Even as We Speak (57 page)

Despite what you may have heard, Australia’s spirit of all-embracing Olympic tolerance does not exclude the world’s only remaining superpower. But the Yanks are not always able to
unpack the semantic content of a friendly heckle. It is a fallacy that Americans are without irony; but they do tend to take words at their face value; and it is misleading enough to do that with
British English, while to do it with Australian English makes misapprehension a certainty.

Particularly when it comes to humour, Australian English is a richly ambiguous poetic phenomenon which must be interpreted for tone. When T. S. Eliot said ‘We had the experience but missed
the meaning’ he could have been speaking for American basketballers who switched Channel 7 on late at night and found themselves watching
The Dream
, the hit media experience of the
Sydney Olympics. Hosted by two wits calling themselves H.G. and Roy,
The Dream
celebrated the Olympic ideal by inserting a pointed stick up its crazy date.

The Crazy Date was H.G. and Roy’s name for a certain legs-apart manoeuvre performed by gymnasts in the floor exercises and on the pommel-horse. The term depended for its evocative power on
your being able to deduce, if you hailed from elsewhere, that a specific item of human anatomy was being referred to. You had to remember that the Australian scatological vocabulary is precisely
visual.

H.G. and Roy did a short stretch on British television at one stage, but they are too fond of lingering improvisation to get going in a tight slot. (They would pounce on that statement: they are
very rude.) The two-hour expanse of
The Dream
was ideal for them. They had space to do their thing, and so did their unofficial Olympic mascot, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. Fatso did his
thing in the form of Olympic gold medals expelled majestically from his fundament as he wandered in graphic form across the bottom of the screen. Billie-Jean King, incidentally, was one American
who got the point of
The Dream
exactly. She came on the show to read the news, and looked more than ever the way she always did at Wimbledon – like the brightest girl at the
ball.

Though the mass media had not been as triumphantly awful as the occasion might have invited, the truly heartening coverage was in the Australian ethnic press. If you were looking for the Mature
Nation, there it was. Admittedly the satellite digest edition of
Bild
had two screaming pages about how Germany’s long-jump champion Heike Dreschler had seen off Marion Jones. The
main piece was headlined
Der Sprung in die Unsterblichkeit
: the jump to immortality. It featured a Junoesque picture of Heike in mid-
Sprung
, looking like a wet dream by Arno
Brecker. There was no mention that Heike began her career in the old East Germany, the needle park of the Warsaw Pact. All this was pretty chauvinistic, not to say
völkisch
, but if
you looked at Australia’s home-grown German weekly
Die Woche in Australien
you got a different slant. They were telling two stories at once: one about the Fatherland, and one about
Australia. Germany’s obscure slalom canoeist Thomas Schmidt was congratulated for having propelled himself into the top rank (
Unbekannter Schmidt paddelt sich in die Elite
), but the
main story was a hymn to Australia’s heroes: Cathy, Thorpie
und so weiter
.

It was the same with all the other examples of the ethnic press I could lay my hands on.
El Espanol
, which caters for the Hispano-American community, lauded Milton Wynants of Uruguay
for his silver in the cycling and was moved by the humility of
este excelente pedalista
. And
Edinenie
(‘Unification’) praised Svetlana Khorkina for not letting her
disaster in the vault stop her going on to win an individual gold medal. ‘Not what the Russian Princess of Gymnastics had dreamed of, but all the same . . .’ The word for
‘dream’ is particularly beautiful in Russian and so, of course, is Svetlana. There was a picture of her with her tongue sticking out, but she was doing it beautifully. The same paper, a
few days before, had gone appropriately batso for Tatiana Grigorieva, now an Australian; but what impressed me was the connection with the homeland. This was the eternal Russia, the one that had
been remorselessly assaulted for seventy long years by its own government: and now it was here.

They were all here, and in that lay the jest. As the other big Spanish-language paper
Extra Informativo
said in its front-page story headed (you guessed it) ‘THE RIGHT TO
DREAM’, Australia is a country of the evolved world,
el mundo evolucionado
. From the political viewpoint, all that stuff about Australia’s delayed ascendancy to the status of a
mature nation is an insult to millions of innocent dead. One of the oldest, most stable and productive democracies in existence, Australia was a mature nation when Russia, Italy, Germany, China and
Japan were in the grip of madness. What happened to the Aboriginals was no bush picnic, but their sufferings are further trivialized when Australia is portrayed as a racist country, as too many of
Australia’s subsidized intellectuals are fond of doing. The question of Australia’s institutional racism was settled at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. There was no Olympic Village to
speak of and the citizens were invited to accept the visiting athletes into their houses. A full two-thirds of those who offered their hospitality asked for coloured guests, and the more coloured
the better. After that, the White Australia policy had no chance of survival: and anyway, it had always been based on the fear that non-Caucasian immigrants, far from being inferior, might work too
hard and do too well.

