was a Labour Government, not the secret police. He was dealing with his own people, after all. But if he had lived longer it would have put him in a completely two-faced position with people he had to work with. His sickness may not have weakened his judgement, but his judgement was a symptom of his profound social isolation, an exile fostered by his brutal polemic style. But it was perhaps a complex-ridden act of fraternity for the reasons Anthony Powell expressed in another context when he remarked that, like most people in rebellion, Orwell was ‘more than half in love with what he was rebelling against’.

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Orwell died in January 1950, world-famous by then, and no longer poor after a life of skimping. The Anglican service he wanted was put together by birds of his feather, Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge, and his body was buried in consecrated ground arranged by David Astor. The ‘Tory Anarchist’, the man with the universal protestant style, returned to Tory ground; a tribal end. ‘George died’, Muggeridge noted, ‘on Lenin’s birthday, and is being buried by the Astors, which seems to cover the full range of his life.’ But not quite; Muggeridge made a mistake: Orwell had died on Lenin’s death day – throwing his own shadow into our laps today, as we still look to him as an antidote to mendacity, terrorist thinking and revenge thinking on all sides. Despite everything you might want to say against him – or if not against, then, by way of correctional thoughts he would think fair (like those he applied to Gandhi in the last essay he wrote) – his voice has installed itself like a pilot light. If our present wars escalate I will still be reading him as the furious exemplar of imperfect, humanistic steadiness.

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EZ R A P OU N D The Tragic Orientalist

David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work. Volume 1 The Young Genius 1885–1920 (2007) Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, edited and introduced by Zhaoming Qian (2008)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. These beautiful lines were written by Ezra Pound in 1913, when he first set out to write in a thoroughly contemporary way: directly to ‘the thing itself,’ without Edwardian rhetoric or ‘emotional slither.’ He had been staying in Paris, having a brief respite from the fusty literary London scene he was trying to reform. He drafted a long poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ and worked hard on it before realising its failure. He began to cut it back – and back, until months later he was left with this couplet, with its sure cadence and crisp images. The lines, their achievement, perfectly embody so much of the massively contradictory genius of Pound, that wilful ego hell-bent on making beauty. Yes, he was a great windbag, as brash as Uncle Sam or John Bull. But he was also the dancer who knew how to land quietly on a leaf, while holding it up to the light. The lines have an Oriental air. They could have been translated from Chinese or Japanese: they read like a haiku. But no translation has taken place. They are however an expression of how far Pound had assimilated Eastern habits of economy and concrete statement. And they indicate two things about that poetic moment, for Pound.

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The antennae of the young cultural warrior had already picked up the extent to which matters Oriental might reinforce the best of the modern impulse. At the same time his own sensibility had been straining away from his European crib, padded as it was by his love of the Troubadours (his love of love) and the poetry of Dante (Pound’s love of light). Since the beginning of the century he’d been writing his way, literally, through these idioms, creating personae, performing them like a player wearing a mask. The result, more often than not, were poems as archaic in diction as anything. And yet even in these first books, which were as arty as could be, and which he put out with shameless self-promotion and repetitions right up until 1914, you can feel the energy that would lead him, eventually, out into an extraordinary clearing where he would stand almost alone, his voice as heroically forged as Lawrence and Joyce and Eliot. And the paradox then was that Pound’s voice was not connected with ‘life’ in any direct way – not like Lawrence’s, for instance. It was still the product of a masking, an immersion in an act of projecting himself into something else. The Metro poem was an omen. It pointed to the extent to which Pound’s life and work, his angry heart and visionary yearnings, would be close to an enactment of Eastern aesthetics and philosophy, a translation voyage that would shape his modernism. This paradox is deepened by the fact that Pound never travelled East: in 1914, he passed up a chance to go to China and was thereafter out of touch with crucial events as they unfolded. His China was a construction: what he got out of it was always literary and thus partially dead, even as he could breathe a life into it for aesthetic and political purposes. He hoped that China – or his Confucius, at least – would save Europe from itself, but it no more did that than his Chinese dictionary saved him from a crackup when he was caged at Pisa in 1945. Subsequently he was taken back to his native America to be tried for treason, but was found instead to be insane, and incarcerated in St Elizabeth Hospital in Washington – moved from the ‘monkey cage to the hell hole’ as he put it, where he remained until 1958, all the time, it has to be said, unrepentant of his Fascism, and even more loyal to

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the Confucius oeuvre he treated like a god that could not fail, but which did, rather miserably, for Pound. This conclusion seems to me to be vividly illustrated by two recent books – one, David Moody’s Ezra Pound: Poet, the latest and among the best biographies, this first volume offering lucid close readings of Pound’s early books; the other, Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, an invaluable selection of exchanges between the poet and the Chinese friends who were more important to his work than most commentary acknowledges. Together they are an invitation to see Pound as a tragic Orientalist, the most wilful of poets who so often tried too hard to command what could not be grasped absolutely, and whose bouts of humility were insufficient to carry him through to a point of arrival that could consistently sustain him aesthetically, ethically, and spiritually. Pound’s orientation towards the East showed itself quite early. For a brief love affair it involved India. In 1913, the luminous Rabindranath Tagore descended upon London’s literary parlours – reading his songs that were to be translated by Pound’s mentor, W.B. Yeats, and which would, when they were published as Gitanjali, win the Nobel Prize. Tagore’s physical beauty and spiritual wisdom were immensely seductive, and for the best part of a year Pound enthused. In the measures and melodies of the Bengali songs he felt he was hearing what he had been seeking: something of the ‘fundamental laws in word music.’ The Bengali musical ritual, he felt, ‘takes man more quickly from a sense of himself, and brings him into the emotion of ‘the flowing’, of harmonic nature, of orderly and calm sequence.’ You can sense Pound’s own inner needs at work in this appraisal, especially when he concluded, in what would become his typically polemical way, that Tagore’s songs, with their ‘whole and their flow,’ could be ‘the balance and corrective’ of Western humanism. ‘We have found our new Greece.’ But the shine of Tagore soon wore oil. ‘As a religious teacher,’ he declared Tagore ‘superfluous’; the prose translation of the songs was judged to be just ‘more theosophy.’

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Pound already felt he had had more than enough theosophy from his early mentor Yeats. He was wanting something harder, of course, something right outside the wispy, other worldly, Celtic twilight. And – it seems so obvious now – he wanted something less inner-directed: a reference point as outward, as far from his unique psychological self as a sculpture on the Parthenon. It was as if he wanted to act out a belief that did not involve his own feelings directly. So he kept working towards the harder images, a modern cadence, the better to give vers libre a backbone. ‘Go in fear of abstractions,’ he was telling everyone in 1914, which he demonstrated with imagist poems of his own, some Chineseish, cribbed from Giles’s History of Chinese Literature. One wonders how long he might have kept up this kind of thing. Little did he know what was about to fall into his lap from the EastWest heavens, as it were. In 1913 he was bequeathed the archive of the American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, a Harvard-educated scholar of Spanish descent who had been based in Tokyo. With little Chinese himself, Fenollosa worked from Japanese translations, assisted by Professors Mori and Ariga, who made their ‘decipherings’. It was a mongrel swag of notes, proof that great historical moments of translation are seldom pure in themselves. But it was a treasure trove and Pound knew it. From them he would produce his book of Noh Plays, and put out ‘The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry,’ the famous and misleadingly influential essay by Fenollosa which gave modernism (and imagism) their picture theory of language at the expense of the Chinese sounds of speech. What Fenollosa did honour however, his ‘unassailable originality’ as Hugh Kenner was to say, was the idea of ‘ideograms as actions’ – the fact that Chinese signs denoted processes. And a processor Pound indeed became as he pounced on the bare translations – hardly more than oracles bones, really – he had of Li Bo (or Rihaku, in the Japanese). The result was his first sustainedly modern work, Cathay, published in 1915, when he was thirty. It remains stunning today: muscular and vivid, as full of vigour as it is of beauty. The title confirms its mythic quality as ‘Eastern’, as something coming from exotically beyond the Western metropolis. But – 38 8 –

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its tone has the urgency of that era in Western Europe, which was one year into its slaughter. Pound’s genius was to render the poems of the great poet of exile, Li Bo, in ways that caught the mood at the front. In fact, he sent a copy of two poems, ‘Song of The Boatman of Shu’, and ‘Lament from the Frontier Guard,’ to his friend, the sculpture Gaudier-Brzeska who was in the trenches. The ‘Lament’ begins: By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand, Lonely from the beginning of time till now! Trees fall, the grass grows yellow with autumn. I climb the towers and towers To watch out over the barbarous land: Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert. There is no wall left to this village. Bones white with a thousand frosts, High leaps, covered with trees and grasses; Who brought this to pass? Who has brought the flaming imperial anger? Who has brought the army with drums and kettle drums? Barbarous kings … And sorrow, sorrow like rain. Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning … ‘They depict our situation in a wonderful way,’ Gaudier told him. The whole book was organised to do so. When T.S. Eliot famously remarked that with Cathay Pound ‘is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time,’ he overlooked the fact, like most critics since. To his great credit Moody does not. He rightly praises Cathay as brilliantly ahead of its time – anti-war poems that jumped the gun on Wilfred Owen and others. Pound, who never went to the front, did not out of respect for the soldiers attempt to render the war directly. Cathay is momentously strong partly because it provided a godsend of deflection for Pound, a grand way of making an impersonal art, its classical mode, matter. – 38 9 –

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Eliot’s supercilious comment was even more reprehensible because it was made in 1928, by which time it was obvious that Pound’s orientalism was never merely literary. By 1924, full of hatred for the political culture of England, its old men with their ‘dead, dry talk, gassed out,’ he had moved to Rapallo in Italy. Faber was putting out his first book of Cantos; he was counting his days according to the Fascist calendar. In 1928, by which time he’d become increasingly aware that the Cantos were obscure fragments, he translated the first of his Confucian teachings, The Great Learning. Of course, Pound’s notion of virtue, the light in minds and hearts, the luminous moments of History that he notated in the Cantos, were also European, even American in a few instances. But the Chinese Cantos, inhabited by Confucius, provided the loudest bells for his determinedly secular temple: they give the work more coherence than any other component. In 1933, when he gave Il Duce a deluxe edition of the Cantos, he hoped its teaching would leap off the page. ‘Ma questo e divertente,’ Mussolini remarked, which Pound experienced as a sign of ‘the Boss’ seeing into the heart of things. The poet returned to Rapallo as if walking on air – as deluded about that as he was about Jews being the ruination of Capitalism because they were the only usurers. Thereafter Pound hitched himself to two posts – Social Credit and Confucius. During the war he mixed splatterings of both into his anti-Semitic spew out from Radio Rome. After Mussolini was deposed in 1943, he translated Confucius into Italian – for the renewal of Italian Fascism and civilisation in general. He had done four of the Confucian books by then. His co-translator was Alberto Luchini, Director of the Department of Racial Studies and Propaganda under the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture. With all this in mind, some of Pound’s Confucius works can have a smell about them. But that goes as soon as you enter them, for reasons akin to the merits of Cathay. They are electrically charged, as fresh as the turbulent days they were written in, even though they could recklessly depart from plain scholarship. Pound has long been criticised for that, but in the longer run it has ceased to matter. As Wyndham Lewis beautifully stated in 1925, ‘He has not effected this intimate entrance into everything that is noble and – 39 0 –

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enchanting for nothing.’ Pound could, as Lewis put it, ‘get into the skin of someone else,’ becoming ‘a lion or lynx on the spot.’ He did this with the poetry of the troubadours as well as Cavalcanti, and he seems to have done it with ancient Chinese culture writ large, in the form of Confucius – processing the sage’s dynamic utterances, which themselves had undergone two thousand years of Chinese translation and commentary. Pound’s work endures beside the scholarly works of James Legge (who Pound sneered at because so much Christianity flavoured Legge’s Confucius), as well as Arthur Waley, who Pound seems to have hated, perhaps because Waley did know the languages, both Chinese and Japanese, not to mention the fact that Waley’s own little book of Chinese poems, published in 1918, had a freshness and influence of its own (also overlooked by Eliot). To say that Pound is vulnerable as a translator is an under-statement. When he did Cathay he had no Chinese and could not sound out a single character. At the time he did not advertise the fact. In 1928, as Eliot praised his inventions, he humbly told his father that: ‘Given infinite time I MIGHT be able to read a Chinese poem, that’s to say I know how the ideography works, and can find em in the dictionary or vocabulary … No I am not a Sinologue. Don’t spread the idea that I read it as zeasy as a yourapean langwidge.’ In the thirties, Pound was devoting four or five hours a day to learning Chinese, pressing on alone until – and this is the great value of Zhaoming Qian’s selection of letters – he had his first help from a Chinese in person. Fengchi Yang, an historian trained in Peking, then studying in Rome, met Pound in 1939. They wrote to each other in Italian, which is reproduced and translated here. Yang helped Pound work out various Chinese characters, including refinements for the Italian editions. That was a minor episode, however. The helpers Pound had after the war are essential to the story of his late life in translation. His exchanges with them illustrate both his devotion to the task, and the great opportunity he missed to open fully to Chinese wisdom. His helpers varied. Qian is keen to correct several stereotypical assumptions he thinks have crept into the literature. One is that the Confucianism – 391 –

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‘was responsible for’ Pound’s Fascism, a misunderstanding prompted by Pound’s claim in Guide to Kulchur (1937) that Confucius was ‘totalitarian’ and ‘fascist.’ This was rot, of course: Pound at his bombastic worst. He was fascist because it suited his personality and coded his fears; he was putting Confucius to use, his way. Qian also wants to point out that the helpers did not necessarily share Pound’s politics: Yang, starkly, did not; he saw himself as an alien in Italy. Others did not even share his faith in Confucius, wanting China to have a modern future. By the time Pound was in the ‘bug house’ anyone who stepped forward to help was entering a lion’s den – albeit an erratic, invalid, weary lion, who could be as energised by help as flattery. There are some noxious letters here from a young translator, David Wang, a Chinese-born student who graduated in English at Dartmouth College. He wrote to Pound as the ‘Creator of World Literature’ whose ‘wisdom surpassed that of Confucius’ and fed the poet his prejudices about the ‘polluting elements in the United States.’ Wang was upset when a fellow student, (and subsequently a journalist in Nation) took exception to a little poem he had written: ‘Decadence sets in/ When kikes and niggers/ become overseers.’ He wrote to Pound soliciting sympathy and help. There is no sign here that Pound ever objected to Wang’s train of thought. He liked Wang’s translations enough to put him in touch with William Carlos Williams, with whom he was to collaborate (Williams having by then tempered the young man’s bigotries). The unavoidable truth is that during these years Pound was in avid touch with various right-wing outlets around the world – exercising his paranoia, taking his Fascism for a quiet walk, echoes of which can be detected in the late Rock Drill and Thrones. Pound’s most important, generous and civilised helper at this time was Achilles Fang, a scholar in German from the University of Peking, now at Harvard, writing a PhD on Pound’s Pisan Cantos. They met often and wrote to each other from 1950 to 1958, when Pound was released to return to Italy. Fang made crucial corrections to Pound’s Analects, as well as the great

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bi-lingual Stone-Classics edition of The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot. He then helped Pound put out the Confucian Odes – which the ‘barbarians’ needed, Pound wrote, to ‘prevent anyone trying to reduce wisdom to abstract formula … without roots and branches, and life.’ Their frank and scholarly exchange is the meat of Qian’s book, which makes it absorbing and invaluable. Fang began by providing Pound with other classics, most importantly The Book of History, which he considered to be the book of books. He had Pound reading Mencius and not just Confucius. He coaxed Pound to be more tolerant of the work of James Legge. It was Legge’s translation, after all, which shadowed ‘the four tuan’ (foundations) of Confucian thought: benevolence; righteousness; propriety; knowledge. Fang plunged into a deep and sustained exchange with Pound on the meaning of key characters. Duty. Justice. Respect. Humanity. Admittedly, it is an odd reading experience, to witness Pound’s devotion to these concepts, even as he spits and fumes in ways that so flout the Confucian injunction; ‘cultivate oneself and be respectful.’ Fang humours him, feeds him. Soon enough he had the poet lamenting ‘the very fragmentary state of Ez’formation.’ He would reinforce Pound in pointed ways: their discussion on Humanity leads to Fang saying ‘a Chinese is nothing but a homo politicus.’ And he adds: ‘More than to the Semites or Aryans.’ You can almost hear the poet purr at this: it must have confirmed his sense of the great unity of his processing of Confucius, the whole that the world might be if ethics and aesthetics could come together in the polis. In January 1952, the trust between them is sufficient for Pound to send a poem he has written in Chinese. This produces a revelation, one crucial to the larger history of the poet’s adventures in translation. ‘Does it make sense?’ Pound asked his teacher. Did it scan ‘according to an accepted Chinese ear?’ Truth was, Pound said, he was in a ‘Fog’ about the roots of sounds. ‘Grawnpaw find berry dif ’kult merember noise appertaining pixchoor abbrev/’. Pound was already half confessing – it’s striking how his own lingo can keep the reader out – to his and Fenollosa’s supreme oversight of the 1920s.

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Fang told him the poem was a failure: it made no sound sense, he was sorry to say. Pound tries to excuse himself: ‘Total impossibility to form any idea of a REAL sound of any language save by HEARING it spoken.’ Then he came out with it: ‘For years I never made ANY attempt to hitch ANY sound to the idiograms/content with the meaning and the visual form.’ But here he was, aged 67, still working his guts out to get it right, at last. You can feel his exhilaration, which is laced with despair at his time running down. Fang often compliments him too, and that spurs him on. When they turn to the Confucian Odes (which Waley put out back in 1937), Pound wants a bi-lingual text that would suggest the poem’s ‘singing key’. ‘Very hard for a senile ignoramus to attain vocal fluidity,’ he told Fang. But he would hang out for it – dreaming, it would seem, of an edition of the odes as real as those that Confucius once heard. A pipe dream. In the end, for all Pound’s flaws, the muscular English of his Confucian work stands clean and strong, demonstrating the virtues he had engraved on his seal: Boa En-de: Preserve Grace-Virtue. And that is why it’s such a shame that Pound was unable to consider the full context of Confucian philosophy, much of which is inseparable from such other civilising influences as Buddhism and Taoism, especially the latter. To these he remained closed, hostile, even though Qian wants us to read otherwise. The spasm over Arthur Waley is a case in point. In 1951, when Waley’s translation of Lao Tzu was published, Pound foamed at the ‘horrible translations’, the ‘waleeze’, which he seemed to connect with the language of the English establishment, ‘what passes for langquitch in the Slimes’ (the London Times). Scorn extended to doubts about the worth of the other great Taoist, Zhuangzi. Fang tried to educate the poet. ‘I am inclined to think,’ he replied, ‘that Tao te-ching can be used as a metaphysical foundation for Jeffersonian democracy. It is the later Toazers who misinterpreted him. Lao-tze was no more Taoistic than you are.’ Pound wanted to argue. After referring to Waley’s ‘alleged translation’ as being one ‘OF the most obscene bks /ever printed even in the Perfidious Isle,’

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he asked Fang: ‘Does Lao contain ANYTHING useful that is NOT in the Four Books …?’ Fang did his best: ‘Lao is ambiguous to have much valuable for sensible beings … BUT Chuang Chou (Zhuangzi) generally misunderstood to be a Taoist (but he is more Confucian than Taoist), should be of great importance to sensible Confucians.’ Pound went quiet soon after this, apparently resigned to not being ‘a sensible Confucian.’ He missed the chance to rethink the connection between ethical philosophy and democracy, the possibility of more open processes, poetic and political, just as he dismissed notions of ‘calm’, which were advanced by ‘the bamboo grove boys’ (his term for the Buddhists). And that was it. So near and so far, you might say, when it comes to a fluid understanding of the sophisticated spectrum of Chinese thought about language itself, and the ethics and metaphysics of using it. Pound fell out with Fang in 1958. Harvard University Press did not honour its agreement to do the scholarly bilingual Odes, and Pound in his paranoid way blamed Fang. He was bitterly distressed that the Chinese language would not be there, its sounds in the company of his English – his last wilful literary act, you might say, a demand for the literal with regard to his Confucius. He sailed to Italy convinced that ‘the hatred of the Chinese classics boils thru most of our Universities.’ The rest of Pound’s story is sad and well known. In Italy he sank increasingly into his silences. If more of the East had been processed in him they might have been happier ones. He did that self-lacerating interview with Allen Ginsberg in which he spoke of his work as mere fragments – a judgement the Taoist in Confucius, or the Confucian in Zhuangzi would have tempered, helping him more gently to take stock. All this is still to come in the Moody biography, the second volume for which we should eagerly wait. Qian ends his book wonderfully – by including Pound’s hitherto un­published ‘Preliminary Survey’ of the Chinese language, written in 1951. It is dense, wild, a kind of ethnographic essay on the organic roots of language. I imagine that scholars indifferent to Pound’s poetry would mock its

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impertinence and error. But it’s a stimulating reminder of the long history of Western fascination with Chinese, which, as Hugh Kenner pointed out in his great book, The Pound Era, has prompted discourse on languages as an ideal construct, on the one hand, and on its organicist nature on the other – which was the kind of thing that fascinated another famous American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also came to the topic through Confucius. To say this is to locate Pound in a poetic tradition of engagement with China – Pound’s own being longer than that of any other poet. I suppose I am saying that if Pound had paused a touch transcendentally, or just checked his Henry Ford tendencies, his end might have been better. Fang gave some praise to the ‘Preliminary Survey’. Significantly he complimented Pound on his notion of chi, the pivot, as a brilliant insight into Confucian language – what Pound called ‘the point of rest’, like ‘the centrum circoli of Dante’s vision in the Vita Nuova.’ Order and light, these are the great parameters summoned up by any narrative of Pound, along with the disorder and darkness integral to it.

