Meanjin Vol 72, No 3

By Meanjin Quarterly

Meanjin is a quarterly literary journal publishing the best new writing from established voices and emerging talents. For over 70 years Meanjin has articulated questions of national importance, questions or art, culture, policy and identity, as well as introducing some of the greatest literary names Australia has ever produced. It continues to be a touchstone of Australian cultural life and a must read for writers, thinkers and artists of any ilk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522862799

Book preview

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Contents

No. 3, 2013

Editorial by Zora Sanders 

Perspectives

Visiting Prisons Past by Suzy Freeman-Greene

The Italian Job: Can publishers get over their own digital divide? by Caroline Hamilton

South of the Border by Sally McLaren

Meanjin Papers

Speed and Politics by Waleed Aly

Essays

All good things are wild and free: Considering the zoo by Estelle Tang

The Australian Idea of a University by Glyn Davis

Fed up in the Air by Gideon Haigh

Christina Stead: Her Luck by Ann-Marie Priest

Frozen: On Translating Jules Verne’s The Ice Sphinx by Chris Flynn

A.A. Phillips and the ‘Cultural Cringe’: Creating an ‘Australian Tradition’ by Rollo Hesketh

Fiction

Freshwater Dreaming by Jane Jervis-Read

The Bomb Hole by Craig Billingham

Death of Venus by Angelina Mirabito

Gingerbread Men by Anthony Panegyres

Gallery Nicholas Walton-Healey with featured poets

Memoir

The Breaking Point by Jessie Cole

Reconsidering Berlin by Marcia Jacobs

We held hands by Kathryn Freeman

Poetry

Her Dream by Michelle Cahill

Hunter River Delta by Kate Waterhouse

Reading at Lunchtime by Andrew Lansdown

Not Here by Rose Lucas

sonnet breathing by Kevin Gillam

The Real Fox by Gary Allen

Eyelet by Danny Gentile

The Owl by Anthony Lawrence

Ossuary by Peter Rose

espresso by Gregory Horne

All the Night Terrors by Gregory Horne

Anamnesis by Dan Disney

Distance by Simeon Kronenberg

Galanty Shows by Rebecca Lilly

Killing a Sheep

Contributors

Subscription rates

Editorial

Zora Sanders

You would be unlikely to turn to a publication like ours seeking breaking news stories and up-to-the-minute debate. A journal that comes out once every three months does not lend itself to the fast-paced world of contemporary news media. Still, in usual circumstances a canny author can tailor their writing to remain relevant for at least a quarter of a year. In usual circumstance an author can make educated guesses and rely on at least a few assumptions about what the future will hold. But when writing about politics in this country, there no longer seem to be any usual circumstances.

In the last issue, Anne Summers wrote about the expectations and particular challenges that confront women in power, drawing on the experience of Julia Gillard to make her case. Barely had the ink dried on that issue of Meanjin before Gillard was ousted, debate about the role of gender in politics exploded briefly and then diminished, and Summers’ count of countries led by women diminished by one. How does any author contribute meaningfully to the political debate when the ground is shifting so significantly and at such speed?

In these pages Waleed Aly argues that speed itself has become the problem. If we value speed—speed of communication, speed of debate, speed of resolution to our problems—above all else, if speed becomes a virtue, what hope do we have for a substantial public life in this country? In the autumn issue, Katharine Murphy discussed a similar idea in her essay ‘This Connected Life’, where she reflected on a year characterised by relentless technology-enabled speed, and the longing to slow down that came after.

Doubtless there are many who also wish they were a little less connected, a little less switched on, a little less accessible, but feel unable to slow down for fear of dropping out altogether. There is already a text-speak acronym that perfectly describes this fear: ‘FOMO’ (fearing of missing out). Fear that if you slow down, power off, disconnect, the world will go on without you, that it might not even notice your absence.

But perhaps when you are holding this issue of Meanjin in your hands, heavy with physical paper and ink, full of ideas and images and small moments of contemplation, then switching off and dropping out for a few hours might seem a good idea after all.

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Christina Stead, by Jacqueline Mitelman, 1981, collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Perspectives

Visiting Prisons Past

Suzy Freeman-Greene

I once went to a party at the Old Melbourne Gaol. I wore a checked mini-dress and drank quite a bit. We danced on stone pavers to some pretty ordinary music, one floor below the hangman’s scaffold.

It was a Christmas do for the Age (when money was flowing). I remember coloured lights; a hallway pockmarked with cell doors and staggering upstairs to see the place where Ned Kelly—hooded, with hands tied—took his last breath.

While I’m a sucker for a dance floor, an awful lot of people chose to linger outside that night, drinking and talking under stars. They were closer to the bar. But were they also reacting to the general creepiness of the place? What the hell were we doing, I now wonder, partying in such a grim, sad spot?

Houses where murders happened tend to be a hard sell but the ghosts of prisons don’t seem to haunt in the same way. People live on the sites of old jails. They dance in them and apparently even marry. (The Old Melbourne Gaol hosts weddings.) Are prisons seen as less charged places because, well, those stuck in them deserved to suffer?

Melbourne’s most famous prison, Pentridge, ran for 147 years. It closed in 1997. On the website of Pentridge Village, a new housing development at the old jail in Coburg, a promotional video almost comically erases the past. Tall double gates open onto Merriview Place—an ‘exclusive enclave’ near a creek that is, we’re told, ‘the natural escape’. And Pentridge Village is ‘so friendly, so individual’.

I didn’t make any friends when I went to Pentridge Village but I did find the past weirdly visible. Townhouses picked out in insouciant colours—orange, mustard, lime, yellow—nestled around prison features: the high bluestone wall, the old D-Division wing. The original entrance—a gloomy, grey homage to state power—housed the Eden Mediterranean restaurant. (Book your next function here!)

