The Inspector-General of Misconception (14 page)

The Office of the Inspector-General has been sent reeling with shock following recent reports of an intellectual virus hitherto thought to have been eradicated in all but the most remote parts of Australia.

Although it was after midnight when the first report came in, we immediately assembled an emergency task force in the operations room.

We used our PowerPoint program to good effect and could see that our officers were impressed by the composure and cogency of our presentation although were visibly shaken when we revealed the problem.

We told our assembled officers that what we were witnessing was the reappearance of the dreaded Cultural Cringe, a virus thought to have been eradicated from the anatomy of the nation.

But worse, gruesome mutations of the original virus were festering.

The term is attributed to critic A.A. Phillips who said in 1950 that, ‘Above our writers – and other artists – looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe.'

The first consideration facing our Section for Loose Ends was whether cultural cringing was really a matter for Our Office, being officially concerned, as we are, only with cockeyed and odious notions in public discourse.

For instance, could it be simply an act of desecration in the Cemetery of Dead Ideas?

We ruled that it did concern us under the statute concerning Notions To Which There May Be No Happy Answer.

Around this time, inquiries reached us from some writers of the younger generation living abroad asking whether the virus still existed and what should they do with their lives if they think they have it.

That the calls came from some so young and full of promise and brilliance broke our heart.

As they expressed it, there is still an uneasiness which lies within those Australians who have global aspirations.

Our laboratory identified it as Virus Variant A: Agitated Expatriate.

Or, This Little Piggy Went To Market.

The symptoms are as follows: The person who is contemplating living and working overseas (especially in the arts) experiences an immobilising dizziness accompanied
by the recurring incertitude, What-dreadful-things-will-happen-to-me-if-I-don't come-back-to-Australia? Will my creative well dry up if I stay away? Or will it, conversely, dry up if I don't stay away? Or will it be contaminated?

This hangs over the Australian film directors, for example, who go to Hollywood.

This is not the pure Cultural Cringe but a new variant of it.

Phillips himself pronounced the term Cultural Cringe dead in 1983. ‘It is time,' he said, ‘to accord the phrase decent burial before the smell of the corpse gets too high …'

This new variant does not say we are not good enough. It says Australia may not be right for me (or not good enough for me) and if I say this, or even think it, I will be severely punished.

Phillips should be alive today to smell the corpse now as we stand in the graveyard of ideas, in the light rain, while gumbooted cemetery workers dig in the clay to exhume the stinking, twitching body, prematurely buried, still alive and thumping in its coffin, fuelled by rancid nutrients of an unidentifiably foul kind.

One young operative had to go off and be sick behind a squad car. Even old hands were seen to grow pale, trying to master their nausea by smoking cigars with a studied
savoir-faire
.

We instructed all staff to wear rubber gloves and protective clothing while handling the case. We see on the noticeboard that some wag has suggested that given
the sensitive nature of the matter and the egos involved, that we also wear ‘kid gloves' (apologies, goats).

Following our laboratory autopsy, we tender into evidence the first specimen.

The specimen was from the
Sydney Morning Herald
where a columnist commented on the absence of David Malouf from a literary award presentation.

She says, ‘… the author is currently sojourning at his Tuscan home'.

The use of the words ‘currently' and ‘sojourning' are wink words used to suggest a leisurely occupation in foreign parts free of any considerations about what might be happening back here in Australia.

The use of the words ‘Tuscan home' also implicates David. The word ‘Tuscan' is redolent with exotic superiority. And isn't ‘Australia' the only ‘home' an Australian can have?

The next specimen was from the
Australian
in a review of the book of
Contemporary South Pacific Stories
edited by C.K. Stead.

One Pacific writer, Ihimaera, had evidently withdrawn from the book complaining about the integrity or whatever of the selection for the book.

In turn, Stead, the editor of the book, in his introduction attacked Ihimaera for creating the ‘spectacle of … protecting Pacific values by fax from the south of France'.

Elizabeth Webby, in reviewing this book, comments that the implication is that Ihimaera is ‘an expatriate enjoying the good life in France'.

However, Elizabeth goes on to ‘excuse' Ihimaera from
this charge with the defence that he is, in fact, in Menton, France, as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow living, that is, holed up in a little piece of New Zealand in France, so to speak.

Another specimen from the
Sun-Herald
. ‘Artist Arthur Boyd [now deceased] says while he may spend much of his time overseas, there should be no doubting where his heart lies. The Australian of the Year defended (sic) his long stays in Britain … “I do live here, I just like to go away from time to time,” he said.'

The headline of the piece says, ‘Boyd's art is in the right place.'

This and the Ihimaera and Malouf specimens were identified by our laboratory as Virus Variant B: The Unhappy Ones Who Are Stuck Here.

