The Art of Being Australian

part 1: a paper flag, & what is australia?

When I was at primary school they would occasionally (two or three times in the seven years I was there, so not very often) give us pads of offcut paper from somewhere, donations, I suppose. I don’t think we ever knew where they were from.

They were about three inches long and an inch wide, stapled across the middle. Someone always knew how to turn them into flip books. We’d draw a stick figure (at my one and only level of skill) or anything else, and draw it in sequential attitudes or actions at the same spot on each succeeding page, then bend and riffle the pages from front to back. The stick figures and more magnificent things moved as the pages blurred by, every time, to our unending & giggling delight.

I’m not musical, much to my parents’ disappointment; can’t carry a tune in a bucket, as they say here. I wanted to read Mark Mordue’s Boy On Fire because he says it is about the Australianness of Nick Cave’s work (1973- ). I want to know what someone as perceptive & articulate as Mordue has to say about the experience of being Australian, what it feels like, looks like.

“Australianness” began for me when the diamond-shaped lawns in Victoria Square were edged with hundreds of small Australian flags for the young Queen’s visit. Those think-inked, deep-coloured, thick-papered, deep-ink-smelling, red, white and blue flags! All that deep blue for the night sky, the white stars! Roll them up, curl them around that small pale stick – how it fits into your hand! Hold them curled in your hand all the way home… They were yours, mystical souvenirs, a talisman of enrollment and participation.

In... what?

part 2: cave forming, the q. of ozness

There is no one like Mordue for suburban Australian landscapes. His narrative is simultaneously analytic and evocative: the everyday, utterly common experience of going to friends’ houses after school, the photos of teenagers in school uniforms (suddenly seen as I always felt them, a prison), arguments with family, dangerous stone and yellow dirt roads, leafy Malvern and Toorak, gritty, grotty, druggy St. Kilda. They’re all there, Australian as emus.

Primary school, high school... Boy on Fire is remarkable because it’s like a flipbook, because you can see the landscape: the school bullying, going to school, going home, Nick talking, listening to music, arguing, reacting. As you flip the pages you can see Nick Cave forming.

At this point Australianness looks like the nuclear family and middle class, late mid-century white. First the childhood geography of a country town: boys on railway tracks, diving into the river, and then the geography of the single big city on the coast: long suburbs, yo-yo trips to school and home again.

Once Cave leaves school this compact flipbook scatters and fragments, because his life does.

part 3: we’re too far away

Once Cave is at Art School, is in one band, then in another, Australianness looks like an acute awareness of being three months behind the rest of the world, the time it took for magazines to be shipped from the U.S. or the UK.

At the same time, because 45s arrived more quickly than the magazines, Australia also looks like a far-off planet where all music arrives simultaneously and is heard that way, a place where astonishing musical amalgamations could form and be more avant-garde than music simultaneously created in those distant, central cities.

Also at the same time, no existing European culture could imagine white Australian experience, the strangeness and harshness and remoteness. New Zealand was as distant, or more distant, but it had reliable rain, large rivers fed by reliable snow-melt, mountain-shaped mountains, hill-sized hills, and an indigenous people who fought the British to a treaty. It was comprehensible to Europeans.

Australia’s plants and animals made no sense at all: black swan, eucalypt, kangaroo and platypus. The rains were unreliable, the ecologies low and highly variable in primary productivity, the mountains worn by unimaginable amounts of time, the hills so low they walk down to the sea like cattle. The deserts were vast. Europeans spent almost a hundred years looking for the inland sea that European understanding of geography said had to exist. Aboriginal culture was so non-material it was invisible; specializing in social and ecological equilibrium, it was incomprehensible.

These circumstances left Australian writers with two choices: either to include Australian experience and limit the audience, or disguise the work’s location from a global audience already saturated with the emotional and physical architextures of English reticence or American action.

The Western never became a satisfactory Australian trope. The outlaw picture wasn’t a possibility: “bushranger pictures” were banned from 1912-1942, and this censoring that left the Australian industry vulnerable to the effective American takeover of the 1920s. Cowboys and Indians wasn’t a possible framework, either: though white Australia was also a settler society of great violence, the absence of an indigenous warrior culture left a void where European drama demands an antagonist.

You don’t tell a global audience your book doesn’t matter because it’s set in Wangaratta… Cave set his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel in the American South of O’Connor and Faulkner.

part 4a: in the first ½ of the C20th, oil (& acrylic) painting become oracular

During the first sixty five years of the twentieth century, among the (former) European imperial powers and some of their (former) colonies, serious painting became almost oracular. In the late nineteenth century the Impressionists took painting out of the studios of Paris and depicted what many could see every day: landscapes industrializing, picnics, ballet dancers, bars, ordinary furniture, all in the shifting light of a moment – momentary truths in a permanent medium.

The post-Impressionists painted some of the same subjects but differently; the Fauves and Surrealists caught the anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-orthodox mood of WWI, its leadup and aftermath. The Cubists listened to the physicists and destroyed the single and coherent point of view. Images from all these movements became famous, often beginning as scandals, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster advertisements for performances, but also by being widely distributed as prints later.

