Meanjin Vol 72, No 2

By Meanjin Quarterly

In June, Meanjin brings you tales of architecture and superstition from Meg Mundell, while Mark McKenna looks at the strange role of the biographer and Ronnie Scott holds his iPhone high and snaps a selfie. Anna Heyward discovers the life and letters of the inimitable Mary Gilmore and Damon Young wonders what we can learn from comic book heroes. There is fiction from Romy Ash, John Kinsella and Mieke Chew, as well as new memoir, poetry and a very special gallery proposing designs for a new Australian flag.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522862782

Book preview

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Contents

No. 2, 2013

Editorial by Zora Sanders

Perspectives

Dreaming State by Eleanor Hogan

The Year of the Snake: Perspective on Hanoi by Chris Flynn

A McSweenification by Rosanna Stevens

Papers

The Sexual Politics of Power by Anne Summers

Essays

The Mirror that Creates: Australia Imagined in Western Eyes by Nicolas Rothwell

Spirit Levels: The Hidden Realm of Spatial Magic by Meg Mundell

Illustrating Ethical Dilemmas by Damon Young

‘It was one of the vivid moments of existence’: The Letters of Mary Gilmore by Anna Heyward

Reading Contemporary Verse: The Swarm and its (Il)literacies by Martin Langford

Face Value by Ronnie Scott

After Manning Clark: A Biographer’s Postscript by Mark McKenna

The Steeplechasing Mind: Butch Londregan and the Smithwick Kid by Andrew Lemon

Listening to Proteus by Daniel Golding

The Pull of Bullfighting by Timothy Boyle

Fiction

Remembering Ludwig by Mieke Chew

Hundred Year Flood by Romy Ash

Bonfire on the Beach by John Kinsella

Sunday Gardening: The Adventures of John Chinaman on the New Gold Mountain by Grace Yee

Gallery

A Design for the Australian Flag by Harry Williamson

Memoir

The Street by Rachel Buchanan

The River by Kim Mahood

Touching by Hila Shachar

Poetry

From An Exquisite Calendar for the Duke of Madness by Peter Boyle

Ocean by David Wood

The Street Vendor’s Lament by Andy Kissane

To Drag the Saints back from Heaven by Anne Elvey

Chimney by Maria Takolander

Death-Houses by Eileen Chong

Nyctalopia by Mark O’Flynn

Poem of a New Driver by Belinda Rule

Cooee by Andrew Phillips

The God-filled sky as seen by Germaine Greer whilst chopping wood by Susan Bradley Smith

The Darker Continent by Tegan Jane Schetrumpf

Pursuit by Rod Usher

Contributors

Information about subscriptions

Editorial

Zora Sanders

While promoting the Canberra centenary issue, I spent a few days in our capital city, wandering around the cool autumnal streets and being thoroughly charmed by the place. On a particularly windy afternoon I went to the top of Mount Ainslie with Stuart MacKenzie, a town planner with the ACT Government’s Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate, to record a segment on the Griffin plan for our forthcoming Meanjin podcast. Stuart is extremely knowledgeable about Walter and Marion Griffin and their plan for a new ‘ideal’ city, and while we stood in icy gale force winds, surveying the elegant sprawl of Canberra’s inner suburbs, he mentioned to me how much the couple enjoyed and appreciated the Australian bush.

They didn’t share the disdain for Australia’s natural environment that we associate with our colonial forebears. Rather, they had a deep respect for the Australian landscape, something that is especially evident in Marion Griffin’s beautiful watercolour panorama of the imagined view from the summit of Mount Ainslie, a view of a city that would never quite materialise. The work is stunning, all dusky blues and greys, the exact shades that in reality sweep across the city at dusk, and the warped, wind-hunched trees that are so elegantly silhouetted by Griffin’s skilful hand. Even though she had never set foot in Australia when she painted this work, she understood somehow, instinctively, the beauty that Australians often overlooked.

