Literary Activists : Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life 9780702241406, 9780702236624

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Brigid Rooney completed her PhD at Macquarie University before taking up an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sydney. She has published many essays on Christina Stead and on her own current research in Australian literary and cultural studies journals. She now teaches and pursues her research interests in Australian Studies and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.

First published 2009 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.com.au © 2009 Brigid Rooney This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in 12/16pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data National Library of Australia Rooney, Brigid. Literary activists : Australian writer-intellectuals and public life / Brigid Rooney. ISBN: 978 0 7022 3662 4 (pbk.) ISBN: 978 0 7022 4140 6 (ebook.) Includes index. Bibliography. Australian literature – Study and teaching. Popular culture and literature – Australia. Australia – Intellectual life. A828.3

The body is in the social world but the social world is also in the body. Pierre Bourdieu Decay; upon my body that summons was served; and now the flesh speaks sadly, How can we be saved? Judith Wright

CONTENTS

Introduction Australian writers – tourists or residents? Wright and White: Big figures in the cultural landscape 1940s to 1970s Chapter 1 A play of opposites: Judith Wright’s poetic-public crossings Chapter 2 Imagining the real: Patrick White’s literary-political career

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Inheritance, (dis)possession, poetry 1960s to 1980s Chapter 3 Networks and shadows: the public sisterhood of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Judith Wright Chapter 4 Inheritance and refusal: the properties of white Australian poetry

1 3 29

Part 2

Part 3

57 59 78

Fractured consensus: literary whiteness and belonging in the 1990s 95 Chapter 5 Alienating powers: Les Murray’s poetry and politics 97 Chapter 6 Cultivating nation: the quiet diplomacy of David Malouf 119

Part 4

Fragmentation and renewal: Australia’s changing literary publics 1995 to the present Chapter 7 J’accuse in the Antipodes: Helen Garner’s public interventions Chapter 8 Engaging the masses: Tim Winton, activism and the literary bestseller Coda Australian writer-intellectuals in the twenty-first century: legacy and future Acknowledgments Endnotes Select bibliography Index

137 139 158 181 195 198 235 251

I N T RO D U C T I O N

A

ustralian writers – tourists or residents?

In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves. Patrick White, ‘The Prodigal Son’, 1958

Having escaped the Saturday morning chores, I was seated with a friend inside Sydney’s Redfern Town Hall. It was a good-sized, amicable crowd, vocalising softly in sympathy with the speaker. It was 29 March 2003, one week into the Iraq war. The first contingent of Australian troops was preparing to join Coalition forces. And here we were, at the Australian Society of Authors Annual Colin Simpson lecture, where David Marr was delivering his talk: ‘The Role of the Writer in John Howard’s Australia’.1

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Marr captivated his audience that morning. He drew a striking contrast between present-day Australian culture and circumstances some decades ago. During the 1940s and 1950s, he argued, an increase in Australia’s prosperity had had a ‘civilising effect’.Then, in the Whitlam era, the political influence of Australia’s cultural producers – of its creative writers, playwrights and filmmakers – had reached a peak. Whitlam’s sweeping reforms, including an extensive revamp of government funding of the arts, were the vehicle for a more progressive Australian nationalism. As a result, Australian writers had ‘found themselves big figures in the new cultural landscape’: By the mid 1970s – the halfway point in this long loop back to where we are today – political parties anxiously sought the endorsement of the nation’s leading artists. Over ten general elections, arts policy launches became hoopla campaign events in big theatres with big names and big crowds . . . both sides of politics boasted their enthusiasm for supporting the arts . . . Then Australian politics began to shift.

Things are very different now, according to Marr: today, artists and writers have become political liabilities, not assets, and politicians are quick to distance themselves from the taint of arts elitism.2 Nonetheless, Marr sought to rally his audience. At the heart of his talk was the example, drawn from his own expertise as biographer, of the life and work of Patrick White. It was with great effect that Marr conjured White’s irascible spectre, reading out those famous lines, quoted in my epigraph, from ‘The Prodigal Son’, White’s inflammatory criticism of Australian philistinism. Folded into the context of ‘Howard’s Australia’, those fifty-year-old words garnered new power. It seemed to follow, as night follows day, that writers had only to take up White’s example – to use their art to focus ‘without flinching’ on the current national scene, to observe and engage the ‘new old Australia’ – to make a difference. As Marr outlined it, the

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pressing task for writers now was to challenge Australia’s relaxed and comfortable mainstream, to ‘shake off the new philistinism’, to provide the nation’s moral compass, and to ‘find absolutely unexpected ways of doing this’. For the ‘role of the writer is always to surprise’. Questions from the floor afterwards showed strong consensus with these views. Marr’s political appropriation of Patrick White on this occasion was one of which White himself would undoubtedly have approved. It had reached out to and stirred a sympathetic constituency.White’s name had been made to function – not for the first time – politically, as proxy in an ongoing struggle. This struggle was not only about countering then Prime Minister Howard’s version of Australia but also about reviving what Patrick White has come to represent in a much broader, cultural and national – and perhaps too in a deeply humanising – sense: the urgent necessity of sustaining the relevance, value and public authority of an Australian literary culture. Warmed by the event, I returned home. But one question from the floor – where was today’s equivalent of the protest song? – continued to trouble me. It seemed to assume that today’s youth had no culture of political resistance. Yet who was Marr’s audience that day? How representative? I had noticed few young people there – the gathering had been mostly mature in age. Battle-weary baby boomers had comprised a familiar, earnestly polite crowd. They, or rather we, were frequenters of writers’ festivals, listeners to ABC Radio National and purveyors of refined cultural goods. To use one commentator’s phrase, we were an audience of ‘book chatters’.3 Meanwhile, so I imagined, today’s counterparts of 1960s youth were spending the day in casual retail, service or hospitality work. With neither free tertiary education nor affordable housing, they must struggle for a foothold in a competitive global economy. Pathways to adulthood now bristle with complexities and demands with which their parents, even allowing for the threat of conscription, had not contended to the same extent. Further, for politically engaged youth – and there are some – of what relevance is a literary

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book culture dear to older generations? In this age of digital, electronic and visual cultures, books compete and interact with film, television and the internet, all of which offer highly accessible and powerful means of story-telling. Generational differences raise one set of issues. Others are raised by class or, to use more nuanced terms, social relations expressed in economic, occupational and educational differences. In Sydney, social differences also follow geographic patterns. It would, for example, be surprising if the majority of Marr’s audience that day had had very far to travel to inner urban Redfern. A sprinkling may have come from further afield. Just beyond Sydney’s sprawling suburbia, zones of natural beauty like the Blue Mountains or the South Coast are home to tertiary-educated and arts-minded communities fleeing city or suburbs in search of what has been described as a sea- or tree-change. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to Sydney. Even if they commute to workplaces there, few members of this social group seem keen to live in greater south- or north-western suburbia, with its areas of massive socio-economic disadvantage, or heavily mortgaged ‘McMansions’ in burgeoning, public-transportpoor housing estates. What of the exigencies of life in such suburbs? I live in a 1960s dormitory suburb, one in which significant demographic changes have been underway for some time. An older generation of AngloCeltic Australians has been moving out and younger families, mainly of Korean and Chinese background, have been moving in. Local streets, shopping precincts and community groups are zones of lived multicultural contingency and interaction. Occasional inter-ethnic unease is felt alongside the ‘hopeful possibilities’ of renewed neighbourhoods.4 The anxieties of older residents are slowly, perhaps in generational terms, giving way to pragmatic acceptance. Our children, in local schools, are meanwhile evolving and inhabiting newer versions of Australian cultural identity and social being. Yet from this vantage point, in the middle of Sydney’s great suburban sprawl, White’s fictional Sarsaparilla seems both a world away

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and not so distant. My suburb is near to Castle Hill, that sometime place of purgatory which, in White’s day, stood on the outer edge of an expanding suburban frontier bounded by the greenbelt, now defunct. Castle Hill has become suburban heartland. Its shopping centres are full of teenagers and young adults, many of whom still live at home with their parents and commute to their places of further education and training or to their jobs in the new economy. Amid the flux of contemporary culture, few seem interested in or attuned to the kind of Australian literary history or cultural knowledge assumed in Marr’s speech. The works of Patrick White are rarely, if ever, in stock in my local bookshop. It is true that Castle Hill today would be as unrecognisable to Patrick White as his 1950s Castle Hill would have been to the area’s original owners, the Dharug people. This doubly layered amnesia about the history of place seems integral to suburban development. Yet, surprisingly, traces of White do linger. Dogwoods, the old farmhouse that he and Manoly Lascaris occupied from 1948 to 1964, looks out onto a traffic-congested Showground Road.You can still see some of the trees they planted, now mature. The property has long been closely abutted by suburban homes, surrounded by streets bearing names like ‘Patrick Avenue’,‘White Place’ and ‘Nobel Place’. Castle Hill Library – housed in palatial new quarters behind the massive Castle Towers shopping complex – holds a Patrick White archive, including novels, some ephemera and a photo or two. A librarian there reports local memories of the two men as having been standoffish. The story is that they did not patronise the local stores, preferring the inconvenience of a bus trip to Parramatta for their shopping.5 So a small but rankling hurt was done to residents: perhaps they saw in that gesture White’s rejection of their world, and confirmation of his elitism, or of their own status as outsiders to his world. This suggests a vulnerable point in Marr’s argument about White, also implicated in debates about the public role and representation of Australia’s literary writers. It is a vulnerability that has been readily

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exploited by critics. In his 2005 lecture – ‘Vilifying Australia: The perverse ideology of our adversary culture’ – Keith Windschuttle launched a counter-attack.6 The lecture exemplifies the approach of right-wing commentators who, sometimes working in concert,7 became vigilant in detecting and combating public criticism of the Howard Government. In Windschuttle’s targeting of an unrepresentative class that came to power in the 1970s we see a negative replica of Marr’s own historical account. This class, so his argument goes, ‘captured’ the nation’s institutions – its universities, arts funding bodies, the nation’s public broadcaster (the ABC), schools and museums – and ever since has exhibited a contemptuous and undemocratic disregard for the Australian people at large. Even the iconic Patrick White, Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning writer, is tarred with this same self-serving brush. In his essay, Windschuttle traverses a range of Australian literary writers and dramatists (from Elliot Perlman to Hannie Rayson) whose works have been critical of contemporary Australia. Windschuttle is quick to see exaggeration in these works, yet it is ironic that the word ‘same’ recurs no less than seventeen times in his essay. Disparate ideas, people and political views are conflated within a singular, sensational narrative. Nowhere in his lecture can one find acknowledgment of or reflection on his own position. It is only his adversaries who are ideologically driven, or possessed by a political agenda. Windschuttle makes no apology for subjecting White’s fiction to this treatment, but perhaps David Marr has only himself to blame for dragging White into the latest front in what has been frequently labelled as the ‘culture wars’.8 Even so, Windschuttle’s take on Riders in the Chariot (1961) is literal-minded at best. He dismisses it altogether, as an ‘implausible’, ‘ridiculous’ novel responsible for injecting ‘the Nazi comparison into Australian cultural discourse, where it has been ever since’.9 Even so, amid the distortions of polemic, some grains of truth appear.Windschuttle’s observation – that ‘despair about the majority of the Australian people’ is a familiar attitude among ‘this country’s

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tertiary-educated middle-class professionals’ – hits a nerve. Oddly enough, a similar criticism was also levelled by academic Simon During in 1996. Challenging the terms of White’s status in Australian literature, During’s monograph pointed to the social and historical conditions of literary canon formation.10 What has most worried both earlier Marxist critics and subsequent postmodern and post-Marxist academics is the conservative, late colonial and modernist elitism of White’s style and preoccupations. The political and cultural value of White’s fictions, complicated by representations of White-the-author, has long been the subject of debate among competing groups. Forever at stake in these struggles over the value, for the nation, of White’s fiction are the legitimacy and authority of interested professionals – cultural critics, intellectuals, literary academics, journalists, historians, writers – who seek control over flows of knowledge, power, values and positions within the field of cultural production. This assertion draws on sociological understandings of literary culture as the site of struggle for dominance among interested individuals and groups, and owes much to the work of Pierre Bourdieu.11 In his important, Bourdieu-influenced study of canon formation, John Guillory has pointed to the role of the canon in reproduction of the ‘school’ (by which he means the various levels of the education system). By seeking, via the canon, to reproduce itself institutionally, the ‘school’ is serving the purpose of reproducing social relations. For Guillory, the political content of books is of far less consequence than the role they play, as canonical texts, in social reproduction.12 Debates about Patrick White’s canonicity, and questions about his (and its) elitism – his seeming ‘despair about the majority of the Australian people’ – can therefore be seen as a function of broader cultural debates about social relations and their reproduction. Margaret Simons discusses contemporary social relations in her essay, ‘Ties That Bind’.13 She reflects on former Federal Labor Party leader Mark Latham’s provocative labelling of Australia’s

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tertiary-educated, urban-dwelling cultural insiders as ‘tourists’, and non-tertiary-educated suburbanites as ‘residents’.14 For Latham, ‘tourists’ are those Australians – members of a new class of creative and knowledge workers – who enjoy a distance from economic necessity, who participate in the global economy and who, in keeping with their position, favour the totemic, abstract symbolism of such issues as reconciliation, the republic and refugees. Against this class Latham pits Australia’s silent majority of ‘residents’. These cultural outsiders, often living in poorly serviced suburbs, are more directly exposed to economic necessity. Accordingly, ‘residents’ are preoccupied with issues that impinge directly and immediately on their survival and security – service delivery, infrastructure, the economy, inflation and jobs. Clearly, as Simons points out, this is an overly inflexible dichotomy that does not account for the heterogeneity within and mobility between these social groups, or for their interconnections. Yet, for all its flaws, Latham’s analysis challenges the complacency, moral outrage and superiority assumed by the ‘insider’ class. Putting his analysis to the test, Simons not only engages with the complex phenomenon of suburban Australia, but also questions how ‘outsider’, ‘suburban’ Australians perceive her own urban, ‘insider’ class – those whom Marr addresses and Windschuttle attacks. In other words, how, she asks, do the ‘tourists’ appear to the ‘residents’? This approach offers a fresh alternative to tired polemic about cultural elites versus ordinary Australians. Simons’ mix of empathy and critical reflection is sorely needed if we are ever to get beyond divisive and ideologically-invested clichés about Australian writers and the part they play in the nation’s public life – whether as intellectuals or activists, or through the medium of their creative works. If, as described by Marr, Windschuttle and other historians of social change,15 a new cultural intelligentsia arose in the 1960s as the bearers of a progressive (or, for Windschuttle, unrepresentative and divisive) vision of nation, then Patrick White was a writer in its vanguard. The question therefore arises: To what extent did White’s

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fiction – with its anti-provincial, anti-suburban strain – reproduce the gaze of the ‘tourist’ rather than the ‘resident’? Did White’s literary aesthetic depend upon – was it conditioned by – his economic and class distance from necessity, from the world of the ordinary people he otherwise sought to observe and represent, and (presumably) reach through his fiction? If so, what does this matter, and what does this mean for evaluating the social and political value or relevance of his fiction, of his contribution as writer-intellectual or, later in life, as political activist? And if, as seems possible, this ‘touristic’ relation to national culture coincides with an attribute common to ‘literary’ writers or to ‘artists’ in general – or indeed to those whose purified artistic or critical gaze runs athwart the requirements of immediate commercial success – then in what does the value of the ‘literary’ consist? Does it have any value or meaning other than the reproduction of the values and social power of an unrepresentative class of insiders? What, in other words, is the value of the ‘literary’ to contemporary Australian society? I pose these questions as a way of drawing attention to the central concern of this book. Given these contradictions, how do we value the role and representations of literary writers in contemporary Australian public life? The contradictory role of writers, especially of those who seek to distance themselves from market forces even as they anticipate, write for and address their readerships, is only heightened and exacerbated in Australia, with its colonial history, its longstanding cultural insecurity and its relatively small population. The constraints of the book market in Australia mean that the ecology of the nation’s literary field, within the broader field of cultural production, tends to be fragile, and that diversity of production, contingent on diversity and density of readerships, is hard to sustain. These considerations intersect with recurrent debates in ‘quality’ sectors of the Australian media and the academic humanities about the value, relevance and future viability of Australia’s literary culture. ‘Who is Killing the Great Books of Australia?’ cried one headline in

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2006.16 For a chorus of commentators, the ‘literary’ – often shorthand for literary fiction – has entered a period of steep decline, certainly in Australia and perhaps more widely. Although the term has a richer provenance, I refer to common understandings of the ‘literary’ as fine, creative writing – belles lettres – mostly the novel, but also poetry, drama and literary non-fiction. Within these forms, what distinguishes the ‘literary’ mode, arguably, is the tendency towards a disinvested, purified gaze, or the adoption of an aesthetic that averts or subverts more conventional or popular writing. Also referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the logic of cultural production, Ken Gelder explains that the ‘literary’, which otherwise lacks determinate generic features, most clearly defines itself through its antagonism to the market-oriented logic of its ‘popular’ others. The most stable characteristic of ‘literary’ texts resides not in their formal features but in an authorial rejection of modes that are transient, non-serious or merely ‘popular’.17 Though literary writers anticipate eventual readers, they do not seek to gratify instantly those imagined readers’ wants or demands.18 As inherited romanticist and modernist practice, the ‘literary’ entails or implies an individual writer’s solitary pursuit of creative integrity. The ‘literary text’ is the product of an autonomous, ostensibly disinterested form of individual labour, and the literary production of goods is oriented in such a way as defer, avoid or ignore the immediate demands of the market. Yet this anti-commercial character of the literary belies its own investments, for ultimately literary goods enter, and were always intended to enter, the market.The literary field, which might be imagined as the total array of literary writers, endeavours, processes, groups and institutions interacting and competing at any one time, and which is reproduced over time, is the site of struggle over the terms of cultural distinction and symbolic power. With the postmodern collapse of older high- and popularculture hierarchies, this model may obscure writing that works on cultural borders, or on a continuum, or fail to register how literary forms and values mutate in response to new technologies and social

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formations. Recent work by David Carter, for instance, considers the impact on Australian publishing of an expanded ‘middlebrow’ readership. Mostly tertiary educated and professional – perhaps corresponding to Latham’s ‘tourists’ – these consumers have formed a niche market for stylishly packaged, accessible books of non-fiction, memoir and life-writing governed by a literary aesthetic.19 This suggests that definitions of the ‘literary’ are far from fixed, but respond and adapt to social and cultural transformations that seem otherwise to threaten its survival. The ‘literary’, in its chameleon forms, may be a more adaptive and vigorous mode of continued circulation of cultural capital than declinists allow. Anxiety produced by the decline thesis, the idea that the prestige of the literary is fading, has exacerbated the focus on the public role of writers. Contemporary Australian writers have been blamed for shying away from political engagement, from the big national issues of the day. David Marr is not the only public intellectual to voice this concern. ‘It is my melancholy duty to report that in 2004 the idea that writers are society’s conscience is far from universal wisdom’, declared publisher Louise Adler in her foreword to the Australian edition of Authors Take Sides (2004). Like its predecessor (similarly-titled anthologies dating from the Spanish Civil War), this book published the views of British, American and Australian writers about the Gulf and Iraq Wars. A politically diverse group of Australian writers – Fiona Capp, Brian Castro, Thomas Keneally, Sylvia Lawson, Hilary McPhee, David Malouf, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, Peter Robb, Stephen Sewell, David Williamson, and more – contributed to the Australian edition. Yet in her foreword, Adler criticises the less than enthusiastic response of a number of writers she approached. Some, she says, declined outright. Frank Moorhouse asked, drolly, ‘why writers were approached rather than dentists or accountants’.20 Elsewhere, but in similar vein, Adler suggested a ‘relationship between Australia’s current anodyne political culture and the reluctant reclusive writer’.21 She wondered if writers’ lack of explicit

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political engagement is linked to a tendency in current Australian fiction to shrink from the big issues. Comparing Philip Roth’s American Pastoral with Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, Adler found the latter, with its controlled emotional palette and obsessive taxonomies, typical of an Australian national habit of self-loathing, ambivalence and reticence. Where Roth’s book is ‘epic’, she said, Bail’s is ‘epigrammatic’. Not everyone agreed: Ivor Indyk considered that Bail’s book, and much Australian literature, resists the grandiose imperial gesture, with its ironies and reserved lyricism, its ‘melancholy leavened by comedy’ and its ‘cherishing of the small and the local’.22 Some of this debate overlooks the longer history of Australian literary culture as well as the conditions that hamper or foster it. The literary market in Australia has always been tenuous, requiring systems of support and patronage to survive in an environment dominated by American and British markets and publishing cartels.23 Factors in the seeming downturn of literary publishing include the increasing dominance of visual and electronic cultures, the dwindling of government patronage, and the continuing exposure of local writing to global markets.24 There has also been controversy about the arrival of BookScan in Australia, an electronic system of tracking and promptly feeding back highly accurate sales data to its subscribers. Critics fear that BookScan will demystify and devalue the ‘literary’ by exposing to view its low returns and poor sales.25 Others, like Hilary McPhee, suggest all is not lost, and that strategic, creative action by passionate editors is needed to subvert the shortterm, monocultural effects of solely market-driven logics.26 Debate about the decline of Australian literature parallels and intersects with another set of issues: the alleged decline of Australia’s public intellectuals. Both in Australia and elsewhere, debate about the ‘decline of public intellectuals’ reached a peak in the late 1990s.27 From 1996 to 1997, writer and broadcaster Robert Dessaix conducted interviews on ABC Radio National exploring the role of intellectuals in Australian public life.28 His chosen interviewees, mostly baby-boomers or older, were predominantly

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writers – journalists and academics, and a few freelance creative writers. Among the latter were David Williamson and Helen Garner, two writers whose literary careers had developed independently of institutions or corporations. Critics like Mark Davis in Gangland (1997) and David Carter in The Ideas Market (2005) have noted that this canon of Australian intellectuals was not only indicative of Dessaix’s own literary leanings but complied with dominant generational and racial norms.29 Yet critics themselves tend to agree, implicitly and as signalled by their own interventions, on the desirability of public-intellectual activity, and it is not hard to detect their investment in redefining public-intellectual activity for an emerging generation rather than breaking with the concept altogether.30 Though the 1990s debate about public intellectuals eventually subsided, familiar elements resurfaced in the ‘death of literature’ debate. David Marr and Louise Adler, like Anne Summers before them, identified literary writers as potential public intellectuals, expressing the belief that writers are needed to challenge and arouse the nation. They feared that the value of writers, of literature itself, was under threat, and they intervened, as public intellectuals themselves, hoping that decline was reversible. The key term, therefore, that hinges debates about the decline of both writers and intellectuals, and writers as intellectuals, and that organises their logic, is that of ‘nation’. Recurrent concerns revolve around how nation is imagined and defined, and who gets to do that defining. The worry about whether Australia’s literary legacy can survive the twin forces of new media technologies and accelerated globalisation already assumes the necessity of nation as, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, an imagined community, one that needs to be nurtured and sustained by an active public sphere with a flourishing print media and a sophisticated, home-grown culture.31 In Australia, questions of nationhood have, however, been profoundly anxious, not only on account of the nation’s marginal geopolitical position vis-à-vis the Anglophone world, but also because of its lingering colonial legacy.32 Ultimately, it needs to be remembered, discourses about

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decline of the literary, and worry about the value and status of writers, are inseparably linked to the condition of the publishing market. Fears about decline of local cultural production take on extra intensity in a small market open to a global economy. Despite fears, evidence abounds of Australian writers engaging in the public life of nation in myriad ways and with remarkable energy. Critics and commentators rarely seem cognisant, however, of the conditions under which literary writers intervene or act in public life.What motivates writers to function as public intellectuals? How do writers’ public interventions impact on their careers or reputations? How should we interpret their representations, and their writings, in this light? Here, too, I need to pause briefly to reflect on some of the key terms used in this book. The structural and historical relation between the ‘public sphere’ and ‘literary realm’ has been influentially traced by Jürgen Habermas.33 This book is partly informed by that tradition, but specifically attends to how Australian literary culture interacts with print journalism and the electronic media to forge the ‘public life’ of nation. Until recently, at least, the mediasphere has been the main arena for imagining a collective, national community. Literary works are themselves, of course, just one of many components of the nation’s ‘public life’. Yet their contexts and effects create specific relationships between authors/ producers and their readers/consumers. Also integral to this discussion are the seemingly mutually exclusive categories of intellectuals and activists. As much of my argument will show, some writers are better described as intellectuals, and others better described as activists in their mode of public intervention. More often, however, these categories overlap and intersect. In some periods, ‘intellectuals’ seem to take centre stage. At other times, writer-activists proliferate. This book considers a spectrum of writerly engagement, and it registers how, why and with what effect writers adopt these various roles at different times in their careers. This book also asks how writers’ public interventions influence the way we read, value and interpret their writings. Critics have

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neither connected nor differentiated carefully among the various, sometimes contradictory and conflicting modes of writerly public engagement – intellectual debate, activism and writing itself – nor subjected these to scrutiny. How has it happened that otherwise reclusive writers – like Patrick White or Tim Winton – have found themselves fronting activist campaigns? What has been the significance of those writers who, like Judith Wright or David Malouf, have involved themselves in behind-the-scenes campaigning, lobbying, networking, or advocating for causes? Many writers have contributed their ideas, either by means of their books or in interviews, to public discourse and debate. Sometimes they have done so diplomatically and quietly; at other times polemically and divisively. Some have sought to quarantine their writing from their public engagement. Others have drawn on their public engagements and activisms creatively, feeding these experiences back into their writing in new and challenging ways. How do writers negotiate the gap between the single-minded, solitary pursuit of writing and their public, collaborative or political interventions? How do writers hold in tension their need to retreat from the world with their need to engage in it? And what impact do their activities have on the value writers accrue in the literary marketplace? A familiar stock of images shapes the way we conceive of writerintellectuals in public life. From at least the nineteenth century, the idea of the literary figure as social prophet or seer has been integral to the logic of the modern literary field. It is no accident that it is from literary models that Edward Said constructs his argument that contemporary intellectuals, embedded in disparate specialised fields, should revive and adopt an increasingly endangered spirit of independent amateurism. Such a spirit would, he argues, allow them to resist the narrowing bonds of corporate specialisation, and to communicate with and advocate for wider publics. Said invokes individual writers who follow their vocations independently and who, by preserving a necessary detachment from the world, are able to ‘speak the truth to power’. He insists that a critical, courageous,

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even cantankerous integrity is needed to guard against the corrupting pressures of conformity in an increasingly professionalised society.34 He reminds us, too, that the figure of the literary writer as public intellectual is sourced – in Western modernity – in the Dreyfus affair of late nineteenth-century France. It was novelist Emile Zola who intervened on behalf of the beleaguered Alfred Dreyfus, a French captain of Jewish background falsely convicted of treason by a corrupted military tribunal. With his audacious front page publication in L’Aurore of J’accuse (1898), an open letter to the President, Zola willingly exposed himself to charges of libel. News of the Dreyfus affair and of Zola’s intervention, which dramatically rendered the writer as social prophet, was avidly followed by reading publics as far away as colonial Australia.35 Zola’s reinvention of the writer-intellectual was both specific to French literature and had a deeper Western European provenance, recognisable in German and English romanticist responses to the French Revolution, and in Shelley’s famous claim that poets are the world’s ‘unacknowledged legislators’. They may not have risked imprisonment, as Zola did, but some Australian literary writers have nevertheless intervened dramatically in Australian public life. Their interventions have had an impact not only on their own careers and on the Australian literary field, but on the way we, as contemporary Australians, imagine ourselves, our ambivalent and contested history, our changing identities and our national or international futures. What do writers risk by becoming involved as public actors, as intellectuals and activists, or both? What are the rewards, if any? In what circumstances do the interventions of writers capture the collective imagination and what contradictions must they negotiate in crossing from ‘literature’ to ‘nation’? A brief snapshot of an aggravated but self-contained case of one highprofile Australian writer’s public engagement serves to dramatise some of these central issues and illustrates the approach I take. David Williamson is Australia’s most well-known and successful playwright. Some would say he is more celebrity than literary

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figure.Yet others recognise his long and prolific career, and his solid achievement as an eloquent and fearless satirist of social pretension. One of his most memorable ‘public interventions’ was his 1995 play, Dead White Males, targeting the literary academy’s adoption of poststructuralist theory. The play provoked bitter debate, intensifying media scrutiny of the specialised world of the literary academy. The latter was found guilty of traducing the canon and laying barbaric waste to a shared cultural heritage. The debate exposed the academic humanities to withering, commonsense criticism based on assumed universal values. Thrust out of context into the public limelight, poststructuralism appeared a bizarre and alienating intellectual fad. Though the worlds of the national media and the academic humanities are in practice interlinked through academic and writers’ associations, collaborative projects and mutual interests in cultural production, Williamson’s intervention was discursively polarising. Professional literary academics seemed to be pitted against non-academic critics, writers and readers. For commentators allied to the media, Williamson had spoken the truth to power. For humanities academics versed in these theories, Williamson had played the cheap populist card of anti-intellectualism. The very popularity of Williamson’s play – which enjoyed sellout seasons in Sydney and Melbourne – rubbed salt into these wounds. Williamson had become, in Fiona McFarlane’s words, ‘the poster child for bringing down the ivory tower’.36 A decade later, on 8 September 2005, Williamson delivered a stinging broadside against a very different target.37 Having unexpectedly placed the successful bid in a charity auction, Williamson and his wife Kristen joined a massive cruise liner bound for Noumea. To their horror, they found that their fellow passengers, ‘aspirational Australians’, were vulgar hedonists. In scathing terms, Williamson likened his voyage aboard ‘Cruise Ship Australia’ to the current direction of nation. The serious intent of Williamson’s ‘ship of fools’ story was to highlight the heedless over-consumption, by present-day Australians, of finite resources – fresh water, arable

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land, clean air, balanced ecosystems – and the legacy of this environmental destruction for future generations. His opening satirical flourishes included a hint of self-mockery: once aboard he found no-one ‘discussing Proust or George Eliot’. Williamson’s attack on suburban philistines, however, was as provocative as his earlier attack on academic elites. Right-wing media commentators leapt upon the contradictions in Williamson’s polemic. Brian Musgrove has pointed to the sinister unanimity of the right-wing counter-attack.38 For example, a lengthy editorial in Australia’s national broadsheet newspaper, the Australian, seized on the most glaring weakness in Williamson’s rhetoric – ‘If artists reject ordinary people’, it proclaimed, ‘they are the losers’: We will never get a great culture in Australia until there are more artists prepared to understand, rather than demonise, this pragmatic turn of mind . . . Until the writers and filmmakers are prepared to shake themselves free of moral vanity, passengers on the good ship Australia will be increasingly disposed to hand them a paddle and pitch them overboard.39

The editorial’s extension of Williamson’s nautical analogy produces troubling ironies. Its anticipation of ‘artists overboard’ seems to conjure a shameful episode in recent Australian history.40 Its ad hominem attack suggests a desire to silence the errant Williamson, former doyen of anti-political correctness. In response, however, Williamson seemed unflappable – indeed he showed some relish for public contention. Perhaps, for Williamson, right-wing fury was preferable to agreement or, worse, indifference. Williamson’s attack on acquisitive aspirationals – on the obsessive focus on ‘new cars’, ‘kitchen refits’, ‘renovation’, ‘private education for their children’, ‘holidays like this’ and so on – spoke truth to one kind of power, unsettling the hegemonic worldview of newly prosperous Australians.41 Though bloggers and right-wing pundits made

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fun of this elitism, he touched a raw nerve in the nation’s mood of happy insularity, resonating with recent findings of an underlying discontent with the endless personal treadmill demanded by economic growth.42 Echoing Patrick White’s ‘Great Australian Emptiness’, Williamson criticises crassly materialist Australian ‘residents’ on tour, and meanwhile accords dignity and value to the cultural tourism enjoyed by people like himself (the lecture refers to an educational cruise Williamson had experienced). This is a reassertion of cultural distinction at the expense of culture-lacking suburbanites. The life of an independent, autonomous writer, particularly one as successful as Williamson, may well appear detached, leisured and privileged from the perspective of Latham’s ‘residents’ or Windschuttle’s ‘ordinary’ Australians. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, ‘aspirational Australians’ are an amorphous group too readily caricatured. One person’s aspirational Australian may be another person’s mainstream theatregoer. What separates the aspirational Australians of Williamson’s essay from the audience that attends his plays? Might these groups overlap? Though once edgy and radical, Williamson’s work is now synonymous with Australia’s theatre establishment. He enjoys a dominant position in the field and his plays are often credited with bankrolling Australian theatre.Yet he has been criticised for churning out overly formulaic drama for well-heeled audiences. Is it possible that Williamson’s iconoclasm, his polemic against the philistine class, is a way of reclaiming a resistant artistic identity? I am not arguing here that his ‘Cruise Ship Australia’ speech lacks sincerity: clearly it serves a serious and timely argument about contemporary Australians’ reckless consumption of resources. Rather, Williamson’s reputation as a theatre practitioner has derived from the satirical edge of his drama. It would be surprising if, as a cultural producer, he did not feel a need occasionally to reassert these qualities publicly.43 So here lies the core situation with which this book is concerned. To cross into the public sphere, to ‘speak truth to power’, yields career benefits and risks for individual writers and also

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consequences for the literary field. Writers’ public interventions are about many things, one of which is the ongoing struggle for authority and legitimacy – the prestige of the writer within the field, and the prestige of the field itself. How better to reclaim the value of the writer, and legitimate artistic identity, than to adopt the role of provocateur or iconoclast? Pierre Bourdieu has persuasively interpreted the career of Emile Zola in precisely these terms: Zola’s public intervention on behalf of Dreyfus augmented his own cultural prestige (threatened by his novels’ best-selling status) by functioning as social prophet. His intervention also bolstered the principle and value of the autonomy of the artist in the literary field in nineteenth-century France.44 Nevertheless, Bourdieu is by no means a cynic about the artists and writers he discusses in The Rules of Art (1996). What he wants to do is hold the necessary self-interest of artists in tension with the demands and promise of artistic autonomy. For Bourdieu, the market-refusing logic of art holds out the promise of human freedom, a freedom he believes artists and intellectuals should collectively fight for, extend and ‘universalise’.45 Sharing this hope, I do not doubt the sincerity of individual writers, nor do I suggest that their actions are devoid of political value. On the contrary, I regard individual writers as mostly genuine, mostly sincere, and I see their actions as meaningful and significant. If artists possess the purified gaze of the tourist, then this too is a knowledge-producing resource, especially if that gaze is self-aware and self-reflexive. Self-reflexivity, self-awareness – these are goals for the critic too. I struggle with representations of writers that remain unfairly reductive or polarised, just as I resist the opposite idea that writers are heroic and altruistic, somehow free from all vested interests.46 So, in this book, writers’ public interventions are not just calculated expressions of narrow ideological interest against which the meanings of their texts are simplistically deciphered. Such representations are grist to the mill in public debates and in some quarters of academe. Instead, it is my desire to understand, or look beneath, prefabricated

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or two dimensional renderings of writers, to apprehend the processes in which they are involved and with which they engage – to track their flawed, fascinating struggles with and through contradictions. Engaging with this more complex picture, it may be possible to generate deeper understanding and more realistic models of public action that, even when self-interest is involved, extend beyond the self. Exploration of these tensions may illuminate how, as Pascale Casanova explains, ‘writers invent their own freedom – which is to say perpetuate, or alter, or reject, or add to, or deny, or forget, or betray their national literary (and linguistic) heritage’, and why this is both necessary and important.47 So the following chapters are written in sympathy with the call for writers to engage with nation, and with the idea that, in Adler’s words, great writers can ‘move us to try to understand more profoundly, indeed more acutely, the world we live in’. But they also confront critically the ambiguous nature of public engagement and the complex representations and debates such engagement stimulates.To reckon with what happens when Australian writers function as public intellectuals and activists, we must consider how various dimensions interact. These dimensions include the context, career trajectory, reception and reputation, and media representations of writers. The task also demands sensitive re-readings of literary works. Some of these works are not just adjuncts to or mirrors of an author’s public intervention, but constitute an author’s public intervention. Literary works have catalysed extensive, sometimes bitter public debate, as well as works in response that reflect on the fallout of such debate. I will traverse these dimensions, seeking connections and patterns among them, aiming to release their significance. For that reason, the chapters that follow explore the works and careers of a set of indisputably eminent Australian authors relevant to Australia’s recent cultural history. These are writers whose careers have been more public than most, and whose impact and representations have been significant. Some are no longer with us, but their influence lingers. Some are still at the peak of their careers. In

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discussing these writers, certain themes and images recur, particularly with respect to literary works. These themes include alienation and belonging, insiders and outsiders, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the prophet or fool-elect, and the victim who is, more often than not, a wounded, white man. These themes convey familiar national narratives that join representations of the literary writer to public life in distinctively Australian terms. Although this book is comprised of four, broadly chronological sections, a cultural and perhaps generational shift defines its two halves. The book’s first half (made up of Parts 1 and 2) concerns the cultural turn from an older Left versus Right politics to the postcolonial national agendas that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and entered the political mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s.48 Crystallised in the writings and activism of two giants of post-war Australian literature, Judith Wright (Chapter 1) and Patrick White (Chapter 2), this revisionist agenda involved the deconstruction of respectable Anglo-Australian identity and a questioning of the nation’s settler-colonial past and present. Separately, and sometimes jointly, Judith Wright and Patrick White played a significant part in shaping Australian literary and public debates and their legacy is still unfolding. Judith Wright is a recurrent figure throughout the book, especially in Part 2, which discusses the challenge to the literary field brought by new Indigenous voices, as well as responses to this challenge by white Australian writers. Wright’s interaction with two key figures, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Les Murray, structures the discussion in Part 2.The emergence of Indigenous literary writing in Australia – a development entwined with activism – deserves detailed treatment beyond the scope of this book, and has already been discussed by a range of scholars.49 My discussion, in Chapter 3, of Oodgeroo’s poetry, activism and collaboration with Judith Wright, in the context of a literary field in which white writers were, and arguably remain, predominant, highlights issues of gender and race that pertain throughout the book. Complementing this discussion, Chapter

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4 traces the sometimes uneasy dialogue between Judith Wright and Les Murray. Together these chapters illustrate how 1970s and 1980s debates about colonisation, whiteness, inheritance and belonging pervaded both the literary field and Australian public discourse in ways that would come under increasing challenge in the 1990s. The second half of the book (comprising Parts 3 and 4), begins by canvassing the controversial 1990s and by comparing the public representations of two very different writers: Les Murray (Chapter 5) and David Malouf (Chapter 6). Both enjoy international reputations and both are regarded, nationally, as public intellectuals. Murray’s controversial public interventions have alienated some potential readers, especially within the Australian literary academy. In this context, engagement with Murray’s poetry involves a difficult balance for some readers. Yet this ‘alienating’ stance has been generative of Murray’s public persona and his literary logic. In contrast, Malouf is a supremely diplomatic public figure; even so, some critics have been troubled by his quiet insistence on settler-colonial belonging, a pursuit that has long been central to Australian literary culture. Malouf ’s public engagement with these issues, by no means simplistic, invites questions about the nature, receptiveness and limits of contemporary literary readerships. Part 4 investigates the careers of Helen Garner (Chapter 7) and Tim Winton (Chapter 8), two writers whose reputations were consolidated in the 1990s and who are immensely popular at a national level – in Winton’s case internationally. As best-selling Australian authors, Garner and Winton provide a fascinating insight into transformations and marketing of the literary within contemporary Australian culture, a process enhanced by these authors’ roles, respectively, as public intellectual and activist campaigner. The Coda (Chapter 9) offers some conclusions as well as a brief sketch of Australian literary activism since 9/11, tracing ongoing trends and legacies in this period. These are illustrated through discussion of Richard Flanagan’s anti-logging campaigning and in light of his novel, The U nknown Terrorist (2006).

Pa r t 1

Wright and White: Big figures in the cultural landscape 1940s to 1970s

Chapter 1

a play of opposites: Judith Wright’s poetic-public crossings

O

n 27 June 2000, following Judith Wright’s death, Senator Michael Forshaw paid his respects in australia’s Federal parliament: I am sure there is not a person in this parliament and probably not a person in this country over the age of about 30, maybe even younger, who at some stage in their life did not read some of Judith Wright’s poetry . . . She was to poetry what patrick White was to the australian novel and Sidney Nolan and Drysdale were to australian painting.1

Forshaw’s formal acknowledgment of Judith Wright’s passing was an almost solo effort in contrast with the eloquent outpouring from both sides of politics on the death, some months later, of Sir Donald Bradman.2 It is understandable if politicians prefer associating themselves with sporting legends like Bradman, rather than with poets, especially when the latter have been outspoken critics of government or nation. according to his own website, from 1970 to 1974 Michael Forshaw, an aLp Senator from NSW, studied arts at the University of Sydney, majoring in english and australian literature.3 this perhaps explains his personal appreciation of Wright, a poet

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more likely to be remembered by one of his generation and training. the silence of his colleagues, many of whom hold degrees in Law and economics, is a sobering reminder that even the most canonical of australia’s literary figures may be valued, or even remembered, by only a restricted sector of the population. Senator Forshaw’s speech provides a thoughtful yet familiar verbal snapshot of Judith Wright: she was the pre-eminent australian poet of her generation; her early poetry imparted her love of a harsh and beautiful land to australian school children; this love led her to become a conservationist; she was a remarkably early champion of aboriginal people. She was, moreover, ‘a conservative poet’ who was ‘never a conservative person in outlook’. Forshaw concludes with two headlines from articles in that day’s Australian, representing Wright as ‘Guardian of the land and the people’ and ‘poet probed the nation’s soul’ (items by literary critics Veronica Brady and Julian Croft respectively). respectful sentiment is demanded on such occasions. the process of Wright’s sanctification, however, began well before her death. In the 1990s, in her old age, having retired from poetry and from more visible and active forms of public involvement (though still an energetic correspondent), Wright was acquiring an almost mythological glamour. richard Glover’s 1993 Good Weekend article revealed her as occupying a ‘world without words’: not only was she suffering from a now complete loss of hearing, she was also threatened with blindness. Based on an interview with Wright at home in Braidwood, Glover’s story presented her as bitterly disillusioned with nation and world, in despair about the future of humanity. the piece elicited an outpouring of letters from readers who sought to comfort her and urge continued hope.4 Glover’s essay renewed public attention to Wright, and she used the opportunity to press home her ongoing concerns. traces of the mythology of the poet-as-prophet have in fact adhered to Wright from the very beginning of her public life. this mythology, which partakes of romantic ideas of the artist withdrawn from the world, is part truth and part distortion. Wright’s

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5

own memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999), and Veronica Brady’s authorised biography, South of My Days (1998), provide insights into her achievements, struggle, strengths and foibles.Yet the overriding representation of Judith Wright that emerges from the mass of media, biographical and critical material (not just Brady’s and Wright’s) is an austere image of the poet as public prophet. the ‘prophet from the wilderness’,5 a recurring theme in white australian settlercolonial literature, has powerful, quasi-biblical associations, and no doubt some beneficial effects. So why worry about this mythology? First, the image is too simplistic, minimising the complex and dynamic character of Wright’s work and performance. Second, it is depoliticising, making the poet seem saintly and unworldly, impossible to emulate: she is somehow ‘out of touch’ with the world and occupies a mythic plane. third, the image is alienating, making it easy, as some do, to reject Wright and her agenda as too pure, too politically correct, too unpleasantly guilt-ridden. Beyond Wright’s death, there is her legacy to be sustained and interpreted. this legacy is already in the process of being reconstituted, as philip Mead has pointed out, not by literary scholars, but by activists, ecologists, environmental historians and like-minded writers and artists. Mead also observes that Wright’s significant contribution has long been overlooked by scholars of australia’s intellectual history, perhaps due to the culturally liminal position of woman poet.6 attention has been newly drawn to the significance of her activism; her poetry is being selectively recast in that light. and there has been the view, underwritten by her own late-in-life comment, that in the final analysis it was activism that became her most valuable contribution. at odds with this is the residual, popular memory of Wright as the author of ‘South of My Days’ (1945) and ‘Bullocky’ (1944), poems remembered (not entirely inaccurately) as celebrating the land of the pioneers. But Judith Wright’s story is more three-dimensional and dynamic than this suggests. It is best considered from the beginning, with the broad phases of her poetry, her intellectual engagement and her

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activism, sketched in. We need to see how these three distinct but related modes of public life interacted, how her poetic-public crossings defy simple categorisation, or the favouring of one dimension over another.7 to focus on Wright as primarily poet or primarily activist bypasses not only the intellectual coherence of her vision, but also the profound and unrivalled degree to which her poeticpublic crossings wrought a dynamic synthesis that influenced both poetry and nation.

Unsettling the legacy of Wright’s early poetry While it is never surprising that only a few of a poet’s works survive in the archives of public memory, it is striking that in Judith Wright’s case the mostly frequently reproduced poems come from her first two books, The Moving Image (1946) and Woman to Man (1949). though the slightly later ‘eroded hills’ (1951) and ‘at Cooloolah’ (1954) have lately been acquiring iconic status, the much remarked phenomenal success of her 1940s poems had a profound bearing on the way Wright herself came to be publicly represented. early impressions of this woman poet so quickly solidified that they were both a benefit and burden. these impressions helped define her unfolding poetic-public career. Wright’s poetry was certainly among the first, and probably the most influential, in its articulation, at a fraught moment in australia’s history, of a new national sensibility. It perhaps presented what British cultural critic raymond Williams described as an emergent ‘structure of feeling’.8 While she was just one of a number of new australian poets (including John Blight, David Campbell, rosemary Dobson, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb and others) to project this feeling, it was Wright’s singularly commanding and self-possessed voice that burnt itself into collective memory.9 tracing the contours of a vulnerable, ancient land, her poems were distinguished by a boldly sensual, feminine–maternal encounter with time, place and self:

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South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country rises that tableland, high delicate outline of bony slopes wincing under the winter, low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite— clean, lean, hungry country . . .10

In ‘South of my Days’, first published in the Bulletin in 1945, Wright’s vision of pastoral country as an exposed, suffering body struck a nerve, tapping into the unconscious of a settler-colonial culture that hungered for belonging. australians had felt keenly the threat posed by the war in the pacific. these insecurities were only exacerbated by droughts that had stretched nearly unbroken from 1937 to 1945. a homely love of the land – expressed in imaginative or symbolic terms – is now so central to australia’s national culture that it is impossible to appreciate the full impact of Wright’s early poetry, which itself, in turn, helped express and affirm that love of the land. Its power came partly from its combination of the strange and the familiar. It yielded a familiar melancholy, akin to australia’s colonial and bush poetry. But it was freshly empathetic and observant, infused with feminine awareness of land as body. In his review, thirty years later, of Wright’s Collected Poems 1942–1970, fellow poet and longtime supporter Douglas Stewart recalled his own amazed reaction when, as editor of the Bulletin’s red page, he first encountered her poem, ‘trapped Dingo’: unheralded, untrumpeted, unaccompanied by any covering letter . . . Instantly it was apparent that a new planet had swum into our ken. I remember staring at the poem in bewilderment.Who was Judith Wright?

Fond of superlatives though he was, Stewart was probably right to observe that Wright’s poetry offered an ‘embarrassment of riches’ to any anthologist wanting to represent the poetry of ‘the wide brown

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land’.11 Yet the embarrassment and astonishment Stewart registers is not unconnected with Wright’s gender. he barely conceals the assumption that this woman poet had emerged suddenly, without precedent, from the obscurity of the private realm, rather than from the expected male networks. as former flagship of a white australian masculinity, the Bulletin, under Stewart’s editorial guidance, was a significant avenue for the post-war renewal of an earlier literary nationalism, one that nevertheless continued to be dominantly masculine. It was inevitable that recognition of Judith Wright should be couched in patriarchal terms.12 the persistent gendering of Wright’s work and role was an implicit but crucial factor in her evolving reputation. From the earliest, her representation of female experience – epitomised in the widely admired poem, ‘Woman to Man’ (1946) – augmented her national standing: the eyeless labourer in the night, the selfless, shapeless seed I hold, builds for its resurrection day— silent and swift and deep from sight foresees the unimagined light.13

a poetry of feminine experience was not a threat to male contemporaries. and so, the radical coalescence of Wright’s feminine poetic with her sensuous apprehension of land was, for a time at least, readily contained by a literary reception that slotted the woman poet into masculinist national frameworks. Wright’s growing awareness of the legacy of colonisation would eventually, however, unsettle her role as bardic national poet. a nationalist poetry, regardless of the poet’s intentions, also serves as a colonising instrument. Wright explained her view that ‘Bullocky’ had been shorn of its original context and now served a purpose of which she could not approve. ‘Bullocky’:

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9

. . . was written in the early years of the war – a time whose emotional climate is long forgotten, but which roused high patriotism and a somewhat hysterical view of the splendours of the national history.14

the constant anthologisation of Wright’s early poems and their ritual inclusion in school curricula – witness Senator Forshaw’s tribute – had entrenched Wright’s name in public memory, well beyond that of her peers. her frustration about the nationalist reception of her poetry, especially its use in schools, grew more acute over time. Noting that other poems from the early period, like ‘Niggers Leap: New england’ and ‘Bora ring’, had been conveniently overlooked by educators, Wright finally acted in 1988 when, incensed by Bicentennial nationalism, she withdrew permission for further anthologisation of ‘Bullocky’.15 to consider Judith Wright’s poetic and public evolutions, therefore, is to recognise the power and limits of interpretive frameworks available within any one period (as Leigh Dale has shown).16 this recognition also allows us to see how Wright herself resisted the more stubborn of these representations – and to observe how her life outgrew them. her resistance found its strongest expression in the way she grappled with and renegotiated her ‘inheritance’. ‘Inheritance’ carries certain ambiguities here that accompany Wright’s developing poetry, her life narrative, and her activism. In everyday usage, ‘inheritance’ refers to that bundle of resources transmitted from one generation to the next. While all cultures have ways of ensuring the intergenerational passage of resources (goods, culture, knowledge), settler-colonial australian systems of inheritance of property have played, and arguably continue to play, a specific role in colonising the land. Bound up with this stubborn reality, and complicating it, are also those less tangible things inherited by virtue of birth into a specific family, class and culture. Yet although each individual may be equipped to move along a certain life path, to acquire certain tastes or fulfil a certain social destiny,

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that path is never simple, direct or predictable. Individual responses to social destiny are highly variable, affected by multiple factors, not least of which are educational opportunities. Further, as Bourdieu argues, cultural reproduction is not simple repetition of the same, but thrives on interruption, challenge and resistance.17 a central paradox arising from my observation of writers is that even when, or especially when, they refuse the burden of the past, surprising patterns of continuity emerge. In an australian context, refusals of cultural inheritance have often expressed, or intersected with, recurring settler-colonial anxieties about legitimacy and belonging. as a fifth generation member of one of australia’s landed dynasties, Wright was born into a privileged class. her characteristic fearlessness and principled certainty of view are legible as signs of a born-to-rule patrician outlook, or habitus as Bourdieu would say, altered though this was by life experience. as a girl she enjoyed the physical freedom to roam the acreage at Wallamumbi, her family’s New england property. Yet Wright’s classed position was qualified by gender. her family’s custom was to favour male rather than female inheritance of the land itself. a bequest from her paternal grandmother, May Wright, had provided for Judith’s education, and there would be the very occasional windfall from her family later in life.18 though her origins gave Wright social cachet, the financial benefits were modest. She seemed outwardly accepting of her noninheriting status. Yet her early poetry suggests that this gendered displacement from any prospect of possessing the land was deeply formative. as Jennifer Strauss puts it, the New england poetry stakes its claim to ‘a birthright socially denied but . . . symbolically asserted by the female child’.19 Veronica Brady’s biography hints at a constitutive narrative based on the poet’s double displacement from the land she loved. the primary displacement, her exclusion from inheriting the property because of gender, was followed by another displacement, even more decisive: her refusal of the social destiny of grazier’s wife.20 If Wright rebelled against her pastoral heritage and its social

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destiny, what did she choose in its place? the decisive move to relinquish this social destiny was her radical choice of life partner in Jack McKinney, whom she met in 1944. a man much older than herself, impoverished, homeless and estranged from his wife, a veteran still suffering from the trauma of the Great War, Jack was a self-taught philosopher who had made it his quixotic goal to fathom the crisis of the modern world. In choosing him, Wright was not only embracing his intellectual quest, she was also breaking irrevocably with social convention. her early poetry glows with the energies of this courtship and their life together on Mount tamborine. Despite their isolation from the metropolis, however, the couple interacted regularly with visitors and friends, among whom were artists and writers like the Blackmans, the palmers and others. Jack and Judith proved a magnet for Brisbane’s radical and artistic networks. Seclusion and engagement were always in productive tension in the couple’s life. though they retreated from the overtly political, they were involved in developing a way of living and a pattern of thought that would bear fruit in Wright’s poetry, and later, her more political activism.

a woman of principle: 1949–1962 Wright’s apparently unique status as ‘woman’ poet of the land seems amnesic about female precursors, like Mary Gilmore, with whom she had much in common and whom she herself acknowledged.21 this was partly connected to the wider problem of discontinuity within australian literature: writers seemed to emerge, in different periods, as if from nowhere only to slip from view again. In the 1950s Wright herself tackled this problem when she took on the role of literary critic. her invited lectures, initially for the Commonwealth Literary Fund, led her to conduct considerable research on precursor poets. She did much to rescue Charles harpur from obscurity, and her reevaluation of the poetries of John Shaw Nielsen and Christopher Brennan, among others, made a profound impression. Given the

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overwhelmingly male-dominated canon of english poetry, largely unchallenged till the 1970s, it is perhaps not surprising that Wright’s earlier recovery of an australian poetic tradition was so exclusively focused on male rather than female precursors. Wright did come to identify herself later on with the struggle of women, and women writers. her considerable effort in the 1950s and 1960s, brought to fruition in her groundbreaking critical study Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), established – it must be emphasised – retrospectively, a line of literary fathers. In recovering this tradition of australian poetry, Wright was asserting the legitimacy of her poetic vision in a re-imagined inheritance. While Wright did acknowledge the influence of women like Mary Gilmore and her grandmother May Wright, her prevailing tendency was to privilege male figures, whether poets (like harpur and Kendall) or ancestors (like her grandfather, albert Wright). this was perhaps a sign of inherent conservatism, yet her chosen exemplars were also nonconformists.the australian-born son of convicts, harpur had applied the techniques and philosophy of the romantic poets, particularly of Wordsworth, to the observation of australian place. his poems manifested a symptomatic split-consciousness that Wright detected at the heart of australian poetry. In harpur,Wright discovered the first really ambitiously ‘literary’ white australian poet of the land, also, significantly, a thinker of principled, political convictions. She admired his ‘incorruptible sincerity, earnestness and personal pride’ and his sense of duty to australia: ‘he set himself the task of becoming the first authentic voice of a new nation in whose future, even at his depths of disappointment and despair, he never quite lost hope’.22 She elevated him, even at his worst, above his more popular near-contemporary henry Kendall. harpur, she wrote, ‘thinks, and he can think with power and poetry’.23 It’s as if harpur provided Wright, a woman of principle, with a blueprint for her own poetic and public crossings in and beyond the 1960s. Wright’s rebellion was, therefore, always the rebellion of an insider. She was impelled by a highly developed sense of integrity

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and drew on principles not inconsistent with conservative, even patriarchal, concepts of duty. the social legacy of a colonial grazier class is displaced by a wider duty to future generations, and to those dispossessed. From 1948, Wright turned to her grandfather’s diaries to develop an imaginative re-creation, a fictionalised history, of the pioneering struggle of her ancestors. Widely and favourably reviewed, The Generations of Men (1959) was both a work of familial piety and, in fact, deeply attuned to the ambivalences of the frontier. If the virtue of pietas infused her attitude towards the past, it also led her to confront the evidence of environmental destruction and aboriginal dispossession. a transformed pietas – a sense of duty born of conservatism in its more rigorous sense – perhaps drove her devastating but largely ignored sequel, The Cry for the Dead (1981). this later work, based on Wright’s own detailed historical research, has been one of the least acknowledged of the revisionist histories of the frontier with which it coincided.24 the oft-repeated cliché that it was the early poetry which established Judith Wright’s reputation obscures the more complex likelihood that it was her openness to change, growth and risk-taking – in both poetry and public life – that augmented her reputation over time. In The Gateway (1953) and The Two Fires (1955), her break away from the lyrical immediacy of her early work drew strong criticism. that reverential awe towards the ‘poetess’ could turn sour is evident in Vincent Buckley’s oft-quoted remark that in trying ‘not to be a woman, but a bard, commentator or prophet, she becomes a bit of a shrew’.25 It is ironic that Wright’s philosophical and poetic engagement with modernity’s self-destructiveness in these two collections was at first so readily dismissed, for this was the intellectual scaffold for a maturing environmental poetics. the poems of these collections produce an ecological sensibility well in advance of her peers, one still challenging today. as late as 1991, Shirley Walker’s admirable study of Wright’s poetry – one of the most philosophically informed and lucid analyses to date – seems inhibited by unnecessarily narrow literary horizons of interpretation.

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even Walker reads Wright’s later poetry against the perceived perfection of the poetry of Woman to Man, using that collection as a yardstick. this lens obscures the dynamic processes that the later poems engage. elevating the poetry that balances the tensions of symbolism and realism, the split between excessive abstraction on the one hand and a flat mundanity of voice on the other becomes a sign of failure.Yet it may be that Wright’s formal failures were more important than her early successes, for the effort to continue to think with and through poetry, to test and resolve the antinomies of poetry and world, required this bursting of old wine skins. Despite the apparent quiescence and domestic focus of life on Mount tamborine in the 1950s, the poems of The Gateway and Two Fires show that this period involved a dramatic crystallisation of Wright’s intellectual and ethical vision, and her poetic attempt to fuse her ‘passions into one clear stone’ (‘Birds’, 1952).26 her sense of crisis had been rendered all the more acute by her combined exposure to McKinney’s intellectual inquiry, the experience of motherhood and, with the advent of the Korean War, the apocalyptic threat of the ‘atomic age’. We feel the pulse of urgency, the sense of threshold and imminent crossing, in the opening stanzas of her poem ‘Sanctuary’ (1953). they also suggest the turn of the poet’s gaze from the land itself towards the source of problems, in the metropolis: the road beneath the giant original trees sweeps on and cannot wait.Varnished by dew, its darkness mimics mirrors and is bright behind the panic eyes the driver sees caught in the headlights. Behind his wheels the night takes over: only the road ahead is true. It knows where it is going: we go too. Sanctuary, the sign said. Sanctuary— trees, not houses; flat skins pinned to the road

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of possum and native cat; and here the old tree stood for how many thousand years?—that old gnome-tree some axe-new boy cut down. Sanctuary, it said: but only the road has meaning here. It leads into the world’s cities like a long fuse laid.27

a brooding menace gathers as the lengthening vowels of the last words take hold, forcing us to linger. the forward momentum of time is halted, thrown into reverse, as the anticipatory present (‘leads’) unravels into an already plotted past (‘laid’). So the poem’s verbal pattern echoes its warning: humanity is slowly, blindly, plunging, in destructive disregard for nature, for environment, into a trap of its own making. alluding to heraclitean imagery and shot through with an intensely nuclear-age consciousness, many of Wright’s Two Fires poems exercise the dangers and promise of the life force. the poetry confronts an existential terror magnified by humanity’s complicity in collective extinction. For such ‘wounded’, self-betraying, time-bound beings only time itself, ‘change and distance’, can shape ‘some new tremendous symbol for the soul’ (‘the harp and the King’, 1953).28 though Wright was thus explicitly probing connections between poet and world, in both her poetry and prose of the 1950s, she eschewed direct political involvement at this time, seeking instead the deeper causalities at work. She wrote to Kathleen Mcarthur: . . . I feel more and more as life drums it in that politics are not the important thing. It’s like concentrating on the rash and forgetting to treat the measles. politics are the froth on the top of the cauldron, to mix the metaphor; not what makes the water boil. the really important thing is to find why the water’s boiling – and the really difficult one.29

Wright’s early resolve to remain politically detached weakened, though, particularly when she began to register the environmental

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devastation brought about by the post-war era’s unbridled clearing, development and mining of places she loved, like Cooloola and Fraser Island.