Anarchic, individualistic images were the antithesis of the art of the Third Reich, beginning in the early 1930s. Monumental, oppressive architecture, bland, brutal personal types (The Athlete, The Worker). “Degenerate Art” was the new refusé, increasingly exhibited in secret, in Germany, in obscure private galleries which stayed open at personal risk to their owners, or taken from larger galleries by the new German authorities, who then closed the galleries altogether.

After WWII many European artists emigrated to the United States, diversifying painting until and after Jackson Pollock removed painting from the easel altogether, worked directly on canvas flat on a floor or the ground. Pollock’s drip paintings – paint dribbled from a can or dripped or flung from a stick or brush, layered so densely the intersecting lines resembled undergrowth or neural pathways – were politicized, promoted by the U.S. State Department as emblematic of freedom and the superiority of democracy over Soviet totalitarianism.

At that moment painting in oil on a canvas on an easel, and its later successors, briefly became the pre-eminent medium where a society depicted its (new) understanding of reality.

Gallery walls replaced the rock, cave and chapel walls where images of understanding or mythology had been displayed since the creation of the songlines of Australia, the paintings of Lascaux, Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire: until they themselves were replaced by movie screens, television screens, computer screens, phone screens.

part 4b – the outback, the other

White Australian art began with Joseph Banks. Beyond the very small scale of botanical illustration, the sketchers of scenes or whole landscapes couldn’t come to terms with the non-European shapes of the trees and the bush. Beyond that, the light was wrong, the colours were wrong, the distances were wrong, the scale was wrong.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Australian Impressionists such as Fred McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, Hans Heysen, and Grace Cossington Smith had caught the colours and shapes and distances, and sometimes the isolation.

Jon Perceval (1923-2000) and John Olsen (1928- ) are celebratory painters of the sea and coast. Perceval draws from Van Gogh, painting energetic seas and sea creatures; Olsen also paints the sea, often from within, creatures all vibrant spreading watercolour, all node and filament. Even when he paints landscapes they look as though they’re somehow under water.

I’m looking at the way the paintings of Drysdale, Tucker, Boyd & Nolan depict Australian landscape, the interior, not the width of its beaches, the swimmable sea-edge. The interior is where Australia differs from everywhere else; it's the extent that had to be settled, conquered, tragically traversed. Until the last 30 years or so it's where the British/European model of almost everything had most damagingly failed.

I’m looking at the artists in their birth-date order. This gives Nolan an air of being almost the youngest, who disputes (the fusty-musty perceptions of) the others. This isn't the case. Nolan's first series of Kelly paintings was exhibited in 1949; they were immediately successful. Boyd's Bride series wasn't exhibited until 1958; Tucker's Profile Man portraits continued until 1978. Drysdale's work was always about desert and desertification and ruin. Tucker's and Boyd's work became more various than Drysdale's. They dealt with landscape as observers of pre-existing Australia, the country beneath and at the periphery of Anglo settlement and concerns, the terrain that must be supported in order to support, and which had been and still is inhabited by more than the Anglo-Irish influx. Tucker's and Boyd's perspectives lay outside the immense success of Nolan's Kelly. Their differing perspectives still describe white Australia's Aboriginal policy arguments.

Russell Drysdale's Aboriginal women and children stand in country towns that resemble De Chirico's afternoons or late, deserted mornings. Giacometti Europeans arrive to build things, or think about it. Except for the buildings and pondering, inactive whites, everything’s tormented: hollow white tree trunks lie like giant bones, rocks lie like vast porous bones; severed tree roots stand in the landscape like giant bone spiders caught in mid-step. Everything is red, orange, black, bone-dry, bereft of water and movement, a static hellscape of dispossession for Europeans and Aboriginal people alike.

Albert Tucker’s iconic Australian man, left profile, flat-hatted, desiccated, nose like a chisel, is usually alone in a landscape of rock or sand. In all the “Intruder and Parrots” paintings, the parrots shriek in fear or alarm as they fly past the increasingly decayed, destroyed, inhuman figure. In “Explorer and Bird” (1968) the explorer is in a landscape of dead white trees. His left eye looks directly at the viewer, as do the red eyes of the black bird behind him. In “Explorer” (1976) his head remains; the portion of his body that has always been visible is dissolving into the hills rising behind him. In “Explorer” (1988) the male figure is old. His beard is white, his one eye is invisible; the trees in the background are black sticks. They’ve been burnt, but the dust and roots of the landscape are filtering into his body, below his shoulder.

The softening of this male figure takes place after “After the Bushfire” (1973). In that painting red and blue parrots enter the painting from the right. The background is burnt eucalypts, with one spared white trunk rising at a slight diagonal. Immediately to the right of this trunk is the first of a pair of eyes, which look directly at the viewer. They are not located in any discernible body. I take them to be the total presence of the bush, creatures, scrub, trees, the genius of the place.

Tucker seems to be suggesting that the bitter, desiccated, embattled, inflexible white Australian male, whose pose was implacable opposition to the landscape and its creatures, will become part of it, or come to be dissolved into it.

In “Waterhole With Sheep” (ca. 1950) Arthur Boyd’s native birds fly and dive close to the water, in complete separation from the other half of the canvas where sheep graze by a shelter. The birds are detailed and differentiated; the sheep, further away, are painted sketches. They’re dull, a mass identity, less alive and real than the birds.

