by Peter Drew
For the rest of my time in Melbourne I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend with AIDS. He made me wonder, who else out there was playing a character? Maybe I was playing a character? I didn’t think so, but how could I be sure? Maybe if I spoke to someone else who was playing a character, someone who seemed to be operating out of bad faith just to amuse themselves, maybe then I would understand myself better. One name immediately sprang to mind.
Opportunity Makes the Thief
I tracked down the address of Keith’s office with a little help from a friend. I’d assumed that someone like him would have a grand office in one of Melbourne’s most intimidating towers, so I was surprised to discover that he’d opted for a little old building down the east end of Collins Street. I sent him an email with a light-hearted request for a meeting but received no reply. It was my last day in Melbourne so I thought, What the hell? I’ll just show up at his door and see what happens.
After a morning of postering I caught the number 11 tram to see him. I’d left all my gear at the hostel and put on some semi-clean clothes. As I stood on the tram I tried to formulate a plan for what I would say, but quickly realised I had no idea. All I knew about Keith was that he sometimes worked for a conservative think tank, the name of which I couldn’t even remember. On both our previous meetings he seemed to relish the opportunity to mock my posters and everything they stood for. That’s why I felt confident he would agree to see me. I had a feeling that men like Keith take pleasure in dissecting other men. To him, I was easy prey. But I wasn’t scared. After two weeks of being ignored on the street I was looking forward to it.
I took myself up the stairs and searched the rabbit warren of narrow corridors for Keith’s office. The place was full of small law and accounting practices. Apart from the herringbone wood floors, the interior was very plain. I found the door I was looking for. I hesitated. Then I knocked and a female voice said, ‘Come in.’
‘Hello,’ I said, stepping in. ‘I’m here to see Keith. I don’t have an appointment but I was hoping to get his opinion on my new design.’ I held up the single rolled poster I’d brought with me.
‘Oh, yes, okay,’ said the elderly secretary with a mixture of warmth and confusion. She asked my name and told me to sit down before she stepped out. From the next room I could hear her speaking quietly. Then I heard Keith let out a chuckle. A second later he appeared, wearing his most conspiratorial smile.
‘Drew, what a pleasant surprise! Come in. Thank you, Grace.’
Keith’s office was lined with cheap shelves that were filled with binders, and one antique shelf filled with books I didn’t recognise. His desk was an oak rectangle with a green leather top and matching chairs. He even had one of those green desk lamps amid the clutter. The office was small and cramped. The only things in the room that didn’t obviously relate to work were the books and a large print of Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ that hung on the wall behind Keith’s desk.
‘You like Max Dupain?’ I asked.
‘It’s a powerful image,’ said Keith curtly. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m sorry to bother you at work but I was hoping to get your opinion on my new poster,’ I said.
‘Let me guess, climate change?’ Keith quipped.
‘Colonisation, actually.’ I stood up to unfurl the poster.
‘No, not in here,’ Keith protested. ‘Why not just tell me about it?’
So I sat down and told Keith all about the design. I told him how my original plan had fallen apart and how people on the street seemed unmoved by the ‘Aboriginal Land’ poster. I told him that I didn’t know why.
‘Well, that’s easy,’ said Keith. ‘Because everybody understands that opportunity makes the thief.’
‘What do you mean?’
Keith leaned forward. ‘Do you honestly believe that anyone in this country doesn’t already realise that this was once Aboriginal land? From a young age, every Australian student is told “respect the traditional owners”, etcetera, etcetera. We all know the land was seized, we’re just too polite to say so.’
‘I wouldn’t call that politeness,’ I said.
‘No? You don’t think Aborigines are ashamed of the fact they couldn’t prevent the land from being taken? Of course they are. The word “settlement” is simply a polite compromise between “invasion” and “conquest”. It allows Aborigines to forget they were conquered and it allows the rest of us to forget about our own brutality.’
‘I’m not sure it’s working,’ I said. ‘I mean, you seem pretty comfortable with accepting that brutality. Wouldn’t we all be better off if we acknowledged the truth?’
Keith leaned far back in his chair. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘All of the most beautiful things created by man were made in compensation for the truth. That’s why nobody likes your ghastly poster!’ He let out a short laugh, as if he’d surprised himself.
‘Well, I’m glad I came here,’ I said, ‘because it’s making it easier to take you less seriously. Do you even believe what you’re saying?’
‘Why not?’ said Keith, still amused. But he could see that he was losing me. ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘You’ve been polite to me, so I should return the favour. But let me ask you this – how much culture from 1788 remains alive today, and how much has been swept aside by modernity? Can you dance an Irish jig or recite the Lord’s Prayer? Can you milk a cow or sow a field?’
I shook my head.