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MO ON L IGH T A MONG S T ON E S Meredith McKinney’s Pillow Book

‘Poetically we dwell …’ Heidegger wonderfully essayed, borrowing a phrase from Holderlin. The phrase has been in me for a long time, feeding notions of how poetry might be inseparable from a form of life. When I was writing books connected with Aboriginal culture, the poetry seemed to come out of the ground, almost literally. There, in the performance of sacred song, with each step and syllable, a poetic existence was acted out, and all in the open air, a singing of the body in the public place. The ground and the body were painted, but there was no writing to speak of. The poem was voiced from the Dreaming, the poetic key to reality, as W.F. Stanner put it. Everything was vitally connected with everything else. Lately, I have found myself taken up with a poetic dwelling that belongs indoors or, if not inside, then along a set of thresholds, and with such refinements and thorough literariness, that it presents a whole other illustration of Heidegger’s maxim. For it seems that a thoroughgoing model of poetic dwelling can be found not just on the ceremonial grounds of the archaic, but in the exquisite routines of the pre-medieval court in Japan, or more particularly, in the world of the shining prince of eleventh-century Kyoto, where, for a hundred years or so, women excelled in the most passionate brushwork, writing their Japanese freely in the tremulous air, you might say – air left to them by the men whose official duties and exclusive rights to formal education obliged them to inhabit the Chinese language. Before this sounds too literary by half – though classical Japanese culture was literary, in the extreme – consider the poetic consequences of the Japanese dwelling itself. You live in a membrane, the thinness of which, with its paper walls and screens, heightens awareness to an extraordinary degree. Recently,

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sleeping in an eight-mat room in Kyoto, I felt that I was hardly sleeping at all. Every sound penetrates one’s own space: a cough two rooms away, footsteps in the street, even, it seems, moonlight among stones in the garden. Seldom had I been so conscious of my own breath. Never before – or not since camping alone in the desert – had I been conscious of the weight of a word, if I happened to speak. Types of social space, surely, are conducive to some kinds of poetry rather than others. When you live decorously close to the floor, and walk without shoes near others, there is a pace to things that must affect phrasings, as well as tones and direction of speech. Privacy must become a sensual experience. The breathing space is a world whose inhabitants might crave moments to themselves, even as, in another mood, they thrive on being seen, and on peeping, and on that sweet bird called the letter, which they will to secretly wing its way from one pavilion to another. The hidden, the unhidden, what might be revealed by words tremulously attuned to the physical realities of the dwelling – this seems to determine much. There is a lovely moment – and ‘lovely’ is a word that seems to arise naturally according to the demands of such a habitat – in the diary of Lady Murasaki, the author of The Tale of Genji, the world’s first great novel, and a fiction that depends absolutely upon poetic dwelling. Murasaki, who is a court attendant, is on her way back to her room, when she looks in on Lady Saisho: She lay with her head pillowed on a writing box, her face all but hidden by a series of robes – dark red lined with green, purple lined with dark red – over which she had thrown a deep crimson gown of unusually glossy silk. The shape of her forehead was enchanting and so delicate. She looked just like one of those princesses you find depicted in illustrations. I pulled back the sleeve that covered her face. ‘You remind me of a fairy-tale princess,’ I said. She looked up with a start. ‘You are dreadful!’ she said, propping herself up. ‘Waking people up like that without a thought!’ – 39 8 –

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I remember being struck by the attractive way her face suddenly flushed. So it is that someone normally very beautiful can look even more beautiful than ever on occasions.

It is hard to imagine a more self-conscious passage. Once looking and being looked at are framed so exquisitely there can be no end to art and artifice, and a sense of self agreeably revealed and sometimes violated – all in the interest of ‘beauty’. What kind of poetry arises from such an aestheticised world when beauty can be, well, suffocating and precious in the extreme? Lady Murasaki’s response was to weave herself into the great fiction of the shining prince, and to place it beside a diary of court life that was elegantly candid about its petty intrigues and absurdities, and fully conscious of her own ‘tasting the bitterness of life to the very full’. Her tone is nostalgic, melancholy and tart. She does not spare herself – ‘a retiring old fossil’ – any more than she does other women at court, such as ‘the dreadfully conceited Sei Shonagon’, the author of The Pillow Book, who ‘thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters’. Admittedly, The Pillow Book is not to be compared artistically to The Tale of Genji, which is one reason why Shonagon’s translator, Meredith McKinney, in her superb introduction, feels the need to make a case for the diarist as not a ‘silly chatterbox,’ and not less ‘aware’ (a spiritually central Japanese term) than Murasaki. Within the orbit of Japanese studies, it is fascinating to consider such pleading, but Shonagon’s sensibility needs no defence. Poetic dwelling ripples in the whole stream of her observations, even when they are casual asides. ‘As we read her apparently crazy quilt of vignettes and opinions and anecdotes,’ McKinney writes, ‘we find ourselves deep inside this world, and feel her responses along our own nerves.’ Shonagon’s charm lies in the quality of her bemusement and in the mastery of detail that can generate – even across cultures – a shudder. One minute, full of the usual admiration, she observes senior courtiers and others near the Watch Gate of the palace. ‘But when I actually saw them at close quarters at the palace, the attendants’ faces were all dark and blotchy where – 39 9 –

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their white powder hadn’t covered the skin properly, precisely like black patches of earth showing through where snow has half melted – a truly horrible sight.’ Murasaki intrusively lifts the veil, in the manner of the novelist: Shonagon’s snapshots would be deadly if they were not so droll. Shonagon loves many things around her: seasons, ceremonies and especially her mistress, Empress Teishi, whom she serves faithfully for seven years, leading up to the year 1000. The Pillow Book is replete with domestic and royal details that glow like gold leaf on a screen painting. Yet at the same time, the inimitable charm of Shonagon is to know how to present her dislikes, especially those moments when men have penetrated one threshold or another. In one of her many lists, ‘Infuriating Things’, she notes: A man you’ve had to conceal in some unsatisfactory hiding place, who then begins to snore. Or, a man comes on a secret visit wearing a particularly tall lacquered cap, and of course as he scuttles in hastily he manages to knock it against something with a loud bump. I also hate it when a rough reed blind catches on the head as someone passes underneath, and makes that scratchy noise.

Shonagon is acutely sensitive to noise, to scents, to ineptitude, to the inflection of every performance in the living space, including the mediocrity of Buddhist ceremonies, especially when the sutras are chanted too long by monks who are not good-looking. The things she loves are indeed attractive – ‘a baby’s face painted on a gourd’ – but the things that make her wince are equally telling. ‘Dispiriting Things’ include ‘a dog howling in the middle of the day. The sight in spring of a trap for catching winter fish … A birthing hut where the baby has died …’ ‘Repulsive things’ include ‘Hairless baby mice [tumbling] out of their nest … A rather dirty place in the darkness. A very ordinary woman looking after lots of children. The way a man must feel when his wife, who he’s not really very fond of, is ill for a long time.’

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There is an emphatic personal presence here, the conventions of poetry be damned, you might be tempted to say. Except, of course, that these are details a Western modernist would celebrate: the ‘direct treatment of the thing’, as Ezra Pound said. For Shonagon, more formally, poetry starts where The Pillow Book does: with notes on the seasons and the times of year, registrations that embrace the sensual actualities of Kyoto as the place in which she lives in her body and no-one else’s, especially in summer ‘at the dark of the moon’, with ‘fireflies … dancing everywhere in a mazy flight’. Soon we come to her notations on mountains, peaks, plains and river pools, topography that has been named with full poetic intent, as McKinney’s treasure trove of notes points out. A name could be more important than the place itself. Some names ‘delight’, others ‘terrify’ Shonagon. As she names things, we experience the envelopment of poetry. ‘Surusawa Pond is a very special place,’ she writes, ‘because the Emperor paid it a formal visit when he heard how one of the Palace Maidens had drowned herself there. Thinking of Hitomaro’s marvellous words “her hair tangled as in sleep”, there is really nothing I can add.’ Hitomaro, one of the great poets of the ninth century, was famously presented in the first of the imperial anthologies. By the time Shonagon was in court, the poetry of the Heian period (794–1192) was in full flower, and all educated persons were expected to be intimate with the Kokinshu, the classic anthology, which ran to twenty-four volumes. Shonagon is thrillingly on her mettle when, just as she and the gentlewomen are settled inside the blinds of the veranda, splendid in their ‘cherry-blossom combination Chinese jackets’, with their ‘sleeves all spilling out on display below the blinds’, who should abruptly intrude but His Majesty himself. Instantly, a courtier intones a poem of praise and, in response, Her Majesty turns to Shonagon and asks her to grind some ink. ‘I was so agog at the scene before me that I could barely manage to keep the inkstick steady in its holder. Then Her Majesty proceeded to fold a piece of white paper, and said to us, “Now I want each of you to write here the first ancient poem that springs to mind.”’ After much consternation, Shonagon wrote:

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With the passing years my years grow old upon me yet when I see this lovely flower of spring I forget age and time. Then she changed, ‘flower of spring’ to ‘your face, my lady’. We are told: ‘Her majesty ran her eye over the poems, remarking, “I just wanted to discover what was in your hearts”.’ This was not the end of the story. How could it be, when much more than memory was being tested? ‘I felt a sudden sweat break out all over me,’ Shonagon writes, sounding refreshingly unlike Lady Murasaki. And she goes on to tell how, on another day, Her Majesty took out the Kokinshu, read the opening lines and asked her ladies to complete the poem from memory. Agonies. ‘Some of us had copied out the Kokinshu many times, and should really have known it all by heart.’ So the time passed. You were as fine as the costumes you wore, and the poetry you had mastered, and from which you could – at the drop of the royal hat, or in the recesses of the night, when a man expressed his wish to visit, or had, with tact, managed to visit – improvise. Poetry made everything possible because poetry was the quintessence of the ineffable. Poetry also abetted moments as erotic as a sonnet by Shakespeare, but without the Christian pieties that cramped the style of Eros as we know him. Shonagon transmits a carnal relish for the moment when Captain Sanekata, sitting beside a lady whose ‘red cord’ had loosened from her gown, was moved to recite: A wintry indifference freezes the well’s blue waters to a knot of ice. How might I melt that cord and loosen its icy knot? – 402 –

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The woman couldn’t speak: she was too young to know what to do, and she was in public. Shonagon: ‘It’s no good being bashful and hesitant when it comes to poetic compositions. Where does that ever get you? … the important thing is that it must be something you come out with on the spur of the moment.’ It is comments like these that convey the passionate intensity of things, as well as Shonagon’s freshness and courage. She wrote a poem to fill the gap left by the girl’s failure. The cord’s knot is loose as ice on the water’s surface It finds itself undone by the warm sunlight of a garland of festive fern leaves in the hair. McKinney tells us about the festival to which this moment belonged (the dancers had been performing the Dance of Heavenly Maidens), the significance of red cords, the play on words involved in the Japanese for ‘mountain wells’, ‘mountain indigo’, ‘cord’, ‘ice’, and ‘creeping fern’. Utterances of supreme concentration, these poems might seem trite, but they are not. The writer and spontaneous speaker of them were as attuned to allusion as a good musician. The art of the Japanese poem, especially the five-line tanka (with its 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count), was to refine the note that everyone would recognise as delightfully new – but not so new as to violate convention. There is another thing that must be said about the essential nature of poetic dwelling in Japanese court life: its characteristic immediacy and concreteness, which is enlivening today. It was not simply that individual sensibilities exercised a penchant for ephemeral states, for fleeting descriptive moments and impersonal registrations of events. Nor was it that Buddhist views committed individuals to a sense of a present that contained all time. But in important ways, the Japanese language did. As McKinney points out, – 403 –

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‘the classical Japanese language does not need, and very seldom has, a specified subject to the verb. Is it I, or you, or we or perhaps she, who is experiencing this?’ The poem, then, is a kind of natural offering outside the self: grammar creates an aesthetic distance that invigorates speaker and poem. McKinney suggests that in The Pillow Book we enter ‘a kind of entranced historical present’. To which I would like to add, bearing in mind that the other feature of Japanese is the range of inflections applied to verbs, that it is an historical present charged with subtle and strong energies: a quicksilver world, hot-bloodedly active with darts aimed at the self as well as others. The debt we owe to a good translator is profound. How else could we have gone to new and uniquely toned places? With The Pillow Book, McKinney sits in the company of such famous English-speaking scholars of Japanese as Ivan Morris and Arthur Waley. Her edition comes with plans of the imperial court, and charming illustrations of the costumes of the day. McKinney has also translated the work of Saigyo, the famous tenth-century poet, monk and traveller, and the twentieth-century short story writer Furui Yoshikichi. ‘I set to work with this boundless pile of paper,’ Shonagon said of herself – as did, it seems, McKinney, when she began her Japanese studies at the Australian National University, before going on to teach in Japan for twenty years. It is splendid to read a classic as classically done as a masterful poem.

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So long as there is such a thing as force, we cannot say that we must not use force, but rather that we must not abuse it, as we are prone to do when we make it the sole standard and ignore love. When love and force do not go together, then love is mere weakness and force brutal. Peace becomes death when it is alone. War becomes a demon when it destroys its mate. Rabindranath Tagore to Charles Andrews, 7 August 19151

What’s an Australian doing writing about Tagore? Well, this Australian, who was brought up in a secular, socialistic, working-class, trade-union family, happened to be in India following some of the footsteps of the Buddha. At the end of his journey, which seemed to be full of auspicious events, he stumbled into Shantiniketan and discovered Tagore. He found himself reading about Tagore in Japan, Tagore on Nationalism, or Tagore on State Nationalism, to be more precise, the militant critique of which suited him down to the ground, especially at that moment in history, 2002–2003, when America had sprung into action like King Kong – flouting massive, world-wide protests, leaving most of us with an indelible sense of political impotence. Anti-imperialist thinking is in my blood, as it has long been in Irish and Indian blood. As Tagore could instinctively refer to ‘my Bengali heart’ out of pride and a defiant hope in the face of his British rulers, I can whole-heartedly mouth Joseph Furphy’s great phrase, ‘temper democratic, bias Australian’, when not kow-towing to London or Washington. If only. A patriotic shame 1

‘Letters to a Friend’, in English Writings of Tagore (EWT), Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, vol 3, p 248.

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accompanies my travels with Tagore. I was hooked on Tagore’s forms of universalism, yearning as I was by then to travel as an internationalist, without the albatross of an Australian passport, tainted as it has become by war crimes and the on-going jingoistic cant as our soldiers die in Afghanistan to save America’s face. Of course one argues with oneself: an activist, leftist rage pitted against the Buddhistic self that would if it could make peace; a nationalist at war with a self that dreams of making ‘a zero of the self ’ (to use Gandhi’s telling phrase in the last paragraph of his autobiography). Tagore knew this dilemma profoundly, precociously. Amidst my disgrace of being abjectly Australian under American dominion, Tagore is, like Gandhi, a guide to one dreaming of an un-colonised mind. And so I came to be travelling East with Tagore, especially to Japan, a place he visited three times (1916, 1924, 1929) and which I had already started to frequent for reasons of poetry, Buddhism and history. Tagore as one vehicle for grounding myself in the ‘East’, and the wars that have shaped, still shape, this region. Also, I was travelling in the footsteps of my father, a peace-activist, who flew from Tokyo to Hanoi in 1972, when it was being bombed by the Americans with the ferocity hitherto reserved for Korean towns and villages in 1951, and Japanese cities in 1945. The point here is: Tagore was prescient about the atrocious penchant colonial powers have to bomb civilians off the face of the earth. ‘The History of Bombing’ could be a subtitle of my book in progress, Peacemongers. Tagore died in 1941, a few months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But everything he had been saying about the inexorable connections between the nation state, militarism, racism, and global criminality was already coming true, so that by the time the war came to an end in the Far East, and the War Crimes Tribunal was set up in Tokyo in 1946, Tagore was present. I have come to imagine his ghost sitting on the judicial bench in Tokyo, keeping company with his compatriot from Calcutta, Justice Radhabinod Pal, who was one of the token Asians appointed at the last minute by the Americans. Historically speaking, Pal was the decisive judge in Tokyo. Against the ‘majority judgment’ so called, he negated the trial’s legality, and declared – 406 –

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everyone in the dock to be innocent. He was the first, it’s now clear, to present the trial as a ‘Victor’s Justice’, where justice is contaminated by double standards.2 His long ‘Dissentient’ judgment, suppressed at the time, was published in Calcutta in 1953.3 The full basis upon which he flouted high allied morality – and with it some of Australia’s own post-war needs in the Far East – is still open to different interpretations, especially in Japan, some of which (others not) have interesting lines of thought and feeling that would have been congenial to Tagore.4 I have several threads to weave into each other. The first is an all too brief account of Tagore’s transition from innocence to experience of Japan’s militarism. The second is his true story, a fable almost, about bombing and anti-colonial resistance. The third is a note upon Tagore’s profound moral teaching about defeat, so called, along with his subtle and supple notions of heroism and hope as civilisations dishonour themselves. Then we reach the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, where Justice Pal, naively thought by the victorious great powers to be an ally in their legal endeavours, turns out to have come to Tokyo with a secret weapon strapped to his heart. Penultimately, I rest, if that’s possible, pretty much where Ashis Nandy ends his illuminating essay on Pal – with the notion that when it comes to matters of judgment on war and peace, the civilisational and Tagore-ish point is that culpability is not easily divisible.5 Finally, I shall turn back to Tagore who had managed – as he did with so much so often – to cosmically, historically, politically and poetically encompass the above, always throwing his light forward, as it were. My assumption is that Tagore’s melancholia, his laments about war, are in tune with our own in this era of pre-emptive strikes, continuous war and war crimes. What I offer is a kind of upholding of Tagore’s idealism, 2 3

4 5

Richard H Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Radhabinod Pal, International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), Calcutta: Sanyal, 1953. The best overview is Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack and Gerry Simpson (eds), Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011. Ashis Nandy ‘The Other Within: The Strange Case of Radhabinod Pal’s Judgment of Culpability’, in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves, Princeton: New Jersey, 1995.

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the better to face the damaged life of our own Minima Moralia,6 where the war-crimes trial has become part of our way of life. Tagore’s innocence and experience of Japan

Imaginatively, well before setting foot in Japan, Tagore was no stranger to it. As early as 1902, the rising sun of Japan had impressed itself on some of the best minds in Calcutta – inspired in part by the Indian dalliances of Tagore’s friend Okakura Tenshin, the Japanese aesthete who declared, in his famous tract, The Ideals of the East, that ‘Asia is one’.7 Regarding Japan in this early stage of its modernisation, Tagore celebrated the connection between the relational bonds of the Orient and the capacity of Japanese soldiers for self-sacrifice. This they did, Tagore thought, ‘through their relationship with the Mikado who stands for the country at large’. ‘They sacrificed themselves to their dharma’, Tagore said approvingly, because their actions organically flowed from their sense of kinship, not from machines, not war as ‘a technical, mechanical matter’. What Westerners might think ‘mass-suicide’ was no such thing. Rather: ‘by enlivening warfare with this sense of grace, Japan has attained glory. It has earned the praise of both the East and the West.’8 Even more shocking was Tagore’s response to Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, at the news of which he led students in a triumphal march around Santiniketan, and composed a number of haikus in honour of Japan’s ‘daring heroes’.9 6 7

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, London: Verso, 2005.

‘Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and the Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell in the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.’ Cited in Rustrom Bharucha, Another Asia; Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp 16–17.

8 Bharucha, Another Asia, pp 57–58. 9

Stephen N Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, p 43.

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In 1916 he set off on his first visit to Japan. His diary is full of pictures that illuminate Japan and the Japanese. He fell in love with their cult of beauty, which he linked to his sense of their ‘strong manhood’ – ‘a heroism which is at one with their artistic genius’.10 But then the scales fell from his eyes. He wrote his famous essay on Nationalism,11 writing in white heat, as his secretary observed. In Japan he drew upon it to demonstrate courage of his own: to large and prestigious gatherings, he proclaimed, over and over again, that the Japanese nation, so proudly nationalist and modern, had taken an evil, demonic turn that was putting it on ‘the path to suicide’. Furthermore, Japan had surrendered to ‘the tidal wave of falsehood’, joined ‘the howling wolves of the modern era’. The nation state was ‘organized selfishness’, a manifestation of the machine age that fostered materialism, greed, conflict, racism and cruel regimes of borders. He condemned the West’s power mongering, its secret treaties and trade deals, its hypocrisies and paranoia, its gunboats, and its condescension towards its subject peoples. He named, without the help of Marx, the rule of ‘the abstract’ – ‘a scientific product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the dissolution of personal humanity’. ‘My brothers,’ he pleaded, ‘when the red light of conflagration sends up its crackle of laughter to the stars, keep your faith upon those stars and not upon the fire of destruction.’12 Needling Japan’s racism, he reminded everyone it was only when the West knew that Japan could do ‘the devil dance of pillage, murder and the ravishment of innocent women, while the world goes to ruin’ – only then did the West develop respect. Tagore’s plea was: ‘do not enter the spiral of race revenge, don’t fall into the abyss of reverse colonialism’. As he once beautifully put it, ‘It is our pride that seeks difference, and gloats upon it. But sympathy is a higher faculty being our spiritual organ of sight; it has the natural vision of the advaitam.’13 Japan could be modern if it recognised that modernism 10 Hay, Asian Ideals, p 44. 11

Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism, Calcutta: Rupa, 1917.

13

Tagore to Charles Freer Andrews, 17 January 1921, in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (eds), Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 251.

12 Tagore, Nationalism, pp 34, 62, 87, 101, 42, 51, 49.

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was ‘freedom of mind, not slavery of taste’.14 That was the Bushido Japan should advance! Not surprisingly, the Poet/Prophet developed a bad press. The remarks of a sage, so-called, from a place still under its colonial heel, a non-nation: these did not impress, least of all when he seemed to be devaluing all notions of material progress. Official invitations soon ceased. In June 1916 Tagore left for Seattle. When he had arrived in Japan he had been greeted by 20,000 people at the Tokyo railway station. On the way back from America he was met at the dock by one friend and a solitary journalist. ‘Some of the newspapers’, he told an American audience, ‘praised my utterances for their poetical qualities, while adding with a leer that it was the poetry of a defeated people.’ Never wanting to be less than honest about India, Tagore added, ‘I felt that they were right.’15 Tagore’s noble defeatism

Tagore’s valorous poetic response was to turn the manly, warrior notions of heroism upside down, inside out. The poem, ‘The Song of the Defeated’, makes India’s subjection a cause for pride. My Master had bid me while I stand by the roadside, to sing the song of Defeat, for that is the bride whom he woos in secret. She has put on the dark veil, hiding her face from the crowd, but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark … In the ‘Song of the Defeated’, Tagore recovers his full and most flexible voice as a poet. The Prophet, caught up in the valour of public performance, returns to the Muse, the female presence that enables his truly open heart. Tagore’s grandeur and wisdom consisted of knowing such things. He went back to Japan in 1924, unrepentant about what he had said in 1916, but now speaking in a different, more passive key. He preferred the company of Japanese women, who might save the honour of Japan. He spoke 14 Tagore, Nationalism, p 31.