In “Potter and the Seashore” (undated) a yellow bird stands in the air, shrieking at a European woman like a Fury or a Norn, who is in or on a cliff, spinning. The yarn is a fishing line. The figure’s long hair is bound like a club. She looks down at her wheel and at nothing else. The hill and cliff behind her form a large iron-like, cog-like shape which seems to chew at the sea. In the sky above, ahead of an approaching storm, a black cockatoo holds a crab in its claws. An isolated drip of red paint, looking like blood, occupies the upper centre of the canvas. The birds, native species, seem to be denouncing European control and deliberately blind, mechanical and damaging approach to everything around it.

In his “Bride Sequence” from the mid-50s, Boyd’s white men are inert and adrift; frozen and suspended brides fend off the bloody beaks and claws of black cockatoos. Native species attack the invaders as they attempt to reproduce. But when the bride embraces an Aboriginal man, nature calms and flowers.

“Chained Figure and Bent Tree” (1973) presents a naked white male artist chained to a small bent tree. The artist is bent over his painting. His head is in a metal box, which is tied to the tree by a length of rope which stops him falling head-first into the earth he is trying to paint. This framework – a perceptual box – supports and constrains him. His head is turned; the painted painter can see nothing of the background. (No actual goats were actually harmed.)

“Bride in the Wimmera” (1975) shows the bride and a crow both bowed to the earth, in harmony, doing it reverence.

These intuitions / meditations about landscape began in the 1940s and continued until the late 1970s. (Tucker’s first exhibition was in 1933, Drysdale’s in 1942, Nolan’s first Kelly series in 1949; Arthur Boyd began paying attention to landscape in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. The Bride Paintings were first exhibited in 1958.) Though Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings began with an intent to paint landscape, beginning with Wimmera while he was in the Army in 1942, Nolan was also concerned with Australian national identity.

The framework of British Navy rule over a penal colony was broken by a growing population of non-convicts, time-served convicts and their free descendants. In 1813 Wentworth and Blaxland crossed the Blue Mountains, which had constrained the western spread of the colony. The white Australian population expanded to the Blue Mountains and beyond, the site of Melbourne and beyond. But it replicated the old class structure.

To weld the beginning directly to the end:
After they’d wandered onto the properties of squatters, who would only release them on the payment of a fine, the very young Ned Kelly stole poor selectors’ horses back. The notoriously corrupt State of Victoria police – often straight from England, often Protestant – came after him. Kelly made armour, put it on, fought and killed the pursuing police until his capture and trial.

Working Class Hero Rebels Against Injustice…

The Kelly paintings re-created and enlarged the already popular figure of Kelly as an image, act, and raison d’être for white Australian society. They did this at the same time, in the same oracular medium, and with the same level of imperative, importance and cultural heft as landscape paintings by Drysdale, Tucker, and Boyd. The paintings were so popular/resonant that in 1964 Thames and Hudson produced a small volume of reproductions of the 1946-47 series (16 cm x 21 cm, 60 pages), sized and priced for the popular market. It featured a prologue by the most famous and well-regarded Australian journalist/writer of the time, Alan Moorehead. Nolan painted a second Kelly series in 1954-56, and returned to the subject later and often in other media, as in the 1978 screen print “Bush Picnic”.

The Kelly images often present the landscape as a sketch of space where the figures stand or fall in tableaux. The trees or scrub are drawn about them, emphasizing and centralizing them: the landscapes become arenas.

White Australian identity became a heroic rebellion against inherited and unjust social rules. As a charming, cheerful, ungovernable young man armoured in a defiance and self defence - which began as the defence of others - the apotheosis of the larrikin, the Kelly figure allowed a number of things:

*It created an independent Australian identity of denying and disproving British assertions of moral authority; it created a path to self-respect outside the limits of British approval.

*It put the landscape and the moral question of its ownership in the background, making the subject of Australia and Australian identity to conflicts within white society.

*Effectively part of the sub-genre Western, the sheriff hunting the outlaw, the Kelly paintings were a bushranger picture on a gallery wall. By focusing on the Anglo version of invader versus native-born, the Kelly figure allowed anyone predisposed to it to altogether elide any question of identity beyond the story, any question of indigenous Australia.

The paintings themselves are small, and intense and vivid – you can see them in passing in an early scene of Russell Crowe's Poker Face (2022), set in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They're startling, as though the colour has been forced the way black and white film could once be forced into exposing images beyond the normal range; it's as though the images are trying to transcend the story's limited origins, its hero's social, legal, and colonial status and the continent's geopolitical unimportance: as though they're trying to create a new order of being.

After the first series Kelly begins to become many things – a vision- or dream-clobbered Everyman, half-Christ (1, 2, 3, 4), half-Terminator (6, 7, 8, 9). Finally he's a sign, or a spirit/dream/threat of freedom or destruction.

Perhaps he’s mad. Watched/accompanied by cockatoos and pterodactyls, perhaps he’s caught a case of Tucker and Boyd. Perhaps he’s an expatriate’s longing, a fever-dream; a dissolving cloud, a clot of air, a wisp of an idea. Perhaps he’s anything you want; a grab-bag; an image trapped in its own success. By the end of Nolan’s art Kelly is a shape-shifter, an inchoate symbol for every need and desire and lack and premonition in male Anglo-Australian existence.