In this issue Nicholas Rothwell picks up this thread. The force of international influence is something we as Australians are constantly aware of. Our Palladian buildings and avenues of plane trees, our American television and Italian food, all seem to hint that we are a semi-formed country, a semi-formed people. But rarely do we consider that these currents of influence flow both ways. Rothwell argues that, just as successive waves of strangers have been making and remaking Australia in the image of somewhere else, so too have these waves carried the idea of Australia around the world, exerting their own subtle influence. There are plenty of examples and Rothwell’s argument is very convincing. You only have to flick through these pages to see the currents of ideas in motion: steeplechasing in Virginia sits side by side with the eternally shifting soundscapes of Proteus. The bullfighters of Madrid warily circle a dream-conjured castle made of swans. A Chinese family in New Zealand peers warily over the fence at the artists and designers creating a new flag for our country.

The joy of a publication like Meanjin is this fluidity. How does a reader separate one idea from the next, one story from another? Why would you want to? When an issue comes together, invariably unexpected links emerge, similarities become plain, and arguments suddenly erupt.

Perspectives

Dreaming State

Eleanor Hogan

‘… it seems that this country will prove most hostile to anything in the nature of planned development. It has been shown that deserts prefer to resist history and develop along their own lines. As I have remarked, we do not know. There may, in fact, be a veritable paradise adorning the interior. Nobody can say. But I am inclined to believe, Mr Voss, that you will discover a few blackfellers, and a few flies, and something resembling the bottom of the sea.’

—Patrick White, Voss

This warning to Patrick White’s prospective explorer Voss reflects many people’s sentiments, past and present, about what might exist at the heart of the Australian continent. Central Australia remains a sleeper in the national imaginary, a dreaming state that resists both history and definition. It sprawls across an area sometimes known as the cross-border or tri-state region: bureaucratic monikers that attempt to encompass the lands and settlements of sixteen Aboriginal language groups over which the furthermost boundary claims of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia are mapped. Alice Springs, the unofficial capital of this forgotten state, a place with a population that hovers around 27,000, has perhaps a greater grasp on the nation’s psyche—not to mention that of international tourists—than any other Australian city except Sydney.

Nothing prepares you for the first sight of Central Australia from a plane: as you fly over low-hanging fists of clouds, the reptilian spine of the MacDonnell Ranges thrusts out of burnt, calloused earth, then curves protectively around the desert hub of Alice Springs. According to the Arrernte, the local traditional owners, the ranges were created by ancestral caterpillar beings—Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrengatye—who crawled out of the plains, calling and shaping the landscape into being. Mparntwe Alice Springs is the focal point of the dreaming tracks, the nation’s mythological centre. Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called it ‘Little Rome’: ‘Country is nothing else but culture and all over Australia this culture is alive. We still have the same culture, still sing the song … It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.’¹

Yet Central Australia is also the zero-point of national identity, a place whose remoteness and difficulty of access have suggested a canvas for the projection of various hopes, fears and desires. Alice Springs has retained a purchase as the premier outback town, the gateway for explorers, tourists, bureaucrats, alternative-lifers and others to the desert. But while many see the Centre as embodying the frontier identity and lifestyle, they are often urban folk who rarely venture there, except for a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. A sentiment prevails that nothing’s there once you fly beyond the ‘real world’ of suburbia. One of the unconscious fears that gnaw at the non-indigenous psyche is how precarious our grip is on this continent. We’re a coastal rather than a desert people: we cling to its edges in capital cities that poet A.D. Hope once described as ‘five teeming sores’. Underlying this anxiety is the notion of the emptiness, the deadness of the Centre. Its hidden dangers are exemplified by the image of the starving explorer swallowed up by hostile country, and the media hysteria generated by stories such as the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain at Uluru and the abduction of British backpacker Peter Falconio.

