Tag Archives: Frank Moorhouse

SWF 2023: My sixth day

Posted on 31 May 2023 | 4 comments

Another early start with 10–11 am: Barrie Cassidy & Friends: State of the Nation

Veteran journalist Barrie Cassidy has been a regular at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, but this is the first time I’ve been to one of his sessions. He was on stage with what the festival program calls ‘his hand-picked squad of the country’s sharpest pundits’: Amy Remeikis, Niki Savva and Laura Tingle. They’re all regulars on current affairs TV, but I don’t think I’d seen any of them in person before.

The subject was politics, that is to say mainly electoral politics and the state of the major parties. The most telling comment was towards the end when Barrie Cassidy said, ‘When there’s consensus between the major parties, the media doesn’t chase it up.’ This means that the press doesn’t do a lot of interrogating of the AUKUS deal – is it actually in Australia’s interest or is it a matter of us serving the interests of the UK and the US? Similarly, coverage of climate issues through a party-political lens can often miss the point.

Nikki Savva’s subject seems to be the Liberal party. She sees the current dominance of Labor in Federal parliament and in all mainland states is largely due to the decline of the Liberals as a fighting machine and also as representative of a population. They are ceasing to be an effective opposition, or even an opposition at all. Peter Dutton’s survival strategy depends on three things: the failure of teh referendum on the Voice; an economic crash; and the rise of intolerance. Hard to cheer for him, then, and she says many dyed in the wool Liberals can no longer bring themselves to vote for what the party has become since Howard.

Amy Remeikis, introduced by Barrie Cassidy as political correspondent for The Australian much to the amusement of the Guardian readers in the audience, thought Labor’s ascendancy had something to do with changing demographics. Millennials now outnumber boomers, and in addition to the tendency of people to be more progressive when young, there’s the fact that life is particularly tough for the young these days.

Laura Tingle added that politics tends to go in cycles. This is Labor’s time for dominance, it was at rock bottom in 2014.

All agreed that there is a growing disconnect between the political class – politicians, political journalists, people who turn up for panels like this one – and the rest of the community. People are doing it hard, inequality is bigger than it’s ever been, our sense of common life is being eroded (not as badly in the USA, yet). Things are better than they were before last year’s election. The people in charge now are there with good motives, but business as usual could lead to disaster. We need grown-up conversations about tax and climate policy, and we’ve got a way to go for that.

A non-party-political subject that got some airplay was the recent resignation of Stan Grant after he was subjected to vicious and sometimes racist attack for giving a Wiradjuri perspective on the British Crown. Laura Tingle, as recently elected member of the ABC’s Board, said she had been out of action for a couple of weeks because of a bereavement, but deeply regretted Stan’s lack of support from management and the Board.

I haven’t ever watched Insiders, which used to be Barrie Cassidy’s Sunday morning show on the ABC. I imagine this was a slightly generalised version of that. One of the questions at the end referred to the fact that over a number of years not one non-white panellist had appeared on that show (the questioner didn’t need to point out that all the panellists today were white). Barrie did the only thing he could do and said it had been a mistake.

11 am: Osman Faruqi on Australia’s War Against Hip Hop

I listened to this Curiosity Lecture almost by accident. I know almost nothing about hip hop, and I guess I skip over headlines saying that it has been banned in venues including Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.

Osman Faruqi’s exasperated plea could have been meant specifically for me: ‘For once, listen to some art that doesn’t come from Bondi or Balmain.’ (Though, to be honest, I don’t know when I last listened to music from either Bondi or Balmain.)

He told us that NSW Police have taken steps to ban particular hip hop performers saying, nonsensically, that their music is used to ‘procure’ members for criminal bikie gangs etc. This censorship, he said, is ‘the greatest example of artistic suppression in Australia’s history’. If Nick Cave, who is white and part of the music establishment, sings about murdering every woman he sees, no one bans his song as inciting murder. When Bill Henson’s photographs are taken down, there’s an outcry. But if a brown rapper uses violent imagery they are banned from performing and police have their videos removed from YouTube, and there is resounding silence from the art world, including from successful white rappers.