I saw a black and white photo of the South Australian tableland recently, a small sculpture on a small ridge-top, a stick figure with a square helmet and eye-slit. There, in a different bush, land cleared for sheep, is a little folkloric imp, jaunty and joyous and alive. He raises a smile in passing, if you're passing, if you're of Euro descent.

part 5: important oz art is male & anglo-celtic & heterosexual

“Important Australian art” was white, male, Anglo-Australian. Perceptive or not, wise or not, it subsumed all other painting by all other painters.

Art by women was suppressed, under-represented, under-rated, or written out of the history, if it was produced at all. In the work of pre-eminent male painters women often fared badly – Drysdale’s later bloated sticks, Boyd’s naked, head-dressed brides.

The post-War immigrant Poles, Czechs and Hungarians of the South Australian modernist movement had been rigorously trained in Middle European art schools and knew the work of painters such as Kandinsky at first hand. Their abstract and urban paintings, foreign in conception and technique, were largely rejected by the Adelaide Establishment. They still remain all but unknown outside it.

The barriers to immigrant women artists were even higher. The Polish printmaker Lidia Groblicka fled local ethnic cleansing with her family during the War, graduated in printmaking at the Krakow Academy of Fine Art (1957), emigrated to Australia and settled in Adelaide in 1966. Her critical and sardonic work was not well-regarded by the “conservative, traditionally inclined” selection committee; she didn’t become a Fellow of the Royal South Australian Society of Artists until 1972.

The Polish artists Wladyslaw and Ludwik Dutkiewicz were my distant cousins by marriage. My secondary school had a two-figure sculpture by Voitre Marek; a church in a neighbouring parish had one of his crucifixes.

Art by gay artists was either public or gay; it couldn’t be both; homosexuality was illegal until the mid-’70s.

Aboriginal artefacts were displayed in the South Australian Museum (cultural and natural history); beyond items of serious academic study, Aboriginal painting was seen mostly in the form of souvenirs for tourists – boomerangs, shields, long spears, fishing spears, woomeras, bull-roarers, or items for the home with Aboriginal motifs – x-ray animals on tea towels, mulga wood ashtrays in the shape of Australia, mulga wood rulers for children.

3 small Namatjiras from the Rex Ingamells collection in The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, in 2005. Beautiful. You think of them as highly-coloured because you’ve seen the tourist trap versions. But they're not: they're very subdued and restrained, very controlled; being so small and subdued they produce calm and concentration; then you see the mountains as flesh, the country breathing, the dead heart living.

And then you can see Australia without Europeans: a globe of being, Country, Dreaming, clans, community, seasons, rituals, music, dance, celebration. Country – sandy soil, red dirt, well-watered plain, gibber plain, desert – is the centre of the universe, the spindle of the stars. You are not on the edge of some other power’s arrangements and concerns, exploitations and cruelties. Your people and place are not peripheral to a more valid life somewhere else. They are the centre, a living landscape created by the Ancestors.

An unimaginable sense of fullness.

part 6: but even more of us are still too far away

Albert Namatjra (1902-1959) was not the first Aboriginal painter to use European techniques, but he was the most prominent. Namatjira’s paintings were circulating and being acclaimed and sold when Nolan was painting the first Kelly series. They weren’t seen as coterminous, complimentary, or even alternative views of the same continent. In the public mind they were just... separate.

By the late ’60s Leonard French’s (1928-2017) earth abstracts such as “Creation” (1970), took Drysdale’s colours and made cosmic jewels of them. His jewel-like colours always hinted at depths we couldn’t see.

But French’s and other later developments were not much broadcast at that time. They never quite entered the popular imagination – his best-known work is still the spectacular and much-loved stained glass ceiling in the National Gallery of Victoria (1968).

In that moment, while I was at Primary School making my two hopeless flipbooks, at early secondary school, and flummoxed by Geometry, most Australian writing was out of print. Neither men’s business nor women’s business, it was pretty much nobody’s business. The renaissance in local publishing was encouraged by Whitlam’s tenure as Prime Minister. McPhee Gribble began publishing in 1975.

Despite Gough Whitlam opening his first campaign speech with “Men and women of Australia,” his government’s funding initiatives for national and community arts, his agenda of “buying back the farm” (buying back large foreign holdings of Australian land), despite the referendum approving Australian citizenship for Aborigines in 1967, despite a growing sense of being a people, the sense of being cast ashore on a distant island did not immediately dissipate. Distance, geography, and demographics couldn’t be wished away.

To be Australian was still to be often reminded that you really needed to be somewhere else. Dancers, choreographers, singers, actors, musicians, conductors, film directors, editors, cinematographers, writers, journalists, architects, scientists ... Peers, knowledge, funding, work; venues, audiences, markets: a career in the arts on the model of a career in business or industry.

Nick Cave relocated to London in 1980.

part 7: some generationally-delineated aust cultural markers; immigrant children sound like us

I relocated to Los Angeles in 1982.

