Evening on the Edge of the Arafura Sea

Where it meets Darwin, and Australia looks out to Asia.

Circling Federation Square

I came upon Federation Square before I was aware of it.

I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.

This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.

This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.

Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.

I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.

On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.

I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.

Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.

By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.

But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.

Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.

Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.

Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.

Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.

The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.

The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.

The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.

Poor fellow, my country.

The Howard Fridge Magnet

It’s hard to know where to begin, talking about this image and this object.

My ur-memory of being born in Adelaide – lying on the front lawn, perhaps 14 months old, under the measureless blue sky.

Every sense I had of Australia was founded on measurelessness. It was vast: deserts, distances, summer temperatures and lack of water, thinness of population. It was extreme in all respects; it was that shape on the map of the world on my first, cylindrical pencil-case, at my first school, far from the rest of the world. It was where we lived.

Australia was an abstraction, but a physical one.

In some ways that was our sense of ourselves – that lack of definition. There were stockmen, stations, deserts, mines, schools (Schools of Mines) and the unmentioned uncomfort of the Aborigines. There was work and the weekend, cricket, tennis, picnics. There was not-being-England-or-Europe-or-America. There were rain and sun and roads, church, school, going to town and going to the bay. At Victor Harbor we watched the Southern Ocean smash on the State’s granite edge. The word un-Australian did not exist. There was no Australian English parallel to the linguistic foundation of HUAC. (If it had existed we would’ve seized it for the rich lexicon of schoolyard abuse. It would’ve applied to every migrant in sight.)

And yet, around 1996-1997, around the time John Howard first took office, I began to see it on the net. At first I was full of bewildered laughter. Then I supposed it signalled a new move on the remaining threads of Aboriginal existence – all that 40,000 year old rock art vandalizing the mining-leases.

It was quite clear , even from this distance, that Australian meant wrapped in the flag xenophobia, detention centres, and conditions of detention that didn’t border on torture but 747’d into it, visa, sunglasses, beer and bubbly and baggage, bent on a bloody good time.

Detention Centres: on the edge of the Nullarbor, on Christmas Island. Iron-roofed, concrete sheds at Woomera, wooden huts on Christmas Island – families separated, huge suicide / attempted suicide / self-mutilation rates… Afghanis, Hazzara, Iraquis, Iranians fleeing the wars “our side” had started / funded / taken over, too poor or paperless to fly in unmolested, were attempting to arrive in leaky boats from Indonesia.

The Federal Government’s response was to move the Australian territorial line, so that anyone arriving on a speck of rock northwest of Western Australia would not have arrived on Australian soil and therefore been entitled to protection under several treaties we were proud to have signed in the late 1940s, but would have arrived nowhere – paperless, stateless, detainable. The problem, from two elections’ worth of Australian POV, was neither the wars we buggered around on the edge of nor our foreign policy, but the (Indonesian) fishermen who sailed the boats.

Which sometimes sank.

On the eve of the 2001 Federal election one of them did. The Australian Navy ship on hand reported that the adults had thrown the children overboard (in an effort to compel the Australian Navy to rescue them). That interpretation was wrong, was almost immediately revised by the navy, and the correction sent to the Prime Minister’s office. But the original report was broadcast and re-broadcast as news, propaganda for the Howard government. It may have won him his 3rd term.

The image of refugees throwing their children overboard was the very definition of un-Australian.

In sympathy with al-Qaeda and in revenge for Australia’s part in the independence of East Timor, the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiah mounted two suicide-bomb attacks on tourists at Kuta Beach, on Bali, in October, 2002. Eighty-eight Australians were killed, among others: in Australia the catch-cry against the people-smugglers, and the smuggled people – all of them un-Australian – was now terrorism. Terrorism was undeniable, graphic and vivid, and undeniably aimed at us, and people-smuggling was the risk of terrorism. There were so many refugees being intercepted, and there was enough opposition to having detention centres on Australian soil that the 3rd Howard Government devised “The Pacific Solution” – bare bleached rock enclosures on Nauru, which was strong-armed into taking detainees, and paid to. Nauru had nothing to export once we’d mined it to the sea-line for superphosphate.

The detainees waited until their cases could be heard. There were astonishingly few Australian speakers of the required languages. The one or two who had been released and tried to return to Afghanistan disappeared completely on the Afghani border or thereabouts, very likely killed by the forces they had been fleeing. Several Australian citizens – women, generally – of Philipino or other non-Caucasian extraction were seized and “deported” to Manila or wherever the Minister of Defence thought they’d come from.

This much I gathered from reading The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, from Australian blogs and emails from friends.

I sat at the screen and saw.