The Centre has alternately been imbued with romantic and optimistic aspirations, such as the nineteenth-century quest to find the inland sea and fertile pastoral lands, and the drive to create a connection with an unlimited Asian market through the laying of the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in the creation of a great central state. Nevil Shute’s character Jean Paget in A Town Like Alice (1950) perceived Alice Springs to be a model of postwar suburban expansion: ‘this town had everything a reasonable girl could want … If this was the outback, she thought, there were a great many worse places.’ The Centre has also been imagined in terms of its spiritual capital, in books such as Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines journey to discover a universal key to humankind’s nomadic nature. More recently, dreams of northern Australian development have re-emerged through the Territory’s Country Liberal Party platform and the Coalition’s policy vision. Nevertheless, the backblocks of the Centre, being landlocked, with limited options for agricultural production and high transportation costs, are often overlooked in favour of seaboard city Darwin’s promise of access to Asia and the subsequent sway of ‘Top End’ interests in Territorian politics. Central Australia is said to rely on the ‘Aboriginal dollar’, with one-third of its economy estimated to relate to government expenditure on health and community service delivery in the local ‘Aboriginal industry’.

Implicit in the sporadic surfacing of the Centre in national consciousness is the duality of past longings and preoccupations, as in the sudden interest in implementation of the Northern Territory Intervention as the focus for urban people’s anxieties and aspirations about neo-liberal social policy. If the image of the remote Aboriginal community as a vice-ridden ghetto suggests another turn on the theme of rottenness at the nation’s core, the flipside is a tendency present in elements of left-wing and environmentalist thought, including elements of support for Aboriginal outstations, to romanticise the Centre as offering a return to a post-lapsarian idyll. Once again, it’s as if Central Australia is a giant Petri dish of orange dust with a few blackfellas and flies out there, available in this case for social experimentation.

Much of the Centre’s appeal relates to a fascination with origins, with the frontier on which the nation was and continues to be forged. These frontier resonances are often unsettling because they highlight our ongoing ambivalence about ourselves, our past and our national identity. Yet the potential for change has long been one of the promises held by Central Australia as an embodiment of the frontier, a place where people journey to reverse personal and economic fortunes, to rebuild identities and relationships, including between Aboriginal and settler peoples. The challenge Central Australia holds is to recognise the ongoing presence of the frontier and, with this, the possibility of transformation.

The Year of the Snake: Perspective on Hanoi

Chris Flynn

In the middle of a thousand-year-old city humming with seven million souls, I am awoken at four o’clock every morning by a crowing rooster. His strangled squawk ululates across the jumble of corrugated tin rooftops, comforting in their proximity to the narrow hotel window. Given there is no way a vehicle as large as a fire engine could penetrate the traffic in the Old Quarter, I take solace in the fact I could, in the event of a conflagration, escape across this flimsy roofing, running and leaping to safety like some pale, slightly arthritic version of Jason Bourne.

There are no other birds here, except eagles. All the wild songbirds are in ornate wooden cages, hanging from shopfronts or for sale in the Hoang Hoa Tham market. Hanoians take their feathered prisoners to the park on play dates so they can learn new songs from each other. The eagles, meanwhile, their food source exhausted, warily ride the currents high overhead, waiting for one of the legion of well-guarded chihuahuas to make a bid for freedom, and provide lunch.

It is the final days of the Year of the Dragon. Strange, repetitive carnival music plays in the streets, interspersed with stentorian public announcements. We are either being wished a Happy New Year or have four minutes to farewell our loved ones before the missiles make landfall. Instrumental versions of 1980s pop classics form an unsettling, almost creepy soundtrack as they float out of kerbside eateries. The music I am listening to, A$AP Rocky, is alien, does not belong here. ‘Extraordinary swag and a mouth full of gold, chrome to ya dome ’til ya get glockjaw.’ Will an instrumental version of that be playing in three decades time? Probably not.

Wandering street vendors, all of them women, carry enormous loads of fruit through traffic that flows around them like a flock of wheeling swifts. Hanoians and seasoned travellers alike stride confidently across multiple speeding lanes, impassively dodging certain death by inches. New arrivals to the city stand rooted to the pavement, slowly turning the map in their Lonely Planet guide through all points of the compass as they await a reassuring traffic light that will never come. As I marvel at how a dozen new wi-fi hotspots spring up every time I check my phone, a man steers his motorbike into the kerb next to me. On the pillion is a human-sized stack of books, which he offers for sale. He has Lonely Planet guides and Hunter S. Thompson, Bill Bryson and Robert M. Pirsig, even an odd-looking copy of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. They are all fakes from China, with garish scanned covers. One still has the price sticker from the original store, Eason, a Northern Irish book chain. I don’t have the heart to tell this enterprising indie pirate retailer that every Westerner on the flight in had an e-reader.