Geography is not enough to define national identity. I’ve lived in the United States longer now than I lived in Australia: if identity were wholly geographic I’d be American. I’m not - not by passport, culture, speech, habit of thought, or bookshelf; not by ingrained landscape, and not by desire. I retain major and minor cultural markers:

A disposition to skepticism, Australian because its worm’s-eye view was working class/convict English first. The Irish also tended to be skeptical of the decisions of the ruling class.

A refusal to ask personal questions, even of friends of great long standing. You don’t question people’s pasts in a country where /forebears/pasts have a real chance of involving time served.

A particular, drily laconic type of sarcasm which is fundamentally self-protective, revealing almost nothing of the speaker. Revealing almost nothing of the speaker is crucial to a particular Australian mode. Perhaps it is a mode that’s less used than it used to be, it remains a verbal stance you can adopt or drop as the moment requires. It’s communication as combat; a certain intonation, aggressive and mocking; undercuts everything, makes further conversation impossible.

This mode is the aggressive, verbal brother of the personal questions taboo. Both work to prevent accusation or discussion of family history, specifically convict forebears – “the stain,” as it used to be called, before the game changed to “How long has your family been here?” That taboo also forestalls questions about that other, greater, un-nameable transgression: Aboriginal blood. If convict ancestry was the stain, Aboriginal ancestry was utterly unacknowledgeable, unmentionable. It should not exist. It could not exist, even as the stain’s dark shadow.

My azimuth is still fundamentally from the far south, from the eastern side of the Indian Ocean, from the northern side of the Southern Ocean, from that distinctive landmass, its heat, its dry interior, strange flora and fauna; from under the magpie cries of early summer mornings, clear invisible notes falling through the clear blue air.

National identity has to be fundamentally geographic, whatever else it is. We imprint on our surroundings as soon as we can see them. They are how the world is, the only world we know.

The first chapter of The Future Eaters describes Australian plants as evolving to use as few resources as possible and use them slowly and sparingly. That was exactly the basis of my ethical upbringing. It was also the pan-female upbringing, of course. And yet it seems to me that the emphasis on scarcity of resources and the sheer labour it takes to create them was also particularly Australian; working class, not middle class. Everything had to be constructed from scratch or be reinvented. This habit and concern, which I’ve found among some of my contemporaries, seems to me to constitute a marker for a sub-culture defined by religion, gender, class, generation and ethnicity.

(Nor do I want to be American.) (Oh, otherness, stubbornness! Oh, first generation immigrant! I’m an old Italian woman: hunch-backed, black-dressed; garlic and grandchildren; cataract eyes.)

Anglo-Celtic identity softened with the children of post-war refugees, hated though their parents had been, with the children of Viet and Somali refugees, hated though their parents had been. The immigrants – their what-is-it food, odd clothing, impenetrable language, odd habits, the things they didn’t know – ultimately became Australian. Their names became pronounceable; their kids sounded like us; garlic and spaghetti became staples.

National identity is constructed, coerced and changeable. The identity the framed the subculture of my friends was passing into history when I was in my 30s – the sense of the commonality of resources being replaced by the greed, naked ambition and entitlement of neoliberal Australia.

Class has always trumped nationality (Renoir, Grand Illusion). Mass mobility dissolves it, and nationality becomes a matter of birthplace and accent. Regional or national identities form and flourish in isolation.

part 8a: we are born not only into a place, but into a set of understandings about that place

We’re born not only into a place but into a set of understandings about that place. Understandings can change; events force them to: Australian landscape and ecology changed at the beginning and end of the last Ice Age, and after the Great Flood. White Australian understanding of landscape and society became more complex and sympathetic as Drysdale’s, Tucker’s, and Boyd’s birthdates proceeded into the twentieth century. Anglo-Celtic Australian society came ultimately to include post-War immigrants, Vietnamese and later refugees.

Since 1996 Australia’s neoliberal governments have followed a blanket policy of mandatory, indefinite detention of asylum seekers of colour, including children, who do not have visas, and who arrive or attempt to arrive by boat. They are held in detention centres in conditions that produce illness, self-harm, and attempted suicide, that violate international treaties on refugees and asylum seekers signed by the Australian Government after World War 2. The prison colony’s prison colony.

part 8b: while we’ve been gone

Wealth was much more equally shared 40-50 years ago than it is now.

Neoliberalism is a set of procedures for converting prosperous democracies with expanding popular rights into places of concentrated wealth and neo-feudal serfdom. The vote-getting tool of neoliberalism is the culture war / rightwing populism. The goal is power; the mechanism is identifying or creating cerain segments of the population, demonizing them and removing them from the voter rolls.

At the beginning of the ’80s there was an artificial Australian hue laid over particular tv commercials and films; words like “bonzer” – which I’d never heard from anyone younger than my parents, who did not marry young – were suddenly being used as though everybody used them. This grossly starchy and manipulative ploy was deployed to convince us that a tan plastic & resin museum of a past was worth the future destroyed by the loss of the Whitlam government. I’d’ve sworn in Brit or American, or anything else, if I’d had to see or hear it much longer. It went on a lot longer, until the larrikin energy saved by seat belts from an earlier, swifter fate, was encouraged into public xenophobia, race riots, rightwing populism. “It’ll take decades to re-civilize the place,” one of my oldest friends said.

By the ’90s labour was being casualized: de-unionized, part-time, “just in time,” unstable.

