Commentary
‘No,’ Ania Walwicz said at the Melbourne Festival when asked if she was an ethnic writer, ‘I’m a fat writer.’ We laughed and applauded.
The multicultural professionals, however, may not let her (or Tess Lyssiotis) off the hook so easily. I have in mind that small but eloquent band of people, usually from institutions, who actually have a vested interest in keeping constructs like Anglo-Celtic/non-Anglo-Celtic, English-speaking background/non-English-speaking background alive and functional.
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I met Patrick White first in 1965. Reduced to 1.9s.6d, he was lying, in an American edition of Riders in the Chariot, on a sale table at Finney Isles department store in Brisbane. So much has changed. Today, we would talk of remainders; the shop has been taken over by David Jones which has in turn been taken over by Adelaide Steamship which later bought up Grace Bros; prices are now given in dollar and cents.
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Writers and readers, it seems to me, are often driven by a need to confess. Everything. Not just sins. But the lot. To confess in the original secular sense of this word; to utter, to declare (ourselves, that is), to disclose and uncover what lies hidden within us. If I’d not been a writer, I used to think I’d like to have been an archaeologist. It’s only recently I’ve located the connection between writing fiction and archaeology. Historians and biographers are probably just as confessional in their work as writers of declared fictions. But they are undoubtedly able to more easily disguise this because they are accountable to the objective – to outcrops of unrelocatable facts along the way, that is.
... (read more)The presence of the Irish ambassador and the muscatel was accounted for by the first theme of the week, which was that of W.B. Yeats and his influence. It is not surprising that a great many Celtic accents could be heard off stage as well as on. Indeed, the previous night saw a private dinner held by the W.B. Yeats Society of W.A. (one of only four Yeats societies in the world) whose only club rule seemed to be that some of Yeats’s poems should be read and suitably appreciated.
... (read more)A slightly unconventional 1950s upbringing – I was nourished on Russia’s virtues as well as Weeties – may be responsible for my inability to believe in that pandemic, the tall poppy syndrome; instead I’ve always seen the naming of it as just one more jaunt down that jingoistic path which supposedly leads to the discovery of a definition of Australian identity – surely one of the dreariest literary pursuits known to person. But having popped my head up over the parapet a few times in the last few weeks, and having attracted an absolute fusillade of complaint, I was thinking seriously about changing my tune.
... (read more)First up, best dressed is a warning for flatmates where the laggard must take comfort from the prospect that ‘An overcoat covers a multitude of sins’.
... (read more)Just one of the interesting things I found out from reading Tom Shapcott’s The Literature Board: A Brief History (reviewed by Evan Williams in the April ABR) was that I appeared to be just about the only person in Australia who’d never received a Lit. Board grant. Well, me and Sasha Soldatow, who’s a minor celebrity because of Private – Do Not Open (Penguin $8.95 pb) but much more famous for never having received a grant in over a decade’s application. One year he even included a naked photo – of himself – with the standard form. That only seemed to contribute to his perfect score: twelve out of twelve knock backs. And that’s just one thing you won’t find in Tom Shapcott’s book, teeming though it is with statistics for every occasion.
... (read more)Contemporary Australian literature was among the less obscure topics discussed at the recent Modern Language Association convention held in New York. About 15,000 delegates came to the bazaar, some looking for jobs or friends, others attending a boggling array of literary discussions on bat fantasy in Dickens, the future of East European nature poetry and the shape of language in Thea Astley’s work. This last one was a fine lecture given by Robert Ross, tireless president of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies, which will hold its own conference in March at Penn State University. Marcia Allentuck gave a lively talk about Australian Yiddish literature – in particular Herz Bergner’s Light and Shadows, which portrayed the bitter angst of the immigrant almost thirty years before the current wave of immigrant writing.
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Melbourne, which has somehow appropriated for itself the reputation of being the first Australian city of ‘thought’, has become the last major city in this country to host a large-scale writer’s week. Well, we now have one and it’s called the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, and it is currently being staged.
... (read more)I have never flown first class on Qantas; I’d love to, but somehow I don’t think I ever will. But next time you fly first class on a Qantas 747, take a look at the inflight library and you might be surprised to find copies of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s Strong Man from Piraeus; Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino; Evan Green’s Alice to Nowhere; Gerald Murnane’s A Lifetime on Clouds; or Kate Grenville’s Lillian’s Story.
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