Commentary

Travelling to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) conference on the morning tram, I marvel at Melbourne’s sophistication and self-regard. In Swanston Street, new sculptures honour John Brack’s satire of Melbourne’s regimented workers, while in front of the State Library there’s a classical portal half buried in the pavement, as if the ancient world lies below. At the Trades Hall in Carlton, the framed wall directory is ‘Heritage Only’, so I follow the photocopied paper arrows to the conference venue. There’s more historical self-consciousness here than in the new National Museum in Canberra. Banners assert the importance of eight hours’ work, recreation and rest, and there is a massive socialist realist representation of good Australian workers toiling to keep the country alive. We’re in the sacred place of the Left: Frank Hardy, Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten surely haunt us here. 

Of all major South-East Asian nations, the Philippines is least known in Australia, and rarely studied, even in our universities. The material and historical differences between the two countries seem to have blinded us to the interests our two countries share. Australia did not support the long Filipino struggle for independence, as with Indonesia’s, nor actively oppose it, as with Vietnam’s. Nonetheless, both countries were part of SEATO and supported US involvement in Indo-China. Within ASEAN, the Philippines has often been the country most sympathetic to greater links with Australia, and the Philippines is regarded as a high-priority country for development assistance by Ausaid.

Attending a poetry festival is not normally considered a life-threatening event (not even if you are prone to deep vein thrombosis from constant sitting) but when I told my family I was going to Struga, I was greeted by worried looks and expressions of deep concern. Struga is in the Republic of Macedonia. Just days before, Macedonian hotheads had set fire to a mosque in Prilip (not that far from Struga) in revenge for the death of a Prilip policeman in a road-mine explosion planted by Albanian terrorists. The hair-trigger tensions in that country were clearly dangerous, and possibly escalating.

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare is referred to as the happy hunting ground of all minds which have lost their balance. He is also referred to by Buck Mulligan, even less reverently, though with a distinct nationalist tilt, as ‘Shakespeare. I seem to recall the name. Ah, to be sure, the fellow who writes like Synge.’ Well, there probably are analogies between the greatest of all dramatists, who could also, as Donald Davie pointed out, use any word in the language he chose (and hence manipulated an extended diction), and the chap who set the Abbey Theatre stage on fire with the dynamic stylisation of Irish peasant speech in The Playboy of the Western World. Just as there are analogies between the poet who could write King Lear and the lonely Jesuit who wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains: cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer no-man-fathomed: / Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there’, and all those tragic sonnets. Not to mention the fellow who posed in front of the bookshop sign in Paris.

Back in April, when Peter Rose asked me to write an irregular column for ABR on the campaigns that the Australian Society of Authors runs on behalf of writers, it seemed perfectly clear what the subject of my first column should be. At that time, after years of hints and veiled threats, the Government had finally revealed its hand and introduced a Bill into Federal Parliament to allow the parallel importation of books. The Government wanted this legislation passed before the end of the financial year – it was a priority item.

Rhetoric has a bad name. And for good reason. Not only does it suggest insincerity and verbal manipulation, it also has a strong odour of scholasticism about it. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I turn to ancient rhetoric to urge upon you two terms I find useful in thinking about contemporary Australian poetry. I will make it as palatable as I can and hope it doesn’t choke going down. Whether it is nourishing or not, I leave you to decide.

On the second last day of the weeklong Poetry Africa 2001 international festival in Durban, South Africa, an interview with me appeared in one of the national newspapers. The text presented me as a returned exile. I was asked questions such as: ‘Have you lost your South Africanness, or do you still need it?’ Since my return to South Africa – I was last here in 1995, just after the first ‘free and fair’ election – I’ve been asked about my feelings towards South Africa and Australia. The questions are always intentionally superficial: there’s a right and a wrong answer. I’ve found that usually the best response is evasion or, better, a lie. In their questioning is a not so subtle politics of decorum: Are you a foreigner? If you are, mind your manners.

There are watchdogs and there are lapdogs. Watchdogs are alert. At the slightest movement, they growl. When they bite, it hurts. Lapdogs are alert – to their master’s moods.

Purists and lawyers, sit down. You may need smelling salts or whisky, according to taste. Ready? All right. I predict that your children, or perhaps your children’s children, will read in grammar textbooks that they is the third-person singular pronoun when referring to a person, as well as being the third-person plural pronoun. It will be confined to an animal or a thing.