‘Of course you can’t. But nobody puts pressure on you to look backwards and bemoan all that you’ve supposedly lost, because white people are allowed to believe in progress. Now, consider all the pressure placed upon the Aborigine to “be Aboriginal” and perform the cruel pantomime of a culture set in opposition to modernity, just to service our delusion of sensitivity. Consider the cost of that delusion. Australia spends billions every year simply maintaining the shocking disadvantage of remote communities. We could start to “close the gap” tomorrow if we took the steps necessary to encourage those communities to assimilate, economically and socially. But that would require us to surrender the idea of the world’s “oldest living culture”, artificially kept frozen in time. Maybe we’re so greedy that we think we can be powerful as well as innocent? Or maybe we’re just afraid that we won’t be forgiven for what it took to create modern Australia?’
Keith wasn’t smiling anymore. After a pause he continued.
‘It’s no wonder we tell ourselves stories of a unifying spirit and write noble documents. Maybe it’s the best we can do to legislate our base natures into civility.’
He seemed spent, like he’d said what he really wanted to say, but regretted it. I actually felt sorry for him because he seemed to grasp that the answers he was seeking were probably beyond his own understanding. I didn’t feel up to putting him on the spot, so I changed the subject.
‘Why do you like that image?’ I asked, looking up at the Sunbaker behind him. Keith turned to look at it and a weary smile returned to his face.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe for all the reasons that I don’t necessarily agree with everything I just told you.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, suddenly alert.
But Keith looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘No. Now, unless you’re in a position to open an account, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ His smile was gone.
I stood up. He rose also and stuck out his hand. I shook it, picked up my poster and got out of there. A minute later I was back on Collins Street among the normal people knocking off from work. I found a café and wrote down everything that Keith had said, as best as I could remember it. I knew he’d said more than he’d intended to. I knew I’d never get that chance again, but I felt like I’d heard more than enough. Any time I didn’t feel like getting out of bed to stick up posters, any time I didn’t want to cook up another batch of glue, any time I felt like giving up, I could always read what Keith had said and find all the motivation I needed to keep going.
The Trol
ley Problem
I knew I didn’t agree with what Keith had said, but I couldn’t say why. His opinions weren’t the kind you can easily confront without being sucked into their vortex of self-loathing and brutality. They seemed like the kind of opinions you need to tunnel underneath. I had a feeling that something was missing right at the core of Keith’s worldview and I needed time to figure out what it was. In the meantime, his dislike of my current poster was encouraging.
After Melbourne I joined a group of friends who were heading to Tasmania for the Dark Mofo festival. We were splitting the cost of accommodation so I’d be able to see the festival at night and put up posters in the morning. The chance to be immersed in other people’s art seemed like the break I needed.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Every year half a million contemporary art fans turn mid-winter Hobart into a theme park for the disillusioned. The whole town gets coloured black and red. It’s about as edgy as a goth kid’s twenty-first birthday party, yet it manages to pull $50 million into the city’s economy. Every year there’s a controversy and in 2017 it was a performance art piece by Hermann Nitsch, for which a bull would be taken off the feedlot and ritually sacrificed for art. Naturally, my gut reaction was to side with the artist. My other gut reaction was disgust. Nitsch’s work is deliberately repulsive. I had no interest in seeing people covered in animal blood. However, I greatly enjoyed the controversy leading up to the festival.
I especially enjoyed David Walsh’s personal contribution to the debate. He issued a good-humoured statement on MONA’s website, exploring the positive, though unintended, consequences of horrific acts. He cited the Port Arthur massacre and the subsequent change to gun laws that saved hundreds of lives. He then went on to invoke the thought experiment known as the ‘trolley problem’:
There is a runaway trolley barrelling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:
1.Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track.
2.Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
Which is the most ethical choice?
… Most people pull the lever. They kill one to save five. So the ends justify the means? Not so fast. When the experiment is slightly altered, so that one has to push a fat man onto the tracks to stop the trolley, very few will do it … It is, apparently, only moral to kill one to save five when the action is an indirect consequence of the intervention.
The first time I was presented with the trolley problem I thought it was pretty dumb. There was something about the inclusion of the ‘fat man’ that seemed wilfully absurd, almost as if it intended to mock the fallibility of our ethical instincts. I think it betrays an underlying misanthropy that afflicts many people who worship reason. At the time I was enrolled in an Honours degree in Philosophy at Adelaide Uni. Soon after being presented with the trolley problem I dropped out to pursue the even less financially stable option of being an artist. I never got a chance to lay down what I disliked about the trolley problem, so I’ll tell you here.
What’s wrong with the trolley problem is that it presumes an absolute knowledge of causality that doesn’t exist in the real world. The real world doesn’t run on tracks. In the real world we never really know what the future holds. We don’t know if a fat man will stop a trolley because the real world is infinitely complex. That complexity has forged our ethical instincts over millions of years of evolution, so I don’t rush to mock their fallibility.
I liked the way David Walsh went on to suggest that art was a valuable arena for testing those ethical instincts. I started to think about my own posters, but I didn’t want to. Instead I came up with my own rebuke to the trolley problem in the form of a silly little allegory called Susan and the Stockman:
A plane carrying three scientists who have found remedies for climate change, cancer and AIDS crashes in the outback. They are all critically injured and require organ transplants. Complicating matters, their blood type is AB-negative, which is very rare.
