Essay

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;

Autobiography is based on a paradox. It is a generic representation of identity, but identity and genre appear to be antithetical. If we conventionally think of our identity as unique (singular, autonomous and self-made), how then can the presentation of that identity be generic? How, when narrating our lives, can we be both singular and understandable? Does narrating a life presuppose a way of writing (that is, a genre) that will make it recognisable as a story of a life? And how individual can we be, given that we are social animals? We live in families, form attachments and belong to institutions. How much is identity a case of identifying with others?

Australian art criticism is a toothless pander that may not even exist. At least that is what some of this country’s most prominent critics, past and present, think. Christopher Heathcote, for example, who was senior art critic for The Age during the early 1990s, believes that art criticism has ‘been shut down by vested, mainly institutional, interests’ and that the system rewards only the ‘most servile conformists’.¹ In his opinion: ‘Serve out your time brown-nosing the bureaucracy, and you too will land a cushy sinecure in some part of the museo-academic ziggurat.’

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the brave new world of Museum Expansion Incorporated. Do you have an overstuffed museum? Is it situated, perhaps, next to an urban area in need of a makeover: some rotting docklands, say, or an abandoned flour mill? Are you privy, alternatively, to plans for a combined retail/office/residential development in need of that one extra component to give it the ultimate lift? Then buttonhole a politician eager for a good news story for a change, generate a pile of capital works grant applications, and take out some philanthropists for a really long lunch. You are now free to commission an architect or two. Either young and keen, or old and eminent, it doesn’t much matter as long as they have a creative vision expansive enough to sustain an innovative piece of ‘destination’ architecture.

Though we have seen periods during which Australian cinema has been synonymous with period-set narratives and idealised evocations of the outback, there has always been a darker side to our cinematic imagination, a gritty, hard-edged element that is just as crucial to this country’s feature film output as are the sepia-tinged dreamscapes. Many of the pivotal films of the Australian New Wave brought a vivid, finely judged aesthetic to the bleakest of subject matter. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) conjured a harrowing tragedy of grisly murders and manhunts, while Peter Weir’s darkly comic feature début, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), presented a paranoid, murderous rural community whose raison d’être was maintaining its seclusion, even if that meant killing any outsiders who found their way into town.

Moving house recently reacquainted me with my books as I handled each one, packing and unpacking, dismantling the shelves from under them, banging the shelves together in the new place and lining up the books in a jumbled vestige of the old order. Books carried round for half a lifetime, books read more than once, books that will never be read, gifts, enthusiasms, bearers of memory and desire. Arranging books is something we all must do, culling and keeping in mysterious ways that reflect ourselves and our circumstances.

A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a splay of emerald, turquoise, black and yellow feathers – was too dazed to bite, and clearly had a broken wing. Though we’ve always called these beautiful birds 28s, technically they are a ring-necked parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln variety of ring-necked. The demarcation lines between varieties are hazy. The local ‘nickname’ matters as local names do. We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. My daughter doesn’t know it died. She said it was the closest she’d ever come to something so ‘amazing’. I left it at that.

Nowadays, we want the truth. Suddenly, it seems, we are no longer content to be sceptical and laconic and sophisticated, or to take the line that there are many kinds of truth and that it all depends on how you look at it, and on who is doing the looking. Politicians and journalists, for example, long assumed by a knowing public to belong to professions that not only display but positively require a flexible approach to the facts, now find themselves being scrutinised and investigated to establish whether or not they have been telling lies. The Blairs – Jayson of The New York Times, and Tony of Her Majesty’s government – cannot, in their recent tribulations, have missed the irony of this dramatic shift. Where once we tolerated, even celebrated, shading and nuance and the need, sometimes, to elaborate and select and even invent in order to arrive at a truth of a kind that told us far more than the mere facts ever would, now we just want to get down to those plain unelaborated facts and to establish what really did happen, or is currently happening, or is about to happen.

For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.

Since the publication of the inaugural Best Australian Essays in 1998, Black Inc.’s ‘Best’ series has grown into an impressive franchise that now takes in the Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Poems and Best Australian Sportswriting. That, until this year, the essays, stories and regular Quarterly Essay should all have had a single editor, Peter Craven, seems in retrospect quite extraordinary. It was perhaps inevitable that such an empire would eventually fragment – evolving, say, into a rotating series of guest editorships under Craven’s direction. But his departure from Black Inc. early this year, after a disagreement with publisher Morry Schwartz over the future of the Quarterly Essay series, came as a shock to followers of this series.