Griffith Review

One year after Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, Griffith Review 23 features comment from selected summiteers in the ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ group, and others. Editor Julianne Schultz’s introduction provides a short history of support for writers and artists beginning 250 years ago when Lord Bute, the prime minister, granting Samuel Johnson a government-funded pension for life, warned against ‘Reducing discussion of the arts, creativity and culture to economics …’

Robert Drewe, one of Australia’s most absorbing fiction writers, has prime position in the opening pages of the latest Meanjin. ‘The Aquarium at Night’ is so deft and engaging it draws me in, almost despite myself. It is a story about boys, surfing, prison life and ‘easygoing’ Australian masculinity. These topics may not immediately appeal, but the story stirs with the rhythms of memory, desire, the slow burn of maturing manhood, and the role that writing plays in coming to confront one’s self. Drewe’s prose seduces and convinces: a man remembering his childhood self is ‘A skinny, mop-headed grommet leaning out the window to check the morning’s wind and weather for the day’s surf potential and dreaming of legendary breaks. By 6.15 he’d be over the ridge and in the ocean.’ An incidental character in the prison Creative Writing class is ‘[a] twenty-stone Christian who’d decapitated his son-in-law with an axe for infidelity’. This is what draws me in, the sagacity of the prose, its grounded eloquence, its lack of mere aesthetics.

'I had fully expected to find Karoline and her family living in difficult circumstances but in their home I am confronted and embarrassed by the extent of their poverty.’ In his stand-out piece of reportage, Peter Mares relates how Karoline and Jone came to Australia from Fiji to pick fruit, pluck chickens and make their families’ lives back home more bearable. They stay illegally, ‘enmeshed in a complex web of opportunity and obligation’. This refugee story details the global reasons for, and effects of, such journeys, as well as the daily hardship of poverty. The shock of reality, the yearning to make a positive difference, the allure of an ‘authentic’ experience, the realisation of its impossibility, and the weary cynicism of disappointment: these themes persist as Australians write about their Asian neighbourhood.

One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not all young people today fit the conservative–materialist stereotype the media is so fond of.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the idea of ‘culture’ was radically democratised. The meaning of the word shifted away from the old, exclusive definition – culture as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, as Matthew Arnold put it in 1869 – and became a more inclusive concept that took in popular forms. We have become used to the idea that there is no clear dividing line between high and low. There is something liberating about having the freedom to treat popular cultural forms as the objects of serious attention. Even Meanjin, the most venerable and literary of these three journals, can publish an essay – an interesting. well-written and intelligent essay – on a pair of television soaps without it seeming out of place alongside more traditional subjects. But while some barriers fall, others go up. Cultural studies, as the academic discipline that has sprung up to exploit this relatively new freedom, faces the question of whether it should direct itself toward a general, non-academic audience or police the distinction between ‘serious’ academic writing and the kind of analysis that might be found in the mainstream media.