15 Tagore, Nationalism, p 94.

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‘in the name of the Buddha’, extolling the virtue of Maitri, ‘sympathy for all beings and races and creatures’.16 The celebrated public moment of Tagore’s disillusionment with Japan came in 1937. The occasion was, fittingly enough, a break with another poet – Noguchi Yonejiro, who wrote to Tagore from Tokyo. Yes, the ‘slaughtering madness’ in China was terrible but it was inevitable – ‘the war of Asia for Asia’ that Japan was undertaking single-handedly, heroically. ‘You are building your conception of Asia’, Tagore wrote back, ‘which would be raised on a tower of skulls … a mountain of bleeding corpses and the wilderness of bombed and burst cities …’17 Even after this exchange, which went on at some length, Japan-love lingered. There was an invitation, all expenses to be paid, which came in October 1938 from the rabid ultra-nationalist Rash Behari Bose in Tokyo. Tagore only decided not to go when Japan bombed the civilians of Canton. The aeroplane fable

The criminal potential of the aeroplane had been noticed in the Great War, of course, and the fear of its role in the making of a future ‘total war’ had been driving many conferences in the Hague and in Geneva – absurdly so at the great meeting of the League of Nations in 1932, the failure of which led to a European re-armament once Hitler led Germany out of the League. Nonetheless, it is the fullness of Tagore’s consciousness of this matter which is so noteworthy. In 1932, on his visit to Persia, he had flown in an aeroplane for the first time. The tale he tells was meant to be prescient. He begins subtly, with remarks about the flying machine and his experience of being in the air. Its progress, he felt, was ‘not in harmony with the wind’, its voice that of ‘a raging beast’, and the higher it climbed it reduced the play of senses so that all the signs that made the earth real were wiped out. The hold of the earth on the mind and heart was ‘loosened’, and a terrible ‘aloofness’ took its place. Looking down, he asked the question: ‘Who is kin, who stranger?’ – and he thought: ‘It 16 17

Rabindranath Tagore, Talks in Japan, Calcutta: Shizen, 2006, pp 96–97.

‘Tagore and Noguchi’, in EWT, vol 3, p 837.

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is a travesty of this teaching of the Gita that the flying machine has raised on high.’ He went on: A British air force is stationed in Baghdad. Its Christian chaplain informs me that they are engaged in bombing operations on some Sheikh villages. The men, women and children, there done to death, meet their fate by decree of the upper region of British imperialism – which finds it so easy thus to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims.18

And so the British were: in fact, they had been so doing since 1924, when they adopted, for the first time in modern history, a general policy of strategically bombing a civilian population. Tagore did not need telling that villages in northern India and the present-day Afghanistan had been bombed in that period, including several weeks of intense bombing in the Punjab,19 after the massacre at Amritsar which prompted him to return his knighthood. What is important about his Persian tale is the depth of its phenomenology. Tagore saw the connection between states of mind and technology, and, thereby, the political/military implications. In Persia, at the little village of Shah-Reza, Tagore was presented with a poem that went: ‘Tagore, he is unique, the philosopher who knows what is past and what the future holds.’ Persia was just entering the modern world, but the local poet seems to have intuited the quality of Tagore’s antenna. And this Persian tale has another dimension. One day, Tagore continues, British airmen were shot down in the desert. An Afghan girl led the airmen into a neighbouring cave, and to protect them, a Malik remained on guard at the entrance of the cave. Forty men with brandished knives rushed forward to attack them, but the Malik dissuaded them. All the time, bombs were dropping from above 18 19

Rabindranath Tagore, Journey to Persia and Iraq: 1932, Visva-Bharati: Santiniketan, 2003, p 23.

Yuki Tanaka, ‘British ‘Humane Bombing’ in Iraq During the Interwar Era’, in Yki Tanaka and Marilyn B Young (eds), Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, New York: Free Press, 2009, pp 17–23.

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and people were crowding in to take shelter in the cave. Some Maliks of the neighbourhood and a Mollah proposed to help the Britishers and some of the women offered to feed them. After some time they at last disguised the airmen as Mahsuds and brought them to a safe place.20

In other words, there was something more important than the anti-imperialist struggle, conceived in narrow political terms. What was at stake was the depth of our compassion for each other. Tagore’s sense of common humanity transcended the urgency with which even he opposed imperialism. Struggles there must be, but they were struggles that had a spiritual dimension to which we must attend at our cost. Tagore’s last words, hope eschewed, hope lingering

Tagore’s last essay, ‘Crisis in Civilization’, which he wrote for his eightieth birthday, was a statement of profound disillusionment: with the English liberalism that had proved to be so contemptuously indifferent to Indian people, and with the civilisation of India where Manu, its proper conduct, had ‘steadily degenerated into socialized tyranny’. Where, then, were the models for national self-sufficiency, pride, wellbeing, and for the ‘upholding of the dignity of human relationships’? Feebly, Tagore pointed to the north. To Iran, ‘which has finally disentangled herself from the meshes of European diplomacy’. And to the Soviet Union, whose ‘astounding progress’ made him ‘feel happy and jealous at the same time’. Elsewhere, however – ‘The demon of barbarity’. And: ‘The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in the psychology of the West, aroused itself and desecrates the spirit of Man.’ ‘And yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man.’ Like Freud, Tagore only just managed to hold onto his faith in ‘Man’. I would rather look forward to the opening of a new chapter in the history after the cataclysm is over and the atmosphere is rendered clean 20

‘Man’, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol 3: A Miscellany, New Delhi: Shatya Akademi, 1996, p 207.

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with the spirit of service and sacrifice. Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East where the sun rises.21

There was another essay, which he did not quite finish, but which was assembled by his helpers. These were the words that sought to affirm something very simple: his own field of freedom – which was his own consciousness, his inner soul, the domain of his poetry. His last wishes were not to be ‘enmeshed in a net of external events’, or forced by ‘a pedantic historian’ out of ‘the centre of his creativity as a poet’. What he was defending was ‘the reason that lay in his inner soul’, the ‘self alone’ that was ‘the agent’, ‘the helm of his own vessel’. ‘I have not been able to put the entire history of my life in words, but that history is of no importance.’ His advice to others was to ‘try and highlight only the history which is piloted by man-as-creator towards the Magnum that lies beyond history and is at the very centre of the human soul’.22 Tagore’s ghost, the Tokyo Trial and Justice Pal

General MacArthur, to his credit, made the Tokyo Trial a pan-Asian event. After he appointed eleven Westerners to the bench he added, rather tokenistically, it is true, three Asians. One was from China and one from the Philippines, both of which had been invaded by the Japanese, although Calcutta had once also been bombed by its Asian friends who wanted to free them from Western imperialism.23 The man from India, Radhabinod Pal, from the High Court of Calcutta, was more of a lawyer than the other two. But he was not the international lawyer many thought him to be. His mental constitution had been shaped otherwise, which he kept to himself, as he did whatever hopes he had for the trial. The extreme scepticism was expressed by Gandhi: ‘Let the allies set up

21 Tagore, Crisis in Civilization, in EWT, vol 3, pp 724–726. 22 23

Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History, New York: Columbia, 2002, pp 98–99.

See Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War, Basic Books: NY, 2010, pp 1, 12–13, 66–67, 103–150, 263. The total number of deaths by famine is disputed, as is its precise causes. But Churchill’s venom towards the Congress leadership is not.

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their trial of war crimes’, Gandhi had pronounced; ‘they could achieve nothing’. ‘Those who have their hands dyed deep in blood cannot build a non-violent order for the world’, Gandhi wrote. ‘If they, the victors, are so arrogant as to think they can have lasting peace while the exploitation of the coloured and the so called backward races goes on, they are living in a fool’s paradise.’24 If the colonialist moment was a fool’s paradise, it was also an idealist’s lotus pond. Tagore, under whose name Pal had been giving lectures at the University of Calcutta, would not have been so doctrinaire as to say ‘fools’. Nor would he have absolutely resisted the idea of sovereign authorities bringing justice to bear. I imagine he would have wanted such a process to take stock of how it was that in the cosmic balance of things, the forces of war, which he had once called the ‘demon’, had destroyed ‘its mate, peace’. As he had written during the Great War: ‘When love and force do not go together, then love is mere weakness and force brutal.’25 The trial Tagore might have imagined, where the allies had assembled their sovereign powers to pass justice, would have had to have love in it. The Tokyo Trial started in May 1946. In the half-starved burnt-out city, Pal arrived late, as it happened: the trial had begun. Not that it mattered much: one of his sharpest colleagues (the Dutch judge, Roling, another dissenter) thought that Pal’s mind had been made up by the time he got there, and Pal himself was to reveal that he engaged in his own researches for the trial, a major and partisan breach of procedure for any judge in the British/ American system.26 In any case, Pal’s attendance at the trial was to be the lowest of all the judges, with the exception of Justice Sir William Webb, the Australian appointed by the Americans to preside over the court. Other aspects of the set-up were authored in advance: and here I use ‘authored’ as it was employed 24 Gandhi, Collected Works, vol 5, pp 216–218; Pyarelal, The Last Phase, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1956, vol 1, pp 112–114. 25

26

Tagore to Andrews, ‘Letters to a Friend’, EWT, vol 3, p 248.

B.V.A. Roling, The Tokyo Trial and Beyond, Reflections of a Peacemonger, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p 29. Pal himself refers to his evidence gathering in the statement that is engraved on the monument to him outside the historical museum at the Yasukuni Shrine, where numerous war-criminals have been buried.

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at Versailles in 1918 at the end of the First World War, when a substantial inquiry was conducted into its ‘authorship’ – as if to imply that complex historical events could be totally repossessed, as it were, Hegelian fashion, or with the literary coherence of a Tolstoy. Still, it has to be said that to speak of ‘authorship’ has one advantage: it is a reminder that history can be almost indistinguishable from the writing of it, and that that writing requires of historians some measure of how they themselves might be implicated in the writing, covertly or overtly. Pal was shrewd. This is perhaps the first thing that needs to be said about his massive, 700page, serpentine Dissentient judgment. It was his history of the war written in dialectical defiance of the trial’s whole triumphalist rationale. It was both in the spirit of Tagore’s last hope of recovering the land of the rising sun, and Gandhi’s conviction that trials conducted by those with blood on their hands could come to nothing. Pal’s method of exposition was to polemicise from two directions: first, via his account of the war-record of the West’s nation states, tainted as it was by colonialism; secondly via an application of the West’s legal positivism to the ‘Victor’s Justice’. And then, or rather throughout, by working his sense of morality, his Dharma, into the subsoil of his Tokyo judgment that exonerated all of the accused, and flouted the Court’s terms of judgment. It is crucial also to say that Pal was composing as the great powers were seeking to establish, without losing their control of the world, the United Nations, the charter which he was to be involved in. Like everybody else he hoped the UN would not turn out to be as feckless and self-serving of states as was the League of Nations, another body righteously born post-war, and which was thus, in its bones, bound to be an impossible mix of idealism and anxiety, self-interest and moral narcissism – the narcissism to which Freud drew attention soon after the First World War, when the victors sought to disclaim their own part in the slaughter, as if it had not been in their nature, their darker vicissitudes! Pal is admittedly less blunt in his language, but he has a keen interest in the quality of motivation that should inform a tribunal sitting without hubris in legal judgment.

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Early on he speaks of the ‘unconscious’: this in the context of the vigilance required of any criminal investigations. ‘Objective and sound judgment’ and ‘the integrity of human justice’ could only be achieved, or ‘bias created by racial or political factors’ avoided, if ‘we know how unconscious processes may go on in the mind of anyone who devotes his interest to finding out how a crime was committed, who committed it, and what were the motives and psychic attitude of the criminal’. The practice of the law, Pal was saying, had to ‘avoid the eagerness to accept as real anything that lies in the direction of the unconscious wishes …’27 Yet one had to be realistic. Pal cites Hegel: ‘Nothing done in the preservation of a state is illegal.’ Hence the history of sovereignty un-surrendered in the West (most vividly with the Pact of Paris in 1928). All the more reason then – this is Pal’s other layer of reasoning – that such a tribunal as the one set up in Tokyo should genuinely aspire to be ‘a court of law not a manifestation of power’. Of course in the grand sweep of history – what Pal vividly calls ‘the centuries of civilization that stretch between us and the days of summary slaying of the vanquished’ – the case for civilisation had been pitted against the state’s freedom to make war. It was true to say that even though there was no international community – Pal never tires of repeating this – there was ‘an historically grown sentiment against war’, an interest in ‘embryonic citizenship’ in a world community with a ‘conscience’. Nonetheless, when the conduct of the nations was taken into account the law that had emerged was: ‘ONLY A LOST WAR IS A CRIME.’28 Thus, in Tokyo, ‘the so called trial … obliterates the centuries of civilization which stretches between us and the summary slaying of the defeated’.29 The ‘obliterates’ says much that Pal was not saying: so much for the wisdom of the West, its self-knowledge, its intellectual and moral coherence, its just sense of the other when the other was the enemy. ‘Obliterates’ as good 27 Pal, IMTFE, p 7.

28 Pal, IMTFE, pp 44, 17, 25, 48, 43, 57.

29 Pal, Crimes in International Relations, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1955, p 58.

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as drops a bomb on the West’s claims that it had conducted itself from 1928 until 1945 with ‘a widening sense of humanity’. Pal says the ‘embrace was never wide enough to accept Japan as a member of the League of Nations’. Nor was it wide enough to seek to curtail how ‘one nation sought to dominate the other’. Thirdly, since this was the case, how could ‘the master nation’ ever pretend that ‘its base is humanity’? Pal pulls back from saying the colonial powers themselves were living ‘a criminal life’ according to the laws shaped for Nuremberg and Tokyo.30 He does not need to because it is the thrust of his judgment to demonstrate that if crime is indeed the issue, the West committed one of the greatest crimes of all. Pal points to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To the claim that the bombs were dropped for the humanitarian motives of ending the war, Pal retorts: ‘I, for one, do not perceive any such feeling of broad humanity in the justifying words of those who were responsible for their use.’ Rather they were more in keeping with the German Kaiser’s defence of his atrocious methods in the First World War, when he declared: My soul is torn, but everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women and children and old men must be slaughtered and not a tree or house be left standing. With these methods of terrorism, which are alone capable of affecting people as degenerate as the French, the war will be over in two months …

‘In the Pacific war under consideration,’ Pal went on, ‘if there was anything approaching what was indicated in the above letter of the German emperor, it is the decision from the allied powers to use the ATOM BOMB. Future generations will judge this dire decision …’31 Since his judgment had not been published in full in Tokyo, Pal published his full text in Calcutta in 1953, five years later, at the height of the Cold War. He included an appendix called ‘The Special Edition 30 Pal, IMTFE, pp 62–64.

31 Pal, IMTFE, pp 620–621.

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of the Atomic Destruction’ – the full text and horrific photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, published by the Asahi Picture News on 6 August 1952. This was the first of its kind to be published in Japan, as it was illegal to do so until the American occupation was over. ‘When we talk about future war at all, we must not forget that merciless destiny – perhaps far more terrible one than was shown in HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI – may come upon ourselves in the future.’ ‘The name of Justice’, he says in his closing remarks, ‘should not be allowed to be invoked for the prolongation of the pursuit of vindictive retaliation. The world is in need of generous magnanimity and understanding charity. The real question arising in a genuinely anxious mind is, ‘can mankind grow up quickly enough to win the race between civilization and disaster?’’ But to think at all about this – for ‘a peace-bound public’ to deepen their understanding of ‘the doubts and fears, the ignorance and the greed, which make this horror possible’ – the trials of hated enemies is not the way: For even if the leaders of the defeated nations were guilty, that was probably found on illusions. It may indeed be that such illusions were only egocentric. Yet we cannot overlook the fact that even as such egocentric illusions these are ingrained in human minds everywhere. It is very likely that …

And here Pal breaks his own sentence in half, in order to go on: When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then justice, holding her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.32

The bold type was Pal’s, as was his cryptically resonant italicising of ‘Reason’. What on earth was he talking about?

32 Pal, IMTFE, pp 700–701.

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Pal’s secret Dharma

After his first mention of the atomic bombs, Pal still had 600 pages to go. Here he begins his special pleading for Japan, a text that goes beyond what most of us would agree with these days, Tagore included. However Pal also argues in a way that spells out much of what Tagore might have thought when he spoke of peace and war out of harmony with each other.33 The key to Pal prior to Tokyo, at the trial and after it, was this. He was a doctoral scholar beloved of Ancient Hindu law, a passion for which would produce two books, one on the history of Hindu law, the other on its philosophy.34 On these topics he twice held forth for the Tagore Lectures at the University of Calcutta. His Tokyo judgment was a covert tract upon the Dharma: it was what enabled him to resist the teachings of the Tribunal; and it was what gave a depth to his stance which was much more than being an anti-colonial polemic. 33



34

Pal argues that in China, Japan was not much more a warmonger than the other great powers. He favours Japan’s historical justification for increasingly feeling embattled as the decade wore on: the covert behaviour of America in China; the embargoes; the portrayal of its own motives as expansionist, no matter the context, and the neglect of Japan’s conviction that there was a war to be had against Communism. As regards Japan’s conduct at war in China and the Pacific, Pal concedes the actuality of suffering – the ‘atrocities and wanton cruelties’, the ‘foul’ and ‘brutal’ deeds. He notes, also, the extent to which the culprits had already been published in situ soon after the war ended, a justice applied by those in a position to witness first-hand those who were responsible. But he does not concede that the Tokyo leadership was directly culpable for the deaths on the Thai-Burma railway; and he is at pains to try to explain the profound cultural difference between Japan and the West with regard to the dignity of a prisoner of war. As to the Japanese refusal to formally sign the Geneva Convention on POWs, Pal reminded the court that it was Japan’s ancient traditions of warriorship which had restrained them; and that in any case Japan had informally advised the Allied powers that they would abide by the Convention mutatis mutandis. That is to say, the Japanese were no more nor less ‘essentially’ capable of cruelty than anyone else. They had not, in essence, eschewed humanitarian codes. And so on. The structure of Pal’s argumentation was in general to stake out the common ground of war being hell, and to highlight cultural differences in ways that brought the other, even a diabolical enemy, into the universal fold.

What sounds like special pleading is more extreme when Pal deals with Japanese war propaganda, its regulations for schools and universities, the repressions built into its body politic, all that went into the Corporate Fascism of its strange blend of modernity and mystical Emperor Worship. With as shocking an indifference to democratic practice as Tagore could fall foul of when he was travelling in Japan, Pal steps over all this. The History of Hindu Law in the Vedic Age and Post-Vedic Times Down to the Institutes of Manu, Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1959; and The Hindu Philosophy of Law, Calcutta: Biswas Bhjandar, nd.

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In his book on the history of Hindu law, when Pal refers explicitly to the West, he worries about the connection between its ‘civilization and its science’, its ‘spiritual chaos’ and ‘intellectual doubt or political decadence’. Against all this Pal affirmed the ancient teachings, writing lucidly and most expansively. In summary, the upshot of Pal’s exposition was to affirm the relativity of knowledge, our inevitable ignorance of totalities. Pal writes of the full consciousness of subject and object being hidden in darkness; of the interrelationships of persons, and their consequent realisation of altruisms; of one consciousness before the consciousness of others, wherein, he argues, we seek the basis of duty as well as justice – all of which is the antithesis of force and interest, the blind absolutism in which injustice originates. In short, Pal’s account helps explain his own preoccupation with what he called, in his Tokyo judgment, the ‘unconscious’. One only has to linger over a few of the richer passages in the ancient sutras to register the ways they must have pressed in upon his sense of the trial.35 35





Pal’s key passage is delivered in the middle of his A History of Hindu Law in the Vedic Age and Post-Vedic Times Down to the Institutes of Manu (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1959) when he is considering Vedic teachings about freedom, and its connections with doing good rather than evil. The latter was ‘almost always the result of external compulsions, of physical servitudes, necessities, passions etc., while good is the mere release of our true and proper activities, at once kindly and intelligent’. Furthermore: ‘In doing evil, the will would do that which it did not really intend; in doing good, it would do what it really preferred, which is indeed preferred by other wills, by the universe.’

We have seen how these Vedic rishis hold in the background of their thought a ‘what do I know’ and a ‘perhaps’. They assert that ‘the human brain is not adequate to comprehend the totality of reality; only a small fringe of it is knowable by us, and even what is knowable is not always known in its true light, but partakes of the colour of the media through which we perceive it. The totality of subjective thought cannot be conceived as identical with and adequate to the totality of objective reality … moreover, the subject itself is not completely comprehensible to itself … There is then, at the bottom of consciousness of the unknown, and of that which is perhaps irreducible to knowledge, something at least which for consciousness is intellectually obscure even though it be actually immanent in its very existence. In a word, the individual and introspective consciousness is not adequate to its own conditions, its own basis, its own content, or its own synthesis. The common or synthetic basis of the object and subject is hidden in darkness and …’ If this sounds like a council of despair about our ignorance it is not. The sentence continues: they conceive other consciousnesses and are led, as it were, to an intellectual altruism, the foundation of other altruisms (my italics). The rest of what Pal had to say is what he must have felt should have been the living backdrop – the felt fabric of argument – in the proceedings in Tokyo: The principle of the relativity of knowledge had naturally a limiting effect on action as well as on thought. In limiting intellectual dogmatism, it limited practical dogmatism

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The Dharmasutras also appeal to Pal because they preceded the West’s Greek and Roman philosophy and law. They were also laws once extolled by ‘warrior poets and philosophers who despised the arts and commerce and lived mostly by agriculture with one hand on the sword the other on the plough’. And they were primal in that the Vedic order of things ‘was the universal bond that holds the world together’, with its ‘directive and distributive justice’ that was ‘universally sought and esteemed’. Furthermore, this order lived not in the lap of any earthy sovereign, with his or her application of ‘applied power’, but in the roots of what made relationship possible, namely, daya, compassion or love. The law was an ‘ever present part of an ever-flowing stream’, something with an ‘inner order of associations’, and yet something that was, at its roots, ‘unconscious and mysterious’. His scholarly project was to tease out the issues of divine Law from divine Reason, especially the latter from the former, as he had as little sympathy for divinity itself as he had for coercive sovereignty. Dharma’s Reason was the thing, the same Reason Pal’s judgment has in bold. At this point, Pal’s scholarship directly bears upon the closing music of the Dissentient report – how the time will come when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation so that justice requires us to change places. Lovelessness is Pal’s high theme. ‘All the world’, he writes, its ‘organizations in relation to Nature, in regard to art, concerning human beings, reveal this lovelessness’. The law can help our struggle against lovelessness.36

36

also and restrained the egoism of one individual especially in the presence of another. The ego not being the sole consideration, the principle of attention became more important and the idea was sufficient to necessitate the practical and moral restraint of one will in the presence of other wills, of one consciousness before the consciousness of others. Herein perhaps one must seek for the basis of duty as well as justice. Justice is indeed a mutual limitation of wills and consciousness by a single idea equally limitative of all, by the idea of limitation itself as which is inherent in knowledge, which is inherent in our consciousness as limited by other consciousness. In spite of ourselves we stop short before our fellow man as before an indefinable something which our science cannot fathom, which our analysis cannot measure, and which by the very fact of its being a consciousness is sacred to our own. On the contrary, to make one’s ego absolute is to dogmatise in action as well as in thought; it is to act as though one possessed the absolute formula of being: it is to say that the world as known is all, that force is all, that interest is all. Injustice originates in this practical dogmatism, in this blind absolutism.

Pal hastened to add – as if he was sitting in judgment somewhere – that none of the above meant to say there was an ‘ultimate guarantee of right’. The law had to be enforced: ‘Justice without force is impotent …’ But this was not to deny ‘the superiority of internal control’. Nandy ‘The Other Within’, p 75.