Showing my age: in the 1970s the campaign against censorship focused on erotic material, because the banning of material deemed pornographic (the famous example if Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam was also banned). You don’t have to love pornography or be a fan of drill-rap to be uneasy about what’s happening now

12–12.30 pm: Beginnings: Remembering Robert Adamson and Frank Moorhouse

There were a number of ‘Beginnings’ sessions. It’s a nice idea: people read the beginnings of their favourite books, or perhaps their own books, on the assumption that writers put a lot of attention to their opening paragraphs.

This short session used the format to honour Frank Moorhouse and Robert Adamson, who both died in the last 12 months. I wonder if it would be an idea to plan a couple of elegiac sessions along these lines for every Writers’ Festival. Spaces could be left blank for people who die too late to be included in advance publicity. John Tranter, who died on 21 April this year, might then have been honoured.

As it was, Annabel Crabb and Mark Mordue read to us.

Annabel read the opening pages of the first two ‘Edith’ books, the first line of the third, and then the final pages, Edith’s death scene, from Cold Light, the third book. It was shockingly good.

Mark Mordue opened with a letter found in Adamson’s papers in which Frank Moorhouse responded warmly to one of Adamson’s poems. He spoke briefly about Adamson’s life, including his time in prison, his drug addiction and the role of his wife Juno Gemes. He finished with a poem that Adamson wrote for her, ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul’, which Adamson himself read at at least one previous Sydney Writers’ Festival. It ends:

_________________________ the future awaits you.
I stepped into the day, by following your gaze.

I want to make a final small observation about acknowledgements of country.

My initial prompt for this was an acknowledgement that was gobsmackingly perfunctory: the presenter didn’t look at us, but read hurriedly from a clipboard, stumbling slightly over the words. Disrespect may not have been intended, but it was certainly there.

I started to notice how other presenters made their acknowledgements personal. For example:

  • Michael Williams spoke briefly of how the land was unceded and so the issue of sovereignty was unresolved
  • Omar Sakr noted that some people object to the acknowledgements and responded that words – words like ‘genocide’ and ‘sovereignty’ – matter, that words give rise to actions
  • Sisonke Msimang made acknowledgement first in her own mother tongue and then in English
  • Felicity Plunkett quoted two lines about the power of country from First Nations poet Ellen van Neerven
  • Barrie Cassidy drew our attention to the coming referendum on a First Nations Voice to Parliament.

I was born on Mamu land in what is now North Queensland, and my father remembered as a child hearing ceremony down at the river behind our place. I’m writing this on Gadigal-Wangal land. Both places make my heart sing.

And the Festival is over, bar the podcasting.

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A tiny footnote on Frank Moorhouse

Posted on 2 July 2022 | 7 comments

Frank Moorhouse died last week, after making a huge contribution to Australian literature and to the lives of Australian writers. Many thoughtful and informative pieces have been published. In case you’ve missed them altogether, I’ll just mention Julianne Lamond’s piece in The Conversation and the most recent Monday Musing in the Whispering Gums blog.

What I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the recent articles – or anywhere else, for that matter – is that in the late 1960s, before the publication of his first collection of stories, Futility and Other Animals, he wrote a series of sketches for the student paper Honi Soit under the general title ‘Around the Laundromats’. From memory they featured a big lazy cat, and each piece featured a conversation in a laundromat. Frank lived in what he came to call ‘the Ghetto of Balmain’, but I’m pretty sure some of these encounters happened in the laundromat opposite my flat in Glebe. One of them featured the young woman who was my girlfriend at the time, whom he called ‘the English Student’ or something of the sort.

I wonder if anyone has dug those sketches out, and if they would be worth reprinting, perhaps as a small book.