Poetry to activism to poetry: 1962–1980s travelling back together after appearing in support of Whitlam at a pre-election Labor rally at the Sydney Opera house in 1974, patrick White received a telling warning from Judith Wright: ‘Once you put your foot on the flypaper, you’ll never shake it off ’.30 Wright knew what she was talking about: for more than two long decades, she became thoroughly involved in campaigning for a raft of environmental, aboriginal and human rights causes. It was 1962, the year that Judith and Jack were finally able to marry and daughter Meredith began boarding school, that marked the start of Wright’s major activist involvement,31 at first for the environment and subsequently also for Indigenous people whose struggle for recognition, civil rights and justice was about to intensify. Jack’s death in 1966, Judith’s 1968 european tour with Meredith during the student uprisings, and the 1976 move to Mongarlowe near Canberra were also shaping contexts for this very public part of her life. What did Wright’s activism actually entail? It may be worth enumerating some part of her public engagements as an indication. their complexity made documentation difficult. In declining health, and finding her intimate collaboration with Nugget Coombs hard to write about, Wright abandoned an attempted sequel to Half a Lifetime (1999).Veronica Brady’s authorised biography, South of My Days, likewise, is so packed with detail about Wright’s commitments that the sense of coherent patterning remains elusive. In essence, Wright moved well beyond an established but bounded public role – that of poet-intellectual – to become a thoroughgoing campaigner in support of specific issues. She developed expertise in (indeed her work helped found) the new discipline of environmental science. She engaged in environmental, historical,

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anthropological and cross-cultural research, wrote books and essays, delivered countless public addresses on both environmental and aboriginal issues, eventually also challenging white concepts of wilderness that excluded aboriginal people. She cultivated and supported, financially and strategically, the efforts of networks and organisations trying to bring about change. She wrote endless letters of protest, letters of support, and letters to persuade and inform. her correspondents included ministers, prime ministers, activists, fellow poets and writers, artists, scientists, Indigenous people and many others. She served on the executive of campaign committees. In 1962 Wright co-founded the Wildlife preservation Society of Queensland (WpSQ) with Kathleen Mcarthur, David Fleay and Brian Clouston. In her unpublished tribute to Wright, long-time close friend Kathleen Mcarthur allows us to glimpse the context: Conservation had not been a major issue before September 1962, when suddenly it was, led primarily by the nation’s birdwatchers who needed an avenue for protest against the australian prime Minister for giving the British hall expedition permission to take what bird specimens they desired . . . the resentment was strong.32

For more than a decade Wright served as president of WpSQ, campaigning (as Mcarthur also records) against the sandmining of coastal foredunes, the clearing of the brigalow, the commercial denuding and sale of rare bushflowers, and the slaughter of ‘rainforest pigeons for the pot’.33 Wright was soon at the forefront of a protracted battle with the rampantly pro-development Bjelkepetersen Queensland Government to save, among other places, the Great Barrier reef, a struggle documented in her book, The Coral Battleground (1977).Wright herself wasted little time pondering why she commanded such media attention. In The Coral Battleground, she remarked merely that being a poet made her a ‘curiosity showpiece in the conservation movement’.34 as philip Mead points out, Wright’s transition from activism to governmental work, during the

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period of the Whitlam government, marked a new phase in her public career.35 Yet this role did not sever her from activism and she evidently retained her independence of view. She did not resile, for example, from criticising even such an activist government as Whitlam’s for its perceived inadequacies.36 No doubt because of her work and profile as a conservationist, in 1973 Wright was invited by the Whitlam government to join the Committee of Inquiry into the National estate, a massive nationwide stocktake of australia’s natural heritage. It is no accident that so many of Wright’s poems from these decades entail an aerial perspective, the gaze from the plane window onto the earth below. a critical event, discussed further in Chapter 3, was Wright’s encounter in 1963 with Kath Walker, later known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Wright’s recommendation to publish Kath Walker’s first book of poems, We are going (1964), was the first move in an enduring cross-cultural friendship of mutual learning and support. as Jennifer Jones argues, the friendship between the women modelled an inter-racial openness focused on listening rather than on domination.37 Wright’s receptiveness to Oodgeroo’s often challenging viewpoint had been primed by her long awareness of a hidden history, publicly suppressed yet privately circulated, of the colonial frontier. In her early poetry this knowledge had been conveyed in terms that were elegiac and haunted about this past. the encounter with Oodgeroo, however, brought the past into the present. Wright’s poem ‘two Dreamtimes’ (1973) relays her sharply pained new awareness: a knife’s between us. My righteous kin still have cruel faces. Neither you nor I can win them, though we meet in secret kindness. I am born of the conquerors, you of the persecuted.

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raped by rum and an alien law, progress and economics.38

For Wright, recognition of what this meant could no longer be avoided. What she did about her knowledge was multidimensional. She championed Oodgeroo’s work as poet. She lobbied for and gave financial support to Oodgeroo’s Moongalba project, her education centre on Stradbroke Island set up to provide a cross-cultural experience for young australians. Likewise, Wright did whatever she could to support an emerging generation of Black australian writers, such as Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert and roberta Sykes. While she lived at Mongarlowe, Wright sought out the land’s traditional owners and offered to pay rent. She publicly challenged white environmentalists about their failure to consider aboriginal perspectives. together with hC Nugget Coombs, a close intellectual ally for many years, Wright initiated the aboriginal treaty Committee (1979–1984), serving as its secretary and documenting its cause in her book, We Call for a Treaty (1985). throughout these years, she also continued to nurture fellow writers, and australia’s literary culture – she served as a founding member of the Whitlam government’s arts Council Literature Board, which had replaced the previous scheme, the Commonwealth Literary Fund. In other words, as tim Bonyhady put it, Wright ‘bore the grind of daily campaigning’, a fatiguing involvement often cited as the cause of her alleged loss of poetic energy. Bonyhady repeats this view on the basis of statements Wright herself made, suggesting that by the early 1970s poems were ‘only occasionally “squeezed” out of her’.39 her daughter, Meredith McKinney, has a rather different view: she suspects that Wright’s activism may have been another way of expressing her vision at a time when her poetic energies were beginning to dissipate.40 Wright herself stated, plainly enough, that after 1985 the muse simply left her altogether. amongst those who discussed whether Wright should give up activism for poetry, it was surprisingly aD hope, a debunker of the

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political role of writers, who in 1975 offered the most salient and insightful observation: . . . those of her friends and her critics who deplore the loss to poetry involved, as they think, by her plunge into what e. M. Forster once called ‘the world of anger and telegrams’, possibly do not realize how deeply the active and the contemplative life may combine in a poet.41

Certainly the poems from this long period – from collections such as The Other Half (1966), Shadow (1970) and Alive (1973) – engage in a running dialogue about the threatened retreat of the muse, the loss of an earlier, more innocent intensity, the onset of age, and the fear of being out of step with younger poets. In ‘tightropes’ (1976), for example, finding herself crossing mountainous country in which her habit of ‘keeping horizons straight’ does not equip her for the ‘peaks around’ that ‘draw my attention to the gulfs below’,42 the poet faces the double challenge of maturity – of writing poetry, and maintaining a principled position through ambiguities. Yet the commonly stated view that Wright’s poetry suffered in both quantity and quality in this ‘middle’ period is questionable, notwithstanding her own public statements. the poetry articulates a self-doubt that may have been read too simplistically as weakness. Many of the poems from these two decades are remarkable exercises in restoring the poet’s sense of value and self, a self otherwise exposed with eyes painfully open to the horror of a destructive humanity. Given that poetry – certainly poetry in the tradition of the romantics – addresses itself to an imagined future readership, a posthumous audience, what use are a poet’s words when all realistic hope in that future fails? In that context, I think Wright’s poetry, even at its most prosaic, bitter or ugly, asks to be read as an exercise of defiance, flung out as a kind of hope or commitment against encroaching extinction. Indeed, some of Wright’s most brilliant poetry is produced in this period, directly out of this exhausting

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despair. ‘Lament for passenger pigeons’ (1973), for example, is a penetrating and disturbing meditation on human despoliation of the environment that is as toughly challenging, as arrestingly powerful and as tightly synthesised a political vision as any poem written by Blake or Yeats. to excerpt even these concluding lines is to betray the whole, to unravel its compacted sequence of thought, and disintegrate its antinomies which seek an impossible imaginative recovery of that which is lost: What is the being and the end of man? Blank surfaces reverb a human voice whose echo tells us that we choose to die: or else, against the blank of everything, to reinvent that passenger, that birdsiren-and-angel image we contain essential in a constellating word. to sing of Being, its escaping wing, to utter absence in a human chord and recreate the meaning as we sing.43

there were sympathetic and sometimes admiring reviews of this ‘middle’ poetry, such as robert adamson’s thoughtful discussion of Alive, which observed the cyclical dynamic that had skewed Wright’s reception: over-adulation of her early poetry, he suggested, had led to unrealistic expectations and disappointment about her subsequent work. responses to Collected Poems 1942–1970 (1971), and to her volume, Fourth Quarter (1976), which included many poems that spoke directly, sometimes with frustration, to her activist experiences, were very mixed. Chris Wallace-Crabbe would today probably shrink from his 1971 remarks on Wright’s ‘rather sibylline voice’ and robert Gray from his 1977 criticism of Fourth Quarter’s ‘flat, complaining, nagging tone’. reacting to the anger spilling out of the poems, Gray also echoed the view that Wright

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had become exhausted from over-involvement in political activism. John tranter’s review of Fourth Quarter was particularly devastating, attacking Wright’s work as a eurocentric reflection of the ideology and viewpoint of an older generation of australians.44 Gender, like nation, is an intractable category requiring more rigorous analysis than a few easy shots at 1970s pre-second-wavefeminist language. that Wright herself was aware of and played on the gendered ambivalence of her status can be seen in her remarks at a 1980 Women Writers Congress: I shall assume you’ve asked me [to address you] as a Wise old Woman, who with the aid of rhyming spells can foretell your future and advise you on possible ways of coping with life as poet and writer in a chaotic and apparently collapsing civilisation, so I will take on that role.45

the fact that, in Fourth Quarter and other collections, Wright was dwelling nakedly on themes of age, vulnerability and mortality – swinging from bitterness and anger to self mockery – may have been unappetising for an emerging younger generation of (male) poets, especially those intent on asserting a new cosmopolitan aesthetic. What was being overlooked, at least until the work of critics like Shirley Walker (1991) and Jennifer Strauss (1995), was that this phase in Wright’s poetry entailed both continuity and departure. here she effected a break with the more predictable and narcissistic ambitions of ‘poetry’, and with the narrow and prescriptive boundaries of her public image. In the process her late poems actively renew and revitalise her chief preoccupations from the standpoint of wisdom, reactivating the ‘play of opposites’. though she began to withdraw from some of her involvements during the late 1980s, Wright remained politically active and committed. She continued to speak out publicly, and her archived correspondence attests to her continuing support (to say the least) for campaigns for a treaty, for anti-nuclear and peace causes, for the

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boycott of the Bicentenary, in support of native title claims following the Mabo decision and, despite her initial scepticism, for the cause of reconciliation. her last and perhaps most inspiring public appearance occurred only a week before her death: on a bitter cold day in 2000, equipped with walking frame, she joined in the ‘people’s walk for reconciliation’ across the Canberra Bridge.

a play of opposites: Phantom Dwelling Wright herself finally expressed the view, as Bonyhady reminds us, that activists are needed much more than poets. Yet to take this at face value is to entertain a false dichotomy that much of Wright’s poetry confounds. Veronica Brady argues convincingly that the division is intellectually artificial, since Wright’s poetry and activism sprang from the same dialogic source, and worked to renew each other.46 For Wright’s own assertion that her activism was more important than her poetry was consistent with her no-nonsense public persona, and her desire to goad others into action. She would have wanted readers to recognise the greater value of human integrity and commitment over a short-term focus on worldly careerism, including the career of poet. her no-nonsense public persona cohered with her own habit of disinvestment. as poet she cultivated the practice of trimming the ego, of distancing herself from the field of poetry and its rivalries. her preference, increasingly, was for doing rather than merely talking. It may have been this strength of mind that sustained Wright as practising and engaged poet for so long. Indeed, despite critical response to her poetry, she continued to confront and draw upon her life experiences. She also found an answer, perhaps one with which tranter could also be content, which gave exquisite expression to the poems of her final volume, Phantom Dwelling (1985). her last poems show her breaking with the investments of her younger self as she sought to strip away habitual poetic rhetoric and mannerism. In Phantom Dwelling, Wright revisits earlier themes, subjecting

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them to cool, sometimes ironic appraisal. Consider the brief excerpt from the well-known sequence, ‘For a pastoral Family’ (1985): Our people who gnawed at the fringe of the edible leaf of this country left you a margin of action, a rural security, and left to me what serves as a base for poetry, a doubtful song that has a dying fall.47

Implicating herself in this shared ancestry, the poet undercuts family pretension to success, wealth or durable tenure.the wider inclusiveness of the personal pronoun – ‘our people’ – renders family history complicit with colonial history, playing also with and against familiar representations of the ‘poet of the pioneers’, within which she had been caught. the poet shrugs off the value of an inheritance that has afforded her brothers merely ‘a margin of action’, a ‘rural security’, in a life now (and always already) shrunk to an enclosed provinciality of uncertain legitimacy.Yet this same material inheritance, doubled by the cultural inheritance of english romanticism, has served as the poet’s own ‘base for poetry’. So she is drawn back into contingency, into a circuit of compromise, which inscribes her ‘doubtful song’ with its eliot-like ‘dying fall’. though resignedly acknowledging this predicament as mutual, Wright’s verse attests to the burden brought by colonial guilt to her poetry and public life. thus Wright invokes and plays upon her anglo-Irish-literary inheritance of romantic and post-romantic favourites, Blake, Yeats and Keats. these remain reference points in Phantom Dwelling – they are, after all, the poets who sought communion with nature as a means of reconstituting value, of re-engaging with the world. Yet that heritage, too, is framed and distanced, as the poet seeks renewed discipline through confinement to earth and restriction of power,48 and attends to microcosmic worlds and small, evanescent life-forms. the poem ‘Caddis-Fly’ is a vivid meditation,

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its diction simple and clean, its images marvellously delicate. Its opening stanza – Small twilight helicopter, four skins of crystal veined taut with chitinous fibre carry you into my wineglass. Why such a dying fall?49

– playfully, ironically echoes that earlier melancholic line in ‘For a pastoral Family’. If the voice of Wright’s mid to later poetry seemed prosaic or abstracted, here a calm austerity releases a mature and confident power. a fresh clarity emerges from the highly attentive focus of a deliberately delimited gaze, yet one surprisingly continuous with the approach enunciated in ‘the writer and the crisis’, her 1952 essay.50 the rhythms of Wright’s verse in Phantom Dwelling, furthermore, reach beyond eurocentric australian traditions to poetries from asian and Middle eastern cultures (answering tranter’s critique of ‘eurocentrism’). alluding sparely to the four masters of Japanese haiku from each of whom an attribute is drawn, Wright finds the wherewithal to distance herself from the old, worldly pressure of public representation. here she puts on hold the egoism that attends public performance, reaching for equilibrium and poise. In ‘Brevity’, from the longer sequence,‘Notes at edge’, she relinquishes poetic contrivance and pursues experience, the sensory moment, allowing the universe momentarily to expand from a fragment: Old rhythm, old Metre these days I don’t draw very deep breaths. there isn’t much left to say. rhyme, my old cymbal, I don’t clash you as often,

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or trust your old promises of music and unison. I used to love Keats, Blake. Now I try haiku for its honed brevities, its inclusive silences. Issa. Shiki. Buson. Basho. Few words and with no rhetoric. enclosed by silence as is the thrush’s call.51

an ironic awareness of age, mortality and physical frailty, of cultural and bodily limitation, produces these poems, thwarting or constraining indulgence in romantic visions, or individualistic poetic rhetoric. the poems in this collection don’t yield the negatively haunted quality sometimes associated with Wright. they negotiate pessimism and polarities with graceful humour. Meanwhile, their active delimitation of poetic space performs a refusal of the more grandiose claims of both inheritance and posterity.they make their strongest investment in the present, surrendering or setting in poised perspective the heroic claims of high art and public life. Yet the polarities they seek to resolve are continuous with and newly illuminating of Wright’s thought and poetry: the play of opposites, their interpenetration— there’s the reality, the fission and the fusion. Impossible to choose between absolutes, ultimates. pure light, pure lightlessness cannot be perceived. ‘twisted are the hearts of men—dark powers possess them. Burn the distant evildoer, the unseen sinner.’

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that prayer to agni, fire-god, cannot be prayed. We are all of us born of fire, possessed by darkness.52

Of course such a gesture of delimitation and refusal may only be available to an already established national poet. It is exactly this gesture, however, that promises to renew Wright’s readership into and beyond the present. Selected verse from Phantom Dwelling was included in John tranter and philip Mead’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991). In 1986, philip Mead wrote with considerable astonishment about Wright’s experimental use, in her concluding sequence – ‘the Shadow of Fire’ – of the ghazal, an ancient persian verse form.53 Wright’s later poetry can thus be seen as both continuous with her earlier work and as open to changes – changes not only in her own life, but also in response to the poetries of succeeding generations. resisting familiar patterns, Wright’s fresh perspectives and forms – of haiku and ghazal – shatter the contours of those nationalist and gendered categories within which her poetry had been understood. the early recognition of Wright’s poetry was an ambivalent platform, both benefit and burden. though it caught her in a net of representations with which she became increasingly uncomfortable, it provided an incalculable reservoir of symbolic capital upon which she drew in her activism for the environment and for aboriginal people. It is ironic that it was Wright who so publicly and profoundly challenged the pioneering legend that her own early poetry had once helped to renew in national memory. the sharpest contradictions emerge here. On the one hand, through her movement from poet-intellectual to activist and with her rigorous questioning of her own white belonging, Wright’s reputation as a prophetic public figure was secured. On the other, it was through her poetry that Wright sought to distance herself not only from representations within which she had been caught as poet and public figure, but also from the debilitating effects of what pressed so hard upon her, impelling her into public life: the technologically-driven

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destructiveness of modernity and the injustices of colonisation. It is fitting to conclude by contemplating the title she gave her last volume of poetry, Phantom Dwelling. It alludes to Basho¯’s famous haibun, from which the following passage comes. Wright’s resolution of opposites in Phantom Dwelling is achieved through a similarly wry relinquishing of self that opens it to the world: I’ve worn out my body in journeys that are as aimless as the winds and clouds, and expended my feelings on flowers and birds. But somehow I’ve been able to make a living this way, and so in the end, unskilled and talentless as I am, I give myself wholly to this one concern, poetry. Bo Juyi worked so hard at it that he almost ruined his five vital organs, and Du Fu grew lean and emaciated because of it. as far as intelligence or the quality of our writings go, I can never compare to such men. and yet we all in the end live, do we not, in a phantom dwelling? But enough of that – I’m off to bed.54

Chapter 2

Imagining the real: patrick White’s literary-political career It is precisely now, when we are dealing with the raw real of a catastrophe, that we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which determine its perception . . . It is the awareness that we live in an insulated, artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction.1 Mrs poulter continued running. She did not believe she had seen what she had seen, but again, believed. She would not believe. that is, she believed in everything now under the bruised and bursting sky. Not to say heaven.2

W

hat is it that triggers a sense of ‘the real’? I would pinpoint the early 1980s as the time of my own first sidelong brush with that void, the one that suddenly yawns open, somewhere beneath, beyond or deep inside the comfortable matrix of life and the mundane world, and towards which one is suddenly hurtling in time. It might have been a dream.Yet, in an instant, it was no longer a dream – ordinary life had become the dream.this ‘real’, also encountered by Mrs poulter in The Solid Mandala (1966), has personal and wider social dimensions. In his provocative essay in the wake of

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9/11,‘Welcome to the Desert of the real’, Slavoj Žižek discusses the strange switching of realities effected by such an event – not just the making real of virtual realities but also the spectacular entry of the image into reality. amid the swirl of paranoid and defensive reactions to 9/11, he locates the ordinary, symbolic structures that stop us (i.e. those of ‘us’ who live in ‘First World’ comfort) from dealing with the social and political consequences of privilege – a crisis deepened by our very cushioning from it, inflaming our sense of threat. there have been other times when the ‘real’ has seemed close rather than distant. the early 1980s, for example, were vividly coloured by collective nuclear imaginings, as the nuclear threat developed a hold on the popular imagination. ronald reagan, the ‘Star Wars’ president, was in the White house; women had set up a peace camp on Greenham Common; the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior, was sabotaged in auckland’s harbour; the Chernobyl disaster cast a radioactive pall over europe; in australia, the Nuclear Disarmament party contested the 1984 australian Federal election and won a NSW Senate seat in 1987. a global peace movement, stimulated by NatO’s 1979 decision to deploy cruise and pershing II missiles in europe,3 was building in australia as well. palm Sunday anti-war protests, swelling with each successive year, broke all records. apocalyptic songs by Midnight Oil converged with books and films, like Jonathan Schell’s analysis of the cultural meaning of nuclear catastrophe, The Fate of the Earth (1980), russell hoban’s post-apocalypse novel, Riddley Walker (1980), raymond Briggs’s story in cartoon graphics, When the Wind Blows (1982), and Nicholas Meyer’s film, The Day After (1983).4 though the threat of nuclear weaponry is still with us, it has been displaced by other spectres. Beyond the Berlin Wall and other geopolitical changes, the nuclear nightmare has been eclipsed by the systemic complexity and creeping banality of global warming. In the early 1980s, however, ‘imagining the real’ meant anticipating not just the reality of one’s own individual death, but social and species annihilation. If 1950s youth had already been there, 1980s

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youth discovered the nightmare all over again.the prospect of postapocalyptic landscapes made the normality of everyday life illusory. Young and old came together in rare unanimity: the implications of nuclear warfare are so immense that it’s tempting to turn our backs – to persuade ourselves it can’t concern australia. Until, if we’re honest, we have to admit that beside this global issue nothing else matters. What work of fiction, written in these circumstances, can seem anything but trivial?5

So spoke patrick White on 21 October 1981. approaching seventy, freshly infamous from the previous week’s publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass, he was the star attraction at the inaugural meeting in Melbourne of people for Nuclear Disarmament.White’s celebrity status certainly did not hurt the NDp launch: more than a thousand people turned up. according to Judith Wright, who was also there, three hundred had to be turned away from the overcrowded venue.6 this was the first occasion on which White had spoken for the anti-nuclear movement. already a seasoned public speaker, he had campaigned for a range of causes during the previous two decades. as australia’s only Nobel prize-winning writer, White was firmly entrenched as the nation’s pre-eminent, canonical, literary figure. By the 1980s he had become a national monument and his symbolic capital was immense.to her daughter, Judith Wright joked that patrick White had had to be ‘winkled out of his misanthropic shell for the occasion’.7 Yet, though long considered reclusive, White had become, increasingly, a very public figure whose outspokenness had won both admirers and detractors. his public persona was replete with contradiction, oscillating between an irritable impatience and pleasure in his theatrical public role. as a prominent supporter of Gough Whitlam, his verbal attacks on those involved in the 1975 dismissal of that government had been crude and colourful. Like Judith Wright, however, White mostly favoured new, non-partisan

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causes such as the australian republic, environmentalism, aboriginal rights and anti-nuclear war – all the concerns of an australian generation younger than his own. White’s activism is usually said to have begun when he joined his neighbours in protest against a proposed sporting complex in Centennial park. But it can be traced back much further: in 1969, with forty-four other writers, White risked gaol to sign an anticonscription petition; he rallied with harry Seidler in 1965 to protest the government’s controversial sidelining of architect Joern Utzon during construction of the Sydney Opera house; and in 1946, he penned an outraged letter to the Sydney Morning Herald protesting the racism of fellow australian passengers towards migrants that he witnessed on his voyage home from europe.8 Beyond the 1960s, White shed the conservative politics of his family and took up increasingly leftist and progressive causes. his activism included, among other things, his speech at Whitlam’s 1974 election campaign launch, many addresses for the anti-nuclear movement from the late 1970s to the 1980s, and his much publicised boycott of the 1988 Bicentenary. he used his considerable wealth to fund a range of groups and causes of which he approved. White’s involvement in these political debates and causes is already comprehensively documented in his published speeches (Patrick White Speaks, 1989), David Marr’s biography, and his own memoir, Flaws in the Glass (1981). In ‘the Fine art of activism’, as discussed in Chapter 1, tim Bonyhady contemplates the tensions of art and activism. he compares arthur Boyd, peter Garrett and patrick White somewhat unfavourably with Judith Wright. his account of patrick White, one of many 1970s artist-activists for whom environmental issues had become ‘increasingly prominent and fashionable’, is particularly unflattering. he notes White’s surprised pleasure in addressing the rally against the sporting stadium in Centennial park, and from appearing on television: 9 this experience should have taught White that his literary status

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also gave him political muscle. Yet he still thought it an ‘incredible suggestion’ when one of his neighbours said that he would carry a lot of weight if he also spoke at rallies. On one day he spoke twice – first from the back of a truck in Centennial park, then at the town hall – and what he described as his ‘shocking career’ as an activist was launched. White never lost this ‘virus’ – nor particularly wanted to. he thought it too important and enjoyed it too much. protection of Fraser Island, nuclear disarmament and the stopping of the monorail were just some of the causes he took up and often helped to finance. Patrick White Speaks – his collected political speeches – are enduring testimony to his activism. Yet White not only gave almost no expression to his environmentalism in his novels and plays but, from the outset, put his writing first. after venturing onto television in defence of Centennial park in 1972, he immediately devoted himself to finishing off the second draft of The Eye of the Storm. Only then, needing his customary twomonth break from his manuscript, was he happy to ‘spend a couple of months campaigning for the neighbourhood’.10

this reading of White’s ‘environmentalism’ as lacking in commitment, coming a poor second to his art, relies on the author’s own account, ‘Incident in Martin road and the Shocking Career which Developed out of It’ (in Flaws in the Glass). ‘environmentalism’, however, is not necessarily the optimal category for identifying connections between White’s literary vision and his political activism. another, more serious problem with Bonyhady’s discussion is its reliance on Flaws in the Glass. the self-parody and calculated exhibitionism of the memoir warn us against taking White’s narcissism at face value. the public, political White is too easily doubled by the dubious, the insincere and the inauthentic. there is no denying that Judith Wright’s activist career was

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sustained, committed and exhausting. Furthermore, Wright was not one for theatrical grandstanding. In these terms, the comparison is indeed stark. Bonyhady is also right to propose that the nature of the relation between art and activism differed in each case: Wright’s poetry and activism, as we’ve seen, were connected at a deep level and supported by the philosophical framework she developed in her partnership with Jack McKinney.White, however, kept firm boundaries between these spheres of activity, so the connection is less easy to discern. But is it true that there was little continuity between the preoccupations in White’s fiction and the political views expressed in his speeches? Were White’s public interventions dilettantish and narcissistic in character, and, even if so, what does this mean, or matter? there is in fact little consensus about whether and how White’s art and activism interacted, or about the value of his public interventions (outside his works of fiction). In contrast to Bonyhady’s essay, Dorothy Green’s blurb for the australian edition of Patrick White Speaks proclaims the coherence of White’s vision: What interests me most about this book is its consistency with the novels – the moral stance is firm from the beginning. as novelist and citizen, patrick White is the voice of our country’s conscience. he begs us to search our hearts.11

tim Winton, on the other hand, has been decidedly critical of White’s 1964 move from relative isolation in Castle hill to entanglement in metropolitan public life. For Winton, the novels White wrote while living in semi-rural Castle hill were his finest, whereas the move to Centennial park marked his ‘retreat into the kingdom of disgust, the steady burgeoning of fame and the diminution of his powers’: In Sydney his life becomes far more social; the prickly persona that once protected him begins to eat him alive and he becomes much more read about than read . . . Fame seems to have robbed White of his vision and replaced it with his mission – keeping everyone else,

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from the next door neighbours to ronald reagan, in line. preaching from the high ground of material safety . . . [White] created a monster of a persona which robbed his work of the lasting attention that it deserves.12

Winton’s negative judgment against the direction White took in the second half of his life suggests something of the former’s own desire, at a particular point in his own career, to resist patterns laid down by his formidable precursor.Yet Winton’s view of White’s ‘monster’ persona coheres too readily with familiar representations of the author. Indeed, White himself colluded in the myth of the sacred monster that still clings to his memory.13 Winton’s observation does usefully draw attention to the interaction of suburb and metropolis in White’s work, and their associated polarities of obscurity and exposure, privacy and publicity. In Marr’s biography, 1964 stands as a pivot point in White’s literarypolitical career. at one level this simply serves Marr’s compelling narrative. Yet White’s move from suburb to city does correspond to a shift in his negotiation of art and public life. By looking at what he was writing in the lead up to and in the midst of this transition, we can observe some of these negotiations at their most heightened and sensitive point. how is White’s public ‘coming out’ (in more than one sense) as author and activist, anticipated and rehearsed in his art from this time? What do these interactions between his art and activism reveal – not only about the author’s politics and texts but also about the dynamics of literary field and nation in australia? Impinging heavily on these questions is the alternately monumental and monstrous character of the author’s public image. So we begin by traversing the genesis and reception of the public ‘patrick White’, well before 1964.

Prophet from the (suburban) desert: genesis of the public ‘Patrick White’ ‘If artists reject ordinary people, they are the losers’, declared the

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Australian’s lead editorial in response to David Williamson’s ‘Cruise Ship australia’ speech in 2005. Criticising the ‘development of the arts in australia over the past generation’ and ‘the willingness of artists to cut themselves adrift from the life of society and to become sneering, carping critics of ordinary lives and values’, the editorial makes one careful exception: On very rare occasions, as in the fiction of patrick White, this superior attitude and the mockery that frequently accompanies it have approached the condition of high art.14

Ironically, the patrick White phenomenon aroused similar concerns, in the early 1960s, among members of australia’s literary left. ‘realist Writers’ Jack Beasley and Judah Waten worried about the politics of cultural privilege and high modernist practice in White’s Riders in the Chariot (1961). they regarded the novel as anti-democratic, anti-realist and politically regressive. angered by its depiction of ordinary australian workers as the perpetrators of himmelfarb’s mock crucifixion, Beasley remarked: ‘patrick White’s is not a private vision, he reproduces in literature the vision of his class’.15 Indeed White’s novel triggered something of a rift on the literary left about the meaning and direction of a realism which had been informed by both the tradition of australian democratic nationalism and midcentury Marxist aesthetics.16 In one sense, the concern that White’s aesthetic would undermine class-conscious, politically-oriented writing was prescient. In the Australian’s 2005 editorial, we see that it is the indeed the ‘condition of high art’ with which White’s work is associated that excuses, or even legitimates, his otherwise elitist critique of ordinary suburban australians. presumably David Williamson, the target of the editorial’s attack, can claim no such legitimacy. In combination with White’s reputation as a metaphysical writer, his canonical status – his practice of an exclusive form of ‘high art’ – allows a new conservative (media) ascendancy to coopt his fiction and neutralise its politically disruptive dimensions.

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White’s politics have also been continually revisited by academic critics, no more so than in the decade since his death in 1990. Simon During’s 1996 monograph executed a timely, if controversial, critique of White’s role as australia’s ‘Great Writer’.17 During argued that White’s aesthetic values, corresponding to his white-anglo, ruling-class and colonialist social origins, place him as ‘late colonial’, looking towards but not yet embodying a postcolonial australia. his emergence, furthermore, had served the need of a professionalising australian literary field at a precise historical moment.18 to build its national and international status, in During’s argument, the field was ripe for the contribution of an internationally celebrated (and translated) ‘Great Writer’ figure such as White. During’s analysis anticipates pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (2004), which describes the competition among nations for symbolic dominance in the space of world literature, a contest waged through the proxy of translated ‘great writer’ figures.19 as part of his larger argument about White’s theatrical staging of his life through fiction, During also offered incisive readings of White’s closeted camp aesthetic. his book was much criticised, however – most strenuously by one of the few australian literary journalists based outside the academy, peter Craven, who is well known for his public advocacy of (neglected) canonical works.20 One suspects that During’s seeming lack of sympathy for, and critical externality to, the australian literary field’s priorities was what most offended its insiders. It does seem, more than ten years later, that During may have been too sanguine about australia’s postcolonial turn. this now looks like the product of a specific cultural cycle, the hawke–Keating era, in which australia’s educated classes enjoyed greater than usual (albeit still limited) hegemonic power. More recently, ‘patrick White’ – as both canonical and culturally progressive figure – is being revived again among educated australian readers, and in literary, cultural and academic circles, as a subset of efforts to boost the currency and prestige of australian literature.21

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No-one wishes to be seen as an elitist out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, certainly not writers seeking a national readership. aspects of his discourse and fiction notwithstanding, patrick White presented himself as someone who valued, identified with and cared about the ordinary person. he was keenly interested in responses to his books by ordinary readers, as distinct from critics. One lovely example was his obsession with the condition of his books in the local library: from signs of wear, he discerned the point at which readers had given up on The Aunt’s Story (1948), in the difficult ‘jardin exotique’ section.22 White also characterised himself, somewhat romantically, not as a genius but a vessel, an involuntary medium of the books that took possession of him – they would ‘boil up’ in him. after getting down the first draft he would labour hard, like an ordinary workman, at ‘oxywelding’ (a favourite term) his sentences together. White’s discomfort with being positioned as a professional intellectual is a necessary corollary of his representation of his writing as a craft or labour. requests for White’s ‘intellectual’ commentary in literary journals, for example, were usually declined – If I have not sent you articles, if I haven’t reviewed books, it is because I am not a professional intellectual. I am an artist trying to get down on paper a number of novels I have in my head . . .23

White’s self-construction as artist-cum-labourer, rather than professional intellectual, sustained his imaginary connection with the life, experience and perspectives of ordinary people. refusal of the role of professional intellectual does seem consistent with a strongly ‘romantic’ model of the amateur creative writer, also implied in edward Said’s work. the amateur writer is situated outside formal institutions and remains averse to their dictates – even while relying on such institutions and professional bodies for the cultural reception and dissemination of the work.24 Independently wealthy, White never had to depend for a living on

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the field’s networks and institutions. though he readily assumed the role of literary patron,25 he did not review other people’s books and frequently refused literary prizes. these dispositions – congruent with White’s literary habitus – also cohere strongly with his specific class position. In John McLaren’s terms (a refinement of Beasley’s earlier analysis), White was an insider-critic of australia’s older, traditional ‘ruling class’, a class in decline, ‘on the brink of dispossession’. McLaren suggests that, in the novels, ‘White’s break with history as a linear process reflects the break in the continuity of the dominance of australian life by pastoral money’.the journey of theodora Goodman, in The Aunt’s Story, therefore, ‘stands as an image of her class, dislodged from the homes they have built but unable to find a past where they can belong’.26 Marr’s biography records the almost textbook cultivation of young patrick for membership of australia’s colonial ruling class. With his mother the boy encountered Sydney’s cultural and theatrical elite. Later he endured the misery of British boarding school, derived ambivalent pleasure from jackerooing for several years on properties owned by friends and relatives in outback NSW, and led a mildly dilettantish life at Cambridge before resolving on becoming a ‘writer’ and then drifting, on a stipend, through London, europe and New York. though such a life may have had its difficulties, this mobility inculcated White’s transnational habitus and privileged outlook. he developed an ease of familiarity with the modern metropolis that provided him with social and cultural capital – both the powerful literary and artistic connections and the intellectual and psychological distance required to carry out his dissection of provincial australia. While significant, class-of-origin is no simple or singular determinant of aesthetic and political outlook. White’s chronic, debilitating asthma and his sexual difference were obvious contributing factors. there were also the transformations effected by his World War II experiences, and his meeting with Manoly Lascaris. these experiences mitigated the primacy of his ‘white-anglo’ orientation. even

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so, through his refusal of a more conventional social destiny as heir to his class’s ideological, political and social values, White embraced its logical correlative in his pursuit of an aristocracy of culture. his priestly adherence to art for art’s sake – his absolute discipline and steadfast defence of his work’s integrity against the whims of publishers – was eventually rewarded with international recognition. the Nobel prize was the ultimate sign and multiplying dividend of his investment. Symbolic capital accrued not only to White himself but also to australia’s literary field, placing him as the measure of value and judgment at its gravitational centre, and improving recognition of the field in global literary space.27 In returning to australia to live and write, in choosing antipodean obscurity (though importantly, as his letters show, he maintained his New York and London connections), White had moved in reverse of other ambitious australian writers. how did he dispose himself among actual ‘ordinary’, suburban australians whose lives, translated into his fiction, became the vector of his national and international success? australia – and Castle hill in particular – represented both exile and home, echoing the deep duality of White’s insider–outsider perspective, offering both detachment and reconnection, a double vision for a dual audience of nation and global literary markets. In 1948, not long after arriving in australia, Manoly and patrick moved to Dogwoods in Showground road. Within reach of the city but on its periphery, the culturally isolated and physically taxing life at Dogwoods provided conditions of adversity, stimulating the works that secured White’s reputation as the australian novelist: The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957). as discussed earlier, at Castle hill the two men lived private lives, generally preserving a distance from neighbours and from the local community.28 the reason for this perceived remoteness from the neighbours is not hard to fathom: homosexuality was not for public view in the 1950s, and Marr’s biography records the local ‘fiction’ of the two bachelors, business partners, living together at Dogwoods. Distance from the community is only too apparent in the Sarsaparilla works:

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yet the reality these fictions and dramas constructs is recognisable. there is, moreover, a palpable empathy for, if not desiring proximity to, the most repressed of these fictional suburbanites. amid the religious imagery, there is a strong civic dimension in these works. they are less focused on australian nature, than on that other sense of ‘environment’: the regulative social order planted upon the land, its normative lifestyles, hierarchies and distinctions, and the plight of the outsider exiled within.

From ‘the Prodigal Son’ to Riders in the Chariot Critical to the forging of White’s public persona was the timing, in the wake of Voss, of his first significant public intervention, or ‘coming out’ as author: the publication of his landmark essay, ‘the prodigal Son’. the essay ventures what is, simultaneously, an embrace and castigation of australia. Its frequently quoted ‘Great australian emptiness’ passage about the provincialism and materialism of a suburban nation (revived, once again, by David Marr, in 2003) has become, if the oxymoron is allowed, a verbal icon.White’s critique is delivered in the context of what is an authorial manifesto, his declaration that it is his central vision and purpose, as a writer, ‘to people australia’. the reproductive theme, here, is so familiar as almost not to register, but he was fond of tropes of reproduction and inheritance, of the idea of works that will fertilise and populate the national imaginary. the biblical title – ‘prodigal Son’ – is multiply resonant. as prodigal son, White has liberally squandered his familial ‘inheritance’ in order to re-enter the nation, reborn, as an artist. the prodigal son story presents the author, in public, as flawed, sinful and self-flagellating, but also as favoured, elect, and irritably prophetic. the essay adds to the layering of biblical narratives, or metanarratives, created by the novels that built White’s reputation. as many have observed, the saga Tree of Man is the adam and eve story, an australian genesis. Voss sends the mad prophet into the australian

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wilderness, in a negation of outmoded ideas of nation. In ‘the prodigal Son’ essay, the author materialises, as public figure beyond the text, as one who channels and guarantees – makes ‘real’ – the text, making Word into Flesh. this sequence, with ‘the prodigal Son’ as its declarative hinge, prepares the way for White’s ‘New testament’ sequel, with its four pillars, or witnesses – indeed its four apostles – of Riders in the Chariot (1961). the intersecting earthly lives and divine visions of four protagonists – eccentric spinster and earth spirit Mary hare, the receptive and generous ruth Godbold, Jewish refugee Mordecai himmelfarb and half-caste aboriginal and artist alf Dubbo – comprise Riders in the Chariot. the interiority of these four characters is developed in sharp relief to its suburban demons, Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack. the four-part structure mirrors the New testament, as does the climactic mock crucifixion scene, replicating the holocaust amid the banality of suburbia. harry rosetree, the employer who represses his Jewish identity so as to assimilate to australian life, is the Judas figure, while alf Dubbo corresponds to peter, the apostle who both believes and betrays. there is a national politics, a literary vision of nation, implied in all this religion. Riders in the Chariot is both the finale of White’s trilogy of mythic, biblically charged national fictions and the inauguration of his representation of contemporary australia. as such, the novel represents a new phase in White’s engagement with national public life and activism. religious interpretations of Riders at first jostled uneasily against readings of its satirical and political elements – until the metaphysical view became the preferred reading. More recently, Riders has been re-politicised, its mock-crucifixion scene considered anew in relation to the Cronulla riots of 2005.29 andrew McCann argues that Riders in the Chariot plays out its drama against the background of an already colonised pastoral landscape gradually succumbing to an encroaching suburbia, itself the next wave of colonisation.30 In this context, the colonising project is carried on through modernisation itself. the final razing of Mary

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hare’s ancestral colonial home, Xanadu, is an exercise in obliterating the past. as McCann suggests, the suburbia that colonises the ground on which Xanadu stood represents an effort to control time, to manage and freeze it with the help of consumer goods and hygienic housekeeping practices, to suppress the passage of time and processes of decay. White’s modernist strategies, disruptive of conventional narrative temporalities, replicate and play with these temporal obstructions, or – if we consider White as the moderniser par excellence of the australian literary field – show complicity with the colonising imperative of modernism itself. McCann’s work is a corrective to critics unwilling to register the radical politics of White’s suburbia, and his political uses of abjection. White’s focus on abjection constitutes a specific mode of epiphanic revelation that neither cancels nor avoids but, increasingly, opens onto the political. Some commentators have difficulty comprehending, for example, the moment in The Tree of Man when Stan sees God in a gob of his own spittle.31 For McCann, in contrast, White’s grotesque images of bodily function, sexuality, decay and death work to disrupt the smooth reproduction of time-, body- and difference-denying categories of the beautiful and the normal. Not only that, White’s use of abjection, especially with his texts’ biblical framing, points towards the divine, establishing a conduit between ethical and spiritual integrity. this approach to reading White’s fiction also helps illuminate the artist figure in relation to the public patrick White. Clearly this is an autobiographical figure, but one in which the personal and political are experimentally renegotiated, unfolding through successive fictions. arguably, this thread – of the artist in White’s fiction – produces a metanarrative or running commentary about White himself as an artist, and this is ultimately layered into White’s public persona. the presence of this metanarrative of the artist encourages the mutual implication and constant crossing of fictional and nonfictional texts – as occurs also in his later fiction, culminating in the extraordinary last novels, The Twyborn Affair and the underrated

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postmodern novel, Memoirs of Many in One (1986). these metafictions result in the further amplification of the public ‘patrick White’. In Riders in the Chariot, alf Dubbo is White’s first such ‘artist’ figure. It is intriguing and perhaps symptomatic that although White researched Judaism to inform his portrayal of Mordecai himmelfarb, he felt no such need or compulsion to research aboriginal culture. If alf Dubbo is a white colonial fantasy of aboriginality, the point is that he represents the figure of the insider–outsider – the exile at home.this identifies him closely with the other three elect, but his liminality as ‘half-caste’ is specific and overdetermining. he is a supremely abjected figure: ‘Neither the actor, nor the spectator, he was that most miserable of all human beings, the artist’.32 this liminal aboriginality, one assumes, parallels White’s own abjected, yet-to-be-publicised homosexuality. even so, Dubbo’s ambiguous sexual encounters, such as his sexual union with father-figure reverend timothy Calderon (primally interrupted and repressed by Calderon’s sister Mrs pask) do not weigh heavily on him. they are nothing compared with the burden of his art: he is enslaved by the force of his vision, driven to painting it, in exhausting, painful repetition. In his final painting of ‘the Chariot-thing’, Dubbo creates an effect which mirrors White’s own time-defying fictional project. Viewed from an angle, the painting fleetingly achieves an optical illusion, ‘a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion’, in which the banks of the river seem to move, while the river lies still: So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position.33

If suburbia’s effort is to immobilise time, in alf Dubbo’s painting we see art’s parallel impulse, its attempt to disrupt and reverse the normal or conventional experience of time, to penetrate or imagine ‘the

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real’.this is something that White himself attempts, in his fiction. his interest in verisimilitude, in the realistic conjuring of surface realities, is compulsively arrested by an aesthetic, working even through his sentences, which repeatedly deploy the conditional and entangle certainty with doubt. White’s method of character description, too, usually offers multiple possible interpretations as momentary gestures or exchanges unfold. Dubbo gives pictorial expression to what the other three characters enact.the artist’s attempt to arrest and reverse time corresponds to the ascetic’s effort. himmelfarb seeks to resist the temporal, worldly demands of self and ego. On arriving in australia, he refuses the expected path of applying for a university post, because, he explains, ‘the intellect has failed us’. Yet his refusal is doubled, or negated, by the revelation that it is ego-driven. his decision to buy a modest house at Sarsaparilla to reinforce his spiritual quest for the ‘treasures of peace’ is accompanied by a punishing self-awareness of the ascetic’s tendency to self indulgence: this man of ascetic and selfless aspirations had so far diverged from his ideals as to hanker after physical seclusion.34

having purchased the house and learned of a job at Brighta Bicycle Lamps at Baranugli, which seemed ‘chosen for him’, himmelfarb allows himself to be directed by events: ‘to abandon self is, after all, to accept the course that offers’.35 the continual effort to surrender to time, rather than control it, involves a discipline of the ego.this both separates himmelfarb from the everyday and plunges him into it further. the ordinary is transfigured – in the recurrence of Germany’s holocaust mentality in the workers at the bicycle factory – as the brutal ‘reality’ from which he had sought to sequester himself.the resistance of both painter and ascetic is shaped through a difficult contingency with rather than simple alienation and exile from the everyday, suburban other. If White’s fiction and politics are more closely intertwined than

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some have contended, what is the vision that arises from that intertwining? and was he, as Winton implied, abandoning his real subject matter – ordinary australians living ordinary lives on the land and in the suburbs – when he moved to the city and into greater public visibility? What organises the relationship between his art and his later activism? these questions, among others, seem central to his writing of The Solid Mandala – the book he wrote while in transit in 1964. It is White’s goodbye to suburbia, yet – as we will see – it negates any simple denial of suburbia.

On the irritable threshold: The Solid Mandala as mentioned earlier, the biography marks 1964 as the turning point in White’s public career. By 1964 his literary reputation as the great australian writer was secure, but it is noteworthy that after Riders in the Chariot he did not produce another full length novel for several years. In the interim, he wrote novellas and short stories (The Burnt Ones, 1964) and developed his theatrical connections, writing three plays and attempting, in addition, an opera libretto. hubber and Smith suggest reasons for this sudden diversification of White’s creative output: . . . new contact with theatre people both at home and abroad, a psychic release following the arduous creation of Riders in the Chariot, perhaps an unconscious attempt to raise his literary status by diversifying his output, and more probably the desire to find new ways to say the ‘unsayable things’.36

The Ham Funeral – written decades earlier in 1947 – was rejected by the governors of the 1962 adelaide Festival, causing a heated controversy. the play was then staged separately, under the direction of John tasker, by the University of adelaide’s Student Guild. the fracas was, in Marr’s words, a ‘rallying point for those who were unhappy with the boring, official culture of australia in the late

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1950s and early 1960s’.37 this not only built White’s public profile as someone implacably opposed to parochial, conservative and provincial australia but also forged his connection with young australian directors, playwrights and actors. Several factors were now converging to impel change. the death of White’s american publisher and mentor, Ben huebsch, of Viking press, coincided with the death of his mother, an event of profound emotional significance. It was a financial watershed as well. the White inheritance that now passed fully to him enabled his move to ‘Martin road’. this brought him close to the city, just as it was acquiring its present cosmopolitan character, and gave him regular access to artistic networks. It was here that White began to plug in to changing cultural and political energies that would develop through the late 1960s, and come to fruition in the years of the Whitlam government. return to the city gave impetus to his public ‘coming out’ in multiple senses. though he never subscribed to the ‘gay rights’ movement,38 White’s ‘coming out’ from the 1960s onwards entailed the inexorable exposure, in both fiction and life, of the public author figure, his increasingly progressive political alignment, and the fact of his homosexuality. the phrase, ‘the urge to say unsayable things’, mentioned above, comes from a letter White wrote during the critical second drafting of The Vivisector (1970),39 the novel that, in concert with Riders and The Solid Mandala, pursues the theme of the artist’s relation to society. Beyond the abjected artist alf Dubbo, in Riders, White develops the split writerly selves of arthur and Waldo in The Solid Mandala. the split self is subsequently embodied and exhaustively exercised through the figure of the changeling artist, hurtle Duffield, in The Vivisector. In other words, the fiction that accompanies White’s ‘coming out’ into public life – his involvement in theatre, the move to Centennial park, the public exposure of his partnership with Manoly, his growing activism and his literary celebrity – serially explores lived contradictions between privacy and publicity, art and life, intimacy and detachment, generous love and narcissistic alienation.

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White had been itching for change, as he wrote to huebsch in 1962: I don’t yet quite understand what has happened, but something has, both inside and out . . . if I went on as I have been doing I should soon find myself a comfortable mediocrity, whereas I am looking for an unopened door, through which I can step and find myself rejuvenated.40

even if not the door, The Solid Mandala certainly marked a shift. White wrote his first draft at an exact transition point: his departure from the ‘terminus’ of Castle hill and his return to the city, the scene of his early childhood.41 the setting of the twins’ home in Sarsaparilla’s terminus road, ‘down which the yellow grasses thundered’,42 represents a geographical and psychological dead end. Yet White’s fictional setting bears a chiasmatic – inverted – relation to its geographic and biographical referents. Castle hill’s actual terminus Street runs parallel to the main road, Old Northern road. Curiously this puts it at right angles with – and on the other side of the shopping strip to – Showground road, the location of Dogwoods. this mirror mapping creates a metafictional chiasmus that expresses White’s own symbolic crossroads. Likewise, White maps his characters carefully within and against a precise local history of Castle hill. the tram terminus estate, established in 1910, was the start of that suburban frontier with which White’s Sarsaparilla fiction is politically preoccupied. It had been built to capitalise on the newly extended tram (later train) line that ran from parramatta to Castle hill. after the train line was decommissioned in 1932, buses serviced the route.43 encoded within the text, the suburb’s local history asserts a material counterpoint to Waldo’s self-absorbed, labyrinthine, time-defying narrative: ‘at least Dad had retired, and buses had replaced the train which used to run between Sarsaparilla and Baranugli, so Waldo could give himself to the more pneumatic bus, and reflect bitterly on his relationship with his father’.44

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though The Solid Mandala suggests a precise locatedness, the fictional Sarsaparilla, as I mentioned earlier, remains spatially indeterminate. It is a transitional zone, occupying the ragged, weedy boundary between the urban and the rural. In the novel, not unlike White’s own biographical returns (‘to the scenes of [his] childhood’), linear progress is thwarted by repetition and inversion. In terminus road, beginnings are ravelled into ends, and ends into beginnings. If progressive movement through space–time entails the abandonment of past selves, the narrative’s recursive movement entails repetition and conflation of selves. Like his self-referential and ever-deferred work, Tiresias A Youngish Man, Waldo’s own narration is heavily knotted, frustrating readerly desire for event and progression. this knotting, coupled with the narrative’s incessant figuring of this zone as time-defying, liminal and unstable, builds up a textual irritation. produced as theme and narrative process, textual irritation mirrors representations of the author as irritable public figure. White described The Solid Mandala as ‘a book full of ambivalence and unease – transitoriness’, pervaded by a sense of ‘fatality and foreboding’, the fear that once removed from the land at Castle hill his creativity would run dry. the novel’s protagonists, arthur and Waldo, the twins of terminus road, represent the two halves of himself: ‘Waldo is myself at my coldest and worst’.45 Citing White’s reflections, Marr comments that: ‘it was as if he had taken a scalpel to himself and excised the innocent arthur, leaving the monster Waldo behind’.46 Marr’s image of the scalpel, the instrument of self-excoriation, resonates with McCann’s discussion of abjection as political disruption of the norms of suburb and nation. White’s mode of representation might, therefore, be an aesthetic of prohibition, implicating his homosexuality (though not solely governed by it).47 this correlates with the constantly irritable sensibility of White’s public performances. In The Solid Mandala, one can see what Sianne Ngai has described, in her book Ugly Feelings, as the minor affect of irritation. Ngai’s book offers a brilliant analysis

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of a series of less-than-heroic emotions or minor affects – what she terms negative emotions or ‘ugly feelings’ – in a range of american literary and popular texts.48 Irritation confronts us almost immediately in The Solid Mandala. It sets the tone of the opening conversation between Mrs poulter and her friend Mrs Dun, bumping ‘not unpleasantly’ together on the Baranugli bus: ‘Mrs Dun perhaps benefited more, though Mrs poulter, it could not be denied, enjoyed the involuntary contact with her small, dry, decent friend.’ a defamiliarised pleasure is achieved via consciousness of boundaries – of dry contact, and the bumping and grinding of the bus, the proximity of stiff suburban wives to giggling girls. this irritable pleasure is produced not only at the level of imagery and lexicon, but at the level of syntax, with its weave of austen-like, anglo-formalities, threaded with White’s signature use of the conditional: She had a certain relentlessness of conviction. If it hadn’t been for her gloves her knuckles would have shown up on white on the chrome rail.49

the omnipresent conditional in White’s prose – that which would have occurred had it not been for – works satirically. Yet its stitching together of characters’ suspended desires with the realities of social constraint produces an excess of irritation. For the reader, there is a continual, chafing aggravation. Following Ngai, I suspect the recurrence of irritation focuses attention at the level of the epidermis – the sensitive skin or edge – something that recurs compulsively in White’s writing – witness the last line of Season at Sarsaparilla: ‘You can’t shed your skin . . . even if it itches like hell!’50 It is White’s habit – fitting with his theatrical modes of representation – to attend to discomforts of the skin, to focus on the bodily surface of characters – their mannerisms, style, prudishness, habits. tongues and teeth, awkwardly set or clashing, recur in asides, reminding us of characters’ physical limits, and ratcheting

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up the grating sensation of uncomfortable social interactions and thoughts. Often noted for its painterly texture, White’s prose yields irritable energies directed towards the carving out of depths, so that surfaces become, paradoxically, sites of intensity of feeling, and this does the work of affective and social excavation. I’d suggest that one of the unexpected effects of this epidermal preoccupation is political. Why is it political? Because a focus on the banality of surfaces, as prime site for the production of deep feelings, strikingly coheres with White’s desire to make the ordinary yield the extraordinary, as articulated in ‘the prodigal Son’. We might arguably read this project – of finding the extraordinary within the ordinary – as effected through a textual modus operandi that not only seeks out states of tension and liminality but also projects depths onto surfaces. the experience of australia as irritant is an attitude or desire that deeply informs White’s project – in both literary and political arenas. his conditional formulations, doubling brute actuality or brutalising fantasy, constantly and abrasively cut into and supplement what seems the otherwise empty, impervious or unyielding screen of an australian cultural landscape. the production of depth out of surfaces is expressed, or symbolised, in arthur’s solid mandalas, his marbles. here the two-dimensional image of the mandala acquires three-dimensional depth. the glass of the marble presents a surface that opens onto visible depths that can’t be penetrated or dismembered, except by the gaze. Waldo’s self-betraying, vulnerable narration constitutes the knotted heart of the marble that arthur reserves for his brother. that marble, lost at the point of Waldo’s own death, has ‘a knot at the centre, which made him consider palming it off, until, on looking long and close, he discovered the knot was the whole point’.51 Imaged in stones and marbles, in the rolling, marbled eyes of the dogs, in their turds and genitalia, in arthur’s dance for Mrs poulter, and in the asymmetric four-part design of the narrative, the solid mandala reveals even as it encloses the threat of fragmentation.