Everything I’d ever been told about Australia was wrong – a lie, a fantasy – and always had been. According to promoted social reality, if we hadn’t always been (invasions, convict prisons, Aboriginal massacres), in the meantime we had become more generous, more equal, more open, less cruel than the rest of history.

Post-war immigrants had never had the easy time the newsreels made out, but once we had given homes to the homeless after World War II. And now we were locking refugees up in barbed-wire camps in the desert, keeping them indefinitely, driving them to self-mutilation and suicide.

They can’t be trusted, put them somewhere, lock them up. The catch-cry of the twentieth century coming from Australian throats, re-electing that government again and again. That this victimization could be the path to domestic political power –

Even the dry yellow-brown hills were lies. We weren’t better than or different from anyone else: if any evil could be conceived, we could conceive it.

The hills lurched and paled and retreated, turned to paper. They’d never happened to me, moving past the window as we drove, throwing the road and the car around their heavy masses, above and past the gullies that created the evening winds, or that stood in the near distance, through the window at school. They’d happened to someone else.

And now, in Oregon, if I went to move off the chair in front of the computer, I moved slowly; I didn’t know how to trust what my eyes told me about the relationship of my feet to the ground.

==

In 2005 QANTAS had an astonishing deal, which meant I could go home and see the family and friends I’d hardly seen in twenty years. One of the friends saved me the Howard fridge magnet. “Bloody government,” she said. “It’ll take decades to re-civilize the place.”

And now I’m looking at it, and it’s hard to know how to even think about this image and this object.

The image is the first thing that catches your eye. A young woman is glancing and smiling happily at another young woman, a policewoman. Their smiles and body language suggest that they share something, have something in common, agree on something. Conversation with the police is friendly, non-threatening, cozy, two girls chatting.

After seeing the image the eye takes in the next-largest element, the headline.

First there’s the sickly condescension – Let’s. It’s a word used to suggest agreement between a child and its parents’ wishes, mediated through that odious near-child representative, the prefect. For all the allegedly friendly chat in the photo, we (the public, the citizens) aren’t really adults. We … need to be managed, need to be persuaded, need to be told.

Let’s look out – a coercive suggestion (join the commonly-established agreement) and do something you didn’t have the acumen to see for yourself. You need to be told.

– for Australia. Which must be too young to look out for itself, because we’re not confessing to naivete or witlessness as a country (are we?). We’re certainly not confessing to fascism and its spin and spawn.

So, looking out for Australia is like / becomes young women getting together to look “out for” (keep in mind and act in the interests of) the younger/less powerful/less aware/less.

Australia is undefined, except as explicitly Caucasian, female, unarmed, unthreatening, concerned with nurture and care, implicitly wanting to protect and be protected.

This use of a policewoman is a complete subversion of the progress towards equality Australian women made over the previous 30 years.

This use of a policewoman is a device to present the capture and imprisonment under conditions of torture look like maternal care.

This use of a policewoman is a device to present a cheerful-looking young woman as just herself, and not the false face of mining magnates & associated interests.

Two girls having a chat. Detention camps disguised and justified.

Even while it’s utterly racist, duplicitous, injurious to its victims and insulting to its readership, the Howard fridge-magnet is also absurd. (Is that what makes it Australian? That ineradicable amateurism?) The block back-grounded in blue gives the phone number for a translation service for reporting suspicious activity if you don’t speak English well... But you need to read English well enough to make your way through this slab of 8-point Ariel, the longest block of prose on the page.

Of course, that could be the point.

I go on staring.

Someone designed this object. Someone wrote the copy. Someone, one of us, an Australian, went to work one day, was told to make this by another Australian, and did.

==

The detention centres still exist (in the desert) (offshore). We’re used to them.

==

Officially.

Throughout the stretch of Howard governments (1996-2007), Australian human rights groups investigated, documented, made representations to the government and to at least one independent Senate enquiry. (I wrote letters; vapid paragraphs on ornate letterhead came in reply.) Amnesty International investigated. Refugee prisoners – because that’s what they are – go on hunger strikes.

The Gillard government has reintroduced “the Pacific solution” because there’s likely to be a Federal election before the end of 2013, and locking up refugees “still plays well in Middle Australia.”

Well there it is: an Australian middle America to go with un-American un-Australia.

The friend who gave me the fridge magnet is right. It will take decades to re-civilize the place, if we ever do. Our governments, both flavours, are neo-Georgian: they’ve gone back to running prisons for the demonized and criminalized poor, and enabling the global and gobalized rich.

Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.

Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.

Stow, Schepisi, White, Craven, Joyce, McCaffrey, Stow

7.8.10

Took A Counterfeit Silence to work to look at it. Towards midday I found I wasn't feeling well and looked forward to being lunch behind a closed door... Then I made what turned out to be the mistake of reading an article in The Australian.

Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush – Schepisi doing an Australian pic (at last, again), doing White, and I hadn't known, hadn't known, and it was happening, and it was going well –

Except that the article was by Craven. Sprawling, sloppy, fundamentally unorganized, reeking of stale alcohol (no Hepworthian lyric or charm, nor even Gopaleen anger/wryness); just critical gush about White, the sensitivity of Schepisi's direction and its necessary femininity in this case.

Now look: I've read enough over the years to know that Schepisi doesn't normally whisper emotions into his actors' ears. Rampling only had 3 weeks for the shoot. So this essentially feminine whispering, this seductive mesmerism, instead of being a function of Rampling's schedule, is, in Craven's universe, Schepisi becoming a Rampling-White Svengali, channelling gayness and White, bringing forth the hidden feminine –

Schepisi's never less than sensitive! Doesn't Craven remember Uluru at the beginning of A Cry in the Dark, remember how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith turns on the difference between a cut and a dissolve?

But that's not enough. Now Craven has to claim that The Devil's Playground is "the greatest representation of an Australian Catholic childhood ever done"…

What does he know of Australian Catholic childhood? He doesn't know that nothing had changed since The Dead, not even the cooking: there were still heavy, thick, cut-crystal bowls at Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day (roast lamb, also had cold for dinner), long discussions about Irish tenors (the Irish tenor voice now in Gilbert and Sullivan, the G&S societies everywhere), lace curtains, Sunday afternoon visits, verbal political brawls, all held below hung portraits of those gone to The Great War and in front of mantlepieces with smaller upright photographs of those from Changi and Tobruk.

He has no idea how as very very small kid you dreamed in all but Gaelic, how those Sunday afternoon visits took you to the house of the great-aunt who remembers Sydney Kidman coming to say goodbye to her mother when he left for the interior, to create an empire and the over-grazing that has been Australia's bane.

He has no idea about the Pellegrini's, suppliers of incense & other necessities: rosary beads, prayer books, missals, scapulars, holy pictures, Immaculate Conception medals, first communion medals, confirmation medals, ordinary saints' medals, statues – he has no idea of the bric a brac made a Catholic childhood of that era, the happiness of the school holiday on St. Patrick's Day, the rose-petals on Holy Thursday (still weeping for Adonis)...

He has no idea that The Dead is more relevant to Australian Catholic childhood than Portrait of the Artist or The Devil's Playground. He doesn't mention Catherine Keneally's books at all. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, doesn't care because it doesn't matter: the copy's in, the paper's out, right, wrong, or blue in the face – no one's going to challenge it or him because Australia can only have one eminence at any one time – critic, climate scientist, poet, director, jurist.

Craven knows The Devil's Playground is a critique of the Catholic Church; he doesn't bother or have to bother to distinguish the church from the childhood. He's read Portrait, and there's a speech in Devil's Playground straight from it, so there's Irish Catholic Australian childhood for you: subject signed, sealed and delivered. The church stands in for the childhood and male stands in for all. There's your bloody article and that's that.

As for Devil's Playground itself: Arthur Dignam will never be convincing as a heterosexual, Thomas Keneally will never be convincing as anything; the speeches about The Rules, The Rules, are heavy-handed, forced and false; the ominous music by Bruce Smeaton laid over the opening shot as we peer around the bend in the very muddy river makes us wonder if Picnic at Hanging Rock has taken to the water. It's a far less perfect film than we thought it was or wanted it to be. It was a first feature by a new director; it was achieved against formidable odds; it was the work of a potentially great film-maker with an already impressive control of sound perspective and a visual technique that remains unique, and who has done outstanding work since.

So why does Craven even bother to make the claim? He doesn't know the subject or he'd know The Dead is more relevant than Portrait. He's telling us, again, that he knows more about everything than any of us ever will, no matter what experience or expertise we may have been forced to inherit or internalize, no matter what knowledge or experience he actually lacks.

And the writing! The badly-constructed sentences, the implicit dissing of everything he's not in the act of praising,  the self-aggrandizement via the utterly unnecessary inclusion of his own history ("now so different from reading it at 20"), the sheer sense of dissipation the prose always exudes: reading it's like being within reeking-range of a drunk man spewing.

A spewing drunk. That's what we've got for a critic. No wonder I feel ill.

And so, lunch. A closed door, some cold water. Some more cold water.

After a while I betook myself to the Stow. When he died I looked him up – Wikipedia, probably – and found a biography so painfully discreet it screamed. The first paragraph of The Merry Go Round in the Sea, quoted somewhere on the web, a detailed description of the central iron post of the of the merry go round rendered in terms of tailoring / costume, is not something any straight man would have written. Well, no straight man after Henry James.