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Southerly 74/2

Posted on 31 December 2014 | 1 comment

David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon (editors), Southerly Vol 74 No 2 2014: Australian Dreams 1

southerly-74-2When Dorothea Mackellar was living in England a little over a century ago, she dreamed – and versified – about a sunburnt country, rugged mountain ranges and sweeping plains. Times have changed. When David Brooks sent out an invitation for an issue of Southerly on Australian dreams, he wrote of ‘a mounting dismay and shame at seeing the cruel place we’ve become’, and though in his editorial he protests that he doesn’t want to deliver a jeremiad, that editorial will do the job until an actual jeremiad comes along.

So there’s not a lot of singing about the wide brown land here.

Rowena Lennox’s ‘Timor Dreaming’, about a friend who was killed in the East Timor massacre of 1976, pokes at the open wound of the Australian government’s silence then and its bullying more recently. JH Crone’s three-part ‘Elegy to Giants’ mourns Australians killed in the Bali bombing while ambivalently celebrating their ‘binge Bintang, root, vomit’ lifestyle (and in the third part, a jarringly unrhymed parody of CJ Dennis identifies them as descendants of Dennis’s Ginger Mick).

Jim Everett, a plangermairreener man of the First Nations of north-east Tasmania, refuses to identify as an Australian citizen in a fiercely polemical article, ‘Savage Nation: First Nations’ Philosophy and Sovereignty’. Mudrooroo Nyoongah, citizen of the world, faces old age, illness and the prospect of death in two powerful lyrics, ‘Wisps of Delightful Desire’ and ‘Old Fella Poem’.

Joshua Mostafa’s ‘Against Progress: Dreams, Nightmares, and the Meaning of Abbott’ probes the state of the Australian political culture (don’t be put off by its citing of a contemporary French philosopher, which often foreshadows pages of heavily academic prose, but not here): crudely summarised, he argues that public debate is too often limited to a contest between those who play on people’s fears and those who play on the fear of having one’s fears played on.

A number of the poems could have been written in direct response to David Brooks’ Claytons-jeremiad, touching on asylum seekers’ deaths at sea, environmental degradation and the parlous state of currently existing democracy. The poems that resonated with me most strongly, though, didn’t have an obvious connection to the theme: travellers’ tales from Laurie Duggan – ‘A short history of France’ and ‘New York Notes’ (not the only travellers’ tales by any means); a snowy expatriate winter from Kevin Hart – ‘February’; and a long piece by Sian Ellett, ‘Chopin & Friedric’, in which the top part of each page has a slam poem by a teenager with multiple sclerosis while at the bottom his mother gives her point of view.

The closest thing to a good old-fashioned bush yarn is Frank Moorhouse’s ‘I, initiation’, which starts out, ‘At the age of eight as a cub scout, with a never before experienced delight, I cooked and ate my first lamb chop barbecued on a green forked stick at my first camp fire in the bush,’ and goes on to talk about his regular eight-day solitary sojourns in the bush. But we are taken way out of our – and his – comfort zone with the story of an accident involving his scrotum and the years of psychoanalysis that followed. The closest thing to a good old Aussie family story, and the piece if fiction that most wrung my withers, is Cecelia Harris’s ‘All That is Left Behind’, a father–daughter story that is full of snow rather than sunburn.

Michelle Borzi’s ‘David Malouf, Earth Hour‘ provides what I’m always hoping for when I read literary criticism. She quotes generously, and helps us see the poetry with fresh eyes.

There are signs that some items were written – and edited – in haste. It’s hard to take seriously an article about Gough Whitlam that misspells Malcolm Fraser’s surname and the name of the Labor Party (especially given that Southerly follows US spelling conventions elsewhere). A reference in one article led to a critical response to the piece it was supposed to refer me to. One story ends so abruptly that one wonders if a couple of pages have dropped off or, more likely, it’s an undeclared excerpt from a longer work. And, fascinating though it is, I do wonder if Frank Moorhouse mightn’t have put his memoir through another draft to take some of the awkwardness out of his discussion of Aboriginal initiation ceremonies and the TMI discussion of his therapy.

Evidently a further Australian Dreams issue is in the pipeline. Good!

