Was it in any way relevant? To Slessor? To the Festival? To Adelaide?
It was one of the ironies of Writers’ Week that Kenneth Slessor, without doubt one of our greatest writers, however seriously flawed, seemed less alive, less actual, than the non-existent poet whose powerfully factitious images (under the hand of Sidney Nolan) had burst out all over the walls of the South Australian Gallery. What a funny literature it is whose most ‘contemporary’ and ‘significant’ poet is a fake. There were young poets in Adelaide who stayed away from the Slessor Tribute and paid their homage at the Gallery to a great modern master. There will be visitors to the Festival, writers from South East Asia and elsewhere, who will leave Australia with the firm conviction that our only really considerable poet was Ern Malley.
The seventies was a ridge in our cultural history. It was the decade when writers, at least, stopped going away to live in other countries – the end of the expatriate tradition.
Writers who went away in the past include Miles Franklin, Martin Boyd, Christina Stead, Sumner Locke Elliott, Russell Braddon, Hugh Atkinson, Alan Moorehead, Alan Seymour, James Aldridge, Ray Mathew, Shirley Hazzard, Morris West, Peter Porter, Randolph Stow, George Johnston, Harold Stewart, Eric Lambert, Desmond O’Grady, and Colleen McCullough. Patrick White, I’m told, considered American citizenship and then decided to return home.
Writers of my age and younger have travelled and continue to travel but do not contemplate permanently living abroad. As Jim Davidson has said, it represents the beginning of the de-dominionisation of Australia.
The anxiety still assails Australians working in the arts that Australia may not be a sufficient place for the development of creativity and intelligence, the achievement of excellence. This is because Australia is not worth making art from, or its cultural traditions do not permit the making of art yet, or because the audience or readership here is not sophisticated or receptive enough or, economically, not big enough. Sometimes the deficiency is said to be in our history – that a country needs so many civil wars, upheavals, and social tragedies to produce great art. Sometimes it is a fear that to stay in Australia would develop in a creative person an Australian perspective that would be too narrow to appeal to an international readership or would lack the dynamic, at this point, to interest an international readership.
D. R. Burns, in an article in the National Times, thought that the prevailing attitude among those of us in the arts was that we were ‘stuck with it’ – stuck with being Australian and had to do what we could with it.
The seventies also marked the flowering of opportunity for creative work as never before – in film, dance, opera, crafts. In writing, painting and music the possibility of full-time involvement became real with the establishment of adequate funding through the Australia Council. So, to a degree, the economic problem was removed and this combined with the feeling that it was no longer a psychological or sensibility option to go away and ‘become’ another nationality. There was evidence too that going from a minor culture to a major culture was wounding to a personality, meant the suppression of self and the adoption of untrue accent, manner, mores and styles.
Sometimes, some of us here have adopted an expatriate spirit, have become desk expatriates who immerse ourselves in the culture of another country, reading only the magazines of that country, taking cultural heroes from that country, filling ourselves with its cultural history and gossip. In another form it is found in a stretching of our ancestral connections so as to attach oneself to another tradition – Celtic, Irish or whatever.
I do not claim to be pure and I do not write from a position of nationalistic righteousness. But it is a historical fact that we are not now going away to live.
We know that good work can be produced by expatriatism, although the dangers of moving from minor to major cultures are great (Henry James, who comes to mind, was almost tutored from childhood to be a cosmopolitan; James Joyce moved from a minor culture to a minor culture; Nabokov moved from a major culture to a major culture). Of the Australian expatriates, none has achieved greatness and many exist creatively only through their Australian readers.
My prediction is that the seventies provided the options for a creative life in Australia and that the eighties will see a further flowering of Australian originality both within and for an Australian perspective and within the international arena.
I see this as a simple result of finding the people with imaginative talent and letting them spend their time developing and expressing this talent as they see fit. This is done by using a mixture of market rewards and patronage, both private and public, and through educational and critical attention. Because of the reward–punishment factor in criticism and patronage, it is important to have many places to go for funding; there should not be only one body controlling patronage.
I think that we are passing through the ‘flattery of realism’ stage – the pleasure of seeing ourselves on the screen, in the pages of a book – to a creative playfulness, an ease with form, a fascination with form which at the same time does not have to leave the ‘pleasure of seeing ourselves’ behind. We will forever want to see ourselves. But it should not be enough.
During the mid seventies a dinner party was given by the publishers Collins and filmed by the BBC, at which the guests, Australian writers, were to chat about ‘new nationalism’ and the end of the expatriate tradition with Australian expatriate author Russell Braddon. (Russell Braddon had already given interviews in which he said he thought the new nationalism of Whitlam and the arts was making ‘a banana republic’ of Australia.)
The BBC film was directed by recently returned Australian film-maker Tom Hayden.
The Last Expatriate
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 13.10.73)
The dinner party was at the Interval Restaurant, where a bullring of snorting, pawing, frisking Australian writers gathered. They included Ruth Park, Kylie Tennant and Ronald McKie of the ‘Australian battler’ tradition; and Martin Johnston, Craig McGregor, Michael Wilding and ourselves, who represented the generation of patronage – maybe the Soft-Life Kids.