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the structure of White’s text mimics the mandala, as counterweight to its irritated surfaces. While Waldo’s narrative is wrapped and enclosed by arthur’s, the narratives of both brothers are in turn enclosed by the abiding presence of Mrs poulter. the very first image of the two brothers is mediated by the glass window of the bus, from Mrs poulter’s perspective. to Mrs poulter is given the apocalyptic experience of the real, depicted in my epigraph, the abject vision of violent death erupting through the mundane surfaces of Sarsaparilla and the television screen. and the narrative closes with her final image, as she turns ‘to do the expected things, before re-entering her actual sphere of life’.52 this of course, makes a marble of the text itself, returning the reader, in circular fashion, to the book’s first epigraph, from paul eluard: ‘there is another world, but it is in this one’. here is White’s assertion of the immanence of the spiritual (the actual sphere, or the real) to the material (surface, sensory) world – of the extraordinary to the ordinary. So that surfaces yield depths, suburbia yields art, as the narcissistic recluse re-enters the public realm that he appears, from some angles, never really to have avoided.

the shocking career of a public recluse ‘Yes, the big word is spoken out loud: Flaubert was a bourgeois, and the most worthy, the most scrupulous, the most orderly you could want. he often said so himself, proud of the esteem he enjoyed, his entire life ordered around work, which did not prevent him from slitting the throat of the bourgeois, of striking out at them on every occasion with his lyrical fits of anger . . . happily, alongside the impeccable stylist, the rhetorician crazy about perfection, there is a philosopher inside Flaubert. he is the grandest nay-sayer we have had in our literature. he professes veritable nihilism – an ism that would have infuriated him – and he did not write a page that did not plunge deep within our emptiness.’53

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this was emile Zola’s meditation on Flaubert, cited by pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art. In nineteenth-century France, according to Bourdieu, Flaubert’s stance effected a double rupture, the assertion of a freedom from the market as it was currently organised, according to the dual poles of conventional bourgeois literature and socially engaged writing. his refusal of these poles, like Baudelaire’s, was a quest for the freedom to serve the principle of artistic autonomy, to pursue an art for art’s sake. thus Flaubert deplored the idea of writers becoming socially or publicly involved.Yet this ostensibly nihilist stance, as Zola suggests, paradoxically resulted in a newly confronting, ethical art. It would seem that patrick White’s aesthetic and vision, as exercised in his fictional vivisection of society and the artist, and in his prickly and contradictory public performances, might read as participating in this tradition. how then to respond to White’s apparent relish for public performance, especially as a speaker for various political causes during the last two decades of his life? Can he be taken seriously or is he to be dismissed as a poseur? Or do such moral binaries miss the point? In ‘Incident in Martin road and the Shocking Career which Developed out of It’ (Flaws), White suggests that activism gave vent to his long-thwarted theatrical ambitions: ‘the desire to speak was added to the impulse to write. the frustrated actor in me finding an outlet at the end? perhaps’.54 Does this trivialise his activism, or is it a case of disarming honesty? are attraction to exhibitionism and serious political passion irreconcilable? In the biography, David Marr tells a story that suggests just the opposite. ‘r’, White’s lover during his Cambridge years, tells of their visit to a mutual friend who owned a large classical record collection. ‘On this evening he put his gramophone on, and almost at once patrick started dancing. It quickly became rather wild, and I found this almost flamboyant expression of himself a strange revelation of a patrick I had hardly known. the other man and I sat at the side of the room, at first amused, but then, as the dancing became more

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extravagant, rather embarrassed. When the music stopped – though there must have been several records played – there was silence. and this silence continued as patrick and I walked down to our rooms by the river – the whole length of the college – and when we got there we parted, and went to our separate bedrooms.’55

the painful episode remains enigmatic, although ‘r’ retrospectively interprets it as celebrating White’s imminent release not only from Cambridge but also from constraining family and social bonds. the striking sequence of unexplained eruption, abandonment to the dance, then absolute withdrawal calls to mind, perhaps, the polarities of arthur’s shambling dance of the mandala – ‘half clumsy, half electric’, performed for Mrs poulter on the grass amid the blackberry bushes – and the perversely cold withdrawal of Waldo.56 these symbiotic authorial representations point to the productive tension between White’s reclusiveness and exhibitionism – his disciplined refusals at odds with his driving desire for recognition.these tensions appear, then, as the organising logic of both his art and his activism. Further, and in sympathy with Dorothy Green, it may be possible to see what connects White’s speeches with his fictional works. In ‘the prodigal Son’, he wants to disrupt ‘the Great australian emptiness’, to challenge a culture too preoccupied with material things and narrowed by fearful insularity. Of all the causes he espoused in the 1980s, it seems to have been the anti-nuclear cause that galvanised him most deeply, connecting not only with his anger about political corruption, but also with his earlier experiences of war and the Blitz. his speeches about the nuclear threat produce a powerful synchrony with the recurrent concerns in his fiction. In ‘Imagining the real’, his contribution to a symposium of writers in 1986, he worried about the blind complacency still suffered by many australians, and asked: how can any of us who have lived through the period of hiroshima and Nagasaki accept the preparations for another holocaust

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by reagan and his satellites? I find it difficult to understand how even younger citizens of the world, when faced with the history and images of the two martyred Japanese cities, do not react with a more personal horror – to those tatters of humanity – the grey rags of skin – flesh where the flies bred maggots in unprotected wounds – deformed limbs – inflated scars.57

‘Imagining the real’ describes the constant focus and serious intent of White’s literary-political project. his case offers an example of the literary as both an aristocratic cultural logic, and as a political practice that refuses (even while it depends on) the demands of the market, with its effort to pierce, circumvent and transcend the world. this highly literary logic is at once conservative and potentially politicising. If White’s alienation from the ordinary – his touristlike observation of ‘residents’ – was a function of his social privilege and his distance from economic necessity, it was also generative of texts that represented everyday australian culture with the lucidity of the insider–outsider. White’s disposition, both patrician and selfpunishing, produced something more than mere bitterness about australian parochialism: it drove his desire to find an ‘extraordinary’ world within the ordinary one, to fill the great australian emptiness. his partner Manoly Lascaris has been quoted as saying: ‘patrick’s novels . . . projected on to the immense depths of this land the myths of human adventures and human failures.they humanised space; emptiness became meaningful; the distant lost its sharpness; the invisible became the dance of fearsome colours.’58

Certainly, if the success of David Marr’s 2003 invocation of ‘the prodigal Son’ and the overwhelmingly positive reception of the 2007 revival of The Season at Sarsaparilla are any indication, White’s words have not yet lost their power to connect with the australian experience, to re-enter the virtual space of nation that they partly helped to imagine in the post-war era.

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though the literary is under challenge, and though White himself may now be, in tim Winton’s phrase, ‘more read about than read’, perhaps his inheritance in australia is not yet spent. Indeed we may recognise its traces in the work of Winton himself, though there (as discussed in Chapter 8) the theme of the extraordinary in the ordinary is domesticated for a broader readership – most recently in his novel Breath (2008). We may also, however, glimpse the more disturbing legacy of White’s aesthetic and political vision, its capacity to unsettle colonial and national complacencies, in the rhetoric of some of the most challenging of contemporary australian writers. We encounter it, for example, in Christos tsiolkas’s Dead Europe (2005), and again in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999). White’s inheritance is also present in Brian Castro’s fiction, and in his provocative call for a renewal of literary ‘quality’: perhaps it is time to inculcate a sense of apocalypse and foment a demand for exceptional rhetoric – an insistence on literary quality rather than equality.59

Pa r t 2

Inheritance, (dis)possession, poetry 1960s to 1980s

Chapter 3

Networks and shadows: the public sisterhood of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Judith Wright My shadow-sister, I sing to you from my place with my righteous kin, to where you stand with the Koori dead, ‘trust none – not even poets.’1

J

udith Wright’s correspondence reveals her ongoing moral and practical support for black australian writer-activists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. her closest personal connection was with her friend, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, formerly known as Kath Walker (I use both her names, as context requires).2 Fifty-three letters from Oodgeroo are held in Wright’s papers in the National Library of australia, along with twenty-three of Wright’s replies. Wright also corresponded with Kevin Gilbert, Jack Davis and roberta Sykes, key figures in the overlapping arenas of black activism and writing.3 Wright’s letters show how she prioritised the needs of this new cohort of writers, supporting them in their campaigns and interceding on their behalf with government and other agencies.4 She also turned to these writers for advice, or sought their permission when she wanted to speak about their own poetry or aspects of aboriginal culture. She was a trusted white woman whose support could be relied upon and whose influence was important.

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In view of her good relations with aboriginal writer-activists, Wright’s exhortation in her poem, ‘two Dreamtimes’ – ‘trust none – not even poets’ – is self-doubting, if not self-accusing. the sacred realm of poetry is implicated in colonisation and dispossession, and her warning – not to trust poets – brings home the divide between the women: ‘I am born of the conquerors, / you of the persecuted’. Friendship is hedged by suspicion and fear; the colonial past bleeds into the present. the wounds borne by coloniser and colonised threaten trust between the women poets. the violence – dramatised in the knife, a ‘weapon made from your country’s bones’ – is countered by the gift of the poem itself, which comes to rest, lightly, on the word ‘sister’, a fragile bond to set against the weight of history. though the women’s worlds are differentiated and a distance interposed, this is also what generates the desire to connect. So, although seemingly simple and direct, ‘two Dreamtimes’ delivers a multi-layered performance. as Noel rowe puts it, such a poem is ‘doing more than what it is saying’.5 On one hand, the poem’s dedication to ‘Kath Walker’ invites us to see the poem as part of a personal conversation between the women. On the other, it is a public declaration or performance of inter-racial ‘sisterhood’ which fuses personal with national history. though Wright’s poem has been my starting point, this chapter focuses mainly on Oodgeroo. at relevant points, however, I consider Oodgeroo’s poetic and public relationship with Wright. In taking this ‘shared’ approach, I am not suggesting that Oodgeroo’s work does not warrant a chapter to itself. rather this method allows me to consider the impact on australia’s literary field of Oodgeroo’s emergence as poet, in connection with Wright’s role as mediator and broker – a role that proved in many ways reciprocal. australian literature had been (and largely continues to be) dominated by non-Indigenous, white australian writers. Despite this situation – or rather because of it, due to her exceptional ‘representative’ and thus confining cultural position as the aboriginal poet – Oodgeroo developed a significant national and international reputation as

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writer-intellectual and writer-activist. the pairing of Oodgeroo and Wright throws emphasis on their performance of intercultural dialogue, and complements the next chapter in which questions of literary inheritance and dispossession are considered – in that case, through conversations between Judith Wright and Les Murray, about the rights and wrongs of settler-colonial poetry in australia. Oodgeroo achieved a level of popular recognition that surpassed that of many non-Indigenous australian writers.6 her contributions to australian public life, and especially to promotion of intercultural awareness, were multidimensional: poetry was only one aspect of an evolving public career that encompassed art, teaching and cultural ambassadorship.7 appearing in the public sphere at a precise historic juncture, Oodgeroo’s poetry created a national platform for her activism. the combined impact of the work of Oodgeroo and Wright is difficult to quantify but there is no doubt about the enduring cultural significance of their individual and joint public interventions. how should we understand their collaboration, their ‘public sisterhood’? What kind of australian literary activism do the women’s shared writings and representations forge?

We are Going: the ‘arrival’ of aboriginal writing publication in 1964 of Kath Walker’s We are Going inaugurated second-wave aboriginal literary activism in australian public life.8 as Judith Wright observed, ‘1964 was a sharply controversial year, as the black protest movement thrust its way into the limelight’.9 In Walker’s case, the connection between writing and activism could not have been closer. Significantly, it was Wright who first reviewed Walker’s manuscript in 1963, for Jacaranda press. Struck by the way these poems ‘rang out and commanded attention’, Wright recommended publication.10 We are Going reportedly went on to sell 10,000 copies, ‘seven editions in seven months’.11 anita heiss claims that as many as 500 copies of We are Going were sold in one day, a remarkable figure for any australian book of poetry.12

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the book’s title, We are Going – like the poem from which it comes – performs a striking double gesture. It announces the departure of the ‘Old australians’ and stages the arrival of the aboriginal voice, a grief-stricken but assertive presence in the public sphere: ‘We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low. We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now and scattered. the scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. the eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place the bora ring is gone. the corroboree is gone. and we are going.’13

this is perhaps Kath Walker’s most celebrated poem. Indebted to aboriginal oral culture, its appropriation of white poetic discourse is nevertheless equally marked. Its chant-like repetition of ‘gone’ echoes Judith Wright’s ‘Bora ring’, a poem Walker had first encountered as a teenager: 14 ‘the song is gone . . . / the hunter is gone . . .’15 Both Wright’s and Walker’s poems are elegiac in mood and diction. there is an intriguing echo, too, of a story by poet James Devaney, who first encouraged Kath Walker to write poetry.16 Devaney’s best-selling book, The Vanished Tribes (1929) (source of the word ‘Jindyworobak’) concludes its sequence of pseudo-aboriginal legends with a fictionalised account, from a tribal aboriginal standpoint, of the coming of the white settlers. the sweep of history is plotted against the lifespan of one individual tribal man, whose melancholic chant concludes the tale: ‘Where are the vanished tribes, where are the Birrawannas? Where are the great camps now, and the light laughter by the smokes of the evening fires? Gone are the songs of Dirrawan, the songmaker of

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the Karamarra lake people; gone is the mirth of Wakwakko of the terilumbi tribesmen. Gone are the tellers of tales, who would sit by the evening fires and tell tales of wonder and magic: of the Laughing Woman and the shadowy people, of Wilwinpa the comfortless, She-who-is-lost.’17

the old man’s chant is an elegy for a soon-to-be-extinct race. Like Devaney’s other stories, The Vanished Tribes repeats ‘noble savage’ and ‘dying race’ discourses. andrew McCann discusses this ‘literature of extinction’, a category that applies to a mass of nineteenth-century texts representing aboriginal people as a doomed race.18 this settler-culture literature sentimentalised and whitewashed frontier history, presenting aboriginal dispossession through a romantic filter of nostalgia and melancholy. McCann’s point is that, notwithstanding Wright’s evident political sympathies, the conventional elegiac form of ‘at Cooloolah’ (1955) is rhetorically continuous with the literature of extinction and that this depoliticises her subject. Yet elegy has been similarly deployed by aboriginal people,19 and Judith Wright once commented that she found Walker’s poems ‘more moving than any elegy in an english country churchyard’.20 Does Walker merely repeat eurocentric versions of aboriginal culture, placing it as the antithesis of modernity, and assigning it to categories of nature and prehistory rather than a living culture, coeval with Western modernity? to read Walker’s poem in this way requires that we ignore the political force garnered by aboriginal identity and signature. By contrast, the context of Walker’s aboriginal identity enjoins us to recognise her use of elegy as strategic imitation or performance of the coloniser’s discourse, not simple repetition. Indeed, in the context of their friendship, her poem surely responds to, reframes and unsettles her friend’s account of aboriginal (and thus her own) extinction. thus, during the early 1960s dawn of aboriginal civil rights, Walker’s use of the coloniser’s poetic idiom attempts to do what african-american poet and feminist audré

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Lorde would (later) define as impossible – to dismantle the Master’s house with the Master’s tools.21 If, furthermore, we make room for this more dynamic, intertextual reading of Walker’s poem, should we not also rethink Devaney’s story, in which the white author-narrator adopts or ‘impersonates’ the perspective of an aboriginal tribal elder? White writers are now reluctant to appropriate the voices and bodies of colonised aboriginal others. this does not mean, however, that white appropriation of aboriginal culture has ceased – far from it.22 Yet, for all its apparently narcissistic, white self-mirroring, Devaney’s imagining of the other’s viewpoint achieves, in the context of the story and the book, a depiction of white invaders that is somewhat in excess of nostalgia or melancholy. the invaders appear, rather, as callous, violent usurpers of aboriginal places. White impersonation both reproduces and unsettles the story’s discourse of extinction. With white authorial performance of an imagined black point of view, the spell – of the natural inevitability of the ‘dying race’ – is momentarily broken: in other words, race appears, in Butler’s terms, as repetition, a performance that denaturalises seemingly fixed identity categories.23 If we return to Walker’s poem, then, a reversal of the performance of white poetic idioms is freighted with the living collectivity of aboriginal people, enacted in the first person plural of its title – a title that says ‘we are going’ at the exact point of the literary ‘arrival’ of that ‘we’. So, ‘standing somewhere between elegy and protest’,24 Walker’s poem is neither naive nor coopted. to say that We are Going was a landmark book of poems is to state the obvious. Yet the nature of its intervention was complex, with literary and political dimensions. the political dimension lay in the book’s capacity to influence how aboriginal people were imagined by australians. It was circulated, for example, through literary-activist networks linked to the union movement: ralph Kelly, poet and builders’ labourer, published a story in 1965 in the N.S.W. Builders’ Labourer in which Walker’s collection is the object

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of exchange and an occasion for political and cross-cultural dialogue between the narrator (Kelly) and an aboriginal co-worker.25 Walker’s poems acquired particular rhetorical power from the context of the 1967 referendum. those present at the 5th annual General Meeting of the Federal Council for the advancement of aborigines and torres Strait Islanders (FCaatSI) (adelaide 1962), describe as electrifying Kath Walker’s reading of ‘aboriginal Charter of rights’, the poem she wrote for the occasion.26 Its stirring conclusion runs: Make us mates, not poor relations, Citizens, not serfs on stations. Must we native Old australians In our land rank as aliens? Banish bans and conquer caste, then we’ll win our own at last.27

the commanding language and pounding rhythm – the thesis– antithesis patterning of bold imperatives contending against a litany of oppressions – made for an effective propaganda piece. But was it poetry? that question of how to value Walker’s poetry occupied critics and reviewers for some time, as discussed shortly. If the force of Walker’s poetry, authenticated by her aboriginal identity, was a key to her success, another was timing. the 1960s was perhaps the last period when a book of poetry – rather than a film, television program or novel – could play such a galvanising public role. as anita heiss notes, poetry in the era of the protest song was a logical and effective vehicle for aboriginal protest.28 the mid-1960s also saw the intersection of significant forces for cultural change. australian literature was being reconstituted within a newly professional field with a developing ‘infrastructure’ of academic and critical reception and established contemporary authors to canonise. the cachet of high literary culture had not yet waned, nor had its aura faded with postmodernity’s transformations.the Cold War was

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less virulent and, with the emergence of new postcolonial states, older colonial assumptions were increasingly discredited. Secondwave feminism was imminent. restricted literary culture, including the rarified field of poetry, was still (for now) the preserve of white, male, anglo-australians.29 Women writers and critics tended to play ancillary or subordinate roles. Notwithstanding her ruling class connections, Wright, as we have seen, was being represented in highly gendered terms. there is little doubt, as Katherine Gallagher recently put it, that Walker’s 1964 book ‘was an important factor in the success of the 1967 referendum campaign’.30 this was in part because Walker’s poems not only caught the imagination of australia’s national reading public but entered popular culture. In 1966, several were set to music by australian singer-songwriter, Gary Shearwater, and versions were performed during the 1967 campaign. the elegiac ‘We are Going’ became ‘We are going to freedom’, its musical score recalling the african-american civil rights song, ‘We Shall Overcome’. a week before the referendum, another version of the song (entitled ‘Vote Yes For Freedom’) was performed by the aboriginal australian Fellowship, in a documentary (‘the Day of the aboriginal’) broadcast on aBC television.31 the crossover from elegy to protest song underscores the significance of Walker’s intervention at this precise historic moment. the multi-platform production of her poetry foreshadows, furthermore, the syncretic character of Walker’s subsequent writing, artistic and teaching projects. these developments, however, stand in contrast to the guarded responses of literary critics and reviewers, some of whom were fellow poets. While no-one quarrelled with the political message of the poetry, many took issue with its value as poetry. their responses suggested the disturbance caused by Walker’s poetry within the australian literary field.

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Poetry or propaganda: unsettling white literary values Mrs Walker presents herself as a poet and must be judged as such. John Wallis32 Kath Walker is a public poet. It is impossible to understand her work without first accepting this aspect of her writing Doobov33

Kath Walker’s poetry addressed a dual audience of white and Indigenous australians. On this reality hinges the meanings her poetry generated. White australian commentators, however, were not disposed to notice or respond to this dual context. Did the reception of her poetry by white critics matter to Walker or, for that matter, to other emerging Indigenous writers? What did white criticism suggest about the challenge Walker’s poetry made to australian literary values? these questions relate to the struggle within the literary field over who wields the power to judge, classify, evaluate and consecrate the works of writers. If sales are any judge, Kath Walker’s three volumes of poetry, We are Going, The Dawn is at Hand (1966) and My People (1970), were enthusiastically received by a broad australian readership. But popularity through sales did not (and still may not) guarantee legitimacy or lasting cultural prestige. Walker’s poetry posed a challenge to arbiters of taste in the australian literary field. It could not be dismissed as inconsequential because it was politically serious and significant, yet it seemed too ‘simple’ and ‘direct’ for literary taste, and critics questioned its literary merit. the terms of the 1960s debate over Walker’s poetry – was it poetry or propaganda? – were of course intrinsically hostile to aboriginal cultural difference. White literary norms required (indeed still require) a stance of individualist autonomy, a privileging of ‘art for art’s sake’. these values, integral to Western ‘modernity’, tended to pre-empt recognition of the relational, collective and oral character of much Indigenous literary production. In recent years, arguably, the

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emergence of contemporary performance poetry has seen broader recognition of embodied dimensions of poetry, beyond mere ‘words on the page’. horizons of interpretation, furthermore, inspired by feminism, postcolonial and whiteness studies, among other modes, have been developed to recognise and encourage a wider diversity of writing, including – even privileging – minority identities. In the contemporary era, this diversification has helped weaken the older privilege (within the academy at least) of high literary practice. the range of early responses to Walker’s poetry when it first appeared, in the 1960s, however, highlights the limits of those critical frameworks available for responding. this is hardly surprising given the institutional and cultural dominance of certain reading practices, whether arnoldian, Leavisite or New Critical in provenance. even so, there were some positive and sympathetic reviews from within the literary world, including one from Jindyworobak poet, roland robinson. reviewer after reviewer, however – nearly all male journalists, academics, and fellow poets – deemed that most of Walker’s poems, persuasive and politically effective though they were, lacked ‘literary’ merit or were not properly ‘literary’ at all. they were dismissed as ‘clichéd’ or doggerel, as propaganda rather than poetry. John Wallis (quoted above) reflected a strongly conservative view from within the field. he implicitly assumes a static, naturalised system of literary values. rodney hall, himself a dedicated campaigner for aboriginal rights, stood out as a culturally-aware supporter:‘When you close Kath Walker’s book, the whole idea of literary criticism may seem irrelevant, if not impudent’.Yet even hall distinguished between ‘poetry’ and ‘propaganda’: ‘as literature it is negligible, but as social communication it has a vitality many an author of sophisticated literature might envy’. to be fair, hall was one of the few to describe Walker’s poetry in performance: ‘the tub-thumping of aboriginal Charter of rights (for example) is precisely the quality that won it a prolonged and enthusiastic ovation when it was first read aloud at an aboriginal rights meeting’.34 ruth Doobov’s essay was one of the first to consider Walker’s poetry in relation to the public contexts it addressed.35

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Oodgeroo expressed pride in her poetry and relished performing for her audiences. But how did she respond to the (mostly white and male) critical establishment? She was acutely aware of what was at stake beyond her own career: such criticism could undermine the cultural value and perspectives of aboriginal writing per se. all accounts suggest she was gifted with considerable self-possession. Judith Wright describes her first meeting with ‘Kath Walker’ in 1964 at the launch of We are Going: She was wearing a resplendent sea-green silk dress, which I admired, admiring even more her answer that it was a secondhand one (no women I knew would have made such a confession) . . . she was confident and forthcoming as I had found few of her people to be. this woman was independent, poised and beautiful, where most were reserved and watchful with good reason.36

Intelligence and poise were crucial attributes, and Walker was deft at handling debate. One approach she took was to refer ironically to her status as poet. In her brief Foreword to The Dawn is at Hand (1966), Walker disarms critics, displaying sophisticated awareness of what Bourdieu calls the ‘rules of the game’: I am well aware that the success of We are Going, which went quickly into seven editions, was not due to any greatness in my simple verse, but to the fact that it was the work of an aboriginal. It had therefore what I believe the French call a succès de curiosité.37

She firmly scotches rumours of her ‘Communist’ associations, circulated to discredit her. this denial was understandable in 1966 though she was in fact (briefly) a member of the Communist party of australia (Cpa) and had received encouragement to write from Queensland’s realist Writers’ Group (some members of which were Cpa affiliated).38 Instead, she defines herself as someone interested in writing ‘good’ poetry, not just ‘propaganda-like stuff . . . on behalf

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of aboriginal advancement’.Yet she defines the poet as medium or instrument of her people rather than creative genius, and situates her writing as cultural custodianship: ‘Neither are the tribal tales here my own invention, but were heard from the old people when I was a child’. She is less concerned with acquitting herself before a jury of white critics or conforming to white canonical values, than with discharging her responsibilities towards her people.Yet to what extent was this responsibility a function of the cultural burden of representation, as aboriginal poet, that she had to carry, and which must have seemed, at times, like the proverbial gilded cage? as a ‘breakthrough’ aboriginal poet, Oodgeroo took seriously her duty to nurture fellow aboriginal writers. She advocated for black writing as a new literary field needing infrastructural support. In a short essay, ‘aboriginal Literature’, published in 1975 in Identity (a quarterly magazine edited by Jack Davis that was ‘the single most important and influential aboriginal periodical in the country’39), she surveys key figures – herself, Colin Johnson, Jack Davis, Kevin Gilbert and Dick roughsey. She argues that ‘we, of the literary field here in australia’ should encourage government to ‘set up for the indigenous people, a school for writers’, who could network with writers of New Zealand, the pacific and other places ‘where the indigene has made his or her way into the field of literature’. performing as critic, she offers dispassionate appraisal of Jack Davis as ‘by far a better poet than is Kath Walker’. ‘Kath Walker’, rather, is ‘one who wants to open doors’: She firmly believes that whatever comes from the heart is good, and should therefore be placed at the disposal of all people . . . her poetry is sloganistic, civil writerish, plain and simple.40

this ironic, third-person, critical appraisal of ‘Kath Walker’ appropriates the posture of the white critic who classifies and judges, and creates the terms of reception for Indigenous writing. In her last major public address, we witness Oodgeroo’s ongoing

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shepherding of the Indigenous literary field. In ‘Writers of australia, “I dips me lid”’, she takes her audience for a ‘walk down memory lane’, casually sampling poetry encountered from girlhood to the present.41 She poses wry questions about colonial, anglo-oriented responses to the land, detours amusingly by Shakespeare, Mary Gilmore and Dorothea Mackellar and arrives, in a more serious mood, at Judith Wright’s ‘Bora ring’. here, Oodgeroo remembers her astonishment, as a teenager, at encountering a white woman who cared. Locating the origins of her personal connection with Judith, this passage becomes her bridge from white writing into the new field of Indigenous writing. the effect is to turn the tables so that anglo-european and white australian poetic traditions appear as the prehistory of contemporary aboriginal writing. She begins detachedly in the third person of ‘Kath Walker’, ‘the first poet through the field’, and proceeds through Jack Davis, eva Johnson, Mudrooroo Narogin, Maureen Watson and robert Walker. In her discursive appropriation of the role of ‘critic’ she is not simply the ‘mother-figure’ of aboriginal writing,42 but a writer-intellectual who asserts its value and significance in the australian literary field. the support of established white writers was critical to the successful early reception of black australian writing.Wright was among the most forthright to publicly champion the new ‘Koori Voice’. In 1973, at a honolulu conference about ‘socio-literature’, Wright introduced aboriginal writing as an emerging field. Wright’s presentation starkly contextualised the writers – Davis, Gilbert, Johnson and Walker – within the longer history of colonisation and dispossession of aboriginal people. Well in advance of ‘whiteness studies’, Wright contested the values imposed on aboriginal writing by the colonising culture, pointing to the blinkered paternalism of white critics: the aboriginal ‘problem’ is in truth really a white ‘problem’. We have regarded ourselves as having the right to treat aborigines as in some sense children, who must be taught to accept and conform

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to our standards – of morality, of social relationship, of economic action and of religious values. at first inarticulately, now articulately, they have resisted all our attempts to impose these standards; their grounds of resistance we are now, however reluctantly, beginning to recognise as valid. Does this not also call into question other Western values and standards of judgement, in the face of our own increasing unease about the other standards and acceptances of white society?43

Wright’s advocacy of Oodgeroo’s poetry, in particular, derived its passionate, emotional tone from their friendship. they learned and drew support from each other, working towards shared goals. a space of risk and revelation was opened between them, a space within which they contended with and perhaps began to unfix the immobile, binary identities of coloniser and colonised.44 the public representation and performance of this inter-racial friendship was a significant component of the women’s shared activism. the performance of their ‘shadow sisterhood’, contributing to the public profile and recognition of both women, was heroic, as we will see, but not without ambivalence.

Shadow-sisters: performing an inter-racial filial bond My shadow sister, I talk to you From my sit down place with the Koori dead. In Quandamooka the knife I threw I know not where the handle lies. But, my shadow sister, this I know, Your dreams are my dreams Your thoughts are my thoughts and our shadow that made us sisters that binds us closer together,

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together with us CrIeS . . . (‘Sister poet’45)

‘Sister poet’ is Oodgeroo’s reply to Judith’s ‘two Dreamtimes’. according to Cochrane, Judith wrote ‘two Dreamtimes’ between 1971 and 1972 while Oodgeroo stayed at Mount tamborine. Oodgeroo, she remarks, was so moved by the poem that ‘she was unable to read it aloud for many months’, and ‘it was three years before she felt able to reply in kind’.46 though she gave it to Judith, Oodgeroo did not herself publish ‘Sister poet’, and it remained unpublished until after her death. It was first printed in Cochrane’s biography, where it is framed by the story of the women’s encounter. reading the poems side by side highlights their dialogue in time and space and across cultures. the poems are gifts from the women to each other and, ultimately, to the public. Wright’s profound sorrow – her haunted sense of complicity – is met by Oodgeroo’s generosity of response, her thought that the shadow itself bonds them. read together, the poems enact a rite of reconciliation that would not be performed, at national level, for almost four decades, a national rite that, when it came, would still be hedged by qualifications and conditions.47 read together, the poems perhaps still challenge, if not over-shadow, non-Indigenous australian habits of imposing the terms of encounter on Indigenous australians. the women’s mutual narrative of inter-racial friendship recurs throughout their public representations. Oodgeroo spoke, for example, about how she had shared with Judith the ‘new dreamtime’ story she had drafted, subsequently published in Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972).48 By means of the ‘paperbark tree’, the story unites Oodgeroo’s individual history with ancestral aboriginal culture. In response to Oodgeroo’s draft, Judith showed her friend ‘Canefields’, a poem she had written long before they had met, about a girl among the paperbarks. Both marvelled at the poem’s prefiguring of Oodgeroo’s story. another text that deploys the women’s shared story to

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communicate with, or teach, australians about race relations is Frank heimans’ film biography of Oodgeroo, Shadow Sister.49 It documents ‘Moongalba’, Oodgeroo’s place on Stradbroke Island – the place, she explained, where her people ‘sat down’. Oodgeroo sought long and in vain to establish permanent tenure at Moongalba, and she saw heimans’ film as a chance to recruit public support for the project. In this pre-Mabo, early land rights era, Oodgeroo’s acreage had been leased to her by redlands Shire Council for a peppercorn rental.50 But under Queensland’s Bjelkepetersen Government no help was forthcoming, and Wright’s strenuous lobbying on Oodgeroo’s behalf unfortunately coincided with the dismissal of the Whitlam Government.51 In Shadow Sisters, which effectively continues this lobbying, Oodgeroo is pictured living in makeshift conditions, communing with nature, caring for the land and its creatures, and instructing visiting school children in aboriginal and Islander customs and inter-racial relations. at the midpoint of the film is a sequence showing Judith Wright’s visit, putting on public display, once again, the women’s friendship. Oodgeroo’s voiceover emphasises their shared concern to protect the land against mining and development, and quotes from Judith’s ‘two Dreamtimes’. She then reads from her own (at this point unpublished) poem, ‘Sister poet’. For Jennifer Jones, the women’s collaboration yields a muchneeded positive model of cross-cultural encounter in which ‘separate griefs’ are recognised: accepting difference, Judith Wright and Oodgeroo offer a legacy of active listening and learning, a way of living together in the ‘contact zone.’52 It is patently clear that Judith and Oodgeroo sought to model cross-cultural relations and dramatically deployed representations of their friendship for this purpose. Veronica Brady’s Wright biography also reports the longevity of the women’s political mobilisation of their friendship for activist causes. During the Springbok tour in 1972, in a pointed anti-apartheid protest, Judith and Kath dined with rodney hall and aboriginal pastor Jim Brady at the motel where the all-white

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rugby players were staying.53 the subsequent weaving of the image of their friendship into so many of their public addresses and essays continues this deliberate mode of activist campaigning. Yet to acknowledge these goals and their positive effects should not blind us to the ambivalence and contradiction that enter into the public performance of the women’s texts. these ambivalences inevitably cling to the public, and especially to didactic and performative, representations of difference – including racialised difference. the performative, for JL austin, is that category of utterance where words perform actions – or where words do ‘more than what they are saying’.54 Intended meaning may be shadowed by its opposite, entangling the speaker within pre-existing nets of discourse and representation:55 . . . the invader’s feet will tangle in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.56

Claims to authenticity permeate the women’s dialogue. In their fervour, these claims conjure the shadow of doubt, the threat of the inauthentic, a doubt that must be repressed. the didacticism of the women’s performance may trigger recoil against the cultural power harnessed through declared vulnerability, or may strike some listeners as hollow.57 at the very point where the poems seek to describe difference and demand justice, moreover, the burden of representation begins to shadow the shadow sisters. essentialised categories of race and gender return, and from these categories escape is difficult. this is most problematic for Oodgeroo: in this public dialogue, she must always play the part of the aboriginal ‘other’.58 this is a burden that Oodgeroo herself willingly bore and embraced, but aboriginal people have rightly complained that, in interaction with the dominant white settler culture, there is no escape from ‘aboriginality’, from the burden and responsibility of aboriginal identity. aboriginal public intellectuals, for example, are only asked to comment on aboriginal issues, and never about non-racially-defined matters of public interest.59

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In an unpublished manuscript of Wright’s memoir, about the second half of her life – in a section that did not make it into Half a Lifetime – repressed doubt stirs, momentarily. During Kath’s visit to Mount tamborine in 1967, she and Judith travelled to look for a suitable site to teach children about caring for country – the idea that would come to fruition in the Moongalba project. Judith records in her unpublished draft how on this occasion the two had travelled together along the back roads of Queensland’s Border rangers. Coming across a rock shelter likely to have been an aboriginal campsite, Judith remembers how, while Kath was otherwise occupied, she anxiously scuffled into the ground what she suspected were bullets lying amid the scatter of stone tools and charcoal.60 this is a strange memory, unexplained and unexplored in the manuscript. perhaps it speaks, half-knowingly and in the reflex of the moment, to a solicitous need, in Wright, to remain the good white australian. In her very protectiveness, we might glimpse the ‘big sister’, and with that, the fragility of the trust between them. this tentative doubt sits alongside, and is perhaps a function of, the special privilege Wright accorded her friendship with Oodgeroo. In her unpublished memoir, Judith reflected that Kath was ‘. . . my truest, perhaps my deepest, friend – we met in a place that my white friends never entered. though we met seldom, a thread of understanding joined us’.61 Wright is sincere, and her sincerity is shown, perhaps, in a diffidence in writing about the ‘second half ’ of her life. perhaps the sincere and the personal, once publicly exposed, are too easily transformed into counterfeit. Oodgeroo’s death, in 1993, affected Wright deeply. their relationship had enabled Wright to confront the colonial legacy that had haunted her for so long. It was a politicising and a healing encounter.the public sisterhood of the two women prefigured, and began to prepare the ground for, reconciliation – a movement that gathered momentum among ordinary, middle-class, non-Indigenous australians, and became a major discourse of nation by the 1990s, a movement that, for all its goodwill, carries ambivalence, in the

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still unrequited yearning of the settler-culture to achieve legitimate belonging. the women’s mutual narrative – their poems and stories about shadow sisterhood – made a fragile, performative crucible in which cross-cultural dialogue might begin to occur, in which contemporary, settler australians might begin to recognise the ongoing legacy of colonisation and the continuing dispossession of aboriginal people. From their very first meeting, the women were already engaged in their separate but related causes. ‘Kath was an activist’, wrote Wright in her unpublished memoir, ‘one who made things happen – and I might have been swept up in her train but that I was already engaged in the work of the Wildlife preservation Society of Queensland’.62 their friendship affirmed and supported their efforts during the years ahead. poetry was at the heart of their friendship. It was the language of their mutual activism; the ground of their shadowed bond; and it was the site of a new cultural politics. Wright’s words about the impact of Oodgeroo’s literary achievement express the intertwining of activism and literature, writing and nation, in the representations of both women: her own people knew of her, and were led and heartened by her work, from one side of australia to the other. She was a legend; and among the people of the communities, reserves and fringes of the cities her fame put heart into people she could never have reached without the poems and their success. they were memorable, they were memorised and they will be remembered. her work has vital things to say, as well as angry and funny and insulting and biting things. It has won its way against the white critics, the formalists, and the inventors of canons.63

Chapter 4

Inheritance and refusal: the properties of white australian poetry Sail backwards over oceans. Sail backwards over time. Let your forebears stay in their lands, and let mine stay in mine.

W

hile the 1960s saw Indigenous literary-activism break through into australia’s public sphere, the ripples continued to spread through literary culture during the next decade. By the 1970s, the white australian response to Indigenous presence and claims was triggering a debate that continues today. Can or should australia’s settler-colonial culture assert legitimacy? On what moral basis can non-Indigenous australian writers take imaginative possession of the land? What does this mean for white australian poetry? In its bluntest terms – in the wake of colonisation, what ethical position remains for white australian poets of land and nation? In her poem ‘Let’s Get it right’ (2002), the culminating stanza of which is quoted above, Melissa Lucashenko appropriates Wh auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ (‘Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone . . .’). the effect is startling. the poem silences contemporary (white australian) interlocutors, demanding an impossible reversal of time, an unwinding and unbinding of colonial history:

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at Myall Creek and Ballina, at twenty thousand fires, Unshoot the guns, unhorse the troops, Destroy the funeral pyres. place brownskin tots in mothers’ arms. Unhang our brothers too. Unrape our women’s centuries, and make our stories true.1

the anger here is edged with futility.Yet in its aspect as protest, the poem is far from futile. It is powerful because of its furious futility. to understand, moreover, that Lucashenko’s own ancestry is both Ukrainian and aboriginal (Yugambeh/Bundjalung people) is to glimpse further ironies that dramatise the self-dividedness of colonised and coloniser alike. Indeed Lucashenko has written in another mood, and very eloquently, of the need for belonging by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous australians, and of the urgency of acting as ‘citizens, inheritors and custodians’ of ‘tiny, fragile landscapes’, as the carers of local australian places.2 Given everything at stake in white australian belonging to place – including the basis for a national poetry – it is not surprising that Judith Wright and Les Murray were among those involved in debating these issues during the 1970s. the poets expressed their views in various contexts, in prose and poetry. at the end of the decade, they also exchanged their opinions privately, though still ‘on the record’, in a remarkable sequence of letters. Commentators have tended to put Wright and Murray in separate political compartments, regarding them as ideologically opposed: Wright is seen as the progressive pioneer of ecological consciousness and advocate for aboriginal rights, and Murray as the regressive conservative, advocate of husbandry not ecology, whose opinions about aboriginal matters can be provocative. to focus exclusively on their real political differences, however, is to overlook what the two poets shared, and to ignore their mutual

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sympathies and circumstances. Both can be seen, from some angles, as conservative and both as radical in the views they espoused. What was their common ground? as poets of the land, both Wright and Murray adopted, consciously or not, the traditional mantle of the ‘bard’, a role that represents the poet as organically linked to the people rather than as belonging to a cultural elite. as a threshold figure, the ‘bard’ embodies both the otherworldliness of poetic practice and worldly or public orientation. as helen Lambert points out, Murray has long been represented as bardic in these ways: he is a ‘singer of the soil, the seasons and the market’, and a mediator of two worlds – ‘the vernacular and the divine’.3 Bardic qualities, as we have seen, were also attributed to Wright, although she was wary of such categories. Gender, class, religion and philosophy differentiated her stance from Murray’s, but her ‘prophetic’ voice, her focus on land, and her preoccupations with body, spirit and time positioned Wright early in her career in the bardic role. though neither poet overtly claimed such a role, their poetries of the land afforded them, and constituted, a national platform. this also formed the basis of their mutual, and at times competing, interests within the literary field. In reckoning with their exchange, we need to register the literary context – to bring into focus australian poetry as a field, indeed as a restricted sub-field of the literary field, itself a sub-field of the broader field of cultural production. In Bourdieu’s analysis, cultural fields tend to reproduce themselves by adapting to changing historical conditions, developing technologies and diversifying readerships, and by responding to the demands of national and international settings. amid and indeed through such adaptation and transformation, the logics of the most rarified forms of culture can survive and perpetuate themselves. the purified gaze of the artist, implying a distance from the market and from the ordinary, as discussed in my introduction, is a prevailing logic of this kind. related to this logic is the refusal of inheritance – of worldly inheritance, perhaps. But also, more significantly, autonomy for the artist may involve refusal of the

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cultural inheritance of precursors or of dominant conventions in the field. Gestures of refusal characteristically entail the double move of the insider-outsider, for whom alienation stimulates engagement.4 In an australian context, as David McCooey points out, the field of poetry is paradoxically both marginal and significant within the nation’s broader public culture.5 In other words, while australian poetry is economically and politically marginal, having only a tiny market and exclusive readerships, it retains a specific symbolic power. Certainly this was so in the 1960s, and arguably lingers even in the digital age. readers of poetry are cultivated consumers of information, frequently involved in elite networks and/or the academic world. poetry, in australia as elsewhere, is a source of cultural meanings and prestige with potentially national and even international reach. In australia, however, to this set of paradoxes is added the contested legitimacy of settler-colonial belonging to the land, and one of the ways in which this is manifested is in struggles over the ‘bardic role’. Wright and Murray were, necessarily, both positioned as ‘bards’ within the space of australian poetry and participants involved in (re)constituting and perpetuating the value and potency of that national role. their differing attitudes to land, and to the colonial past, therefore, drew them into a somewhat agonistic relation with each other. By the 1970s, australian poetry was undergoing radical realignment, both expanding democratically and splintering into competing factions. Beyond the first fractures, amid the poetic revolutions of the so-called Generation of ’68, the field would diversify considerably, especially with the advent of the electronic and then digital age. the 1970s also saw a new phase in the orientation of australian poetry to global literary space. Debates about settler-colonial identity – about nationhood, legitimacy, inheritance and belonging – were inseparable from these transformations, increasing the pressure on poets to justify their positions in democratising and increasingly competitive literary and public spheres. these pressures seem relevant to the interactions between Judith Wright and Les Murray over the ethics

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of engaging with aboriginal culture, and over the question of white australian settler-colonial relationships to land.

the day Les met Judith Les Murray first met Judith Wright in 1967 at a University of New england ‘Writing School’. Murray was then a relative newcomer to the field of australian poetry. after publishing The Ilex Tree, with Geoffrey Lehmann (1965), his reputation was growing.6 Wright, on the other hand, was pre-eminent in the field.7 the most recent sign of her authority was her groundbreaking book delineating an australian literary inheritance, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965). She had identified the ‘double aspect’ of australian poetry as the function of transplanted settler-culture perspectives.With its lineage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century male poets, Wright’s Preoccupations was the literary counterpart of her pioneering saga, The Generations of Men (1959). Combined, these books traced Wright’s poetic and pastoral inheritances, suggesting both her conformity with and thoughtful interrogation of these heritages. though her 1949 anthology of australian poetry broke new ground with its almost equal inclusion of male and female poets,8 her critical work, Preoccupations, appears to constitute a predominantly masculine canon – Mary Gilmore is one of the few female precursors mentioned and then only in passing. Wright’s own eminent literary status had been partly contingent on her early poetry’s reproduction (though not in a simple way) of the roles of dutiful daughter and maternal feminine. By the early 1960s, her literary career was in tension with activist commitments – the campaign to save the Great Barrier reef among other things – was escalating. these increasingly limited her time and energy for poetry during the next two decades. In 1967, when Les met Judith, the referendum addressing the citizenship rights and constitutional status of aboriginal people met with overwhelming popular support. though sixties counterculture and second-wave feminism had not quite arrived,9 cultural

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and generational change was in the wind, and these changes would also impact on the field of australian poetry. Murray’s biographer, peter alexander, describes the 1967 encounter with Wright from Murray’s point of view, drawing attention to their contrasting social positions: he loved Wright’s early sensuous and unexpected imagery, and had the tact not to tell her he thought her later work increasingly wooden and programmatic . . . For her part Wright, who disliked conformity, seems to have been taken by his casualness, his tattered shorts, and his habit of grinding out his cigarette-butts with a bare foot. Seeing him for the first time, she said to him approvingly,‘You’ll do’. he was clearly a real non-conformist in a world of pretenders. Wright came from a distinguished and wealthy squatter background, an inheritance she was trying to live down, and when she spoke to Murray of their link with the land, had virtually no comprehension of his terribly deprived background. Murray was polite, rather as D. h. Lawrence was when edith Sitwell complained to him about the miseries of her millionaire childhood.10

around this brief exchange, alexander builds his account of the poets’ respective literary and political positions. there is irony at Wright’s expense, for alexander (whose biography attracted criticism for its partiality) reads her nonconformist values as inauthentic. Wright’s desire to ‘live down’ her inheritance barely conceals her patrician attitudes. a drama of misrecognition unfolds: like the master in hegel’s dialectic, Wright is blind to class difference while Murray is the servant who sees but remains politely restrained. Murray’s tact in not revealing his childhood poverty tells against Wright’s privileged insensitivity and, as the subordinate party, it is Murray who occupies higher moral ground. alexander’s Lawrence–Sitwell parallel, ostensibly about class-based difference, also amplifies a gendered narrative, one in which attention to class works partly to displace the gendered workings of inheritance.

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the account does not acknowledge, for instance, that inheritance of land in the Wright family was patrilineal. Indeed a gendered matrix of meanings conditions the Wright–Murray encounter. Gender aggravates the field-related tension between precursor and heir. as senior poet of the land, Wright doubles as his precursor and a stern maternal figure: she is potential patron and gatekeeper. this power is most succinctly present in the established poet’s nod to the rising pretender, crisply conveyed in Wright’s ‘You’ll do’. Murray’s own public statements about Wright have varied dramatically over time. he evidently wanted to remain in her good graces and was proud of having suggested her to Whitlam for the post of Governor-General. Just a few years later, however, in a Quadrant essay, ‘the Coming republic’ (1976), Murray pronounced his view that Wright had ‘lost all her compassionate understanding of country people since she became an activist’.11 In this essay, he laid out his opinion that the australian republic was inevitable, that the nation, beyond Whitlam era failures to do so, should divest itself of the last of its colonial ties and embrace its destiny as a vernacular (i.e. ordinary folk-led as distinct from an elite- or ‘ascendancy’-led) republic. In this context he criticised Wright, who at that stage had become very vocal in support of aboriginal issues, for her increased stridency and the loss of her intimate link to vernacular traditions: She seems to have denied the pioneers and lost her Dreaming, and it’s a tragedy. trying to make not so much ‘high’ as rich and flexible art out of traditional and vernacular materials is a lonely enough pursuit these days, without seeing one’s best colleague go over to the colonial party.12

the 1976 essay was reprinted two decades later in Murray’s essay collection, The Quality of Sprawl (1999). In this collection, Murray’s earlier criticism of Wright is offset by his account of the time he nominated her for Governor-General.13 Murray’s 1976 criticism of Wright was egregious, but can be

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partly understood against the backdrop of tensions that developed, at least on Murray’s side, during the Whitlam era. Like many australian writers and artists, both had invested hopes for reform in the Whitlam government and both had been drawn into the momentum for cultural change it generated and reflected. as early as 1963 Murray had begun to articulate his hope for the republic, developing this into an ideal, one that was conducive to his overall aesthetic and philosophy, of the vernacular republic as democratic, egalitarian yet centrally-managed polity. though conservative, he was in some respects a supporter of centralised government: as a Labor supporter in the lead-up to the Whitlam era Murray was invited to contribute his ideas about the radical reform of government patronage of the arts in a policy paper for the Labor Opposition in 1969. he subsequently published a version of this paper in Quadrant.14 Wright was far more deeply involved than Murray in Whitlam government initiatives. her high-profile involvement in the campaign to save the Great Barrier reef brought her into influential political and bureaucratic networks. In this context she developed a close friendship with Nugget Coombs, then a senior public servant under the holt Government and Chairman of the Council for aboriginal affairs. Coombs subsequently became special adviser to Whitlam.as Chair of the new australia Council of the arts, Coombs saw to it that Wright was appointed to that body, and he sought her assistance in setting up the new Literature Board. according to Veronica Brady, they became such trusted colleagues that he sometimes asked Wright to deputise for him at speaking engagements.15 In late 1972, Wright wrote a letter to Murray (among others), inviting him to sit on the Council’s Literature Board. Murray politely declined this invitation, worrying not only that Coombs might not approve of his politics, but also about his own likely future need for fellowships.16 though he did not say so to Wright, he bore a deep grudge against Coombs whom he believed had done him a serious wrong. according to alexander, and also Murray’s own account, in 1969 Coombs had promised to provide Murray with funding to

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produce an anthology of aboriginal poetry and song. On the strength of this promise, Murray – who was having difficulty finding employment – bore the cost of moving his family to Canberra. Once there, he found himself brushed off by staff in Coombs’ office.17 Wright’s very close association with Coombs during the Whitlam era would not have endeared her to Murray and she may have read between the lines of Murray’s polite refusal of her invitation. In her update to Literature Board Chair Geoffrey Blainey, she noted that ‘Les and Nugget haven’t been wholly at one in the past’, adding, however, that ‘Nugget is quite onside about his being on the advisory board and he [Murray] is a vocal young man with ideas’.18 this dynamic, between the poets, of invitation and decline, suggests mutuality as well as rivalry.Wright was a longstanding advocate of decent income support for artists, seen especially in her lobbying for adequate copyright protection. She not only saw Murray as a potential ally in arts advocacy, but sincerely admired his poetry. In November 1976, the year Murray attacked her in his Quadrant essay, Wright recommended him (among others) to James Vinson, of St James press in London, editor of Great Writers of the World, as outstanding among his contemporaries: I would suggest medium-length essays for all except Murray . . . he deserves a longer essay, being the most important of the younger writers in the group and a leader in the use of australian vernacular in poetry with a high intellectual content as well as remarkable command of language.19

Invitation and decline also characterise a challenging exchange of letters between Wright and Murray between 1980 and 1983, over the rights and wrongs of a treaty, about land rights, and about the ethics of white australian borrowings from aboriginal culture.20 It is in these letters that their very different attitudes are most fully clarified, along with the challenge this entailed for their long-standing professional regard for each other. Now deeply involved as secretary

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to the aboriginal treaty Committee (chaired by Coombs), Wright opened the correspondence. She first praised Murray for his justpublished verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), and then roundly castigated him, alleging he had wrongly and insensitively borrowed from sacred aboriginal rites. She concluded by demanding a forfeit: an excerpt from the manuscript of The Boys for an exhibition she was organising in support of the treaty campaign. It was, to say the least, a provocative letter, exuding Wright’s patrician air.21 While Murray’s replies in their subsequent exchange suggest he is on the defensive, his arguments prove searching, reasoned, surprisingly prescient about land rights issues and generous in detail – more than usually so, compared with some of his publicly expressed sentiments on similar matters. perhaps he had been put on his mettle but his responses show he is in dialogue with an esteemed peer, rather than with an abstracted opponent who can be reduced to type. Wright’s replies are at first peremptory and dismissive, but become engaged and interested, even though she cannot agree. Increasingly she urges the idea, with his consent, of contributing their exchange to the exhibition. this does not eventuate (possibly to do with delays and timing), though Murray does signal his in principle agreement. Finally they agree to hand over the correspondence to the National Library, with Murray stipulating that conditions be imposed on permission to quote until such time as the correspondence is published in full, and Wright indicating that her letters needed no such restrictions.22 this correspondence, published in 2003 in the literary journal Southerly, is revealing on many counts. It is bound to unsettle anyone approaching these issues – or the poets themselves – simplistically or dogmatically. It shows the effort and time, though she was sorely pressed, that Wright was willing to invest in dialoguing with Murray, even though she knew she was unlikely to change his mind (as she admits early on). It displays the strength of Wright’s convictions, the depth of her knowledge about and commitment to aboriginal causes, and her conviction as to the pressing need for justice. It also

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reveals the considerable erudition that sustains Murray’s values, as well as his fear that an elite ‘caste’, remote from ordinary australians, was seeking to deploy a divisive race politics. his resistance is determined, but yields some cogent arguments with which Wright is in agreement. throughout we can see Murray’s desire to stay on good terms with Wright who, after all, wielded much influence through her networks. although Wright commented wryly in 1999, ‘Les and I don’t always get on the best’, she was still an admirer of his poetic and intellectual capabilities.23 Implicit in their exchanges, however, was a contest over the inheritance of a white australian poetry of the land – in particular, over the legitimacy of its reproduction as a privileged national poetry. Where Wright had refused the nationalist and – in that sense – colonial role of white australian poetry as unjust, Murray refused the terms of that refusal. the length and duration of the 1980s correspondence testify to how invested they were, as literary figures, in issues of white australian belonging to the land. personal investments, barely spoken, also conditioned the letters, for in 1980, Murray was making plans, after many years of metropolitan living, to return home to Bunyah. this represented a reclaiming of his family’s land. herein lies the most materially rooted and powerfully symbolic connection between property and poetry, the contingencies of which bear on the narratives of inheritance of both Murray and Wright.

Properties of white poetry: possession, inheritance and refusal the Forty, at last, our beautiful deep land it was Jim’s, it was allan’s, it was reg’s, it is Dad’s –24

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Les Murray’s autobiographical narrative is not unknown to his readers. the story of his exile from and return to his home in Bunyah is one he regularly canvasses and celebrates in his poetry and prose. at its heart is a narrative of inheritance that binds property and poetry together. there are many examples, but a concise version of the core narrative is found in Lawrence Bourke’s ‘Les Murray Overview’, available from the poet’s official website (www. lesmurray.org): Born in Nabiac, New South Wales, australia, he grew up an only child in the isolated Bunyah valley close by. Murrays had settled in the area in 1848 with other Scottish presbyterians; by 1938 the great holdings had gone, and Murray’s father, a tenant farmer, was later dispossessed when his father (and landlord) died. twelve years after Les Murray’s (induced) birth his mother miscarried, severely haemorrhaging. the district doctor refused to send an ambulance and she died. Murray, linking his birth to her death, traces his poetic vocation from these traumatic events, seeing in them the relegation of the rural poor by urban élites. Dispossession, relegation, and independence become major preoccupations of his poetry.25

the account of the disinheritance of Murray’s father by his grandfather is provocatively described here as a ‘dispossession’. this substitution echoes Murray’s own determined resistance to attempts to make moral distinctions between the circumstances of poor white australian farmers – of which he sees his own family’s story as representative – and the position of aboriginal people. the equation that Murray often insists upon drawing, between the difficult circumstances of his own family and the historic dispossession of aboriginal peoples from their lands, is an aspect of his politics that has troubled some of his readers. Once he was able to derive a reasonably secure income from poetry, Murray bought back his father’s forty acres in Bunyah, and – when his family was

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ready – moved there to live. ‘Laconics: the Forty acres’ (1975) ritually declares and reasserts ownership. this assertion is integral to the properties of Murray’s poetry – not only thematically, but also to its syntactic rhythms and images expressive of anchorage and spatial command – as most avowedly declared in the poem, ‘the Quality of Sprawl’ (1983). Yet poise, spatial command and equilibrium prove vulnerable. No sooner had the poet returned to Bunyah than his longest bout of depression began. Murray frequently connects the onset of this depression with the accidental triggering of traumatic memories from his childhood. these include not only bullying he endured from girls at high school, but a trauma closely converging with it: the death of his mother when he was twelve years old. In a sequence of three poems, recollecting the trauma of this death, a level of raw personal emotion is evident, though restrained and controlled by the verse. In ‘the Steel’ (1982), as Noel rowe argues in an acute and empathetic reading, the poem wants to attach blame.Yet – and this is rowe’s counter to the negative judgment made against the poem by Murray himself when he learned, through his biographer alexander, that he had somewhat misconstrued events – the speaker weighs the balance finely, constantly, between justice and vengefulness, and finally veers away from simply scapegoating the doctor, judging such a response to be merely ‘human sacrifice’:26 there is justice, there is death, humanist: you can’t have both. activist, you can’t serve both. You do not move in measured space. the poor man’s anger is a prayer for equities time cannot hold and steel grows from our mother’s grace. Justice is the people’s otherworld.27

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even so, Murray’s poetry performs habitual dramas of selfpossession and re-possession. thus property – psychological as well as material – is always being secured in and through poetry. Depression is, after all, the deep loss of such self-possession; Murray’s poetry not only comes from it, but helps restore the self. Murray gives perhaps the most frank and vivid account of his battle with depression in his 1997 essay, ‘Killing the Black Dog’.28 though remarkably lucid, his self-analysis remains shy of certain implications, one of which is a set of polarised attitudes to women. Murray’s unstable gender politics, discussed in Chapter 5, seem charged with fear and longing, and with the difficulties of masculine boundaries, especially around powerful women. Judith Wright felt very differently about the connection, the complicities, between property and her poetry, and she struggled to find adequate resolution. as a fifth generation white australian, the descendent of a pioneering dynasty, she was a beneficiary of the wealth and privilege of the ‘landed gentry’ class into which she was born. In the course of her life, Wright’s attitude to this inheritance – to the pioneering past with which her family was associated, and the wider history of colonisation it represented – hardened significantly. By the time of Born of the Conquerors (1992), a collection of her essays and speeches on colonial and aboriginal issues, she had comprehensively rejected the pastoral heritage for the destruction it had visited on aboriginal culture and on the land itself. While Wright’s political stance was clear, what did her rejection of her pastoral heritage mean for her literary inheritance, for her own poetry? as discussed in earlier chapters, the more obvious signs were her discomfort about ‘Bullocky’ (1944) and the haunted, selfaccusing settler-consciousness of poems like ‘at Cooloolah’ (1954) and ‘two Dreamtimes’ (1973). In a poem she first published in the Bulletin in 1951, it is possible to see Wright in the process of adjusting her poetic frame away from the viewpoint of a white, pastoral inheritance:

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Inheritor these hills my father’s father stripped, and beggars to the winter wind they crouch like shoulders naked and whipped— humble, abandoned, out of mind. Of their scant creeks I drank once and ate sour cherries from old trees found in their gullies fruiting by chance. Neither fruit nor water gave my mind ease. I dream of hills bandaged in snow, their eyelids clenched to keep out fear. When the last leaf and bird go let my thoughts stand like trees here.29

this iconic poem, now known to readers as ‘eroded hills’, was given its more familiar title when eventually published in The Gateway in 1953. this alteration of titles is suggestive of a shift in focus from the speaker’s desire for personal possession of the land to a focus on the land itself and the damage caused by the agricultural practices brought by the colonisers. the poem’s affective power derives from its series of startlingly self-punishing images that make hills into whipped shoulders, then thoughts into trees. the final stanza makes one of Wright’s most familiar gestures, of holding the human imagination against a vision of species annihilation. Some might say that, for all this, the poem is profoundly conservative in its formal aesthetic, with its conventional rhyme scheme and elegiac tone, and its final fusing of contradictions in that last image. In writing poetry Wright increasingly contended with the limiting properties of this culturally inherited aesthetic and perhaps, too, a loss of the property of self, with her time so heavily taxed by her public life as an advocate and activist for environmental and aboriginal causes.these burdens and constraints, however, were also productive for poetry.

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though she firmly rejects her pastoral inheritance, in her last poetry Wright concedes to her forebears a limited legitimacy, likening them to Yeats’ fisherman . . . a small stream, narrow but clean, running apart from the world.30

their ‘marginal sort of grace’,31 softening their arrogance, partly mitigates her own (earlier and seemingly unequivocal) declaration that she was ‘born of the conquerors’. this suggests a reflective mood that distances the poem from her more severe public stance against the white pioneering past.the lines come from ‘For a pastoral Family’, from her last collection, The Phantom Dwelling, and they make the link between pastoral and poetic inheritances, implicating her own ‘poetic style’ which is closest in form and mood to the romantic lyric: If my poetic style, your pastoral produce, are challenged by shifts in the market or a change of taste, at least we can go down smiling with enough left in our pockets to be noted in literary or local histories.32

In these deflating lines Wright seems less to disavow her angloeuropean poetic inheritance than to cut down its claims, leaving room only for poetry as a ‘small stream, narrow but clean’. as discussed in Chapter 1, this suggests that Wright was less interested in grandiose gestures of ‘refusal’, than a refusal of grandiose gestures – at least where poetry was concerned. the refusal of inheritance remains a keynote to the end of Judith Wright’s writing life. the activist half of Wright’s life, beyond her husband Jack McKinney’s death is absent from Half a Lifetime. In its place an apology stands, along with some other suggestive

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fragments: a poem, ‘Lake in Spring’, which meditates delicately on change since her beloved’s departure and a short piece which ponders the multitudinous, shimmering autobiographical ‘I’. In these concluding pages, prefaced by ‘at Cooloolah’, Wright names the various landscapes of her life, and offers her public apology to the traditional peoples whose lands they once were. Wright’s refusal of inheritance is registered in her impossible attempt to divest herself of literary authority. It is impossible not least because, following Bourdieu, such a gesture of refusal is consonant with, and ultimately constitutive of high literary values, establishing her distance from worldly ambition and disavowing desire for posthumous success.33 It also can’t help but reinstate a problematic and constitutive boundary between poetry and world, one that protects poetry as otherworldly, as a utopian space of sadness and beauty. Is this the boundary, too, that protects the world from having to change, since there’s always poetry to save us? So it is with a complicated admiration that I see that the refusal of inheritance played out in Wright’s late writing, with its words held out against the void, returns us again to her 1951 poem, in which her thoughts stand in the denuded landscape, like trees.