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SWF 2012: The Weekend

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 2 comments

First, a photo from Friday night. This is Tamar Chnorhokian, who read first in Moving People. That’s not a sponsor’s logo in the background, the story was set in a supermarket. You can see what I mean about the performers having nowhere to hide.

And now a sprint through my crowded weekend. My only serious queuing experience of the Festival was for the 11.30 session of What Would Edith Do? on Saturday – I got there before the previous session finished and so was comfortably towards the front of the queue. Edith Campbell Berry, the main character in Frank Moorhouse’s Dark Palace, Grand Days and Cold Light, may not have seized my imagination, perhaps because I haven’t read the first two books, but she has clearly been important to many people. I went to this hoping to find out what I’ve been missing and I got what I was after. Emily Maguire, novelist, discovered Edith in her late teenage years as a model of how it might be possible to live – rising to challenges and living nervously out of one’s depth rather than settling for the life mapped out by social expectations. She said there had been a number of times when she had actually asked herself the WWED question. Sadly, she deemed only one of them suitable for public exposure, but as it involved being invited to speak at a function in North Vietnam when she actually had no idea of the purpose of the function or who the Party functionaries thought she was, it was a perfectly satisfactory anecdote. The other panellists, journalists Annabel Crabb and Cynthia Banham, had come to the character later in life, but managed to convey the appeal. I realised that Cold Light is all aftermath: a woman who has lived daringly and intelligently, challenged convention in her private life and made a contribution on the world stage, returns to Australia in the 1950s where there is no place for such a woman and lives on scraps for the rest of her life. For those who have seen Edith riding around Geneva in a cowgirl suit or (is this really what they said?) stroking Anthony Eden’s head in her lap, the third trilogy is heartbreaking. Frank Moorhouse wasn’t there, but the best line of the session was his. He had told Annabel Crabb that one of the advantages of having spent 20 years with a single character was that she can now do her own PR and he doesn’t even have to turn up.

National Treasures was another poetry session that wasn’t quite what I had read the advertising to mean. I thought the participants – Mark Tredinnick, Vivian Smith and Judith Beveridge – were going to talk about Australian poetry they treasured, and read some to us, plus some of their own. What we got was excellent, but it wasn’t that: Judith Beveridge stayed firmly in the chair role, and the others talked of their own writing careers, and read from their work. When he was 15,  in the 1940s, Vivian S had sent off poems to The Bulletin, then pretty much the only place that published poetry in Australia. He received encouraging responses from the literary editor, Douglas Stewart, advising him to ditch the archaic poeticisms and recommending that he read contemporary poets such as T S Eliot. Decades later, Mark T was similarly advised by critic Jim Tulip, but the poets he recommended were William Carlos Williams, Robert Gray and Vivian Smith.

Tasmanian Aborigines was next, in which Lyndall Ryan talked to Ann Curthoys about her new book, a rewrite of her 1981 book on the same subject. Inevitably, the session involved a revisiting of the so-called History Wars: Keith Windschuttle had singled Professor Ryan’s 1981 book out for his accusation that lefty historians had fabricated evidence of massacre and his claim that in fact the original inhabitants of this country had just faded away when the Europeans arrived, possibly because of their inherent weaknesses. Windschuttle has been thoroughly discredited as a historian, of course, but it was interesting to hear Ryan’s take on the episode now. Asked what difference his intervention had made to our general understanding of Australian history, she said that paradoxically he had driven her and other back to interrogate their sources more thoroughly, and where in her first book she had focused on Aboriginal resistance, she had now looked at ‘settler activism’ and found that the evidence indicates that the violence of the frontier was much worse than historians had previously understood. Massacre, for instance, looms much larger in the new book than it did in the original.

Anne Curthoys was warm and personal as her interlocutor. She opened with a wonderful quote to the effect that in order to write history, one needs to have a deep commitment to the subject that relates to some great love or business in the present, and asked Lyndall Ryan what this love or business was in her case. But Professor Ryan was not to be seduced away from her calm, scholarly demeanour, and answered in terms of the breakthroughs in research since 1981. The question in my mind, which I didn’t get to ask, was along the same lines: as a white Australian, uncovering the evidence of terrible things done by your own forebears, how do you keep your composure, or if (as I think would be desirable) you lose your composure how do you keep your scholarly integrity? I guess I’ll just leave that one hanging.