Other motorbikes are carrying tangerine and cherry blossom trees, fellow riders reaching out to brush their branches for luck. Goods are on sale for Tet, and I spot several bikes with Sony Bravia flatscreens on the pillion, and a door wedged vertically between two men, the passenger with his nose pressed into the letterbox as if he is trying to post himself.

As New Year’s Eve approaches the street stalls become even more chaotic than usual. Golden fake American hundred-dollar bills are being sold for 10,000 dong (less than fifty cents). These will be burnt by the stackload to ensure wealth in the afterlife. Women crowd around a two-metre-high stack of loose bras, which someone is selling for a buck each from their stoop. We are running on the energy of macaroons from Anh Hòa bakery and Gold Weasel coffee. The coffee is ground from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a weasel and is drunk with condensed milk. It tastes better than any coffee I’ve ever had. Kopi Luwak, the most expensive coffee in the world, is also available, though I’m informed it is probably fake too. Those beans emerge from the anus of a palm civet before being sold at $300 per kilo. It seems the rarer the animal’s arsehole, the better the joe.

Everyone warns us that Hanoi will be closed, shut down for a few days once the Year of the Snake begins. It is true, in a way. The four million motorbike horns fall silent. It is eerily quiet. The empty morning streets are covered in glitter, a constellation of colours amid the piles of ash. Perhaps the missiles fell after all. The populace is gone and we are the only survivors. The city is ever so briefly ours.

A McSweenification

Rosanna Stevens

The week I arrived in San Francisco for my three-month stint, I walked to Tartine—a local Mission bakery and SF institution—with Jordan Bass, managing editor of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. He was buying bread for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, and by tagging along I was trying to take advantage of my internship in the McSweeney’s offices. While we waited at the tail end of an out-the-door line, bundled up in our coats, Bass told me about his visit to Australia early in 2012. He was surprised, he said, by the number of times he was asked about McSweeney’s ability to remain afloat at a time when print publishing is in decline—as though every austral ear and eye expected to learn some great secret to McSweeney’s success. I think I was expected to understand the implications of this comment but I struggle to. I’ve travelled continents for this bakery-line moment: you mean to imply there is no secret? Or there is a secret?

After twelve weeks in the McSweeney’s offices, I’ve grown less surprised by the eccentricities of this place. Like Rollerblades Guy, whose backpack boom box interrupts our workspace with a passing shout, as he coasts along Valencia Street in yellow hot pants. I’ve come to expect him when the weather is pleasant and the staff—most often hunched over their computers—leave all the doors between their office and the street front wide open. After a muggy winter, the fresh air helps clear the McSweeney’s space of a yeasty residue from the next-door pub.

The publishing house shopfront on Valencia Street is home to another Dave Eggers enterprise, ScholarMatch, where three members of staff sit in a neat grey and white space behind black, IKEA-minimalist desks. ScholarMatch’s mission is to source and direct college funding for students otherwise unable to afford a tertiary education. There’s a sliding plywood door at the back of the room that features a hand-painted Grover decorated with reindeer antlers. The first time I pushed it open I felt like Dorothy unveiling the Wizard busily working his revered puppetry. Behind Grover sits nearly the entire McSweeney’s mechanism—an open warehouse space featuring floating floorboards dotted with Persian rugs. Collections of mismatched desks line the room, side by side. Occasionally a bulky metal workstation, a scratched secretaire or an old dining table helps define a passage through the space. Walls are lined with shelves. One corner hosts a collection of drawers overflowing with mail addressed to staff members. Another wall is covered with stacked sets of Quarterly Concern. There’s a compartment dedicated to issue 36, infamously published in the form of a box decorated with the image of a red-faced man, designed by Brian McMullen. Against other walls rest collections of McMullen’s children’s books, out-of-circulation copies of Wholphin, and Eggers’ novel A Hologram for the King. The staff are distributed in a similarly compartmentalised fashion. In one corner sit the Voice of Witness employees. In another is Andi Mudd, managing editor of the Believer magazine. Customer Service is located beside the plywood entrance. It’s manned by Sunra, office Spotify DJ, and the only member of staff with a mug shot on the McSweeney’s website. I’ve discovered over the past weeks that the sole reason anyone else has a Spotify account is to try to interrupt Sunra’s playlist, which has been the same for more than a season, and haunts every member of staff on the floor. Sunra doesn’t know this. Somewhere towards the back of the building there’s a basement, a storeroom and a kitchen.