Pa r t 3

Fractured consensus: literary whiteness and belonging in the 1990s

Chapter 5

alienating powers: Les Murray’s poetry and politics Consider the elephant, thick-skinned, intelligent vast, the beast of long affection, long revenge, capable of absorbing a whole pond. Unable to jump. and very private at love.1

C

ollected Poems 1961–2002 hardly marks a pause in the ceaseless poetic production of Les Murray. though it omits the two verse narratives, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Fredy Neptune (1998), the collection is voluminous, a four-decade conspectus of Murray’s poetry. More collections have ensued – Poems the Size of Photographs (2002), Learning Human (2003) and Biplane Houses (2006), and a new volume of Selected Poems (2007) – as well as half a dozen collections translated into languages other than english. Collected Poems is a large, generously proportioned paperback, the poems laid out so they are easy on the eye. Indeed the book is an object lesson in Murray’s famous ‘quality of sprawl’: Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind. reprimanded and dismissed

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it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail of possibility.2

Murray’s poetic largesse has its visual correlative in the cover of Collected Poems. Like its 1991 predecessor, the 2002 edition bears a photograph, taken from behind, of a seated circus elephant lovingly hugged by a little girl. this ‘beauty and beast’ image makes a joke obviously at the poet’s own expense. Intelligent vast, a beast of long affection and revenge, thick-skinned, private at love: all allude both to the man himself and, in another sense, to his expansive body of work. at first, the joke seems benign, inviting a bond with readers while anticipating and disarming detractors. then its ambivalence registers, its desire to rally friends against foes. It is as though readers must be recruited to Murray’s side against his opponents, real or imagined.3 Murray’s admirers and detractors are real enough, though the former by now demonstrably outnumber the latter. as I write, Murray is well into the fifth and, so far, most peaceable decade of his long public career. he is presently and indisputably the best known of australia’s contemporary poets, at home and abroad. to the weary amusement of rivals in australian literary circles, Murray is routinely tagged as one of the top five poets in english today, as australia’s unofficial poet laureate and as the nation’s likeliest contender for the Nobel prize in Literature (patrick White being, to date, the only australian recipient of that prize). the signs are that his reputation and readership base are flourishing in the wake of prestigious poetry prizes and glowing international reviews, particularly of his second verse novel, Fredy Neptune (1998). he has been a highly effective self-promoter, touring frequently and shepherding translation of his works into a range of european languages. his international profile is supported by an attractive website.4 Murray’s reputation, augmented by the translation of his work into many european languages, is now, in pascale Casanova’s terms, being reckoned in terms of the ‘world republic of letters’.5 the crossing from

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national to international literary space multiplies Murray’s literary capital. International recognition is not only important for individual writers but essential for the prestige of their own nations’ literary fields. Casanova describes a complex system of interdependence and exchange of capital and value between national and international literary space, a process that, she argues, tends to reinforce principles of artistic autonomy.6 Murray’s international consecration is likely to bring prestige to the australian literary field and ensure his continuing pre-eminence within it, despite his contentious political views. the Murray phenomenon is unthinkable without his poetry. It is on the poetry – with its technical and intellectual brilliance and its strong emotional charge – that his reputation is most securely founded. Unlike Judith Wright whose reputation as poet, established early in the national arena, defined her public profile and lent power to her later activism (though the latter did not help her international literary profile), Murray’s reputation has grown commensurately with his poetry and prose and its wide international dissemination. he is now described as belonging, with Joseph Brodsky, Seamus heaney and Derek Walcott, to poetry’s ‘superleague’.7 Yet there is a locally specific dynamic in Murray’s case – a long interwoven mutuality of poetry, prose writings and media interventions – that has given to his representations a very distinctive and sensational impress. Overseas commentators and critics, mostly admiring of Murray, look askance at his vexed australian reception, sceptical of the relevance of local squabbles to international readerships and suspecting petty rivalry.8 this is an important corrective to an australian viewpoint. the external, non-australian view, however, is not absolute, and offers no more complete a perspective on Murray than the local perspective. Nor are external (extra-national) views impartial.again, Casanova argues that ‘writers who seek greater freedom for their work are those who know the laws of world literary space and who make use of them in trying to subvert the dominant norms of their respective national fields’.9 Murray’s privileging of

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rural, folk-derived, Christian values conforms to dominant strands of australian settler-culture nationalism. Yet his assertion of these values also constitutes a bid for aesthetic freedom from australian literary norms, as these hold within the restricted sub-field of poetry in which, since the 1970s, urban, postmodernist and cosmopolitan sensibilities have contested the privileged status of national poetries of the land. In transnational literary space, Murray’s poetry is freed from the cultural norms of australia’s local literary field. to that transnational space, furthermore, his poetry contributes precisely the exotic, authentic character of the local that sometimes appears regressive to fellow poets and critics at home. his poetry repackages local australian contexts for global readerships, reconstituting the local as global – a move that especially characterises Fredy Neptune.10 Local and international frameworks together, therefore, constitute the poet’s significance as a public and literary figure. Les Murray’s role in drafting, at the behest of then prime Minister John howard, the ill-fated australian constitutional preamble (which was ultimately rejected along with the proposed republic in the 1999 referendum), occasioned much media commentary. In a subsequent essay, Murray firmly distanced himself from the final draft of the preamble.11 though this was one of the most dramatic of his public interventions, Murray was already a controversial public figure, his reputation having reached a peak (or nadir) several years earlier.this was the point at which his castigation of australia’s progressive cultural elites was most bitterly inflamed. as detailed in alexander’s biography, the poet’s anger had been building for some time, and had personal as well as ideological sources. Murray now claims that he had been in the grip of a severe clinical depression. publication of his award-winning Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) was one outcome of this time. Media response to that book fed the mounting backlash against ‘political correctness’ that accompanied the demise of the hawke–Keating Labor government, the rise of John howard’s Coalition government and the ascendency of a newly conservative australian media and polity. the progressive

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cultural agenda that had driven the new nationalism of preceding decades, intensifying around the 1988 Bicentenary, had been closely identified with universities, the broadsheet and quality media and australia’s urban intelligentsia. these social and institutional formations now suffered internal fractures. an exaggerated ‘culture wars’ discourse pitted the postmodern humanities academy against public literary figures (like Murray, Garner and Williamson) and against the liberal mediasphere. at this time, as a conservative australian writer who was no stranger to controversy, Les Murray already had form. Where Judith Wright had deflected inquiry into her private life and had actively spurned the cult of personality, Les Murray has often alluded to his personal life as part of his public discourse. he has also fostered a love–hate relationship with his publics, provoking reaction yet evidently hurt by the consequences. throughout his career, which included influential posts as an editor and reviewer, there had already been many bloody battles in the ‘Cosy Corner’ and ‘snake-pit’, as he once referred to it, of australian poetry.12 In these battles, which were interconnected with literary, publishing and academic circles, Murray was either villain or victim, depending on the account one reads. John Kinsella’s memoir offers a corrective to typically polarised accounts of the so-called poetry wars and their chief antagonists, Les Murray and John tranter, suggesting that ‘Les is a whole lot more complex than many would like to think’.13 Yet it does seem that Murray sets out to provoke: no more so than with the verse novel he published in 1980. as his biographer, peter alexander, documents, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980), which I will discuss shortly, sparked some furious and, reportedly, nasty protests on australian campuses by those who were deeply offended by the book’s caricatured feminist.14 By the 1990s, certain politically loaded pejoratives had become attached to the poet, some of which were also thrown into circulation, no doubt pre-emptively, by Murray himself: ‘subhuman redneck’, the ‘token fascist’, and the nation’s ‘gadfly laureate’. In

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short, few australian literary figures have stirred such enduring and aggravated public emotions – positive and negative, and positive in reaction to alleged negative. these emotions have saturated Murray’s australian reception, though remote echoes still sound, even in non-australian responses to the most polemical of his poems. this emotional saturation in Murray’s public representations makes the task of winnowing out unadorned fact from hyperbole quite futile. It is also futile for the very good reason that pain and suffering constitute the central drama of Murray’s public persona.they infuse both his poetry and his autobiographical narratives and cannot be subtracted from them. In Bastards from the Bush, a short documentary film he made with Bob ellis, Murray recalls the trauma of his teenage years at taree high School where, as a shy, socially inept boy, he was mercilessly bullied: ‘No sentence addressed to me would fail to contain a reference to “fat”’. Girls in particular, he says, tormented him, and so he learned ‘that the heart of harassment is sexual, that it’s designed to castrate you’, and that to be attacked, not by one’s own sex but by the opposite sex, is to be rendered incapable of retaliation. and so: What I really did I suppose was to make a new body for myself out of poetry, a body of work. Since my flesh body was unacceptable to womankind I would make myself a perpetual body of poetry.15

at once poignantly funny and aggressively pre-emptive, this statement, like the cover of Collected Poems, is intended both to secure the sympathy of Murray’s readers and to goad his critics. Murray’s critics are indeed irritated by his frequent deployment of ‘victim’ status in a way that allows him to avoid blame and to steal a march on would-be analysts. Despite his polarising public interventions, the edgy, ambivalent, even gendered character of Murray’s performances has escaped serious attention. this becomes especially clear when the poems themselves are brought into focus as an integral part of his public

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persona. there are very few female critics, let alone feminist literary scholars, who have engaged deeply, or at all, with Murray’s work.16 the horror that The Boys That Stole the Funeral struck into such readers’ hearts is one possible reason for this lack of interest. another, not unrelated reason, concerns the gender dynamics in Murray’s poetry, not just its thematic treatment of male and female characters, but the way its emotional tenor positions its readers to comply with its quite patriarchal representations of gender, a set of representations integral to Murray’s deeply felt but conservative version of Christianity.17 What Murray’s aggressive certainty underscores, however and ironically, is a vulnerability or fragility, one that also plays into his oftremarked tendency to cast himself publicly as a victim of bullying. the oscillation between bully and victim that has, at least in the past, characterised Murray’s public rhetoric – and the sense that this is not simply posturing – has perhaps discouraged those critics who wish to engage both sympathetically and critically with his work. One must, it seems, either be for Murray or against him. Lack of feminist engagement with Murray in a way that is both tough and empathetic represents a lost opportunity, for there is much to discover in the way gender conditions both his poetry and public performances, and much to learn, through his work, about the gendering of australian literary and public spheres. In the previous chapter I touched on some of these gendered dimensions, in the classed representation of the 1970s encounter between Les Murray and Judith Wright. In this discussion of Murray, I want to think further about the character of his public performance as it is refracted in several of his major works. For Murray’s poetry foregrounds men who are both emphatically masculine and feminised in their vulnerability. they are accompanied by a cast of women, proper and improper, approved and disapproved. then there are the burning women, behind which, perhaps, is the figure of the lost mother. these characters do relay the patriarchal structure of Murray’s vision, but they also hold the key to his affective and alienating powers as an australian writer-intellectual.

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Of weeping and burning men While the public Murray is verbally acrobatic and loquacious, many of his privileged male figures exhibit a laconic taciturnity that identifies them with a classically australian masculinity, and that locates them firmly in their rural (‘Boeotian’) culture. One of the most compelling images of contained masculinity is found in his famous poem, ‘the Mitchells’ (1977). the constructed, refracted nature of the scene and its figures is instantly signalled by the mediating observer: I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise I think for wires . . .18

the gaze casually picks out the elements of the scene – water boiling in a prune tin, bees, blossoms and noonday wattles – and returns to the men lunching and exchanging their ritual conversation. this is brief in words but extended in non-verbal cues, like ‘pain and subtle amusement’. the drama proceeds through subtle switches in tense: there are frequent shifts between activity and passivity, between present continuous tense, conveying the temporality of speaker and story, and subjunctives that raise the men’s conversation from individual to ritual performance. the poem presents an arcadian tableau, an almost-still life in which foreground and background drift together, and the individual identities of the men, as soon as sketched, return to wordless, class-subsuming fraternity. the final sentence introduces a signature nationalist twist, deftly inverting country and city, by appropriating suburbia for the bush, and the bush for suburbia: ‘Nearly everything / they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue’.19 What is the connection between these taciturn Mitchells and another recurrent male figure, the weeping man, in Murray’s poetry? how do these culturally loaded male figures, in their repetitions, evolutions and transformations, help to deliver Murray’s

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public performance, and define the relation between his poetry and his politics? the weeping man appears first in the heart of Sydney’s business district, in Martin place, in the early poem ‘an absolutely Ordinary rainbow’ (1969).this poem is one of Murray’s best known and most loved by general readers, having been routinely taught in australian schools. Its opening makes reference, significantly, to that iconic, national poem of australian masculinity,‘the Man from Snowy river’. Murray’s poem transposes the latter’s bush telegraph to the city, moving through public sites of masculine exchange: coffee shop (repin’s), bistro (Lorenzini’s), private club (tattersall’s) and stock exchange. Meanwhile ‘we surround’ but do not approach the man in Martin place who weeps, unperturbed in his ‘pentagram of sorrow’. Murray’s inversion of the city is noticeably doubled by gender inversion: it is significant that it is a man who ecstatically abandons himself to public grief. this is not a radical inversion capable of upsetting gendered social hierarchies, however, but one that works to restore the sacred and, along with it, patriarchal hegemony.20 the man’s undemanding expression of grief miraculously transforms public space: . . . the fiercest manhood, the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected judgements of peace.21

the scene hinges on the man’s wordlessness, on his purely bodily performance which confounds everyone around it while occasioning their flurries of activity. the man’s wordless performance is the sustaining counterpart of the verbal eloquence of the poem itself. Dignity and spiritual grace accrue to the weeping man in Martin place and flow outward: the spectacle of masculine vulnerability touches and implicates beholders, making believers of them, and transfiguring the city as sacred space.22

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the spectacle of masculine vulnerability is put to more troubling and overtly polemical uses in The Boys Who Stole the Funeral where the gender inversion applied to female characters is symptomatic of social disorder. Written on the cusp of Murray’s own return to his family property at Bunyah (as discussed in Chapter 4), The Boys is both a stunning technical accomplishment and an ideological intervention in debates about the direction of australian nationhood in the 1970s. It conveys Murray’s desire to recover traditional rural values and his rejection of modernity’s urban elites, especially second-wave feminist and anti-Vietnam War protesters, against whom he defines his own values, culture and vision of nation. Comprising 140 sonnets of flexibly variegated line length and layout, tears are traded for fire, and the weeping man is subsumed by the burning man. the novel runs at a swift pace, retailing the adventures of Kevin Forbutt and Cameron reeby, two ‘boys’, really young men who, in defiance of Kevin’s parents’ own fashionable rejection of their forefathers’ values, take it upon themselves to steal, transport and bury in the earth of his home country the remains of Kevin’s dead uncle and anzac digger, Clarence Dunn. this is clearly an indigenising narrative, partly drawn from aboriginal repatriation and burial customs and incorporating a surreal sequence involving a controversially creolised Irish-aboriginal initiation rite.23 the names cue us in to these values: Kevin Forbutt is nicknamed ‘Clancy’ (alluding to that other famous poem from the australian Legend, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’), and Cam reeby is ‘ratchet’, ‘for his prospects’,24 but also, I suspect, with sidelong and ironic reference to that domineering and damaged woman, Nurse ratched, of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). the novel performs an antipodean transformation of the modernist framework of eliot’s rewriting of the Grail myth, in The Wasteland, with passing reference inter alia to Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’ poems. The Boys Who Stole the Funeral also owes much to the vernacular, narrative and distinctively settler-colonial use of the sonnet by New

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Zealand poet James Baxter, in ‘Jerusalem Sonnets, 1969’.25 as well as referencing or borrowing from these literary sources, Murray’s verse novel vies with cinema, with its montage-like sequencing and rapid cross-cutting between self-contained vignettes. and it circulates, implicitly, the popular currency of 1970s american new wave cinema, while deliberately reversing the latter’s anti-establishment values.this is hinted not only in ‘ratchet’ (Note: the film of Kesey’s novel was released in 1975), but in the allusion to the Native american (Cheyenne) ‘Contrary’, a warrior who prepares for battle by doing everything backwards. this figure was popularised in thomas Berger’s revisionist frontier novel, Little Big Man (1965), the film of which was released in 1970.26 the reference occurs in Sonnet 11, which presents the central thematic insight into the social causes of reeby’s helpless woundedness. Speaking in halting fragments, reeby recalls the primal, emasculating scene of his ‘epic fight with women’, which had occurred on campus, ‘after the ulrike meinhoff memorial lecture’, when the women mistook him for a ‘liberal’ and set upon him with that ‘ventriloquial howl they do’. reeby’s own retaliation is not described. Instead, at this point, the sonnet breaks, as reeby talks, in his broken phrases, about the Contrary: you had to do everything except in war back to front wash in dust walk backwards it made you insane for fighting those women their cropped copper hair and one was crying its a mask when you cant get a mask off it makes you murderous we’ve tried to believe the opposite of everything too quickly27

this not only conveys what has damaged reeby, but also mounts the verse novel’s central critique of the sixties generation, which it regards as a conformist amalgam of anti-traditional, anti-national, anti-male and anti-rural postures. reeby only begins to regain his potency through his idyllic courtship of Jennie Dunn, one of the novel’s ‘proper’ women. this sequence is presented in scenes significantly intercut with Forbutt’s angry verbal confrontation with

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his father. Kevin’s father is an already emasculated figure, a puppet exploited by three feminist ‘furies’, including his wife. Kevin’s rejection of his fallen parents is essential to his own initiation to manhood, yet in defying them he also fears merely repeating their conformist gestures of generational rebellion. It is not hard to see, in Kevin’s negotiation of this problem, Les Murray’s own contrary manifesto of resistance to the resisters – his resistance not only to Judith Wright’s activist agenda, and to her seeming public rejection of her colonial heritage, but also to his rivals among the (homogeneously labelled) Generation of ’68 poets. amid these personal contortions, one can see the desire to belong, the necessity of refusal and the double alienation such positioning entails. though Murray has referred to the ‘cleft stick’ wedging his critics28 – the contradiction of liking the poetry but disliking the politics – this also seems to involve a double bind for the poet himself. Murray is, after all, a poet possessed of subtle and complex linguistic powers. his work necessarily orients itself towards restricted, rarified readerships whose assumed (elite, multicultural, group-think) values he challenges, rather than towards a broader ‘mainstream’, whose assumed (vernacular, traditional, conservative) values he wants to honour and restore. homologous with Kevin Forbutt’s refusal of his progressive-conformist parents, Murray’s is a refusal of an imagined elite to which he would otherwise seem naturally to belong. In an escalating sequence of violence prefigured in apocalyptic visitations of a burning man, Noeline Kampff – a feminist, and therefore ‘improper’ woman, one of the furies who manipulates Kevin’s father – exacts retribution against reeby for his fight with women. the poem registers a combination of sympathy and repulsion towards Noeline, with her ‘haunted, measuring eyes’.29 Mirroring notorious anti-Vietnam War protests, she enacts her own thwarted reproductive desire, whether for baby or abortion, by dumping a bucket of beef blood over reeby. In response, after reeby is unintentionally shot dead by pursuing police, Jennie avenges his earlier humiliation at Noeline’s hands by throwing boiling water in the

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latter’s face, disfiguring her, and making her ideological ‘mask’ physical. this is the culminating act of retribution in a spiral of violence that manifests, or is precipitated by, general communal disorder associated with the loss of traditional values. the novel contests an australian nationalism that denigrates manly anzac sacrifice, rural virtue and proper gender roles. Inversion of gender roles among fashionable city-based circles is not just symptom but chief cause of communal corruption. even Murray’s most sympathetic readers have found the antifeminism of The Boys Who Stole the Funeral hard to take. Critics, mainly male, have instead attended to the religious tenor of The Boys, its appropriation of the Grail myth and its recovery of a cultural and spiritual centredness in the country. they have not been inclined to engage directly with its difficult and tormented gender politics.30 Lawrence Bourke is one of the few exceptions. he observes both the confronting, ideological system of Murray’s novel and its aesthetic achievement, apprehending its configuration of male and female characters as a function of Murray’s tendency to centralise masculinist perspectives.31 Yet Bourke’s reading, which identifies the patriarchal ideology of The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, does not go far enough in its pursuit of these gender structures, and their impact on the emotional tenor and politics of the poem. If Noeline Kampff ’s name signals the character’s ‘misplaced belligerence’ (Bourke’s phrase32), in its excess this belligerence returns as the poet’s own. this observation might begin to make sense of a surprising parallel Murray drew, one which suggests the close proximity, or interdependence, in Murray’s world, of victimhood and aggression, and the relationship of gender structures to these conditions. anticipating reaction from feminists, Murray firmly resisted negative constructions of the book’s controversial female character: I may surprise you, though, by telling you there’s almost nobody in the novel I have more sympathy for than for [Noeline Kampff]. her nearest parallel in my past work is the Weeping Man in the poem an

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absolutely Ordinary rainbow. he is a human absolute, and she has tried to be one; her cliché is the hideous music of that attempt.33

What, then, should one make of this remark? Murray’s observation confirms the interconnection between these figures of gender inversion. Yet the moral valuation of each character produces their opposition, suggesting that an agonistic model of gender relations inhabits and conditions Murray’s poetic imaginary. Noeline Kampff is a hideous parody, a clichéd inversion, of the Weeping Man. While both characters, as ‘human absolutes’, are paradoxical public spectacles, and both wounded, she is to be pitied, while he is to be revered. the boiling water that fixes Noeline’s mask forever also transfixes in an appalled gaze the ‘we’ (other characters in the poem, as well as implied readers) who surround her.

Of burning women and alienated men these familiar themes and figures, partly transmuted, recur in Murray’s second verse novel, Fredy Neptune (1998), a work that amplifies tensions between alienation and belonging which, as we have already seen, comprise a central dynamic in Murray’s poetic and public interventions. It is significant that the novel’s protagonist took shape at the peak of Murray’s depression even as he was venting darker moods in Subhuman Redneck Poems. In 1992, according to Murray’s own account, Fredy ‘stood up in the centre of [his] imagination, like the weeping man in Martin place years before him and said I’m Friedrich adolf Boettcher, a German-australian sailor from a farm outside Dungog, in New South Wales’.34 an impressive feat of sustained narrative poetry (260 pages or so), in dialogue with tS eliot’s The Wasteland, ezra pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros,35 Murray’s poem narrates the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of a representatively ordinary man. Fredy Boettcher, the poem’s German-australian anti-hero, tells his extraordinary story in a voice that is vernacular,

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humble and partially self-aware. During his picaresque progress (he crosses oceans and continents, works at a dazzling variety of jobs and brushes against twentieth-century celebrities like Lawrence of arabia and Marlene Dietrich), Fredy at one point joins a circus troupe. here his routine involves suspending himself from a swing, using only his foot or chin. In this position, below the line, Fredy mimes mundane feats of dressing or tea-drinking to entertain the audience. the routine is literally effortless, for Fredy is both victim and beneficiary of a strange condition: he feels no bodily pain or sensation.thus, he cannot sense the gravity to which he is nonetheless subject, nor can he feel the painful muscular exertion required to resist gravity’s pull.36 During his circus interlude, Fredy acquires a working name that gives the novel its multiply resonant title. Weightless, buoyant as a zeppelin through history’s darker currents, drifting back and forth across national and ideological borders, Fredy is a Neptune figure. he invariably finds himself ‘working below the line’, trying to avoid the twin perils that dog him – detection of his alien condition and complicity with twentieth-century horror: ‘I crouched below it all / and gradually my head cleared’.37 Fredy’s contortions, once again, suggest the doubling of alienation, the multiplication of refusals, aesthetic and political, that must be performed to avoid exposure. Fredy’s bodily insensitivity is ironically coupled with heightened sensitivity to human suffering. a mere twelve stanzas into the poem, Fredy’s numbness descends suddenly when, haplessly conscripted to the German and thence turkish side in World War I in 1915, he witnesses the genocidal burning of a group of armenian women. this infamy is graphically rendered in Siamanto’s poem, The Dance, an excerpt of which Murray deploys as epigraph to his novel: In shock I slammed my shutters like a storm, turned to the one gone, asked: ‘these eyes of mine— how shall I dig them out, how shall I, how?’38

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this appalled gaze precipitates and propels Fredy’s narrative. Indeed, the action of Fredy Neptune begins at the exact point that The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, Murray’s previous verse novel written twenty years earlier, had ended: the protagonist’s gaze on the burning women recalls the implied gaze on the burned face of Noeline Kampff. amid the random chaos of historic events, Fredy must try to remain human in the face of twentieth-century barbarity. Divided from his ‘inner man’, Fredy is both representatively schizoid and literally alienated from both himself and all others.39 his cure can only be wrought through a process of acknowledgment, forgiveness and reconciliation. healing transpires, as prophesied, when Fredy finally learns to pray with his whole heart. Murray’s protagonist copes through decades-long numbness by dissembling his condition, by passing as normal and ordinary, fearing ostracism or worse if his difference is discovered. above all, Fredy avoids women – at least at first – as prime victims of male destructive power: No more women friends. My running away to spare them hurt them undeserving. But knowing me would kill them. I had to live near the human race, and be mates with lots of it, shallowly . . .40

Fearing his capacity to hurt women, Fredy must nonetheless learn to trust them again. Fredy is both im/potent and hyper-masculine, damaged and divided, and women are foils to his fragility. Combining inner vulnerability and freakish strength, Fredy performs superhuman feats that both amaze and alienate onlookers, luring him towards dangerous exposure of his difference. In its focus on a masculinity threatened by its own capacity to damage women, Fredy Neptune recalls The Boys Who Stole the Funeral. It might be argued that Fredy Neptune demonstrates a heightened lucidity, restoring to the treatment of gender relations some of the balance lacking in the earlier verse novel.Yet agonism and alienation,

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embodied in Fredy, are structural to both the verse narratives. Fredy’s alienation is the counterpart of the desire to belong. though he declares himself beyond ‘the fellowship of suffering’,41 Fredy yearns to merge once more with ordinary humanity. In and through his extraordinary situation, Fredy is ordinary, a twentiethcentury everyman. Yet he is no simple anti-hero, for he is the privileged bearer of the novel’s values. In the poem’s ekphrastic beginning,42 the reader is invited to regard a still snapshot of Fredy’s family: that was sausage day on our farm outside Dungog. there’s my father reinhard Boettcher, my mother agnes . . .43

this ‘familiar’ preface only briefly forestalls the rapid cinematic unreeling of a defamiliarising tale. With his vernacular voice and ingenue spirit, Fredy is a normalising alien amid the utterly alienating normal of the twentieth century. ‘Me, an alien!’ Fredy cries at one point, following a medical diagnosis, ‘I fumed at that. and then admitted to myself / that it was true. I had become an alien’.44 Fredy’s condition, like poetry or prophesy, is both gift and liability. It not only renders him alien, but endows him with privileged insight. alienation is therefore not merely an undesirable symptom, but the enabling condition of Fredy’s poem – of the very production of poetry. So it is logical that the narrative should end as abruptly as it began: after Fredy’s healing, his heightened vision vanishes, and the ordinary of everyday life resumes, its density now impervious to poetry: ‘But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it’.45 With his unstable boundaries, and his compulsion to cross boundaries, Fredy embodies the generative paradox of Murray’s poetic practice. this is the paradox that accompanies an alienating vision – a vision that comes from a hyper-sensitivity that doubles

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as self-serving insensitivity. how is this hyper- or in-sensitivity to be understood? Can Fredy’s quest for release from entrapment in a perpetually misrecognised, (in)sensitive body be regarded as displaced confession of what Murray’s critics might say has been the excess of the poet’s own public and political interventions? Fredy Neptune can be read as a revisiting of these issues, and of Murray’s own sensitive position in relation to australian national and literary fields. Murray’s ‘damaged man’ story, as we have seen, works to dignify or excuse some of his more provocative outbursts, both poetic and public. Yet, in Fredy Neptune, no less than in his other writings, Nazis and fashionable Western elites are subsumed into the Orwellian category of ‘thought police’. the hurtful teenage mob still blends seamlessly with the educated elite – a group that problematically encompasses not only Murray’s ‘opponents’, but fellow poets, cultivated readers and academics. Many among these elites are also, as previously discussed, his readers. Fredy Neptune refracts, at once, the nation’s collective history and Murray’s own autobiographical narrative, and the narrative of the damaged man becomes analogous to the story of persecuted poet. Murray’s belief that his views have attracted powerful literary enemies is certainly reproduced in alexander’s authorised biography, in which the field of contemporary australian poetry divides neatly into warring camps and enemies are ranged in a powerful conspiracy against Murray: . . . in the literary world I felt like a pariah, admired abroad but detested at home. the inner circles of the australia Council knew me as their token Fascist, and colleagues who were thought to be close to me found their careers did not prosper; they faced obstruction, bad reviews, lack of funding . . . 46

there has been and there remains antipathy from some australian poets, critics and academics in response to Murray’s vehement rejection of what he regards as the mob mentality of progressivist,

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urban multicultural elites and the arbiters of ‘political correctness’. reviews of his tS eliot prize-winning Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) manifest the cross-section of responses to Murray’s most provocative work. Murray’s tS eliot prize win, bringing the poet and australian literature international prestige, was nationally headlined in australia, and welcomed by a range of commentators, but praise was mixed with condemnation.47 ‘the Beneficiaries’, a bitterly contentious poem attacking Western intellectuals for failing to celebrate auschwitz – since it had been deployed in their ‘centuries / long war against God’ – was met, unsurprisingly, with outrage. Ken Bolton, who, according to alexander, was a long-standing enemy of Murray, wrote: has it occurred to Murray to wonder what the shades of adorno or Benjamin, or of countless other intellectual Jews, might have had to say to that? the poem is too stupid to take seriously except as a symptom of Murray’s various kinds of decline. Is it only a joke? Or a taunt? With the new political ascendancy in australia Murray has perhaps (as one of those previously ‘chosen’ for baiting) well remembered the modes he learned in the playground. For this he gets the tS eliot prize.48

On the other hand, UK academic Steven Matthews’ more distanced assessment shows the benefits and limitations of a non-australian view. Matthews sees Murray as a progressive who defines the ‘nature of an emergent and separate national consciousness, one in which the links with europe can be properly acknowledged and the brutal history of colonisation can be exposed, but also one freed from both of these ties’.49 Commenting on ‘the Beneficiaries’, Matthews notes Murray’s ‘urge to say the historically and politically unsayable’ in order to raise ‘larger questions’ about his positioning ‘with regard to his audience, both in australia and beyond’.50 though this offers a useful corrective from a position apparently free of local investment in australian national debate, its

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rewriting of Murray’s radical folk conservatism as politically progressive is dubious, and seems somewhat conscripted to the poet’s own viewpoint.51 perhaps Fredy Neptune wrests back something of the compassionate equilibrium put at risk in Murray’s most polemical interventions, and it is notable that, as he says, he wrote it in tandem with Subhuman Redneck Poems.though perfectly consistent with his concerns about the tyrannies of the fashionable elite, the thrust of Fredy Neptune is towards healing and reconciliation – towards the question of how the damaged man can live sociably, with equanimity and forbearance, in the twentieth century. ‘equanimity’, after all, is that moral or spiritual value enshrined in the best of Murray’s poetry. Meanwhile, questions of personal, national and international reconciliation are exercised in Fredy Neptune’s climactic sequence in which Fredy submits himself to prayer: You have to pray with a whole heart, says my inner man to me, and you haven’t got one. Can I get one? Forgive the aborigines. What have I got to forgive? They never hurt me! For being on our conscience. I shook my head, and did. Forgiving feels like starting to. that I spose I feel uneasy round you, I thought to them, shook my head and started understanding. hans served, and the ball came bounding back Like a happy pup. Forgive the Jews, my self said. that one felt miles steep, stone-blocked and black as iron. That’s not really mine, the Hitler madness—No it’s not, said my self. It isn’t on your head. But it’s in your languages. So I started that forgiveness, wincing, asking it as I gave it. When I stopped asking it, cities stopped burning in my mind. My efforts faded and went inward. I was let rest and come back to hans searching under the building for his ball.

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then my self said Forgive women. Those burning? all women, it said. Something tore on me, like bandage coming off scab and hair, the white tearing off me like linen. and I knew what was coming: Forgive God, my self said. I shuddered at that one. Judging him and sensing life eternal, said my self, are different hearts.You want a single heart, to pray. Choose one and drop one. I looked inside them both and only one of them allowed prayer, so I chose it, and my prayer was prayed and sent, already as I chose it.52

peter alexander quotes this sequence to support his view that Murray’s antagonism to australia’s cultural and political elites stems from a genuinely reconciliatory vision of nation. Complexities and ironies abound, however, in the way that Murray presents reconciliation in his poem. though it prevents us from dismissing Murray as simply ‘redneck’ or ‘conservative’, the sequence, with its hierarchy of challenges – from aborigines, to the Jews, to all women, to God – perpetuates the habit of conflating, making ‘equal’, incommensurable claims.this is consistent with Murray’s complaint against what he regards as socially divisive forms of redress or affirmative action.53 While the power of the poem derives from its narrative of the damaged man, questions remain, at least in an australian national setting, about how far Fredy’s personal reconciliation moves from a collective syndrome of white australian victimhood that it begins to identify: . . . white australians see themselves in foundational ways as victims, aware always of their own suffering, hardships and defeats, and so cannot view themselves as victimisers, as responsible for the suffering and hardship and tragedy they inflict on others, those they displace, dispossess, disadvantage . . .54

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During the howard era, the political (though perhaps not cultural) ascendancy of urban, multicultural, progressivist australia was eclipsed. the delivery of a national apology in early 2008 by a new government suggested a change in the weather, with opinion polls in its wake running strongly in favour of prime Minister Kevin rudd. the extent and depth of national commitment, however, are yet to be tested. the unthinkable legacy of dispossession and the ongoing trauma of colonisation still tear at the fabric of national belonging, creating a burden borne more heavily by the colonised than the coloniser. Murray’s own long resistance to these questions, exercised in Fredy Neptune, reminds us eloquently enough about the bind in which the poets of australia’s settler culture, and its critics and readers, may find themselves – the bind of confronting a blood-history while wanting to assert non-Indigenous heritage and belonging. the narrative of the weeping man, the damaged man in Murray’s poetry, returns us, in that more difficult sense, to the syndrome of white victimhood – with its co-requisite of manhood and community achieved through national rituals of blood sacrifice. Can the spectacle of the weeping man redeem us, or will it divert us from the responsibility to address this history, to bring justice, and, with that, the possibility of healing? It would be easy to rest there, to reduce what is at play in Fredy Neptune. the poem itself may be more open to these questions than my reading allows. Fredy’s struggle to forgive the victims on his conscience suggests that his poem, too, is haunted by colonial history, and that he, like the speaker in Wright’s ‘at Cooloolah’, ‘must quiet a heart accused by its own fear’.55 Murray does not allow his Fredy to bear the full burden of the terrible history that marks him, that propels him and to which he must respond.Yet while he is not guilty, the poem concedes, he may well be responsible. For he is a beneficiary: the history of genocide is ‘in [his] languages’.56

Chapter 6

Cultivating nation: the quiet diplomacy of David Malouf You know all this. It is the earth as we have made it, clearing, grafting, transplanting, carrying seeds from one place to another, following no plan that we could enunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some other, deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creatures we long for and must become.1

D

avid Malouf makes writing look easy. Whether in poetry or prose, his writing is the fluid medium of his thought. to read it feels like swimming, or, less arduously, being carried along in a gentle but firm current. We drift with his softly undulating phrases, experiencing each separate breathing moment, until we arrive at the still pool where all resolves into a quiet, crystal clarity. Malouf ’s invitations, effected as they so often are through first and second person pronouns, can be hard to refuse.2 his pronouns, which I have been mirroring, perform a particular magic. take the above quote, from one of Malouf ’s most admired novels, An Imaginary Life (1978). the narrator is Ovid, so the ‘you’ and ‘we’ refer to his fellow roman citizens, from whose presence the poet has been exiled to the furthest frontier of empire.the ‘you’ and ‘we’, however, extend effortlessly, organically, across the abyss of time, to ‘us’, Ovid’s twentieth-century readers (and beyond). ‘We’

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are the avatars of the romans, the distant inheritors of that imperial culture that made the ‘West’. ‘We’ not only encompass contemporary cosmopolitan readers, but readers from settler nations, including australians engaged in the postcolonial work of ‘clearing, grafting, transplanting’ and making our landscapes. the impact, however, does not only come from the pronouns. It is at the level of the sentence that Malouf ’s language–thought nexus is given its distinctive shape. In this representative example, he opens with a simple statement – ‘it is the earth as we have made it’. this is given flesh by a succession of sensory images, scenarios and possibilities, a linked chain of spaces, each in turn marked off by a comma that pulls against and cumulatively leads towards the final, artfully nested paradoxes: ‘the landscape we have made reveals to us the creatures we long for and must become’. this is characteristic of Malouf, whether in writing or speech, with the interlacing of style and meaning, the personal and the communal, the intimate and the national. his approach is urbane, inclusive and generous.Yet for all its exploratory shape, the language remains insistent, persuasive, gently pressing us to agree. these are the traits, found everywhere in his poetry and prose, that distinguish David Malouf ’s public style. It is a style that strongly contrasts with Les Murray’s public persona.Where Murray provokes and enrages with his extreme formulations, or inspires a protective sympathy, Malouf is unflappable: always moderate, circumspect and courteous. he presents an urbane and engaging approach to public conversation, and appears totally uninterested in divisive political point-scoring. Do these qualities carry him further than some of his peers in national debate? has he found a way to think aloud in more nuanced ways amid the rivalries and objectifying pressures of public life? Malouf has managed, in his writings and public forums, to address some very sensitive areas of australian history, legend and identity, usually without provoking controversy. his unflaggingly reasonable public discourse has earned him respect from the widest range commentators. even conservative columnist Gerard

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henderson was sufficiently impressed by Malouf ’s 1998 Boyer Lectures to suggest that he, rather than the appointed Les Murray, would have been better equipped to draft a new constitutional preamble: ‘Unlike many intellectuals, Malouf is not alienated. he is sympathetic to, and critical of, australia. In short, a realist’.3 Yet, despite his thoughtful approach, Malouf has not entirely escaped controversy. he has been subject to criticism and sustained at least one aggravated attack. the latter occurred as his literary reputation was reaching new heights, when his novel, Remembering Babylon (1993), was shortlisted for the Booker prize. It may not be coincidental that it was after this episode that Malouf ’s own direct participation in public discourse, and his non-fictional writing on australian history and culture, began to increase. From the mid- to late 1990s to the present, Malouf has been a sought-after speaker on matters of national culture, both at home and overseas. at one of the first of these ‘national’ engagements, at the Sydney Institute in 1994, Malouf addressed the topic, ‘Identity as Lived experience: Uniquely australian’, and an excerpt was published in the Weekend Australian.4 Meanwhile, the attention paid to Malouf by literary critics in the academy has fluctuated.While the austLit database shows a remarkable surge of critical works about Remembering Babylon, eclipsing response to his preceding books (except for An Imaginary Life), there has been some drop-off in academic attention to Malouf ’s writing beyond Remembering Babylon. Meanwhile the database also shows that, in the mid- to late 1990s, the number of newspaper columns published about Malouf quadrupled compared with previous five-year spans. the reasons for these broad trends are complex, but what they point to is an intensification of Malouf ’s profile as a public figure at a particular point in his career that is not matched by sustained growth in academic attention to his work. Given Malouf is such an esteemed writer, and such a benign figure, both at home and abroad, why has he been criticised and what have been the repercussions? how has Malouf responded?

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One very consistent thread of criticism, among others, concerns the literary task prefigured in the above epigraph from An Imaginary Life: the task of creating the landscapes within which we can discover ourselves. elsewhere, in his Neustadt Lecture (2000), he articulates this as the task of taking ‘possession’ of the place: Of course we already possess it in fact, through occupation or conquest, and that possession is legitimised by law. But there is only one way that we can truly possess the land (I wrote a novel, Harland’s Half Acre, about this): that is by taking it into ourselves, interiorising and reimagining it as native people have done. this too is a work for poetry, and for the kind of fiction that dares to take on what it is too often left for poetry alone to do.5

If the literary imagination is civilising, what is the cost of this project? how should writers respond to Walter Benjamin’s unsettling insight that, ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’?6 Is the literary necessarily implicated in the ongoing colonisation of the land? Or is art one of the few arenas to hold out the promise of human dignity and freedom? these are questions, as we have seen, that exercised both Wright and Murray, and they recur in new ways and with just as much urgency, for David Malouf. On what basis does Malouf negotiate these questions and with what effects?

Malouf, his critics, and some things Remembering Babylon forgets In 1993, renowned expatriate australian intellectual Germaine Greer delivered a sensational broadside in a review of Malouf ’s multiple-prize-winning novel, Remembering Babylon (1993). the novel reworks the captivity narrative, and is reminiscent of A Fringe of Leaves (1976), patrick White’s novel about eliza Fraser. White’s novel dismantles the civilised self through the abject encounter with

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the primitive other. eliza is herself a changed woman, and though her return to settlement does not significantly disrupt its boundaries, White’s novel does unsettle its values. Remembering Babylon uses similar historical and narrative resources to pursue even more explicitly postcolonial and national themes. the story famously opens at the point of the feral child’s return from the wilderness to the edge of settlement, where he is first encountered by a small band of children, including the two main characters, Lachlan Beattie and Janet McIvor. as a white aboriginal figure, Gemmy Fairley triggers anxiety and violence within the white frontier settlement. his hybrid, liminal being owes something to the archetype of the sacred monster: his suffering seems to be the conduit for the ethical transformation of colonial selves, prefiguring the nation. this transformation of colonial selves in the novel is especially enabled by the framing of events. Beyond the main action, in the concluding chapter, Remembering Babylon incorporates a fragmented ‘memory’ of frontier violence. this last chapter sketches Janet’s and Lachlan’s divergent lives from the childhood period of the main narrative (1850s) to old age (in the War years). at one point during this interval, we are told, Lachlan had heard rumours of the ‘dispersal’ of a clan which Gemmy may have joined. he is guided to a burial site and there he recognises Gemmy’s bones, bundled in bark, alongside those of the massacred clan.this memory completes Lachlan’s post-Federation perspective, both alluding to colonial violence and bringing closure: ‘all that was fifty years ago. an age. they were living in another country. he could afford to admit now that it had not ended’.7 In post-colonial time, the surviving white characters’ act of remembering ‘Babylon’ gives historic ‘depth’ to australia’s otherwise superficial nationhood. In her review, ‘Malouf ’s Objectionable Whitewash’, Greer took Malouf to task for the whiteness that governed his treatment of the colonial frontier, for the euphemistic substitution of a white black man for actual aboriginal people, who are themselves depicted negatively, so she argues, and for suppressing the real violence of the

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frontier. In effect, Greer had zeroed in on the nation’s soft spot in relation to its postcolonial status and identity. In 1993, these were newly sensitised matters, in light of revisionist histories of the australian frontier and in the wake of the 1992 Mabo judgment, the high Court’s landmark overturning of the terra nullius as justification for colonisation.8 Greer’s review is unrelenting, but a brief sample will suffice: ‘remembering Babylon’ is most dreadful in that it reduces aborigines to the role that today’s black english-men, americans or australians might have thought they had finally transcended, the role of the white man’s id. aware of the revulsion that would ensue if he were to use a real aborigine as the butt of his supremacist fantasy, Malouf invents a lay figure, the limping, speechless black white man, Gemmy Farley [sic], whom he need not shrink from calling a savage.9

Greer’s high-profile intervention drew immediate, angry return fire from literary critics and journalists. responses in the broadsheet press expressed outrage at the tone and substance of the criticisms. Malouf himself did not wade in, maintaining a dignified silence. Ultimately, and even in the short term, the episode seemed to do his reputation little harm. Indeed it may have brought benefits. Greer’s attack, mounted in defiance of the Booker prize shortlisting of Remembering Babylon, was consistent with her reputation as provocative australian expatriate. her abrasive interventions have often zeroed in on national soft spots, outraging australians with crude truths delivered for dual British-australian audiences and inflaming colonial sensitivities. this time Greer’s intervention not only rallied readers but stimulated academic and critical debates, at least for a time, about Malouf ’s work. Remembering Babylon had reprised the preoccupations of An Imagined Life, itself a central text in the academic field of postcolonial literary study. In recent years, postcolonial and other literary critical frameworks have come under

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increasing challenge with the emergence of whiteness studies.10 In some ways, Remembering Babylon was an early casualty of such institutional formations within the academy. Following Greer’s attack, Suvendrini perera read the book as suppressing the violent realities of the colonial frontier, thus itself colonising Indigenous bodies and history.11 For other critics, Malouf is a conservative thinker, whose art ‘amounts to a refusal of the category of the “political” in favour of a high literariness’ – a use of the ‘spiritual’ to efface ‘real, political questions’.12 Beyond the Remembering Babylon controversy, academic critics of Malouf may be loosely divided between admirers and those who regard his politics as too conservative, or aestheticised.these detractors see Malouf ’s discourse as blind to whiteness and as perpetuating, for all his urbanity, colonising attitudes. Others highlight the subtlety of Malouf ’s thought and his capacity for ethical responsiveness. For the latter group, Remembering Babylon invites an ethically transformative response to the guilty legacy of frontier history. Conflicting academic evaluations of Malouf should not be overstated and should be set in perspective. Firstly, a broad spectrum of opinion exists within the academic literary community about Malouf, as for other high-profile writers, regardless of political debates about their work. having said that, it is self-evident that critics, like myself, work within institutional cultures. It is foolish to deny that there is pressure to conform to prevailing views. Yet this is as true of media and public cultures as it is of academic cultures. Freelance critics who publish in the broadsheet media, for example, rarely question rather romanticised modes of understanding artists and writers. they can be too quick to accuse their academic colleagues of being unduly influenced by theoretical fashions, without having reckoned deeply with these forms of knowledge themselves. On the other hand, plenty of academics now publish opinion pieces in the media and must negotiate both academic and broader readerships and cultures. another necessary perspective, amid these others, is that older

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forms of literary criticism, within the academy, are under significant challenge. In part this is because of the recent dearth of publishing avenues for such work, and the apparent lack of an interested readership.Yet there surely is a public vitally interested in discussing literature: as seen in the burgeoning of literary festivals, book clubs and literary conversation in print, electronic and online media. Literary criticism must now compete for readers in a public realm saturated by democratic literary conversations. Indeed the middleman may now be redundant, since writers have themselves become the brokers of their own work with their publics, in interviews, at book clubs, at festivals and elsewhere. For Malouf, in the mid-1990s, this latest phase in the long intensification of the writer’s role in the public sphere was just beginning. to look at Malouf ’s literary career, however, and to consider the range of his writings is to be struck by how consistent his cultivation of nation has been, and how it positioned him to become a key public intellectual interactively engaged with his readership. although his career is not yet finished, his works already possess a firm outline that invites discussion, and that casts light on the kind of public and national role he performs.

Cultivating literature of and for nation I think of [the writing of successive books] as being like a house that you’re building and [to which you’re] adding rooms. each of those rooms has to be part of that house and not part of another house. But once you’ve added on a room you’ve changed the spatial relationships of the whole thing.13

Malouf has spoken frequently of his successive books as spaces or rooms in the interactive architecture of his unfolding imaginative work. Indeed his career can be represented in this way: its linearity is at odds with non-linear, recurring patterns. Malouf began with

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poetry, moved into fiction, then non-fictional essays, and lately has published a volume of short stories and another book of poetry.the same diversion from linearity characterises the sequence of production of his novels. An Imaginary Life was ‘the last book that in my case happened to come second, and, in appearing so early, opened up the whole view backward, or rather ahead.’14 In his end is his beginning. the refusal of time is a supremely literary gesture. Malouf certainly conceives of writing as offering spatial resistance to the linear flow of time.this paradox is particularly applicable to the novel, and in his novels Malouf structures time, through the retrospection of his characters, with particular care. In Malouf ’s fiction, the spatialising of narrative has two purposes. to slow up the narrative, to make it expand in a spatial sense, is to hold back or defer its linear, temporal impulses. this tendency in Malouf ’s fiction is closely allied to its literary and poetic sensibility. the other goal that Malouf achieves by spatialising his narratives is opening up the sensory experience of ‘self ’ and ‘place’. One way that time is disrupted and spatialised in Malouf ’s novels is through the retrospection of characters like Dante, phil Vernon, Lachlan Beattie, and Michael adair. their meditative crossings between past and present bring about their personal transformations, or – more accurately – the reader’s witnessing of transformation. For many of these protagonists, often quiet or introverted personalities, retrospection is interwoven with the observation of more extroverted, spectacular or adventurous others. In Johnno, Dante learns by observing the larger-than-life Johnno; in Harland’s Half Acre, phil Vernon mediates for the artist Frank harland; in Remembering Babylon, Lachlan Beattie’s maturity is enabled by his encounter with Gemmy Fairley; in The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Michael adair’s self-acceptance arrives after the (symbolic) death of Fergus Connellan. these ‘others’ are never the conduit of the narrative, but the enigmatic objects of its gaze. Meanwhile, the observer figure comes to self-acceptance through quasi-sacramental images of

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metamorphosis or fusion that occur in suspended time. the arrest of time signals aesthetic rather than political resolution, returning us to and affirming the literary. Such literary modes of storytelling, in a secular age, translate the nation itself as a sacred, mythic space. In a not yet postcolonial nation, the imaginative possession of place may seem urgent, yet produces ambivalence. the question, therefore, is how political and aesthetic dimensions interact in Malouf ’s fiction. While, as we have seen, Malouf did not respond publicly to the Remembering Babylon controversy, his next novel, The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996), constitutes a reply of sorts.15 as its title suggests, this book continues Malouf ’s engagement with national conversations about the meaning and legacy of the colonial frontier. the story unfolds from the perspective of British officer Michael adair who waits out the night at close quarters with a condemned bushranger whose execution he must oversee in the morning. adair is a truly exemplary Malouf protagonist, resembling the observerprotagonist of earlier novels. he is an adoptive child in a genteel but dysfunctional Irish family. as such, adair never quite belongs to his new social milieu. a professional man of middling talents, he struggles with inadequacy and placelessness, yet he is doggedly ambitious. adair’s remembered childhood experiences of displacement run parallel to his nomadic adult life as a British functionary in the colonies. Outwardly a dutiful colonial servant, inwardly adair wrestles with guilt, desire, envy and thwarted ambition. he manages these emotions with habitual restraint, an attribute painfully acquired and self-imposed rather than inherited. adair seems to embody and prefigure the deracinated, contemporary cosmopolitan subject. the view that shapes adair corresponds to Malouf ’s subsequent Quarterly Essay, in which Britishness is seen as a ‘portable identity’, the outcome of an invader/settler history since roman times. For Malouf, Britishness entails the habit of acquiring one’s relationship to place, rather than accessing belonging through the essentialist identity of the ‘native’.16 the main plotline in Conversations is very simple. expanding out

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from its compacted sequence are the memories of adair, as well as of the condemned man, and of various troopers. In conversation with helen Daniel about this novel, Malouf observed: . . . I really want to use the novel to stop time, to slow things up.You can slow up the narrative so that a second is something that can be explored maybe over pages. I like that play between movement and stillness in the novel.17

Frequent interruption of linear time allows the narrative to flow into many rooms of consciousness, to represent selves in the process of becoming. at the very centre of Conversations, adair’s retrospection is interrupted by the haunting spectre of frontier violence. It is a crucial scene that closes the distance that, in Remembering Babylon, had otherwise been interposed between the central characters and the moment of frontier violence.18 Garretty, one of the troopers, describes an uncanny experience. While crossing a paddock one day, he suddenly feels that he’s wading in a lake of blood: ‘. . . all of a sudden there were these voices cryin’ . . . I’d stepped into a place where something terrible had happened, or was goin’ t’ happen . . .’.19 this account draws from Jonas, the silent aboriginal tracker seated beyond the campfire circle, a high-pitched wailing sound, ‘itself coming from a point several feet beyond him, out of the earth’.the hairs rise on adair’s neck. Langhurst, a trooper who eventually becomes a settler, squats directly opposite the tracker, gazing into a face contorted by ‘horror or grief ’, as though into a mirror. the wailing multiplies, ‘peopling the night’, but just as abruptly ceases.20 having vividly suggested an uncanny horror, the narrative resumes. the morning arrives and adair permits Carney, the condemned man, to bathe in the river. For its witnesses, this cleansing is a ritual of forgiveness. a blessing is extended to adair and the witnessing troopers, who are themselves implicated in the injustices of the ‘insufficient law’.21 as adair later discovers, this ordinary moment will enter the colony’s myth-making. In

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the final moments of the narrative adair is reconciled to his own insufficient self. he receives the sacramental loaf of bread, its salty sweetness ‘driving new light into his heart, refreshing his mouth like common speech’.22 Malouf ’s fictions seem to reproduce what pierre Nora has described (with reference to monuments and museums) as sacred places of memory.23 In the realm of the sacred, nation and art come together, mutually sustaining and reproducing each other.24 Gelder and Jacobs argue that in australia the sacred is coupled with the uncanny, a shifting between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between lack and excess. they locate the source of this ambivalence in unresolved settler-colonial anxiety about aboriginal people, whose marginalisation through ongoing dispossession from the land is uncannily inverted in the proliferating power of the aboriginal sacred.25 It is towards the need for a national sacred, and the consequent need to deal with the blockage of colonial anxiety, that Malouf ’s fiction so insistently addresses itself. his novels engage in the quest for a national, spiritual healing. the exact nature of the deepest wound – the guilty memory that tears at the coloniser’s consciousness – is only ever glimpsed sidelong. the narratives seem to pass quickly through unspeakable violations to gaze hopefully beyond them. this is an aspect of Malouf ’s sensitive and quiet diplomacy. For andrew McCann, who discusses ‘the obstinacy of the sacred’ in australian settler culture, however, Malouf ’s aesthetic approach in Remembering Babylon forestalls the political, opening up only to close over the trauma of colonial violence.26 Conversations moves somewhat closer to that trauma, and in so doing, offers a response to critics of Remembering Babylon. By the same token, the political is still displaced through the novel’s final spiritual resolution. epiphanic moments and sacramental imagery temporarily foreclose more troubling, messier realities. In saying so, I am not just reading Malouf against the grain, but attempting to extrapolate the thought that middle-class, urban white desires for

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belonging underwrite the impulse to reconciliation. this recognition, of the self-serving character of such white belonging, can be held in tension with the prospect that reconciliation – like Malouf ’s novel – is about working within and through liberal ideologies towards an ethical vision, without which there can be little hope of inclusive community. Malouf ’s own sincerity and personal ethics, however, ought not to be doubted. his collaboration with Jackie huggins in drafting the 1999 draft National Declaration of reconciliation was neither conspicuous nor hollow. It is clear from documentation of this process that Malouf was invited to undertake this task.27 that Malouf has never publicised or capitalised on this involvement attests to his personal integrity. Further, as Gelder has noted, there may be no convenient position, for a white australian writer or critic, outside the colonising project: ‘. . . those same unsettling conditions of postcolonialism are enabling a settler australian relation to country to become, paradoxically perhaps, more secure than ever before – which is also bad news for some, but good news for others’.28 So we find ourselves still standing at the troubled boundary between art and worldly engagement, between literature and national public life. What difference does the creative work of someone like Malouf really make to national discourse? What do his public interventions matter, and to whom? Under what conditions are these interventions made? Crossing into non-fictional writing, Malouf has directly advocated the forging of imaginative belonging to land. In pursuing this case, Malouf cultivates the very sensibilities, or selves, that can recognise and respond to the literary landscapes he has made. recognising this interest and its attendant difficulties, this final section considers the literary character of Malouf ’s nonfictional prose, linking this to questions about the renewal of both literature and nation.

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Cultivating a literary nation . . . everything can be resurrected, at least in memory . . . we want to believe that the past is not obliterated, that the past is not erased . . . that somehow it’s inside the present and in us . . .29

Malouf ’s non-fictional prose – including 12 Edmondstone Street (1985), A spirit of play (2000) and ‘Made in england’ – transmutes key elements of his fiction. the consciousness of fictional protagonist is replaced by the intimate persona of the ‘author’. the past is mapped through Malouf ’s own memory and imagination, and these are interwoven with historical anecdote and meditation on collective attributes. these prose works are no less literary than Malouf ’s other works. In both contexts, thought is developed through sensory immersion in lost objects and past selves. In his highly praised Quarterly Essay – ‘Made in england’ – Malouf ’s boyhood memories of suburban Brisbane inform his evocative rendering of mid-twentieth-century anglo-australia. private memory acquires public meaning as the essay orients itself to an australian readership of similar age, taste, social position and ethnicity. Fresh historical perspectives are enriched by the sensual immediacy of Malouf ’s eloquently detailed vignettes.Yet readers are not simply indulged – they are gently invited to move through nostalgia towards nuanced appreciation of post-war australia so that its residue in the present can be recognised. Malouf conjures the anglo-australia of his boyhood as an exotic zone. he describes a more recent visit to Dundee, a provincial Scottish town, where, stepping into the street, he’s all of a sudden ‘overwhelmingly flooded with a proustian feeling of time regained’. the crossing of Scotland with australia, and also ‘now’ with ‘then’, signals the presence of a chronotope (a folded spacetime characteristic of myth) as Malouf transports the reader to 1940s Brisbane:

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the smells, the bodies and faces of the people around me in the street, something indefinable in the whole atmosphere and style of the place, had taken me back. and that was the clue, of course: style . . . What I had encountered was something that was continuous here but which we had long since abandoned – when? sometime in the ’50s, perhaps – and so completely that this, the original, which I found so immediately recoverable, must for most of us be no more than a distant memory, and for young people so entirely foreign that they might feel no connection with it at all.30

this passage leads into Malouf ’s tremendously evocative account of everyday life in that now-lost but nostalgically revivified australia – its textures, sights and smells, its bodies, foods and medicines, its routine places of work and leisure. In this context, Malouf tracks the formation of a specifically australian outlook and temperament or (as he terms it) ‘habit’.the author’s own hybrid, cosmopolitan style of australianness then appears to us as the seasoned outcome of this longer historical process, its urbane adaptiveness always already the living embodiment of transatlantic and transpacific inheritances. In his Boyer Lectures, Malouf borrows from the cosmopolitan american, henry James, to describe the australian predicament as a ‘complex fate’.31 Malouf ’s cosmopolitan address, in ‘Made in england’, works to differentiate present-day australia from, while producing nostalgia for, its vanished parent-culture. In memorialising anglo-australia, the essay memorialises a Britishness once considered authentically australian. Malouf writes affectionately of British-australianness as a condition that returns in spectral form: ‘It was australian and where we were. Now. that is, then’.32 his emphases here – on now/then, were/is – repeat his earlier gesture of crossing place with time, mirroring his own act of memory. the essay’s space-time crossings draw attention to the effect that clings, for a generation, to an inheritance (now anachronism) that Malouf at once mourns and enjoys. this is pleasure that can only be indulged from the safety of a removed, cosmopolitan vantage point.