Or This Little Piggy Stayed Home.

The symptoms of this virus are as follows. The sufferer experiences a profound sense of unease on reading about expatriate fellow nationals – are they having a better life? Are they meeting famous and wonderful people who will advance their career and enrich their life while I am back here working away by the light of a candle in a pokey room in Grub Street?

Further, the sufferer is then gripped by an uncontrollable rage that the absent fellow national, by living in a desirable foreign environment, is committing a cultural treason; the expatriate has escaped from the limitations of Australian life; that the fellow national, that is, is not back here putting up with the hell of it all on the frontier; is not helping to build the culture.

The next specimen is an advertisement for Australia Council funding which specified that the recipient ‘must spend most of their time in Australia'.

This is Virus Variant C: You Will Remain Seated; Do Not Attempt To Leave.

The sufferer experiences these symptoms: The dread that one by one anyone who is any good is leaving the country and that those who are left will be seen as second rate, poor cousins in the cultural world. In their head the sufferers hear someone saying, Will-the-last-to-leave-please-turn-off-the-lights.

In the Australia Council and other arts funding bodies, this quickly becomes a craving for the power to stop anyone leaving. ‘If we have our way, no one will get out.'

These variants of the virus have created an atmosphere where those Australians who have chosen to live abroad and make their careers there are, upon returning to Australia on a visit, made to swear loyalty oaths before they are received, applauded or rewarded.

The most famous loyalty oath now was written by the late Peter Allen who, every time he visited, had to stand up in public and sing, ‘But no matter how far or how wide I roam, I still call Australia home.'

Expatriates such as Clive James and Robert Hughes who can't sing, are made to say, ‘Australia has changed
so much
since the fifties – it is not the same place which I fled back then. Circus Oz is fantastic and the restaurants are really world class.'

Findings

As with the parent virus, all the mutations are spawned by the simple fact of being born in Australia, a country which, on the maps, is Down Under.

In the cases of Boyd, Ihimaera and Malouf: In this we see, obliquely, some faint hope of a cure.

More often these days, in interviews and at dinner parties, our operatives report that people remark that ideally they would like to be able to say, ‘I share my time between my apartment in Paris and a humpy in the Flinders Ranges.'

That seems increasingly to be an acceptable sort of thing to say. Hence, Boyd and his wife, in the article quoted above, were described as dividing their time ‘between Suffolk and Bundanon, their south coast property'.

Warning:
It is still not acceptable to say that as soon as I can arrange it I am getting the hell out of here for good.

Uncharacteristically for Our Office, we have ruled that the whole matter of the problem of this National Wound Which Will Not Heal is too tricky to adjudicate.

In the absence of a clear adjudication, we can only issue a public warning as follows. While the parent virus may not be endemic, an assortment of strains are (many more than identified in this report!), and that even
being frequently conscious
of the existence of these matters is a type of infection.

The aim may be to turn the wound to a thing of beauty.

But for as long as it is asked, it remains a serious question.

We can only advise that as a general rule, all those in the arts practise Unsafe Art until further notice.

To expatriates we advise, in the words of that famous expatriate, James Joyce – that they be ‘cunning exiles'. You may conceivably produce a
Ulysses
.

And remember that all successful expatriates are, in the end, possessively reclaimed by their mother country.

We once had a large wall chart in the ‘War Room' of our writing office on which we identified the various power groups in the literary arts.

It was very much the old Left/Right analysis. Nonsocialist/democratic-socialist/communist/Trotskyist/anarchist.

The Inspector-General's Office has the chart now.

Who fights for control of the literary arts in contemporary Australia?

The literary culture is a network of decision-making processes which can be seen as cultural ganglia or switch points.

The first ganglia of the literary process is the power to identify, to publicly encourage, and so authorise new talent.

It is the power to control the gateways to book publication.

The power groups now include the admission
committees to tertiary writing courses and the committees which decide new writer grants.

It includes the control of writers' centres and festivals which can in turn decide who appears on panels at writers' festivals and other events.

It includes the editorship of the ‘official' little magazines; that is those funded by the state or by universities –
Meanjin
,
Southerly
,
Overland
,
Westerly
, and so on – which have as their mission the introduction of new talent to the readership.

These nerve centres are also places of ideological conflict because they provide regular forums for this conflict – prize-awarding panels, management committees, selection committees, policy formulation groups, curricula committees, staff meetings, and so on.

It is at these points where the Australian cultural wars are seething and fuming even if the battlelines are not yet fully public.

In our analysis, we will be drawing on arts policy generally as well as that which is specifically applied to writing.