Craig, on behalf of the dinner party, asked the question: What the hell were we being set up for?
Now, now, now, said Tom Hayden soothingly, it’s nothing like that. The idea for the dinner had arisen out of a conversation between Russell and him about the shrinking expatriate community in the UK and how the immigration restrictions were making the traditional Australian pilgrimage to live and work in the UK now impossible. Also, they’d seen that the new arts policies in Australia had meant that many expatriates were coming back home.
But Russell came in: Didn’t we think that Australians had something to give Britain and Britain something to give us? Weren’t we worried by the immigration restrictions or didn’t it matter anymore? He was plaintive.
We found the question had never entered our mind.
Ruth Park said surely everyone was against travel restrictions – all travel restrictions.
Yes, of course.
We said Australian writers were still great travellers and receptive to other cultures – they went up the Asian trail, into London, to the USA. But they weren’t becoming expatriates.
Martin Johnston said that, on the other hand, some young writers did not want to travel at all.
True.
Tom Hayden said that we were heavily related to British culture – we grew up on William books, Biggles, boarding school stories, Monopoly, the Goons.
Not I, said Craig, I grew up on Ginger Meggs, Dad and Dave, Snakes Gully, and the Search for the Golden Boomerang brought to you by Hoadley’s Violet Crumble bars.
We had grown up on both the Hayden diet and the McGregor diet (with the addition of Champion magazine) but had no inclination either to live or visit the UK.
And I, said English-born Michael Wilding, grew up on it and that’s why I left England.
Russell said that he was against grants to writers. If you couldn’t get enough readers t
o live then you shouldn’t write full time. He said you wrote some sorts of books that you didn’t like so as to get money to write the books you wanted to write.
Michael Wilding said that if grants meant that writers didn’t write books they didn’t want to write, that would be a good thing.
Someone said something about writers writing for a small population.
Kylie Tennant said that she was having trouble convincing her son John that discipline and hard work were essential for good writing.
Russell said that you had to write for a world market and not for your own ‘little patch’.
We said that we found writing a compulsive thing and you did it and found the means to live the best way you could. Grants were one way. They didn’t make the job of writing any easier; it was still sweating blood etc. But if you had to do another job you would write less and probably also do the other job poorly.
Russell said that it did matter where the money came from. If it came from taxpayers it could mean one less kidney unit.
We had forgotten the reply to this argument.
Michael remembered it. He pointed out that many worthwhile activities in a society competed with other worthwhile activities. In this argument, any money for the arts, wherever it came from, was taken from elsewhere and thus tainted.
We suggested that you could be against the idea of grants but still take them. One should remain permanently suspicious of government’s dabbling in the arts. The boring anarchist argument. This was, though, greeted with some approval.
While we talked all this through and drank wine the BBC cameras rolled.
After the film lights were switched off we all said what we really thought. Russell said that we had been hiding our true identities behind cynicism. He found things different in Melbourne.
Martin said that, frankly, the grant meant that he could stop reviewing films and books because even with this sort of work he was finicky. It meant he could stop doing one finicky thing and concentrate on poetry, another finicky thing.
And about being Australian, he felt that he was just a person in the world.
Kylie said that she needed the deadline to complete work. Grants removed this pressure.
About the cynicism, we said that Russell should go to Melbourne where things were different.
Michael said that it was people from Melbourne who raised the Sydney/Melbourne difference argument. That was the difference.
But we could share in our minds Russell’s concern – as doyen of the expatriate writers – at the ending of a way of life, the dwindling numbers of Young Australian Writers turning up at Australia House literary parties. And we could share the feelings of the battlers like Kylie and Ruth who saw the end to the scrounging life of writing with its retrospective romance and virtues. But we didn’t feel any regret at the passing of either.
David Malouf Replies
(from Notes and Furphies, 3/1979)
In a letter to the editor David Malouf replied to Russel Ward’s accusations of un-Australian activities while at a writers’ conference in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1979.
I have by me as I write the script I was then reading from and find nothing in it that would explain the false and silly notions I am credited with. I was not at Lugano to ‘pay special attention to Lawson and Patrick White’ (that is another of Russel Ward’s inaccuracies) but to lecture on Australian poetry and to deal in seminar with some individual poems. My claim to these highly trained readers was that they might be interested in some of our writing not for what it has to tell them of a strange and distant place but for what it has to reveal to them of themselves. I see no other reason, myself, for reading or for asking others to read. My own feeling is that Australians overseas need to be especially careful that they are not selling our writing short by presenting it as a ‘greenhide and stringybark’ curiosity when our real importance, our real achievement, might be in pioneering the experience of suburban man and in presenting Europe with an image of itself that is both an imitation (which in its translation to a new place has become a new thing) and a critical revaluation. A good deal of contemporary Australian writing is as inventive, as relevant, as sophisticated as its European equivalent, and it is in these terms that we might expect European readers to be interested in it. As an Australian writer I get irritated when I am saddled with Ned Kelly and C. J. Dennis, since I find them about as relevant to my life, and my writing, as a contemporary American might find, say, James Brothers and Brett Harte. Nobody would dispute the reasonableness of this in the American case. Why should it be interpreted as a deliberate national betrayal on the part of an Australian?