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and again, there’s that insistent first person plural pronoun positioning and guiding readers. It is the pronoun that invites but also, unintentionally, excludes. Later in the essay, Malouf locates what are for him important continuities – those features of British inheritance that survive. One of these is language itself. Malouf doesn’t just mean ‘english’, but a specific form of it – ‘late enlightenment english’, a form that ‘created that peculiar mildness of social interaction here that has for more than two centuries now kept all kinds of extremism beyond the possibilities of acceptable public discourse and the worst sorts of violence at bay’.33 elsewhere, Malouf suggests this inheritance has produced a certain ‘habit of mind’.34 as David Carter warns, however, this veers perilously close to early twentiethcentury notions of the ‘genius of the anglo-Saxon race’.35 Malouf may knowingly tread this ambiguous middle ground in his rhetoric, seeking to recover a better national self against a dangerous tide of fear and paranoia. Maybe he wants to resist the machinery of colonialism from within, through a necessary entanglement within imperial discourse.36 I wonder if the ideal of political purity – routinely demanded of writers – is feasible within broader public sphere discussion. Such purity of position might seem possible, among peers and colleagues, within safe institutional enclosures and specialised disciplinary settings, but Quarterly Essays, though by no means oriented to a mass-market readership, presume a more diverse reading public. Gillian Whitlock draws attention to necessary constraints on those who would address broad public readerships. She speaks of the need to gauge a readership’s willingness to listen: ‘What must be told to, and what will be heard by these readerships is limited, and negotiated with care’.37 Malouf ’s writing is calculated to induce in his imagined readers an ethical responsiveness. the space for that response might contract altogether if confronted by uncompromising political address, or by the politically deconstructive approaches so often taken up by literary and cultural academics. the institutional rhetoric of academic, literary and postcolonial critics can, moreover, be similarly implicated

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in imperialising, colonising discourses. to target, as this book also does, the foibles of writers speaking to broader publics is never an uninvested or disinterested activity. In his 1998 Boyer Lectures, Malouf implicitly defended Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek by arguing that imaginative writing is one of the ways in which ‘we come at last into full possession of a place’: I am not suggesting this as yet another and deeper move in the long process of appropriating the continent and displacing its original owners, but as a move towards what is, in effect, a convergence of indigenous and non-indigenous understanding, a collective spiritual consciousness that will be the true form of reconciliation here.38

Like necessity’s virtue, the habitus of high literariness in a notquite-postcolonial context motivates a writer like Malouf to press forward his vision of nation. the factors driving his literary vision are evidently ethical, yet carrying forward the project of national belonging also serves to cultivate likeminded readerships. Malouf ’s writing has been taken up in debates about belonging that proliferated in the mid-1990s in australian book culture. Carter has discussed influential non-fictional works by white australian public intellectuals who address a broadly educated readership of professional, managerial and academic readers – your typical aBC radio National audience.39 these readers are more likely to be conversant with elite debates about nation than are broader reading or viewing publics: they are also the key market for books such as Edge of the Sacred by David tacey and peter read’s Belonging. these books advocate a new kind of australianness, one spiritually connected and responsive to the land, and a subjectivity attuned to ecological and wilderness values. In Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia (2003), editor John Cameron cites Malouf ’s Boyer Lectures about australians’ ‘complex fate’, as a rationale for the search for an australian ‘sense of place’.40

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From the mid-1990s, as Carter and others observe,41 the market for literary fiction in australia contracted while the market for books catering to ‘middlebrow’ tastes, especially non-fictional writings (creatively written history, the personal essay and memoir), expanded. Malouf ’s earlier fiction positioned him well for these developments. though continuing to write fiction (the short story collections Dream Stuff, in 2000, and Every Move You Make, in 2006), Malouf was also commissioned to deliver his Boyer Lectures and Quarterly Essay. these non-fictional works induct readers into the author’s presence, engaging them intimately in his thought processes, shuttling between the domains of the personal (anecdote and memory) and the public (collective, historical). these new rooms added to the architectural body of Malouf ’s work have retrospectively renovated its meanings, and have in their own way participated in the national self-transformations required by the ‘complex fate’ of inheritance. In his fictional and non-fictional work, Malouf quietly continues to cultivate australian literature as a national project.

Pa r t 4

Fragmentation and renewal: australia’s changing literary publics 1995 to the present

Chapter 7

J’accuse in the antipodes: helen Garner’s public interventions

I

n early 1995, in a Union cafeteria at Sydney’s Macquarie University, I listened to fellow students – all young women – discussing helen Garner’s new book, The First Stone,1 which was then stirring national media controversy.this was Garner’s first book-length work of non-fiction. In it she had sought frankly to examine issues of sex and power folded into a recent campus-based scandal. It concerned allegations of sexual harassment brought by two female students against Melbourne University’s Master of Ormond College, and the court case that ensued. the young women to whom I was listening were incensed by the book, and by the way the nation’s broadsheet media had sided with Garner. they were angry at how the students, young women like themselves, and the campus feminists who had advised them, were being portrayed. and they were particularly outraged by Garner’s action in writing her famously pre-emptive letter of sympathy to the Master of Ormond College. Because of her letter, the young women involved in the case had steadfastly refused to meet or talk with Garner, and she had found her access blocked by their academic protectors. the letter had, Garner later wrote, ‘caused many doors to be slammed in my face’, destroying any chance of hearing, and so representing, both sides of the story.2

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I had returned to university after a seven-year career in schoolteaching followed by a period of child-rearing. though I was unaware of it then, my progress from teaching and child-rearing to second career superficially resembled Garner’s own. Our lives, like other white australian women of our class and respective generations, had been patterned by traditional gendered roles and feminist-inspired re-orientations. Garner graduated with a major in english literature from Melbourne University in 1965. She taught for seven years in Victorian state high schools. She was dismissed from her teaching post, in 1972, following complaints about her libertarian approach to sex education in the classroom. this misadventure opened the space for Garner’s subsequent career as freelance journalist and writer. By the age of 35 she had published Monkey Grip,3 a sensational first novel routinely (though perhaps not accurately) touted as the first work of australian feminist fiction.4 If Monkey Grip represented a provocative beginning to Garner’s literary career, this paled in comparison with the stunning advent of The First Stone two decades later. The First Stone was a media event that ripened swirling debates about academic elites, ‘culture wars’ and ‘political correctness’. these debates, as mentioned earlier, erupted in the mid-1990s as pressures built for a swing to conservative national politics. Sending minor shock waves across literary, academic and broader media domains, The First Stone was a cause célèbre oddly reminiscent of emile Zola’s publication in 1898 of J’accuse, protesting the wrongful conviction and imprisonment for treason of Jewish artillery officer alfred Dreyfus by anti-Semitic French military authorities.5 Bourdieu has described the rhythms of the nineteenth-century French literary field, the regular oscillation between writers’ periodic impulses of withdrawal into ‘art for art’s sake’ and their engagement with the political. he asserts that it was only once the principle of literary autonomy had been securely established – with the emergence of a fully defined literary enclosure or field that enjoyed relative autonomy from economic and political fields – that writers began to contemplate political

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engagement. Zola’s J’accuse was the clarion call to that engagement. Zola’s intervention established the idea that the principles of autonomy and freedom from the tyranny of raw power and the market, enjoyed by writers, should be universally applicable principles, and universalised for all. and so in the name of these rights to freedom and justice, Zola challenged the fields of power, and their governing principles of expedience, money and might.6 One hundred years, an antipodean setting and gender – and, of course, the severity of consequences for the accused (Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil’s Island for ten years, and the Master of Ormond College lost his job) – separate these two literary-public events. It is instructive to consider The First Stone, however, as a belated, australian J’accuse, a strange echoing or derivation of the northern hemisphere original. their respective impacts on both authors and readers, and their public dynamics, suggest these parallels. Garner’s public intervention in the Ormond College case, like Zola’s in the Dreyfus affair, utterly changed the author’s reception in both restricted academic and public domains, expanding her readership and public status. The First Stone also signalled a realignment of australia’s literary market, and a corresponding shift in the nature of the political engagement of writers. Garner’s intervention was, like Zola’s, an assault on institutional power. this time, the institution was not the state, but the university, and the feminists and theoreticians within it, whose ‘political correctness’ and influence over young women threatened the autonomy, freedoms and legitimacy of the amateur writer-intellectual and their readership. this was also Garner’s first book-length work of journalistic reportage, and it announced her crossing from fiction to non-fiction – The First Stone was in the first wave of non-fictional prose that would dominate australian literary publishing for the next decade. the young women arguing in the cafeteria were my friends. I admired their wit and intelligence and I was in awe of their command of theories that had transformed the academic humanities since my own undergraduate days. these, including poststructuralist

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and postmodernist feminist theory, had their genesis, in part, in the student protests in paris of 1968. Gradually, New Leftism, with its revisioning of older Marxist and psychoanalytic paradigms, had been carried into universities by that same generation of activists and thinkers who entered the academic establishment in europe and the US from the 1970s, and in australia, a little belatedly, during the 1980s. I bought Garner’s book and read it, and – with the benefit of my own dual perspective on feminist formations – I could see why it was causing a stir. It was eloquently, lucidly and seductively written, a page turner. It was politically challenging, yet troubling in ethical terms. I soon encountered the response to Garner’s book by professional women of my own age, with careers and lives beyond the university. these women loved the book, and defended Garner vigorously. they valued her wise and experienced voice, and they decried the ‘political correctness’, as they saw it, exercised by puritan academic feminists, and by their younger protégées who were complying with rather than rebelling against enclosed institutional values. those dinner party conversations were intense. I found myself remonstrating with friends on both sides, and was uncertain where justice lay or what deeper issues were implicated. the personal mode of my writing in this chapter, so far, comes nowhere near the intimacy of Garner’s writing. a heady combination of publicity and vulnerability is integral to her representations. the privacy and intimacy of her writing carry it far into the public imagination. Yet, if Garner has attended to suffering in her writing, she has also incurred it, for herself and others, by crossing into ethically dangerous territory. those who criticise her exposure of others – her ‘othering’ of others – must reckon with her considerable rhetorical gifts, her command of prose, and her artfully-artless literary voice. Critics must also reckon with the protective shield thrown round her work by the awareness, threaded everywhere into her prose, of the suffering her writing may cause. the many doors that slammed in Garner’s face after she sent

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her letter to the Master, leading to the speculative and personal journey of The First Stone, were doors that opened the way to her reinvigorated public and literary career. Garner’s visibility as a writer-intellectual has since eclipsed that of most other contemporary australian writers. In robert Dessaix’s radio National series on australian public intellectuals (1996–1997), helen Garner was the only novelist interviewed at length, though arts and humanities thinkers predominated.7 ten years on from The First Stone debate, in March 2005, a Sydney Morning Herald survey ranked Garner eighth in its list of the top 100 australian public intellectuals.8 though the survey’s method of asking ‘public intellectuals’ themselves to nominate top ‘public intellectuals’ was circular, it conformed to a familiar logic of elite, field-based recognition of peers. those ranked in the top ten were mainly white, male academics. Garner was one of just three women, and the only creative writer included in the elite group. the two other women were Germaine Greer, ranked third, and Inga Clendinnen, ranked sixth.9 What logic – indeed what literary disposition – has enabled Garner to become, according to media commentators, one of australia’s most widely recognised ‘public intellectuals’? What contradictions attend her literary and public performances? What does Garner’s career suggest about the changing status of the literary in australia? these ‘literary’ questions may seem at odds with recent evaluations of Garner as a ‘bestselling’ rather than ‘literary’ author, but in what follows I am interested in how the category of the literary has been reactivated in and by Garner’s non-fictional prose.10 It should not be forgotten, in this period, that the trend to literary non-fiction did not necessarily originate in australia, though Garner’s First Stone represented its australian vanguard. the literary non-fiction of US writer Janet Malcolm was one particularly significant influence on Garner’s work.11 If Garner’s own crossings between fiction and nonfiction are indicative, the peak of that wave of literary non-fiction may now have passed. as I write, she has just published The Spare Room, her first work of fiction since Cosmo Cosmolino (1992).12 I

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will explore these questions – about the role of the literary in Garner’s crossings from fiction to non-fiction – by working backwards through time in a reverse chronology of her milestone texts. I give most attention to Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and The First Stone (1995), but then wind backwards via Monkey Grip (1977) to finish with a highly controversial short memoir that constituted Garner’s very first public intervention: ‘Why Does the Women Get all the pain’ (1972). By moving backwards through these texts and times, we can glimpse the generative literary logic that sustains Garner’s evolving public interventions.

rituals of sacrifice: Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The First Stone Between 1992 and 2007, helen Garner published only nonfictional works – reviews, collections of memoirs and anecdotes, journalism, essays and two full-length works of reportage.the more recent of her two books of reportage, the Walkley award-winning Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), was an australian bestseller. Sales figures were said to have outstripped even the The First Stone.13 this removes all doubt about Garner’s popular success and her significance – given the seriousness and topicality of these nonfictional works – as a public intellectual.to compare the two books, as Garner herself invites us to do in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, is to recognise her abiding interest in the lives, emotions and choices of individuals pitted against anonymous, powerful institutions. the way Garner proceeds in these books has everything to do with their enormous success and public impact, and brings into sharp focus the persistently gendered and ‘white’ character of australian public and literary discourse. In Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Garner documents her investigation of a crime involving two law students, anu Singh and Madhavi rao. these young women were charged with the murder, by lethal heroin injection, of Singh’s boyfriend, Joe Cinque. Garner’s true

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crime narrative revolves around the courtroom drama and her own encounters with both the Singh and Cinque families. She speculates about the social milieu within which the crime occurred – of students and other young people, adrift at the margins of australia’s capital city, Canberra. her book inducts us into a bleak world of alienation, amorality and drug dependency. What follows exemplifies the eloquence and power of Garner’s approach. She is describing the scene outside the courtroom, immediately after the presiding judge, Justice Crispin, has sentenced anu Singh, who has been found guilty of manslaughter on grounds of reduced responsibility, to ten years imprisonment, four of which were non-parole: I was awestruck by Maria Cinque’s composure. Nino Cinque maintained his place, with few words and a sweet expression, alongside the huge, elemental drama of his wife’s persona; but such power dwelt in her that others shrivelled in her presence, became wispy, insubstantial. She never grand-standed or behaved falsely; yet as their suffering and outrage intensified, there rose from the depths of her a tremendous, unassailable archetype: the mother. We recognised it. It answered to a need in us as well. her outburst after the sentence was not a rupture of protocol. On the contrary, we had waited for her to utter. It was an honoured and necessary stage of a ritual: a pietà. We listened in respect, almost in gratitude. We needed to hear the sufferer cry out against her fate, although we knew that for this pain and loss there could be no remedy.14

this bears witness to the terrible spectacle of the victim’s sorrowing mother, placing her grief firmly at the centre of the narrative. throughout the book, the maternal power of Maria Cinque is magnified in its narrator’s own awed response. Maria appears as an elemental, even divine figure. Garner’s prose takes on biblical cadences in describing her: ‘but such power dwelt in her . . .’; ‘there rose from the depths of her . . .’; ‘we had waited for her to utter . . .’ and ‘We needed to hear the sufferer cry out against her fate . . .’ as its title

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suggests, however, the book does more than simply witness Maria’s grief: it performs a public, communal ritual. along with questions of grief, Garner is most concerned with the law’s failure to cope with the violence engendered by the accused and her accomplice. though we do see Justice Crispin as well-intentioned, the book asks us to regard his finding of manslaughter (rather than murder) as completely inadequate. the secular law of the modern nationstate cannot assuage the grief of the victims, the Cinque family. the law is found morally and spiritually wanting, unable to provide a moral compass that can distinguish good from evil. So Garner’s book offers itself up to fill this gap, as prayer or devotion, performing a ritual consolatio. It is Garner’s book that fills the void left by the law and which atones for the death of Joe Cinque. another very highly regarded australian public intellectual, historian Inga Clendinnen, spoke of Joe Cinque’s Consolation in her 2004 Lionel Murphy Memorial Lecture. praising the book’s eloquence, Clendinnen nevertheless urged her specialist audience of lawyers to read it for themselves, to find out about a general populist, rather than well-informed, understanding of the law. though diplomatic, Clendinnen suggests that Garner’s book does little to dispel widespread ignorance of the law: Garner’s ‘heart-felt’ narrative is utterly impatient of the slow business of due process and the cautious accretions of common law . . . reading Joe Cinque’s Consolation re-persuaded me of the need for the law to constrain our popular passion for justice.15

Clendinnen observes the power of Garner’s use of folklore, fairytale and myth. these residual traces of the sacred establish hidden continuities in the text that layer and thicken its potent biblical allusions. It is worth looking at these ‘sacred’ elements of Garner’s book in more detail, for they are a conduit for the literary, and the main source of resistance to ‘institutions’. Consider again the above quoted passage describing Maria Cinque. It climaxes with

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a reference to the pietà, the classic devotional image of Mary at the foot of the cross holding the body of her dead son. the pietà image signals not only the idea of the sacred, but the religious sense of sacrifice as a ritual that forges community. Within this sacrificial economy, though she is a victim, Maria Cinque is recast as a ‘phallic’ mother. She becomes the object of a worshipful fear: ‘others shrivelled in her presence’.16 While Maria Cinque inspires a reverence mixed with dread,17 her son Joe is the focus of devout contemplation. Joe’s suffering body, frequently imagined in the text, is the avenue for the revelation (and containment through prayer) of a violence that erupts elsewhere. the narrator’s gaze travels slowly over the crime scene photos then lingers on Joe’s tortured body, which acquires the properties of a sacred body – innocent, suffering, crucified.18 In the final paragraph, too, the narrator’s gaze converges (with that of the Cinques and our own) on the photo of Joe: ‘We gazed in silence on her undefended son’.19 On the adjacent page, floating free in a blank, wordless space is a small black and white passport-sized photo of Joe himself, returning the reader’s gaze. Like the devotional holy card of Catholic tradition, Joe’s final image conducts the reader into an intimate, simultaneously public, circuit of grief, effecting a communion ritual, a redemption through sacrifice of collective guilt.this is the culmination of a devotion practised throughout the book, in the repeated, prayerful refrain: ‘Joe Cinque is dead’. these roman Catholic atmospherics do not correspond with Garner’s own form of Christianity,20 but they do reveal the closeness of her identification with the Cinques and the desire implicit in her text’s mirroring of an (imagined) Italian religious ethos. Why does Garner invoke the sacred, and why does her book interweave Christian and pre-Christian mythical resources? One reason, as stated above, is to make up for what the law lacks, to bring consolation to the Cinques, to try to repair the irreparable ‘rent in the social fabric made by their son’s murder’.21 the sacred is what stands against the coldly bureaucratic functioning of the

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legal institution. In modernity’s market-based society, even although ‘religion’ is arguably on the rise, the role of the once powerful sacred in everyday life has shrunk to residual form – to the world of art, a ‘sacred island’, in Bourdieu’s description, opposed to ‘the profane, everyday world of production, a sanctuary for the gratuitous, disinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest’.22 through art, however, the aura of the sacred is continually recovered, becoming a resource accessed by individuals. It enters into the imagining of nation, sustaining belief and binding community. the sacred elements of Garner’s non-fictional work, therefore, endow it with its literary character, and are the source of symbolic power in the public sphere. this symbolic power, however, and as Bourdieu argues, correlates with ‘symbolic violence’.23 By this I mean the way a strong, emotional narrative like Garner’s, engendering powerful feelings of identification with its innocent victims, tacitly imposes dominant, commonsense modes of understanding and works to silence other views. the refrain – ‘Joe Cinque is dead’ – is often repeated just at the point of anxiety or disturbance, when feelings become overloaded. It seems, at times, to cut short the possibility of moving beyond animosity towards understanding the accused, anu Singh.24 Such a rich, empathetic imagining of Singh (while suggested) cannot really be entertained, for fear the text’s emotional integrity would fragment, and the rent in the social fabric worsen. even in the genesis of Joe Cinque’s Consolation, identification with the victim is profoundly implicated. at first half-hearted and distracted by her own troubles, Garner seeks an emotional hook. She finds it in the Daily Telegraph double page spread on the committal proceedings. the report carries the transcript – reproduced in the first part of the narrative – of the emergency call made by anu Singh to paramedics. Garner writes: It was the shrill blast of this dialogue that broke through my indifference and galvanised me: the killer’s voice pleading, dodging, feinting;

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the dispatcher’s desperate striving for command; and the jolting visual flashes of Joe Cinque’s death throes – the close presence, behind the screaming, of a young man’s body in extremis – his limbs, his mouth, his teeth, his heart.25

the placement of this transcript at the outset is dramatic, intended to jolt the reader, as it did Garner, with the shocking drama of violent death-work.this procedure exactly corresponds to the opening of The First Stone, which begins with the twelve-page transcript of Colin Shepherd’s police interview. the interview transcript is immediately followed by Garner’s recollected reading of the report in the Age – ‘I still remember the jolt I got from the desolate little item’26 – after which she dashes off her famous, pre-emptive letter of sympathy to the Master. as mentioned earlier, it is Garner herself who notes the uncanny parallels between Joe Cinque’s Consolation and The First Stone. Yet she does not pursue the full implications of these parallels. to do so might have seemed too self-indulgent, and so by acknowledging the ‘bad joke’ she hopes to defuse the issue. this is one of Garner’s signature gestures: she opens a window, promising dialogue, but the effect is to disarm the reader, both introducing complexity and curtailing more difficult perspectives. If we take seriously Garner’s invitation to bring her two books together, however, and parallel their uses of the sacred, we can see how a literary logic works to shape and underwrite her mode of public intervention. Crossing from fiction to journalism, with publication of The First Stone, was not about leaving the literary (as a self-contained, unworldly realm) behind. Indeed it is precisely through making such generic crossings that the literary is broadened and its public relevance invigorated. the renewal of the literary imagination, at the moment of its apparent relinquishment, is presaged in an author’s Note placed as front matter in The First Stone. here Garner explains her decision, for legal reasons, to adopt fictional names and split one character into several. She observes that this entailed raising ‘. . . the story

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on to a level where, instead of its being just an incident specific to one institution at one historical moment, its archetypal features have become visible’ [emphasis in text]. this strategy does more than protect the author against defamation: morphing one feminist academic into an angry mob of feminist conspirators enhances the archetypal character of her story. even in Garner’s lack of choice (she must do this for legal reasons), we see the space opening for the artist-as-prophet, as seer or medium who divines (rather than designs) mythic archetypes. Whether by design or not, in giving the mild-mannered, suffering Master of Ormond College the name of ‘Colin Shepherd’, Garner makes him into an allegorical victim. ‘Colin Shepherd’, in concert with the book’s title, refunctions key biblical texts. across genders, it aligns the Master with the female adulterer of the ‘first stone’ story. It also associates him with the Good Shepherd. So a connection is forged between the Master’s story and the Gospel story of the passion, in which the Good Shepherd becomes the sacrificial lamb. For anthropologist rené Girard, archaic rituals of human sacrifice functioned to short-circuit the threat of spiralling communal violence and restore harmony. Girard points to an anti-sacrificial strain that nevertheless runs through Old testament stories, a strain brought to fruition by Christ, who enjoined his community to forgo such blood-letting and human sacrifice.27 Girard regards the Gospel’s ‘first stone’ story as the pivotal elucidation of this emerging ethic of sympathy for victims, an ethic crystallised in the passion. Christ’s words to the lynch mob gathered to stone the adulterer – ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ – used the law to transform the law’s ritual from actual blood-letting to symbolic sacrifice.28 It may be unreasonable or perverse to demand that a literary writer like Garner be in control of, rather than subject to, the conflicting demands of justice and empathy. Garner protects herself by being transparent about her emotional struggle. Intermittently she registers the imperative to do more than simply submit to these forces, and to imaginatively understand the unlovable wrongdoer. there

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is a strength of animus against anu Singh, in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, that is only barely suppressed, blocking such imaginative power. this is clearly a function of Garner’s passionate identification with the Cinques: ‘It was real. It was the brutal hand that fate had dealt her. It was the unendurable that she had to endure. Never in my life had I felt so weak, so vain, so stupid’.29 Garner’s immersion in the ‘real’ of this story necessarily inhibited her capacity to imagine all viewpoints fearlessly. perhaps Singh did not deserve better treatment, and I have no way of gauging her guilt. It should be noted, here, that beyond publication of her book, and after her relationship with the Cinques had become more relaxed, Garner began to reimagine Singh’s viewpoint: ‘I can be aware now of how much affected I was by the Cinques’ emotions, how much of that rubbed off on me, if you like, and how my desire not to hurt them any further perhaps constrained me in the breadth of imagining that I was allowing myself . . . I feel that [anu Singh’s] a suffering soul’.30

But more troubling questions, impossibly slippery, about lines of class, race and nation in the text, direct us again to symbolic violence, the omnipresence of a white, middle-class australian way of seeing, still dominant in the literary field. Garner herself lifts this problem briefly to the surface when she asks Singh’s father why, in prison, an aboriginal girl had sought out anu’s help with reading. he replies: ‘She said, “Because you’re Indian”. She wouldn’t ask anyone who was . . .’ the word white hung in the room, unspoken.31

Garner raises the problem here only to drop it. Suggested but unresolved, ‘whiteness’ hangs like a spectre over the text. the Italoaustralian family’s working-class and unassuming ordinariness

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attracts sympathy, while the Singh family’s educated privilege alienates. these subtle, normative lines of identification double the gendered stereotypes that characterise Singh, as Clendinnen also observes,32 as an archetypal witch-figure. Only a witch-figure could provoke Garner’s reaction to her photo: ‘anu Singh raised my girl-hackles in a bristle’.33 this comes uncomfortably close to the treatment of the complainants in The First Stone.34 So, even if not an ‘innocent’ scapegoat, Singh is a target. Still rankling from the hurt of The First Stone, Garner did not avoid repeating its patterns of generational rivalry in Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In a strange twist, the ferocious attack by nameless feminists on The First Stone’s hapless Master returns in Joe Cinque’s Consolation in the anger projected by the narrative against the accused. Contending with questions of sex and power, The First Stone further inflamed them. Mimetic violence bled into the world beyond the text – in the spiralling media representations of the public ‘stoning’ of Garner by the gang of outraged feminists. academic responses proliferated – to the media-driven moral panic about both feminism and the academy that The First Stone fuelled, and to the generational tensions the book addressed and exacerbated.Yet many of these responses were clearly also invested in institutional identity and positioning.35 I refer to Jenna Mead’s discussion in bodyjamming (a collection of academic feminist essays countering Garner’s book) of how the media played on the idea of ‘stoning’ – how Garner’s own performance eventually displaced the Master’s own, and how she assumed the role of victim or scapegoat in the public arena.36 Yet Mead and others were themselves conscripted into this drama no less firmly than Garner herself – everyone underestimated the power of the religious and cultural meanings unleashed. the more that academic feminists attempted to refute or discredit Garner, the more they played into the theatrical scene of mob violence invoked in Garner’s biblical narrative. this only bore witness, in the public mind at least, to the truth of Garner’s text. thus robert Manne’s review of bodyjamming slammed it for its cruelty,37 and indeed it

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was, in parts, cruel. Yet Manne’s response, like others, became part of the now established pattern of reciprocal disavowal of power and investment. a great spiral of mimetic rivalry played out on both sides of The First Stone debate, venting mid-1990s anxieties about how multicultural urban elites, inhabiting australia’s public, media and cultural institutions, had reshaped the national imaginary, and relegated to the margins the views of ordinary white australians, an imagined silent majority who soon came to be known in australian political debate as ‘the mainstream’.38 the deep structures of identification in both Garner’s books of reportage, defining her representations as a public intellectual, are interconnected with her self-representation as a lone woman in public space, an ordinary individual who happens to be a writer, who finds herself looking at powerful institutions from the outside. It is ironic that in The First Stone the institution of the law is seen as overzealous in pursuit of the accused, whereas in Joe Cinque’s Consolation the law suffers from a distinct lack of zeal in pursuing wrongdoers. Challenging the moral and spiritual inadequacy of the institution of the law and the academy represents Garner’s bid for authority. Both books display the inherent rivalry of the literary field with other fields, which may possess greater material power. they seek to draw power back to the autonomous realm of the artist, via the sacred.

a woman, her bicycle and some public crossings: recycling the literary amateur the dust jacket for the first edition of Garner’s debut novel, Monkey Grip, features a photo, taken from just overhead, of a barefoot woman, dressed in sunhat and flowery frock, riding a bike on the stony pavement. the woman, though we cannot see her face, seems to be helen Garner herself.39 the cover, therefore, flirts with the idea of disclosing what had been, for some time, kept secret about the autobiographical provenance of Garner’s first work of fiction.

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although she first insisted, when asked about its diary-like character, that Monkey Grip was a novel, Garner eventually, as she herself put it, ‘came clean’: I did publish my diary. that’s exactly what I did. I left out what I thought were the boring bits, wrote bridging passages, and changed all the names. It was the best fun I ever had, down there in the domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria in 1976, working with a pencil and an exercise book on one of those squeaking silky oak swivel chairs. I’ll never be that innocent again.40

Garner’s confession came long after she had stopped writing fiction and moved into journalism and non-fiction. In the same essay, she meditated on the diary’s autobiographical ‘I’, asserting that it is, necessarily, an invention. Likewise, in a 2005 Melbourne Festival conversation, Garner resisted hilary Mcphee’s idea that she is not one to use a mask: ‘Well, I do sometimes think that I have got a mask but it’s a really thin one and it looks exactly like the real person underneath’.41 this is curiously and demonstrably so: Garner’s representations perpetually tease the boundary between fiction and autobiography, art and real world. her latest work of fiction, The Spare Room (2008), blurs these boundaries even further, inserting herself into her own fictional construct at its most sensitive point: Garner names her protagonist ‘helen’, as a way of publicly owning the ugly, ignoble feelings the character experiences in nursing her dying friend.42 at first glance, the focus of Monkey Grip is narrowly trained on the private sphere. the novel retails the banalities of its protagonist’s domestic rounds, and her emotional processes. With Nora, we experience the flow of interactions with friends and lovers.We follow the cycles of her own mad addiction to the beautiful, drug-addicted Javo, her management of household, parental and personal worlds, her failures, illness, angst, joys, bodily desires and irritations. Finally Nora drifts away from Javo, and from the intensity of their love-making.

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throughout, however, the book knits itself intricately into a momentous transition in australia’s public life. Monkey Grip is set in 1975, the year of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government. It marks the symbolic end of australia’s most radical socio-political experiment, one which inaugurated new cultural agendas. the characters in Monkey Grip reinvent the rules about drugs, sex and parenting. they are meshed with Melbourne’s counterculture – including the magazine, Digger, and the pram Factory. the novel refers only obliquely, tangentially, to such historic contexts, almost taking them for granted as we focus on the foreground of characters’ lives, yet as coordinates for the narrative they are instructive:43 I spent another coke night, almost till dawn, in my bed with Bill.We talked about things I had never talked about before: what it means to be alive in 1975, what change is and might be, how we see ourselves fitting in (or not) to this society, what the next step might be. We talked about these desolate things. We couldn’t have slept longer than an hour and a half; the dawn came and we got up and attended to the children.44

Monkey Grip caused a sensation with its unusually explicit language and content, and was greeted with incomprehension by conservative readers. In his review, ‘Lost Generation’, ronald Conway wrote disapprovingly of its banality, the ‘relentless reporting of every bodily pulse and hedonistic twitch’ and its ‘self-absorbed clannish characters . . . too busy scrabbling amid sundry sensations with their backsides turned to a larger society’.45 From a feminist perspective, he missed the point. For Lesley Morgan, a feminist reviewer, Nora’s story showed the ‘large gap between intellectual understanding of feminism and living as a feminist’.46 Monkey Grip was not the first text Garner built on a diary: the journals she kept were the spines for both The First Stone and then Joe Cinque’s Consolation.47 Was it inevitable, fated or fortuitous that Garner should have arrived in the place she now holds in australian public life? her

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recounting of milestone events suggests the presence of such determining forces, in the face of which she was passive rather than an agent of her own destiny, making deliberate choices. What was it that drove her to write that pre-emptive letter of sympathy to the Master of Ormond College? how different might things have been otherwise? Back in the beginning, in 1972, before she had written Monkey Grip, a sequence of events that hurled Garner out of schoolteaching and into writing as a full-time career unfolded. In ‘Why Does the Women Get all the pain’, Garner vividly describes the frank and dangerous conversation about sex that she had with her Form One Fitzroy high School students.48 to read her account is to be moved and struck by Garner’s honesty, her feeling for the children, her warmth and openness. Yet, as rosi Braidotti observes, there are telling gaps and elisions that point to other complexities.49 as Garner herself mentions, she took care to explain to her students that if word got out she could face dismissal. So why, in that case, did Garner then go ahead and publish her full account of that lesson in Digger in 1972? Once the account was in the public domain, parents were bound to, and did, complain, and the Victorian Department of education took action. publishing the account was surely tempting fate but Garner had already crossed over from teacher to writer in the very act of engaging students in such a conversation in the first place, in sharing intimate details of her own sex life. the preemptive choice she made that day was in conformity with the logic that would continue to serve her literary and public career. In Monkey Grip, Nora is at once exposed and protected on her bike as she rides around Melbourne. the bike signifies both her grip on practical, earthbound things and a freedom and autonomy claimed and enacted. Nora’s mobility and autonomy convey Garner’s highrisk solo ventures through the complex and historically-layered geographies of australian public and literary space. She has been willing to intrude the most private of matters into the wider public realm, and this has been a highly successful strategy, one not incompatible with sentimental australian fondness for the most vulnerable

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and ordinary victim figure. this preparedness to expose herself, to take risks, enabled by her giftedness with language, has allowed her voice and work to carry beyond that of others, and beyond the narrow and increasingly competitive australian market for elite literary works. her recent dismissal of critics who regard her as disingenuous in the way she defends her practice of exposing her life, and the lives of others, to public view, is understandable. In return, she asks how they imagine that writers find their stories at all: people talk as if a story is something lying on the ground that you pick up and dust off and put in a book. But material isn’t a story, it’s a mess, a cloudy series of events or experiences. On every page there’s [sic] a thousand tiny decisions about how you’re going to tell it. and once you’ve written something, you can’t even remember which bits ‘really happened’ and which bits you made up.50

Unlike the passivity Garner often emphasises in accounts of her creative process, this points to an interaction between intuition and choice, and suggests that there is skill involved. Such skill may seem natural and embodied, but it might be likened to the skill of the bike-rider, anticipating and dodging obstacles, building up speed or putting in the hard physical effort. this conjures many aspects of Garner’s own solo endeavour, and of her risky negotiations with the public sphere. So we return to the vulnerable, questing, self-doubting and often lonely figure of the female author, forever the amateur, pedalling her bike through Melbourne University or walking the sterile streets of Canberra, setting herself against dehumanising, institutional, professionalising forces. In her texts and public interventions, Garner’s habitual yet skilled performance, in keeping with this older logic of the literary field, ensures that she remains at once detached from worldly institutions, and intimately, emotionally involved with her imagined public.

Chapter 8

engaging the masses: tim Winton, activism and the literary bestseller there were moments in Scully’s day when he simply could not use a brush or plane or hammer for the thought of the summer he was about to miss at home: the colourless grass prostrate before the wind, the flat sea whitehot at its edge and the boats paralysed at their moorings with the heat and the smell of the desert descending upon them in the marinas and coves and riverbends.1 Where do I fit into australia? Who knows? there must be a saddle free between C. J. Dennis and patrick White. Down among the middlebrow somewhere.2

I

n his prose memoir, Land’s Edge (1993),tim Winton has fun with a critic who called him a ‘literalist’. this observation, he says, ‘delighted me. For, despite his faulty spelling, he got me right; I am a “littoralist”, someone who picks over things at the edges’.3 there are many ways in which Winton is a littoralist. the author’s home, as is well known, is on Western australia’s coast, and he has spoken of his need to spend some part of each day of his life in touch with or immersed in the ocean. Winton’s fictions are mostly set in small beachside or fishing towns, or filled with longing for such places. his characters are ordinary people from the working class and the

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underclass, obscure and marginal to metropolis and nation. they are fishermen, surfers, beachcombers and castaways, entranced by actual or remembered coastal landscapes. Yet despite or because of his outlook as a regional West australian writer, Winton amplifies the condition of being antipodean, of living as a white australian, on an island continent, on the edge of the world.4 the littoral proves a useful metaphor for the place carved out by Winton’s fiction within the literary field. are his works literary or popular? With characteristic intensity yet a no-nonsense air,Winton himself swiftly dispenses with such questions, characterising them as elite-driven and of little relevance to himself or his readers. Instead his works avowedly reach for, and constitute, a homely niche ‘down among the middlebrow somewhere’. Neither ‘literary’ nor ‘trash fiction’,5 Winton’s novels, especially since the 1990s, occupy the zone between these categories. he enjoys the cachet of the literary and the commercial reach of the bestseller.Yet, as robert Dixon points out, Winton’s works are generally avoided by literary scholars, even though they are popularly canonised, feted in the press and at writers’ festivals and set on school curricula. Far less critical, scholarly attention is given to Winton than his impressive public profile might otherwise lead one to imagine.6 Winton and his works occupy an edge, not only spatially, between land and ocean, but also generically, between broader cultural and more highly restricted literary zones. there is a temporal dimension to his littoralism as well. Winton’s outlook is arguably linked to a specific generational moment. Born in 1960, he is the youngest of the writers discussed so far in this book, though still a baby-boomer. It is noteworthy that he was born in the second of the two baby-boomer decades. thus he escapes its most defining cohort (the 1945 to 1955 group). he qualifies, rather, as a member of the Jones Generation (1954 to 1964), a recently ‘discovered’ group now distinguished from baby-boomers for niche-marketing purposes.7 this generation, the Joneses (otherwise known as late baby-boomers), crucially lags behind the Generation of ’68 and

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anticipates Generation X. this perhaps allows Winton to bridge some of the generational differences within a mass-tertiary-educated readership, as well as reach younger readers who encounter his books at school. this interstitial position, geographic and generational, may be a factor in Winton’s attitude not just to writing but also to activism. Like others of his cohort, Winton reached adolescence during or just after the Whitlam era. he was a beneficiary of Whitlam’s program of enhancement of educational institutions and cultural infrastructures. at the same time, because of their age, members of Winton’s generation were more likely to be witnesses to, rather than direct initiators of or participants in, the activisms that burned through 1970s australia. as already discussed in previous chapters, these ‘New Left’ activisms, intellectual and social agendas, evolving out of the anti-Vietnam protest movement, were centred on anti-imperialism, the progressive identities and cultural politics of feminism, gay rights and aboriginal issues, and the environment.8 Winton, and those younger than him, on the other hand, witnessed the transformation and redirection of these energies, and sometimes their subsidence, as the baby-boomers-proper settled down and became institutionally coopted in the 1980s. though he offered occasional comments in interviews about national or political events, Winton was neither particularly activist nor politically vocal during the first two decades of his career. he did, however, make some minor incursions into public debate. During the years of the howard Government, he expressed disappointment about the failed referendum for a republic and the lack of an apology to the Stolen Generations, as well as outrage about the treatment of refugees.9 In the early twenty-first century, however, Winton took a more vocal, public stand on a range of environmental issues, and began engaging in grassroots, activist campaigning. this mid-literary-career shift – by 2000 Winton was surely at the peak of his career as a celebrated australian novelist – corresponds to patterns we have seen in the careers of both Judith Wright and

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patrick White. the specific catalyst for the ‘warming of Winton’10 was a proposal to build an enormous, $200 million, environmentally destructive marina resort on Western australia’s pristine Ningaloo reef. From about 2000, though immersed in drafting Dirt Music (2001, a novel that took an uncharacteristic seven years to complete), Winton began networking with environmentalists and locals to develop what turned into a high-profile and ultimately successful media campaign to block the resort.11 Winton’s work on the Ningaloo campaign was just the start of his continuing involvement as patron and speaker for marine conservation issues. Drawn into a campaign that he later depicted as a broad-based coalition of ordinary community folk and urban conservationists, Winton found himself on a steep learning curve. he described this in retrospect, allowing a glimpse of the exhausting nature of activist campaigning: With other campaigners I’ve had meetings with cabinet ministers and businessmen. I’ve tried to bite my lip and learn some political strategy. I know much more about media process than I wanted to discover and I understand the endless desperation of fundraising. I’ve sat through late-night strategic brainstorms and given speeches in town halls. In the same day I’ve encountered teary volunteers, depressed scientists and sly bureaucrats. I’ve helped with ad copy, newsletters, press releases, anguished about t-shirts. I’ve waded through reports and recommendations, marvelled at the virtuoso obfuscation of government agencies and the slick spin of entrepreneurs, and written pleading letters to scientists, pollies, rockers, angry rednecks and schoolkids. I’ve been a tour guide and snorkelling instructor to infants, journos and movie stars. I know about actions and demos, rallies and stunts, the celebs you need to get an issue attention. None of them my idea of a good time. But at least now I see the difference between power and passion.12

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It is clear that Winton worked tirelessly, with others, to save the Ningaloo reef. thus he was surely following in the footsteps of both patrick White and Judith Wright – serving, like White, as iconic figurehead and financial donor and, like Wright, as behind-the-scenes committee worker.13 Since Ningaloo, Winton has broadened his commitments. Currently the patron of the australian Marine Conservation Society, he has intervened, with others, in a controversial anti-logging boycott in tasmania. he has also been an advocate for the sustainable use of seafood, and most recently a vocal supporter of anti-whaling activism.14 In all these areas, Winton has communicated with a broad, national public about environmental issues. all this seems straightforward enough. Yet Winton’s example is worth pursuing in more detail for what it suggests about the contradictions attendant on being both a celebrity writer – one who occupies the border between literary and popular – and an activist. Winton’s interstitial – littoral–literary – perspective gives a very distinctive slant to his engagement with both literary and public matters. What is the connection, if any, between Winton’s evolving fictional works and his late-blooming environmental activism? how is activism represented in Winton’s novels, and how does this correlate or contrast with his own campaign rhetoric? these questions require close attention to the logic that enables Winton in his crossing between literary and activist domains. this logic can be discerned in the ways that he articulates and resolves, in his writings and speeches, the contradictions between withdrawal and engagement, and between the literary and the popular. Situated on the boundary of the literary and popular, Winton’s example highlights the changes presently occurring in australia’s literary field, and illustrates how these changes are also bringing renewal.

From boy wonder to national living treasure Winton’s progress from budding writer to national icon maps onto a salesworthy myth of the reclusive genius who turns out to be a

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down-to-earth everyman figure, an unassuming, ordinary australian bloke. this myth may be a media-publishing-literary construct, but it is very sustaining for Winton’s public career. the myth is partly grounded in the realities of the author’s own life and works, certainly as he himself represents them. a brief survey of his career and reception serves to foreground the salient contradictions for Winton’s public persona. By the time he was 24, Winton had published his first, Vogel prize-winning novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), followed by the Miles Franklin award-winning Shallows (1984). as the 1980s progressed, he produced several further novels, including the critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical fiction That Eye the Sky (1986), and two volumes of short stories. In the first decade, he averaged one book per year. By the time of his novella In the Winter Dark (1988), reviewers and journalists were routinely hailing Winton as a ‘wunderkind’, though at times sarcastically: almost 20 cents a page for a novella is rather steep, even if it buys the latest book by the wunderkind of recent australian fiction.15

the ‘wunderkind’ epithet crystallised Winton’s image as youthful literary prodigy, an impression visually guaranteed by photogenic images of the author, with familiar features that have been maintained into middle age: the long plait, chunky surfer body, freckled face and far-seeing gaze. although early reviewers were critical of the young writer’s yet-to-mature craft, they agreed on his remarkable talent. Interviews and feature articles accumulated with publication of That Eye the Sky, strengthening the author’s profile and disseminating his down-to-earth values and attitudes. his very ‘australian’ dislike of elitism and pretension was much noted. Winton’s life appeared to mesh neatly with his writing, and vice versa: It had been a long fight between Jerra Nilsam and the fish. he pressed the flat end of the oar against its brow. Globes of moisture

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clustered on its flanks. his father grinned in the stern. the engine was chuckling. Water parted like an incision behind. the fish grunted. his father said it was a turrum. the long fan of tail slapped the gunwale, the gills were pumping, and blood globbed the bottom of the boat.16

It is in the voice, the very grain of his language, that Winton’s literary claim so strikingly asserts itself. his descriptions are luscious and visceral, not only documenting but mimicking the sensory richness of littoral or marine environments. Winton’s linguistic weave of the poetic with the worldly in these descriptions is commanding – indeed he seems to draw his poetry from the very stuff of marine life, boats and fishing, while holding the reader’s attention with his dynamic rhythms and sensational plots. Winton’s publisher, hilary Mcphee, quotes the above passage, the first paragraph of An Open Swimmer, to dramatise the voice that caught her attention from the very start. It was a voice, she says, that became more utterly the author’s own over time, and ‘carved out for me its own space in my head’: he uses rhythm to great effect. he uses short sentences and single words like blows. he invented language like ‘globbed’ in his very first published paragraph. and his knowledge runs deep and you trust him – with the way people talk to each other, with natural lore, with the workings of boats and of fish.17

Mcphee echoes many commentators, and Winton himself, in seeing the connection with american writers like hemingway and Melville. Winton also cites southern US writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy as key influences, noting the parallel between Southern US and West australian writers’ distance from the cultural centre – a shared sense of being on the edge of the edge of the world.18 Closer to home, especially in Cloudstreet (1991) with its Geraldton connection, Winton also

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takes his coordinates from randolph Stow, a fellow West australian writer who arguably languished in the cultural shadow of his east coast contemporary, patrick White. With Cloudstreet, a tragicomic working-class family saga set in perth from the 1940s to 1960s, Winton made the transition from ‘wunderkind’ to national living treasure.19 Winning a second Miles Franklin for its author, Cloudstreet built a devoted australian readership. robert Dixon points out that – despite the slight time lag – Cloudstreet was Winton’s Bicentennial novel. as such it expressed a whole gamut of national desires and aspirations borne out of that heightened context.20 It has since acquired popular status as the ‘Great australian Novel’, appearing in the top 10 of the (albeit dubious) aBC’s list of australia’s Favourite Books (2004).21 this ranking seems partly contingent on its status as a school text: Cloudstreet is regularly set for study in australian senior school english courses. the school market is highly desirable for ensuring a durable national readership.Yet even this market needs supplementing. In Winton’s case, it is the quality media, rather than the academy, that has generated some of the wider cultural discussion essential to building durable recognition. If Cloudstreet has achieved general popular acclaim, academic and scholarly reception is more sporadic.22 It is instructive to compare Cloudstreet in these terms with patrick White’s The Tree of Man.23 In both cases, before consensus had congealed, early reviews were surprisingly uneven, with one or two critics offering memorably scathing and potentially damaging assessments. aD hope’s famous remark about Tree of Man’s ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’ was only slightly more rebarbative than comments made about Cloudstreet by Kate Jennings and peter pierce. Jennings, for example, complained of Cloudstreet’s overly stereotyped characters, its impulse to happy endings, its ‘pandering to the zeitgeist’, its horror towards the literati, and its nationalistic ‘sentimentalising’ of working-class characters: ‘he patronises them, much as John Steinbeck did’.24 Whereas patrick White was stung by hope’s comment and never

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forgave him, Winton was relaxed and good humoured. he seemed to revel in his critics’ dismissive forecasts that his book would merely entertain (rather than educate) a popular readership.25 Winton’s refusal of the judgments of literary and academic elites coheres entirely with his self-construction as a professional writer who adopts an intimate rather than alienated stance towards his reading public.this goes beyond merely temperamental differences between Winton and White. Winton’s response, though undoubtedly sincere, can be seen as adapted to changes in literary values brought by the professionalisation and tertiary credentialling of writers and the decreasing importance of academic literary criticism. this professionalisation has been accompanied by the emergence of confident, educated consumers seeking interaction with authors at festivals and engaging in book-club discussions or online forums. the rise of popularly canonising forces signals the increased density of the field, as discussed by Dixon (following Carter). Winton’s career, as Dixon points out, coincides with the thickening and diversification of australian literary infrastructure and opinion-making.26 It also suggests the diffusion and democratisation of sources of cultural authority beyond a restricted circle of academics and elite writers. these changes suggest not so much a decline in the production of ‘high postmodernist’ literary texts, as a decline in the symbolic prestige and authority of such texts within the australian literary field. Linguistic and stylistic sophistication and inaccessibility, perhaps exemplified in patrick White’s fiction, are no longer prized so highly. Yet The Tree of Man and Cloudstreet comparison highlights proximities as well as distances between patrick White and tim Winton. each book secured the status of its respective author as a national figure. Both discern the extraordinary within the ordinary. Both locate their richest narrative resources in the australian suburb or small town and in domesticity, though their critical stance and mood differs. Both novels partly romanticise working-class or ‘ordinary’ australians. Winton’s own background, of course, lends

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him greater credibility in representing such groups, and he exhibits considerable tenderness towards his working-class characters. Son of a privileged, anglo-identified, landowning family, patrick White identified with imagined, ordinary australians in ways that were more ambivalent, troubled, vicarious and fantasmatic. Yet, as a partial outsider, White may have been more incisive in his observations.the recently revived White play Season at Sarsaparilla (directed by Benedict andrews for the Sydney theatre Company in 2007) revealed itself as newly relevant, astringent and critically powerful. Catching the mood of 2007, Season at Sarsaparilla suggested teasing contrasts with the much loved Belvoir Street production, ten years earlier, of Cloudstreet (scripted by Nick enright and Justin Monjo, and directed by Neil armfield in 1998).27 as noted earlier, White and Winton were both drawn, later in their careers, into activism. What they offered these campaigns was eloquence, along with their own vast reservoir of literary capital or cultural prestige and consequent national recognition. Yet what speaks most forcefully of Winton’s partly disavowed proximity to White, as mentioned in Chapter 2, was his uncharacteristically trenchant critique in 1995 of Marr’s edition of Patrick White: Letters. Winton launched an attack on the late White for having moved, in 1964, from suburb to city, and for turning away from the local and ordinary settings of his Sarsaparilla fiction. In 1995,Winton deemed White’s engagement with activist and theatrical circles, and the fiction that ensued, to have been wasteful and decadent, a betrayal of his true gifts and responsibilities as a writer.28 What this attack illuminated, however, was Winton’s own priorities, the strength of his need, at the time, to avoid making a similar detour. Despite his determined renunciation of activist and literary (especially Sydney- or Melbourne-centric) circles, Winton was never entirely apolitical or disinterested. he has, as we have seen, ventured his views about a range of political matters. More tellingly, in his second novel, published in 1984, Winton reveals his fascination with the politics, personalities and ambivalences associated with one

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of the more dramatic activist campaigns of post-war australia: the anti-whaling campaign in albany in 1977. In writing Shallows,Winton imaginatively visits the scene, and tensions between proximity and distance – between the loyalties of residents and the alienated gaze of tourists – are implied in his narrative approach. these tensions are most manifested in the novel’s ambivalent representation of activism, an ambivalence that has all but vanished from Winton’s own recent public speech, in 2007, against whaling: In the effort to curtail this renewed slaughter it seems that two crucial avenues have not been fully investigated. Legal action, and direct action. Given the political and cultural sensitivities involved, neither of these is anybody’s idea of the first and best way to solve the problem, but after the failure of all diplomatic and procedural efforts, there seems to be no alternative left. there is still no humane way to kill a whale.29

In the shallows of activism here – it is 1831 on the southernmost tip of the newest and oldest continent, the bottom of the world.30

this opening line from Shallows concisely maps the contradictory australian condition while placing us firmly in Winton’s world.the title – Shallows – has multiple resonances, extending tensions inherent in this national paradox. ‘Shallows’ refers, metonymically, to the dangerous lure of shallows for migrating whales and the mystery of mass whale stranding as well as to the horror of the whalers’ flensing deck awash with blood. the narrative is layered into three time periods, corresponding to the three generations of the Coupar family. the Coupars, we are told from the outset, are ‘fools-elect’. they are the narrative’s Jonah figures, suffering, punished and chosen: Queenie dreams vividly, for example, of being swallowed by a

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whale. the first time period is presented through american whaler Nathaniel Coupar’s journal, read voraciously by Cleve. the journal tells of the brutal colonial prehistory of the town in the 1830s, and of Nathaniel’s part in a whaling venture that descended into savagery. as the sole survivor, Nathaniel later returns to angelus, amasses a fortune, settles on the fringes of town at Wirrup and begets the narrative’s dynasty before finally suiciding in dark despair. the second layer of the narrative is the 1930s, a period of industrial strife and Depression, recalled in fragmentary conversation or reverie by the older townspeople. this layer of history registers the activist youth of Daniel Coupar and his peers. the main thrust of the narrative is in the present, in 1978, centring on Daniel’s granddaughter, Queenie. her marriage to Cleve Cookson, possibly the chief ‘fool-elect’, is foundering in the shallows of failing commitment. the action Queenie takes is to cross to activism. her choice, however, is instinctive and involuntary. She ruptures the suspended animation gripping them all by abandoning local loyalties to lie down with the activists in the blood on the flensing deck. the story of Queenie’s estrangement from, and later tentative reunion with, Cleve parallels the fate of her grandfather Daniel, who meanwhile descends into crisis over his own failures and shame – his untended flocks on his drought-stricken property, and his inability to forgive himself for the accidental death of his wife, who had years earlier fallen from a waterfall to the shallows below. Other horrors attach to the shallows, less explicit but more pervasive, setting the novel’s tone of suspended time and wasted energy. anxious feelings of unsettlement permeate the narrative. horror clings to the secret colonial history of the town of angelus, and the inheritance of guilt corrupting its families. aboriginal people linger as silent, abject presences on the edge of these collective white histories, producing an anxiety that Winton’s narrative registers without resolving. It is the conflict among white characters – the townsfolk, the Coupars, and the activists – that occupies the novel’s

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foreground. the character who most visibly embodies repression is the repugnant Desmond pustling. a foul, sterile man plagued by rotting teeth and gums, pustling is rather a caricature, reminiscent of american frontier types; he exerts a godlike control over the community and reaches into every corner until he owns all property and the future itself. at one level, Winton’s novel is a precisely researched local history. Winton, who lived in albany from 1972 to 1976, remembers identifying with local hippies. he also recalls his uneasy awareness, even as a teenager, of the town’s whaling industry: the city was irredeemably corrupt and the world had lost its way. I was fourteen, the churchgoing son of the local cop, but I was for the hippies. In town the respectable citizenry were butchering whales and bussing tourists out to witness the fun while the state’s most remarkable natural harbour turned into an industrial drain.31

In 1976, at the age of sixteen, Winton left albany for high school in perth. So he was not living in albany in 1977, when activists confronted whalers in dramatic scenes at the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company. at sixteen or seventeen years of age, a young person’s social and political awareness is only just beginning to dawn, and so it would not be surprising if Winton, now in perth, had followed news of the protests.the albany protests ended in the closure of the world’s last whaling station, and resulted in the founding of Greenpeace and the positioning of australia as a leading campaigner in a still ongoing, worldwide anti-whaling movement. the activist incursion, in Winton’s novel, signals the pressure of globalisation at local and national level, pressures increasing at this time. It maps local forces in a small town on the cusp of transition from dirty industrial (whaling) base to tourist economy. progress to respectability involves the sanitising of the town’s brutal colonial past. though he deliberately allows his son-in-law Cleve to read Nathaniel Coupar’s journals, hoping for ‘a disturbance, a stick in the stagnant pool’,32

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Daniel’s secret burning of his ancestor’s despairing final entry firmly suppresses the past once again. the story Winton tells seems to document or parallel the actual historic events at albany.Winton’s characters relay the diverse demographic of townsfolk descended from american whalers, convicts and multi-ethnic immigrant adventurers, along with derelict aboriginal people. the activists, passing at first as tourists, are students and hippies from australia’s eastern states and other nations. they represent the external forces of change – economic, political and global – descending on angelus’s insular, time-bound community. the activists are led by an independently wealthy Frenchman, Feurier, a character modelled on Jean-paul Fortom-Gouin, the real-life activist who led and financed the campaign with a coalition from australia, France, Canada and the US.33 In Winton’s novel, which concerns itself with failed patrilineal inheritance, Feurier’s father is the diver, Jacques Cousteau. his investments and motives remain enigmatic to Queenie, although he does sway her with his passionate expression of interest in whales as the largest living creatures on the planet. these realist, documentary aspects of the text, however, have their counterweight in its carefully contrived literary structure and themes. although Queenie is Winton’s ostensible protagonist, her husband Cleve Cookson, with his susceptibility to powerful, selfdefeating male role models, relays the novel’s central problematic of incomplete masculinity. Mesmerised by Nathaniel Coupar’s journal, Cleve yearns for approval from Queenie’s grandfather, Daniel. he submits himself to various tests of manhood, with embarrassing results, in ill-fated shark- and kangaroo-hunting episodes. ambivalent, awkward and feminised, Cleve (whose very name seems to suggest a parody of heterosexual gender order, since it is the wife who should ‘cleave’ to her husband) is an early prototype of Winton’s later damaged, vulnerable male protagonists. the most notable of these later figures are Fred Scully, in The Riders, and Luther Fox in Dirt Music. Like these characters, Cleve is a man questing for wholeness and certainty, but falling short of his early promise, conscious of

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the thinness of his own capabilities and caught in the shallows of a tentative masculinity. the storyline about the activists in Shallows is similarly constructed to emphasise ambivalence about human agency. Like the townsfolk, the activists are contemplated from various angles. they are ultimately neither condemned nor privileged, neither villains nor heroes. When Queenie rescues ted Baer, shark hunter and local celebrity, from drowning, their long-planned protest descends into farce. the illusion of activist agency is negated when we learn that their ostensibly successful campaign was orchestrated, all along, by sinister forces. pustling, that dark force of economic progress, coopts their efforts: it is pustling who makes the secret donation to obtain the Zodiac fleet. his goal is to disrupt the whaling industry and shake up the town as a way to tighten his control. Meanwhile, Queenie quickly sheds her activism. pregnant, she drifts back towards Cleve, and together they succumb to the magnetic attraction of the whales which have returned to the shallows, stranding themselves mysteriously, in defiance of whalers and conservationists alike. the concluding image is a suspension or refusal of political, historical and human constructs, reinstating the enigma of the littoral: rapid scalar movements, changes of tone, sounds of unmistakable emotion came to them, and the Cooksons dressed and rushed outside with a torch and ran down the wet sand in the rain and shone the torch and saw the huge, stricken bodies lurching in the shallows. Queenie screamed. Surf thundered and the night was images in torch beams. Masses of flesh and barnacles covered the sand, creeping up, floundering, suffocating under their own weight. a pink vapour from spiracles descended upon Cleve and Queenie Cookson as they moved between the heaving monuments.34

though it won the 1984 Miles Franklin award, Shallows received mixed reviews. It has since fallen into relative obscurity, though it

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is currently in print. Should they encounter it now, Winton’s more recent fans might find Shallows a strange read. the narrative feels awkward, even mechanical at times, and its characters are not always successfully animated. Yet it is fascinating as a rehearsal of Winton’s mature preoccupations. It negotiates the relationship between world and text, activism and art, finally choosing values aligned to art rather than activism. What signals this choice most strongly is the way the narrative presents its ‘fools-elect’, the members of the Coupar family. Descendants of Nathaniel, the american whaler-deserter, they are insider-outsider figures within the text’s social geography. though ‘locals’, they belong neither to the respectable citizenry of angelus nor to the activists. they are displaced from these groups, incapable of simple, homely belonging or pure political action. In this way, the Coupars rehearse the position of the artist.the artist empathises with, while standing at some remove from, the everyday world of normative values. though Winton does not claim to write literary novels, the logic that defines the values in Shallows is most assuredly literary. Indeed the ‘fool-elect’ is a recurring figure in Winton’s writing, the sign and manifestation of the artist as both alien prophet (detached from others) and as a figure who connects with everyday life and people. In Cloudstreet, communal and national tensions are resolved in the death of the ‘fool-elect’. the biblically named Fish Lamb is a beatific and sacrificial figure whose two drownings frame the novel’s action. his crossing between life and death, character and narrator, structures the tale, bringing consolation. Nor do Winton’s subsequent works, aiming firmly at a broad, middlebrow readership, relinquish this privileged character-type. Breath (2008) and Dirt Music are bolder and more confident than Shallows, yet both smuggle in the earlier book’s familiar literary cargo – Breath’s adventurers test the limits of the ordinary, and Dirt Music centres on ‘fools-elect’. this testifies to the ongoing transmission of literary values, even in the context of a very broad readership. Furthermore, it was while he worked on Dirt Music that Winton embarked on

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activist campaigning. this time, however, activism remains firmly outside the bounds of the text.What logic enables Winton’s literarypublic crossings, and how does this reveal itself in Dirt Music?

a fisher of men: activism and community I am not on any fringe mission. I eat meat and fish. I would eat you if I needed to. Because of my background I love hunting and gathering; it’s in my blood. But I am not a mindless captive to those impulses. I can make rational and moral decisions. Like you I can see the logic in curbing my own appetites for the common good. I feel a responsibility to my children. and to those who will come after us. people I will never know. I don’t know what other special right I have to be addressing you. Certainly not as a novelist. Who cares what a novelist thinks?35

reading a tim Winton speech makes one long to have heard him deliver it in person. Charisma and energy leap from the page, not unlike the charisma he exuded, despite his renowned reclusiveness, on andrew Denton’s chat show, Enough Rope, in October 2004. Winton possesses the charisma of someone intensely focused, intelligent, passionately committed, empathetic and good humoured. his persona is a rare combination of the meat-eating and meat-hunting aussie ‘bloke’ and the sensitive writer and thinker who revels in the medium of language. Few australian (or other) literary writers have enjoyed the popular cultural distinction of being an invited guest on Denton’s high profile talk show program. It seems that, despite his disclaimer, everyone cares to hear what tim Winton t hinks. the presence of a disclaimer of this kind – ‘Who cares what a novelist thinks?’ – is revealing in itself. as a form of words it should, at this stage of my argument, be recognisable to readers not so much as disingenuous but as doing something other than what it is saying. It makes a gesture of disavowal of the writer’s public authority. Such

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.

gestures, as we have seen, occur habitually, and are usually indispensable to the public positions taken by writers. they establish the writer as non-elite, non-intellectual, and, therefore, as sincere and legitimate, as someone to be found down ‘among’ the ordinary folk. So the writer appears not as an alien, tourist or outsider, but an everyday participant who just happens to be holding, for the moment, the attention of a wider public. this mode of self-representation does the work of naturalising the writer’s role, distracting from contradictions being straddled, between the possession of cultural authority and the appearance of ordinariness, between power and its lack. a writer who seems too aloof, too powerful or too exceptional runs the risk of alienating readers. Winton’s value, as a celebrity author, to the profile and success of these environmental campaigns is obvious, though this is not a matter he dwells on himself. rather, he is at pains to emphasise the breadth of community participation – the joining of conservationists with local people – in the Ningaloo reef campaign. Winton wants us to regard his activism as a mainstream rather than fringe involvement. as the increased focus on global warming in the leadup to the 2007 Federal election suggests, Winton is addressing a far more environmentally-conscious mainstream than did Judith Wright in the early 1960s. Winton’s emphasis on communal harmony, on the unity of ordinary people against divisive external forces, can be seen as necessarily less risky and radical, and even as benignly conservative or populist. It is widely reported that, like helen Garner, Winton is a committed Christian, though not fundamentalist.36 In this context, his recent activism might be seen as finding consistency with broadly Christian values. Winton’s imagery, in Cloudstreet (witness ‘Fish’ and ‘Lamb’) harmonises with a Christianity oriented to resolving communal conflict. In whatever way his politics are interpreted, however, Winton’s stand is far from negligible, for the resources marshalled by corporations, in coalition with the state, to protect their interests against environmental activism remain considerable.