The contest for official culture

The most obvious places for literary political conflict is in the state ministries of arts and the Australia Council where funding and major prize-judging panels are controlled both by bureaucrats and by advisory boards.

There are more arts ‘prizes' than those which are advertised as prizes.

The officially encouraged shaping or redirection of
culture is carried on through official prizes such as prizes for ‘best multicultural book' or the best work showing concern for reconciliation, or awards for works which celebrate the Year of the Family and so on.

There are other ‘prizes' which are part of official social engineering and foreign policy.

The former government had arts and cultural policies aimed at ‘orienting' us towards Asia.

This redirection of the arts policy is done by government funding for travel and study, to the use of educational funding and incentives to establish courses which lead students in a certain direction, the use of university positions and professorship and courses to bring about a political outcome not simply related to fundamental educational or arts goals.

We are not saying that this is a vicious state control of the arts nor is it totalitarian. It is more a political tilting of education and the arts funding.

But it endorses a mindset which happily accepts the infringement of the autonomy of the individual writer. The only acceptable arts funding policy is for the funding body to get to the writer the resources that the writer believes he or she needs to carry through his or her artistic project and/or to carry through a productive life in the arts. That is, it can be a funding commitment to a project or simply to a writer.

Censorship, the most obvious form of state control of the arts, is now creeping back after being defeated in the seventies and is now drawing its rationale from contemporary hysterias and puritanism.

What are the positions of those fighting for control of the arts?

The Asianists

We came across it in an SBS program where a group of arts administrators were talking about the future of the performing arts. Another example was encountered in Lismore when writing centre administrator Peter Barclay told a dinner for Robert Drewe that the orientation towards Asia must be expected in Australian writing because we would one day be ‘Asian' and the bulk of our population would be ‘Asian' (of course, Asian is a mixture of very different cultures). It was spoken as a foregone conclusion of history and although without necessarily any detectable enthusiasm for life under such an imagined state, it was said with some of that peculiar bitter? angry? relish or fervour for the devastation or collapse or ruin of our present political and cultural system.

As we listened to these two examples, we decided that there were Asianists in our political spectrum.

We define the Asianist as a person who
desires
that Australia, through the passing of time and immigration, should (as a politically or morally desirable thing) become ethnically ‘Asian' (whatever that may mean) with an inevitable obliteration of the European or contemporary ethnic and cultural mix.

The Asianist seeks to accelerate this, and welcomes this, and promotes this through their own efforts, and by lobbying for government policies which accelerate and facilitate this.

We suspect that it is a form of anti-Westernism and a belief in the superiority of vaguely understood, even spurious, ‘Asian values'.

It may contain within it a recognition (or a hope or a belief) that eventually over the centuries all the races of the world will become coffee-coloured through intermarrying and that thus racial prejudice will cease to exist.

It may also be driven by guilt from the old White Australia days.

It is a position in direct conflict with what Les Murray, known jokingly as poet laureate of the National Party, calls the Settler Position.

The Akubra or Settler Position

There is a feeling among some of the literary community, says Les Murray, and around
Quadrant
, that a cultural stream of attitude, sentiment and memory is being bullied out of existence.

This Anglo-Celtic or Settler Tradition argues that not only can we not escape a set of tight historical facts, or readings of these facts, we should endorse and celebrate these. Those facts are that post-1788, Australia was initially settled by the British and this fundamental influence will continue, will dominate the arts, and will alter all who come to settle here.

It can be widened slightly to the ‘European Tradition'.

They see the Settler Tradition as providing the dominant political and cultural guiding ethos – the Australian ethos.

This is not only a position of the political conservatives. The Old Left have a stake in this heritage also. They have a concern for preserving what they see as the trade union mateship ethos and the cooperative traditions of labour (mateship and the fair-go were always a fallacy; look at those excluded from its embrace – women, gays, foreigners, indigenous people and often intellectuals and artists).

As an extension of this, the conservative usually co-opts the ‘literary tradition' in a rather narrow way.

It comes from a misguided application of high art snobbery which masquerades as cultural guardianship. It uses nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century university-acceptable English writing as models of imaginative excellence and rewards and praises mimicry of these models. This snobbery fails to be open to the appearance of literary work when it comes from unexpected genres, employs experimental strategies, or is the work of socially unsavoury authors.

It tends to favour those works which mimic the literary tradition rather than those which are practising the innovative demands of the Western literary tradition.

Patchwork Quilt Multiculturalism

Some efforts have been made to ‘equalise down' the Anglo-Celtic Tradition to be one among many multicultural parts of the Australian mosaic.

The Settler heritage is very uneasy about fitting into multiculturalism as being one among many.

However, the multiculturalists basically argue that
instead of being a side-prize in literary awards, they should be part of the criteria for all prizes.