A stockman finds the crash and calls the nearest hospital. They dispatch a surgeon but she’s several hours away. The stockman must find someone with AB-negative blood and kill them to save the world. He checks the pub, the post office and the local school without any luck. Time is running out. He returns to the crash site to tell the scientists he’s failed, but on the way he meets a stranger called Susan. The stockman asks for her blood type. ‘AB-negative,’ says Susan. He kills her. Delighted, the stockman calls the hospital to tell them the good news. They’re overjoyed. Together, they’ve helped save the world. They advise the stockman to put the organs on ice and await the arrival of the surgeon. ‘She’ll be there soon,’ they say. ‘Her name is Susan.’
Perhaps now you understand why I dropped out of my Philosophy course. Why study for three years just to become a more irritating person? After several days of juggling these, and even more annoying questions, Julie and I decided to have a break from Dark Mofo.
We put the afternoon aside for a picnic in the Queens Domain, a hilly area overlooking the River Derwent. We packed some tasty treats and went for a long walk in the bush. I hadn’t planned to have a big conversation about our future, but we did.
We’d been together for almost ten years. From the beginning our bond had centred on our shared understanding of each other’s creative endeavours. For almost a decade we’d lived in our little blanket-fort of creativity, where the world’s expectations couldn’t penetrate. Blocking out the rest of the world was a team effort. For a long time neither of us had achieved much. But now that we were finally making progress, we had a growing suspicion that our careers would never become a worthy substitute for the satisfaction of family.
‘So the real question is, what do we need to achieve in our careers in order to feel satisfied enough that we don’t later hate ourselves for starting a family?’ I said, in what had started as a romantic chat in the park.
‘I don’t know,’ said Julie. For three and a half years we’d been living in our stinky little apartment in Norwood. There was no future in that place.
‘Let’s aim for the end of 2018,’ she said with some difficulty.
‘Do you mean that we can start trying at the end of 2018, or do you want to actually have a baby then? Because there’s a difference,’ I said, trying to keep it playful.
‘I mean we can start trying then,’ she said in a tone that suggested that I was ruining a perfectly good picnic. I backed off. But as the tranquillity of the setting cleared the air I realised that I needed more.
‘Is it because we don’t have a house?’ I asked.
‘That’s partly it, but it’s also the question of rearranging our priorities,’ said Julie. This isn’t just another project,’ she added. Her choice of words was subtly aimed at me. We both create stuff but I’m the only one who deals in projects. It was a fair criticism. Why should she trust in my ability to support a family? All my time and money goes into producing art projects.
‘So let’s get a house,’ I said.
‘You want to buy a house?’
‘Why not? Dana and Jess bought a place and they’re losers just like us! Do you really want to live in our unit forever?’
‘Of course I don’t, but …’ The silence grew and grew. ‘Let’s look into it,’ she finished eventually.
‘So we’ll buy a house?’ I asked.
‘I’m saying we’ll look into it!’ she said, and I knew this was the best I could hope for. I was happy. We’d made tremendous progress. I promised Julie I wouldn’t bring it up again for the rest of the trip. Then I shut up and we enjoyed our rollmops.
The next morning while I was sticking up posters around the harbour, I found that I had
a spring in my step. Since I’d first dropped out of uni and given up on the idea of ever having a stable job and the financial security that goes with it, I’d never allowed myself to believe that I might start a family of my own. I’d always thought that was for everyone else. Only now did I realise that, since meeting Julie, my desire for family had slowly been creeping back. I felt something new in the core of my being where my self-worth was generated. I bounced around the harbour like a little boy. Was this how Dad felt when Mum was pregnant? I thought. Julie wasn’t even pregnant yet but the mere idea of it had dropped anchor in my mind.
You’ll remember that in the first chapter of this book I described my lack of love for the world, the way that I saw the world as worthless and that I preferred not to participate in all its nonsense. I believe it’s a feeling that afflicts many people, especially as we cross the threshold from childhood into the adult world. It has something to do with accepting the burden of life’s inherent tragedies. For a long time my solution to adulthood was an attitude of detached cynicism. It was an invisible boundary that I built to protect myself from other people’s sincerity. Julie was the one who helped me out of that place.
It happened very early in our relationship, when I was still getting to know her family. We were both invited to the wedding of Julie’s cousin. We drove three hours north of Adelaide to the small country town of Melrose and arrived just in time to catch the ceremony. We squeezed into the back of the tiny church packed full of family, trapped within its warm embrace. I remember singing and a female priest. I felt uncharacteristically open, and the onslaught of emotion began to break through my defences. Where normally I would be detached, I felt present.
The reception started shortly after the ceremony and the onslaught continued. Speeches revealed layer after layer of heartfelt emotion. Where normally I would snicker and dismiss, now I took it all in. Eventually it become too much. I was watching an old man dancing with a small child when I suddenly stood up, walked out and kept walking. I snaked through the streets of Melrose until I couldn’t hear the music behind me. I stopped and realised that I couldn’t go back. I just couldn’t be in that room anymore without breaking down. I’d had similar experiences once or twice in the past. Normally I’d just escape to a safe place and cry it out, but this time I had nowhere to hide.