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the resistance in Winton’s public rhetoric to being positioned as a member of elite groups underwrites the logic that shapes his fiction. In his ‘Save Moreton Bay’ address, Winton’s characterisation of recreational anglers is illuminating in this regard. he distinguishes recreational anglers from professional fishermen, describing them – reflexively, since he counts himself an angler too – as recalcitrant and redneck. he points to this group’s inflated sense of entitlement, and he makes the following, unusual analogy: there’s this strange spirit of exceptionalism in anglers. Like modernist poets, they don’t really think they’re connected to ordinary folks, don’t share the same responsibilities.37

In rejecting the exceptionalist spirit of the angler – that is, their exclusivist, territorial mindset – Winton draws a parallel with what he deems to be the insularity of the high- and postmodernist aesthetic, favoured in restricted and exclusive zones of the literary field. his suggestion that exceptionalism is irresponsible tells us much about both his politics and his literary values, about the distances he places between himself and both radical politics and ‘high’ literary practice. this is the structuring logic that coordinates Winton’s crossings between the literary and the popular, as it also does his crossings between writing and activism. Winton’s dislike of ‘exceptionalism’ as anti-communal is consistent with his choice against the elites but in favour of the value of a literature produced for middlebrow readerships. In Breath (2008), Winton’s supremely accessible tale of a young adolescent australian male’s ‘rite of passage’, a literary logic is both denied and reproduced. pikelet is typical of Winton’s young protagonists, although his story is bookended by his framing narrative as the older, wiser Bruce pike. having survived the ordeals of his youth, pike has attained a grace just sufficient to ordinary life. Breath confirms that Winton’s preoccupation with the extraordinary in the ordinary both resembles and diverges from that of patrick White.

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his characters may be ennobled and distinguished by their dangerous feats in the surf but the greatest risk they face is that of being seduced by the hubristic sin of exceptionalism: So there we were, this unlikely trio. a select and peculiar club, a tiny circle of friends, a cult, no less . . .Years before people started speaking about extreme sports, we spurned the word extreme as unworthy. What we did and what we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.38

In setting themselves apart from the mundane world of ordinary people, the characters jeopardise their humanity. For all its exhilaration, extreme surfing proves morally as well as mortally dangerous, leading to delusion, narcissism and the fatal destruction of the protective bonds of self, family and community. though reviews of the book and Winton’s own interview comments have dwelt on themes of risk-taking, youth and masculinity,39 the undertow of Breath expresses a littoral-literary logic that warns against literary exceptionalism even while desiring and effecting literary intensity. a littoral-literary logic also governs Dirt Music, the book that in 2002 won the author’s third Miles Franklin award and his second Booker prize shortlisting. Like Shallows, Breath and The Turning (2004; a book of interlinked short stories), Dirt Music is set in a small coastal town. and like ‘angelus’, ‘White point’ is a frontier zone, at once suburban and remote, a little settlement clinging to the continent’s edge, where disparate lives are stranded. Like Shallows, Dirt Music maps the social geography of an insular, self-contained community. Its provinciality shapes the actions of its protagonists in their interactions with a cross-section of locals – ordinary workers, movers and shakers, and members of an underclass – some of whom live with guilty secrets and ancestral guilt. Its ‘fools-elect’ are the Fox family. the protagonist, Luther Fox, is his family’s sole surviving member after a shocking car accident. Both he and Georgie Jutland, a middle-aged version of Queenie Coupar, are haunted

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insider-outsider figures. resembling the protagonists in Shallows, they are reclusive, withdrawn and suffering, yearning for purpose and wholeness. Dirt Music involves a love triangle, an affair between the reclusive, wounded Luther and the nurturing, under-appreciated Georgie. the third figure is Georgie’s disaffected husband Jim Buckridge, a hard-nosed, wealthy, professional fisherman – a force to be reckoned with in the community. he is a foil to Luther, the outsider.Yet Jim is also a wounded man, burdened by an inherited guilt because of his own father’s dispossession of the Fox family. Jim’s suffering on this score, his late-surfacing remorse, redeems him, binding him close to the elect community. this story of the two wounded white men, and their exchange of land and women, suggests there is something resistant in this novel to the deeper recognition and integration of either aboriginal or feminist perspectives. Such recognition must be kept to a minimum, in the story, for the unravelling and questioning it could precipitate. If Cloudstreet was Winton’s Bicentennial novel, Dirt Music distantly catches the mood of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, with its images of reconciliation, national unity and healing under potently advertised signs of aboriginal spirituality. as in Shallows, though with a late-1990s awareness resulting from decades of aboriginal activism, the novel reckons with white woundedness and ancestral (implicitly national) guilt. Once again, aboriginal characters hover at the edges. this time, however, they are spiritual guides for the novel’s damaged white characters. In the passage to the northwest, into Coronation Gulf (note that Winton gives this Canadian name to an australian locale, doubling places and meanings), Luther makes a voyage into physical landscape and memory. his bodily experience is doubled by re-immersion, through memory, in literary classics and the music of his past life. Castaway from official literary culture, free to inhabit it as an element, Luther embarks on a spiritual journey that requires the convergence of his own literary culture with the landscape, a voyage of self through space and time

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into a deeper fusion and belonging. Luther arrives, at one point, on a coastline replete with signs of absent–present aboriginal culture. he stumbles upon a sacred, Wandjina figure, hidden deep in a cave. this scene of course asks to be read positively, as a reconciliatory acknowledgment of aboriginal priority. But Luther’s encounter with the mouthless Wandjina image comes disturbingly close to appropriating aboriginal culture to enable settler belonging. While the littoral, the space of the margin, is where Winton is most at home, it also seems a zone of avoidance, safely buffered from immersion in wilder elements. It is intriguing that the professional fishermen of angelus designate Luther Fox a ‘shamateur’.40 Without a professional fishing licence, Luther adopts the guise of a recreational angler as cover for his own unlicensed fishing for profit. Luther’s ‘shamateur’ activities reprise Winton’s interest in the littoral, a space of physical and social between-ness frequented by beachcombers and survivors.Yet just as recreational anglers are analogous to modernist poets, so the ‘shamateur’ is paralleled by Winton’s own evasions of what might be deemed ‘elite’ literary judgments.Winton’s representation of the ‘shamateur’ corresponds with the ambiguities of his writerly place – and perhaps suggests a latent anxiety about his legitimacy as a ‘literary’ writer. evading official and institutional labels, he fishes ‘unlicensed’ in literary waters, passing under the radar of academics and other would-be cultural classifiers. Bypassing these imagined ‘authorities’, especially given the waning power of the literary academy, has not harmed his career. On the contrary, Winton’s tendency to cast off the relevance of remote literary classifiers, while steadfastly adhering to his own version of the literary, justifies his embrace of an expanded readership. Yet if Winton’s novels privilege the margin as a fertile zone of literary reactivation, do they not also register some reluctance to challenge or move much beyond this shifting, littoral space? are they necessarily limited by their middlebrow orientation in what they can say, aesthetically and politically? this is by now a familiar question, and one not at all confined to Winton’s books. his own

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sharpened sense of responsibility for future generations has prompted his activism for marine conservation. this is a logical extension of his longstanding fictional preoccupations. he has made frank and persuasive arguments, in his non-fictional prose and public rhetoric that highlight certain parallels between his fictional characters and his own experience: Like it or not, everything I’ve learned about nature has been revealed with a gun, a spear or a knife and fork in my hand. I know the odds of our being able to live without somehow doing it at nature’s expense. But I’ve longed for some way to be a conscientious objector in the war against nature. I’m not the romantic young man I was, but I now have children and I see the results of the way we live with growing alarm.41

But to what extent does Winton’s recent activism address or compensate for the kinds of questions that could trouble texts so strongly assertive of white australian relationships to land – questions that haunt reader and writer alike? Winton’s wounded white male characters encounter otherness and find spiritual healing in wild nature, wild shorelines. Submitting to, entranced by these landscapes, they are able to find themselves again. they establish themselves, in place, with the briefest of nods to aboriginal presence and claims. Is it enough, any longer, given that historic and ongoing claims of aboriginal people are still far from being met, for white australian readers and writers to indulge desires for legitimacy, belonging, and even for indigeneity on this continent, here at the edge of the world? Yet without that belonging, and the lived commitment to place that goes with it, what prospect remains for the life of any people on this continent, or this planet?

C O Da

australian writer-intellectuals in the twenty-first century: legacy and future For this new subject I changed my style, writing in a different way to my previous books. the sentences are short, the words small, and I want the reader to pass through the words as the eye does through a window, and see straight into the story. I wanted it to be one of those books people read in one or two sittings and feel like they have been in a car smash and their life ever after is a little changed. I wanted it to be a trojan horse of a book, a book that everyone would want to read, but having read it, some ideas escape into the citadels of suburban lounge rooms and people once more begin to think and question.1

I

n the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite claims to the contrary, australian literary writers have been furiously engaged in activism and debate. Indeed this period has seen the efflorescence of australian literary activism. the activism of writers in this period has continued and amplified the now well-established intertwining of australia’s literary and civic cultures. Writers participating in national debates or in activist campaigns since 2000 include richard Flanagan (quoted above), Kate Grenville, rodney hall, anita heiss, Linda Jaivin, thomas Keneally, andrew McGahan, Frank Moorhouse, elliot perlman, hannie rayson, eva Sallis, Kim Scott,

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rosie Scott, Stephen Sewell, Katharine thomson, Christos tsiolkas, alexis Wright, Ouyang Yu, arnold Zable and many of the writers discussed in this book.this list is by no means exhaustive. participation in debate and activism has also extended beyond these mostly literary writers to popular novelists like Bryce Courtenay and Di Morrissey, as well as to a range of theatre, cultural, film, media and celebrity figures. Writers have asserted their views collectively under the auspices of writer-organisations and networks like the australian branch of peN, an international writer advocacy and human rights group, and the australian Society of authors (aSa). they have taken a strong and effective stand, individually and through these networks, in lobbying for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, some of whom are writers.2 thomas Keneally and rosie Scott as well as eva Sallis and Linda Jaivin are only some of the more prominent literary writers to campaign on this issue. Writers have organised their own networks: eva Sallis, for example, with designer Marianne hardwick, established a network in 2001, called ‘australians against racism’.3 Often via such pre-existing or newly established networks, writers have signed petitions, lobbied politicians and campaigned in the community. they have spoken out publicly, at writers festivals, in interview, via essays and opinion pieces in the media and online. they have also produced fiction, poetry and scripts, for theatre and television, that engage searchingly with these and other human rights abuses, increasingly so in the post 9/11 period. richard Flanagan’s book, The Unknown Terrorist, is just one example that I will shortly discuss in more detail, because it so neatly reprises the contradictions and themes identified in this book. the foregoing case studies have highlighted the recent history and ongoing legacy of australia’s writer-intellectuals. the writers discussed are linked to that relatively autonomous ‘field’ of cultural endeavour, the ‘literary’ field. In turn, their work and crossings into public debate have sought to define, renew and perpetuate literary values and constituencies. the writers discussed in this book

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have been among the most publicly prominent of australia’s literary writers, from the mid- to late twentieth century – and of course there are many others. Writers whose careers and works might also have been considered in depth include many of the abovementioned intellectuals, activists and campaigners. their examples testify to the proposition that there has been and continues to be a mutually sustaining connection in australia between literary culture and nation. Literary writers frequently articulate their sense of civic, national and, especially through organisations like peN, international responsibilities. My discussion of australian writer-intellectuals intersects with questions about the relationship between art and political engagement. Writers themselves are often at their most eloquent on this subject. In her essay ‘art in a time of crisis’, eva Sallis rehearses compelling yet familiar arguments about the role of artists and writers, whose freedom to offer their opinions is ‘the test of freedom in any society’.4 her idea that writers are social actors whose opinions are neither exactly private nor exactly expert corresponds with my understanding of the role that literary writers sometimes play as public intellectuals. they bring to this role not expert knowledge but the capacity to represent and communicate ideas. they also bring a commitment to literary-field-related values of freedom and autonomy. their platform is created by the constituency garnered through their writings. this constituency, or readership, is often enhanced by their public interventions, and this in itself contributes to the dynamic of renewal of the literary field. Sallis emphasises the power of the imagination in provoking dissent, particularly the ability to represent the victims of human cruelty, those who have been, in recent years, ‘Out of sight and inaccessible, refugees and asylum-seekers . . . hurt and damaged by us . . . actively vilified and demonised by government in the hope that australians would accept a dehumanised view and not try to imagine what it is like to be them’.5 Sallis’s novel The Marsh Birds (2005) puts this into vivid practice. Drawn from the author’s own work with refugees

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and her encounter with australia’s notorious mandatory detention system when it was least exposed to public scrutiny,6 The Marsh Birds is a powerful, seamlessly wrought imagining, from the point of view of a child refugee, of the experience of being stripped of love, family, identity and belonging. the narrative is conventional and highly accessible, pitched for a broad readership. It is lucid, eloquent and richly evocative. It illustrates exactly what Sallis means when she declares: ‘It is the job of art to bear witness’.7 Yet it has also been the point of this book to grapple with the necessarily ambivalent contradictions that attend writers’ public representations, not in order to be cynical about them, but so as to acknowledge and understand the complexities and challenges involved. even Sallis’s book The Marsh Birds necessarily orients itself to the marketplace, participating in its systems of advertising, reception and recognition. a tribute from helen Garner on the front cover – ‘Marvellous. a brave, beautiful and terribly moving book’ – endorses Sallis’s novel. at the same time, this tribute draws Garner into the ranks of those writers campaigning against the government’s treatment of refugees. the public engagement of writers, in other words, may carry the aura of purity and disinterest – of detachment from mercenary, institutional or worldly concerns – and this lends credibility and power to their representations. Yet such interventions necessarily involve a complex of motivations and circumstances inseparable from the interests of the individual writer’s career and from the interests of the literary field as a whole. It is obviously advantageous, in a small national market, for writers to strengthen their readerships through their crossings between literary and public domains. through the late twentieth century and into the present, the rapid expansion of new technologies and globalising forces has intensified globalising and professionalising pressures on the literary field. the field’s infrastructure has become more complex, and its avenues of reception, publication and dissemination have proliferated.8 Cultural organisations and educational institutions have

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become more interdependent and cross-fertilising. While Judith Wright and patrick White attended university, their writing careers thereafter diverged from formal educational institutions. Both Wright and White, descended from australia’s older squattocracy, were able to achieve a measure of financial independence because of their inheritance. they were both bearers and transformers of that older squattocracy’s values. Meanwhile, the australian academy, along with the nation’s expanded mass schooling system of the post-war era, took up these new australian canonical figures, sometimes in ways that the writers themselves disavowed or rejected. Yet the canonical status of both Wright and White, for a time at least, was contingent on their presence in australian classrooms. In contemporary debates about the teaching of australian literature in schools, we are witnessing the tendency of the educational system to reproduce itself, and dominant cultural groups, by reasserting the value of canonical figures and works. Universities now routinely offer professional courses in creative writing – teaching in these courses is a source of employment for literary writers. In so doing, universities reproduce their own institutional powers of classification and canonisation within the field. thus, tertiary-trained and affiliated literary writers frequently engage with academic theories and knowledge. they may also have career pathways imbricated with the academy. this can be seen as both negative and positive – both evidence of cooption and institutionalisation, and a sign of the democratisation of writing via the mass education system. Yet universities have been and continue to be key avenues for nurturing elite cultural producers, readers and writers who form highly restricted and sophisticated cultures of literary production. Brian Castro, for example, writes brilliant, complex fictions that, one suspects, mostly reach a restricted, theoretically-aware and academically-trained readership. though critically recognised by his literary peers as a major contemporary australian writer, Castro experienced difficulty attracting a publisher for his groundbreaking

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novel Shanghai Dancing (2003).9 It was finally taken on by Giramondo publishing, a university-affiliated, government-funded press associated with Heat magazine, that aspires to ‘build a common ground between the academy and the marketplace; to stimulate exchange between australian writers and readers and their counterparts overseas; and to encourage innovative and adventurous work that might not otherwise find publication because of its subtle commercial appeal’.10 Castro’s postmodern, postcolonial literary practice, though exclusive, is political in its advocacy of literary autonomy as the precondition of worldly engagement. he seeks to disrupt monolingual australian insularity by recovering and reconnecting, through ‘translation’, with a deeper, wider range of transnational cultural inheritances. his insistence on ‘literary quality rather than equality’ is aimed at restoring the radicalising, liberating force of the literary against the narrowly nationalist orientation and conventional aesthetics of contemporary middlebrow writing.11 he is thus writing against the grain of australian novelists like Garner and Winton. Castro’s recent appointment to the University of adelaide’s Chair of Creative Writing is evidence of his significance within the academic enclosure and to a restricted circle of readers. the affiliation of the most highly ‘literary’ of australian writers with the academy has grown alongside and no doubt in response to the democratisation of writing, and the consolidation of an urban, professional middle class for whom the highly literary is perhaps no longer the most privileged conduit of cultural capital. this largely tertiary-educated group, once readers or consumers of the literary, are now increasingly writers, or producers themselves. the market is laden with cultural product while there is a relative dearth of those who wish to invest a great deal of time in reading. as the only one of the writers discussed in my preceding chapters to have tertiary credentials in creative writing,tim Winton stands at the threshold of this shift. his novels orient themselves to a new ‘middlebrow’ readership, to those seeking a quality reading experience but unwilling or unable to invest the time required for more arcane, difficult or

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inaccessible texts.Winton’s fiction embraces a broad readership, offering accessibility and quite immediate reward. Yet it bears the traces of an older literary disposition, referencing its cultural inheritance. Winton, furthermore, adheres to a literary logic, remaining fiercely protective of his autonomy and holding himself apart from literary and academic circles. his reputation for reclusiveness only lends authenticity to his recent activism. So, debates about the decline of the literary are evidence of the very tendency of the literary field, even amid transforming pressures, to reproduce older, inherited dispositions and logics. these atavistic logics, in John Guillory’s terms, stabilise and legitimise otherwise chaotic and unstable structures.12 and a literary logic is still a powerful additive to activism. these case studies show that australian literary activisms have mirrored and, most likely, contributed to the rhythms of the australian electoral cycle, the waxing and waning of various tides of cultural nationalism in the past four decades. In 2008, with the incoming federal Labor Government, a new phase may be underway. these analyses of writers from Judith Wright to tim Winton show that literary writers have played an integral part as cultural changeagents, particularly on the cusp of electoral transitions, whether as figureheads, campaigners, provocateurs or public intellectuals. all of this has underscored the point that the relation between literary field and nation is more resilient than periodic debates about literary decline suggest. While the high literary endeavour of someone like patrick White may have lost its former cultural privilege and may now occupy a niche within a democratically diversifying and globalising cultural field, it does not follow that the power of symbolic capital associated with literary production per se is diminished. Indeed, the political crossings of writers into the public domain, crossings that renew reputations and expand readerships, have as one of their effects the capture and harvesting of a symbolic capital otherwise migrating elsewhere. the volatility of the australian literary field – with its alleged decline only stimulating debate and renewal through public

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engagement – can be seen in the recent example of tasmanian author richard Flanagan’s literary-political interventions. On publication of his political thriller, The Unknown Terrorist (2006), Flanagan participated, as is now routine for authors, in the publicity circuit of media interviews, events and festivals to promote his book. Integral to this publicity is Flanagan’s essay, ‘Writing The Unknown Terrorist’, from which the above epigraph comes, and which is available from both the aBC’s radio National Book Show website and the pan Macmillan-sponsored website (www.theunknownterrorist.com.au). the latter website features a cinematic trailer that anticipates the book’s crossing to film. Indeed, Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studio has reportedly paid ‘a massive sum’ for the rights.13 the conjunctions created between commodification of Flanagan’s book as sensational entertainment and the political polemic it also advertises are uneasy and provocative. Down to the very production values of the book itself as material object – its popular genre formatting of large pages, easy-to-read font, gold embossed dust-jacket lettering and its motif, on cover and front-matter pages, of the silhouetted pole dancer – The Unknown Terrorist presents itself as a ‘trojan horse’ of a book that wages war on australian complacency and materialism. The Unknown Terrorist charts the final four chaotic days of pole dancer Gina Davies, or the Doll, a battler australian and political bystander sold on the myths of a consumer culture. her personal plans are unravelled when her one-night stand with the mysterious tariq implicates her in subsequent terrorist activity. She is hunted not only by the authorities but by an unscrupulous, scaremongering media, which strips her of her identity and inserts her in its web of lies. the downfall of the Doll offers a hyperbolic fable or morality tale of post 9/11 australia in which those who are foolish, unwary or naïve are liable to be crushed by a pitiless, Orwellian system designed to protect and perpetuate the power of big business, state authority and the media. the book is dedicated to David hicks. In ‘Writing The UnknownTerrorist’, Flanagan tells how he immersed himself in the everyday stuff of consumer advertising and Kings

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Cross subculture to construct a ‘mirror to what we had become’.14 In writing a book which, as McCann argues, imitates the popular in order to engage in direct political advocacy, to address the broadest possible australian readership,15 Flanagan only seems to dispense with the ‘literary’. In the novel, high culture is pessimistically negated through its association with Chopin-loving underworld figure Frank Moretti, whose small ‘museum of infamy’, with its souvenirs of genocide, confirmed his belief that ‘the world could be evil as well as beautiful, as though all the beauty he owned needed the shoes and the poison gas and the machete to really shine’.16 Narrative interrogation of cultural values in these terms, however, conveys a seriousness that is typical of the most literary of projects, including patrick White’s own.17 Flanagan’s imitation of the popular in pursuit of political or didactic purposes, however, has elicited mixed responses. For some readers, The Unknown Terrorist is too bluntly didactic and exaggerated, its tone too negative. the narrative does circulate a residually modernist representation of mass consumer culture as debased and meaningless and of ordinary people as captive drones. It makes an ostentatious departure from Flanagan’s earlier prize-winning literary novels Death of a River Guide (1994), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) and Gould’s Book of Fish (2001). While international reviews of The Unknown Terrorist have largely been positive, particularly in the US, the australian reception has been more uneasy. One criticism, by Marr among others, concerns the ‘implausibility’ of the characters and events. as Flanagan pointed out, however, reality soon proved much stranger than fiction, with the apprehension and detention in 2007, under new anti-terrorism laws, of Mohammed haneef, an Indianborn doctor resident in australia on a temporary skilled worker’s visa.18 Just as in The Unknown Terrorist, an individual was spectacularly caught up in escalating events, although media reportage ultimately proved less Orwellian and more open to counter-discourse and questioning than represented in his novel. More troubling to some of these readers, perhaps, was a literary writer’s exploitation

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of the thriller formula at its most voyeuristic. this raised questions of authenticity – was Flanagan’s rejection of ‘art’ for the ‘popular’ a betrayal? Does The Unknown Terrorist undermine the authenticity of his previous works? perhaps this is what Marr meant when he said, of Gould’s Book of Fish, ‘I never believed a word of it’.19 One of the more problematic aspects of The Unknown Terrorist is its oddly two-dimensional rendering of its central character, the Doll. Connected with this is a strange vacuity, or lack of conviction, in the narrative’s stated articulation of the importance of ‘love’. the framing statement – ‘Love is never enough, but it is all we have’20 – is curiously opaque, a syrupy non-sequitur to the main events of the novel. If we think of the Doll’s situation, ‘love’ refers us immediately to the carnal abandon of her night with tariq, depicted graphically, almost brutally. Bordering on masculinist voyeurism, this episode is certainly written with an unflinching quality, a frank intensity pitched towards the expression of love as desire to break through the Doll’s self-objectification. even so, the Doll’s objectification – and the way the novel works with this process – seems strongly implicated in modernist literary values in relation to which mass culture has traditionally been devalued through association with the feminine.21 the rhetoric about ‘love’ – the commodified attribute that is meant to be the novel’s ground of resistance to commodification – becomes a vehicle for authorial concerns about the value of his ‘art’. So the pole dancer, a woman trapped in an inauthentic identity corresponds to, and rehearses the anxieties of, the literary writer who must masquerade as popular writer. Flanagan’s ‘trojan horse’, therefore, distinguishes itself from the popular fiction it imitates. representing Flanagan’s tactical foray into the popular fiction market, the novel is marked by and returns to the category of the literary, through its political intent. this dynamic ultimately distances the novel from the category of the popular, a category that it does not embrace, but that it otherwise (and perhaps unconvincingly) believes itself to know. and there is one more fascinating layer to this pattern of relations

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between author and character, a pattern suggestive of contradictions experienced by the writer in his crossings between literary and broader public domains. the theft of the Doll’s identity (albeit one that is already dubious and shifting) parallels Flanagan’s account of what drove him to write this particular novel: the theft of his power to defend himself against media lies and government spin after his article about logging in tasmania was published in the Age: For many, the lies of others were to become their truth about me . . . I felt something far worse than humiliation, a sense that something deep within me had been taken away.22

With its strongly ambivalent negotiation of literary and popular genres, The Unknown Terrorist is unlikely to be deemed a canonical australian literary work any time soon. to date, though long-listed for the Miles Franklin and the International IMpaC Dublin Literary awards,23 the book has not won any literary prizes. Nor does it seem likely that this would worry or surprise Flanagan himself. his stated intention, after all, was to reach a broader, non-literary readership. Flanagan was joined by andrew McGahan and Linda Jaivin, who also published popular genre fiction on topical or polemical matters in 2006. McGahan’s Underground is not the author’s first foray into genre fiction, but like Flanagan’s book declares the political value of the popular.24 Jaivin, on the other hand, is a writer who is clearly less agonised about negotiating the boundary between the literary and the popular. her novel, The Infernal Optimist, with its ali-G-style protagonist Zeki togan – small-time criminal and australian ‘Candide’ figure – opens a freshly humanising window on the grim world of refugees and asylum seekers languishing in detention centres.25 Jaivin herself has been a vocal critic on this issue and a campaigner for refugee rights.26 Flanagan, too, has been consistent, forthright and outspoken in expressing frustration and anger at the ‘dirty, dead decade’ of australian culture under the howard Government (the phrase comes

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from his novel and mutates as a sound bite in various authorial interviews and non-fictional writings).27 he mourns the loss, in this period, of the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘unique’ australia he had known: ‘our land, our black identity, our mongrel society, our strong democratic impulses’.28 Flanagan’s most spectacular impact has surely been his exposé of state government complicity in old growth logging in tasmania. his essay, ‘Out of Control:the tragedy of tasmania’s Forests’, was published in the Monthly in May 2007. a relatively new organ of public intellectual debate (since mid-2005), the Monthly quickly acquired a reputation for setting the national agenda. It was the Monthly that, in late 2006, published Kevin rudd’s essays, ‘Faith in politics’ (October) and ‘howard’s Brutopia’ (November), leadership manifestos that created impetus for his election as Opposition leader and thence the Labor victory in the November 2007 federal election. Similarly, influential Sydney businessman Geoffrey Cousins, inspired by Flanagan’s Monthly article, ran a high-profile media campaign in the same election to unseat federal environment Minister Malcolm turnbull over his party-line support for Gunns’ proposed pulp mill in tasmania.29 though turnbull retained his seat, the campaign indicated a split in the Liberal party constituency over issues that had formerly split the Labor voter – global warming, the environment, refugees and reconciliation. . . . the rape of tasmania will continue until one day, like so much else that was precious, its great forests will belong only to myth. tasmanians will be condemned to endure the final humiliation: bearing dumb witness to the great lie that delivers wealth to a handful elsewhere, poverty to many of them, and death to their future as the last of these extraordinary places is sacrificed to the woodchippers’ greed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them but to the world, forever. and in a world where it seems everything can be bought, all that will remain are ghosts briefly mocking memory: a ream of copying paper in a Japanese office and a man fern in an english garden. and then they too will be gone.30

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these concluding paragraphs from Flanagan’s Monthly essay echo the melancholy anger that permeates The Unknown Terrorist. Converging with the author’s public campaigning and non-fictional writings, Flanagan’s novel, ironically enough, might well be considered a very striking example of the impassioned, polemical response to howard’s australia for which David Marr had called, in 2003, when he invoked White’s ‘prodigal Son’ protest against the ‘march of material ugliness’ and the ‘Great australian emptiness’. Flanagan’s image of that last, lonely ‘man fern in an english garden’ also brings us full circle to Judith Wright’s inherited hills, now denuded, and her thoughts standing like trees. the context within which australian writers now engage, whether as intellectuals or activists, has certainly changed in the decades since Wright embarked on her activist career. Yet the cultural logic and national orientation of australian writers’ negotiations of art, public life and activism have remained surprisingly continuous. Nowhere have the tensions between art and activism been more profoundly articulated than in Wright’s 1971 poem, dedicated to Jack McKinney, by then her late husband: For a Birthday31 (to J. p. McK.) Bind—that word was spoken, and there was I bound. the rope can no more be broken that then wrapped me round. Live, I was commanded. O life, your touch was strange. there the flesh was founded that bodies my change.

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act—my blood told me. and so time began; time, that now has filled me with the whole world of man. Love, from its unknown centre, spins a silence like thought; and deep there as the heart can enter my wholeness I sought. Decay; upon my body that summons was served; and now the flesh speaks sadly, how can we be saved? Build, though the world be falling, that crystal, your truth. Its eight sides shall be your dwelling though time take your breath.

even amid their failures and inadequacies, in the contingent, ephemeral and unfolding present, dissenting writers – who may not be purely altruistic, who may be caught in the contradictory nets of representation, yet who struggle to free themselves, momentarily, from desires for recognition or from the dictates of the market – such writers may perhaps begin some small, unexpected and ultimately momentous thing. as Flanagan puts it – ‘to write is to point, and not name, to honour with words all that cannot be contained within them.’32 and if words cannot ever contain reality, sometimes words do more than they say. From the interaction between words and the world, a difference can be made.

A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

t

his book has been longer in the writing than I care to remember. Its errors and shortcomings are entirely my own. what strengths it possesses are due to the advice and support I’ve received from a great many people. I gratefully acknowledge the Australian Research council for its award of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2001, which I held at the University of sydney until late 2002.the Fellowship gave me the time to undertake the reading and research required for this project. I also thank the University of sydney, and in particular my esteemed colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and the school of letters, Art and media, who supported me at various crucial intervals with funding and other resources that helped me to keep working on the project alongside my teaching commitments. For their rigorous and capable work as research assistants at various times, I thank Julieanne lamond, elizabeth wulff and Bronwyn lovell. I also thank the staff at Fisher library, in the University of sydney, for their able assistance, and staff in the manuscript Room of the national library of Australia, who provided valuable advice and assistance in accessing Judith wright’s papers. I am very appreciative of staff at the University of Queensland Press who showed enthusiasm for and confidence in my book and

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gave high quality advice during its production. In particular I thank madonna duffy for her support, wendy sanderson for her unfailingly excellent guidance as editor, sybil kesteven for her fantastic job as copyeditor and ellie exarchos for the book’s beautiful cover design. I also acknowledge and thank the Australian Academy of Humanities for providing a grant to support the publication of this book. there are many individuals who gave generously of their time and thoughts in response to successive drafts. For their enduring support and excellent feedback, I owe a considerable debt to all the members of my family (most especially to monique and Barbara Rooney as well as to maurice, emma and Bernard Rooney). Among my friends and colleagues, I owe much to elizabeth webby (for her generous feedback and endless encouragement), Valerie kerruish (for her wonderful, challenging responses for many years), leigh dale (of the fearless and kind red pen) and susan thomas (who lifted my spirits). I also thank katherine Bode and simon during for their incisive comments on the final manuscript. I’m grateful to many colleagues and friends who read and commented on evolving work-in-progress and draft chapters, including elizabeth mcmahon, Robert dixon, Penny Van toorn, Bruce gardiner, sean scalmer, susan sheridan, susan lever and the late and much missed noel Rowe. I received much appreciated advice on various matters germane to the project from the following people: meredith mckinney, kathy Bowrey, kate sexton, noelene Pullen, katharine thomson and david marr. I also thank those colleagues, the editors of journals and book collections, who published papers from my work-in-progress and/or provided feedback along the way: especially leigh dale, lyn mccredden, nicholas Birns, Richard nile, dawn Bennett, nathan Hollier, ned curthoys, debjani ganguly and monique Rooney. I sincerely apologise for any omissions. this book draws what vitality it has from the intellectual and creative work of literary writers themselves, and I offer them my sincere

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gratitude. I hope my book will serve to renew readers’ interest in the works of all the Australian writers I discuss, and in the works of many other authors besides. In quoting from literary works, I have adhered to standard industry practice by confining myself to short quotations essential to the task of criticism and review. In a few necessary cases I have sought specific permission to quote: from works by Indigenous writers, from unpublished manuscripts and when reproducing full-length poems. In light of Indigenous cultural protocols of the Australia council, I sought permission to quote from several Indigenous works. I thank melissa lucashenko for her kind consent to quote from her poem, ‘let’s get It Right (with apologies to wH Auden)’. I also thank denis walker for his kind consent to quote from the poems written by his mother, oodgeroo of the tribe noonuccal. I also thank John wiley and sons for permission to quote from kath walker, My People (milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1970). For their advice and help in making contact with Indigenous copyright owners, I thank sam watson, Anita Heiss, graham king and margaret Rooney. For permission to quote from the unpublished manuscripts of Judith wright held in the national library of Australia, I thank meredith mckinney. I have also reproduced in full several poems by Judith wright and I thank both tom thompson of ett Imprints, and Harpercollins, for their permission to do so. last but not least I am deeply grateful to my family, and especially to my nearest and dearest, John, Robin and Jeremy, whose love and support mean everything to me.

endnotes

Introduction 1. the transcript of marr’s talk, ‘the Role of the writer in John Howard’s Australia’, can be found at ABc Radio national’s Books and writing website, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s823973.htm, accessed 30 April 2008. 2. marr’s analysis was not entirely new – Anne summers, for example, several years earlier highlighted changes in the post-1970s role and status of Australian writers, in ‘the writer Vanishes’, Australian Society of Authors, 32, 2000: 17. 3. this is stephen matchett’s phrase, ‘literati lose the plot’, Australian, 5 February 2005 (Review section). dow Jones & Reuters. Factiva. Fisher library, University of sydney, http://global.factiva.com, accessed 16 may 2008. 4. see Amanda wise’s fascinating ethnographic research capturing some of these everyday, local intercultural processes in the sydney suburb of Ashfield – ‘Hope and Belonging in a multicultural suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26(1–2), 2005: 171–186. 5. Information provided by noelene Pullen, librarian, castle Hill library, and member of the Hills district Historical society, in a conversation on 24 may 2006: the local library holds ephemera from dogwoods that testifies to these shopping patterns. 6. see keith windschuttle, ‘Vilifying Australia: the perverse ideology of our adversary culture’, the 2005 earle Page memorial oration, delivered at Parliament House, sydney, on 22 June 2005, published in Quadrant, september 2005, available from keith windschuttle’s website, the sydney line, http:// www.sydneyline.com/Vilifying%20Australia.htm, accessed 19 march 2008. 7. see Brian musgrove’s analysis of the david williamson ‘cruise ship Australia’ controversy: ‘david williamson in the dock’, Overland 182, 2006: 13–19. 8. david marr indicated to me his dislike of the label ‘culture wars’. I use the

Endnotes

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

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phrase here not to signify my own approval of it, but because it is the label most frequently used by media commentators to refer to the relevant debates of the past decade or so (personal conversation with david marr on 22 June 2006). see windschuttle, ‘Vilifying Australia’. simon during, Patrick White, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1996. key works by Bourdieu that inform the arguments made in this book include Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Richard nice, trans., london: Routledge, 1984); The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Randal Johnson, ed., cambridge, Uk: Polity Press, 1993); and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (susan emanuel, trans., cambridge, Uk: Polity Press, 1996). John guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, chicago: University of chicago Press, 1993, pp. 55–60. margaret simons, ‘ties that Bind’, Griffith Review 8, 2005: 13–36. see, for example, mark latham, From the suburbs: building a nation from our neighbourhoods, Annandale, nsw: Pluto, 2003, esp. pp. 20–24. see, for example, dennis Altman’s account of whitlam-era and post whitlamera activism, in Rehearsals for Change: Politics and Culture in Australia, Perth: curtin University of technology, API network, 1997. see Rosemary neill’s essay, ‘who is killing the great Books of Australia?’, Weekend Australian 18–19 march 2006: Review pp. 4–6; also Andrew mccann, ‘How to fuck a tuscan garden’, Overland 177, 2004: 22–24, reprinted as ‘the Friction of Fiction’, Australian, 22 January 2005 (Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008). others who have intervened in this debate, from a variety of standpoints, include louise Adler, Brian castro, michael duffy, malcolm knox, stephen matchett, Frank moorhouse, Jenny tabakoff and susan wyndham. ken gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, london and new York: Routledge, 2004, p. 22. this might seem to imply that popular writers do seek to ‘gratify’ such readerly expectations and never pursue creative integrity. such a generalisation seems highly questionable. Bourdieu’s models of cultural production may apply in a French context, or at a structural level, but, as John Frow’s work, among others, shows, Bourdieu does not take into account the heterogeneity, flux and overlapping realms of cultural production, especially in the wake of cultural systems affected by globalisation and postmodernity: see especially John Frow, Cultural studies and cultural value, oxford: clarendon Press, 1995, esp. pp. 85–86. see david carter’s essay, ‘Public Intellectuals, Book culture and civil society’, Australian Humanities Review (december 2001) available from http:// www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-december-2001/ carter2.html, accessed 16 June 2008. A reworked version of this essay introduces his edited anthology, The Ideas Market: An alternative take on Australia’s intellectual life, carlton,Vic: melbourne University Press, 2004.

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20. louise Adler, ‘Foreword’, in Authors Take Sides: Iraq and the Gulf War, J moorcroft wilson and c woolf (eds), carlton, Vic: melbourne University Press, 2004. 21. louise Adler, ‘open books, closed minds’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18–19 december 2004, spectrum, p. 9 (Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008) – an edited version of her speech at the 2004 melbourne writers’ Festival. 22. Ivor Indyk, ‘the strange Allure of eucalyptus’, Inaugural lecture, whitlam chair in writing and society at the University of western sydney, presented at government House, sydney, on 29 may 2005. excerpt posted on the whitlam Institute website, University of western sydney, http://www. whitlam.org/its_time/25/ivor.html, accessed 2 may 2006. 23. see, for example, Richard nile, The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2002 and Hilary mcPhee, Other P eople’s Words, sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 2001. 24. Frank moorhouse, ‘so what the hell has happened to Australian writing?’, Weekend Australian, 20–21 may 2006, Review, pp. 8–9; and Anne summers, ‘the writer Vanishes,’ Australian Author, november 2000: 16–21. 25. more than a few articles about Bookscan have been published in the Australian’s Review section: for example, Rosemary neill’s cover-story interview with Bookscan’s chief of staff, michael webster was headlined as ‘Is this the most feared man in Australian literature?’ Weekend Australian, 22–23 July 2006, Review pp. 4–5. 26. comments were made to this effect by Hilary mcPhee in an interview with Ramona koval, ‘Hilary mcPhee on the book industry blame game’, on ABc Radio national’s The Book Show, broadcast on 26 July 2006. transcript available from ABc online, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/ stories/2006/1697344.htm, accessed 16 June 2008. 27. charles kurzman and lynn owens identify distinct waves of scholarly debate about ‘intellectuals’ between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, observing the development of ‘a new momentum in the last years of the twentieth century’ in the UsA, the Uk and elsewhere, in the context of ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘culture wars’ movements: ‘the sociology of Intellectuals’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 2002: 73. 28. the interviews were later published in book form: Robert dessaix (ed.), Speaking Their Minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia. sydney: ABc Books, 1998. 29. mark davis discusses the way dessaix’s interview with marcia langton, though sympathetic, did not invite comment on any other than ‘Aboriginal’ matters – see Gangland: cultural elites and the new generationalism, st leonards, nsw: Allen & Unwin, 1997, pp. 310–311. david carter criticises dessaix’s interview list for its traditional and exclusively ‘literary’ imaginary: see carter’s ‘the conscience Industry: the Rise and Rise of the Public Intellectual’, in david carter (ed.), The Ideas Market, carlton, Vic: melbourne University Press, 2004, pp. 29–30. 30. For example, mark davis has discussed the split, within Australian

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

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progressive culture, between broadly liberal humanist and more radical, critical paradigms, and of the relative incapacity of critical humanities academics, compared with liberals, to mount an effective public critique of neo-conservatism. It seems striking, however, and for example, that davis cites so very few women in his otherwise stimulating discussion of key contributors: ‘the clash of Paradigms: Australian literary theory after liberalism’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL), 7, 2007: 7–31. see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism [1983]. london:Verso, 1991, pp. 5–7. the history wars are part of this picture, as is a more recent spat over whose role it should be to present this history: historians or novelists. this particular debate was opened by historian mark mckenna who took exception to kate grenville’s claims about her novel, The Secret River (2005): see mark mckenna, ‘writing the Past’, Australian Financial Review, 16 december 2005. Review, p. 1. Fairfax digital. http://www.fairfax.com.au/index.ac, accessed 21 december 2005. see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1989]. great Britain: Polity, 1992, esp. chapter 7. edward said, Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures, london: Vintage, 1993, p. xiv. ‘J’accuse: the dreyfus Affair’, an exhibition marking the centenary of the dreyfus case held at the Australian Jewish museum in melbourne, included information about the enormous Australian publicity about and public response to the dreyfus case as it unfolded. For details, see ‘Alfred dreyfus and the war on terror’, transcript of discussion with curator deb Rechter, broadcast on ABc Radio national’s Law Report, on 11 April 2006, available from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2006/1612922.htm#, accessed 30 April 2008. Fiona mcFarlane, ‘williamson on writing’, State of the Arts (ejournal), 20 may 2002, available from http://www.stateart.com.au/sota/performing/default. asp?fid=1016, accessed 30 April 2008. david williamson’s ‘cruise ship Australia’ was the 16th sir Rupert Hamer lecture, at swinburne University, melbourne, on 8 september 2005, and subsequently published in the Bulletin 123(42): 18 october 2005. Factiva. com, accessed 16 June 2008. Brian musgrove, ‘david williamson in the dock’, Overland, 182, 2006: 13–19. ‘titanic conceit’, lead editorial, Australian, 19 october 2005, p. 15. Factiva. com, accessed 16 June 2008. the echo is of the event known as ‘children overboard Affair’, in which, during the heated 2001 election campaign, the Australian government wrongly alleged that asylum seekers, whose boat had been intercepted by the Australian navy, had thrown their children overboard. For a news report at the time and interviews with ministers concerned, see ‘credibility

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41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

Endnotes overboard’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 november 2001. Fairfax digital, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/10/1020914043918.html, accessed 16 June 2008. About six months after williamson delivered this 2005 speech, the drugging, abuse and death of passenger dianne Brimble became a major media story, intensifying public debate about the potentially dark side of the cruise industry. Although Brimble’s death occurred in 2002, the scandal did not become major news until evidence was given at the inquest in march 2006. see story by geesche Jacobsen, ‘A cheery send-off: hours later she was dead’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 march 2006. Fairfax digital, http:// www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-cheery-sendoff-hours-later-she-wasdead/2006/03/10/1141701698613.html, accessed 16 June 2008. Richard eckersley, from the AnU national centre for epidemiology and Population Health, has widely published his research highlighting the personal discontent accompanying prevailing ideologies of economic development. see, for example, Richard eckersley, Well & good: how we feel & why it matters, melbourne: text Publishing, 2004. It is noteworthy that in a subsequently published rejoinder williamson stepped back from the full brunt of his original speech. characterising ‘mcmansion man’, the nemesis of ‘latte man’, as the mythic ideal of his attackers, he went on to observe that ‘people in the suburbs are as diverse and multifaceted as anywhere else’ – see williamson, ‘culture, yes, but please, not in their backyards’, Australian, 23 February 2006. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, (susan emanuel, trans., cambridge, Uk: Polity, 1996, esp. p. 116). see Bourdieu’s ‘Postscript: For a corporatism of the Universal’, the conclusion to his study, The Rules of Art, pp. 339–348. I find susan lever persuasive when she reminds us, in her ‘Ratbag writers and cranky critics: In their Praise’ (JASAL 4, 2005: 21), ‘of the peculiar responsibilities critics have to respond in a human, understanding way to the writers living amongst us – even when they seem blind to the immediate political dangers of what they write’. Pascale casanova, The World Republic of Letters, (mB deBevoise, trans., cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 41). this is not to imply that there was no literary activism prior to the 1960s period in Australia. Indeed this discussion takes up where other studies have left off – see, for example, John mclaren, Writing in Hope and Fear: Literature as Politics in Postwar Australia, cambridge, Uk: cambridge University Press, 1996; and susan mckernan, A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years After the War, sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. see, among many other examples, Adam shoemaker, Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1989; and Anita Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature, canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 2003.

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Chapter 1 1. speech by senator michael Forshaw, Adjournment: wright, ms Judith. 27 June 2000, senate Hansard, Parliament of Australia. Available from ParlInfoweb, http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb//view_document.aspx? tABle=HAnsARds&Id=2041889, accessed 23 June 2008. 2. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsay discussed the dearth of attention paid by parliamentarians to the passing of both Judith wright and, not long after, Ad Hope, in ‘Universal darkness Buries All’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July 2000); after Bradman’s death, leaders of both parties and numerous others made lengthy speeches in support of a motion of condolence, as recorded in Hansard, House of Representatives, Parliament of Australia, 27 February 2001. 3. see homepage of senator michael Forshaw at http://www.michaelforshaw. com/bio.aspx, accessed 16 June 2008. 4. Richard glover, ‘world without words’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 26 June 1993, pp. 34–37 and 39–41; letters from readers of glover’s interview with wright are held in national library of Australia: Judith wright Papers, ms 5781, Box 73 Folder 531. 5. Patrick white’s novel Voss (1957) is undoubtedly the literary work that has done most to articulate and intensify the cultural significance of this theme. one of the earliest (cultural-nationalist) studies to disseminate the theme was geoffrey serle’s well-known book, From the Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972, melbourne: Heinemann, 1973. 6. Philip mead, ‘two Fires: Poetry and local government’, Overland 182, 2006: 32. see also such works as Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership (oakleigh,Vic: cambridge University Press, 2000) and deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a wild country: ethics for decolonisation (sydney: University of new south wales Press, 2004) among others. see also mead’s book, Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (Australian scholarly Publishing, forthcoming 2008), where he endeavours to read some of the relations in wright’s work ‘between poetic production, poetic “life” and socio-political activism’. 7. Insufficient critical attention to wright’s poetry is also the gist of Peter Holbrook’s criticism of Brady’s biography: ‘on such artistic issues, though, this authorised biography won’t help. It tiptoes around its subject like a grammarschool history. the poetry as poetry is barely discussed’ – ‘tiptoeing around wright’, Weekend Australian, 7 march 1998, Review, p. 26. 8. see Raymond williams, Marxism and Literature, oxford: oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 128–135. 9. susan sheridan has pointed out that while wright’s literary authority and recognition surpassed that of her peers, it would not be correct to see her as a solitary woman writer: sheridan argues that she belongs to a cohort of women writers who constitute a ‘lost generation’ whose perspectives have not been adequately mapped.these writers include thea Astley, nancy cato, Rosemary dobson, dorothy green, dorothy Hewett, nancy keesing, Ruth

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Endnotes Park and kylie tennant, among others: ‘generations lost and found: reading women writers together’, keynote Address, manifesting literary Feminisms, conference convened by Ann Vickery and margaret Henderson, women’s studies, monash University, city campus, melbourne, 13–14 december, 2007. Judith wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, Pymble, sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, p. 20. All citations of wright’s poetry refer to this edition. the publication dates given, in parenthesis, for individual poems mentioned or discussed in this book refer to the date of first publication, according to information in the Austlit database: Austlit: the Australian literature Resource. Accessed via Fisher library, University of sydney, http://www.austlit.edu.au douglas stewart, ‘Judith wright: Poet of Australia’, Sunday Australian, 25 April 1971, p. 18. Jennifer strauss also notes the prescriptively masculinist terms of wright’s early reception (Jennifer strauss, Judith Wright, oxford Australian writers series, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1995, p. 13). wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 27. Judith wright, ‘Reading and nationalism’, in Going on Talking, springwood, nsw: Butterfly Books, 1992, p. 46. Judith wright, Going on Talking, p. 47. see leigh dale, The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities (canberra: Association for the study of Australian literature, 1997) for an extensive study of the institutionalisation of Australian literature and the provenance and dissemination of its interpretative frameworks through university english departments from the mid-nineteenth through to the late twentieth centuries. In his study, The Rules of Art, Bourdieu theorises how reproduction of art, and of the literary field occurs. His model suggests that this reproduction (through inheritance or intergenerational transmission) occurs through the field’s doxa of ‘heterodoxy’ – that is, through resistance and refusal. He develops his case in structural terms, but supports it by executing a reading of Flaubert’s The Sentimental Education. For Bourdieu, Flaubert’s novel, with its lucidity, is akin to a sociological study of France’s literary field at the time of writing, and intervenes itself into that mapped space of positions. Its protagonist’s choice represents a refusal of his social destiny, and this parallels Flaubert’s double refusal of French bourgeois and political schools of literature: see especially pp. 26–28 and 94–112. Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright, sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998, p. 209. strauss, Judith Wright, p. 13. Brady alludes to wright’s uncomfortable encounter in 1939 with the son of a local new england family who, it is implied, may have been considered by her family as a suitable match (South of My Days, p. 80). It is a further irony that the property, inherited by her brother david wright, was eventually lost to the family altogether due to financial miscalculation and over-borrowing – as

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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documented in ‘wright stuff ’, an episode of the television series Dynasties, broadcast on ABc television in 2002, directed by stephen Ramsey and tim clark and available on video (sydney: Australian Broadcasting corporation, 2004). In Brady’s account, wright paid regular visits to gilmore in sydney in the late 1930s, apparently admired gilmore’s stories of pioneering days rather than her poetry, and shared her feelings for Aboriginal people and the land (South of My Days, p. 74). Judith wright, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry [1965], Perth: curtin University of technology, API network, 2004, p. 7. Judith wright, Preoccupations, p. 16. see tom griffiths’ analysis of the relation between and significance of these works, in ‘truth and fiction: Judith wright as historian’, Australian Book Review, August 2006, pp. 25–30; wright consulted with Henry Reynolds, among others, during her drafting of the book. Vincent Buckley, Essays in Poetry: Mainly Australian, carlton,Vic: melbourne University Press, 1957, pp. 174–175. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 86. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 139. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 156. this is from Judith’s letter to kathleen mcArthur, dated 9 June 1953; the excerpt was recorded by wright herself in her summary of key points in the letters as preparation for her memoir ms Acc 05/81, Unprocessed materials, Box 78 Folder 68, accessed in march 2006. Patrick white, Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait, london: Penguin Books, 198, p. 226. Veronica Brady cites new legislation that made no-fault divorce possible and a financial windfall as factors that explain their decision to marry at this point: Brady, South of My Days, p. 209. kathleen mcArthur, ‘A tribute to Judith wright’, ms Acc 05/81, Unprocessed materials, Box 78 Folder 69, accessed in march 2006. kathleen mcArthur, ‘A tribute to Judith wright’, ms Acc 05/81, Unprocessed materials, Box 78 Folder 69, accessed in march 2006. Judith wright, The Coral Battleground, west melbourne, Vic: thomas nelson, 1977, p. 99. see Philip mead, Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry, Australian scholarly Publishing, forthcoming in 2008. see, for example, wright’s letter to Patrick white (8 march 1975), enlisting his support against mining on Fraser Island, in which she discusses the whitlam government’s cooperation with the mining company and indicates that she is ‘writing to gough in protest’ – see With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, Patricia clarke and meredith mckinney (eds), canberra: national library of Australia, 2006, p. 267. Jennifer Jones, ‘why weren’t we listening?’, Overland 171, 2003: 44. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 317.

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39. tim Bonyhady, ‘the Fine Art of Activism’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2000, spectrum, p. 4. 40. meredith mckinney, ‘Introduction’, With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, p. xiii. 41. Ad Hope, Judith Wright, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1975, p. 6. 42. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 343. 43. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 320. 44. see Robert Adamson, ‘Alive and well’, Australian, 7 July 1973, Books, p. 20; chris wallace-crabbe, ‘A sense of land and region’, Age, 3 April 1971, p. 13; Robert gray, ‘Poet in Politics’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 1972, weekend magazine and Book Reviews, p. 19; John tranter, ‘through “european” eyes’, Weekend Australian, 6–7 August 1977, p. 13. 45. Judith wright, Going on Talking, p. 23. 46. Veronica Brady, South of My Days, p. 286. 47. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 406. 48. katie Holmes has discussed the ways in which wright’s poems of Phantom Dwelling respond to the localised environment of her bushland home, the ‘edge’, at mongarlowe, just as earlier poems reflect the more tropical surrounds at mount tamborine: ‘gardening at the “edge”: Judith wright’s desert garden, mongarlowe, new south wales’, Australian Humanities Review, 36, 2005, Australian Humanities Review, http://www. australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-July-2005/08Holmes.html, accessed 16 June 2008. 49 wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 417. 50. ‘the writer and the crisis’ (1952). this essay, reprinted in Judith wright, Because I was invited (oxford: oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 165–179), was originally published in two parts in successive issues of Language: A Literary Journal, 1(1), April–may, 1952: 4–7; and 1(2), June–July, 1952: 2–4. 51. wright, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 413. 52. wright, ‘Patterns’, in Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 426. 53. Philip mead, ‘ten of the Best: some Recent Australian Poetry’, Island Magazine, 29, 1986–7: 35. 54. this translation of the passage from matsuo Bashō’s ‘genjū-an no ki (the Hut of the Phantom dwelling)’ can be found at http://www.geocities.com/ tokyo/Island/5022/hut.html, accessed 16 June 2008. Another translation of this same paragraph, from ‘genjū-an no ki’ (‘An essay on the Unreal dwelling’) can be found in makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, new York: twayne Publishers, 1970, pp. 120–121. Chapter 2 1. slavoj Žižek, ‘welcome to the desert of the Real’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(2), 2002: 387. see also Žižek’s, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, london:Verso,2 002. 2. Patrick white, The Solid Mandala [1966], london: Penguin Books, 1969, p. 302.

