Essay

On 30 March 2001 Helen Garner attended a Victims of Crime Rally on the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House.

The sun shone on a loose crowd that was forming at the top of Bourke Street. Many of the demonstrators had attached pictures of their murdered loved ones to their T shirts … On their backs people wore the slogan MAKE THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME. A common poster read LET THE VICTIM HAVE THE LAST WORD IN THE SENTENCE.

Garner describes suffering faces, clumsy and sob-broken speeches, anger sharpened to ‘rough, skin-prickling eloquence’, recitations of lists of the dead, lists of crimes and sentences. At the end of the rally, Garner asked some of the speakers for their addresses. When she told a man who had impressed her with his eloquence – he wore an Akubra and his face was ‘sun-creased, sparkly-eyed and intensely like-able’ – that she was writing a book about a murder, he shook her hand and said, ‘[T]hanks for takin’ an interest’.

It is hard to avoid the assessment that the most visible product to date of the war on terrorism has been nothing much more, or less, than more war and more terror. The unhappy reality since September 11 seems to be that all our major cities, and concentrations of Westerners anywhere, are as vulnerable as ever; the capacity of terrorist actors to do harm is as great as ever; their motivations are as great as ever; their identity is as elusive as ever; international cooperation is as fragile as ever; and international policy priorities are as misplaced as ever.

In Iraq, where the terrorist connection was the least plausible of all the reasons for going to war, terrorist violence has now become the most harrowing of all its consequences. The significance of Richard Clarke’s evidence to the September 11 Commission is not what the former anti-terrorism chief had to say, with all the wisdom that hindsight confers, about the failure of either Republican or Democrat administrations to take more effective action before September 11; rather, it is about the decision after September 11 to attack Iraq, a country that had about as much to do with it as Mexico, creating in the process the most expensive recruitment campaign for Islamist extremism ever launched.

In a much-quoted passage at the end of the General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes remarked, with some whimsy, on the power of policy intellectuals like himself:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.

The art collections are the main thing in an art museum, not the special exhibitions or other programs necessary for present-day credibility and fundraising. Special exhibitions can be easy fast-food showbiz, or else they can be too authoritarian, over-theorised, and bullying. Collections, the bigger the better, are where you can drop in, any day of the year, for a bit of reinvention. It’s good to choose your own pace when you want to get out of yourself .

About a decade ago, I picked up a book because I liked the cover: bleak street, stark buildings, empty sky, a robed man, his back turned, in the distance; in the foreground, a woman in a burka looking to the left at something we can’t see. When the blurb promised me ‘a Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw, with an insidious power to grip’, I bought it. It gripped. In fact, it scared the living bejesus out of me. That was my introduction to Hilary Mantel’s writings. Since then, I have read nearly everything she has published.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is about a sensible young couple who, after years of humanitarian work in Africa, decide to go to Saudi Arabia to repair their fortunes. The husband will work on a seductively extravagant building project; the wife will read, write and relax in their pleasant, if mildly claustrophobic, apartment. Then small things begin to go wrong.

Some years ago I wrote a poem called ‘A Table of Coincidences’, which contained the lines: ‘the day Christopher Columbus discovered America / Was the day Piero della Francesca died.’ This is a verifiable fact, unless changes in the Western calendar have altered things. Clearly, I was being sententious and reactionary: the ancient good of the world and its new doubtfulness seemed to start on the one day. A hostile reviewer pointed out that every date in the world is the anniversary of some other date, and poured scorn on my notion by suggesting that a momentous event like the Armistice in 1918 might share a date with the invention of Coca-Cola. But we still honour anniversaries, and I am only too conscious of the 365 days that have passed since 11 September 2001.

Death and bereavement come to us all, often as the most challenging experiences of our lives. In the end, we must all confront the inevitability of our own mortality. A study of dying and responses to death takes us to the heart of the history of any culture, and sharpens our understanding of the meaning of our lives. Despite the significance of death in human life, Ken Inglis and other scholars observed in the twentieth century ‘a modern distaste for the physical facts of mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’. Only in the last twenty years has the taboo on death begun to lift. Public and academic concern has been stimulated by the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, palliative care, and suicide rates, and by medical technology’s increasing interventions to prolong life. However, historians in Australia have been slower to participate in this discussion than colleagues in France, the USA, and Britain, especially for the nineteenth century. My own contribution is a book entitled Australian Ways of Death: A social and cultural history 1840–1918, and this essay tells an essential and distinctively Australian part of that story.

Bad art is where the personality of the artist reveals itself most fascinatingly, according to Lord Henry Wootton, the Wildean aesthete in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is an idea that assumes an unexpected relevance as we reach the tenth anniversary of what is perhaps the strangest phenomenon in Australian publishing history.

A few weeks ago, I attended the session on ‘What is an Australian Classic?’ during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. My own definition of what makes a classic is a simple one: a book from the past that retains significance, that still entertains and enlightens us, even though we may respond to it in quite different ways from its initial readers. In some cases, of course, classics were not so highly regarded on first publication. Even Gerard Windsor, at the festival, had to concede that Joyce’s Ulysses was a classic; it was of course banned in Australia, and elsewhere, for many years. And one of the eight titles in the first series of A&R Classics, Come in Spinner ($21.95pb, 0 207 19756 3), also received a very mixed reception, as one of its authors, Florence James, remembers in the introduction she wrote in 1988 for the first printing of the unedited version of the novel. In 1951, the Sydney Daily Telegraph called Come in Spinner ‘a muckraking novel fit for the literary dustbin’, even though it had earlier won the newspaper’s own novel competition!

Querulous impatience has overtaken discussion of Aboriginal matters in some quarters. ‘If we apologise, they must forgive and then assimilate. Invite them to discussions about how to ameliorate their misery – the disintegration of community, the alcoholism, the glue sniffing. But they mustn’t talk “ideology”. We’ve had enough brooding over the past, heard enough about treaties and self-determination, and more than enough about genocide. It’s time to move on.’ That’s what I hear and in that tone.