Red Flag Left

We had not expected to find evidence of a continued existence of the Old Communist Left position on the arts; that is, only art which supports (or preferably arises from) the ‘working class' or proletariat is acceptable.

In the fifties, and into the sixties, the Communist Party was the major patron of the arts in Australia. It had funds for overseas travel to communist countries; it controlled significant literary prizes such as the Mary Gilmore Prize; it had its own literary magazines; its writers' centre (the Realist Writers' Groups); its own annual anthology; and a book publishing company, The Australasian Book Society.

We had believed that this was an exhausted position. Not so. Although the evidence comes from Humphrey McQueen's book about the painter, Tom Roberts, it is based on a position applicable to the literary arts as well.

Talking of his book, McQueen said, ‘Roberts' place in Australian history and culture is up there with … Lawson and Paterson … who perpetuate our image of what constitutes the genuine Australian Legend.'

Please note the idea of a ‘genuine Australian Legend'.

‘People see Roberts as a Lawson-type struggle, praising the dignity of rural labour and working classes as one of them, but he wasn't at all.'

Gee whiz, Humphrey.

‘Roberts was a friend of the squattocracy, vain about his physical fitness and appearance, wore fine suits, a red satin-lined opera cape …'

But worse.

‘He spoke fluent French, sailed saloon class to and from England … was always the businessman artist, heavily into self-promotion, hobnobbing with figures who mattered in Australian society from landed gentry and businessmen and their wives, politicians, the law, people in music, theatre – all the arts.'

Grim stuff.

It could be that Humphrey is the only living person who holds such a romantic view of the importance of the relationship between the artist and the proletariat.

Or for that matter, such a romantic view of the artist that ‘self-promotion' and business-like care for one's talent is seen as discrediting.

The Grim Separatists

In the Australian arts, there has emerged a broader form of multiculturalism from that which is expressed officially about ethnicity. It is a Separatist Position.

The Separatist will oppose the appropriation of his or her culture by an outsider; feels that it is a no-go area for those who are not inheritors of his or her tradition or epistemology.

So, some writers say that only women should write about women, only gays about gays, only those of the working class about the working class.

It goes further than who should write about what. It
goes to the disqualification of who should read or, in the case of visual arts, see the work.

A report in the
Sydney Morning Herald
tells of an exhibition of lesbian art in Sydney where some lesbians declined to be involved because they didn't want to exhibit to ‘mixed' audiences.

This is, of course, a sexist generalisation by those lesbians about males or heterosexuals and their ‘ways of seeing'.

An example was an academic who accused white Australians of ‘stealing' Aboriginal knowledge and stories.

Separatists tend to argue that all art is trapped in its ideology and that there are only good and bad ideologies and that good art is that which expresses and serves good ideologies.

They would dispute that writing can fulfil the literary mission as described, say, by Lionel Trilling, ‘to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture … to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment'.

Queer Anti-Separatists

Some are fighting back against this.

Gregg Araki, who made the film
The Doom Generation: A Heterosexual Film
says that he wants to escape such categorisation. ‘What I wanted to do is to subvert the whole categorisation of movies as gay films or straight films.'

This is the position of ‘Queer culture' which wants to include bisexuals, transsexuals, gays, lesbians and ‘other
than straights' into a new alliance, and the abandonment of ‘labels'.

As with movements such as the Rainbow Coalition, Queerdom is too inclusive, too embracing, to be an entity with a substantial boundary.

The Above-it-All Cosmopolitan Tradition

Unlike the Separatists, the Cosmopolitan Tradition is untrammelled by ideas of respectfulness of other cultures or boundaries.

It believes in the ultimate authority of the imagination which can travel across gender, travel across cultures, travel across centuries, travel across age.

This upsets the Separatist Position because the Cosmopolitan imagination does not recognise no-go areas; not that is, on the basis of ideology, only on the basis of the artist recognising his or her own self-limitations.

Cosmopolitanism is perhaps not the best term and we wish to use it neutrally. It comes out of arguments last century in other places such as Germany and Russia where the artists who believed in opening themselves to all influences were called the Cosmopolitans and were opposed by those calling themselves Nationalists who saw the true nurturing of art in exclusively engaging with the country of birth, finding one's own standards and forms of artistic expression.

It can be a desire for an internationalist, single world culture or art, but ultimately it produces an art which embroiders itself as the individual artist sees fit.

Its standards may be international, but it is not
Internationalist in that it desires uniformity. So the Russian expressionists were different from the Spanish and French and other expressionists, yet all were being inspired by influences coming from France at the time.

It sometimes expresses itself as love affairs with New York or Paris or London or Prague, with other cultural traditions which are seen as super-enriched.