In 1992 the Mabo decision affirmed native title to ancestral land. The potential threat to pastoral and other leases was obvious. In 2007, in the name of preventing child abuse, the Howard government initiated “The Northern Territory Emergency Response,” which the Howard and Gilliard governments enacted, and which re-established Federal government control over the finances of Aboriginal residents on reservations. This set of actions by both major parties/coalitions seemed aimed at denying Aboriginal authority over land, Aboriginal ability to effectively oppose mining leases and use land ownership as a basis for self-determination. Aboriginal deaths in custody continue. There’s still no treaty.

Aboriginal culture has a much greater presence in wider Australian culture. Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin prize for Carpentaria, a novel from an Aboriginal point of view; amid great argument Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu re-presents some pre-European Aboriginal cultures as practising cultivation and farming. Sally Morgan and Doris Pilkington have written about the treatment, particularly of Aboriginal children, at the hands of white policy. Indigenous film-makers are making indigenous narratives, there is an Indigenous rock music industry where before there was none. The art market has grown in size and value. An Aboriginal woman can become a celebrated experimental painter. Contemporary Aboriginal art and artists seem to flourish, even as reports of elderly male Aboriginal traditional painters still being coerced, exploited and abused to supply the voracious market for traditional Aboriginal art.

The large-canvas fine art market... Large, mega-expensive Aboriginal canvasses feel more like status symbols or trophies than appreciation or cultural understanding or sympathy. The price of paintings like these can make owning them a not-so-sly declaration of domination over the land and its immense non-white prehistory a deep revisionism taking place, a final declaration of victory in an old argument waged in a once genuinely prestigious medium, an end to the succession of visual metaphors of the cruelty, delusion and damage of white settlement.

With the net, with the tools of production and distribution far more available, public culture is in constant flux, constantly thrusting and failing, evolving and expanding. But though there’s an astounding amount of artistic work being done in Australia, (cheap-ish electronics have made it easier, the ’net’s made it easier, equal pay and reproductive autonomy have made it easier), little of it is paid, and very little of it is well-paid. Art undistributed cannot change either the tone of debate or public culture.

Public culture is what most people see – covered by mass media, or taught or experienced in public schools. The key to changing it is to control what most people see and are taught.

Australia has the symptoms of the worldwide, rightwing billionaire agenda: attacks on public education, public broadcasting and the arts, anti-vaccine protests on the American model (attacks on public health / the legitimacy of the current forms and assumptions of government).

At the same time there is a reckless extractive frenzy seizing the soil and water. Two of the thirstiest plants in the world, rice and cotton, are being farmed by irrigation in NSW. Water quotas are ignored. The Murray-Darling river system is under immense stress: towns have almost no water, sheep-farming ran out of water. Farming in Australia has often resembled mining, but this looks like asset-stripping. Someone's still got the paintings, but.

part 9: community

There’s a tv show increasingly mangled onto YouTube called Grand Designs. It’s been broadcast by Channel 4 since 1998. There are NZ and Aust. spinoffs. The NZ episodes feature houses, very expensive, built from scratch on remote plots of terrain in NZ (think steel wall- and roof-frames helicoptered in, dangling in a day rainy and gusty). The artisan glazing and furniture making for these houses is difficult, if not unthought-of. The craftsmen are interviewed in their shops – immensely knowledgeable, conscientious, master craftsmen. A sense of seriousness emanates from them, a sense of community and work mattering in and to the community.

In the Australian version there’s a sense of complete isolation. The glaziers and blacksmiths are interviewed in their shops, but do not give the impression of being interested in or excited by or in sympathy with the project. They give the impression of competence; they produce the work, install the windows – hundreds of pounds of steel frame and glass expanse moving at the push of a thumb – This is not trivial work. But among the men manipulating the glass and frame into position there’s a palpable sense of dis-location, psychic or emotional distance from the project, even from their own activity.

In one episode we didn’t see either the craftsmen or the manufacturers because the young owner, who was modifying and redesigning much of his new tract house to make it more sustainable and energy efficient, had ordered components directly from the factory in Germany. Apart from the presenter, the only person we saw was the young man whose house it was, and sometimes his wife. The house was unique. The tract was remote; beyond the houses raw plains stretched away to hills. We weren’t watching the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended. We were watching a voice crying in the wilderness.

The Lord of the Rings had an Australian cinematographer, but the Kiwis made it.

part 10: colony, colony

Boy from the city on the edge of the universe grows up to lead a stadium band... Stadium careers like Cave’s are a thing of the past. Technology and capitalism have completely changed the landscape of writing, producing, selling, and understanding rock and pop.

The single-song MP3 bypassed commercial radio, vinyl, CDs, the industry architecture of strings of hit singles and the AM/FM/College radio divides. Spotify pays artists so little musicians can’t live on their music despite global distribution. Musicians perpetually on tour, surviving on sales of t-shirts and CDs at live concerts, are likely to just be worn down and worn out, and go under. Relentless touring schedules can be lethal.