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3. Alice cook and gwyn kirk, Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions From the Women’s Peace Movement, london: Pluto Press, 1983, p. 7. 4. Jonathan schell, The Fate of the Earth, london: cape, 1982; Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, london: Bloomsbury, 1980; Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows, Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin, 1982; The Day After (director: nicholas meyer), American Broadcasting company, 1983. the early 1980s saw a surge in scientific and popular discussion of nuclear war, with public leadership by high profile scientists like Paul ehrlich and carl sagan – see Paul R ehrlich et al., The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War, london: sidgwick & Jackson, 1984. 5. Patrick white, ‘And if a Button is Pressed’ (1981), Patrick White Speaks, sydney: Primavera, 1989, p. 99. 6. letter from Judith wright to meredith mckinney, 29 october 1981, in Judith wright Papers nlA ms 5781 (in Unprocessed materials, Box msAcc 05/48 and 05/81, Box 2/7 Folder marked ‘correspondence’). 7. letter from Judith wright to meredith mckinney, 29 october 1981. 8. For details about the anti-conscription petition, see marr, Patrick White: A Life, london: Jonathan cape, 1991, pp. 492–494; regarding white’s support for Joern Utzon, see information listed on the sydney opera House website (available at http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/about/the_architect. aspx, accessed 31 march 2008) and story about Harry seidler by Joe Rolio, ‘deconstructing Harry’, Bulletin, 18 June 2003. Factiva database, accessed 16 June 2008. For white’s letter to the editor, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 october 1946, see Patrick white, Patrick White: Letters, david marr (ed.), milsons Point, nsw: Random House, 1994, p. 67. 9. while this view conforms to white’s own account in Flaws in the Glass ([1981], london: Penguin Books, 1983, pp. 221–227) it contradicts information provided in david marr’s biography concerning white’s much earlier activist outings: for example, on 9 december 1969 white risked arrest by joining forty-four other ‘writers, actors, politicians and academics’ in chifley square to make an illegal call to young men not to register for conscription – white was photographed signing various documents, including a statement of defiance of the national service Act; no-one was arrested however (marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 493). 10. tim Bonyhady, ‘the Fine Art of Activism’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2000, spectrum, p. 4. 11. this detail about dorothy green’s blurb can be found in Brian Hubber and Vivian smith, Patrick White: A Bibliography, Auburn, Vic: Quiddlers, 2004, p. 240. 12. tim winton,‘Foreign Body’ – winton’s review of Patrick White: Letters – published in London Review of Books, 22 June 1995: 18–19. 13. see, for example, Helen garner’s review of marr’s biography – ‘Patrick white: the Artist as Holy monster’, in True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction, melbourne: text Publishing, 1996, pp. 103–108. 14. ‘titanic conceit’, lead editorial, Australian, 19 october 2005.

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15. Jack Beasley, ‘the great Hatred: Patrick white as novelist’, Realist Writer, 9, 1962: 11. Beasley also cites the Times Literary Supplement (15 december 1961, pp. 889–891) review that criticised white for his ‘patrician’ values: ‘his sympathy is occluded for the middling damned, though not his understanding’ (p. 891). see also Judah waten, ‘Australian literature in 1962’, Realist Writer, 12, 1963: 26–28; reprinted in delys Bird et al. (eds), Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950–2000, st lucia Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 56–58. 16. For further evidence of divided opinion about whether white’s aesthetic could be considered realist or not, and the way that ‘realism’ itself was being redefined, see Jd Blake’s untitled comment in Overland 25, 1962: 34–36. the politics and definition of realism have long been the subject of dispute, and a vast literature has grown around it. these debates are central to Raymond williams’ body of work, which grappled – in advance of revisions of marxism stimulated by the new left – with realism and its evolving forms and political meanings. see, for example, Raymond williams, Marxism and Literature, oxford: oxford University Press, 1977, and Culture, london: Fontana, 1980. 17. simon during, Patrick White, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1996. 18. see especially during’s incisive discussion of the leverage of international publishing and its impact on reputation in white’s evolving career, Patrick White, pp. 1–14. 19. Pascale casanova, The World Republic of Letters, (mB deBevoise, trans., cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 2004, esp. pp. 108–110). 20. Peter craven, ‘whitewash and cultural cringe return’, Australian, 6 march 1996, p. 27; see also John stuart leonard’s essay on the controversy: ‘craven on during, during on white’, Meanjin, 55(2), 1996: 267–275; and John Frow’s defence of during’s book: ‘over white’s dead Body’, Age, 30 march 1996, p. 8. 21. witness recurring debates and minor media events in the broadsheet press that work to revive and renew Patrick white’s reputation and with it the currency if not the prestige of the Australian literary field. the most recent has been the hoax in which under the name of ‘wraith Picket’ (anagram of ‘Patrick white’) the Australian newspaper submitted to various Australian publishers (with minor edits to character names) a chapter of The Eye of the Storm. the manuscript was rejected by every publisher. the hoax was then revealed by the newspaper: see Jennifer sexton, ‘Publishers reject nobel Prize writing’, Australian, 15 July 2006, p. 1, commentary by Peter craven, ‘How could our literary world be so stupid?’, Australian, 20 July 2006, p. 12, and david malouf ’s essay in the following year, ‘Patrick white Reappraised’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 January 2007 (available from tls online, http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,25338-2529485,00.html). other signs of media-cultural sphere revival of the public Patrick white are the ‘why Bother with Patrick white’ website, a collaborative venture between scholars, the Australian Broadcasting commission and a corporate entity, cinemedia

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25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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(see http://arts.abc.net.au/white/). stimulated by the revelation in 2006 of the national library of Australia’s acquisition from white’s literary executor, Barbara mobbs, of a significant collection of unpublished white manuscripts and materials (see david marr, ‘white’s literary treasure Found’, Age, 3 november 2006, p. 1), several conferences and events were held in 2007 in sydney and canberra, also coinciding with the 50-year anniversary of publication of Voss: for example, ‘Patrick white Remembered’, held in sydney on 26–27 may, hosted by the writing and society Research group (University of western sydney), the school of english and the Australian studies Program (University of new south wales), and the Association for the study of Australian literature (AsAl), in conjunction with the 2007 sydney writers’ Festival. marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 258. white’s letter to clem christesen, 19 november 1960 (Patrick White: Letters, p. 174). edward said, Representations of the Intellectual:The 1993 Reith Lectures, london: Vintage, 1994, pp. 72–73. For a more extended discussion of said’s model of the exilic literary outsider see my essay, ‘Reluctant prophets and gadfly laureates: the Australian writer as public intellectual’, in debjani ganguly and edward curthoys, eds, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, melbourne: melbourne University Press, 2007, pp. 96–118. there are many examples of white’s patronage, financial and other – notably, his donation of the $81,862 nobel Prize money to set up the Patrick white Award for older Australian writers not yet sufficiently recognised for their achievement: marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 537. John mclaren, ‘Introduction’, Prophet from the Desert: critical essays on Patrick White, John mclaren (ed.), melbourne: Red Hill Press, 1995, pp. iii and vi. see also nathan Hollier: ‘From hope to disillusion? A literary and cultural history of the whitlam period 1966–1975’, Phd thesis, Victoria University, 2006, available at Victoria University eprints Repository, http://eprints. vu.edu.au/archive/00000526/, accessed 16 June 2008, for a comparison of the Anglo-Puritan backgrounds of whitlam and white. Hollier also notes the importance of John mclaren’s analysis (Hollier, footnote 186, p. 176). this corresponds with elizabeth webby’s point that the relationship of ‘Patrick white’ to the ‘Australian literary field’ was mutually beneficial, see ‘our Invisible colossus’, Australian Literary Review, 2(4), 2007: 3, 10. they were also remote from sydney’s literary/artistic community, members of which were very hazy on white’s exact whereabouts, according to marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 274. see elizabeth webby’s criticism of during’s reading of white, and her reappraisal of Riders in the Chariot, in ‘our Invisible colossus’, Australian, 2 may 2007. Accessed in Factiva database. see also Bernadette Brennan’s essay, ‘Riders in the chariot: A tale for our times’, JASAL, 7, 2007: 32–45. Available from http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/ article/view/626, accessed 16 June 2008.

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30. see Andrew mccann, ‘the ethics of Abjection: Patrick white’s Riders in the Chariot’, Australian Literary Studies, 18(2), 1997: 145–155. 31. In an otherwise perceptive reading of the novel, John Beston remarks that this episode ‘seems intended to startle the reader as much as to challenge thought’: ‘The Tree of Man as a Pioneer novel’, Antipodes, december 2003: 152. 32. Patrick white, Riders in the Chariot [1961], Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin Books, 1964, p. 407. 33. white, Riders in the Chariot, p. 458. 34. white, Riders in the Chariot, p. 199. 35. white, Riders in the Chariot, p. 200. 36. Hubber and smith, Patrick White: A B ibliography, p. 124. 37. marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 394. 38. marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 526. 39. white’s letter to cynthia nolan, 30 march 1969, in Patrick White: Letters, p. 343. 40. white’s letter to Ben Huebsch, 29 April 1962, in Patrick White: Letters, p. 205. 41. According to marr, white began writing The Solid Mandala at dogwoods, in about June of 1964, and finished the first draft of the novel in the fortnight after the move to martin Road, in october. noting the concurrent death of white’s American (Viking Press) publisher and close confidant Ben Huebsch, marr speculates that this too may have contributed to the shift in tone in white’s writing thereafter: ‘the painful theatre years had a good deal to do with this change, but a quality of formal grandeur that now faded from white’s writing had reflected Huebsch himself ’ – marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 438. 42. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 174. 43. Personal telephone conversation with noelene Pullen, librarian, castle Hill library, 24 may 2006. 44. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 145. 45. white, Flaws in the Glass, pp. 146–147. 46. marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 448. 47. Andrew mccann, ‘decomposing suburbia: Patrick white’s Perversity’, Australian Literary Studies, 18(4), 1998: 68. 48. sianne ngai, Ugly Feelings, cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 49. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 13 50. Patrick white, The Season at Sarsaparilla in Four Plays by Patrick White, london: eyre & spottiswoode, 1965, p. 177. 51. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 228. 52. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 316. 53. Zola on Flaubert, cited by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art, p. 94. 54. white, Flaws in the Glass, p. 225. 55. marr, Patrick White: A Li fe, p. 135. 56. white, The Solid Mandala, p. 265, 57. Patrick White S peaks, david marr (ed.), p. 178.

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58. Quoted in Vrasidas karalis, Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris, Blackheath, nsw: Brandl & schlesinger, 2008, p. 29. 59. Brian castro, ‘making oneself Foreign: essay’, Meanjin, 64(3), 2005: 14. Chapter 3 1. Judith wright, ‘two dreamtimes’, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 318. 2. Judith continued to speak of her friend as ‘kath’ beyond her change of name to ‘oodgeroo’ in 1988 (see Judith wright manuscripts: unprocessed materials at date of access: ms Acc 05/48 and Acc 05/89, nlA, ms headed ‘new Problems, new Friends’, p. 5). 3. At least until sykes’s identity was contested in the mid-1990s, as was the identity of one of the other significant black writers from this time, colin Johnson, later called mudrooroo narogin. Both writers contributed enormously to the emergence of Indigenous literary activism, but questions of legitimate Indigenous identity became more pressing as that field expanded, consolidated and professionalised. the identities of both sykes and Johnson/mudrooroo unravelled in the 1990s under pressure to justify their claims to Aboriginality ancestry. on Roberta sykes see sonja kurtzer, ‘Is she or Isn’t she?: Roberta sykes and “Authentic” Aboriginality’, Overland, 171, 2003: 50–56; on mudrooroo see terry goldie, ‘on not Being Australian: mudrooroo and demidenko’, Australian Literary Studies, 21(4), 2004: 89–100. 4. Judith was a long-term subscriber, for example, to Roberta sykes’s Black women’s Action in education Foundation (BwAeF) newsletter, and gave practical support to sykes at several intervals in her career. wright, for example, refereed sykes’s nomination for an Australian Human Rights Award in 1994 (see, for example, wright’s letters to sandra Forbes (22 may 1994) and Justice elizabeth evatt (14 July 1994) in Judith wright Papers, nlA ms 5781, Box 80, Folder 586). 5. noel Rowe, ‘Just Poetry’, in Bernadette Brennan (ed.), Just Words: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2008, p. 48. 6. Adam shoemaker has emphasised the way walker’s international reputation magnified her national role and public impact – see Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1989, p. 181. 7. see kathie cochrane’s biography for full details of all these dimensions of her career: kathie cochrane, Oodgeroo, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1994. 8. kath walker, We are Going: Poems, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964. I use the phrase ‘second-wave’ in order not to obscure the first wave of 1930s Aboriginal activism (culminating in the 1938 petition) and the first published Aboriginal writing by the multi-talented david Unaipon. 9. Judith wright, ‘the Poetry: An Appreciation’, in cochrane, Oodgeroo, p. 171. 10. Judith wright, ‘the Poetry: An Appreciation’, p. 163.

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11. As quoted in Roland Robinson’s review, ‘An Aboriginal Poet’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 november 1966, p. 20; and for the suggestion by thomas shapcott that publication of We are Going was a ‘singular’ but not ‘unique’ event in Australian publishing, see ‘Alive, Alive-o’, Australian Book Review, 6(2–3), 1967: 33. 12. Anita Heiss, ‘Black Poetics’, Meanjin, 65(1), 2006: p. 180. 13. kath walker, ‘we are going’, reprinted in My People: A Kath Walker Collection [1970], milton, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1981, p. 78. 14. oodgeroo, ‘writers of Australia, “I dips me lid”’, in cochrane, Oodgeroo, p. 217. 15. Judith wright, ‘Bora Ring’, in Collected Poems, p. 8. 16. see, for example, John collins, ‘A mate in Publishing’, in ‘oodgeroo: A tribute’, Australian Literary Studies special Issue, 16(4), 1994: 11. 17. James devaney, The Vanished Tribes, sydney: cornstalk, 1929, p. 233. 18. see Andrew mccann, ‘the literature of extinction’, Meanjin, 65(1), 2006: 51. Relevant discussion of the colonial archive in Australia can be found in Patricia grimshaw and Russell mcgregor (eds), Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples, melbourne: History department, University of melbourne, 2007. 19. see, for example, Jack davis’s poem, ‘the First Born’ (1970), and eva Johnson’s ‘A letter to my mother’ (1983), both quoted by oodgeroo in ‘writers of Australia, “I dips me lid”’ (1993), in cochrane, Oodgeroo, pp. 221–223. 20. Judith wright, ‘the Poetry: An Appreciation’, p. 172. 21. Audré lorde, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, california: crossing Press, 1984, p. 112. 22. see Irene watson’s incisive essay on the continuing co-option and cannibalising of Aboriginal spaces and identities in contemporary Australia: ‘settled and unsettled spaces: Are we free to roam?’, in ACRAWSA (Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal), 1, 2005: 40–52. 23. this refers to Butler’s theory of performativity, which she developed from work by Jl Austin and derrida, and which considers drag as a performance that denaturalises the fixed categories of gender identity. see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, new York: Routledge, 1990, p. 141. 24. this phrase is borrowed from noel Rowe’s reading of eva Johnson’s poem, ‘A letter to my mother’, in ‘Just Poetry’, from Brennan (ed.), Just Words: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, p. 48. 25. see Ralph kelly, ‘enough to go Around’, N.S.W. Builders’ Labourer, August– september–october, 1965, pp. 27–28. 26. see Rodney Hall’s review of My People, ‘crying mercy for 50,000’, Australian, 24 April 1971, p. 20. 27. kath walker, ‘Aboriginal charter of Rights’, reprinted in My People, pp. 36–37. 28. Anita Heiss cites an observation to this effect by Josie douglas and marg Bowman, in her book Dhuuluu-Yala To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature, canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 2003, p. 35.

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29. see Ann Vickery, ‘the Rise of “women’s Poetry” in the 1970s: An Initial survey into new Australian Poetry, the women’s movement, and a matrix of Revolutions’, Australian Feminist Studies, 22(53), 2007: 265–285. 30. katherine gallagher, ‘towards Reconciliation: Inspiration and leadership – oodgeroo of the tribe noonuccal (1920–1993) and Judith wright (1915–2000)’, Agenda 41(1–2), 2005: 38. 31. Bain Attwood, The 1967 referendum: race, power and the Australian constitution, canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 2007, p. 45. 32. John wallis’s opinion piece, ‘kath walker: Poetry or Propaganda’ in Checkpoint: a Journal of Liberal Opinion, 10, 1972: 24. 33. Ruth doobov, ‘the new dreamtime: kath walker in Australian literature’, Australian Literary Studies, 6(1), 1973: 46–55. 34. Rodney Hall’s review, Australian, 24 April 1971, p. 20. 35. Ruth doobov, ‘the new dreamtime: kath walker in Australian literature’, p. 47. 36. Unpublished draft of Judith wright’s memoir (see materials, unprocessed at date of access, in ms Acc 05/48 and Acc 05/89, nlA, ms titled ‘new Problems, new Friends’, pp. 1–2). 37. kath walker, ‘Foreword’, The Dawn is at Hand: Poems by Kath Walker, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966. 38. Indeed the cPA had almost been the sole white organisation to support the Aboriginal cause during the middle decades of the century. Its class-oriented, internationalist perspective was conducive to the civil rights cause. For a discussion of kath walker’s connections with the cPA and Realist writers’ group, see John collins, ‘A mate in Publishing’, in Adam shoemaker (ed.), Oodgeroo: A Tribute, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1994, pp. 10–14. 39. this is according to Adam shoemaker in Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988, p. 231. 40. kath walker, ‘Aboriginal literature’, Identity, 2(3), 1975: 39. 41. oodgeroo, ‘writers of Australia, “I dips me lid”’, in cochrane, Oodgeroo, pp. 212–229. 42. Bruce Bennett calls Jack davis the ‘father-figure’, kath walker/oodgeroo the ‘mother-figure’ and david Unaipon the ‘grandfather figure’ of Aboriginal writing in Australia, in ‘Reconciling the Accounts: Jack davis, Judith wright, A.d. Hope’, Homing In: Essays on Literature and Selfhood, Perth: API network, 2006, p. 247. 43. Judith wright, ‘the koori Voice: A new literature’, Australian Author, spring 1973: 42–43. 44. I am indebted to my colleague, Valerie kerruish, for the phrasing here, and the thought it represents about what kind of space it was between the two women. 45. oodgeroo noonuccal, ‘sister Poet’, in kathie cochrane, Oodgeroo, p. 97. 46. kathie cochrane, Oodgeroo, p. 96. 47. After a decade in which the previous government had refused to apologise,

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48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

Endnotes following the tabling of the Bringing them Home Report in Federal Parliament on 26 may 1997, on wednesday 13 February 2008 (first day of new Parliament after the election of november 2007) the incoming Prime minister kevin Rudd apologised to the nation’s Indigenous Australians on behalf of the Australian Parliament and all non-Indigenous Australians. the apology was warmly received and manifestly popular. It was, however, made without an offer of compensation for wrongs done to ‘the stolen generations’, other than to invest in provision of services to combat Aboriginal socio-economic and health disadvantage. Background information about these events can be found via the Parliamentary library, Parliament of Australia, available from http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/Bn/2007-08/ BringingthemHomeReport.htm#intro, accessed 2 may 2008. see kath walker, ‘oodgeroo’, in Stradbroke Dreamtime, dennis chapel, illus., sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972, pp. 100–103. see Shadow Sister, directed by Frank Heimans (cinetel Productions, 1977; dVd FrontRow Video distribution). Judith wright, ‘moongalba’, in Born of the Conquerors, canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 1991, p. 5. First published as ‘creating a new dreamtime’, National Times, 14–19 June 1976. on 21 october 1975, wright sent a stinging letter to the minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Hon. l Johnson, asking that the ageing oodgeroo be given permanent housing at moongalba. the timing of this letter could not have been worse, coinciding with the dismissal of the whitlam government. Yet it did provoke a flustered and (apparently) concerned response. see Judith wright Papers nlA ms 5781, Box 64, Folder 470. Jennifer Jones, ‘why weren’t we listening? oodgeroo and Judith wright’, Overland, 171, 2003: 49. Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright, sydney: Angus & Roberston, 1998, p. 310. see Jl Austin, How To Do Things with Words, london: oxford University Press, 1962, lecture VIII forward; and also, for the last phrase, noel Rowe, ‘Just Poetry’, in Brennan (ed.), Just Words: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, p. 48. derrida inverts the cause-effect direction of Austin’s category of the performative, emphasising instead the social power of language to direct meaning, to script and perform the speaker, rather than the speaker scripting or controlling performance. see derrida, ‘signature, event, context’, Margins of Philosophy (Alan Bass, trans.), Brighton, Uk: the Harvester Press, 1982, pp. 322–327. Judith wright, ‘At cooloolah’, in Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 140. sarah Ahmed has contributed a challenging essay to debates about the new Australian field of ‘critical whiteness studies’, identifying the perils of declarations of whiteness as a substitute for action: she argues that ‘declaring whiteness, or even “admitting” to one’s own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be “evidence” of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says . . . declaring one’s whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique,

Endnotes

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

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can reproduce white privilege in ways that are “unforeseen”’ – ‘declarations of whiteness: the non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, borderlands e-journal, 3(2), 2004. Available from http://www.borderlands.net.au/ For this insight, I am deeply indebted to ongoing dialogue with my own sister, monique Rooney, whose work on ‘passing’ narratives discusses complexities of inter-racial representations in the relationship between African-American writer Zora neale Hurston and her white patron, Fannie Hurst. see, for example, monique’s essay, ‘my You: Fannie Hurst, Zora neale Hurston and literary patronage’, in sheffield Hallam’s Working Papers on the Web, ‘Racial disciplines’ issue, monique Rooney (ed.), 5, 2003, available from http:// extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/race/rooneym.htm see, for example, marcia langton’s complaint about the way she was positioned in Robert dessaix’s interviews with public intellectuals, as noted in mark davis, Gangland: cultural elites and the new generationalism, st leonards, nsw: Allen & Unwin, 1997, pp. 310–311. Judith wright unpublished ms., ‘new Problems, new Friends’, p. 3. Judith wright, ‘new Problems, new Friends’, p. 5. Judith wright, ‘new Problems, new Friends’, p. 2. wright, ‘the Poetry: An Appreciation’, in cochrane, Oodgeroo, p. 183.

Chapter 4 1. melissa lucashenko, ‘let’s get It Right (with apologies to wH Auden)’, in Life in Gadigal Country, Anita Heiss (ed.), strawberry Hills, nsw: gadigal Information service, 2002, pp. 73–74. 2. see melissa lucashenko, ‘not Quite white in the Head’, Griffith Review, summer 2003–2004, p. 21. 3. Helen lambert, ‘A draft preamble: les murray and the politics of poetry’, Journal of Australian Studies, 80, 2004, pp. 9–10. 4. see Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of cultural production, within which restricted literary and artistic fields are symbolically privileged domains, as the ‘economic world reversed’: The Field of Cultural Production, cambridge, Uk: Polity Press, 1993, pp. 29ff. 5. david mccooey, ‘marginalia: the Public life of Australian Poetry’, TEXT: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, special Issue, no. 4, october 2005. Available from http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/ issue4/mccooey.htm, accessed 18 may 2008. 6. Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, south melbourne,Vic: oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 121–123. 7. see nicholas Birns, ‘Australian Poetry from kenneth slessor to Jennifer strauss’, in A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900, nicholas Birns and Rebecca mcneer (eds), Rochester: camden House, 2007, pp. 184– 185 regarding the unusual prominence of several Australian women poets (wright, dobson and Harwood) relative to their peers elsewhere. 8. Judith wright, Australian Poetry 1948, sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1949 – just under half of the poets represented in this anthology are women

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Endnotes (mary gilmore, nancy cato, elizabeth Riddell, Rosemary dobson and others). see Ann Vickery, ‘the Rise of “women’s Poetry” in the 1970s: An Initial survey into new Australian Poetry, the women’s movement, and a matrix of Revolutions’, Australian Feminist Studies, 22(53), 2007: 265–285. Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, p. 122. the other sources on which this description of wright and her view of murray are based are cited as two interviews between Alexander and les murray, one in person and one by phone – footnotes 108–111 to chapter 10 in Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, p. 318. les murray, ‘the coming Republic’, Quadrant, 20(4), 1976, reprinted as ‘the Australian Republic’, in The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts About Australia, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 1999, pp. 69–87 – reference to wright on p.79. les murray, ‘the Australian Republic’, p. 79. In a brief ‘our man From Bunyah’ piece, printed early in Quality of Sprawl, murray confirms the rumour that he once nominated wright for governorgeneral, see ‘the People as sovereign’, p. 15. see Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, p. 145; and les murray, The Peasant Mandarin, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1978, which includes ‘Patronage in Australia’ (1972), pp. 1–21, and ‘Patronage Revisited’ (1977), pp. 22–35. Veronica Brady, South of My Days, p. 320. this information is drawn from murray’s letter to wright, dated 7 February 1973, held in Judith wright’s Papers, nlA ms 5781, Box 25 Folder 185. Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, pp. 147–149 – murray himself describes the episode in his essay, ‘Patronage Revisited’, in The Peasant Mandarin, pp. 23–24. see Judith wright’s letter, dated 9 Feb 1973, to geoffrey Blainey, chairman of the Australia council for the Arts, Judith wright Papers, nlA ms 5781, Box 25, Folder 185. see wright’s letter to James Vinson, dated 12 november 1976, held in Judith wright Papers, nlA ms 5781, Box 26 Folder 197. see ‘Judith wright and les murray: correspondence’ in Southerly, 63(1): 162–182; an account of this exchange was first given by Alexander in Les Murray: A Life in Progress (pp. 121–123). wright’s opening letter sets the tone of Alexander’s account of the exchange, which describes its dynamics from murray’s point of view. the correspondence was eventually deposited in murray’s papers, access to which required his consent. see Ramona koval’s interview with wright, in Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, sydney: ABc Books, 2005, p. 263. les murray, ‘laconics: the Forty Acres’, in Collected Poems 1961–2002, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 2002, pp. 128–129. see ‘lawrence Bourke’s les murray overview’ at the website states that the overview is

Endnotes

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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excerpted from Bourke's entry on murray in Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, eds eugene Benson and l.w. conolly (Routledge, 1994). noel Rowe, ‘Justice, sacrifice and the mother’s Poem’, The Poetry of Les Murray (laurie Hergenhan and Bruce clunies Ross, eds, special issue of Australian Literary Studies, 20(2), 2001: 154). From les murray, ‘the steel’, Collected Poems, p. 191. see les murray, ‘killing the Black dog – an essay’, in Killing the Black Dog: essays and poems, Annandale, nsw: the Federation Press, 1997, pp. 1–24. Judith wright, ‘eroded Hills’, Collected Poems 1942–1985, p. 81. Judith wright, ‘For a Pastoral Family – section V – change’, Collected Poems, p. 409. wright, ‘For a Pastoral Family – section IV – Pastoral lives’, p. 408. wright, ‘For a Pastoral Family – section II – to my generation’, p. 407. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, pp. 29ff.

Chapter 5 1. les murray, ‘6. the commonwealth of manu’, in ‘walking to the cattle Place’, Collected Poems 1961–2002, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 2002, p. 63. 2. les murray, ‘the Quality of sprawl’, in Collected Poems 1961–2002, pp. 182–183. 3. For a discussion of murray’s tendency to detect and depend on opposition, see noel Rowe, ‘les murray and the Unseen opponent’, Southerly, 51(2), 1991: 319–330. For an example of how this antagonism between murray and members of the so-called cultural elite is sometimes overstated, see note 11 below. 4. the website is located at http://www.lesmurray.org/ 5. see Pascale casanova, The World Republic of Letters (mB deBevoise, trans., cambridge, mA: Harvard University Press, 2004) for the argument that translation ‘constitutes the principal means of access to the literary world for all writers outside the centre’ . . . ‘the major prize and weapon in literary competition’, p. 133. murray would be one of the most ‘translated’ of Australian writers, a phenomenon supported by his own linguistic giftedness. working at one time as a translator, he is fluent or proficient in many european languages (see Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, south melbourne, Vic: oxford University Press, 2000, p. 114). According to murray’s official website, his ‘poetry has so far been published in ten languages: german, Italian, spanish, catalan, norwegian, danish, swedish, Hindi, Russian and dutch. norwegian and swedish translations of Fredy Neptune are also in the pipeline’ – see http://www.lesmurray.org/ 6. see casanova, World Republic of Letters, pp. 108ff. 7. michael murphy dates the appearance of the phrase ‘superleague of poets’ from the early 1990s, and discusses it as an example of global influences that originate from places other than the european–American economic centre of globalisation, that ‘speak for the ambivalent relationship between the local

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Endnotes and the global’: ‘local Habitations, global names: les murray and the Poetry superleague’, Globalisation and its Discontents (stan smith, ed., woodbridge, Uk: Brewer, 2006, pp. 139–140). For a recent example, see essay by Us poet dan chiasson, ‘Fire down Below: the poetry of les murray’, New Yorker, 11 June 2007, available from http:// www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/06/11/070611crbo_books_ chiasson, accessed 4 may 2008. In his monograph, Les Murray (contemporary world writers series, manchester: manchester University Press, 2001), Uk critic steven matthews presents an astute, sympathetic ‘offshore’ analysis of murray that does attend to local Australian debates about the politics of murray’s poetry.the book’s general tenor, however, is detached, transcending these local matters, and arguably does not fully address the ethical dilemmas of a contemporary settler-colonial context. casanova, World Republic of Letters, p. 109. Irmtraud Petersson’s important discussion of the german reception of Fredy Neptune illustrates these issues: ‘“odysseus from the outback”: Fredy Neptune in german and its critical Reception’, Australian Literary Studies, 22(1), 2005: 1–28. the saga of murray’s involvement in drafting the constitutional preamble has been extensively reported and subsequently discussed by, among others, Helen lambert in ‘A draft preamble: les murray and the politics of poetry’, Journal of Australian Studies, 80, 2004: 5–14. murray also penned his own retrospective account of the affair, in ‘the Preamble’s Bottom line’, The Quality of Sprawl, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 1999, pp. 213–225. there is a twist that confounds murray’s assertions that he is routinely relegated by the progressive cultural intelligentsia, or that suggests, at the very least, that the 1990s republican debate was one in which individuals did not adhere to partisan positions. david marr indicated to me, in a personal conversation on 22 June 2006 that it was he who had originally come up with the idea that murray would be an apt person to draft a constitutional preamble. this is borne out by the following record of events: marr’s opinion piece, ‘spirit of the new Preamble must Prevail’, Sydney Morning Herald (smH) (13 February 1999. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008) alludes to a smH request to les murray to draft a preamble, and marr reproduces a short draft that murray faxed in response. then, in a subsequent report entitled ‘Pm knows Poet’s Prose Apt for Preamble’ smH (4 march 1999. Factiva. com, accessed 16 June 2008), the Prime minister John Howard’s invitation to murray is mentioned, by les murray himself, as having come from the Pm after he read murray’s preamble, quoted in marr’s aforementioned article. Preface, The Peasant Mandarin (st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1978), p. viii, also cited by Peter Pierce, ‘les murray’s narrowspeak’, in The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays (Australian literary studies special Issue), laurie Hergenhan and Bruce clunies Ross, eds, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001, p. 77.

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13. John kinsella, Fast, Loose Beginnings: a memoir of intoxications, carlton, Vic: melbourne University Press, 2006, p. 35. 14. see Peter Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, p. 207. 15. see the documentary film, Bastards from the Bush, A Journey with Bob Ellis and Les Murray (director: geoff Burton. Producers: John Izzard and John Barnes. ABc/seedwillow, 1998). the relevant excerpt is available as a free download from the Australian screen website, http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/ bastards-bush/, accessed 4 may 2008. 16. there are far fewer female than male critics and scholars who produce commentary about murray’s poetry (some include sarah Attfield,Veronica Brady, carmel gaffney, lyn mccredden, gig Ryan) and there are hardly any who focus on gender issues (one possible exception is Jennifer strauss who discusses her unease in response to murray’s sequence of poems for his mother: ‘elegies for mothers: Reflections on gwen Harwood’s “mother who gave me life” and les murray’s “three Poems in memory of my mother”, Westerly, 4, 1989: 58–63). 17. murray was baptised a catholic in 1964. According to Alexander his christianity helped him through earlier depressions, but he was attracted to catholicism for its poetic sensibility, and its teachings about transubstantiation and the Virgin mary. He also associated catholicism with a tradition of resistance to the enlightenment: Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, pp. 106–107. 18. les murray, ‘the mitchells’, Collected Poems 1961–2002, p. 117. 19. murray, Collected Poems 1961–2002, p. 118. 20. katherine Bode suggests in her book, Damaged Men Desiring Women: Male Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction (saarbrücken, germany: Vdm Verlag dr müller, 2008), that ‘representations of wounded men’s bodies, rather than transgressing patriarchal constructions of masculinity, actually provide a premise for consolidating male power’ (p. 28). 21. murray, ‘An Absolutely ordinary Rainbow’, Collected Poems 1961–2002, p. 29. 22. see meaghan morris’s discussion of John Forbes’s poem, ‘on the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem’, which, as she points out, wrily references murray’s ‘Absolutely ordinary Rainbow’. morris reads Forbes’s poem as a questioning of the ‘sacred, secular value of the Absolutely ordinary’ enshrined in Australian culture: Too Soon,Too Late: History in Popular Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 106–109. 23. It was this cultural appropriation, and its possible cultural insensitivity, to which Judith wright objected, sparking the exchange of letters about the rights and wrongs of a treaty, among other matters, discussed in chapter 4. 24. les murray, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: a novel sequence, london: Angus & Robertson, 1980, p. 1. 25. see James Baxter, Collected Poems, wellington: oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 453–474. 26. thomas Berger, Little Big Man, london: eyre & spottiswoode, 1965; see pp. 161–162 for the description of the cheyenne warrior, ‘white contrary’.

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27. les murray, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, p. 6. 28. commenting in 1991 on differences in outlook between himself and expatriate Australian poet Peter Porter, murray remarked that, like other critics, Porter was caught in a ‘cleft stick’ between admiring the poetry and worrying about the attitude: noel Peacock, ‘“embracing the Vernacular”: An Interview with les. A. murray’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, 7, 1992: 28. 29. les murray, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, p. 50. 30. see especially martin leer’s discussion of the grail imagery in The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: ‘“only the centre holds”: the meditative landscapes of les murray’ in Les Murray and Australian Poetry (Angela smith, ed., london: menzies centre for Australian studies, king’s college london, 2002, pp. 41–64). 31. see the chapter, ‘“Almost a Father”: men and women in the Vernacular Republic’, in lawrence Bourke’s book A Vivid, Steady State: Les Murray and Australian Poetry, kensington, nsw: new south wales University Press/ endeavour Press, 1992, esp. p. 102: ‘murray’s poetry does have its female figures, but they are satellites which variously reflect and confirm while always revolving around the supposedly normative masculine model’, and later, p. 105, the female characters (in The Boys Who Stole the Funeral) ‘who deny or are denied the traditionally assigned roles drift without security’. 32. see lawrence Bourke, A Vivid, Steady State, p. 107. 33. From les murray’s letter to Peter goldsworthy, cited in Alexander, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, pp. 208–209. 34. les murray, ‘How Fred and I came to write Fredy Neptune’, in Peter craven, ed., The Best Australian Essays 1999, melbourne: Bookman, 1999, p. 365. 35. line Henriksen compares Fredy neptune with Pound’s and walcott’s epic poems – see Henriksen’s essay, ‘“Big Poems Burn women”: Fredy Neptune’s democratic sailor and walcott’s epic Omeros’, in Hergenhan and clunies Ross, eds, The Poetry of Les Murray, pp. 87–109. michael murphy argues that Fredy Neptune is in fact closer in spirit and structure to the picaresque, especially to Voltaire’s Candide, than it is to the Homeric tradition: ‘local Habitations, global names’, p. 152. 36. For an illuminating discussion of the way ‘gravity’ functions in the poem, see charles lock, ‘Fredy Neptune: metonymy and the Incarnate Preposition’, in Hergenhan and clunies Ross, eds, The Poetry of Les Murray, pp. 122–141. 37. les murray, Fredy Neptune, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 1998, p. 110. 38. As inscribed in front matter of les murray’s, Fredy Neptune. 39. I use the word ‘schizoid’ deliberately in this context, following Rd laing: ‘In the schizoid condition here described there is a persistent scission between the self and the body. what the individual regards as his true self is experienced as more or less disembodied, and bodily experience and actions are in turn felt to be part of the false-self system’ – see laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness [1964], london: Routledge, 1971, p. 82. 40. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 84.

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41. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 21. 42. line Henriksen notes the ekphrasis in the poem’s opening, in ‘Big Poems Burn women’, p. 91. 43. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 13. 44. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 35. 45. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 265. 46. les murray, title essay in Killing the Black Dog: Essays and Poems, sydney: the Federation Press, 1997, p. 22. 47. In ‘Redneck in tooth and claw’, Australian Book Review, november 1996, p. 9, the usually mild-mannered don Anderson wrote, for example: ‘there is quite a bit of disgorging in Subhuman Redneck Poems. At least ten percent – though it seems like much more, as traces pervade many poems – of the volume is, not to put too fine a word on it, vile’. Angry responses to murray’s volume also came, for instance, from ken Bolton and gig Ryan (see, ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’ and ‘“And the Foetid Air and gritty”’ both in Heat, 5, 1997: 184–195; and 196–203 respectively). there were those who took a different approach, such as merv lilley in his arresting reading, ‘sex is a nazi’, Overland, 146, 1997: 72–73; see also Jamie grant for the argument that murray’s irony is often missed by critics. Among the many reviewers to pass comment on the collection’s polemic were david Beach (‘Untitled’, Five Bells, 4(2), 1997: 17), david mccooey (‘sensitive redneck poems’, Age, 4 January 1997, p. 5), Angela Rockel (‘Untitled’, Island, 70, 1997: 58–62), and Alan wearne (‘murray and other rivers’, Eureka Street, 7(4), 1997: 43–44). 48. ken Bolton, ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’, p. 193. 49. steven matthews, Les Murray, p. 2. 50. steven matthews, Les Murray, p. 126. 51. For another non-Australian perspective, see Robert crawford’s analysis in Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 1993). crawford argues for setting the poetry of murray alongside that of Judith wright as a shaping, ‘new world’ voice with a ‘sense of the sacred’ (pp. 75–78). 52. les murray, Fredy Neptune, p. 264. 53. murray bluntly compares Aboriginal and Jewish circumstances in his essay, ‘the Preamble’s Bottom line’: ‘when a colleague of mine sent me a poem recently about teachers signing the sorry Book at a high school – I wince at the dragooning of consciences which would have enforced that enterprise! – I shocked him by saying I’d sign too if he could convince me that the Jews, of all times down to the present, were guilty of killing Jesus. If you’ve never personally killed or even hurt an Aborigine and never approved of any such thing, then to apologise for treatment they’ve suffered means that you embrace the principle of collective, inherited guilt, the very notion laid on the Jews to such terrible effect’ (The Quality of Sprawl, p. 224). 54. terry goldie, cited in John docker and gerhard Fischer, Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, sydney: Unsw Press, 2001, p. 9.

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55. Judith wright, ‘At cooloolah’, Collected Poems 1942–1985, sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, pp. 140–141. 56. this phrase, ‘it’s in your languages’, occurs in the extended quotation from Fredy Neptune, above. Chapter 6 1. david malouf, An Imaginary Life [1978], woollahra, nsw: Picador, 1980, p. 30. 2. this chapter includes material adapted from my earlier essay, ‘Remembering Inheritance: david malouf and the literary cultivation of nation’, Journal of Australian Studies, 90, 2007: 65–75. 3. gerard Henderson, ‘more rhyme than reason behind Howard’s choice of “gifted wordsmith”’, Courier-Mail, 12 march 1999, p. 21. 4. david malouf, ‘Identity as lived experience: Uniquely Australian’, Sydney Papers, 6(4), 1994, pp. 146–156; excerpt published as ‘making Better Australians’, Weekend Australian, 17–18 september 1994, p. 29. 5. david malouf, ‘A writing life’ (neustadt lecture), World Literature Today, 74(4), 2000: 705. 6. walter Benjamin, ‘theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations [1968], Hannah Arendt, ed., intro., Harry Zorn, trans., london: Pimlico, 1999, p. 248. 7. malouf, Remembering Babylon, pp. 196–197. 8. Recent debate has highlighted the anachronism of assigning the phrase ‘terra nullius’ to the legal framework within which the first British colonists understood themselves as acting. even so, as Andrew Fitzmaurice has persuasively argued, the ‘cultural disposition that produced terra nullius, particularly attitudes to the exploitation of nature and the belief that property is created by use, permeated the entire experience of european expansion’: ‘the genealogy of terra nullius’, Australian Historical Studies, 38 (129), 2007: 14. 9. germaine greer, ‘malouf ’s objectionable whitewash’, Age, 3 november 1993, p. 11. 10. whiteness studies crossed from the Us to the Australian humanities academy in the late 1990s. Among the most significant studies to analyse the institutional workings of ‘whiteness’ in an Australian context were ghassan Hage’s White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale, nsw: Pluto Press, 1998; and Aileen moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2000. 11. A number of critics participated in debate sparked by germaine greer’s review, ‘malouf ’s objectionable whitewash’. suvendrini Perera made her criticisms in ‘Unspeakable Bodies: Representing the Aboriginal in Australian critical discourse’, Meridian, 13(1), 1994: 15–26. 12. see lyn mccredden, ‘craft and Politics: Remembering Babylon’s Postcolonial Responses’, Southerly, 59(2), 1999: 7.

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13. ‘david malouf: sydney’ (malouf interviewed by sally Blakeney), Bulletin, 7 september 2004. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. 14. malouf, ‘A writing life’, neustadt lecture, p. 3. 15. david malouf, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, london: chatto & windus, 1996. 16. david malouf, ‘made in england: Australia’s British Inheritance’, Quarterly Essay, 12, melbourne,Vic: Black Inc, 2003: 58–59. 17. ‘Interview with david malouf ’, interview with Helen daniel, Australian Humanities Review, 3, september–november 1996. Australian Humanities Review, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/ Issue-sept-1996/intermal.html, accessed 16 June 2008. 18. In the final chapter of Remembering Babylon, lachlan ‘remembers’ this violence, which occurs outside the narrative proper, while he is visiting Janet, so the memory occurs in postcolonial time, after colonisation is, theoretically, complete. the memory, not spoken aloud, concerns the way he follows ambiguous traces and rumours, until he is presented with the (still mute) testimony of gemmy’s bones: pp. 195–197. 19. david malouf, The Conversations at Curlow Creek, p. 114. 20. david malouf, Conversations, p. 114. 21. david malouf, Conversations, p. 201. 22. david malouf, Conversations, p. 214. 23. Pierre nora, ‘general Introduction: Between memory and History’, in lawrence d kritzman, ed., Realms of memory: rethinking the French past [Les Lieux de Mémoire, c1984–c1986] vol. 1, trans. Arthur goldhammer, new York: columbia University Press, 1996–1998, pp. 1–23. 24. I have also explored the interaction of the literary, nation and the sacred in Helen garner’s non-fictional prose: ‘the sinner, the Prophet, and the Pieta: sacrifice and the sacred in Helen garner’s narratives’, Antipodes, 19(2), 2005: 159–165. 25. see ken gelder and Jane m Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, carlton south,Vic: melbourne University Press, 1998, esp. pp. 16–22. 26. see Andrew mccann, ‘the obstinacy of the sacred’, Antipodes, 19 (2), 2005: 153. 27. david malouf ’s involvement, with Jackie Huggins, in drafting the reconciliation document is documented in the council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Archive: ‘Form and content: the process’, in chapter 3, Draft Document for Reconciliation, Annual Report 1998–1999, in Austlii database, http://www. austlii.edu.au/au/other/IndiglRes/car/1999/5/pages/3_2.htm, accessed 4 may 2008. 28. ken gelder, ‘when the Imaginary Australian is not Uncanny: nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian cultural criticism and History’, Journal of Australian Studies 86, 2006: 163. 29. david malouf, in interview with Ramona koval, broadcast on ABc Radio national’s Books and Writing program in march 2000. the transcript of the

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

Endnotes broadcast: ‘david malouf – “dream stuff ” . . . summer series’ is available from ABc Books and writing website: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ bwriting/stories/s225573.htm, accessed 4 may 2008. david malouf, ‘made in england’, p. 8. david malouf, A spirit of play: the making of Australian consciousness, sydney: ABc Books, 1998, pp. 25ff. david malouf, ‘made in england’, p. 11. david malouf, ‘made in england’, p. 48. david malouf, ‘made in england’, p. 43. david carter, ‘made in england, Played in Australia’, Overland, 174, 2004, p. 127. For this argument see stella Borg Barthet, ‘Resistance and Reconciliation in david malouf ’s Conversations at Curlow Creek’, in Bruce Bennett et al., eds, Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth, canberra: Association for commonwealth literature and language studies, 2003, pp. 265–277. gillian whitlock, ‘In the second Person: narrative transactions in stolen generations testimony’, Biography, 24(1), 2001: 208. david malouf, A spirit of play, p. 40. david carter, ‘Public Intellectuals, Book culture and civil society’, Australian Humanities Review, december 2001, available from http://www. australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-december-2001/carter2.html, accessed 16 June 2008. see John cameron, ‘Introduction: Articulating Australian senses of place’, in Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia, John cameron, ed., double Bay, nsw: longueville Books, 2003, p. 1; see also david tacey, Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, north Blackburn, Vic: Harpercollins, 1995; and Peter Read, Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership, oakleigh,Vic: cambridge University Press, 2000. see carter, ‘Public Intellectuals, Book culture and civil society’. Regular discussion also occurs in the media about shifting relations between readership tastes and literary production in Australia – see, for example, an opinion piece by Jenny tabakoff, ‘the lost art of the raconteur’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 december 2004, spectrum, p. 9.

Chapter 7 1. Helen garner, The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power. sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 1995. 2. Helen garner, ‘the Fate of The First Stone’, in True Stories, p. 178. 3. Helen garner, Monkey Grip [1977], Ringwood,Vic: Penguin Books, 1997. 4. see Bronwen levy’s editorial in Hecate for the comment that a lesbian love story pseudonymously published by elizabeth Riley, All That False Instruction (1975), deserved this honour, not Monkey Grip: editorial, Hecate, 21(2), 1995: 8. 5. see note 35 of my Introduction for references to the dreyfus Affair and Zola’s J’accuse.

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6. this account, and the interpretation, is drawn from Pierre Bourdieu’s essay, ‘Fourth lecture. Universal corporatism: the Role of Intellectuals in the modern world’, Poetics Today, 12(4), national literatures/social spaces, 1991: 655–669. 7. the interviews were subsequently reproduced in book form (see Robert dessaix, ed., Speaking Their Minds, Sydney: ABc Books, 1998). 8. michael Visontay, ‘Australia’s top 100 Public Intellectuals’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 march 2005, p. 9. Available from Factiva database. 9. the only other in the top ten who does not fit the mould of traditional (white) academic or professional intellectual is Indigenous leader, noel Pearson. though a history and law graduate, Pearson’s Indigenous identity, activism and positioning seems pivotal to his public intellectual status. 10. Andrew mccann, for example, regards The First Stone as an example of a book that sells because of its ‘momentary topicality’: ‘the Fiction of Friction’, Australian, 22 January 2005, p. B08. In the following argument, I develop material from my previously published essay, ‘the sinner, the Prophet, and the Pieta: sacrifice and the sacred in Helen garner’s narratives’. Antipodes, 19(2), 2005: 159–165. 11. garner’s writing finds a strong parallel to Janet malcolm’s in style, subject matter and in public profile; indeed, malcolm was no stranger to controversy, having survived a libel suit by Jeffrey masson, the subject of her 1983 book, In the Freud Archives. garner continued to express admiration for malcolm’s work, despite the latter’s devastating review of The First Stone in ‘women at war: A case of sexual Harassment’, The New Yorker, 7 July 1997, pp. 73–75; see also garner’s interview with Ramona koval (‘Ramona koval talks to Helen garner and cassandra Pybus’, Australian Book Review, may 1995, p. 12). In Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law (sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 2004, p. 178), garner cites malcolm’s book, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. 12. Helen garner, Cosmo Cosmolino, Ringwood, Vic: mcPhee gribble/Penguin Books, 1992; and The Spare Room, melbourne: text Publishing, 2008. 13. Joe Cinque’s Consolation won a walkley Award for the best work of non-fiction in 2005, and the Austlit database reports that it ‘sold nearly 50,000 copies in the four months following its publication in 2004, outstripping sales of . . . The First Stone.’ see Austlit: the Australian literature Resource. news Item, http://www.austlit.edu.au/news/newsdecember2005January2006, accessed 5 may 2008. 14. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 131. 15. Inga clendinnen, ‘making stories, telling tales: life, literature, law’, 18th lionel murphy memorial lecture, 17 november 2004, p. 7. Available from the lionel murphy Foundation, http://lionelmurphy.anu.edu.au/ memorial_lectures.htm, accessed 5 may 2008. 16. see Julia kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. margaret waller, new York: columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 72–85, for her theory of sacrifice, within which the ‘phallic mother’ is the valorised counterpart of the maternal

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17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Endnotes abject. In her study of kristeva’s theory of sacrifice, martha Reineke explains how ‘the denial of the mother in . . . phallic discourses of maternity – often focused on the mother of christ – attests to the most deeply rooted violence against women and lies at the heart of the sacrificial economy in western patriarchal culture’ (Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 101). Ideas of sacrifice and the sacred in garner’s non-fictional writings are also discussed in my article, ‘the sinner, the Prophet, and the Pieta’, pp. 159–165. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 127. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, pp. 142–144. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 328. In The Feel of Steel (sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 2001), garner discusses her pleasure in reading the Bible (see ‘sighs too deep For words’. In True Stories (1996), she mentions that her ancestors were Plymouth Brethren – see ‘A scrapbook, An Album’). garner has also spoken with Robert dessaix about her christianity (dessaix, Speaking Their M inds, p. 169). Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 280. Pierre Bourdieu deploys an anthropological view of the relation between art, modernity and the sacred: see his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Richard nice, trans., cambridge, Uk: cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 197). see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977; Richard nice, trans, london: sage Publications, 1990), for the axiom that ‘every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations’ (p. 4). see for example Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 58. garner deploys the phrase in disparate contexts, but the overriding effect is to yoke the reader’s gaze to Joe’s dead body. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 21. Helen garner,The First Stone, p. 15. see René girard, The Girard Reader, James g williams, ed., new York: crossroad, 1996, pp. 262ff. see René girard, ‘the First stone’, Renascence, 52(1), 1999: 5–17. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 270. Helen garner’s comment in conversation with martha nussbaum, ‘writing, ethics and public engagement: martha nussbaum & Helen garner in conversation’, chaired and arranged by Hilary mcPhee, melbourne writers’ Festival, August 2005. Humanities writing Project. transcript accessed via www.humanitieswritingproject.net.au in mid January 2007, but no longer available. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 191. Inga clendinnen, ‘making stories, telling tales: life, literature, law’, pp. 6–7. Helen garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, p. 18.

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34. The First Stone’s most frequently quoted description of elizabeth Rosen betrays an admiration that approaches rivalry: ‘she is a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power’, p. 59. 35. In Gangland (1997) which attacked the cultural and institutional dominance of ‘baby boomers’, mark davis provided a timely and important analysis of the moral panic fuelled by The First Stone. though I largely agree with davis, as I have argued elsewhere, his book’s polemicism suggests its stake in the cultural power struggles it otherwise criticises: see Brigid Rooney, ‘writers Behaving Badly: stead, Bourdieu and Australian literary culture’, Australian Literary Studies, 20(1), 2001: 76–87. 36. Jenna mead, ed, bodyjamming, sydney: Random House, 1997, p. 26. 37. Robert manne, ‘more stones thrown over ormond Affair’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 november 1997. 38. The First Stone participated in the precise political context of a growing ideological divide between urban, middle-class winners and regional, working-class losers in Australia’s globalising economy. In the mid-1990s, discourses of anti-political correctness intensified, coalescing around issues of affirmative action for women and Indigenous people, Indigenous land rights, revisionist history of the frontier and whether or not multiculturalism and Asian immigration were threatening the nation’s cohesion. the 1996 election of the Howard government, which sought rhetorically to represent a silent ‘mainstream’ of Australians, was enabled by a voter backlash against a twenty-year bipartisan socially progressive agenda. the rise of the radically right-wing one nation party in the 1996 and 1998 elections, saw the coopting of much of its platform by the two major parties. For an analysis of these political developments, see Judith Brett, ‘John Howard, Pauline Hanson and the politics of grievance’ in The resurgence of racism: Howard, Hanson and the race debate, geoffrey gray and christine winter, eds, clayton,Vic: department of History, monash University, 1997, pp. 7–28. 39. An image of the dustjacket from the first edition of Monkey Grip is included with Ronald conway’s review, ‘lost generation’ in Quadrant, may 1978: 77. that the woman on the bike is in fact garner herself is strongly suggested through comparison with a photo in which garner is pictured wearing an identical dress – this photo accompanies lesley morgan’s review of Monkey Grip, in Womanspeak, 3(5), 1978: 29. 40. Helen garner, ‘I’, Meanjin, 61(1), 2002: 40. 41. garner, from transcript of conversation with Hilary mcPhee and martha nussbaum, ‘writing, ethics and public engagement’, p. 14. 42. Interviews with garner, publicising The Spare Room, detail the book’s play with fictional/non-fictional boundaries: see kate legge, ‘truly Helen’, Weekend Australian, 29–30 march 2008, Magazine, pp. 16–21; and susan wyndham, ‘Facts in the fiction’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29–30 march 2008, spectrum, pp. 26–27. 43. For example, the ‘election day’ is mentioned in passing on p. 184 of Monkey

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Endnotes Grip (the actual date was 13 december 1975); the attempted assassination of President Ford is mentioned on p. 141 (actual date was 5 september 1975). garner, Monkey Grip, pp. 147–148. conway, ‘lost generation’, p. 77. lesley morgan, review of Monkey Grip, p. 29. see garner’s remark in conversation with mcPhee and nussbaum, ‘writing, ethics and public engagement’, p. 8. Helen garner, ‘why does the women get All the Pain’ (1972), reprinted in True Stories, pp. 31–37. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Remembering Fitzroy High’, in Jenna mead, ed., bodyjamming, pp. 121–147. susan wyndham, ‘Facts in the fiction’, p. 26.

Chapter 8 1. tim winton, The Riders, sydney: Pan macmillan, 1994, p. 44. 2. Beth watzke, ‘where Pigs speak in tongues and Angels come and go: A conversation with tim winton’, Antipodes, 5(2), 1991: 96–98. 3. tim winton, Land’s Edge [1993], sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 1998, p. 101. 4. A 55-minute documentary film about tim winton, released in 1998, is entitled Edge of the World (director: geoff Bennett. Producer: don Featherstone. Film Australia Production) – see Australian Film commission online database (http://www.afc.gov.au/filmsandawards/filmdbsearch.aspx). 5. see Peter craven, ‘Perils of the Popular’ (Meanjin, 62(1), 2003: 133–143) who provocatively considers Ian mcewan’s Atonement, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and tim winton’s Dirt Music in these terms. 6. Robert dixon points out that of hundreds of ‘works’ listed in the Austlit database about winton’s novels, very few are academic books or articles published in serious literary journals: see dixon, ‘tim winton, cloudstreet, and the Field of Australian literature’, Westerly, 50, 2005: 249. 7. there is a ‘generation Jones’ website, no doubt an interest group, possibly market-research oriented, based in the UsA: http://www.generationjones. com/ 8. For different views about what shaped the agendas and intellectual currents of this period, see chapters by, respectively, John docker (‘“those Halcyon days”: the moment of the new left’) and dennis Altman (‘the Personal is Political: social movements and cultural change’) in Brian Head and James walter, eds, Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, oxford: oxford University Press, 1988. see also dennis Altman, Rehearsals for Change: Politics and Culture in Australia, Perth: curtin University of technology, API network, 1997. 9. see winton’s topical comments as reported in various newspaper articles, for example: on the republic referendum and on reconciliation, see matt Price, ‘dad reigned at winton’s royal parade/ the referendum – 9 days to go’, Australian, 28 october 1999, p. 7; ‘the great cringe is alive and well’, Australian,

Endnotes

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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28 october 1999, p. 12; Jennifer moran, ‘winton’s celebratory words, Postreferendum,tinged with despair’, Canberra Times, 8 november 1999, p. 3; on the Howard era – Jennifer moran, ‘Australia’s “spirit has shrunk”’, Canberra Times, 16 november 2001, p. 3; on the lack of a national apology, thornton mccamish, ‘tim winton’, The Big Issue Australia, 23, 1997: 6–8; and on refugee policy, kelly Burke, ‘writers Attack “dark chapter” in Asylum Policy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 2002, p. 4. this phrase comes from the title of a news story by Rosemary sorenson, ‘the warming of winton’, Courier-Mail, 12 June 2004, m01. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. this date is derived from winton’s own detailed account of the ningaloo campaign – ‘How the reef was won’, Bulletin, 5 August 2003, p. 17. tim winton, ‘our reef, my belief ’, Australian, 30 november 2002, p. 21. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. winton won the west Australian Premier’s literary Award for Dirt Music in mid 2002, and donated the $25,000 prize money to the reef campaign, as reported in Andrew darby’s story, ‘news – Author winton joins logging boycott’, Age, 6 november 2002, p. 7. Accessed via Factiva database. winton joined other high-profile writers, like Richard Flanagan and Robert dessaix, in boycotting the $40,000 tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize in 2002, because the competition was linked to the ‘ten days on the Island’ festival, sponsored by the state’s timber agency, Forestry tasmania (Andrew darby, ‘news – Author winton joins logging boycott’, Age, 6 november 2002, p. 7). the tasmanian arts community was reportedly split over the boycott, but the festival, directed by Robyn Archer, went ahead regardless (carol Altmann, ‘Artists splinter over Forestry deal’, Australian, 15 november 2002, p. 19). winton’s positions on whaling and sustainable seafood are publicised through his speeches and writings for the Australian marine conservation society (see the Amcs website for winton’s speeches http://www.amcs.org. au/printed.asp?active_page_id=137 and http://www.marineconservation. org.au/default2.asp?active_page_id=465, both accessed 5 may 2008). Andrew Riemer, ‘wait a minute, tim’, review of In the Winter Dark, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1988, p. 77. tim winton, An Open Swimmer, sydney: george Allen & Unwin, 1982, prologue, p. viii. Hilary mcPhee, ‘on Publishing tim winton’, in Tim Winton: A Celebration, ed., Hilary mcPhee, canberra: Friends of the national library of Australia, 1999, p. 22. see, for example, Beth watzke’s interview with winton, ‘where Pigs speak in tongues’, p. 96. winton was awarded his place on the list of national living treasures in 1997 – tim winton. Author Record. Austlit: the Australian literature Resource, http://www.austlit.edu.au, accessed 16 June 2008. Robert dixon, ‘tim winton, cloudstreet, and the Field of Australian literature’, p. 254.