Then I was back to the sun-filled Bangarra Mezzanine for Poetry Australia with Robert Gray, Rhyll McMaster, Tricia Dearborn, Geoffrey Lehmann – and the unfulfilled promise of Robert Adamson. It was a dazzling session – the sun was low over the Harbour and from where I was sitting it was impossible to look directly at whoever was at the lectern. Speaking less literally, it was okay. Each of the four poets read from their own work – some startling eroticism from Tricia Dearborn (I mean that in a good way), two poems from Rhyll McMaster that had me reaching for my pen to write down brilliant lines I knew I’d forget, in a scribble I now can’t read – her new book, Late Night Shopping, is now on my To Buy list. Geoffrey Lehmann read ‘Parenthood’, which begins ‘I have held what I hoped would become the best minds of a generation /  Over the gutter outside an Italian coffee shop watching the small / Warm urine splatter on the asphalt’, and lives up to the promise of it opening. Almost as if in direct reference to Ali Alizadeh’s scathing Overland review of the Lehmann–Gray anthology, Robert Gray read a number of John Shaw Neilson’s limericks.
In the short Q&A, someone did tactfully name the elephant in the room. A bookseller from Perth, she said that the anthology Australian Poetry Since 1788 was selling brilliantly. But, she said, she didn’t understand how a fine poet such as Fay Zwicky hadn’t made the cut. Ali Alizadeh, John Tranter, Peter Minter and other fierce critics of the anthology might have asked the same question but added a hundred names and whole classes of poetry, and gone on to challenge the inclusion of limericks. Here it was a genuine question rather than an attack. It seems to me that what was missing in the selection process was the intervention of someone who knew the field  and could veto the editors’ eccentricities. I can see why it would be hard to resist modifying the general perception of John Shaw Neilson by including a swag of limericks, or to include 14 poems by ‘Bellerive’, whose poems never even made it to the literary pages of the Bulletin of his time. But that’s when an authority figure needs to step in and rap someone over the knuckles.

Oh my paws and whiskers, across the road again to see Hilary Mantel on a huge screen in the Sydney Theatre talking about Bring Up the Bodies. What can I say? She was magnificent, and I’ve now got the book on my iPad. A friend of mine couldn’t read Wolf Hall, because he couldn’t tell who was being talked about a lot of the time – the book would say ‘he’ and expect you to know it was Thomas Cromwell. Evidently a lot of people had the same difficulty, because this new book says ‘he (Cromwell)’. As Michael Cathcart, interviewing Ms Mantell from our stage, said, you can almost hear the author saying, ‘Is that clear enough for you?’

[Added on Wednesday: The Literary Dilettante has an excellent account of this conversation here.]

Gluttons for punishment, we rushed from the theatre and drove to Marrickville for an evening of youthful cabaret/burlesque, which might have been on a different planet, but that’s another story altogether.

On Sunday, I only managed one event, The Oskar Schindler of Asia? in which Robin de Crespigny (pronounced Crepny) and former people-smuggler Ali al Jenabi conversed with ABC’s Heather Ewart (who is much smaller in person than she seems on the TV screen). This was 2012’s equivalent of last year’s conversation with David Hicks. Like Hicks, Ali al Jenabi is being treated unjustly by the Australian government. Although the title of the session is a quote from the judge who tried him for the crime of people smuggling, the government is so committed to the demonising term ‘people smuggler’ or at least so terrified of being attacked by the snarling Tony Abbott  if they are seen to be soft on such people, that al Jenabi, who seems to be a perfectly decent man who has endured terrible things, remains on a bridging visa pending deportation, even while all his family are now Australian residents.

It was a great Festival. Now I have to get back to work.

