Commentary

An exhibition with considerable radical chic, Cook’s Pacific Encounters, currently at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, has stimulated a series of cross-cultural debates at an international conference on the collections made by Captain James Cook and his fellow voyagers (arranged by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Canberra, on July 28). Although there were several centuries of European exploration of the Pacific before the British, the importance of Cook’s voyages was unparalleled before or after. The collection on display in Canberra, primarily assembled by two German scientists, Johann Forster and his son Georg, who accompanied Cook on his second Pacific voyage, is on loan from the University of Göttingen. Like many university collections, it is well conserved and published, but rarely seen. Other parts of the Forster collection are distributed around the globe, the principal holding being at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

In the 1980s, when it seemed that the situation in South Africa would never improve, debate raged about the responsibility of South African novelists to act as witnesses to, and opponents of, apartheid. Some believed that white writers, especially, should use their privileged position in the fight. Nadine Gordimer was prominent among those who felt it was essential to be, in J.M. Coetzee’s words, a ‘stripper-away of convenient illusions and unmasker of colonial bad faith’1 in the realist convention, rather than a spinner of postmodern metafictions.

Australian historians admire Robert Menzies. Pardon? Aren’t historians, like the rest of the Australian academy, left-wing propagandists? Don’t they all loathe the prime minister’s political role model? Regardless of how historians view Menzies’ attitudes to the monarchy, appeasement, the middle class and the Communist Party, they have reached a consensus on one point: Menzies played a significant role in the consolidation and expansion of Australia’s university sector. When Ben Chifley laid the foundation stone of the Australian National University during the election year of 1949, Menzies refused to politicise the initiative; as prime minister in 1956, he appointed a committee to inquire into the plight of Australian universities and insisted on the provision of life-giving funds by the Commonwealth government under conditions which preserved university autonomy. As his biographer, A.W. Martin, notes, ‘Menzies’ support of universities, and the university life, was never at any time in doubt’.

Early last year, Phillip Adams interviewed the British author Pat Barker on his radio programme, Late Night Live. Pat Barker is a novelist who has journeyed into history, most famously in her Regeneration trilogy about World War I, where she fictionalises real, historical individuals. Adams asked her: ‘Which is better at getting at the truth? Fiction or history?’ Her answer was: ‘Oh, fiction every time.’ Barker is a novelist for whom violence and the fear of violence has been a recurrent, powerful theme. She argued that fiction allowed her to ‘slow down’ the horror so that she and her readers could think about it as it happened. In real life she felt that violence was often so swift and shocking that all one could do was recoil. Fiction gave her freedoms that helped her to convey truth.

The quirky kind of pleasure’ provided by coincidence; the ‘rightness’, whether logical or poetic, of connections between seemingly unconnected people, particularly connections that are inadvertent or may remain unknown to the people concerned; the ‘pleasing symmetry’, in retrospect, of various experiences we share with another human being, even when the experiences concerned were painful ones and their circumstances tragic: these are but a few of the broader observations, incidental but also integral, strewn throughout Two Lives (2005), Vikram Seth’s recent memoir of his great-uncle Shanti and Shanti’s German-Jewish wife, Henni. Integral not only to their nephew’s story of their fortuitous coming together in Nazi Germany and subsequent lives in England, but also to the life experiences of Seth’s readers, including (in my own case, certainly) the experience of reading the book itself. Such riches as are to be found in this story of ‘strange journeys’ and ‘chance encounters’ may also be found, Seth observes at the end, ‘behind every door on every street’. For me, the coincidences, inadvertent connections and serendipitous symmetries I found in the author’s trajectory and mine came to border on the uncanny.

Like all books, picture books are a vehicle of communication, narrative, information and emotions. Because of the adaptability of the picture-book genre, which communicates using both verbal and visual language systems, it is sometimes possible for authors and illustrators to challenge the underlying precepts of the role of language in the communication process.

This is one way of doing it:

No New Thing

No new thing under the sun:

The virtuous who prefer the dark;

Fools knighted; the brave undone;

In her review of Arabella Edge’s The God of Spring (ABR, March 2006), Melinda Harvey asserts that the novel is ‘classifiable as “artist fiction”, that boom genre of literary fiction ...’ a genre that involves, she declares, ‘a kind of “painting by numbers”, which is why it’s not surprising that many of its best exponents, Edge included, are graduates of Creative Writing departments’. I am not interested in arguing with Harvey’s analysis of Edge’s novel: it is her casual dismissal of works by ‘graduates of Creative Writing departments’ that concerns me. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard similarly purse-lipped comments, variations on the ‘this author is a writing school graduate (sniff) – and it shows …’ theme, I’d be – well, I’d have a jingle in my pocket. I can only assume that such jaundiced remarks spring from some misapprehensions about, or perhaps a studied indifference to, what graduate writing programmes actually involve. As a graduate of one such programme – I was in fact one of Arabella’s MA classmates— I am glad to be given the opportunity to help dispel some common, but decidedly mistaken, notions.

Biographers like to start their versions of the life of Samuel Barclay Beckett by wondering if he left the womb on 13 May 1906, as his birth certificate indicates, or on Good Friday, April 13, as he claimed. This time the master of grim humour and existential doubt isn’t having a lend of us – it was black Friday – though his claim to memories before that passage are more doubtful. Nevertheless, for me, the Beckett myth is born with the story of when he was a boy growing up in Foxrock, outside Dublin, fearlessly climbing a sixty-foot fir tree in the family garden. Standing atop, with his arms spread wide, he launches himself into the sky like an Anglo-Fenian Icarus; apparently, he had always wondered if the lower branches would catch him. Finding that they did, more or less, this naturally became the ten-year-old’s favourite pastime. To his mother’s horror, he repeated this plummet over and over again, and he didn’t always injure himself.