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Finally, to complete the poetics of Pal’s affirmations and his historical moment in Tokyo, it is necessary to say, in the manner of Ashis Nandy,37 that a single image haunts Pal’s Dissentient judgment. It is of a battlefield. After the battle. There lie the dead and the dying. How should a war end? By what species of judgment? In that ancient epic tale of war between clans, the Mahabharata, there is a teaching about war and conduct that even the god Krishna flouts. It is a moment that calls for mercy as a man lies dying. Nandy: It is then that Lord Krishna, standing among the on-lookers, directs Bhima by a gesture to strike his evil cousin on the thigh. Accordingly, against the canons of Ksatriya duel, Bhima fells Duryodhana. As Duryodhana lies dying, he delivers a majestic admonition to Krishna for participating in dishonourable conduct in war. Even though a god, Krishna is embarrassed. And when Duryodhana dies, the heavens shower flower petals on him for dying as a true Ksatriya and as a victim of an unjust duel.

The point is that, as Nandy explains, in Indian epics ‘no one is all perfect, not even gods. Nor is any one entirely evil either; everyone is flawed and has redeeming features.’ Krishna is the exemplary case, at once an amoral politician and a misguided warrior like Duryodhana. One must make one’s moral choices in an imperfect world in which heroes and villains incorporate each other. The hero is only primarily a hero; the villain only primarily a villain. In such a world the rules of conduct have priority over the demands of vengeance, for only such rules can have moral consistency in a world view that shuns binary oppositions.

Pal’s last emboldened sentence in the judgment – with Reason stripping the mask from illusions so that we might change places – might have been written for the ancient epic. The grandeur of his utterance is his showering of petals upon the war by other means that was the Tokyo Trial. Maybe it is not going 37

Nandy, ‘The Other Within’, pp 53–54.

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too far to think of the judgment as a secular Upanishad, a wild sutra for the anxious, nuclear age, and one written by the ‘core of his secret self ’, to use Nandy’s phrase. Pal was always holding to the belief that, as Nandy puts it, because we are part and parcel of each other, ‘culpability is seldom entirely divisible’.38 The stream

This narrative is a love story at more than one level. Tagore, of course, never gave up on Japan, as he made clear in Crisis in Civilization. Pal sustained his ‘devotion’ (the term is his grandson’s) until the last: his travels in Japan after the war were a form of devotion to Japan, and he wished to be buried in Kyoto.39 My argument is that Tagore and Pal might be seen as fellow-travellers with a Japan vanquished, the Japan that they never ceased to love. The men from Bengal – one morally outraged and alive, the other a ghost with a sublime view of those consorts War and Peace – held out for the beauty that had been razed and which might have been restored, but for the botched trial that damaged everyone’s soul. (If this sounds a little extreme, we should recall the remarks of Chief Prosecutor Joseph Keenan who would opine after the war that the trial was ‘ill-conceived and psychologically unsound’. For gall, the remark matches that of General Willoughby, one of MacArthur’s inner circle, who said it was ‘the worst hypocrisy in recorded history’.)40 Pal managed to provincialise the Tokyo Trial as Tagore had long managed to provincialise Europe.41 Both sought to ground their ethics in traditional Indian culture, rather than the universalism of the West: they would in the end place their trust in the ancient Dharma, which rested in kinship rather than a notion of sovereignty. Both saw the war in the Far East, especially in China, 38

Nandy, ‘The Other Within’, p 80.

40

John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: Norton, 1999, pp 453, 451.

39

41

Personal conversation with Prosenjit Pal, Calcutta, January 2013.

Not that Tagore was compelled to hold to the dualisms of West/East, as Dipesh Chakrabarty brilliantly argues in Provincialising Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. As ever, Tagore conjures a dialectic that is never simply dualistic.

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as a domain of dual culpability. Pal viewed the trial as ruined by its double standards, as well as by its legal processes: it is plausible to say, using Tagore’s terms (in Crisis in Civilization), that the trial had failed in its opportunity to open a new chapter after the ‘cataclysm’; that tragically, it had not rendered the atmosphere ‘clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice’. And both men, the Poet, and the Jurist with a kind of poetic faith in the Dharmasutras, would have concurred in thinking that the trial’s failure to do so rendered it another chapter in the history of colonialism. Pal is not, finally, an apologist for Japan’s war. True, he befriended former war criminals and their families; he fraternised with former militarists and senior political figures, including prime ministers, who had been resurrected as nationalist ideologues opposed to the Peace Constitution.42 Yet he was also the Indian jurist serving the United Nations in its construction of the chapter for human rights. And he gave eulogistic speeches about earlier heroes in the nationalist struggles. He did not, it seems, speak as a Gandhian, but his words placed him as part of Gandhi’s legacy. He is closest to Gandhi, oddly enough, when he avidly affirms the Jain’s faith in self-sacrifice. In other words, there were moments in Pal’s public life when he spoke religiously, straight out of the Dharmasutra’s sense of sacrifice. Indeed, it was the language of sacrifice that united Pal with Tagore, as well as with Gandhi. Pal has yet to receive the biographical treatment he deserves, hidden as he had remained in his Tokyo judgment.43 At the highest level of conceptualising dualisms in history, there is a convergence of streams, or streams within streams, to be more precise. Everything Pal wrote in his judgment can be incorporated by Tagore’s high 42 43

Nakajima Takeshi, ‘Justice Pal’, in Tanaka et al, Beyond Victor’s Justice, pp 141–142.

The lectures and addresses to which I am referring include: Bipincandra Pal Birthday Celebration, Calcutta: New India Printing, 1958; On Deshabandu Chittaranjan Das, Calcutta: New Empire, 1964; Address to All India Peace Congress, 1956, Calcutta: Metropolitan Printing, 1956; ‘International Law in a Changing World’, a lecture delivered in Geneva, 6 June 1961, under the joint auspices of the European office of the United Nations and International Lawyer’s Club, Geneva, reproduced from All India Reporter, October and November 1961; ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, Calcutta: Federation Hall Society, 1965; ‘The Terapanthi Sect of the Swetambar Jains and its Tenets’, Presidential Address, Calcutta: Surana Printing, 1960; Convocation Address, University of Calcutta, Calcutta, July 1945.

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discourse on war and peace as consorts seeking harmony. Pal’s views on the war in China, like Tagore’s long anxiety about Japanese conquests, were a case of war becoming a demon by destroying its mate. And it had done so, not simply because, as Pal’s rather pedantic re-writing of the Chinese episodes showed, but because the West’s nation-state greed had been mimicked by Japan, disturbing the ‘harmony’ of the ‘force’ that is part of the world. ‘Force’ in the Far East had been ‘abused’, to use Tagore’s term, and the rest had followed. I am, manifestly, extemporising – but for two benefits. It allows one to say, first of all, that a key dimension of the abuse was technological. The atomic bombs had been invented: therefore they had to be used. This was an essential aspect of the American decision to drop the bombs, especially the second bomb on Nagasaki, after it was clear that Japan had been defeated and was about to surrender. Tagore tended to be a technological determinist, which could sometimes lead him astray. But in the case of the decision to drop the atomic bombs, he would have been right to argue this way: the technological fed into the phenomenology of imperial habits. Tagore and Pal are in alliance here, passing the same judgment upon the unconscious that creates the atrocities that ruin civilisations. Pal railed at the advent of the atomic bombs. Of Tagore it is possible to say that had he been alive the event might have ‘killed him’.44 Secondly the East–West mimicry, their mirroring, magnified the power plays. There is an astonishing sentence in Pal’s judgment: ‘Japan’s elder statesmen had launched her upon the stream of westernization, and, had done so at a moment when the stream was sweeping towards a goal which was a mystery even to the people of the west themselves.’45 This sounds so much like Tagore. The image conjures two streams flowing into each other so that the West and the East share a self-construction which could only make for trouble, even as they shape the riverbank of shared culpability. The 44 45

Rustom Barucha, personal conversation in Calcutta, January 2013.

And cited, significantly, by the Japanese historian most interested in making a Gandhian of Pal: see Nakajima Takeshi in Tanaka et al, Beyond Victor’s Justice, p 137.

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powers have merged, along with their intimate enemies within – their racist, statist, colonialist, modernist and militarist identities thereby compelled to fight it out without mercy.46 The terms, I know, are metaphoric, and possibly over-psychologised and poeticised, drawing as they do from Tagore’s sense of the Upanishads, Pal’s excavation of Hindu law, Nandy’s politics of selfhood, and my leftist Buddhistic embrace of Tagore’s poetics. There can be nothing simple about war and peace, once they are out and about together, which they usually are, in and out of harmony, as Tagore would put it. Yet all I am simply trying to suggest is that Pal’s Dharma would have had Tagore’s sympathy, his maitri. Pal contributed what he could in the modality of law, rather than poetry, but beneath his legalism was the poetic coherence of his ancient Dharma. This was essential to his historic importance at the Tokyo Trial. I connect his achievement with Tagore’s late remarks about how one should approach ‘the weal and woe of human life’, of ‘abiding humanity across all of history’, with its ‘happiness as well as sadness for all creatures’. Beyond all the business of the ‘pedantic historian’ and in keeping with Pal’s advocacy of a Dharma to counter ‘a loveless world’, this is the picture Tagore most wanted to paint before he died. Once after school I saw a most amazing spectacle from our western veranda. A donkey – not one of those donkeys manufactured by British imperial policy but the animal that has always belonged to our own society and has not changed in its ways since the beginning of time – one such donkey had come up from the washerman’s quarters and was grazing on the grass while a cow fondly licked its body. The attraction of one living being for another that then caught my eye has remained unforgettable for me until this day.47

46

John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1997) is the central text for this mirroring, one that does not revise Japan’s particular criminal record, but which places it in the historical company of American atrocities, which have their differences.

47 Guha, History at the Limit of World History, p 97.

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T H E S S A N D F L AU BER T William Gass, The Tunnel (1995)

William Gass, formally professor of politics at Washington University, is the author of the acclaimed novel Omensetter’s Luck and the fastidious short fiction In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. He is also the most ostentatiously brilliant literary essayist in the United States, a skywriter stylist committed to the power of language to completely sustain its own reality – an absurd metaphysical proposition to which he is obsessively committed. A writer’s writer par excellence. Twenty years ago, when Gass was in Australia, he talked up the big selfreferential novels by writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Gass was dead against anything that wanted to connect words with what most of us would want to call the moral world. ‘What’s wrong with morality? I asked him over a lunch which felt as clammy as his handshake. ‘Oh nothing’, he drawled. ‘It’s just that it gets in the way.’ Gets in the way of art, was what he meant. He told us he had been working on a novel for ten years, a book designed to demonstrate, once and for all, that art could be created independently of ethical considerations. More: that art could be made of evil. Gass said his hero was a Nazi, a virulent anti-Semite. I remember a pall at the table, but maybe the pall was in me. What can one say to such a perverse ambition? Here, finally, is Gass’s big bad book. It is immensely clever, as one would expect. It is masterfully written. It is a monumentally savage work of tireless rhetorical power that both exhausted and depressed me. Often I resented having to turn the page. It darkened me down. Yet I stayed with it – goaded by Gass and corrupted, perhaps,

T he S S and F laubert

by the ‘art.’ The point is: a liberal mind can’t deny The Tunnel precisely because it is partly if not wholly intended as its antithesis. Even as an object, it’s designed to confront. A black cover is crossed with a red band, within which there is a sign like a swastika. Turn over, and you find two brightly coloured ‘Pennants of Passive Attitudes and Emotions’, one pointing to bigotry, the other to vindictiveness. Immediately, you wonder about pitch, tone, intent. The thing about the novel, as Malcolm Bradbury put it so clearly at the recent Adelaide Writer’s Week, is that it is both about history and about lying. Bradbury, an important historian of modern writing and its dilemmas, spoke respectfully of The Tunnel. It was what he called ‘a lifework’. I would call it a death-work. Its subject matter is death in history: more particularly, how to fit Nazism into the larger scheme of human events that must (in this book’s anti-spiritual terms) result in death only. Gass’s narrator, William Frederick Kohler, a late middle-aged US academic, discourses on the ‘fascism of the heart’. He is writing The Tunnel because he cannot bear to write an introduction to his other book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He is digging a tunnel beneath his family home because he despises much on the face of the earth. Back and down we go – to his Midwestern US childhood and to the more exciting student days in Germany, where he happened to be on that night of nights, Kristallnacht, when he threw a brick through a Jew’s shop window. For this is both his apologia and debt to his intellectual mentor, Magus Tibor – ‘Mad Meg’, a cracked philosopher of history somewhat modelled on Martin Heidegger. Kohler’s narrative billows and doubles back on itself. This is Gass’s key ingenuity, contriving an account that permits Kohler to begin plausibly about all manner of things, from poetry (especially that of his once-beloved Rainer Maria Rilke), and the relationship between signs and things, only to crack hardy about the Jews and victims, suffering and events. Kohler is the first

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character in fiction to put Holocaust jokes between respectable covers. Filthy limericks alternate with Tolstoyan reflection on history. A key claim is that history is less about events than ‘a study of language of one kind or another’ and that language gets its meaning – perforce – from what we make of it. Per-force. Get it? Enter the will to power, reality itself. Action. Heroism. Death. Events that matter. It takes about 300 pages to get the weight of this rehash of Nazi ideology, by which time one’s misanthropy has been goaded, one’s humanism cornered. In the meantime Kohler tells us much about his wife Martha, portrayed as a slob like himself: his sons, one of whom he cannot bear to call by name; his gin-sodden mother; his father, an oppressive mediocrity and bigot: parents who ‘betrayed’ him. This utterly Midwestern childhood is brilliantly written, as if Gass has set out to eclipse all other samples of the genre. Some critics find compassion in the treatment, but for me it is written through the cold fish eye. Upon colleagues Kohler spews – as if Gass sports with his scorn of academia. Of Kohler’s lovers, Lou is a former student, a lewd loss he laments; Susan is a Nazi cabaret singer who ate the flesh of Jews. Kohler still dreams of Susu. Sexual obscenities match the political. Lust and death, power and the pathos of subservience, that’s the reality, raves Kohler. But there are other things, things and words. A terror drives Kohler. Beyond the word is – what? Nothing meaningful. The void. More power to words then, which must work in a willed world if they are to work at all. For Kohler is sitting, literally, in the chair of his great Nazi mentor Tibor and his self-disgust has as much to do with his repellent passivity as his much-mentioned small penis. Kohler the bitter, betrayed and increasingly masturbatory little man, venting his spleen and resentment. This is a book about mind, consciousness itself, a mind which won’t stop, that is in its tunnel, the ego underground, making nothing happen. The Tunnel is Samuel Beckett gone baroque. In his early and now famous essays, Gass argued for a ‘completely organized’ novel. This is it – a closed system – as suffocating as Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey To The End of

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The Night or Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fe. Gass’s considerable artistic achievement is to have sustained with brio a linguistic density that consumed the air of decent human feeling, and runs the mind down by intellectualising terror. The strange thing is that once you come up from the experience of reading it, Kohler is more boring than evil. He is so American in his child-centred sense of grievance, thus so infantile as a political intelligence, that he belittles his own great themes. It is hard to tell whether Gass is writing about the US or letting the US write him. As a philosophical tract, which this novel mainly is, it is flawed by a sophistical premise: that there should be a logically necessary connection between language and the world. Such is not the case. Meaning depends on a form of life, and that, which may include actions which are loving and spiritual and true, is still a matter of what we chose to make of it. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, Gass wants us to bury his tunnel in light. But Kohler, who knows?

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T H E U SE S A N D A BU SE S OF H U M I L I AT ION Rabindranath Tagore’s Management of Defeat

One year I said I didn’t Want to be arrested. Back too frail to be man-handled. I settled for the dawn peace-vigil: Candles flickering in the police horse’s eyes. War can make cowards of poets. This year I didn’t want to protest Under anti-SAS banners. Those young blokes might have been sent to Mt Sinjar To fight their way up To show the way down For the stranded women and children: Just the kind of war heroes we want. Now, from my retreat near Swan Island I hear that they stood on the hands Of my friends, stripped them And dragged them along the ground Took a hessian bag

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Put it over their heads Stood on their backs Said they would kick a head If it so much as opened its mouth. Words fail me when I think of that war Let alone try to imagine its peace. Unspeakable Heroes, 2014

I wrote this poem last October, when the Australian Hornets joined the American bombing raids in northern Iraq, a step back into a war many of us thought had at last been left – well, more or less. It is a fact of our postcolonial Australia that we don’t pull out of such situations without the compliance of our Master in War, any more than we enter them without being under a bowdlerised banner of necessity. The simple truth is that we live with this species of humiliation as a matter of course. The experience of humiliation was most acute when the wars started in 2002–03, when Afghanistan was invaded and Iraq was attacked from the air with all that shock and awe – their humiliation, manifestly. But ours too, as we had to face our political impotence as citizens of a democracy: no amount of protest in the capitals of the West could check the war machine, just as no amount of humiliation at our subsequent defeats can deter us from generating the same mistakes all over again. Defeat, of course, is what barely can be mentioned. The denials of defeat energise fresh jingoism, as we swing into another round with all the dubious precautions against killing civilians, mission creep and so on. Now, as we bear witness to the stagey beheadings, we burn at the stake of our own delusions about what constitutes courage. The round is the thing. Yes, there is light as well as dark to be seen, but the whole experience is a wrecking light, as what counts as ‘complexity’ – worthy of empirical journalism, or a think-piece of judicious ideology – is morally

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blinding. No one solution seems to offer harmlessness to the innocent, and Lao Tzu’s ancient political observations rings true. Heaven and Earth are heartless treating creatures like straw dogs sages are heartless also they treat people like straw dogs The event that occasioned the poem was a local incident in Queenscliff, the little old fishing town just inside the heads of Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. For some years now the place has been visited by the Swan Island Peace Convergence, who come to protest at the gates of ASIS – the Australian Secret Intelligence Service – which has its headquarters on Swan Island. The secret base has long served as an intelligence gathering agency and an outfit for covert operations. It trains SAS soldiers, services ASIO and the AFP, and has been in the forefront of Australia’s efforts on behalf of the Coalition of the Willing. Its presence in sleepy Queenscliff was inconspicuous until 1983, when the SAS bungled a training exercise that took the form of a raid on the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. A sheepish Premier John Cain had to reveal to parliament the whereabouts of the secret base. More recently, in the summer of 2012, three soldiers on leave from the Middle East drowned in the waters of Swan Bay. In the early hours of the morning they left a local pub and drove their car off the road while crossing to the island. I was woken with a sense of flashing lights across the water, and the spot is still alive in my memory every time I sit at the screen in this room overlooking Swan Bay. The loss of those men was a wicked wastage, especially as the wars wound down, when we were still there to save America’s face. The futility of those wars is my line of sight. The poem has a familiar ideological position. You can take it or leave it, but the point is – as I try to indicate – the present moment seems to be beyond ideology, or misconstrued by it. That is why I felt like a squib not turning up at the demonstration last year. The wrecking light held me back, and I stayed home, content to help in – 43 4 –

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other ways. I lent my kayak to the group. I welcomed one of the main organisers, Jessica Morrison, who had a cup of tea in my kitchen, where an advance copy of Peacemongers (UQP, 2014) happened to be on the table. The Peace Convergence features in its last, homecoming chapter: the reader comes to them after various journeys to the East, where I travelled in the company of those renowned figures of anti-colonial history, Rabindranath Tagore, the great thinker and poet who called MK Gandhi Mahatma – ‘Great Soul’ (and to whom Gandhi was rejoined by calling Tagore India’s ‘Great Sentinel’). I threw myself into these Eastern journeys after America’s King Kong response to its humiliation from the attacks on New York and Washington. I was pleased to be gone from my home country. I felt like Tagore in 1916: ‘I am not a patriot – I shall ever seek my compatriots all over the world.’ You can’t contemplate the life and work of either figure without wondering at the lack of pacifist resonances in our culture at the present time. Tagore was not, strictly speaking, a pacifist, and Gandhi was not as absolute about non-violence as you might think. But their burning question was how to make something other than war out of powerlessness? Both took this to be a sharply personal question as well as a political one, and while neither ever gave answers that were fully satisfying, I came to feel that their rich domain of thought and feeling was what our legacy lamentably lacked. When news came in of what had happened to the four activists who were taken in by soldiers on Swan Island, several things hit me at once: the captors and the captive were young Australians about the same age, yet they had no relationship other than antithesis. This was especially the case with the soldiers: those they held captive were treated as the enemy. The soldiers took the law into their own hands, or had laws of their own in mind. According to all reports so far, humiliation of the peace activists was their intention. But there was humiliation for both sides, really. The activists were left with an official inquiry that would calibrate the offences committed against them, while at another level the reality for the young soldiers was a psychological dynamic that was necessarily covert: it involved their inability to – 435 –

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accept the humiliating proposition that they were going back to the Middle East, where our forces had experienced a defeat that could not be named. Everything the activists had to say to them (when they were allowed to speak) added up to this: that they, the soldiers, were in denial or ignorant or both, and that their ignorance was historically founded, that they were being, to put it crudely, the mugs of history, which in so many ways most of us are. ‘Man does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it,’ as a line of Tagore’s poetry goes. In the mirroring waters of Swan Bay, there they were, each side suffering a form of humiliation that seems destined to repeat itself unless it is transfigured. It is probably too much to ask of young soldiers that they know such things clearly. They have too many other things to learn. But of the peace activists, it’s a different matter. Gandhi’s teachings were designed to instruct. His satyagraha, ‘soul-force’, put a faith in a god-fearing ability for courage in the face of defeat, the better to win a moral battle with one’s enemy. Or to put this another way: battles for peace involved a courage and skill in combat against one’s own cowardice, the better to sustain a human respect for one’s enemy, even in the face of death. How far you take this – one’s willingness to die for peace – soon became the guts of the issue for peacemakers. Gandhi could not coherently resolve it: one only has to recall the optimistic letter he wrote to Herr Hitler in 1939, and of how he thought the English should open the doors to the Nazis rather than take the path of violent resistance, and how the Jews should passively walk into the ovens. Gandhi did, however, think that his compatriots should fight the Japanese. For all his universalism, Gandhi was in the end an Indian pacifist. Today, more broadly, the forces against pacifist dissent can have the might and ruthlessness of a Hitler – China has no kind face to present to the Tibetans, for instance. Any wonder that the self-immolation of monks is one pacifist stance. At the time of writing, one hundred and forty monks have perished. Who is going to argue against the logic of their actions? Not the Dalai Lama, who praised the monks on ABC TV’s 7.30 last year: he said they

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were expressing their anguish at the suffering of others. Their suicides were an act of altruism. He meant also that they were acts of ‘inner-disarmament’. I can’t help imagining Time’s Arrow in flight over Swan Island. Will the day come when peace activists have to burn themselves to death on the bridge? It is an aberrant thought. But you only have to think of the unspeakable wars we might continue to be in when such acts might make sense. Australia has long made a cult of defeat at Gallipoli. The battle was even a side battle, a tactical decoy, so in the grand sweep of things the defeat was more humiliating than most. The cult also has its bad objects – the inept British officers, Churchill’s reckless strategic mistake and so on. The depth of humiliation that had to be shrouded has become clearer over the years. It made sense to press humiliation into the bedrock of history, the better to found a legend of warriorship. All of which is the legacy of what our colonised state of mind at the time – our patriotic loyalty to Empire – predetermined: a predisposition for a dignity forged by martyrdom to Empire, rather than a clear grappling with the experience of defeat. Yet owning up to defeat has the promise of self-respect, if not nobility – spiritually and historically. I was most struck by this when I came upon Tagore’s poem ‘Song of Defeat’. He wrote it in 1916, after his first experience of Japan. As he kept telling his adoring hosts, many of whom received him as the great Poet-Prophet, he arrived as if to a sacred place, given ancient Japan’s Buddhist legacy. Japan had, alas, since lost its way to militarism, including a racist expansionism – habits of mind and conduct that it had learned from the nation-states in the West. Eloquently, Tagore held forth to large, distinguished audiences. Before long he had his Japanese critics, the most indignant of whom said that he should be dismissed. Here was a man who ignored Japan’s new progress, a man who had no right to such opinions because he came from a ‘ruined country’. By ruined, they meant poor, colonised, without a nation-state of its own.