230

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21. see ABc online, http://www.abc.net.au/myfavouritebook/, accessed 5 may 2008. 22. Jennifer Rutherford’s book, The Gauche Intruder (carlton south, Vic: melbourne University Press, 2000) is an exception. Rutherford includes a chapter on winton’s The Riders and critiques the novel’s privileging of its good, innocent masculine victim over its absent, negatively-coded female character. some criticism has also been levelled at the Belvoir street theatre production of Cloudstreet for its sentimental and nationalist white appropriation of Aboriginal spirituality – winton himself has been buffered against the full brunt of this criticism which was directed more at the stage production than at the novel itself. see tom Burvill, ‘nostalgia and the global city: Recuperating the “Battler” in the sydney Production of Cloudstreet’, in Australian Writing and the City: Proceedings of the 1999 ASAL Conference Held at the NSW Writers’ Centre, Sydney, Fran de groen and ken stewart, eds, sydney nsw: Association for the study of Australian literature, 2000, pp. 157–163. 23. not only Robert dixon makes this comparison (dixon, p. 256) but also carol Franklin, in ‘neighbours, dreams and neighbours’, Southerly, 51(4), 1991: 162. Various commentators have noted similarities between winton’s Cloudstreet and aspects of other Patrick white novels: david myers sees correspondences with The Solid Mandala (Untitled review of Cloudstreet, in LiNQ Literature in North Queensland, 19(1), 1992: 134, 136); and neil Armfield, in interview, has implied a parallel between Patrick white’s Riders in the Chariot and Cloudstreet. Armfield contemplated adapting the former for the stage, but then turned to the Cloudstreet script being developed by monjo and enright, evidently finding similar national themes, though packaged in a more ‘do-able’ way. see sonia Harford, ‘on the street where we live’, Age, 13 december 1997, saturday extra, p. 5. 24. kate Jennings, ‘Brilliant in Parts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 march 1991, p. 29. Accessed via Factiva database; see also Peter Pierce, ‘enjoyable lamb and Pickles’, Bulletin, 9 April 1991, p. 104. 25. winton’s response to Jennings and Pierce is reported by Robert Hefner in ‘winton on cloud nine after reviews’ (Canberra Times, 21 April 1991, p. 23): ‘“[kate] said it was as bad as John steinbeck, that it was anti-intellectual, sentimental, and it was enjoyable, but that wasn’t the point. Peter said it was distractingly enjoyable . . . as bad as kurt Vonnegut, you know. that made my day!”’ and ‘“even the ones that didn’t like the book said it was going to be popular”’. 26. see dixon, ‘tim winton, Cloudstreet, and the Field of Australian literature’, p. 248. 27. see Jack teiwes for an analysis of the enright and monjo–Armfield stage adaptation of Cloudstreet, highlighting its political emphases, its politicised rehearsal of national reconciliation (an acute issue in 1997), a theme not so specifically foregrounded in the book: ‘nostalgia, Reconciliation or new national myth?: the Adaptation of Cloudstreet to the stage’, in Australasian Drama Studies, 48, 2006: 228–247.

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28. see chapter 2 regarding tim winton’s ‘Foreign Body’, review of marr, Patrick White: Letters, marr, ed., especially note 10. 29. tim winton, ‘no Humane way to kill a whale’, posted on The Last Whale Blogspot, dated monday 5 november 2007, available from ‘the last whale’ Blog. chris Pash, http://thelastwhale.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-humaneway-to-kill-whale-tim-winton.html, accessed 5 may 2008. 30. tim winton, Shallows, p. ix. 31. tim winton, ‘strange Passion: A landscape memoir’, in Down to Earth: Australian Landscapes, by Richard woldendorp and tim winton, Fremantle, wA: Fremantle Arts centre Press, 1999, p. xxi. 32. tim winton, Shallows, p. 12. 33. see story about Jean-Paul Fortom-gouin: Alex tibbitts, ‘Phantom figure behind a cause unveiled’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 september 2007, p. 9. Accessible via,‘the last whale’, http://thelastwhale.blogspot.com/2007/09/ phantom-returns-briefly.html, accessed 5 may 2008. chris Pash’s ‘creative non-fictional’ history of the anti-whaling protests in Albany in 1973, The Last Whale, is forthcoming from Fremantle Press in october 2008. Pash was a journalist who covered the protests at the time, met the participants, and is now actively involved in remembering and documenting the events. 34. tim winton, Shallows, p. 235. 35. tim winton,‘saving moreton Bay’, speech delivered at the Australian marine conservation society Art Auction, Queensland state library, 24 August, 2007, transcript available from Australian marine conservation website at http://www.marineconservation.org.au/default2.asp?active_page_id=460, accessed 5 may 2008. 36. Baptised into a small church of christ community, which he has described as being a ‘sect’, winton now reportedly attends an Anglican church, but declines to define his religious affiliations, and dislikes institutional labels: see interview with Ray willbanks, in Speaking Volumes: Australian writers and their work, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1992, p. 196. see also gail williams and maree curtis, ‘A nice guy calls the tune’, Sunday Times (Perth), 4 november 2001. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. 37. tim winton, ‘saving moreton Bay’. 38. tim winton, Breath, camberwell, Vic: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin group, 2008, p. 100. 39. winton is quoted as saying that the novel relays aspects of his own experience in Albany as a teenager: ‘there was this palpable compulsion towards risk . . . and that had to do with defeating the empire of boredom’ – in Jason steger, ‘winton draws breath from a reckless youth’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 2008, spectrum, Books, p. 29. 40. tim winton, Dirt Music, p. 18. 41. tim winton, ‘strange passion’, p. xxx. Coda 1. Richard Flanagan, ‘writing The Unknown Terrorist’, ABc Radio national

232

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Endnotes Book Show, 23 november 2006, transcript available from http://www.abc. net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1795273.htm, accessed 23 June 2008. Former President of sydney Pen, katherine thomson, indicated to me, in a personal conversation on 28 may 2006, that Pen had enjoyed good access to politicians and very good access to the media in Australia to get its stories published or broadcast. she pointed out that this is because journalists have a shared interest in resisting suppression of free speech and in protesting against the persecution of dissenting writers. see the website for this network, which sallis and Hardwick established in october 2001 in response to the government’s treatment of refugees under Australia’s mandatory detention policies, ‘to counter destructive stereotyping of race and culture by actively promoting understanding and debate through the media, arts, education and the law’ (from the ‘Background’ page on the network’s website – http://www.australiansagainstracism.org/). Rosie scott and thomas keneally produced, as a special edition of Southerly (64(1)), a collection of stories, poems and artworks by refugees and asylum-seekers in Australian detention centres: Another Country, Broadway, nsw: sydney Pen & Halstead Press, 2004.there have been numerous other publications – from essays to poetry and children’s literature – especially between 2002 and 2006, about the plight of refugees in mandatory detention in Australia, and publication of texts and artworks by refugees themselves. eva sallis, ‘Art in a time of crisis’. sallis presented this as a lecture at Flinders University, south Australia, on 11 november 2005, after which it was published in the online magazine, New Matilda, 20 november 2005, newmatilda. com/node/1171?ArticleId=1171&HomepageId=116, accessed 16 June 2008. the essay is now included in Just Words: Australian Authors Writing For Justice, Bernadette Brennan, ed., st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2008, p. 1. eva sallis, ‘Art in a time of crisis’, pp. 3–4. through her network, ‘Australians Against Racism’ and with others (sonja dechian, Jenni devereaux, Heather millar), eva sallis ran competitions in Australian schools that resulted in two anthologies of stories by and about refugees and children in detention: Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories (kent town, sA: wakefield Press, 2004) and No Place Like Home: Australian Stories by Young Writers Aged 8–21 Years (kent town, sA: wakefield Press, 2005). eva sallis, ‘Art in a time of crisis’, p. 11. this point is amply illustrated by Robert dixon’s essay, ‘tim winton, Cloudstreet, and the Field of Australian literature’, Westerly, 50, 2005: 240–260. Brian castro, Shanghai Dancing, Artarmon, nsw: giramondo Publishing, 2003. this information comes from giramondo Publishing’s homepage at http:// www.giramondopublishing.com/, accessed 6 may 2008 Brian castro, ‘making oneself Foreign’, Meanjin, 64(3), 2005: 14. John guillory observes that: ‘Any given social formation constructs itself out

Endnotes

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

233

of much older apparatuses of reproduction that must be adapted to new social relations. these older apparatuses coexist with and complicate the social space of recent, perhaps more organic institutions (the capitalist corporation, for example). In the face of inevitable struggles within and at the juncture of institutional ensembles, the most atavistic features of older institutional structures serve to legitimate and stabilize what is always illegitimate and unstable – the momentary conjunctural order. But let us name this situation exactly: it is contradiction’. see guillory, Cultural Capital:The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, chicago: University of chicago Press, 1993, p. 59. susan wyndham, ‘Flanagan gets dream treatment’, Sydney Morning Herald – entertainment Blog, 9 June 2007. Fairfax digital, http://blogs.smh.com.au/ entertainment/archives/undercover/013753.html, accessed 6 may 2008. Richard Flanagan, ‘writing The U nknown Terrorist’, p. 5. Andrew mccann observes that Flanagan’s novel ‘incorporates aspects of the popular gestus into its formal texture, but it also wants us to understand that its formal imitation of the world it describes is constitutive of a realism that is ultimately about demolishing our illusions’ – see ‘Professing the Popular: Political Fiction circa 2006’, New Reckonings: Australian Literature Past, Present, Future – Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Webby, leigh dale and Brigid Rooney, eds, Australian Literary Studies special issue, october 2007: 51. Richard Flanagan, The U nknown Terrorist, sydney: Picador, 2006, p. 133. Andrew mccann, ‘Professing the Popular’, p. 51. In the previous year, Haneef had given his British cousin a sIm card that was then (erroneously) implicated in the 2007 london and glasgow bombings. Haneef was detained without charge under the anti-terrorism legislation for almost a month until the case against him collapsed. the Haneef case coincided with the decline of the Howard government’s popularity, and was subject to sustained media attention and vigorous activism by his legal team. see, for example, Haneef documents available through the Sydney Morning Herald website: http://www.smh.com.au/pdf/haneef_documents.pdf; and related story, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/haneef-documentsrevealed/2007/07/17/1184559779812.html, accessed 6 may 2008. david marr, ‘the terrorist stripped Bare’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 october 2006. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist’, p. 316. the tagline, ‘love is never enough, but it is all we have’, arguably exemplifies the ‘trojan horse’ (or literary-passing-as-popular) character of Flanagan’s novel: the line resonates with an epigraph to Patrick white’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976), attributed to louis Aragon: ‘love is your last chance. there is really nothing else on earth to keep you there’. more obviously, the line recalls the lyrics of ‘never enough’ (1978), a popular song performed by olivia newton-John (composed by John Farrar, Pat Farrar, Alan tarney and trevor spencer). see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 44–62. Richard Flanagan, ‘writing The U nknown Terrorist, p. 2.

234

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23. Information about these prizes is listed in the Austlit database. 24. Andrew mcgahan, Underground, crows nest nsw: Allen & Unwin, 2006. 25. linda Jaivin, The Infernal Optimist, sydney: Fourth estate/Harpercollins, 2006. 26. Jaivin has published many essays and stories about the time she spent visiting Villawood detention centre. For example, see ‘the Place where travel stopped’, Meanjin, 62(4), 2003: 108–114. 27. Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist, sydney: Picador, 2006, p. 280; in his 2008 Australia day essay, Flanagan refers to the ‘dirty, lost decade’ – see ‘the lost larrikin’, Bulletin, 29 January 2008, p. 28. 28. Richard Flanagan, ‘writing The U nknown Terrorist’, p. 5. 29. see Philip coorey, ‘Pulp mill fight moves into mPs’ backyards’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 August 2007, available from Fairfax digital, http://www. smh.com.au/news/national/pulp-mill-fight-moves-into-mps-backyards /2007/08/27/1188067034453.html, accessed 6 may 2008. 30. Richard Flanagan, ‘out of control: the tragedy of tasmania’s Forests’, Monthly, Issue 23, may 2007, p. 31. Full article available from online monthly http://themonthly.com.au/tm/node/512, accessed 16 June 2008. 31. Judith wright, ‘For a Birthday’, Collected Poems 1942–1985, sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, p. 151. 32. Richard Flanagan, ‘Across a newborn baby’s eyes’, Bulletin, 17 december–14 January, 2002–2003, p. 27.

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greer, germaine. ‘malouf ’s objectionable whitewash’, Age, 3 november 1993, p. 11. griffith, tom. ‘truth and fiction: Judith wright as historian’, Australian Book Review, August 2006: 25–30. grimshaw, Patricia and Russell mcgregor, eds. Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples, melbourne, Vic: History department, University of melbourne, 2007. guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, chicago: University of chicago Press, 1993. _____ ‘Bourdieu’s Refusal’. Modern Language Quarterly, 58(4), 1997: 367–398. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1989]. great Britain: Polity, 1992. Hage, ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale, nsw: Pluto Press, 1998. Hall, Rodney. ‘crying mercy for 50,000’, Australian, 24 April 1971, p. 20. Hatherell, william. The Third Metropolis: Imagining Brisbane Through Art and Literature 1940–1970, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2007. Head, Brian and James walter, eds. Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, oxford: oxford University Press, 1988. Heiss, Anita (ed.). Life in Gadigal Country, strawberry Hills, nsw: gadigal Information service, 2002. _____ Dhuuluu-Yala To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature. canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 2003. _____ ‘Black Poetics’, Meanjin, 55(1), 2006: 180–191. Henderson, gerard. ‘more rhyme than reason behind Howard’s choice of “gifted wordsmith”’, Courier-Mail, 12 march 1999, p. 21. Henriksen, line. ‘“Big Poems Burn women”: Fredy Neptune’s democratic sailor and walcott’s epic Omeros’. In Hergenhan, laurie and Bruce clunies Ross, eds. The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, pp. 87–109. Hergenhan, laurie and Bruce clunies Ross, eds. The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays. special issue of Australian Literary Studies, 20(2), st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001. Hoban, Russell. Riddley Walker, london: Bloomsbury, 1980. Holbrook, Peter. ‘tiptoeing around wright’, Review of Veronica Brady, South of My Days, Weekend Australian, 7 march 1998, Review: 26. Holmes, katie. ‘gardening at the “edge”: Judith wright’s desert garden, mongarlowe, new south wales’, Australian Humanities Review, 36, 2005, available from Australian Humanities Review, school of Humanities, Australian national University, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-July2005/08Holmes.html, accessed 16 June 2008. Hollier, nathan. ‘From Hope to disillusion? A literary and cultural history of the whitlam period 1966–1975’, Phd thesis,Victoria University, 2006 – Victoria University eprints Repository, http://eprints.vu.edu.au/archive/00000526/, accessed 16 June 2008. Hope, Ad. Judith Wright, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1975.

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Hubber, Brian and Vivian smith. Patrick White: A Bibliography, Auburn,Vic: Quiddlers, 2004. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Indyk, Ivor. David Malouf. oxford Australian writers series. melbourne: oxford University Press, 1993. _____ David Malouf: A Celebration, canberra: Friends of the national library of Australia, 2001. _____ ‘the strange Allure of Eucalyptus’, Inaugural lecture, whitlam chair in writing and society at the University of western sydney, presented at government House, sydney, on 29 may 2005. excerpt posted on the whitlam Institute website, University of western sydney, http://www.whitlam.org/ its_time/25/ivor.html, accessed 2 may 2006. Jaivin, linda. ‘the Place where travel stopped’, Meanjin, 62(4), 2003: 108–114. _____ The Infernal Optimist, sydney: Fourth estate/Harpercollins, 2006. Jennings, kate. ‘Brilliant in Parts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 march 1991, p. 29. Jones, Jennifer. ‘why weren’t we listening’, overland 171, 2003. pp. 44–49. kane, Paul. Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity, cambridge, Uk: cambridge University Press, 1996. karalis, Vrasidas. Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris, Blackheath, nsw: Brandl & schlesinger, 2008. kelly, Ralph.‘enough to go Around’, N.S.W Builders’ Labourer, August-septemberoctober, 1965, pp. 27–28. kinsella, John. Fast, Loose Beginnings: a memoir of intoxications, carlton, Victoria: melbourne University Press, 2006. koval, Ramona. ‘Ramona koval talks to Helen garner and cassandra Pybus’, Australian Book Review, may 1995: 9–12. _____ Tasting Life Twice: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, sydney: ABc Books, 2005. _____ ‘Hilary mcPhee on the book industry blame game’, ABc Radio national, The Book Show, 26 July 2006. transcript available from ABc online http:// www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2006/1697344.htm, accessed 16 June 2008. kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. margaret waller, new York: columbia University Press, 1984. kurtzer, sonja. ‘Is she or Isn’t she? Roberta sykes and “Authentic” Aboriginality’, Overland, 171, 2003: 50–56. kurzman, charles and lynn owens. ‘the sociology of Intellectuals’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 2002: 63–90. laing, Rd. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness [1964], london: Routledge, 1971. lambert, Helen. ‘A draft preamble: les murray and the politics of poetry’, Journal of Australian Studies, 80, 2004: 5–14. latham, mark. From the suburbs: building a nation from our neighbourhoods, Annandale, nsw: Pluto, 2003.

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leer, martin. ‘“only the centre holds”: the meditative landscapes of les murray’. Les Murray and Australian Poetry, Angela smith, ed., london: menzies centre for Australian studies, king’s college london, 2002. pp. 41–64. legge, kate. ‘truly Helen’, Weekend Australian, 29–30 march 2008, Magazine, pp. 16–21. leonard, John stuart. ‘craven on during, during on white’, Meanjin, 55(2), 1996: 267–275. lever, susan.‘Ratbag writers and cranky critics: In their Praise’, JASAL, 4, 2005: 11–22, available from Journal of the Association for the study of Australian literature (JAsAl), online at national library of Australia (nlA) http:// www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/44, accessed 16 June 2008. levy, Bronwen. ‘editorial’, Hecate, 21(2), 1995: 4–9. lilley, merv. ‘sex is a nazi’, Overland, 146, 1997: 72–3. lock, charles. ‘Fredy Neptune: metonymy and the Incarnate Preposition’, The Poetry of Les Murray. In Hergenhan, laurie and Bruce clunies Ross, eds, pp. 122–141. lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, california: crossing Press, 1984. lucashenko, melissa. ‘let’s get It Right (with apologies to w. H. Auden)’, Life in Gadigal Country, Anita Heiss, ed., strawberry Hills, nsw: gadigal Information service, 2002. pp. 73–4. _____ ‘not Quite white in the Head’, Griffith Review, summer, 2003–2004: 11–21. mccann, Andrew. ‘the ethics of Abjection: Patrick white’s Riders in the Chariot’, Australian Literary Studies, 18(2), 1997: 145–155. _____ ‘decomposing suburbia: Patrick white’s Perversity’, Australian Literary Studies, 18(4), 1998: 56–71. _____ ‘How to fuck a tuscan garden’, Overland, 177, 2004: 22–24. _____ ‘the obstinacy of the sacred’, Antipodes, 19 (2), december 2005: 152–158. _____ ‘the literature of extinction’, Meanjin, 65(1), 2006: 48–54. _____ ‘Professing the Popular: Political Fiction circa 2006’, New Reckonings: Australian Literature Past, Present, Future – Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Webby, leigh dale and Brigid Rooney, eds, Australian Literary Studies special issue, october 2007: 43–57. mccooey, david.‘marginalia:the Public life of Australian Poetry’, TEXT special issue, 4, october 2005, available online from text: Australian Association of writing Program, http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue4/mccooey, accessed 18 may 2008. mccredden, lyn. ‘craft and Politics: Remembering Babylon’s Postcolonial Responses’. Southerly, 59(2), 1999: 5–16. mcFarlane, Fiona. ‘williamson on writing’, State of the Arts (ejournal), 20 may 2002, http://www.stateart.com.au/sota/performing/default.asp?fid=1016, accessed 16 June 2008. mcgahan, Andrew. Underground, crows nest, nsw: Allen & Unwin, 2006. mckenna, mark. ‘writing the Past’, Australian Financial Review, 16 december

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_____ Killing the Black Dog: Essays and poems, Annangrove, nsw: the Federation Press, 1997. _____ A Working Forest: Selected Prose, Potts Point, nsw: duffy & snellgrove, 1997. _____ Fredy Neptune, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 1998. _____ ‘How Fred and I came to write Fredy Neptune’, in Peter craven, ed., The Best Australian Essays 1999, melbourne: Bookman, 1999. pp. 364–373. _____ The Quality of Sprawl:Thoughts About Australia, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 1999. _____ Collected Poems 1961–2002, sydney: duffy & snellgrove, 2002. musgrove, Br ian. ‘david williamson in the dock’, Overland, 182, 2006: 13–19. myers, david. Untitled review of Cloudstreet, LiNQ Literature in North Queensland, 19(1), 1992: 133–136. neill, Rosemary. ‘Is this the most feared man in Australian literature?’ Weekend Australian, 22–23 July 2006, Review: 4–5. _____ ‘who is killing the great Books of Australia?’ Weekend Australian, 18–19 march 2006, Review: 4–6. nettelbeck, Amanda, ed. Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf, nedlands, wA: University of western Australia, centre for studies in Australian literature, 1994. ngai, sianne. Ugly Feelings, cambridge, massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005. nile, Richard. The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2002. noonuccal, oodgeroo. We are Going: Poems. Brisbane, Queensland: Jacaranda Press, 1964. _____ The Dawn is at Hand: Poems by Kath Walker, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966. _____ My People: A Kath Walker Collection [1970], Brisbane, Qld: Jacaranda Press, 1981. _____ Stradbroke Dreamtime. sydney nsw: Angus & Robertson, 1972. _____ ‘Aboriginal literature’. Identity, 2(3), 1975: 39–40. _____ ‘writers of Australia, “I dips me lid”’, in kathie cochrane, Oodgeroo, pp. 213–229. nora, Pierre. Realms of memory: rethinking the French past, in lawrence d kritzman, ed., Realms of memory: rethinking the French past [Les Lieux de Mémoire, c1984–c1986] vol. 1, trans. Arthur goldhammer, new York: columbia University Press, 1996–1998. Peacock, noel. ‘“embracing the Vernacular”: An Interview with les. A. murray’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, 7, 1992: 28–40. Perera, suvendrini. ‘Unspeakable Bodies: Representing the Aboriginal in Australian critical discourse’, Meridian, 13(1), 1994: 15–26. Petersson, Irmtraud. ‘ “odysseus from the outback”: Fredy Neptune in german and its critical Reception’, Australian Literary Studies, 22(1), may 2005: 1–28.

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Pierce, Peter. ‘enjoyable lamb and Pickles’, Bulletin, 9 April 1991, p. 104. _____ ‘les murray’s narrowspeak’. In Hergenhan, laurie and Bruce clunies Ross, eds. The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, pp. 76–86. Ramsey, Alan. ‘Universal darkness Buries All’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July 2000, p. 41. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, cambridge: cambridge University Press, 2000. Rechter, deb. ‘Alfred dreyfus and the war on terror’, transcript of interview with deb Rechter, broadcast on ABc Radio national’s Law Report, on 11 April 2006, available from ABc online, Radio national, the law Report, http:// www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2006/1612922.htm#, accessed 16 June 2008. Riemer, Andrew. ‘wait a minute, tim’. Review of In the Winter Dark, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1988, p. 77. Reineke, martha. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Robinson, Roland. ‘An Aboriginal Poet’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 november 1966, p. 20. Rooney, Brigid. ‘writers Behaving Badly: stead, Bourdieu and Australian literary culture’, Australian Literary Studies, 20(1), may 2001: 76–87. _____ ‘the sinner, the Prophet, and the Pieta: sacrifice and the sacred in Helen garner’s narratives’, Antipodes, 19(2), 2005: 159–165. _____ ‘Reluctant prophets and gadfly laureates: the Australian writer as public intellectual’, in Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, debjani ganguly and edward curthoys, eds, melbourne: melbourne University Press, 2007, pp. 96–118. _____ ‘Remembering Inheritance: david malouf and the literary cultivation of nation’, Journal of Australian Studies, 90, 2007: 65–75. Rooney, monique. ‘my You: Fannie Hurst, Zora neale Hurston and literary patronage’, in sheffield Hallam’s Working Papers on the Web, ‘Racial disciplines’ issue, monique Rooney (ed.), 5, 2003, available at http://extra.shu. ac.uk/wpw/race/rooneym.htm, accessed 16 June 2008. Rose, deborah Bird. Reports from a wild country: ethics for decolonisation (sydney: University of new south wales Press, 2004. Rowe, noel. ‘Just Poetry’, in Just Words: Australian Authors Writing for Justice, Bernadette Brennan, ed., pp. 46–61. _____ ‘Justice, sacrifice and the mother’s Poem’, The Poetry of Les Murray. In Hergenhan, laurie and Bruce clunies Ross, eds. The Poetry of Les Murray: Critical Essays, pp. 142–156. _____ ‘les murray and the Unseen opponent’, Southerly, 51(2), 1991: 319–330. Rutherford, Jennifer. The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy. carlton south,Vic: melbourne University Press, 2000. Ryan, gig. ‘“And the Foetid Air and gritty”’. Heat, 5, 1997: 196–203. said, edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, london: Vintage, 1994.

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_____ On Late Style, london: Bloomsbury, 2006. sallis, eva. The Marsh Birds, crows nest, nsw: Allen & Unwin, 2005. _____ ‘Art in a time of crisis’, Just Words: Australian Authors Writing For Justice, Bernadette Brennan, ed., pp. 1–12 scalmer, sean. ‘searching for the Aspirationals’, Overland, 180, 2005: 5–9. schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth, london: cape, 1982. scott, Rosie and thomas keneally (eds). Another Country, Broadway, nsw: sydney Pen & Halstead Press, 2004. serle, geoffrey. From the Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972, melbourne,Vic: Heinemann, 1973. Shadow Sister. director: Frank Heimans, Performer: oodgeroo noonuccal. cinetel Productions, 1977; dVd FrontRow Video distribution. shapcott, thomas. ‘Alive, Alive-o’, Australian Book Review, 6(2–3), 1966–1967: 33. shoemaker, Adam. Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1989. simons, margaret. ‘ties that Bind’, Griffith Review, 8, 2005: 13–36. sorenson, Rosemary. ‘the warming of winton’. Courier-Mail, 12 June 2004, p. m01. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. stewart, douglas. ‘Judith wright: Poet of Australia’, Sunday Australian, 25 April 1971, p. 18. strauss, Jennifer. ‘elegies for mothers: Reflections on gwen Harwood’s “mother who gave me life” and les murray’s “three Poems in memory of my mother”. Westerly, 4, 1989: 58–63. _____ Judith Wright, oxford Australian writers series. melbourne: oxford University Press, 1995. summers, Anne. ‘the writer Vanishes,’ Australian Author, november 2000: 16–21. tacey, david J. Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, north Blackburn,Vic: Harpercollins, 1995. teiwes, Jack. ‘nostalgia, Reconciliation or new national myth?: the Adaptation of Cloudstreet to the stage’. Australasian Drama Studies, 48, 2006: 228–247. ‘titanic conceit’, Australian, lead editorial, 19 october 2005, p. 15. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. tranter, John. ‘through “european” eyes’, Weekend Australian, 6–7 August 1977, p. 13. Ueda, makoto. Matsuo Basho, new York: twayne Publishers, 1970. Vickery, Ann. ‘the Rise of “women’s Poetry” in the 1970s: An Initial survey into new Australian Poetry, the women’s movement, and a matrix of Revolutions’, Australian Feminist Studies, 22(53), 2007: 265–285. Visontay, michael. ‘Australia’s top 100 Public Intellectuals’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 march 2005, p. 9. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. walker, kath. see noonuccal, oodgeroo. walker, shirley. Flame and Shadow: A Study of Judith Wright’s Poetry, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1991. wallace-crabbe, chris. ‘A sense of land and region’, Age, 3 April 1971, p. 13.

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wallis, John. ‘kath walker: Poetry or Propaganda’. Checkpoint: a Journal of Liberal Opinion, 10, 1972: 22–24. waten, Judah. ‘Australian literature in 1962’, Realist Writer, 12, 1963. Reprinted in delys Bird et al. Authority and Influence: Australian Literary Criticism 1950– 2000, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001. watson, Irene. ‘settled and unsettled spaces: Are we free to roam?’, ACRAWSA – Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Journal, 1, 2005: 40–52. watzke, Beth. ‘where Pigs speak in tongues and Angels come and go: A conversation with tim winton’. Antipodes, 5(2), 1991: 96–98. webby, elizabeth. ‘our Invisible colossus’, Australian Literary Review, 2(4), 2007: 3, 10. white, Patrick. The Aunt’s Story [1948], london:Vintage,1 994. _____ The Tree of Man [1955], london: Penguin Books, 1961. _____ Voss [1957], Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin Books, 1960. _____ ‘the Prodigal son’, Australian Letters, 1(3), 1958: 37–40. _____ Riders in the Chariot [1961], Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin Books, 1964. _____ The Burnt Ones [1964], middlesex, england: Penguin Books, 1968. _____ Four Plays by Patrick White, london: eyre & spottiswoode, 1965. _____ The Solid Mandala [1966], london: Penguin Books, 1969. _____ The Vivisector [1970], london:Vintage,1 994. _____ The Eye of the Storm, london: Jonathan cape, 1973. _____ The Cockatoos, london: Jonathan cape, 1974. _____ A Fringe of Leaves, [1976], london:Vintage,1 997. _____ The Twyborn Affair, london: Jonathan cape, 1979. _____ Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait [1981], london: Penguin Books, 1983. _____ Memoirs of Many in One [1986], Harmondsworth, Uk: Penguin Books, 1987. _____ Patrick White Speaks, eds, christine Flynn and Paul Brennan. sydney: Primavera Press, 1989. _____ Patrick White: A Tribute, compiled by clayton Joyce. north Ryde, nsw: Angus & Robertson/Harpercollins, 1991. _____ Patrick White: Letters, david marr, ed., milsons Point, nsw: Random House, 1994. whitlock, gillian. ‘In the second Person: narrative transactions in stolen generations testimony’, Biography, 24(1), 2001: 197–214. willbanks, Ray. Speaking Volumes: Australian writers and their work, Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books, 1992. williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature, oxford: oxford University Press, 1977. _____ Culture, london: Fontana, 1980. williamson, david. ‘cruise ship Australia’, Bulletin, 123( 42), 18 october 2005. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. _____ ‘culture, yes, but please, not in their backyards’, Australian, 23 February 2006, p. 10. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. windschuttle, keith. ‘Vilifying Australia: the perverse ideology of our adversary

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culture’, september 2005. Available from the sydney line. keith windschuttle, http://www.sydneyline.com/Vilifying%20Australia.htm, accessed 16 June 2008. winton, tim. An Open Swimmer, sydney: george Allen & Unwin, 1982. _____ Shallows [1984], north sydney: Allen & Unwin/Unwin Paperbacks, 1985. _____ Scission [1985], camberwell,Vic: Penguin Books, 1998. _____ That Eye,The Sky [1986], camberwell,Vic: Penguin Books, 1998. _____ In the Winter Dark [1988], camberwell,Vic: Penguin Books, 1998. _____ Cloudstreet [1991], camberwell,Vic: Penguin Books, 1998. _____ Land’s Edge [1993], sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 1998. _____ The Riders, sydney: Pan macmillan, 1994. _____ ‘Foreign Body’, London Review of Books, 22 June 1995: 18–19. _____ Blueback [1997], sydney: Picador, 1999. _____ ‘strange Passion: A landscape memoir’, Down to Earth: Australian Landscapes, by Richard woldendorp and tim winton. Fremantle, wA: Fremantle Arts centre Press, 1999, pp. ix–xxxii. _____ Dirt Music, sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 2001. _____ ‘our reef, my belief ’. Australian, 30 november 2002, p. 21. Factiva.com, accessed 16 June 2008. _____ ‘How the reef was won’, Bulletin, 5 August 2003. pp. 16–21. _____ The Turning, sydney: Picador/Pan macmillan, 2004. _____ ‘saving moreton Bay’, speech delivered at the Australian marine conservation society Art Auction, Queensland state library, 24 August, 2007. transcript available from Australian marine conservation society website. media 28 August 2007. http://www.marineconservation.org.au/default2. asp?active_page_id=460, accessed 16 June 2008. _____ ‘no Humane way to kill a whale’, The Last Whale Blogspot, 5 november 2007. Available from the last whale Blogspot. chris Pash, http:// thelastwhale.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-humane-way-to-kill-whale-timwinton.html, accessed 16 June 2008. _____ Breath, camberwell,Vic: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin group, 2008. wise, Amanda. ‘Hope and Belonging in a multicultural suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(1–2), 2005: 171–186. wright, Judith. Papers of Judith wright 1915–2000 (ms 5781), national library of Australia, canberra, Act. _____ Australian Poetry 1948, sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1949. _____ The Generations of Men [1959], melbourne: oxford University Press, 1965. Paperback edition. _____ Preoccupations in Australian Poetry [1965], Perth: curtin University of technology, API network, 2004. _____ Collected Poems 1942–1970, cremorne, nsw: Angus & Robertson, 1971. _____ ‘the koori Voice: A new literature’, Australian Author, october 1973: 38–44. _____ Because I was invited, melbourne: oxford University Press, 1975.

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_____ ‘creating a new dreamtime’, National Times, 14–19 June 1976. Reprinted as ‘moongalba’ in wright, Born of the Conquerors, pp. 3–9. _____ The Coral Battleground. west melbourne,Vic: thomas nelson, 1977. _____ The Cry for the Dead [1981], Perth: curtin University of technology, API network, 2004. _____ Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays by Judith Wright, canberra: Aboriginal studies Press, 1991. _____ Going on Talking, springwood, nsw: Butterfly Books, 1992. _____ Collected Poems 1942–1985, sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994. _____ ‘the Poetry: An Appreciation’, in kathie cochrane, Oodgeroo, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1994, pp. 163–183. _____ Half a Lifetime, Patricia clarke, ed., melbourne: text Publishing, 1999. _____ The Equal Heart and Mind: Letters Between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney, Patricia clarke and meredith mckinney, eds, st lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2004. _____ With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright, meredith mckinney and Patricia clarke, eds, canberra: national library of Australia, 2006. wyndham, susan. ‘Facts in the Fiction’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29–30 march 2008, spectrum: 26–27. Žižek, slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, london:Verso,2 002. _____ ‘welcome to the desert of the Real’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(2), 2002: 385–389.

Index

A Fringe of Leaves (white), 122–3 A spirit of play (malouf), 132 ‘Aboriginal charter of Rights’ (noonuccal), 65, 68 ‘Aboriginal literature’ (noonuccal), 70 Aboriginal treaty committee, 19, 87 Adamson, Robert, 21 Adler, louise, ix–xii, xix–xx, xxi, xxix Alexander, Peter, 83, 85, 90, 100, 101, 114, 115, 117 alienation and belonging theme, xxx Alive (wright), 20, 21 ‘An Absolutely ordinary Rainbow’ (murray), 105 An Imaginary Life (malouf), 119, 121, 122, 124, 127 An Open Swimmer (winton), 163, 164 Anderson, Benedict, xxi anti-conscription movement, 32 anti-nuclear campaign, 30–1, 32 ‘Art in a time of crisis’ (sallis), 183 Arts council literature Board, 19, 85–6 ‘At cooloolah’ (wright), 6, 63, 91, 94, 118 Australia council for the Arts, 85, 114

Australian poetry Aboriginal, 80 autonomy for the artist, 80–1 bardic role, 81 cross-over from elegy to protest song, 64, 66 as a cultural field, 80 in electronic and digital age, 81 ethics of white representation of land and nation, 78–9, 81–2, 88 ‘generation of ’68’, 81, 108 ‘literature of extinction’, 63 poetry or propaganda?, 66, 67–8 poets as unacknowledged legislators, xxiv and settler-colonial identity, 81–2 small market and exclusive, readership, 81 symbolic power of, 81 as a vehicle for protest, 65 Australian society of Authors, 182 Australian writing or writers activism and debate, 181–2 association of writers with academia, 186

252

Index

changing context, 193 conditions hampering literary culture, xx condition of publishing market, xxii as cultural change-agents, 187 decline in prestige of ‘high postmodernist’ texts, 166 dominated by white, middle-class way of seeing, 151 duty to ‘bear witness’, 183–4 fading prestige of the literary, xix under Howard, x–xiv impact of expanded ‘middlebrow’ readership, xix and latham on ‘tourists’ and ‘residents’, xv–xvi linguistic and stylistic sophistication no longer prized as highly, 166 literary art rejected for the popular, 189–91 and new media technology, xxi public engagement and interventions, 141, 184 refusals of cultural inheritance, 10 role of provocateur or iconoclast, xxviii sustaining relevance, xi–xiii tertiary training and literary career pathways 185 value of the ‘literary’ to contemporary society, xvii–xviii value of white’s fiction, xiv–xv under whitlam, x williamson’s attack on ‘aspirational Australians’, xxv–xxvii, 35–6 writer-activists, xxii–xxiii, xxix writer-intellectuals, xxi–xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 183 writers as society’s conscience, xix–xx Australians Against Racism, 182

Authors Take Sides: Iraq and the Gulf War (eds moorcroft wilson, J & woolf, c), xix Bail, murray, xx Bastards from the Bush (film), 102 Baxter, James, 106–7 Beasley, Jack, 36 Belonging (Read), 135 Benang: From the Heart (scott, k), 56 Benjamin, walter, 122 Berger, thomas, 107 Bicentenary boycott, 22–3, 32 Biplane Houses (murray), 97 Blainey, geoffrey, 86 Blight, John, 6 bodyjamming (ed mead, J), 152 Bolton, ken, 115 Bonyhady, tim, 19, 23, 32, 33, 34 Bookscan (see nielsen Bookscan Australia) ‘Bora Ring’ (wright), 9, 62, 71 Born of the Conquerors (wright), 91 Bourdieu, Pierre, v, xv, xviii, xxviii, 10, 53, 69, 80, 94, 140, 148 Bourke, lawrence, 89, 109 Boyd, Arthur, 32 Brady,Veronica, 4, 5, 10, 16, 23, 74, 85 Braidotti, Rosi, 156 Breath (winton), 56, 173, 176, 177 Brennan, christopher, 11 Briggs, Raymond, 30 Brodsky, Joseph, 99 Buckley,Vincent,1 3 Bulletin, 7, 8, 91 ‘Bullocky’ (wright), 5, 8–9, 91 ‘caddis-Fly’ (wright), 24–5 cameron, John, 135 campbell, david, 6 ‘canefields’ (wright), 73 capp, Fiona, xix carter, david, xix, xxi, 134, 135, 136 casanova, Pascale, xxix, 37, 98, 99 castro, Brian, xix, 56, 185–6 Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia (ed cameron), 135

Index clendinnen, Inga, 143, 146, 152 Cloudstreet (winton), 164–5, 173, 175, 178 clouston, Brian, 17 Collected Poems 1961–2002 (murray), 97, 98, 102 Collected Poems 1942–1970 (wright), 7, 21 committee of Inquiry into the national estate, 18 commonwealth literary Fund, 19 constitutional preamble draft (murray), 100 conway, Ronald, 155 coombs, Hc ‘nugget’, 16, 19, 85–6, 87 Cosmo Cosmolino (garner), 143 courtenay, Bryce, 182 cousins, geoffrey, 192 craven, Peter, 37 croft, Julian, 4 dale, leigh, 9 daniel, Helen, 129 davis, Jack, 19, 59, 70 davis, mark, xxi Dead Europe (tsiolkas), 56 Dead White M ales (williamson), xxv Death of a River Guide (Flanagan), 189 denton, Andrew, 174 dessaix, Robert, xx–xxi, 143 devaney, James, 62–3, 64 Digger (periodical), 156 Dirt Music (winton), 161, 171, 173–4, 177–9 dixon, Robert, 159, 165, 166 dobson, Rosemary, 6 doobov, Ruth, 67, 68–9 Dream Stuff (malouf), 136 dreyfus, Alfred, 140 dreyfus affair, xxiv, xxviii during, simon, xv, 37 Edge of the Sacred (tacey), 135 ellis, Bob, 102 Enough Rope (tV program), 174 ‘eroded Hills’ (wright), 6, 91–2

253

Eucalyptus (Bail), xx Every Move You Make (malouf), 136 Flanagan, Richard, xxxi, 181, 182, 188–93, 194 Flaws in the Glass (white), 31, 32, 33, 53 Fleay, david, 17 ‘For a Pastoral Family’ (wright), 24, 25, 93 Forshaw, michael, 3–4, 9 Fourth Quarter (wright), 21–2 Fredy Neptune (murray), 97, 98, 100, 110–14, 116, 118 gallagher, katherine, 66 Gangland (davis), xxi garner, Helen, xxi, 139–157, 184 artist-as-prophet, 150 background, 140 crossing from fiction to nonfiction, 141 diaries the basis for writing, 153–5 feminist reactions to The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation, 132, 142, 152–3 immersion in the ‘real’, 151 individuals pitted against institutions, 141, 144, 153, 157 influence on political engagement of writers, 141 intruding private matters into public realm, 155, 156–7 non-fiction prose following The First Stone, 141, 143, 144 reviews of Monkey Grip, 155 risk-taking, 156–7 sacred and mythical references, 146–8, 149, 150 self-representation as lone woman in public space, 153 The First Stone as public intervention, 139, 141, 142–3, 149, 156 writer-intellectual, xxxi, 143, 144, 153

254

Index

garrett, Peter, 30, 32 gelder, ken, xviii ‘generation ’68’ poets, 81, 108 gilbert, kevin, 19, 59, 70 gilmore, mary, 11, 12, 82 girard, René, 150 glover, Richard, 4 gray, Robert, 21–2 green, dorothy, 34 greer, germaine, 122–3, 143 grenville, kate, 181 guillory, John, xv, 187 Habermas, Jürgen, xxii Half a Lifetime (wright), 4–5, 16, 76, 93 Hall, Rodney, 68, 181 Harland’s Half Acre (malouf), 122, 127 Harpur, charles, 11, 12 Heaney, seamus, 99 Heimans, Frank, 74 Heiss, Anita, 61, 65, 181 Henderson, gerard, 120–1 Hoban, Russell, 30 Hope, Ad, 19–20, 165 Huggins, Jackie, 131 Identity (ed davis, J), 70 ‘Imagining the Real’ (white), 54–5 In the Winter Dark (winton), 163 ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ theme, xxx ‘J’Accuse!’ (Zola), 140–1 Jaivin, linda, 181, 182, 191 Jennings, kate, 165 Joe Cinque’s Consolation (garner), 144–7, 150–2, 153 Johnno (malouf), 127 Johnson, colin, 70 Johnson, eva, 71 Jones, Jennifer, 18, 74 ‘Jones generation’, 159–60 kelly, Ralph, 64–5 kendall, Henry, 12 keneally, thomas, xix, 181, 182 ‘killing the Black dog’ (murray), 91 kinsella, John, 101 ‘laconics: the Forty Acres’ (murray), 90

‘lake in spring’ (wright), 94 lambert, Helen, 80 ‘lament for Passenger Pigeons’ (wright), 21 Land’s Edge (winton), 158 lascaris, manoly, xiii, 39, 40, 55 latham, mark, xv–xvi lawson, sylvia, xix Learning Human (murray), 97 lehmann, geoffrey, 82 ‘les murray overview’ (Burke), 89 ‘let’s get it Right’ (lucashenko), 78–9 literary criticism, 125–7, 166 ‘literature of extinction’, 63 Little Big Man (Berger), 107 lorde, Audré, 63–4 lucashenko, melissa, 78–9 mcArthur, kathleen, 15, 17 mccann, Andrew, 42–3, 63, 130 mccooey, david, 81 mcgahan, Andrew, 181, 191 mckinney, Jack, 11, 14, 16, 34, 93–4, 193–4 mckinney, meredith, 16, 19 mclaren, John, 39 mcPhee, Hilary, xix, xx, 154, 164 ‘made in england’ (malouf), 132 malcolm, Janet, 143 malouf, david, xix, 119–136 Boyer Lectures (1998), 121, 133, 135 criticisms of, 121–6, 128 cultivating literature as a national project, 126–31, 136 diplomacy in addressing sensitive issues, 120–1 identifies continuities in Australia’s British inheritance, 134 literary career, 126–7 ‘made in england’, 128, 132, 134, 136 and national declaration of Reconciliation, 131

Index neustadt lecture, 122 non-fictional prose, 132–3 and quest for national healing, 130 reproduction of sacred places of memory, 130 retrospection of characters, 127 speaking and writing on national history and culture, 121 structuring time, 127–8, 129 style, 120, 127 on taking possession of place, 122, 128, 135 use of pronouns, 119–20, 134 writer-intellectual, xxxi writing inducing an ethical responsiveness, 134 manne, Robert, 152 marr, david, ix–x, xix, xxi, 32, 35, 39, 41, 46, 49, 53, 55, 167, 189 matthews, steven, 115 mead, Jenna, 152 mead, Philip, 5, 17, 27 Memoirs of Many in One (white), 43–4 meyer, nicholas, 30 Monkey Grip (garner), 140, 144, 153, 154–5, 156 Monthly, 192, 193 ‘moongalba’, 19, 76 moorhouse, Frank, xix, 181 morgan, lesley, 155 morrissey, di, 182 murray, les, xix, xxix–xxxi, 79–91, 97–118 alienation and belonging, 110–14 antagonism to cultural and political elites, 100, 114, 117 anti-feminism in his writing, 105, 108–10 Australian viewpoint of, 99, 100 bardic role, 80, 81 childhood unhappiness, 83, 102 and coombs, 85–6 and ‘culture wars’ discourse, 101 depression, 90, 91, 100, 110

255

dispossession and possession in poetry, 89, 91 drafts constitutional preamble, 100 engagement with his work by feminist scholars, 103 gender politics, 90, 91, 102, 103, 109–10 hopes for a republic, 84, 85 images of contained masculinity, 104, 105, 109 international recognition, 98–9, 100 narrative of inheritance, 88–9, 106 national platform through poetry, 80 personal life part of public discourse, 101, 102–3 poetic output, 97–8 public persona, 1102, 03 and reconciliation, 117 and republic issue, 84, 85 setting out to provoke, 101–2 ‘urge to say the unsayable’, 115 use of ‘victim’ status, 102, 103, 109, 117 weeping/damaged man theme, xxx, 104–5, 106, 109–10, 114, 116, 117, 118 and wright, xxx, xxxi, 61, 79–81, 82, 83–4, 86–7, 88 writer-intellectual, xxxi, 103 musgrove, Brian, xxvi My People (noonuccal), 67 narogin, mudrooroo, 71 nation, defining, xxi national declaration of Reconciliation, 131 ngai, sianne, 49–50 nielsen Bookscan Australia, xx nielsen, John shaw, 11 ‘nigger’s leap: new england’ (wright), 9 nobel Prize in literature, 40, 98

256

Index

noonuccal, oodgeroo (kath walker), xxx, 59–77 connection between writing and activism, 61, 64–5 contributions to public life, 61, 65 critics’ responses, 66, 67–8 elegiac poetry, 63 engagement with wright’s poetry, 62 film biography Shadow Sisters, 74 impact of ‘Aboriginal charter of Rights’, 65, 68 nurturing fellow Aboriginal writers, 70–1 performing poetry, 65, 68, 69 poetry or propaganda debate, 66, 67–8 public sisterhood with wright, xxx, 18–19, 59–77 and referendum campaign, 66 response to critics, 69, 70 response to wright’s ‘Bora Ring’, 71 on her status as an Aboriginal poet, 69–70 wright’s role in reception of oodgeroo’s poetry, 18, 71–72, 77 writer-intellectual and writeractivist, 60–1, 71 use of elegy, 63 We are Going a landmark, 61–2, 64, 65–6 wright on noonuccal’s literary achievement, 77 nora, Pierre, 130 ‘notes at edge’ (wright), 25–6 ordinary and the extraordinary theme, xxx ‘out of control: the tragedy of tasmania’s Forests’ (Flanagan), 192, 193 Patrick White S peaks, 32, 33, 34 Pen, 182, 183

Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (eds tranter, J & mead, P), 27 Perera, suvendrini, 125 Perlman, elliot, 181 Phantom Dwelling (wright), ix, 23–7, 28, 54, 55, 93 Pierce, Peter, 165 Poems the Size of Photographs (murray), 97 poetry wars, 101 politicians and poets, 3 Porter, dorothy, xix Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (wright), 12, 82 prophetfigures artist-as-prophet, 150 prophet from the desert or wilderness, 5, 35, 42 as fool-elect , xxx, 168, 169, 173, 177 poet-as-prophet, 4, 5, 13, 27, 80 writer as social prophet or seer, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii Quadrant, 84, 85, 86 Quarterly Essay, 128, 132, 134, 136 Rayson, Hannie, 181 Read, Peter, 135 Realist writers’ group, 69 reconciliation, 22–3, 76–7, 117 Remembering Babylon (malouf), 121–5, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135 republic debate, 84, 85, 100 Riddley Walker (Hoban), 30 Riders in the Chariot (white), 36, 42–3, 44–5, 47 Robb, Peter, xix Robinson, Roland, 68 Roughsey, dick, 70 Rowe, noel, 60, 90 Rudd, kevin, 192 said, edward, xxiii, 38 sallis, eva, 181, 182, 183–4 ‘sanctuary’ (wright), 14–15 schell, Jonathan, 30 scott, kim, 56, 181

Index scott, Rosie, 182 seidler, Harry, 32 Selected Poems (murray), 97 sewell, stephen, xix, 182 Shadow Sisters (film), 74 Shallows (winton), 163, 168–71, 172–3, 177, 178 Shanghai Dancing (castro), 185–6 simons, margaret, xv ‘sister Poet’ (noonuccal), 72–3, 74 South of My Days (Brady), 5, 16 ‘south of my days’ (wright), 5, 6–7 Southerly, 87 stewart, douglas, 6, 7–8 stow, Randolph, 164–5 Stradbroke Dreamtime (noonuccal), 73 strauss, Jennifer, 10, 22 Subhuman Redneck Poems (murray), 100, 110, 115, 116 summers, Anne, xxi sykes, Roberta, 19, 59 tacey, david, 135 tasker, John, 46 That Eye, the Sky (winton), 163 The Aunt’s Story (white), 38, 39 ‘the Beneficiaries’ (murray), 115 The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (murray), 87, 97, 101, 103, 106–9, 112 The Burnt Ones (white), 46 ‘the coming Republic’ (murray), 84 The Conversations at Curlow Creek (malouf), 127, 128–9, 130, 135 The Coral Battleground (wright), 17 The Cry for the Dead (wright), 13 The Dawn is at Hand (noonuccal), 67, 69 The Day After (film), 30 The Eye of the Storm (white), 33 The Fate of the Earth (schell), 30 ‘the Fine Art of Activism’ (see also Bonyhady), 32 The First Stone (garner), 139, 140–3, 144, 149–50, 152, 153, 156 The Gateway (wright), 13, 14, 92

257

The Generations of Men (wright), 13, 82 The Ham Funeral (white), 46 ‘the Harp and the king’ (wright), 15 The Ideas Market (carter), xxi The Il ex Tree (murray), 82 The Infernal Optimist (Jaivin), 191 The Marsh Birds (sallis), 183–4 ‘the mitchells’ (murray), 104 The Moving Image (wright), 6 The Other Half (wright), 20 ‘the Prodigal son’ (white), x, 41–2, 51 The Quality of Sprawl (book of murray essays), 84 ‘the Quality of sprawl’ (murray’s poem), 90, 97–8 The Riders (winton), 171 The Rules of Art (Bourdieu), xxviii The Season at Sarsaparilla (white), 50, 55, 167 The Solid Mandala (white), 29–30, 46, 47, 48–9 The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan), 189 The Spare Room (garner), 143, 154 ‘the steel’ (murray), 90 The Tree of Man (white), 40, 41, 43, 165 The Turning (winton), 177 The Two F ires (wright), 13, 14, 15 The Twyborn Affair (white), 43 The U nknown Terrorist (Flanagan), xxxi, 182, 188–9 The Vanished Tribes (devaney), 62–3 The Vivisector (white), 47 thomson, katharine, 182 ‘tightropes’ (wright), 20 ‘tourists’ and ‘residents’, xv–xvi, 55 tranter, John, 22, 23, 25, 27, 101 ‘trapped dingo’ (wright), 7 tsiolkas, christos, 56, 182 12 Edmondstone Street (malouf), 132 ‘two dreamtimes’ (wright), 18–19, 60, 73, 74, 91 Ugly Feelings (ngai), 49–50

258

Index

Underground (mcgahan), 191 Utzon, Joern, 32 Voss (white), 40, 41–2 walcott, derek, 99 walker, kath see noonuccal, oodgeroo walker, Robert, 71 walker, shirley, 13–14, 22 wallace-crabbe, chris, 21 wallis, John, 67, 68 waten, Judah, 36 watson, maureen, 71 We are Going (noonuccal), 18, 61–2, 67, 69 We Call for a Treaty (wright), 19 webb, Francis, 6 ‘welcome to the desert of the Real’ (Žižek), 29–30 When the Wind Blows (Briggs), 30 white, Patrick, ix, 29–56 activism (his ‘shocking career’), 31–3, 42, 54–5, 162 art prioritised over activism, 32, 33, 34 and Australian philistinism, x, xi autobiographical metanarrative, 38, 43–4 boycotts Bicentenary, 32 at castle Hill, xiii, 40 choosing antipodean obscurity, 40 ‘coming out’ and move to city, 41, 47 as cultural change-agent, 187 debates about value of his fiction, xiv–xv diversifies into short stories and plays, 46 environmentalism not reflected in novels, 33 extraordinary in the ordinary, 51, 52, 55, 166, 176 fear of running dry on move to the city, 49 a ‘great writer’ figure, 31, 37, 46, 166

homosexuality, 40, 44, 47, 49 identification with ordinary people, 38 imagining the real, 29–30, 31, 54–5 impact of mother’s death, 47 independent wealth, 38–9, 47, 55 insider–outsider perspective, 39–40, 41, 55 involvement in the theatre, 46–7 and lascaris, xiii, 39, 40, 55 legacy of unsettling national complacencies, 56 move to the city, 34–5, 46, 47 nobel Prize for literature, 37, 40 ‘Patrick white’ phenomenon, 34–5, 36 political alignment, 37, 47 public persona, 31, 35–41, 43–4, 47 pursuing art for art’s sake, 53 pursuit of aristocracy of culture, 38–9 reaction to criticism, 165–6 ‘reborn’ as an author, 41 relishes public performance, 53–4 representation of contemporary Australia, 42–3 reproduction theme, 41 significance of ‘the Prodigal son’, 41–2 textual irritation in writing, 49–51 The Tree of Man compared with Cloudstreet, 165–7 a ‘tourist’ observing the ‘residents’, 55 urge to say ‘unsayable things’, 46, 47 use of abjection, 43, 44, 49 use of the conditional, 50 winton on his activism and theatre connections, 34–5, 46, 167 writer-intellectual, 38

Index whitlock, gillian, 134 ‘why does the women get All the Pain’ (garner), 144, 156 wildlife Preservation society of Queensland (wPsQ), 17, 77 williams, Raymond, 6 williamson, david, xix, xxi attack on ‘aspirational Australians’ (cruise ship Australia), xxv– xxvii, 35–6 public intervention, xxiv–xxv work synonymous with theatre establishment, xxvii windshuttle, keith, xiv winton, tim, 158–180 Aboriginal spirituality in Dirt Music, 178 attacks white’s activism and theatre connections, 167 from budding writer to national icon, 162–8 celebrity author with charisma, 174–5 christianity, 175 Cloudstreet compared with The Tree of Man, 165–7 credibility representing ‘ordinary’ Australians, 167 critical of white’s move to the city, 34–5 critical reception of his fiction, 165–6 as cultural change-agent, 187 discerning the extraordinary within the ordinary, 56, 166, 176–7 dislike of ‘exceptionalism’, 176, 177 environmental activist, xxxi, 160–1, 162, 173–4, 175, 180 ‘fool-elect’ figure or theme, 168, 169, 173, 177 interest in political matters, 167–8 literary influences on, 164–5

259

as a ‘literary’ writer, 159, 164, 165, 173, 179 a ‘littoralist’, 158–9, 164, 172, 177, 179 member of the Jones generation, 159–60 novels oriented to ‘middlebrow’ readership, 186–7 novels parallel actual events, 163–4, 168–71 protects his autonomy, 187 public persona, 163, 174–5, 176 ‘save moreton Bay’ address, 176 works both literary and popular, 159, 162 Woman to Man (wright), 6, 14 ‘woman to man’ (wright), 8 World Republic of Letters (see also casonova), 37 wright, Albert, 12, 13 wright, Alexis, 182 wright, Judith, 3–28, 59–77, 78–94 Aboriginal and human rights causes, 16–17, 22–3, 27, 87–8 activism, 5, 15–16, 17, 22, 27, 31, 32, 33–4, 82, 85, 93, 162 activism more important than poetry, 23, 82 apology to the dispossessed, 94 bardic role, 13, 80, 81 burden of colonial guilt, 24 champions the new ‘koori Voice’, 71 chosen exemplars or poetprecursors, 12 co-founder wPsQ, 17 colonial legacy, 8–9, 24, 76 connection of activism with poetry, 34 and coombs, 16, 19, 85, 86 crystallisation of vision in 1950s, 14–15 as cultural change-agent, 187 early poetry defines poetic-public career, 6–8, 13

260

Index founding member Arts council literature Board, 19 gendered representation, 8, 10, 12, 22, 66 governmental work, 17–18, 23, 85 as great writer, 185 ‘inheritance’, 9–11, 12, 24, 27, 82, 83, 91–4, 185 an ‘insider’, 12–13 last public appearance, 23 later poetry and Phantom Dwelling, 23–8 legacy, 4, 5, 6 literary critic, 11 loss of poetic energy, 19–22, 82, 92 love of land in early poetry, 7–8 and mckinney, 11, 14, 16, 34, 93–4, 193–4 ‘middle poetry’, 20–2, 25 and murray, xxx, xxxi, 61, 79–81, 82, 83–4, 86–7, 88 murray’s criticisms of, 84–5, 86 national platform through poetry, 80 on paternalism of white critics, 71–2 on representation of the land, 79–81

poet-activist, 5, 15–16, 17, 27 poet-intellectual, 27 poet-as-prophet, 4, 5, 27, 80 privileged pastoral background, 10–11 public sisterhood with noonuccal, xxx, 18–19, 59–77 recovering tradition of Australian poetry, 11–12 references to Asian and middle eastern cultures, 25, 27, 28 resolve to remain politically detached, 15 spurns the cult of personality, 101 status as woman poet, 5, 8, 11, 22 support for Black writer-activists, 19, 59 tributes on her death, 3–4 on white, 31 wright, may, 10, 12 writer-activists, xxii–xxiii, xxix writer-intellectuals, xxi–xxii, xxiii, xxiv Yu, ouyang, 182 Zable, Arnold, 182 Žižek, slavoj, 29–30 Zola, emile, xxiv, xxviii, 53, 140–1