It wasn’t quite the record labels of yore that brought the pop music industry to this pass; it was more the mega-corporations which formed over the last forty years of the C20th and absorbed those labels. Very large entertainment corporations are almost necessarily timid: trying to sell to everybody and offend nobody, they dispense musically simplistic songs written by committee, overuse Auto Tune, get massively outsold by old music and become even less adventurous or even interested in new music. (Rumour has it that Spotify supervisors correct employees who think they're in the music business: “We’re not in the music business. We’re in the subscription business.) The mass audience ends up with the light shows and mushy marshes of sound that Saturday Night Live features, backing dancers with performing arts degrees wondering how they came to be (t)working here.

To create and extend markets corporations destroy community, which is the matrix of art, as Brian Eno says. Some corporations underpay the musicians whose nurture they have destroyed, others underpay writers to the point where writing becomes very difficult for one person to maintain. The chances of mass distribution shrink with every reduction in the number of “The Big [number here] Publishers.” Community arts can be stunningly good, but have little reach. The net is less of a saviour than it promised to be; it’s turned the old distribution problems into new and even more intractable publicity problems.

If you can’t make a living at it, how can rock music, or any art, be more than the efflorescence of the energy of youth? How can you get better at what you’re doing when you can’t go on working insane hours, earning a living and being an artist after? If you do have the sheer talent to do it, how do you avoid becoming another one of those amazing bass guitarists in a horrible local band, one of those amazing local voices at an espresso machine-backed open mic?

Being an artist is made structurally, financially, and functionally difficult by the baked-in Calvinism of imperial English-language cultures. Art is not real work. Art is corrupting, not because it questions (though it can do that), but because it seduces. Art gives pleasure and pleasure is evil, the function and province of the world, the flesh and the devil. Theologized misogyny left art less ethical than sanding the sugar.

Metastasized Calvinism persists as the “Prosperity Gospel,” and artistic ability and activity are still undermined as occupations except in the service of ruthless profiteering.

The net does do one thing: it lets people from anywhere (almost) see what is being done elsewhere, at the time it is being done. It’s Nick Cave listening to 45s again, but when the music is released, not when the physical item finally arrives by ship or plane. Songwriters and performers can react more quickly to new developments. And now Australian song/writing has a wider mix of creators.

But it still leaves the old cultural global structure, the old cultural gravity-well in place. The problem of reach – of getting Australian music heard and identified, positioned to be included in the global musical conversation, to become a modest if not massive influence beyond Australia – is always a problem of publicity, and publicity seems to be ineradicably corruptible.

Mass media made global culture possible, but WW2 and its aftermath physically reinforced and increased their impact. The Marshall Plan extended American presence in Europe and the UK and amplified the pull of American culture there; Japanese noir of the ’50s and ’60s shows American influence everywhere (music, cars, money, swagger, the sheer number of American soldiers). Kurosawa returned to it for years.

But Japan had an 800 year tradition painting, theatre, traditional and written literature, folk music, formal music, and a history of film production. Japan also possessed a non Indo-European language, writing system, religion and culture, all of which, while assaulted, were firmly established and formed a buffer of cultural identity, myths, legends, tales, modes, models and tropes for its artists.

And the UK had an 800 year tradition of painting, theatre, traditional and written literature, folk music, formal music, and a history of film production to act as identity, artistic reference, modes, genres and models to buffer its artists against the influx of American drama, comedy, music and money; gave UK artists a length of time to absorb & assimilate, contain and use and wield the new material.

Artistically, White Australia was still functionally a colony. Its music consisted of inherited European folk or orchestral forms, its film industry remained crippled until 1970, its film distribution system was still in American hands, and much of its literature was out of print (ca. 1950-1966). Serious oil/canvas painting was the only active, vigorous, argumentative, and even partially globally successful prestige artistic activity.

Australia’s theatre situation was and is vulnerable: costly to produce, costly to attend, subject to shrinking subsidy. It is not a stable, broad-based endeavour; consequently, it is constantly reinventing the wheel. The Communist Party had staged theatre locally in Sydney, adaptations of Clifford Odets and Australian plays. They disappeared with the onset of the Cold War. There were some theatre competitions. Like Sumner Locke Elliott, Ray Lawler went to The United States. He returned briefly for the 50th anniversary of The Doll. The 1957 film starred Ernest Borgnine, Anne Baxter, John Mills and Angela Lansbury... Oriel Gray, joint winner of that competition, went on to write dramas and adaptations for the ABC well into the ’70s, raised three children, and is not well-known. Jack Hibberd, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, David Williamson, Dorothy Hewett and others began creating Australian plays in the 1970s. But theatre is costly to produce, costly to attend, subject to shrinking subsidy. It is not a stable, broad-based endeavour despite new writers.

Australian radio production was vigorous, both in Australian content and locally re-recorded American programs. There were radio plays, serials, episodic comedy and nonfiction programmes on the ABC, original and adapted. Crawford Productions, Artransa Studio and some radio stations kept up radio serial production for adults and children through the ’50s and ’60s. Many were American shows re-recorded locally – Portia Faces Life, Hop Harrigan, Superman, Night Beat. Crawford and Artransa later went into TV production. Crawford’s signature show was Homicide.) Local commercial radio produced Bob Dyer’s Pick a Box, Jack Davey’s show, and a staggering number of others: some I never heard, some I remember vaguely or have forgotten, some where I can only remember the opening (“Good morning, boys.” “Good morning, Sir!”) and closing lines of each episode. (“Yes, Bottomley, 'Ow!' Good morning, boys.”)