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Tagore could only agree with them. For he could appear weak, he knew that. To think otherwise, the Japanese had to know that a decade earlier he’d been at the forefront of the nationalist struggle in Bengal, and that he had a body of work – several major novels – which were profound dissections of nationalist thought and feeling. Tagore had never renounced the Indian cause; rather, he had turned back to his creative work instead of investing his later years in political struggle. He had already renounced the terrorist fringe of India’s nationalist movement. The Japanese experience would heighten Tagore’s conviction that in India hope lay in the educational efforts of the school he had already started, and the university and agricultural college that were to come soon after he came back from Japan. Meanwhile, his country remained ruined, and the poem he wrote as a response to the Japanese was a subtle, pacifist rejoinder, which served to turn warrior notions of heroism inside out. My Master had bid me, while I stand by the roadside, to sing the song of Defeat, for that is the bride whom he woos in secret. She has put on the dark veil, hiding her face from the crowd, but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark. She is forsaken of the day, and God’s night is waiting for her with its lamps lighted and flowers wet with dew. She is silent with her eyes downcast; she has left her home behind her, from her home has come the wailing in the wind. But the stars are singing the love song of the eternal to a face sweet with shame and suffering. The door has been opened in the lonely chamber, the call has sounded, and the heart of darkness throbs with awe because of the coming tryst. Here, the Poet-Prophet turns to his Muse, the female presence who solicits an open heart. His strength will come from submission, a form of surrender, a wise passivity. Tagore’s grandeur and courage consisted of knowing – 438 –

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such things, which he held to – this is also the point – without losing his capacity for acts of resistance to intolerable humiliations. The latter make an impressive list. Thus, in 1921, after the massacre at Amritsar, he renounced his knighthood; in later years he gave strong yet critical support to Gandhi’s strategic fasts; and, as the Second World War began, he supported Subhas Chandra Bose, the Nationalist movement’s strong man, as the next leader of Congress (instead, Bose would go into exile to lead the Indian army on the side of the Japanese). By then, too, Tagore had consolidated his thoughts about the aeroplane as the harbinger of atrocity in war. He first flew in a plane on his way to Persia in 1932, as a guest of its modernising king, Reza Shah Pahlavi. It was an experience with physical, metaphysical and moral implications. His progress in the aeroplane, he felt, was ‘not in harmony with the wind’: the voice of the machine was that of ‘a raging beast’, and as it climbed higher it reduced the play of senses so that all the signs that made the earth real were wiped out. Yes, it gave man a ‘seat of divinity in the upper air from which comes light’, but were we up to it? The hold of the earth on the mind and heart was ‘loosened’, and a terrible ‘aloofness’ took its place. Looking down, he asked a question – ‘Who is kin, who stranger?’ – and he thought: ‘It is a travesty of this teaching of the Gita that the flying machine has raised on high.’ Man was not worthy of its powers akin to the air chariot of Lord Indra. His fear was: what ‘if in an evil moment man’s cruel history should spread its black wings’? If that happened, he warned: … if man’s cruel history should invade the realm of divine dreams with its cannibalistic greed and fratricidal ferocity then God’s curse will certainly descend upon us for that hideous desecration and the last curtain will be rung down upon the world of Man for whom God feels ashamed.

This was his message to the Iraq Air Force in 1932. By this time in his life he could often sound like this – an Old Testament prophet and Gandhi rolled into one. What possessed him? Partly it was the Manichean dimensions of the

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machine itself, any machine. More particularly, he had palpable news of those black wings. In Baghdad, where the British air force had a base, he reported: Its Christian chaplain informs me that they are engaged in bombing operations on some Sheikh villages. The men, women and children, there done to death, meet their fate by decree of the upper region of British imperialism – which finds it so easy thus to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims.

‘So dim and insignificant do those unskilled in the modern arts of killing appear to those who glory in such skill,’ Tagore remarked. Tagore knew such things better than most. The Pathans in India’s north-west were bombed in 1915. Four years later, Dacca and Jalalabad were bombed by squadron chief Arthur Harris, the man who would have much to do with the destruction of Europe after 1941. Outside India, the British were bombing natives in Egypt in 1916, in Afghanistan in 1919 and in Egypt again in 1920. In Iraq, before the events of 1923, there had been the landmark attempt to ‘control without occupation’ – a brilliant cost-saving device that put attacks by aeroplane in the place of battalions of soldiers on the ground. In principle, houses, animals and soldiers were supposed to be targets, not the elderly, women and children. Alas. In one air raid there was such wild confusion among the people that, as the official report noted, ‘many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns’. Winston Churchill expressed concern about shooting women and children taking refuge in a lake. If such details were published, he thought, ‘it would be regarded as most dishonouring to the air force’. Churchill spoke of court-martials for the officers concerned, but this was no more likely to happen than the bombings of Iraq in 1932, the ones of which Tagore spoke, would not happen. Admittedly, the British did not invent the bombing of civilians from the air. The honours for modernity in war go to Italy, which dropped bombs into an oasis outside Tripoli in 1911 (when NATO forces bombed Libya in 2011, they were marking a centenary that few in the West seemed to notice). – 440 –

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Before long, the British bombing of villages was part of a fully fledged colonial strategy, which included the heightened moral sense now possessed by the British – something of which, perhaps, the British chaplain had even shared with Tagore in 1932. For what distressed the British staff officer Lionel Charlton was what he called, in his official report, ‘the nearest thing to wanton slaughter’. Charlton had no sooner expressed this in writing than another troublesome sheikh had to be dealt with. From three thousand feet, bombs were released on a crowded bazaar. More than twenty women and children lost their lives. In 1924, Charlton was relieved of his post on the grounds of his conscience. His own heartfelt words were installed in the draft of his report to parliament, ‘Note on the Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq’. Charlton expressed his horror at the tactic, and also offered a pitiless analysis of what bombing meant for the warriors who were the enemy. Where the Arab and the Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-al-Ajaza) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.

These words were erased from the final report: it held to the notion that the aeroplane was a humane means of controlling ungovernable peoples. After Persia, Tagore would often tell this story. The British air force was destroying from the air a Mahsud village in Afghanistan. One of the bombing planes was damaged and came down. An Afghan girl led the airmen into a neighbouring cave, and to protect them, a Malik remained on guard at the entrance of the cave. Forty men with brandished knives rushed forward to attack them, but the Malik dissuaded them. All the time, bombs were dropping from above

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and people were crowding in to take shelter in the cave. Some Maliks of the neighbourhood and a Mollah proposed to help the Britishers and some of the women offered to feed them. After some time they at last disguised the airmen as Mahsuds and brought them to a safe place.

Tagore’s implication was that there was something more important than the colonial struggle, conceived in narrow political terms: at stake was the depth of our compassion for each other. Tagore’s sense of common humanity transcended the urgency with which even he opposed imperialism. Struggles there must be, but they were struggles that had a spiritual dimension to which he felt we must attend at our cost. Tagore was anti-imperialist to the core, yet one who could see into, at the worst of times, something other than the mirror of combat. Less than ten years later, during the saturation bombing of German towns, Churchill was suddenly interrupted one evening, letting words out of his mouth with what his witness called a ‘start’. ‘Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?’ The great leader was screening a film about RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr. England had already bombed Hamburg, almost razing it to the ground. Watching it with him was Richard Casey, the Australian diplomat who would become the Governor of Bengal, a position in which he maintained good relationships with Gandhi. Casey soothed the conscience of the leader, whose spirit exulted in war. Casey reported: ‘I tell him it wasn’t us who had started all this and that this was what it was about: us or them.’ Casey failed to recognise that the word ‘Armageddon’ had long been on Churchill’s lips: ‘Next time the competition may be to kill women and children, and the civil population generally.’ Regarding the aeroplane and its inevitable implication in crimes of war, Churchill was, in his own way, as prescient as Tagore. As the Allies began to bomb the German cities, it was the British pacifist, Vera Brittain, who put the

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most potent arguments against the strategies that were seldom questioned outside England. In her early pamphlet, Humiliation with Honour (1942), Brittain had an epigraph by Tagore from the poem that was included in early editions of Nationalism (1917), the essays that set him against the militarism of all nation states. Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the proud and the powerful With your white robe of simpleness. Let your crown be of humility; your freedom the freedom of the soul … And know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting. Brittain then offers as lucid a definition of pacifist faith as anybody has given. Pacifism is nothing other than a belief in the ultimate transcendence of love over power. This belief comes from inward assurance. It is untouched by logic and beyond argument – though there are many arguments both for and against it. And each person’s assurance is individual; his inspiration cannot arise from another’s reasons, nor can its authority be quenched by another’s scepticism.

Brittain was not wanting to echo Gandhi. Nor was she being religious, her ‘spiritual’ insight notwithstanding. Much of her argument in Humiliation with Honour is designed to separate pacifism from sainthood. She grants the whole-hearted Christian’s rights to martyrdom. She appreciates that such suffering can ‘ennoble’ an individual, ‘for its secret is a love that can neither be destroyed nor conquered, whatever penalty it may be called upon to bear’. ‘Not by power, nor by might, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’ In other words, she is fully in tune with those who would use, ‘like Gandhi in India, only the weapons of the spirit against the powers of darkness, and direct those weapons first against sin in themselves’. But her stress is not on this course, necessarily. It is rather a compulsion to fortify the dissenter in the polis. She wants to give them brave heart.

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Good heart. The honour she seeks has much more to do with the wherewithal of pacifists who must resist the temptation to fall into ‘permanent resentment, in growing hatred, antisocial conspiracy’. This requires a special civic courage – an ability to throw away any need to be ‘respectable’, for one thing. Self-discipline, for another. Selflessness also. She says to the pacifist: ‘Your road to salvation lies through pain and dishonour, for which there is no competition.’ This path, obviously, still has a Christian overtone, as it calls on the pacifist to be with the ‘outcasts’, the ‘sorrowful and the oppressed’. But the salvation to which Brittain refers is not ‘spiritually’ Christian. It is the salvation of a citizen’s common humanity. It is the path leading away from ‘hatred and vengeance’. In other words: ‘the humiliation with honour – the honour of self-discipline and of new wisdom wrought out of bitter experience’. Brittain’s Seeds of Chaos (1944) was her tour de force against the warmakers. Nothing as sustained has ever been published here. It articulates the patriotic and internationalist case against ‘obliteration bombing’. Pacifism could no longer be a force to defeat Hitler, but it could help men and women ‘to keep their heads’ and possibly avoid another and even worse war in the future. If England were to be defeated, it would be ‘humiliation with honour’. Meanwhile one could seek to ‘enlarge the scope of mercy’. The subtitle of Seeds of Chaos was What Mass Bombing Really Means. ‘So the grim competition goes on, until the mass-murder of civilians becomes part of our policy – a descent into barbarism which we should have contemplated with horror in 1939.’ Brittain hastened to add that most British people did not have firsthand experience of being bombed: if they had they surely would not be party to the leadership’s moral descent. In the bombed parts of London in 1941, a survey showed that 47 per cent of people disapproved of reprisals. The same in Coventry, where British civilians were worst hit. The largest vote in favour of retaliation in kind came from those in the safe areas to the north and west. The United Kingdom had more ‘kindly people’ than the official war effort could afford to admit.

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‘Nor do I believe,’ Brittain went on, ‘that the majority of our airmen who are persuaded that mass bombing reduces the period of their peril really want to preserve their own lives by sacrificing German women and babies, any more than our soldiers would want to go into battle using “enemy” mothers and children as a screen.’ But she was not, essentially, addressing those in the heat of battle. She wrote down facts and opinions for citizens struggling to understand the information they had in wartime conditions. They are given in order that you who may realise exactly what the citizens of one Christian country are doing to the men, women and children of another. Only when you know these facts are you in a position to say whether or not you approve. If you do not approve, it is for you to make known your objection – remembering always that it is the infliction of suffering, far more than its endurance, which morally damages the soul of the nation. Tagore died a few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but everything he thought and wrote anticipated how the war in the Far East could end. Not so much with the tower of skulls that Japan was accumulating with its savage war in China, but with the West’s enactment of technological fanaticism in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that there was a peace, trials for war crimes, and a refusal by the West to speak of its own crimes even-handedly. Gandhi was, of course, the one who remarked that a peace created by such blood-stained means was hard to imagine. In seeking to make peace, the ends demand consistency with our means.

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P OE M S T H AT K I L L The fundamentalist will give his life because he believes he is filled with God. He will lay his life down because he has a passport to eternity. He will kill others – the infidels – all those unworthy of God. He can kill with impunity – no guilt, with a clear conscience – because his faith is a sure thing. As a warrior he will go to his grave because he has a God-given body that pumps with certainty. This is his world: a holy circle of absolute conviction, a wheel of fire that consumes doubt as it rolls in the only direction it knows. Life and death, they become the same thing: a purifying path through any destruction in life, a renewal through sacrifice, even, if absolutely necessary, the sacrifice of one’s children. All of which is terrifying to us ‘in the West’. Terrifying and enviable, surely. Would that one could be so at one with God. To know such fullness and purity, to be so secure in the prospect of eternity, a place in heaven. To be, day by day, free of doubt, to have such truth in one’s heart, to be such a stranger to Hamlet. And to know one’s enemy with such clarity, to be unburdened by the never-ending and complex task of tolerance. Above all, to be possessed of such certainty, to be so nourished by unmitigated, inviolable coherence. Away with the ‘thinking reed’ of the self, and ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’. Enviable it is to contemplate the felt reality of such a blessed state, such an everlasting Golden Age of the Self. And to be so without the fretfulness of dialogue, without mental struggle and anxiety, without even a faith in art – and all as a given, all because of a self undivided, a state of being one, at one, and, even more enviably, one among many. One of the blessed crowd, one of the army marching towards heaven. One as a glorious atom of the great cosmic poem. One part of whatever might be brighter than a thousand suns. ‘The future belongs to crowds,’ as Don DeLillo brilliantly wrote in Mao II, his 1991 novel where one crowd after another swarms into consciousness

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– close to home, the ecstatic Moonies, further afield the demented mob grieving for Khoumani, further east the Maoists. Name the crowd and you might locate the psychic point of maximum terror, and possible envy. One protagonist, a photographer with a flat looking up at the Twin Towers, is possessed by dual interests; on the one hand she has spent a lifetime shooting pictures of mass suffering, those images that we have to endure every day and which leave us hollow, marooned; on the other she takes portraits of writers, those specimens par excellence of the singular mind. The writer in the novel is Bill Gray, a recluse who sees himself as a terrorist of sorts. For from his secret bunker he can lob his missives into the body politic. This strategic affinity runs deeper when Gray is lured out of his retreat to be of assistance to a boy – another writer, a young poet kidnapped by Maoists in Lebanon. From here on he is on a path towards extinction. The reader bears witness as DeLillo, with his incantatory prose, sings Gray off to be a hostage of the Maoists who, in the end, sell him to the fundamentalists. That is the last we hear of the novelist. Above all, Mao II is a quintessentially American construction: the mass verses the tragic, albeit free, individual; the social group as alien, the collective as enemy. It is a grandly coherent bipolar tale – a prose poem with a closed circle that is the death of the writer. The novel articulates a fundamental truth about crowds that Elias Canetti surgically dissected 40 years ago in his great book Crowds and Power. This was to do with our primitive fear of being touched by the unknown, a defensive alert that accounts for so much until we are one of a crowd, when body is pressed to body so that, the denser the crowd gets, the more the fear is reversed. ‘The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest,’ Canetti wrote, ‘when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their difference and feel equal.’ Canetti begins with a typology of crowds – the open, the closed crowd, the Invisible Crowd of the Dead, the Baiting Crowd that kills, the Prohibition Crowd, the Flight Crowd, the Double Crowd of war. His list at first seems

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arbitrary, until he comes to the nucleus of the crowd that is the pack – that small primitive horde that is ‘the universal expression of communal excitement’. The Hunting Pack. The Increase Pack. The Lamenting Pack. The Prayer Pack – in the exposition of which Canetti labels Islam as ‘a religion of war’, compared with Christianity as ‘a religion of lament’. As if this grim analysis is not enough, Canetti’s savage exposition opens into what he calls the ‘entrails of power’, which is about killing and eating, and then, in turn, about the survivor who is left standing after the carnage, and who is, by felt definition, full of his power. Canetti’s leaders are the survivors. Their mode is pride and paranoia. As a modern leader, the survivor is the greatest threat ever posed to mankind. This is because the weapon of mass destruction is in the hands of a paranoiac who had already imagined the extinction of the crowds around him. The last sentence of Canetti’s self-confessed paranoid argument is: ‘If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting.’ The sting. How to take the sting out of the lure of fundamentalism, with its atavistic swoon of certainties, while at the same time not weakening the vital source of our own ability to defend ourselves (whoever we are)? Start perhaps, with some fundamentals to which we claim to subscribe. Leunig’s sting is simple. He has a cartoon called Child Porn. There are photographs in four panels, each of which shows a war-torn man with a damaged child in his arms – ruins as a backdrop. The bitter irony is clear. Two kinds of pornography are put uncomfortably together. There are the abused children, the subject of royal commissions, and about which our pack mentality gives off a good deal of hysteria, and the children killed in war, about which we struggle with a crowd mentality, our war crowd, that wants to turn a blind eye. And the key to the sting is its test for what we claim to share as a fundamental: that there is an absolute value in the wellbeing of children, all children, not just ours. Leunig forces the issue: what, in us, is fundamental to what? – 448 –

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The second sting goes to the power of leaders. Here they are implicated – no, pinned by the drawing – in the death of children. Outrageous, surely. That is going too far. And yet, if our leaders cannot share some of the responsibility for some of the slaughter some of the time, what is being said? That the killing is part of nature? That it has causes beyond human reach? That the causes of this war are not of this world? No, sooner or later our own leaders, bad intelligence or not, have to mourn the fact that they have survived these children. After all, most of us, including our democratically elected leaders, share the notion that we make our own history and that when history is a mess, we must be to blame, along with, it goes without saying, the al-Qaeda network. Hence the enduring sting of the cartoon. No wonder then, that Leunig’s hate mail has increased exponentially as his cartoons have named those fundamentally responsible for atrocities and chaos. ‘I hear that you are a father,’ they write. ‘I pity your children. Your wife must be a dog.’ Our own baiting pack would have him if they could. As I write, a savage battle has been raging in Falluja. Before the full American assault, the civilians were warned, remember, that if they did not want to be bombed they should hand over the terrorists in their midst. The impossibility of this demand goes without saying. In effect, the Americans were holding the people of Falluja hostage; the children of Falluja had hoods over their heads. Since then the town has been razed and there is no firm figure as to how many of the 300,000 escaped. We like to think that it is fundamental to our citizenship that we know what is done in our name. But early on in the war our leaders acquiesced to the American decision not to count the dead on the other side. The first of its dead were described as being liquidated into ‘pink mist’. Now we know, thanks to the British medical journal, The Lancet, that 100,000 have died, half of them women and children. Mind you, we still do not have complete figures on the numbers of dead children, but the deaths had no impact on the United States presidential election. That is not surprising as most of the 100,000 were killed by US air strikes. So the figure for the children might

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be as much as ‘we’ can bear and be destined to be swept under the carpet, as child abuse was for so long. Certainly, none of the Christian army that helped re-elect the President has gone on record lamenting the death toll of children, a fundamentalist response of a sort. In a better world, the news might have yielded a prayer crowd with some capacity for penitence, but instead we’ve had those gaudy political rallies, all sugared up for the crowd they really were: the war crowd. Job At Our Elbow

The beauty and terror of the teeth, The whites in the brown face A smile fresh as a mango To be skinned like plastic from Explosives. He grins toward us as The breeze turns, and it’s there, Wide and pearly as a young shark Disturbing the shoal havens. A grin to die for on TV: ‘I know what I am doing.’ And we think, ‘You know not, You have not heard of Erasmus.’ We fancy We frame his frame and ours then more some. We try To see and be clear with Job at our elbow.