While reading manuscript and short-fiction submissions, I noticed that attempting to appeal to McSweeney’s as though it were just a brand of clever writing and pretty hardbacks illustrated a challenge facing many emerging artists, particularly within a literary geography: to differentiate between mimicry and inspiration. While wondrous graphic design, quirky esoterics and obscure writings might seem like the McSweeney’s legacy, pitches and submissions that are imaginative, considered and unpretentious excite the editors most. It seemed to me that to be ‘inspired’ by McSweeney’s might mean writing an unsubtly metaphorical allegory about baboons treating a protagonist badly around a high-rise workplace water cooler, whereas aspiring to McSweeney’s might mean listening to a seventeen-year-old high schooler pitch a cover design for a magazine, because they’re eerily good at manga. This is the secret to McSweeney’s: to be sincere and to receive sincerity.

The truth is, the elegant products of this seemingly dysfunctional system aren’t some kind of magic. There’s nothing effortless or safe about Eggers and his add-on empire. The unafraid, creative, invested and tireless are the ones who staff foodie magazine Lucky Peach and the nationwide primary school–focused 826 chapters alike. I’d like to think that Jordan Bass wasn’t able to divulge any secret to McSweeney’s success because, for the staff who work here, what makes each enterprise thrive seems terrifyingly exhausting, intrinsic and obvious. M

Note: This project was supported by the CAL Creative Industries Career Fund.

Notes

1 W. Rubuntja, The Town Grew Up Dancing: The Life and Art of Wenten Rubuntja, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 2002, p. 161.

From An Exquisite Calendar for the Duke of Madness

Peter Boyle

A simple flat bottomed boat was the most practical vehicle to travel across to that other shore with its tightly bordered countries, its languages and customs jostling so close against each other, the bedsheets of one nation poking into the eyes of another’s laundry, shelves crammed with receptacles for all flying and crawling beings. She had wandered into a land that was called madness. It exploded outwards in her dreams—the cast too heavy, too many people crowding into narrow corridors, massed outside on the landing, the floorboards bound to give way. She was dressed like Ophelia, like a jester garlanded in marigolds. At the same time destiny had singled her out to be a Renaissance prince, fumbling with numerous cards all inscribed with the names of flowers, waiting nonchalantly for the beheading.

And then she was there suddenly far ahead of me—on the small road that leads into the heart of the sky. And I was stuck where I was, here amid the wild silence of dead voices.

*

Within days the trees arrive. The litany of warriors finishes. The rollcall of decapitations reaches an end. While in the mountains winter is laying out its precious dust that tastes of arsenic, it is summer still among the loquat trees by the lake. Once, when strange voices screamed and wept and shattered the house, the three of us children slipped away to the field by the river to tell each other stories and sleep. On the second night as we camped there suddenly the sky was no longer visible. Benign, withered and made entirely from the hair of old dolls, a forest had settled over us. The small boy with the long white shirt who sleeps under my eyelids woke up then. As if to calm himself, his lips were softly intoning: ‘In another lifetime I will be here among you, straight as a tree, alive and simply blossoming.’

*

After the rains came the season of rats, of blood red thistles and boundless peaches,