When the marathon finally got going on the last day, there they were again, working too hard and doing too well. In a light wind that made the harbour glitter like a tray of crushed ice, three
men as black as Egypt’s night were cheered to the echo through streets whose every shop window held more wealth than the annual crop yield of the countries they came from. There was even a
cheer for John Brown, the lone Brit who came fourth, although the television producer managed not to show him crossing the finishing line. Luckily the handling of the Olympics had outstripped the
coverage, just as it had outstripped all expectation.

My viewing point for the closing ceremony was down at Circular Quay. On the second floor of the Paragon hotel I found my chosen window seat already occupied by my young friends from the torch
relay, Polly, Claire and Nugget the pug-faced wag. Polly and Claire were dressed to kill. As I complimented them on their shoes, Nugget poured a litre of lager on mine, probably by accident.
Communication was by sign language. There were millions of people waiting for the showdown and quite a few of them were in the room with us.

I could see the images on the giant screen but couldn’t hear much, which was probably a mercy. In the winged words of Juan Antonio Samaranch, what I can say? It off got to a start bad,
with a vestal virgin routine scored by Vangelis that boded ill for Athens. The virgins wore Fortuny-style pleated gowns that stirred listlessly in the breeze, almost as if something were about to
happen. Then one of the virgins slowly lifted a wreath. Nugget said they were the only virgins in Australia.

When the Aussies came on, things picked up, although the local pop music is more derivative than it thinks, especially when it has a statement to make. Sub-Springsteens and semi-Stones assured
the Aboriginals that salvation was at hand. No doubt Cathy Freeman was relieved to hear this. Kylie Minogue, arriving on the wings of a thong, turned the night around, although her Abba song
‘Dancing Queen’ was a sop to the gays that they scarcely needed, because the Mardi Gras was in control out there like martial law. The
Strictly Ballroom
routines made you want
to join in and thousands of the athletes did. Some of the floats were quite good, but not the ones bearing Paul Hogan and Elle McPherson. Hogan rode on an Akubra hat and Elle on a giant camera.
Neither star had been given anything to do. At least Greg Norman hit a golf ball. In keeping with his nickname, Greg emerged from a great white shark. The relatives of two people who had been eaten
by great white sharks off the coast of South Australia during the previous week were probably not watching.

I thought the Aboriginal ensemble Yothu Yindi was the best thing, but really it was no occasion for critical analysis. The maturity that Australia is right to be nervous about is cultural
maturity, which can’t be had by wishing, but only through achievement – through creativity in all walks of life, from high art down to the small change of civil discourse. In that
respect, the inspired contribution of the 45,000 white-hatted volunteer workers, many of them older than I am, was perhaps the most original feature of the whole jamboree. They were all charmingly
helpful and some of them were outright funny. The visitors loved them. Small groups of Chinese would follow them around, confident that they were going somewhere interesting.

The Sydney Olympics, by synthesizing and highlighting what we already possessed, put us on our own map. We were already on everyone else’s, as a destination, a refuge, an
ideal and (whisper it) a dream. The opening ceremony brought Australia together. The closing ceremony might have tried to show a united world, but it would have mocked the global tragedies that
have given Australia its unique life and have made it the good place where all the earth’s agonies come to be assuaged, the last garden. The full story is too terrible to be told in a night.
Better to let your hair down, and to camp it up.

The Olympics began with Cleopatra’s arrival in Rome, and they ended with Elizabeth Taylor’s departure for the airport. Next day I did the same. I have done so many times, but never
with such regret.

CLIVE JAMES is the author of more than twenty books. As well as verse and novels, he has published collections of essays, literary criticism, television criticism and travel
writing, plus three volumes of autobiography,
Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England
and
May Week Was in June.
His most recent novel was
The Silver Castle.
As a
television performer he has appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the
Postcard
series of travel documentaries. He helped to found the
independent television company Watchmaker, and is currently chairman of the Internet enterprise Welcome Stranger. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded
the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Unreliable Memoirs

Falling Towards England

May Week Was in June

Always Unreliable

FICTION

Brilliant Creatures

The Remake

Brrm! Brrm!

The Silver Castle

VERSE

Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World

Poem of the Year

Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985

The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003

CRITICISM

The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)

Visions Before Midnight

At the Pillars of Hercules

The Crystal Bucket

First Reactions

From the Land of Shadows

Glued to the Box

Snakecharmers in Texas

The Dreaming Swimmer

On Television

Reliable Essays

TRAVEL

Flying Visits

First published 2001 by Picador

This edition published 2004 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-0-330-52667-8 EPUB

Copyright © Clive James 2001

The right of Clive James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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