The pearly teeth of Jack the Knife. Amrozi’s only a boy, surely, but already he is living his poem of death. It has been written. He will act it out until he is in heaven. The word that the smile forced out of me was ‘Satanic’. Such was its pride in murder, the sheen of its righteousness. Then the double take: what do I know of his culture, and the place of the smile? Was I missing something? – 450 –

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No: the scenes at the trial put me right. There is no way you could avoid the smile’s murderous intent. And so the surge of rage in me: the instinctive anger that produces vengeance, that whole impulse that made even Senator John Kerry say, after bin Laden had appeared on America’s pre-election screens, that those people are ‘barbarians’, and that they should be ‘hunted down’ with ‘whatever it takes’. But, of course, the idea of justice constrains one. So we like to think. So, I thought – the liberal optimist voice again, the secular humanist – surely the right social justice programs in the villages that produced the Amrozis would turn or tame that smile towards what we have called, since the 16th century (Christianity’s age of fundamentalism), religious tolerance. Sociology whistles in the dark. ‘Satanic’ is a dangerous word to use, I know. I misled myself with it, as I am not a practising Christian. But it is good to call evil by its name. I believe that evil exists in the world, and that a certain kind of glee – that grin on the face of Private Lynndie England, for example, with her thumbs up beside the naked hooded man in Abu Ghraib – is a clue to it. Evil is a force – it has an energy – with which one has to contend, one way or the other. Amrozi’s smile left me feeling both militant and uncertain as to how to act – within and without. Militant, in the knowledge that some limit to tolerance might have been reached. Uncertain with regard to the means that justify the ends of self-defence. But it is hard to affirm right action – strategically, spiritually – because so much so far has been botched by the Americans. You could start with the total obscenity (and cowardice) of the assaults from the air, where the collateral deaths of civilians are implicitly part of a strategic calculation, one that has been practised in Iraq since Winston Churchill thought it a good idea to bomb villages into compliance with the British Empire. Or take the prison tortures, which are firstly the product of incompetence, as the prisons in Iraq and Cuba were filled with men arrested by mistake, and secondly not ‘atrocities’, (as in the work of ‘a few bad apples’) but systemic humiliations essential to a military strategy in dire straits. The road to them was paved by the – 451 –

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President’s disregard for the Geneva conventions so fundamental to civilised men at war, common decencies swept aside by the true believers in the US Administration, men hell-bent on conducting their own religious war. Bush in his speeches gives signs to his born-again Christian army and, when under pressure, he will appeal to sources of authority beyond himself. As one of his generals in the Pentagon put it, Bush was ‘not elected’, he was ‘appointed by God’. The speaker – a key planner with Donald Rumsfeld’s manhunt offensive, also equates the Muslim world with Satan. ‘Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.’ When I read this, I had an image of teeth flashing again: not pearly teeth but all those smiles of the born-agains, those huge, hollering and praying congregations of fearful Babbitts who voted Bush in on his permanent war ticket. Pearly teeth, Pepsodent teeth, what’s the difference? Job at my elbow or not, I feel like a shag on a rock. Under the Pump

You’ve felt like this before. With a marriage shot Your heart breaking, a small daughter slumped, a son Sweating with the self-doubts of a good young man … When there is little or nothing you can do to save the day. Events have minds of their own. The General you need Is not vain, not ego, not Montgomery, not Macarthur, no. It seems the great man must be a Kutuzov who will “Put in nothing of himself, contrive nothing, undertake nothing”. The taste of destiny has changed. Each morning a golden bowel Of pop from Washington. You want wholemeal but foaming Sugar cons you, is a buzz, is octane, some strange fuel. Oh you protest, you talkback, incessantly with reason and anger. But it enters. It seems to get in at night. You wake to find Yourself shockingly drifting to their pump, their diesel lies. – 452 –

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That was an extraordinary few months leading up to the attack on Iraq. We knew the Americans were lying about the United Nations: there was no genuine plan to ‘wait’ for the UN as the decision to go to war had already been taken. The effect was both to arouse one’s sense of political impotence – which our ineffectual peace marching confirmed – and to pin us, mesmerically, in the energy field created by militarism. This has always been the vortex leading up to war. That’s how it is done. It is an appeal to fear and patriotism that tries to expel political conscience. The rumble of war, like the call to prayer, can put a seductive end to uncertainties. Now we belong somewhere, embedded with those who bring us the news of unity. Now, after the massive entry of will, fate takes its course. If it were not for the fate of children, it might be possible to sit back and experience the unfolding forces of war in the spirit, let’s say, of the Mahabharata, that great Indian epic poem about incessant war, slaughter, total destruction. How modern its slow music feels as we accustom ourselves to permanent war, and the daily news culture of death. In the Mahabharata, the war goes on generation after generation as kin kill kin. In the beginning, there are rules of war but as each grieving clan despairs, the restraints are forgotten, the bloodbath deepens. And the war persists for another reason: each person creates his or her enemy anew: despite everything, he or she has it in mind – out of pride, out of anger, out of grief – that another round of killing is necessary. No victory, then, is definitive. Each seeds the next defeat. And so on until, in desperation, even the noble warriors break their vows and resort to their sacred weapons, their tools of cataclysmic destruction. Thus the great fire, and the deaths on a cosmic scale. But nothing ends absolutely, as there will be more time for the self-creation of enemies. The war music around us is slow for similar reasons. Step by step, the US has created its own enemies – the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the terrorists out of Saudi Arabia, nuclear-proliferating Pakistan. In Iraq, the war to preempt terrorism has created a magnetic force for terrorists. At the same time, the definition of ‘terrorist’ has expanded to include everyone who resists the invasion. And, along with American purity of intent, that innocence so wilful – 453 –

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about doing good, is measured as a faith in a god called democracy, one that will come good, that must fully reveal itself in a matter of years, if not a generation or more, since history is on its side. Leave aside the illusion that the US has democracy at home. Its rhetorical compulsion is to deliver to others what is true to its own lights: a compound of fear and greed and utopianism, each generating the other into a wilfully conceived future. And so on. How else to experience the determinations of the US’s patriotic poem to itself except under the heading of myth? I have been deeply taken by the Mahabharata, which was brought to this country by Peter Brook. What held his version of it together was not any cult of absolute belief – far from it. It was its ancient sense of itself as a poem, a story told by Vyasa, the son of the King of Fishermen. Vyasa recounts everything to the Boy, a most willing witness, the perfect audience for something that becomes real in the telling. It was the Boy’s voice that rang bell-like through the whole production. It seemed to have the clarity of Krishna and Arjuna and Vyasa put together. In the beginning, the Boy can hardly believe that ‘the poetical history of mankind’ might be about him, but Vyasa says, ‘If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.’ Towards the end, after the weapons of mass destruction have been used, the Boy can hardly believe that he had his beginning in the extinction of mankind. ‘Vyasa,’ he says, ‘I’m very tired … will the war end one day?’ ‘Yes, it will end,’ Vyasa says. Boy: ‘I’m afraid, I thought I was going to die when Aswatthaman launched his weapon.’ Vyasa: ‘So did I.’ Boy: ‘But you told me, ‘I’m the author of this poem.’ Could your poem kill you?’ To which neither Vyasa nor the Mahabharata has any immediate answer.

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Safety Pins Binding a person’s wound while looking into his face is an example of an attitude towards a soul. Raimond Gaita

Yes. A given. A condition, our compass. Yet here’s another Iraqi lad, Wishing to touch an American gun, To cradle it in need of care The soldier looking on with bubble gum. For weeks you’ve been in the TV ward Waiting for the pain to lift Pain like a mother’s veil, perhaps Pain torn like a badge from the dead The mother and soldier in yourself looking on. I’m waiting for a video dream to come good: At last the Texan Marine on his knees Face to face with the blood sodden Shi’ite kid The soldier’s lips tenderly tight with safety pins. Repeating your God’s words may mean nothing: it may even mean more killing. Whereas a simple good deed that might be noticed by your god, even the god of your enemy – that might be something. This poem must have been written after seeing something like that – an American soldier helping an Iraqi kid. In any case, I wanted to write something that used Rai Gaita’s aphorism. The US soldiers – many of them kids themselves, really – are not there wanting to kill, even if, in order to kill, they had to fill their tanks and armoured vehicles with the ghetto-blasting coherence of Raining Blood and Angel of Death. Their soundtracks to war, the grinding techno urban poems – 455 –

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that wrapped round them as they slaughtered the Iraqis, were the narcotic for doing what they were barely trained to do: kill large numbers of people at close range, including, once the invasion had been completed, civilians and their children. Children, whom, it has to be said, had by then often become combatants themselves, kids, wired up as bombs, who might innocuously approach. But the innocence of the US boys disappeared once the first battle had been won. They wanted to help all the Iraqis – including the young men who might have been their brothers in some other life. The Baghdad boys drifted up to the vehicles wanting to hear the other soundtracks – the rap and the rock and the country. And after all, these city boys – jobless and poor and half-educated, like most of the American troops – had all that in common, too. At the level of desire, you might say, all belonged to the American Dream. And so the US troops were for a while acting in the spirit of their gospel music and helping out in the schools and the hospitals and cleaning up the Baghdad streets. But not for long. Rubbish was thrown back on the streets. Bombs began to blow up the streets as the American boys – loathed invaders now – rumbled their armoured vehicles along them. Incomprehension and a wild sense of ‘their’ ingratitude – set in among the Americans. Then fear, as the insurgency increased. Then desperation, as the terrorist strategies, in which the fundamentalists take pride, escalated. And it lured the Americans into their retaliations: the night raids on houses, the removal of suspects, their own species of kidnappings, as terrified families saw their own men effectively ‘disappear’. In the beginning, the Americans had been advised about the ethnic differences of Muslim people: how, for instance, ‘placing a detainee on the ground or putting a foot on him implies you are God’. This from a Marine Corps manual. The logic of prison tortures was its reversal, as the thugs of military intelligence played God. Thus the staging of that theatre of humiliation called Abu Ghraib, a production funded at the top, and sustained in the mirrors of the beheadings, in the round of mutual rage and fear, pride and shame and provocation, all now bound together in grief and vengeance.

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American mothers and fathers are not grieving much yet, relatively speaking. American trauma is on a slow fuse. At the time of writing, the liberal US analysis wants to speak of how this new war has not prepared its soldiers to kill – not kill as this new technology and this war demands. In the old days, apparently, during World War Two, for instance, it was natural for only 15 percent of US soldiers to fire their guns at all. They tended to freeze in the heat of battle, to become, at a vital point, conscientious objectors. When the army realised this it trained the men accordingly: to shoot at what they were conditioned to conceive impersonally – at what were called, in the new drill, ‘targets’, rather than a man who might have five children. By Vietnam, 90 per cent of soldiers were firing their guns in the heat of battle. One result of this instilled fury was the Mai Lai massacre. Another was those battalions of soldiers who came home crazed from what they had done. The boys in Iraq have been trained well enough to shoot at their targets. But it seems that they are traumatised by the capacity of their weapons to kill so many at such close range so often. ‘They shoot, we return fire, and they’re all dead.’ The low morale of the US soldiers has already been reported in the papers. Their suicide rate is 30 percent higher than usual in the army. If they are shot up themselves, they are rushed to a German hospital, and then shipped back home, and the care they get is something of a contrast to that of an Iraqi kid in a Baghdad hospital. Even so, it’s possible that the mental state of the American boys might be worse. Not only have they crossed the world to kill men, women and children in their own city, they have been returned to hospital wards where they are discouraged to speak of what they have done. Their debriefings cue them to say what has ‘happened’ to them. The trauma of having killed is denied and, if it does come up, it is psychologised rather than engaged in full. That is to say, as one Veteran Affairs psychologist has put it, it is not faced as a spiritual task. ‘You recognise you did the unthinkable. You blasted away a piece of yourself, violated some trust with God.’ In any case, that is out of the question as battles of faiths are made to rage. Falluja played it all, all over again. The American boys were pumped for battle

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by Christian prayer; they joined the battle on the ruined streets of the town as loud speakers pitted one poem against the other: from one set of speakers the Muslim cries of ‘God is great’, from the other the homicidal rants from AC/DC. As the music roared, wild boys killed wild boys, one lot hurling themselves into martyrdom, the other hollering and bragging about their kill count. Against such a terrifying convergence of conviction, a safety pin looks good. Christmas Day

The Buddha waits in the garden, Among the hydrangeas, taking a space Where the old cats still piss. They are forgiven. Take in the world as it is under a grey sky. Everyone who arrives, who comes and goes, Has done something regretful, harmful, A shameful act, perhaps criminal. Yesterday a poet I know wrote from Kyoto. He lives in a five tatami mat room And, each morning, the monks walk by On their way into the city to beg. I can’t reply. He gave no address. The Zen-garden postcard signalled: For the New Year, till the best silences! When that postcard came from Kyoto, it was close to Christmas 2002 –

after Afghanistan (which was after the Taliban had obliterated the Buddhas of the cliffs), but before Iraq. It was the most poignant of Christmases, when we were about to hit the streets with peace demonstrations, making our crowds that created an illusion of hope. A time for Christ and the Buddha to get together.

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Of what value life? That is the fundamental question the terrorists have put in our faces. Who values it for what, when, and if at all? What faith in what do we secular humanists (if that’s what we are) need for the present crisis? It is commonplace to say that at heart Christianity, Islam and Judaism are in accord. They share a faith in the sanctity of life that is demonstrated by the Abraham who did not kill his son. I suppose you can’t argue with this as common ground. But as narrative, I find it hard to see how the Jesus story, with its self-erasures, is really compatible with the warrior life of Mohammed. It seems to me intellectually and even spiritually mushy to put these two religions in bed with each other, but perhaps this need to be so cut and dried is my being fundamentalist. Better to focus on the temperate zones of each religion and the ways in which, worldwide, Muslim teachers preach against zealotry and terrorism, even when their political geography makes it dangerous to do so. And it may be a good thing that even Paul Wolfowitz, that fundamentalist of democracy, is at home with the moderate Muslims of South-East Asia, and a personal friend of Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, and Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia. Maybe it is possible to imagine, even inside the American war music, quiet pragmatic spaces where faiths speak with each other. The least impositional belief system is probably Buddhism. It has an elaborate set of teachings about time, the self and suffering, which comes down to the modest exhortation to be mindful, day by day, minute by minute, of the suffering of others. No more, no less. The steely truth of Buddhism, a religion without a god, is that it solicits a wakeful mind at home with uncertainty. Its system of respect is an application of tolerance. It has no absolute except perhaps to constantly remind its adherents about the play of mind, its constant process. As a result, Buddhism is in a strong position to undercut delusions about the categories such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘fundamentalism’. One need not imply the other. Terrorism is political strategy as much as it

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is religious zealotry. Coming to grips with one – combating one – need not necessarily entail combating the other. The ‘skilful means’ of Buddhism offers fluidity with regard to political solutions – call them ‘negotiations’, if you will – that the circle and cycle of religious furies close off. Of course the pivotal teaching of Buddhism is to protect the life of all sentient beings. Some Buddhists will argue that this entails, in a context of war, an absolute pacifism. In which case, the self-immolations of monks in the Vietnam War was a natural outcome. My anguish about Iraq makes sense of it. But I am not a conscientious objector, not in the way, say, that the heroic Daniel Berrigan has been, in his long ‘swords into plough shears’ fight against US militarism. I find it hard to travel all the way with Berrigan because he keeps quoting his Isaiah. Today, those who cite their gods are a menace. But we – the humanists – need more than political stamina. Inwardly we need more than modernity’s emptiness – even though the Buddhist teaching is about emptiness. The paradox is that that emptiness goes right back to the great debate in the Marabharata, where those in the situation of continuous war have to find a way to right action. For doing nothing – the retreat to the meditation mat – is not an option (even though some doing nothing is action). I mean action – action as Krishna advised Arjuna on the field of battle. For, faced with the inevitability of war, and the prospect of having to fight his own kin when the world was conceived as kin, the agonising task for Arjuna was to find a conception of his duty. He had to find the right kind of detachment. Essentially, he had to act without anger and pride. ‘Victory and defeat, pleasure and pain are all the same,’ Krishna tells him. ‘Act but don’t reflect on the fruits of the act. Forget desire, seek detachment.’ Arjuna: ‘You urge me to battle, to massacre. Your words are ambiguous. I am confused.’ Krishna: ‘You must not withdraw into solitude. You must not stay without action, for we are here to serve the world.’ For Arjuna, there was much confusion to come. Arjuna has to contend with the instability of his mind, his sense of being swept towards evil, his – 460 –

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belief that his mind is unfree and full of illusion, its incoherence – all of this as well as the trickery of Krishna. He has to learn to live with all such doubts and uncertainties about the world, and about the ‘true battlefield’, which is his deepest being, ‘where each man must fight alone’. The unfolding, of which the Marabharata speaks, seems to me to en­compass whatever wars will demand of us next. The best silences might help us resist and counter more than one enemy at a time, including the enemy of the self. A Concession

And not one breath Was restored To one Shattered throat

Hayden Carruth

OK, say they make nothing happen. Better then to write with silence Blessed repetition close to prayer But not prayer, naturally, as prayer Like a poem may be so much air That goes to waste like dust Gales of dust then rain, then sludge. So consider one, a good one, thumbed in mud Or by a fingernail to mark the clay Of a pot re-turned to the oven Its heat blast storming your face Your eyes your mouth dumb. By that door your courage forms Waiting for your words to fire. – 4 61 –

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Hayden Carruth was writing against the Vietnam War and his poem says it did no good. It is an old sentiment, most famously stated by Auden. Even after his inspiring poem, September 1, 1939 – ‘show an affirming flame’ – he said ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Auden retreated from the war music of Europe for exile in America. In times of war, atrocity, and abuse of public office, poets have been naggingly tempted by exile. Think of the wise men of the Tang Dynasty, whose presence has inhabited my own poems as I have been writing my way through this war. Writing not as proclamation: more like a private survival strategy. Poems ‘are born’, as John Berger puts it, ‘of a sense of helplessness – hence their force’. In our culture – for which we now have to fight, or at least affirm in a strong fresh way – the poem is not only a form of praise, as it is in a theocracy. Our poems, as utterances, know their limits, their relative merits. Poems as manifestations of scepticism, doubt, uncertainty. Poems that have no project other than to be – well, to be as particular as they like, in keeping with a state of mind that has not settled on a God-given coherence. Poems that can’t help but be anti-doctrinal. Protestant poems that have no-one burnt at the stake. Poems that do not fire up from the crowd. Poems that can’t help but be – well, lonely, even as they yearn for the crowd. Poems that issue from individual minds and hearts, that dissent, that can’t help but be different. One way or the other, poems strike out alone. They sting in their own way. One sting leads to another. Poems as strings of stings. (Or poems as cats’ cradles, suspended between the head and the heart – delicate, strong constructions that are open to inspection.) In my case, one sonnet about this war has led to the other. One after the other they have gone out for peace and worried about the extent of our being implicated in the war. Each poem is different, none of them in uniform. I

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can see, too, that they have gone out without being properly dressed (philosophically, metaphysically, emotionally), and that sometimes they’ve been sent out in order to find out who they are, if you know what I mean … You, the reader, you in your singularity (unless you have found a reading group, and even then …). It is strange to be writing this with such an angular sense of reality, but that’s how it seems to be: the poet invested in this Western sense of discomfort. Writing without the luxury of praise. Writing outside the lovely circles of the ancient languages. Remember the shocking question in the Mahabharata: will your poem kill you? There seemed no answer, because the narrative moved in circles of death upon death, illusion after illusion creating more death. Vyasa, in fact, does not directly reply. But he has a scribe: none other than the elephant-headed Ganesh, the son of Shiva. ‘I am the bringer of peace,’ Ganesh announces, when he was about to start writing. ‘But I warn you, my hand can’t stop once I start to write. You must dictate without a single pause.’ It was as if to say: as soon as the death-creating narrative draws breath – shows a chink, offers an opening – the act of writing can shift the ground. Writing, because it can’t help but be critical, might help make peace. The libraries are full of anti-war poems, most of which have not had the good fortune to be action in the world. But I don’t want to absolutely give up on the Yanks. Here is my favourite anti-war poem, written on the walls of a US Army latrine during World War Two. Soldiers who wish to be a hero Are practically zero But those who wish to be civilians Jesus, they run into millions.

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H U M A N S MOK E , BA R E D T H ROAT S The lie has long since lost its honest function as a way of misrepresenting reality. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, 1951

Chilcot. The name sounds like something connected with the stillborn, a perfect offspring of our Minima Moralia, the damaged lives we inhabit since 9/11. One does not want to give time to it but one must. It has been and it has gone, and now it is back with a vengeance. Truly humiliating. One either disembowels oneself or one dissects it. One can remember when the arrival of such a report would have been invaluable, a godsend. Truth descending among us with winged feet. The angel of history having turned around to do good. That was then. We’ve had no such luck. Coils of retrospectivity clog the gut. Reading Chilcot is an exercise in reflux, albeit a necessary one, maybe even a way to better health. One can only try to hope. As it was, there were millions around the world standing on the streets of towns and cities: seldom had the public squares of cities been put to such good use, not since the Vietnam War, really. People had their heads up, their eyes raised. Slogans were worth reading. War for Oil. Stop the War – when the war had not really begun; although it would begin, it had to, it had been written. That was the winter of waiting – our summer of waiting. ‘When the war begins’, I remember writing, in a poem that would make nothing happen, ‘our yacht races will be over …’ We were not assembled without hope, not absolutely. We did not, for instance, have bombs strapped to our chests, although already the Christian pacifists were preparing to be in Baghdad when it all began. We were on home/ safe ground with each other – loved ones, men, women and children – and we

H uman S moke , B ared T hroats

had something to say in protest at them, those who were palpably preparing for war. We had bodies, voices, signs and countersigns assembled for what we were even calling peace. We had rhetoric with a noble history, and we were reviving it with a collective voice, even as our hearts were in our mouths. The depth of anger was inexpressible: that the Twin Towers had so rapidly provoked such a King Kong reaction in New York; that the asinine sentimentality, the insane narcissism of the Americans, already knew no bounds; that their victimhood was so lacking in self-analysis or any grasp of cause and effect – this chain of unreason guaranteed that we would have years, decades, the rest of our damned lives, living with the desperate consequences of what was about to start and which is now still going on – all this had to be suppressed in order to sustain hope and protest in the polis. Some rage had to be quelled in order to begin to think clearly. We had at least assembled, ‘proudly come out’ you might say; the energy was utopian, almost sexual, the better to make the polis pulse in the face of the warmongers. One remembers a sensation of bodies overheated, smoldering, as we marched and came to a halt – the affirming of resolution while also feeling weak in the knees. As they – the dissemblers and the fearful, omnipotent masters of war – brought their plans to fruition, we found ourselves in stockyards of expectation. In their rush to war we looked along our own race, feeling the blows coming, those political and then military events that slaughtered our sense of democratic worth. No matter what we said or did it all just went ahead anyway. The shock and awe of the bombing was meant for Baghdad and had its counterpart in our hearts and minds as we had to absorb the reality, our own unreality – at being rendered, in one last protest, politically impotent – extinguished as citizens, rendered zombie protesters. The thing is: we had thought and said and downright intuited everything that is in the chilling confirmations of Chilcot, and a sickening truth is that if we’d had a sliver of its analysis at the time who knows what strength we would have drawn from it? If. Now we are citizens disabled, and Chilcot arrives to put a seal on our present condition of political Ebola. Having to face the truth all over again, things can only get worse. – 465 –