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Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light

Posted on 2 March 2012 | 1 comment

Frank Moorhouse, Cold Light (Vintage 2011)

This book came highly recommended by what seemed like the whole world, and I can see what people admire, even enjoy about it.

It’s a rare thing, a novel whose main character lives consciously and deliberately as part of the great historical narrative of her time. Edith Campbell Berry engages with ideas, faces political realities, and tries to wield influence to make things better. In the first chapters she has returned to Australia in the early 1950s. She has a hand in the design of Canberra – in fact, her intervention seems to be crucial to the decision to go ahead with Walter and Marion Griffin’s plan for a lake. Through her brother and his partner she is a close-up witness to the Communist Party’s response to Bob Menzies’ failed attempt to ban it, and then to Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the invasion of Hungary. She dines at Menzies’ table, and chats with Whitlam soon after his election in 1972. She works with the International Atomic Energy Agency and is again close to the action when secrets about the English atomic tests in Western Australia leak out. At her death she is a special envoy in the Middle East for the Whitlam government.

But Edith is no cardboard cutout. Through all these years, she has to contend with assumptions that women’s place is not among those wielding power. Failing to gain official positions, she bluffs her way past public service obstacles and procedures, works her connections, takes advantage of gossip that she is some kind of spy. Her sexual experiences, and sexual might-have-beens, are unconventional and complex. Possibly the most attractive thing about the writing is the sense that Frank Moorhouse is discovering things about her as the novel progresses. Ambrose, Edith’s husband at the start of the book and the love of her life, is a transvestite, and I couldn’t resist the notion that this is a metaphor for the way the author slips into Edith’s skin and clothes – including on occasion her underclothes. Be that as it may, there’s a strong sense of Edith as someone Frank admires and loves, someone who exists independently of him. I didn’t need to be told that there was a real woman somewhere in the background (as Frank told Stephen McCarty at Ubud and on Slow TV a while back – it’s towards the end of the clip). It does feel at the end of the book that one has read the story of a life lived for its own sake and not to enact a writer’s world view. That’s really something.

But, you know, I can’t say I enjoyed the book. It’s the third volume of a trilogy and maybe I should have read the other two books first. As it was, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of recapping, an awful lot of ‘As you know, Bob’. I expect that if I’d read the other books, these would have been less irritating, and I might have had greater tolerance for Edith’s frequent ruminations because of a clearer sense of them perhaps as charting her mental journey. She ruminates on on her ideal capital city, on the nature of love, on the lessons to be learned from the League of Nations. I’ve got nothing against ruminations, but I couldn’t find anything wise, witty or provocative in Edith’s – I don’t think I’ve ever been so bored in a book that I still wanted to keep reading.

And then there was the sense that Moorhouse had done a huge amount of research and couldn’t bear to let some of it go even though it didn’t quite serve the story. I’ve got nothing against info dumps: my love of Neal Stephenson is partly due to the way he drops in great wads of information, and if Barbara Hambly’s Free Man of Color groans under the weight of her research into the New Orleans society of its time, it is the groaning of a table laden for a feast. But for whatever reason – perhaps because Moorhouse often presents his information as a character’s reveries or as even less plausible conversations – I wondered if the Readers Digest Condensed Version might be a better book. There’s an extremely poignant moment a bit past the novel’s midpoint, where Edith and Ambrose have parted, perhaps forever. And just as she – and the reader – have a moment to absorb the full import of the event, along comes this conversation with her driver:

‘How long will it take the Major to reach London?’ he asked, making conversation.
‘About fifty hours, plus the time from Canberra to Sydney.’
‘Many stops?’
‘Darwin – Singapore – Calcutta– Karachi – Cairo – Rome. I’d rather not talk, Theo.’
‘Of course, ma’am.’

Your mileage may differ, and I hope it does, but for me that was a case Frank the Irritating Researcher interrupting Frank the Passionate Story-teller. When Edith returned to her reverie, the moment for this reader had been lost.

I didn’t hate the book. I did learn from it. I do admire it. I’m glad I read it. It was a slog.

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