But television replaced radio.

The UK enacted local television content laws; 86% if I remember rightly. UK television survived and became a marvel.

Australia’s local content requirements were late in arriving – the report of the 1963 Vincent Commission found that, from 1956–1963, 97% of all drama shows broadcast in Australia were American productions. Homicide began to air in 1964. Even so, in 1964 American content still constituted more than 80% of material broadcast on Australian television. When local content requirements were enacted the definitions of “content” were constantly challenged and changed. (Do commercials count?) Crawford Productions created a great deal of successful Australian commercial television drama over four decades. A lot of the rest of commercial Australian content consisted of live late afternoon children’s shows and improvised comedy carryon between the acts in variety showcases. Some of it was brilliant, but even brilliant improv is wit and seafoam, in the moment, ephemeral. It can reflect an attitude; it can’t create a whole culture.

An interesting shard of understanding comes out of the ABC’s Power Without Glory (1976). The standard length for a television season was thirteen or twenty-six episodes, three months or six. Frank Hardy’s novel had more plot than thirteen episodes could contain, but less than enough for twenty-six. The ABC decided to make twenty-six episodes; the second half of the series suffered badly from longeurs. No one felt free to make the obvious and sensible but autonomous choice, even when the series would air on the network that produced it. I assume the hope of overseas sales was the reason; a series of nonstandard length would have been much harder to sell. But that choice begins to indicate the kind of straight-jacketed atmosphere that still pervaded, that the new plays at La Mama and the Pram Factory were trying to shred.

After the removal of the Whitlam government the ABC suffered consecutive budget cuts for more than a decade.

Australian television drama production is now falling drastically, again, because formerly Australian companies such as Crawford’s, sold once or twice within Australia, are now small departments in entertainment juggernauts like the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. And so the decisions that matter aren’t made onshore, by or among the people whose communities nourished the art(ists), and who need these artists and their art to help them understand not just the truths universally acknowledged, but themselves and their own times and place. The decisions that define what matters are once more being made in the accounting caves of Overseas.

 

 

part 11: what can a poor boy do

The avarice of metastasized Calvinism ties it all together. Make art hard for the artist, but take the profit if there is any. Billions are the index of godlikeness. 

There’s a double whammy for the artist in this set-up:

1) Success is defined as global recognition because the marketplace is global.

But recognition usually begins locally, particularly for musicians and actors, sometimes for graphic artists. Artists are already accomplished before they leave home, whatever the impulse – community encouragement, the need to develop undeveloped potential, the need of fresh audiences, the need to escape boredom, entrapment, bullying.

2) The global replaces the local and devalues it on the grounds of its lack of audience: - on the grounds that it is local, on the grounds of its limited ability to make money.

Read or listen to any description of artistic success. Pop music is always measured by numbers, of albums, sales, years at the top, other musicians influenced; tv shows by number of seasons, audience, secondary audiences (syndication, DVD & blu-ray sales), streaming numbers; books by sales & media tie-ins; movies by first weekend box office…

There is that moment in the meeting room, badly laid out though it is, when it is completely silent and thirty to forty people are listening. They’re not thinking about anything else. A seven-line poem has stilled them. They’re not eating out of your hand – everyone's in that world. It absorbs the reader/writer/audience simultaneously, word by word.

There’s the moment when the reading’s just ended, when everyone realizes that reader by reader it’s built and built until there’s a thunder in the mind which is the accumulation of the hour of speech; and everyone talks and breathes and laughs as though they’ve got new skin.

During the recording of Arvo Pärt’s new choral music in a church in Tallinn, Pärt’s wife questions him with a glance, tips him off to an almost imperceptible imperfection. Pärt goes to Eicher, who listens and nods, and Pärt approaches the kapellmeister, points to the sheet music and talks about developing this section like that section... The orchestra and choir rework the section, getting it right; and hearing it, Pärt and Eicher begin to waltz.

There’s nothing a stadium audience could add to that moment, it’s already full. That moment is the real measure of artistic success; it’s what the striving has all been for.

The problem is humanity and time rasping on the skin, the problem is hunger, the problem is thirst, the problem is someone wants to bottle it, someone wants to bootleg it, you can make a fortune but you can’t make a living; the problem is you can go there but you can’t live there, the problem is someone wants to tell you you can; the problem is there’s a stranglehold, the problem is centres, the problem is edges, the problem is there’s too much, too little, too late; the problem is hunger, the problem is thirst.

If Oz is a colony again now, what happens when global warming, when the sea levels rise and the winds (how will we navigate the winds and tides; the shipping lanes are already narrowing)
will everyone be uploading and seeing, influencing, influenced, borrowing, stealing, re-forming, arguing, re-casting an incomprehensibly large swirl and vortex of art (how will the ’net battle the calamity of the air)
will everywhere be as Australia was, cut off from everywhere else; everywhere so pressed in for loss of habitat that we will be completely taken up trying to create a complete ecological & artistic understanding of where we are living, a culture that preserves social and ecological equilibrium?

- With many thanks to Dr. Graeme Hastwell for his kindness and advice about ecology.
And for his masterful photographs of the South Australian tableland near and around Burra, where Ned Kelly appears on a small ridge-top.