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Sorry. One falls victim to despair, a cardinal sin, as Kierkegaard remarked. Who wants to argue with that? And sorry is not the order of the day. If one does not want to be assigned to the hospice of despair, one can deny all responsibility, as leaders have been doing effortlessly and with impunity. In one case – that of our own Prime Minister – no error of judgment is conceivable, let alone admissible. An old man with thickening jowls and grey mechanical mouth – ash on the lips – is leaning forward as he might do in a nursing home: energised, revitalised by denial, as if the lies permeating his system will never die, must never be allowed to die. Or not before he dies, at least, may the little cur rest in peace. In the other PM, the Englishman, there’s copious perspiration and everlasting movement from what presents as one inner theatre of self-confirmation. After Sir John Chilcot spoke from the Executive Summary (of twelve volumes and 2.6 million words) drawn up by his five privy councillors seven years after their inquiry began, Tony Blair ranted for two hours without stopping, followed by a masochistic session of questions and answers. Details are rebutted. Strategy reaffirmed. It was not so long ago; it was yesterday: the English PM remembers every demand that events placed on his infallible conscience. His decision, which only he could make, which he did make, stood and must still stand. He wants us to rest assured. That the decision he took was one that he believed in, utterly and faithfully. That if he stood in a pulpit with his hand on the Good Book, he could not be more sincere, authentic, more right and righteous about the absolute necessity – as absolute as the atom – of going to war. If and only if it was a mistake it was a mistake in good faith. Faith in war, that is. He was pallid, perfervid, but the sweat would have been cold … Still, Chilcot might have served to calm the man and that would have been a good thing. Except that these days, as a consultant in the Middle East, touring the Ebola wards and rattling his tin, he’s braying all the while. Think of Orwell on his deathbed: along the hospital ward he could hear the heehawing of his ruling-class contemporaries, their imperious tones echoing. ‘No wonder they hate us’, Orwell remarked, as if hearing himself inside out for the – 466 –

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first time. Blair, with the shrillness of one who has upwardly risen into the ruling class, is incessant animation: the more he bleats the greater his dread, perhaps, of being penetratingly heard. It is sickening because the document has two intestinal movements at the same time. It goes forwards and it goes backwards, offering a prospect of hope that is instinctively subverted. The experience of reading it – arousing memory, grief, guilt, the moral order – is akin to the experience of reading that perversely creative book, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, which takes its title from the image of the chimneys at Auschwitz. Time’s arrow in that narrative leads directly to the ovens. It moves from the ‘beginnings of World War II to the End of Civilization’, which is the subtitle of the book. On every page there’s a further cancellation of hope. This because the recounting is about pacifist failures to stop the war. Everywhere, it seems, good men and women are speaking of the right relationship between ends and means; they rush from one international conference to another, extolling peace, condemning rearma­ ments; they set out on pilgrimages to Germany; one of them – Gandhi – even reached out to Hitler: ‘Dear Friend,’ he wrote in July 1939. ‘Friends have urged me to write to you for the sake of humanity …’ This account of hopeful, even pragmatic bids for peace is full of grainy details because Baker is a novelist with a magpie’s eye for what might have been hidden or unmentionable in the natural course of larger political events: Human Smoke is a chronicle of myriad things that might, one feels, just might have made a difference but for … but for what, exactly? Well, the reality of armaments, that was certainly a force to be reckoned with, as was the bellicose disposition of some leaders and the history-bound resentments of others – the anxiety of everyone, the fragmented thinking and fretfulness of those in power, beside which the coherent peace visions of the powerless could be dismissed as utopian. But still Human Smoke unfolds not as a fantasy, not as a fable called ‘What If ’, but more as a meditation on the liquid ordering of events. There was, it seems, a peace option latent in that sequencing even as it accelerated ‘the end of civilization’. In the end (and the end of the reading), the thinking in the book cannot withstand the unfolding reality, as we know what is still to – 4 67 –

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come. One can only try to be a person fit to encounter the WHOLE WORLD differently – either that, or die, and in undesirable ways. Show me O show me the way to go home I must have whiskey or DIE The gravelly lines that Marianne Faithfull drags out of herself. Chilcot is reproach with sang-froid. It is a document of lists regarding the build-up to the war, its outbreak and chaotic aftermath, which culminated in a civil war that spawned the complex, lethal virus of Islamic State: it is heavily implied but never quite said in Chilcot that the shock and awe of the beginning, which proceeded without much thought to the manner of its possible ending, was a prime route to where we are now. Chilcot documents the various pre-war warnings that a military invasion could enlarge human calamity in unforeseeable ways. But the dead to come are not specified in the summary report. Not the civilians bound to die from the bombing, as they have been since colonial powers first attacked colonial villages more than a century ago. Nor the 150,000 Iraqi civilians overall, to name a lower estimate. Nor the dead who would make up the body count of soldiers on the field of battle, nor the US and UK soldiers who would die by their own hand if they got home alive, such was to be the lasting trauma of the war. Nor the death toll as the civil war devoured its own, which is in the nature of civil wars. What one comes to realise, as one embarks on Chilcot’s tracking of political manoeuvres prior to and during the invasion, and in the aftermath of what the report calls a ‘failure of strategy’ is that its cool referencing can only reinforce the horror of it all, which filled us with dread at the beginning and with shame now. The lineations of Chilcot map the subterranean routes to war, and point to our sense of incurring a damaged life since. In Chilcot all things are emergent, interdependent and as resonant – 4 68 –

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as false consciousness itself. A matter of ‘constructs’, you might say, to use a key word in Chilcot. The narrative is incipient as a mindscape as well as a course of dissembling and callous action and willed inaction. Chilcot did not need to colour anything in, or ‘sex anything up’, to use a phrase of the time (the intelligence reports were supposed to have been sexed up to make a case for the war, a claim that Chilcot rejects, a pedantic point considering his overall purport). The narrative uncoils as phantasmagoria, phenomenology, revealing itself as the burden of our political necessity, the one by which we have had to measure our life since 9/11, which has become a long, psychological moment. Chilcot revives one’s rage at the rage of King Kong, the nausea compounding incredulity at shock-and-awe bombing, a political event the insouciance of which rivalled the napalm bombing of Tokyo in 1945. As if to indicate: we are all in tinderboxes now, such is the psychic rendition of what bombing has to mean. 9/11 exposed our lives in Hannah Arendt’s terms of junction point and concrete objectification, of being superfluous as thinking agents. By 2005 the Iraq War had become ‘the forever war’, to use Mark Danner’s words, and the crimes in which we were to become complicit became preparation for reading Chilcot as a kind of Wotif health report, providing we could digest our pathologies a second time round – as if, by facing reality in the rear mirror, things might look up. But what can be done with the remorse that comes of a political defeat that reveals our demolition as citizens for peace? Still, Sir John dishes it all up with invigorating clarity: the report is the work of a senior public servant, aided by five privy counsellors, who writes well enough to lay his own reasoning as bare as we now are. It’s a credit to the superior mode of British reason that this is so, especially after the Brexit vote (coinciding with the release of Chilcot) that was blunderingly prompted by a cabal of old Etonians, those well groomed to speak well of the calamities they recklessly usher in. Chilcot’s style enables us to see some things as they are, or were, and still are. Orwell would not have argued with its prose, even if the quality of its political language was rather too close to Mandarin castes

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of mind. Orwell would have relished moments of transparency regarding nomenclature, if only for instructive ironic effect. While we are not told, for instance, that the code name for the head of MI6 was ‘C’ and that ‘C’ met with his counterparts in Washington as early as February 2002, by which time the Americans had firmly consolidated their decision to go to war, while expecting their British friends to cast about for a legal cover under the auspices of the United Nations, and ‘C’ came back to London cognisant of this deadly truth. So it cannot fail to be interesting to know that his full name in real life, as distinct from his dissembling life in intelligence, was Sir Richard Dearlove, who makes two stunning appearances in Chilcot. More whiskey, please. In Washington, ‘There was a perceptible shift in attitude’, Dearlove reported to London in July 2002. ‘Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy … There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.’ It’s tempting to cast a Dearlove in another episode of Spooks, except that Chilcot leads us less to fiction than to the psychiatric wards of non-fiction. Our disease arose from the welter of hazardous cognitions we had to contend with – the quality of ‘information’ that was fed to us. Only Freud’s iron-kettle joke about the ‘logic of dreams’ does justice to it, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out. The joke asserts three propositions designed to mess with our minds: 1. I never borrowed a kettle from you. 2. I returned it to you intact.

3. The kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Inconsistent arguments that undermine themselves is what Chilcot enumerates, although not in so many words. Having secretly told Bush ‘we are with you all the way, whatever’, Blair’s task was to refine what he called ‘the political context’ so that we could stomach the inconsistencies that were floated in the press as a finely tuned prelude to war. They included: – 470 –

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1. Saddam has weapons that were a ‘clear and present danger’ to everyone. 2. The CIA says that no such weapons have been found, despite extensive attempts to search for them. 3. The American President says there’s no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11. So there we were. Faced with a nutty gruel, as we tried to digest the insane inconsistencies. It was a form of eating shit, otherwise nameable as ideology, to which Chilcot alludes by reference to Blair’s ‘constructs’. ‘Construct’ is first mentioned on page forty-five of the Executive Summary. Chilcot is referring to the ‘ingrained belief of the Government and the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein’s regime retained chemical and biological warfare capabilities, was determined to preserve and if possible enhance its capabilities …’ He goes on: ‘This construct remained influential despite the lack of significant finds by inspectors in the period leading up to military action in March 2003, and even after the Occupation of Iraq’. Chilcot then elaborates on Blair’s scornful rebuttal of Saddam’s credibility on these matters – vociferously asserted by Blair in the speech he regarded as the most important of his life, which he delivered on 18 March, just two days before the invasion of Iraq. Blair’s focus was on Saddam’s ‘same old games’ of ‘obstruction and non-compliance’ along with his denials of still having any weapons of mass destruction, ‘contrary to all intelligence’, denials that ‘no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes’. There had been ‘minor concessions’, Blair said, ‘but there has been no fundamental change of heart or mind’, on the part of Saddam. The truth was, Chilcot demonstrates, that Blair massively overplayed the limitations of his own official intelligence. Rather, certainty was assumed when there was none; the claim that Saddam had actually got rid of the deadly stocks was not contemplated, nor was the notion that the weapons that just might still be in Saddam’s hands were not ‘weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target’. The resignation of one of Blair’s – 471 –

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men, Robin Cook, the Leader of the House of Commons, had already drawn attention to the above, but that did not move Blair to take pause, or to even contemplate the dampening things his own Joint Intelligence Committee had to say about Iraq as a nuclear threat or an immediate threat or as a co-conspirator with terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, before and after 9/11. This caution was shared by Baroness Manningham-Buller, the Director General of the Security Service from 2002 to 2007, as well as David Omand, the Security and Intelligence Co-coordinator in the Cabinet Office from 2002 to 2005. Finally – except that there has been no ‘finally’ in the perfervid universe that Blair whipped up – the link between Iraq and terrorism was indeed uncanny, and it did not belong to what might be called authentic or rational politics. Indeed one senior witness to Chilcot doubted that Blair himself had ‘ever accepted the link between Iraq and terrorism’. Oh, Blair was worried in general about ‘the possible conjunction of terrorism and WMD’ but not, as it happens, in regard to Iraq and terrorism. This submission was by none other than Sir Roger Dearlove. In other words, Chilcot is telling us, the speech that Blair regarded as ‘the most important’ he had ever made was a supremely knowing performance in bad faith. Correction: one could say it was a sincere performance of bad faith. When was the last time a head of intelligence revealed his supreme leader to be such a master of wicked pretense? Mendacity can know no bounds. A few years later, in his memoirs, Blair remarked, as if aware of the insidious knots of what was mendacious with what was mental in the pathological sense, ‘given the history, you couldn’t call Saddam a crazy target’. Chilcot does not really ask the obvious question about Blair’s animated logic for war. The report reminds us of the deceptively sincere tropes towards peace: Blair’s emphasis on the many attempts to get Saddam to cooperate after the Kuwait war (which ended limply when the Americans failed to remove Saddam from office); on Iraq’s history of limited cooperation as the United Nations applied its sanctions, and so on. Immediately after 9/11 the United Kingdom did stress the object of disarming Iraq by peaceful means. The United Kingdom was not manifestly caught up with the Americans’ objective – 472 –

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that went with disarmament: the regime change they’d failed to execute when they had intervened in Kuwait. Blair said, and said again, that he wanted peace by diplomatic means, and Chilcot chronicles this as well – even though his skillful narrative plots the rise of the construct that was to have Blair by the throat. How to explain this? It is impossible to escape the impression that Blair wanted, above all else, to support the United States of America, in all its glory. This did not make him a warmonger through and through. Blair could speak truth to power when power needed restraint and legitimacy, hence the flurry about getting United Nations support for a military ultimatum: he went through hoops to get this in the interests of improving the image of America in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of his own parliament, which would have to vote on any decision to go to war and which was to do so in favour of war by nearly four votes to one. He failed to do so because the ‘second resolution’ did not get up at the United Nations. In the face of opposition from all other members of the Security Council, the idea had to be dropped. Blair then turned to a new inspection – not of the state of play with WMDs in Iraq, not of the latest from the UN’s inspector of Iraq’s stockpiles and weaponry, Hans Blix – an inspection of the fine print and legal nuance that his own legal adviser, Lord Goldsmith, might bring to bear on what might legally justify the act of war. These legal niceties made good newspaper reading at the time, as the Lord’s brief went to and fro from his chambers to Downing Street, hedging as to the war’s legality, never quite opining to Blair’s satisfaction, and when he did (more or less) Blair was to keep it from Cabinet, abusing government processes of consultation. A gift of Chilcot is its provision of these texts: one can activate page notes and delve into the bowels of confidential Whitehall business. By the Christmas of 2002, it was clear that any doves that Blair had ever had on his shoulder had taken flight. Eagle feathers occupied his vestments as he sought to please a president who had long had a deeper agenda than most of us could imagine. Blair’s ‘construct’ became tantamount to being an ideological drive that was part and parcel of the neocon agenda, which had well taken shape before 9/11 (a fact that Chilcot does not explore so much as – 473 –

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imply the existence of). At what point, exactly, does a reformist Labour prime minister – who, like the Labour Party itself, is prone to revel in the humbug of claiming a philosophical legacy of pacifism – surrender to the dark glamour of war? It’s hard to tell (only a good novel by a Dearlove could tell). But who can forget Blair’s sheen through those eighteen months? He seemed to preen himself in the company of Bush, just as a vital new life emanated from Bush when he emerged in Iraq to priapically declare mission accomplished. Chilcot does not get into the entrails of Blair’s Laocoon. What his measured text does is write across the public turbulence at the time: he draws one thick line that says, more than once, that barely a thought was given to actual military strategy, and even less to the post-conflict management of affairs in Iraq. Another firm line is drawn to show that no-one had properly considered the effects of the invasion on the Iraqi people. Indeed Whitehall memoranda said next to nothing about the culture they were invading, its traditions, its language, its beliefs, its complex history, during and before Saddam. The coalition of the willing, that conga line we joined with such alacrity, emerges by implication from Chilcot in all its final, primal, stupid, murderous simplicity. Remember the first images of the invasion that were beamed into our lounge rooms: it was our SAS soldiers who were the first to cross illegally into Iraq. They did so by night; they were on the ground before the bombs came raining down, and one could see the young men all kitted out for the night fighting, with masks and dark glasses shielding their faces as they plodded forward on the desert sands out of which would arise the Islamic State. The Iraq War was trenchantly set up to fail. It was recklessly, dubiously legal from the start. Strangely, despite Chilcot’s account of Goldsmith’s shuffle, the report hardly features the fact that, when it canvassed the views of fiftyseven expert individuals and six organisations qualified to have a view, only one supported the claim that the war was legal. In this burial of informed opinion lies cause for the shame all round. Hence the loud and recent official denials designed to clear the conscience. The simple truth that Sir John Chilcot presents is this, which is said in the first instance of his Executive Summary: ‘Military action was not a last resort’; ‘the diplomatic options had – 474 –

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not at that stage been exhausted’. ‘Led by Mr. Blair, the UK Government chose to support military action.’ Blair said more. Blair, a typically guilt-stricken man, eventually pointed elsewhere. He blamed ‘the system’. The prime statement regarding the inevitability of the war, and the main reason we were destined to be rendered politically impotent as citizens, is that the Pentagon had plans to which Bush had to respond, as did Blair in his turn. More tests and more time for finding WMD was ‘indeed a hard sell to George’, Blair wrote in his memoirs. ‘His system was completely against it. His military, not unreasonably, fearing that delay gave the enemy time – and time could mean a tougher struggle and more lives lost …’ The military’s plans for Iraq drove the timetable to war. When push came to shove, they called the tune. Their needs made time run out. How callow Blair sounds here, for all the world piping up as if in a Punch and Judy show, theatrical until the last. How much reality can we bear? How much of it can we speak? Are we, the aggressors who sparked the everlasting conflict, the ones to try? Do we even have the ticker for it? One might well ask. In 1918, at the end of the Great War, which no-one at the time could imagine until it happened, and which can still defy the imagination, Freud was aghast at those who expressed their incredulity at its slaughter and degradation. That moved him to write his seminal paper on narcissism. How could humankind not know what it is capable of? Because there is no end to our vanities, Freud said, in effect, vanities that serve our instincts in the realm of death. No-one I have spoken to in the last few years has a hopeful way of talking about the field of sacrifice generated since we started what is still the forever war. As this is written planes are still bombing towns and villages, ostensibly to defeat barbaric jihadists, and as they do they wipe out schools and hospitals, and drive more people to live in tents in the desert. A pernicious interdependence of events is now a given. It hardly matters who or what is doing – 475 –

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the bombing, the Russians with Assad, or the Americans with the French, the Turks and the Australians (who are seldom mentioned in news reports). No-one counts on the United Nations. Cities are under siege and starving, and more ruined families under the stars is what we must bear in mind after yet another battle for Fallujah, and the battle for Mosul to come. Towns and villages that fall and rise in battles, creating a new map of territories as various forces advance and retreat. One could be forgiven for thinking there is an endless supply of civilians to take account of, dead or alive. Can one imagine the victors, if that is the term, standing in anything else but rubble? ‘Ground truth’ is vital, says Chilcot at one point, referring to the failures of military command to get the uncensored truth from the front. The ground truth now is what nightmares are made of – slaughter, sacrifice, slavery, mercilessness, criminality, and more war, more rubble as so many dead and maimed invite internment, like a death camp. Oh they are there, some buried alive, and we see – in Aleppo, for instance – the white helmets worn by the men who have stayed behind to dig them out with rudimentary tools and bare hands. The other day I saw a man draw a toddler from under a pile of cement blocks. There was a crowd of brave men around him. They had been digging by day and by night. Various combat forces had been unable and unwilling to cease fire, and the rescue operations took place in the path of bombing runs. Cries went up as the men with white helmets saw what their comrade had in his arms. The child clung to the man, and the man clung to the child even more strongly. The face of the child was lost in the bare neck of the man. There was weeping, but the child seemed, when he looked up, too stunned to weep. God is great, the rescuer called to his companions, and the others echoed him as he handed the boy over. That single child might one day come good: be able to weep, at least. The man who saved him was wiped out a few days later by another cluster bomb. All that is hopeful and true, it seems to me in this reign of mendacity and war, is – to use John Berger’s phrase – the possibility of undefeated despair. Chilcot is a late report on what is besieged within us.

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Meeting the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains

‘How did you get on with the Buddha?’ my daughter asked when I got back from the Blue Mountains. She caught my hesitation and let out a laugh, embarrassed at her slip of the tongue. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘many people have thought of him as a Buddha, the Buddha reborn, actually, ‘a living Buddha’.’ ‘I am just a simple monk,’ he insists, these days. But there is nothing simple about His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama – to use his full title as the leader of the Tibetan people. As a guru, he is seen by foll– owers as holy. ‘God-king’ was a Time magazine favourite. Everyone knows how magic signs revealed him to be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. Before that he was just Lhamo Thondup (which means ‘Wish-Fulfilling Goddess’), a little boy from a simple farming family. At the age of four he was installed in the vast caverns of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, ‘hidden away like an owl’, as he has put it, while being taught the ropes of sacredness. By the age of 24, when he fled the Land of Snows to make a government in exile in Dharamsala, India, he was a geshe, or a doctor of theology, for whom it was natural to consult oracles. The miracle now is that he is a spiritual and political presence in the main capitals of the world. He is one of the most famous people in the world. He’s a celebrity monk, in fact. You won’t find him in a cave any day soon. ‘So basically I always look at the human level,’ he was saying to me as soon as we sat down. ‘My main concern is inner peace,’ he went on. In this project his helpers are educationists and scientists. They have worked towards an education system that teaches young people to know ‘the system of the emotions’. ‘Love love love,’ he said, ‘not adequate.’

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Got a question for the Dalai Lama? In the weeks leading up to my appointment with him, I was asking around. ‘Oh,’ one bright woman said over her latte. ‘I can’t think of anything!’ She was overcome. She took another sip, and added, ‘But you could ask him if he would ever go on MasterChef again.’ I looked to see if she was joking. She mimed a wince. ‘Why, what happened on MasterChef?’ ‘I think they tipped noodles over his head,’ she sighed. How could such a thing happen? What were his minders thinking? I went looking for the atrocity image. I watched the episode from 2011. He was received reverentially and fed gourmet items as if they were religious offerings. Clearly he knew they were not: no-one could be so silly as to think he had not entered a principality of obsessive consumption, with its attendant capitalist vices of competitive skilling and regimes of egoism and cruelty. He ate what he was given and said nice things. He objected when one of the judges carped about a dish. The cook did her best, he snapped. Afterwards, he went backstage to thank the trembling kitchen slaves. He shook every hand and said the Buddhist way was not to criticise food but to be thankful for what they had been given. Thus, at the end of the show, he affirmed, in the face of Gross Consumerism, the ethic of Gratitude. Bravo, I felt. Then I found the image. There he was leaning over a wide sideboard of noodles while the three judges ponced around his skull, piling noodles onto it. The image was a digital concoction. There was the predictable row about disrespect, and the Dalai Lama told the Sunday Times in London that he regretted going on the show but had done so on the advice of his secretaries. Of course, in a celebrity culture, the Dalai Lama and his minders have to be prepared for all manner of events. Celebrity lights exploit every nuance of the possibly new, however cheap and cheapening. The integrity of the star is to be protected but nakedness is the name of the game. You can’t be in it, without the risk of losing it.