And it was clear as I read, with greater and greater depression and horror, that Stow's closeting had destroyed the poetry: it was opaque, portentous, hysterical, and twee; lots and lots of borrowing from Judith Wright, and not much done with that… The best thing in the book was the adaptation of Lao Tsu, though at times he seemed to be calling the Tao God (I can see why, but no)… But if I want to read Lao Tsu I'll read a translation that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end.

It was miserable… I won't be critiquing Stow, though; I've heard and am glad to have heard that the novels and the stories are good.

For the rest of the day I read an inept Anne McCaffrey book, that being all the strength I had; it was derived from The Sword at Sunset and The Crystal Cave and the knife-fight at end of Dune; it had an utterly Sutcliffian plot-structure.

It seems I like the story of Artos the Bear getting horses from southern Gaul no matter how badly it's told – hope at the beginning of the tale set far in the past, all the arguments done with.

Strange and Occluded Dreams

Front Wall of the South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, July 1988.

If this glass exploded the slivers and shards of Australian pre-history, Aboriginal land rights, the Europeanization of the landscape, global warming (Tim Flannery - The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers - will be  director of this museum 10 years later); the notions of museum (that embodiment of pious theft), university, law, rigidly academic education (examinations held in one of the reflected halls), science as separate from life – the entire British Empire of hierarchies would embed themselves in

whatever they found.

The strange and fearful dreams of childhood, my inability to disentangle this clotted and occluded mass except by leaving, by stepping away, looking back.

(Photos: The Great Family Photo Project)

The Sum Of My Parts

i – Waiting for the Tram, 1960

Waiting for the tram and the old rust-coloured asphalt cracked, open mouths perpendicular to the track. Waiting for the tram to go to the Bay and out of the corner of your eye a woman with a boy and a girl, dark brown eyes, dark skin. Your mother doesn't say anything, except at other times. You look away. You don't look at your mother. The others are badly dressed, from a Mission. (You've heard, you haven't heard.) The woman is a good woman (better than you) doing good works. (You're selfish.)

You don't look at them again (except they're next to you. Your skin looks at them, your skin shouts them to your mind, their colour.) The dirt mouths are on the ground, jags of dark.

Because of that woman (better than you) (better than your mother) you can go to the beach and your nature (shortcomings, failures) won't be mentioned (during the tramride) this time.

You're lucky. We're all lucky (said at other times). Lucky means your father's job, our house. Lucky means (not a servant) (not raped) (a long way away) (money).

(you've heard, you haven't heard)
(money)
(not a servant) (a long way away)
(next to you) (during the tramride)
(their colour)

(your skin looks)

(shortcomings, failures) (said at other times)

(the colour of their skin)

(money)

ii – My father and –

The Current Affairs Bulletin was partially funded by the CIA. My father used to subscribe to that… I can still see it on his night-table –

My father, the good-natured, the secret sympathizer with women, children, animals, birds, rivers; the hard-working, the honest, the lacker of guile; the man whose father abandoned him; who'd been a clerk and an accountant; who always did his best, who gardened and painted and roofed; who knew the names of birds and their calls, who buried my cat when she died –

Who'd been a drover and seen the hard light of the gibber plain and the dependence of cattle –

He had no idea where the funding for his magazine – the Catholic magazine he relied on for geopolitical information, for the shape of the world he lived in, for the truth, because he believed in truth and thought the thinkers of the Church would give it to him – was coming from.

The Current Affairs Bulletin always on his night-stand. CIA propaganda always on his night-stand.

Such an intimate assault.

Frances Stonor Connor's Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters mentions Australia very briefly.

We are such small beer, to them.

iii – how do i cut

how do i cut
down

open

the skin
the fat the bone the strings
let them out
the lies
the shadows
the lies
the long chains, the strung-together
chains –

how
open
the marrow
the shadow
open
irrigating canals

light on blood like light on water

how do i cut
v-shaped culverts

cut
the hypocrisy, cronyism, the nest-feathering parasitism,
the sanctimonious brazen mealy-mouthed thieving,
the murderous, blame-shifting, self-serving

lies from everywhere

from
my
veins?

iv – Untitled

What do you want to wear?
– Nothing. Nothing.
Where do you want to go?
– Into the rain. Nowhere.

v – Stroking the Cat

Stroking the cat
on the stairs to the garden.
The stairs go to sleep.

Nothing matters:

The dirt is here
the air is here
the leaves are here

The cat is here,
the hand.

The world is air.

The world drifts
the stairs go to sleep.
Nothing matters.

The air
is asleep,
the world
is asleep,

is warm
is fur
is
content.