I am wary of attempts to define too clearly what our tradition is and to proclaim too loudly what is essential to it. Australia is still revealing itself to us. We oughtn’t to close off possibilities by declaring too early what we have already become. Russel Ward and I differ radically, I suspect, on what Australia is and where it may be going; but I would be surprised if he has a higher regard than I have for our achievements or a more open and optimistic view of our future.
As for my expatriatism, which seems so affronting to him, may I just say this: I get tired of making the point that I am not an expatriate but an Australian writer who happens to spend part of the year outside Australia. I live in an isolated village and work. I did not choose Campagnatico because it is a centre of European culture but because it is cheap, quiet and far removed from a life in Sydney that had become increasingly wasteful of my energies – a life, if you like, that was too culturally distracting for the good of my work. Far from being a ‘cultural desert’ (a phrase that seems meaningless to me) Australia, like most other places these days, has more ‘high culture’ than even the hungriest of us can absorb.
My normal practice is to ignore attacks of this sort. If I reply at some length on this occasion it is because I would be sorry to have it generally assumed, on Russel Ward’s assurance, that I was accepting money from the Literature Board, Foreign Affairs and the Australian taxpayer to promote an interest in our writing when I was, in fact, presenting the country as ‘a place to be shunned by all cultivated persons’. Professor Ward’s account of my un-Australian activities, like much else that he writes, needs to be taken with a generous lump of salt.
A Conversation With Patrick White
Thelma Herring and G. A. Wilkes
(from Southerly, 2/1973)
Q. Some of the published statements about your life seem vague; would you care to clarify them? Your early education, for example?
A. It’s difficult to put dates to some of the events in my early life, though there are isolated episodes which remain very vivid. I know that after I was born in London (1912) my parents brought me back to Australia aged six months. Until I was three we had a flat in a block called ‘Cromer’ in Phillip Street where the Wentworth Hotel now stands. In 1915 we moved to ‘Lulworth’, Rushcutters Bay (out of which grew the Bonners’ house in Voss and the Courtneys’ house in The Vivisector). When I was five (1917) I started going to a kindergarten, ‘Sandtoft’ in Ocean Street, Woollahra, and later on to Cranbrook. How long I spent at each is difficult to say. Perhaps two years at each, or three at Sandtoft and only one at Cranbrook. I was sent to Cranbrook because my father was one of the founders and one of my great-uncles built the original house – so there was this link. But I didn’t stay there long because I suffered increasingly from asthma in Sydney. I went to Tudor House, Moss Vale, when I was nine (1921) and stayed till 1925. (Moss Vale became Sorrel Vale in The Aunt’s Story, and Mount Ashby which you can see from the school, the volcanic hill near the Goodmans’ farm ‘Meroë’.) In 1925 I was taken by my parents to England. We must have left about the beginning of April because the sea voyage from Sydney to England took about two months in those days. We arrived in London on 28 May, on my thirteenth birthday, and stayed in a hotel in Knightsbridge opposite the block of flats where I was born. I started school at Cheltenham the winter of that year, but before that spent some mont
hs at a tutor’s at Portishead near Bristol. My school years were pretty dreary. I hated Cheltenham, its regimentation. But there was always the possibility of going to the theatre in London during the holidays. I was taken to Paris for the first time when I was fourteen, and remember seeing a play by Sasha Guitry in which his wife Yvonne Printemps played the boy Mozart on his first visit to Paris. I can still remember Mozart’s blue eyelids and the smell of that red-plush theatre.
I left school and returned to Australia in 1929, working for a year as a jackeroo near Adaminaby, and a second year near Walgett. A third year I spent getting ready to pass the entrance exam to King’s College Cambridge. I was supposed to read History at Cambridge and was coached in that subject by Fred Wood, then at Sydney University, and later Professor of History at Wellington, NZ. He was very shocked by my style, as other Australian academics have been since. The Woods had a house at Blackheath to which they used to go in the holidays, and I would be driven over from Mount Wilson, where we had a house for many years, to more History sessions with F.W. (Actually, the day I arrived in Cambridge I felt I couldn’t face any more History, and decided to read Modern Languages (French and German) instead. It was a lucky decision. Because I had to go as often as possible to France and Germany to improve myself linguistically.)
My life at Cambridge (1932–35) was rather uneventful. I met none of the great. But I used to hang around A. E. Housman’s rooms hoping I might see him come out. I never did. But I heard him give the Leslie Stephen Lecture in which he shocked people by telling them all his best poetry had been written while he was either ill or drunk. I don’t think I knew Wittgenstein and Moore existed while I was at Cambridge. I’ve certainly never read them although I’ve been asked whether I’ve been influenced by them. Probably I couldn’t understand them if I tried. I did read a great deal at that time, mostly in French and German, and that was a great eye-opener. If I didn’t make the most of Cambridge in other ways, it was because I was far too shy to approach those who would have interested me.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 20