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My daughter, who breathes celebrity, also had a question for him. ‘Ask,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘does he have any fears?’ Fear of night flying, the Dalai Lama said, or words to that effect, when I put the question. He said that when his plane was taking off he felt like that Australian native animal – what was it? He turned to his translator. ‘Koala,’ he added, with a hearty laugh. ‘Koala! It’s an animal with very strong claws,’ I said. His laughter continued. ‘Apart from that, no man-made fears,’ he said. It’s also the banality of celebrity culture that is the killer. On the one hand, you can be humiliated by persons paid to let their vanity run riot in front of the cameras, overexposing the worth of their commodity. On the other hand, you can get stoned to death by the medium that wants everything to be simple. Unbearably so, excruciatingly, boringly so. Still, it has to be said that just about everyone I know loves the Dalai Lama. Sometimes it is utter, devotional love. ‘I want to touch you when you come back,’ said my financial adviser. Or is it a love founded on secular esteem? Admiration and respect for a man who has become synonymous with courage, clarity, decency, patience, and who has survived for so long as an influence for good in the world. A non-violent presence, one should add, thinking of Gandhi, whom the Dalai Lama admires. A pacifist presence in the face of state power, brutal atrocities and all the mendacities of the chaos we endure these days. How does he survive with such vigorous vitality, and after all he has been through? He was a few weeks short of 80 when I met him, and as we sat knee to knee, I could sense his life force, or whatever it was that kept him laughing. ‘Why are you always laughing?’ I asked. ‘Oh, because, we Tibetans, we are very jovial people,’ he said, and he held forth in that inimitable way of his: leaning forward with his head tilted, the smile playing in all parts of his face, his voice a lilt or resounding like a conch shell. – 479 –

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I hoped he would say, ‘Oh, because I have the strength of a person who has mastered “inner disarmament”.’ It is ‘inner disarmament’ to which he refers when he wants to speak spiritually without making a song and dance about being spiritual. The ‘inner disarmament’ comes from stripping away our anger and hatred, leaving us open to the compassion and sense of kinship that give us peace with ourselves and with others  – what humanity needs, he insists. I wanted something wise, like that. The secularists who love him need such straightforward wisdom. Many of us wonder if he is a hedgehog or a fox – I’m thinking of that famous essay on Russian thinkers by Isaiah Berlin, who saw Dostoyevsky, the Christian mystic who knew one big thing, as a hedgehog, and Tolstoy, who knew many different things, as a fox. You could say the Dalai Lama is both fox and hedgehog. With his Buddhist faith in loving-kindness he is a hedgehog. In his skilful means of playing a patient strategic game with China (or MasterChef) he is a fox, albeit a defeated one, it seems. But who has ever met a nicer, foxier hedgehog? Think of his grace and good humour when rebuffed by a prime minister, a president or even a pope, because they care more for the weather in Beijing than they do for a conversation with a good and powerless man. The masses love him for his charming insistence on a worldly innocence. The oxymoron seems to create comfort in our age of escalating anxiety. Time and again he comes across as the human being whose powerlessness shows up power for what it often is: organised callousness. ‘The Chinese,’ he laughed, ‘call me demon.’ ‘Or they said you were a ‘wolf in monk’s robes’, a compliment coming from them,’ I said. ‘Oh yes,’ he chuckled. There was a moment with the Chinese when he did know fear. I mentioned what he’d written as a young man, when he came back from several months living in Peking in 1954. It was a thrilling, dramatic, historical moment and I had written a radio drama about it – Ocean and Great Helmsman –which was broadcast by Radio National in the early ’90s. ‘Ocean’ is often used to refer – 480 –

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to the Buddha, as ‘Great Helmsman’ was a title for Mao. As a boy of 19, the Dalai Lama thought he might join the Communist Party, which he held to be the party of compassion. He had himself transported in a palanquin from Lhasa along with a party of 500 officials. They travelled for weeks, eventually by mule and then by car, jeep and truck, on new roads already being made by Tibetan forced labour. Finally, they crossed into China. Then a plane to Xian, the ancient capital, and on to Peking. He marvelled at China’s technological and material progress. He met Mao many times, found him ‘spellbinding’, and was lulled by the fact that Mao’s mother had been Buddhist and that Mao once praised the Buddha because he was against the caste system. He explained to Mao that the Buddha valued ‘a thorough investigation’ before accepting something as true or false. This was the Dalai Lama showing his pragmatism towards science and modernity. Back in Lhasa, he’d loved looking through his telescope, tuning into the BBC on his radio, repairing his clocks. (In years to come he would be absorbed in the wonders of quantum physics, with its dynamic conceptions of objective reality. One of his recent – and characteristically well-written – books is called The Uni­verse in a Single Atom: How science and spirituality can serve our world.) One day, Mao loomed over him and enunciated another prime truth. Religion is poison. ‘At this,’ the Dalai Lama wrote in his memoir Freedom in Exile, ‘I felt a violent burning sensation all over my face and I was suddenly very afraid. So, I thought, you are the destroyer of the Dharma, after all.’ Do you still feel there are those who would destroy the teachings? ‘Well, one aspect of Chairman Mao has that kind of view. But then, the immediate question is why? Firstly, he could not know the deeper value of the tradition, particularly Buddhism. These days I am saying that if Mao was still alive and had serious contact with modern scientists, he may have – he was quite an intelligent person – he may have different views.’ Marxism and Buddhism. Are they still partners?

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‘Not communism,’ he said, but ‘socialism’. Nowadays ‘communism pays more attention to money and power’ than the principal concepts of a classless society and equal distribution of wealth. He leaned forward when he said ‘socialism’, lighting up as if pleased to say the word after all these years. Religion is not the poison, he has written. ‘Sectarianism is poison.’ Soon after the Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa, Mao broke his promises of making gentle reforms in Tibet. The People’s Liberation Army jackbooted in, monasteries were sacked and atrocity reigned in the land. In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled, leaving a ragtag group of guerrilla fighters who were covertly supported by the CIA. Two of his brothers were active resisters, and the Chinese had attempted to manipulate one of them to assassinate him. The Dalai Lama threw himself into peaceful efforts to support his people as refugees, conceding territorial sovereignty to China while desperately campaigning for cultural autonomy. It has taken the rest of his life to establish his presence on the world stage. He is that rare thing: a leader in exile who must know there is no prospect of his people returning to their homeland, and even if they ever did, it would be barely recognisable – the Chinese would outnumber them, their religion would be in ruins. For all his tenacious optimism and inspiring affirmations, even his fondest supporters must know that the Tibetan cause is politically hopeless. But he cannot say so. His fate has been to stay afloat in their sea of suffering. On this nationalistic front, there were poignant moments when he went to Uluru in June. It was his first visit, although this was his tenth trip to Australia. His minders must have been pleased with the heartwarming footage of him walking hand in hand with Aboriginal elders, their great rock looming in the background. He gave a talk to a few hundred people in a football field, praising them for holding on to their culture and advising Australia to value it as well, rather as if this was a new idea. What his advisers seemed to have failed to tune him into is the depth of social tragedy in central Australia, where the suicide rate is as dire as that of

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monks in Tibet. Even so, as an Aboriginal leader told the television camera, they were lucky compared to the Tibetans. At least Centralians were living on their own land. It is hard to imagine this was not salt into the wound of the Tibetan caravan. With such scales of hopelessness in mind, I ventured to suggest to the Dalai Lama that many Australians are fraught by their own political impotence about the recent wars they’d been in – and now, with Islamic State, are still in, bombs and all, civilians increasingly at risk. ‘When America and its allies invaded Iraq, you wrote that it was a mistake to characterise Saddam Hussein as the villain of the piece.’ He nodded. ‘Even more,’ he said, ‘to say that all problems [are] due to one person – that’s a mistake. Sometimes he was called evil. But that does not mean a person was evil right from the beginning. Right from the beginning – we are the same human beings. We all have the same potential to develop love or compassion, that’s the seed of peace.’ ‘Do you think the same of Islamic State? I mean, how do we heal ourselves from such atrocities, when people are behaving so murderously? Are we making the same mistake as we did with Saddam?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What should we do with the young men, or women, who go to that war and then seek to come back? How should we receive them?’ ‘You should act according to your law,’ he replied, which I took to mean that they could well be arrested and punished, if necessary. But above all, he said, ‘we should look at the human level’. ‘Education,’ he went on. ‘I think many terrorists are genuine followers of Islam. Some have other reasons. But others are religious-minded. So [it is] very important that we don’t push them. We must look at the human level. Some become radical, become terrorists because of a secondary level of human circumstances. At a fundamental level, they are also human beings.’

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‘So, if possible, at some meeting, we should invite these terrorists to sit quietly and relax and discuss. You see, they love their own religion, but their activities are very harmful to the image of Islam, which they love and they follow. Because they have too much emotion, they can see only one aspect. In order to calm their agitated mind, we must extend our love. And talk.’ ‘Please explain how it is that an enemy can be a friend.’ ‘Because you can learn patience,’ he said firmly. ‘And also you can practise infinite love. Usually your love and care applies to your own friends. It doesn’t by nature, biologically, develop that way. We are social animals. So what’s important now is that those who create our problems, those who we call enemy, can, through reasoning, through training, develop a sense of care or a sense of their love, or affection. That we really need.’ I did not doubt that this was well worth saying. It was, admittedly, semantically confusing to hear a teacher say, ‘Not love love love’, almost as if he had Tina Turner’s song in mind, and then in the next instant bring love back with bells on. Naturally, there is a family of terms at work here: love, lovingkindness, forgiveness, compassion – above all, compassion, which is the heart of Buddhist teaching. The teachings play over and over, and in the Dalai Lama’s broken spoken English they can sound like an old gramophone. Yet the repetitions are also deep. Aldous Huxley, who had laid out the common ground of religions East and West in The Perennial Philosophy, observed that it’s a ‘bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “Try to be a little kinder”.’ But, I wondered, what if one just lacked compassion, and didn’t even have it for oneself? I asked him, ‘What should come first, compassion for others or compassion for oneself?’ ‘Too much narrow, selfish tendencies, self-cherishing!’ he declared. ‘If you really have self-hatred you will never spiritually develop. So first you love oneself, then you extend to others. You see, anyone with negative feelings towards the self, it’s impossible to develop love for others.’

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And right here, of course, his deceptively simple teachings slot into the self-regard of celebrity culture. We were walled up in his suite at the plush Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains. There was something of silver sheen beside the Dalai Lama when he came out of the lift. It was his smiling charitable friend, Richard Gere, a longtime student of Buddhism who is the chair of the International Campaign for Tibet. Wealthy people have come from all over the world to this retreat. Guests will partake of advanced Tantric instruction designed to cultivate altruism. Five days of prayers and vows and mantras to deities who are atavistic aides to the betterment of others. The Dalai Lama, the doctor of ancient theology, is backed up by the scores of clergy who can be glimpsed making bowed progress hither and thither, consorting among the rich. His room has the best of views of the beautiful escarpments, glowing like giant kilns in the distance. A cable car is just below us. It is possible to feel, sitting there, that everything was being spoken on the edge of a cliff. For the hard truth of Buddhism is that we must take firm responsibility for ourselves, and the Dalai Lama has in recent years been pulling the rug from beneath himself. How many know, for example, that he is on record as saying he has too many monks and nuns in his operation? Then, more bracingly, ‘I feel that Buddhist monks and nuns tend to talk a great deal about compassion without doing much about it.’ He is also of the opinion that you don’t need to be a Buddhist to get what he is on about. It’s enough for the simple monk to offer teachings as practical medicine against the destructive emotions of anger, fear, pride and egoism. He speaks of his ethics as beyond religion, a teaching for the whole world. ‘Universal responsibility.’ Everything hangs on a notion of interdependence. This is a truth of the cosmos, at every level. At the human level, the self can’t not be connected to others. Self-interest demands that we think of the welfare of others as we do – 4 85 –

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of ourselves. We had best exist while being fully awake to selflessness. This is the wisdom of Buddhism, its golden braid, which can be presented ornately, as it is on this retreat with its medieval trappings, or it can be offered plainly, as psychological insight, which will be demonstrated in a few days, when he discourses on forgiveness. A couple of thousand people will pay to hear him. They won’t have tickets on themselves as potential monks and nuns. They will mainly be hoping for some tips on cultivating a beneficial inner life, which might include the little miracles that sometimes allow us to forgive each other. He is patient. I could feel the patience solid as a rock in front of me. I asked him about cultivating forgiveness. ‘Our only hope is to look to future generations,’ he said, in several contexts. On forgiveness he always wants to distinguish between the bad deed and the bad person. He will stress the healing power of being able to forgive. And he likes to tell the story of a Tibetan friend who was imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese but held on to his own sense of humanity by retaining compassion for them. I remarked, ‘We must make a zero of the self, Gandhi used to say.’ He paused. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but, then, from another point of view, in order to practise infinite love, and selflessness, you need tremendous courage. You need a strong sense of self.’ ‘How much self-sacrifice do we need, if we are to fight for peace? What are your feelings about the monks and others in Tibet who are setting fire to themselves? How should we see those actions?’ A shadow passed across his face. The self-immolations in Tibet are regular these days. There have been 140 since 2009. On his last visit to Australia, in 2013, he told the ABC’s 7.30 program that the self-immolations in Tibet were acts of non-violence. He was signalling that such acts of self-sacrifice are acceptable when they are expressions of compassion towards others, rather than acts of anger. Clearly, he did not want

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to imply any strategic support for such desperate practices. It is doctrinally problematic to take one’s life, when life is of the utmost preciousness. And politically, it would smack of supporting a violent resistance to the Chinese occupation. So the fox, at that moment, goes to ground. ‘Of course, very, very sad. Very sad. They are really concerned about the situation, including religious freedom, and basic human rights. But their method [is] rather desperate, drastic. It is understandable. But it’s a very, very sensitive political matter, so I usually keep quiet!’ He paused once more. ‘I am retired now …’ he said quietly. He retired from being Tibet’s official leader in 2011. Tibet’s government in exile has an elected parliament and a prime minister, Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard-trained lawyer. We might not hear much of the prime minister, but who is to say what will unfold in the future? As a globalist and a realist, the Dalai Lama has set his people on a democratic rather than a theocratic path. Meanwhile, his globetrotting is to spread the teachings of Buddhism – no more, no less. The monies raised simply fund the tours, and anything left over goes to charities. ‘So therefore’, he is fond of saying, between thoughtful utterances. ‘So therefore’ – with a birdcall inflection. His presentations strike bells. One sound does not necessarily follow from another. Or rather, you have to be deeply tuned in to hear the logical links. Often his discourse is a pitch to particular audiences, delivered with a forensic sense of what might answer to their particular needs. The Buddha did this, too, famously frustrating followers who were not quite ready for him. But there was nothing mystifying about the pedagogic strategy. Kindness above all, that’s the thing. I suspect that many people get comfort from this when they are in the warm presence of the Dalai Lama. They want to see the simple monk shine like a saint, far from the darker recesses that are hidden in ancient Tibetan Buddhism, with its rituals and offerings for battling the demons that embody our wickedness. – 487 –

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And nowadays the simple monk has another ploy. Maybe there will be no Dalai Lama after me, he often says. Maybe I will be the last Dalai Lama! How could he say this? I looked at him in the pale light of the Blue Mountains and saw no sign of him vanishing. But the statement solicits the image of a monk going over a cliff (the better perhaps to swing himself off into a hidden cave). Everything the Dalai Lama said to me that day was animated with optimism. In the last minute of our talk, he made a long statement about how the achievements of last century had led into the achievements of this century. I could hardly believe my ears. He seemed to gloss over the horrors of two world wars, global poverty, vanishing species, environmental calamities, the ongoing wars and disease created by ignorance and neglect. His sweeping historical affirmation defied the rational mind. I just had to go away and dwell on it, turn things over, and try to get into the zone of positive thinking. Go on a retreat, perhaps. Sit with it. The confounding thing is that the Dalai Lama simply has a nobility of purpose and method and presence that defies dark gravity. And I should not forget that back in Dharamsala, he hangs a rifle over his bed, something he’s never wanted anyone to photograph. It’s an air gun, and he uses it to frighten the hawks when they arrive to threaten the sparrows he so loves.

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ACK NOW L E D GE M EN T S I am in debt to the former editor of Overland, Nathan Hollier, now Director of Monash University Publishing, for the idea of collecting my essays from 40 years of writing (excluding, for reasons of space, the great majority of book reviews, and most of what I have written on poetry). These collected are, overall, some of the longer essays. A long-standing and erudite friend, John Embling, whose dynamic intellect so often sustains me, had been recommending the same thing for years. It only remained for me to agree, select the essays, and face reading them again in the hard light of their later days, a task which has made me immensely grateful for the attentiveness of other friends: Rod Moss, Ian Wedde, Richard Murphet, Philip Huggins, Rai Gaita, Kieran Finnane, Robert Dare, Richard Tanter, Anna Murdoch, Justin Clemens, Kynan Sutherland, Craig San Roque, Peter Sutton, Graham Bird, Brian Hoath, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Paul Kane, John Wolseley, Kim Mahood, and Tom Griffiths who has so kindly done me the honour of writing an introduction to what is here. Gratitude is also extended to several editors for their receptivity to my work: Alison Caddick and her team at Arena; Julianne Schultz at the Griffith Review; Ian Syson and Barrett Reid at Overland; Ivor Indyk at Heat, Peter Rose at ABR, Nick Feik at The Monthly, as well as the literary editors at The Age and The Australian. The social histories of some essays demand I must pay respects to individuals at their respective institutions: Philip Derby at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies; Gerry Simpson and Rai Gaita at the University of Melbourne Law School; Paul Hetherington at the National Library of Australia. The list gets longer if I dwell on the four decades that span these essays, so I must stress my present life’s absolute essentials: the reading prowess of my son, Joe Hill, along with the keen eye and heart of my wife, Rose Bygrave. I also want to thank my daughter, Vanessa, for what she had to say as I prepared to meet the Dalai Lama.

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Several of these essays have been written for this collection: they include ‘Brecht’s Song’, and ‘Dogs and Grog: New Writing in Alice Springs’, which are not yet published. ‘Human Smoke, Bared Throats’, and ‘Loving Roughneck, John Berger’s Hopeful Body’, were published in Arena in 2016–17. ‘Dark Star’ was first published in The Age, in 1982, seriously revised for this collection, and published in Meanjin in 2017. The others are published here with acknowledgement of their original places of publication as follows: ‘Brushes With The Body: On Lucian Freud’, The Australian’s Literary Review 2008; ‘Crossing Cultures’, Meanjin 2003; ‘Ezra Pound: Tragic Orientalist’, Heat 2010; ‘Flaubert and the SS: William Gass’s The Tunnel’, Quadrant and The Australian 1996; ‘Getting to Grips with Naked’, Griffith Review 2009; ‘Greg Dening’s Cannibalism’, The Age 2004; ‘Hannah Arendt’s Dire Love’, The Age 1996; ‘Holding Landscapes: John Wolseley’s Mapping Into Australia’, Heat 2007; ‘Letter to My Father’, Griffith Review 2008; ‘Maggots and Mysticism: On WEH Stanner’, Arena 2009; ‘Naked Flame: DH Lawrence’, The Age 1986; ‘Notes on Terra Nullius’, Australian Book Review 1987; ‘On the Edge with the Dalai Lama’, The Monthly 2015; ‘Orwell’s Fraternal Glances’, in The Best Australian Essays, edited by Peter Craven, Black Inc., 2003; ‘Poems That Kill’, Griffith Review 2005; ‘Rai Gaita’s Mont Blanc’, in A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita, edited by Craig Taylor, Monash University Publishing 2013; ‘Reason and Lovelessness: Resistance at the Tokyo Trial’, published as ‘Reason and Lovelessness: Tagore, War Crimes and Justice Pal’, Postcolonial Studies 2015; ‘Rod Moss Naked’, Arena 2004; ‘Robert Manne’s Shooting Season’, Australian Book Review 2008; ‘Stepping Out with Fay Zwicky’, Australian Book Review 1986; ‘The Mood We’re In, circa 2004’, Overland 2004; ‘Through Larapinta Land’, in Exploring Central Australia, edited by S.R. Morton and D.J. Mulvaney, Surrey Beatty & Sons 1996; ‘Translating Love into Landscape’, Visva Bhariti Quarterly 2005; ‘Uses and Abuses of Humiliation: Rabindranath Tagore’s Management of Defeat’, Griffith Review 2016; ‘Welcome Dance: On Reading Songs of Central Australia’, Overland

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Acknowledgements

1992; ‘Wild Pilgrim: Ko Un’, The Monthly 2013; and ‘William Buckley, Imagination, Hope’, in the catalogue William Buckley: Rediscovered, Geelong Gallery 2001. The cover of this book I owe to the generosity and tolerance of my friend, the painter/writer Rod Moss, who allowed Joe Hill to tinker with his Dogs in Camp (1991) for design purposes.

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On Reason & Lovelessness: A rich gift. Thirty two invitations to share the speculative adventures, in friendships, in family, in the world of politics and moral and spiritual commitment, of ‘a man in his wholeness, wholly attending’. An extraordinary revelation of the considered life. —David Malouf Reason, as passionate analysis and the higher Reason of moral law, runs through this astonishing collection of essays as a lifeline cast to us in a loveless world bereft of justice. At last we have the proper lens for getting Barry Hill into focus: so varied and extensive is his accomplishment as a writer—in poetry, fiction, social and cultural history, and criticism—that we need this book to gather together in one place an adequate reflection of all that achievement. This is ‘Man Thinking’, in Emerson’s phrase—the work of a finely honed intellect and a capacious spirit—that educates us in the full range of our humanity. Like DH Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and John Berger—all of whom he writes about cogently—Hill shows how a life of writing is a life of thinking, when both the mind and the heart are animated by love and by reason. —Paul Kane, Vassar College These are intimate, stylish essays. This collection showcases Barry Hill’s remarkable intellectual curiosity and erudition. From questions of belonging and attachment, to global challenges of survival, belief and knowledge, Barry unflinchingly pushes through new frontiers to reveal, with passion and precision, new ways of seeing and feeling. —Julianne Schultz, Griffith Review

ISBN: 978-1-925377-26-2 (pb) ISBN: 978-1-925377-27-9 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-925377-66-8 (ePub)

www.publishing.monash.edu

About Reason & Lovelessness Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, history, biography, fiction and reportage. This collection of essays, variously published in Australia, India and London, includes ‘satellites’ of his major works—such as Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in Labour History; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a literary biography on Aboriginal and frontier poetics; and Peacemongers (2014), a pilgrimage book about Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other essays are new: ‘Brecht’s Song’, on his working-class mother; ‘Dark Star’, an expansion of his meeting with Christina Stead on her 80th birthday; ‘Loving Roughneck’, his critical appreciation of John Berger; and ‘On the Edge of the Cliff ’, on his private meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Blue Mountains. As has been the case with his book-length works, Hill’s essays collected here are ground-breaking: freshly, deeply researched, genre-crossing, multidisciplinary, combining the candidly personal with the philosophical.

About the Author BARRY HILL was born in Australia and educated in Melbourne and London, where he worked as an educational psychologist and a journalist for The Age and the Times Educational Supplement. He left newspapers to write full-time in 1976; his first book, The Schools, won the National Book Council prize. As a freelance columnist for The Age he established himself as the country’s first radio critic, and between 1980 and 2010 he wrote many works for ABC Radio National. His libretto Love Strong as Death was performed at The Studio at the Sydney Opera House in 2004. His fiction is widely anthologised, including in Chinese and Japanese translations. ‘The Mood We’re In: circa Australia Day 2004’ won the Alfred Deakin Prize for the Essay. His acclaimed poetry includes Ghosting William Buckley (1993), and Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (2012), which was shortlisted for the UK 2013 Forward Prize. In 2009 Hill was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Between 1998 and 2008 he was Poetry Editor for The Australian, and between 2005 and 2008 a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne. He lives by the sea in Queenscliff with his wife, the singer-songwriter Rose Bygrave.