My Father, Geranium, South Australia, 1919

How Memory Works

Because memory is visual verbal and communal and rehearsed, it can disappear under dominant images. I lived in L.A. for about ten years. I've been to Venice Beach a few times (housecleaning, showing a friend from home who wanted a particular book). And so I have visual and muscle memories of the canal, the boardwalk, and the cavernous 2nd-hand bookshop that had been there for years. (That must have been in '91.)

After seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys I now have visual memories of Venice Beach since the 1970s, when I was actually living on the bottom edge of the other side of the world in small patch of rich dairy-farms, and on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, and in Melbourne.

So what happens in a densely populated, media-rich location such as L.A., is that underground movement proliferate, document and ultimately broadcast themselves; the wealth generated by corruption is so fabulous it makes its own myths – Chinatown and the rest of L.A. noir from Chandler on – I will mount that film festival sooner or later – and these images become our not only our images, but also our memories. We remember going to the pictures; we remember what we saw. Seeing them was what we did.

I almost remember World War 2: until Sputnik it was the largest thing in our mental landscape. My parents and brother had lived through it. The first film I have a whole sense of is The Dam Busters. The radio serial we all listened to was Five Fingers. (Adapted and directed by Morris West. Yes, that Morris West).

I remember having anxiety dreams about the Korean War. I remember the Catholics fleeing the Communists, an exodus from North Vietnam – a 16mm film at school shown by a visiting priest.

There was nothing epic, filmic, beautiful, dramatic, noteworthy, about going to work or church or school, cooking, gardening, going to the beach or the hills.

And so to the vexed matter of Australian film.

There had been a silent film industry which never gained a truly sound footing.

Efftee Studios and Cinesound Productions foundered, in 1935 and 1936, repectively, on the Australian Government's failure to introduce a quota for domestic films. (The British did introduce one, giving rise to the "quota quickie" and, via Korda's Private Lives, to Von Sternberg's failed I, Claudius.)

Once Efftee and Cinesound and failed, there were very few Australian films. Some wartime action/morale boosters (40,000 Horsemen, directed by Charles Chauvel, The Kokoda Trail, directed by Ken G. Hall), and then almost nothing.

The only genuinely working production facility in the country was the Commonwealth Film Unit, the documentary arm of the Commonwealth Government. (Tim Burstall, Bruce Beresford, and Mike Thornhill worked there.)

When I was seven or so there was Smiley Gets a Gun at the drive-in; the same night, before it, a trailer for The Sundowners. We never saw that. My family didn't go to the pictures much and this kind of thing rubbed us the wrong way: Peter Ustinov & Robert Mitchum weren't Australians, couldn't get the accent, didn't reflect our lives; the flick was a foreign concoction, an exotification, a falsification, and we weren't going to pay to go to it.

(At the same time, when I saw South Pacific I kept wanting the camera to swing around and see us. I spent decades waiting for them to turn and see us.)

And so, from the mid-'30s until the early '70s, there was a dearth of images of Australia connected to anything the movies and the world thought important: and which we, therefore, might also find  defining and iconic now that cattle-drives and droughts and generally faux-Western tropes had stopped reflecting our lived experience in even the remotest, most analogical way. (1)

In 1971 there was Walkabout, another exotification, a journey with a hilariously mad geography.

Australian Literature was by and large out of print. Henry Lawson and Judith Wright existed in school editions, like Nevil Shute, Colin Thiele, and Kylie Tenant. Frank Hardy wrote on the Gurindji struggle for land rights. Wake in Fright was passed from hand to hand among teachers who'd never intended to be teachers (a terrifying Lord of the Flies at the edge of a country school). White was... too unique, adult, aristocratic, sophisticated, bizarre, to become a generally understood vision. (2)

Lawson's world was 70 years gone. For sense of place attached to the memorable – it all boiled down to the stark landscapes and dispossessions and implied genocides in the Wright.

1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And there, finally, the hills we'd driven through since I'd been a small child; the hill I'd looked at through my schoolroom window as a young teenager: stubble in summer, green in winter, round, low, inevitable, the true last shape of mountain and stone.

But Picnic gave rise to a spate of chocolate-box historicals, and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith was something you could only watch once, like Wake in Fright.

When I go to think of Australia there's only a rectangle of yellow-green, fading into over-exposure.

...

My family's photos have been largely destroyed. I met my father at the back door by chance one morning in 1988, as I came home from an errand; his hands were full of packets and books of old photos I'd never seen. He was on his way to the incinerator. (I'm so like him in so many ways I know what he was thinking. My mother had died; his life was over; there was no point to the images.)

Seeing what he carried I took everything with a cheerful, "I'll take those, Dad" – so smoothly I'm still amazed at myself – and mailed them to our L.A. address. When I sorted, ordered, and annotated them (nothing between 1927 and 1947 had been dated), I realized there were dozens from the 1950s that have utterly disappeared.

Nostalgia for the Light begins as an account of the astronomical telescope in the high desert of Chile and ends with a consideration of the deliberate suppression of evidence of the dispossession of the indigenous population before the suppression of evidence of mass murder by the Pinochet regime. That felt very familiar.

...

My parents were both very good dancers. My father loved musicals; my mother loved dramas.

"Cities are supposed to stimulate you, but Adelaide just puts me to sleep," a cousin of mine said to me a long time ago. Every time the tram crossed Greenhill Road on its way to the Bay I agreed, and thought of my mother wrestling with the washing and the shopping and the garden (that hard Adelaide clay), thinking of Joan Crawford.

...

So, if memory is visual and verbal and communal and rehearsed, then what is memorable is determined by authority. In colonial situations what the colonizing power wants suppressed will be buried. What the colonizing power thinks important will be believed to be important, and what the colonizing power deems unimportant will fade into unimportance.


Because the political has inserted itself into the personal, the personal is political. We must remember and create our own stuff. Our masters won't.

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1. There was something called Jack and Jill: A Postscript, which arrived (I seem to remember a film can of huge diameter) when I'd asked for something else for my Film Study class in 1971. It came from something called the South Australian Film Corporation, instead of from the Education Department. I showed it, having nothing else: it turned out to be about a bloke with a motorbike and his mate and his girlfriend. It had been shot on weekends over 5 years, as funds and the availability of the actors allowed, by Phillip Adams. (He never did anything as unfunded, difficult, frustrating, unrecognized and unrewarded again. He continued in advertising.)

2. Having Patrick White for your national novelist is like having Pablo Picasso for your portrait photographer.