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Old Melbourne Gaol, photograph by Rob Michalski, 2007

As I contemplated the bizarre juxtapositions (a mezza plate here, some razor wire there), I thought of a man called David Bennett, possibly the unluckiest prisoner to die at Pentridge. A carpenter and convicted rapist, Bennett was asked to rebuild the scaffold there in 1932 after it had been dismantled and transferred from the Old Melbourne Gaol. He built the thing. Then he was hanged from it.

Prisoners were hanged, too, at the Old Castlemaine Gaol, a stone pile in central Victoria that’s at the centre of a development battle. The jail was recently sold to developers for just $550,000. There’s talk of it becoming an entertainment or conference venue, fringed by townhouses. A local lobby group is protesting the plan.

Built in the late 1850s, from locally quarried sandstone, the jail sprawls on a low hill above the pretty town of Castlemaine. Ten inmates were executed there in its early years. Their remains are buried somewhere in the grounds. Prison work gangs quarried bluestone and broke metal. Later the place became a reformatory school and a prison hospital. Incredibly, the cells were still unsewered in the 1980s, when then police minister Steve Crabb described the jail as ‘inhumane’. It closed in 1990.

I recently saw a ‘promenade, site-specific’ theatre performance staged inside the jail, which is mostly off-limits to the public. The show, an overwrought musical about three murdered women, was a tad underwhelming. The building, however, oozed atmosphere.

We entered through the triangular exercise yard, flanked by high sandstone walls each with sixteen barred window slits. Inside, two cell-lined corridors fanned off a circular room. The ceiling was high and made of tin. The windows were arched, like the one on Play School. The walls were beige and dotted with big, bubonic paint blisters. When I touched one, my finger went straight through. We traipsed down a dim staircase into cellars and came to a long corridor, where a thin, pale woman sang ‘Come as You Are’ on a staircase the colour of rust. As she sang, I poked my head through a hobbit-sized door into a small, dark cell. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

The mood was different the next morning, when I walked up to the jail with an artist friend. Light flooded into that circular room, from all those arched windows. ‘It’s a beautiful space,’ he said. ‘It would make a great studio.’

Local resident Claire Seppings is one of those campaigning against the prison sale. ‘I just think it would be a travesty if it ends up like Pentridge,’ she told me. ‘Why would anyone want to live in an old jail with its vast, ugly history and ghosts—not to mention prisoners’ graves?’ It’s a good question. Do they deserve our attention, those dead men buried somewhere under grass? Should we weigh up the pain endured there when measuring a property’s worth?

The Old Melbourne Gaol does a roaring tourist trade today. It also offers cells as studios, for writers with strong constitutions. A few weeks ago I went back to see the jail in daylight. I stood below the scaffold, remembering how I’d jumped and whooped and sweated in my polyester dress. Then I noticed a large, oblong-shaped pane of glass at the bottom of a nearby wall.

Peering in, I found myself looking down into a dark, windowless space. This room, a sign informed me, had been an underground punishment cell.

It was ‘designed to break a prisoner’s spirit by total sensory deprivation’. This meant ‘no light, no sound, no human contact and limited food’. I stood there, reading those bald words, and I felt ashamed.

The Italian Job: Can publishers get over their own digital divide?

Caroline Hamilton

I am flushed with wine and expectation. I have just arrived in Milan to listen to a group of Italian publishers and a selection of international start-up companies discuss opportunities for collaboration in digital publishing. The occasion is the third annual IfBookThen publishing conference. Undoubtedly my expectations are fuelled by the irrational optimism that surrounds the tourist (even when she is ostensibly ‘travelling for work’) and the idealism that tends to attach itself to almost all enterprises bearing the hallmark of ‘e’. IfBookThen is the brainchild of Milan-based e-book retailer BookRepublic. Hosted at the Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, the event bills itself as ‘the conference about the future of publishing’. It sounds impressive (and definitive), but despite the museo’s evidence of Italy’s history of artistic and technological innovation, not to mention the talent gathered together to sip wine and make small talk, I also have a creeping feeling that ‘ the conference about the future of publishing’ might just mean more of the same.

The chattering of the 300 or so members of the audience (most of them at the pointy end of the Italian publishing pyramid) is brought to a hush by the familiar guitar riff that opens Michael Jackson’s hit song ‘Beat It’. I’m baffled by the organisers’ choice of intro music but it’s certainly effective in silencing the talk. Perhaps they hoped to stimulate an optimistic sense that publishers can overcome the odds, but instead I’m having flashbacks to the music video, which depicts rival gangs engaged in a knife fight. As it turns out there may be some substance to the comparison. One of the conference’s first speakers, Javier Celaya, the founder of Dosdoce.com, an online portal that analyses the use of new technologies in the cultural sector across Europe, reports findings from his research. The data he has gathered suggests that publishers and start-ups struggle to relate to each other. As a consequence, Celaya says, ‘most of the large traditional publishing houses don’t have ongoing relationships with technology start-ups. Some have their heads in the sand, others think they have the situation under control. But mostly they just don’t know how to deal with a small, young team.’

This year’s conference is intended to bridge the gap Celaya has identified. Although I had come expecting facts and figures about current readership rates, new markets and trends, the conference is devised as a soft-pitch session where the ‘young start-ups’, as they are habitually called, pitch their ideas to the crowd of publishers, who are periodically reminded by industry commentators such as Celaya that if they continue with ‘business as usual’ they are basically doomed. There is great enthusiasm here (especially on the part of the organisers) for the notion that publishing’s woes could be solved by engaging with young start-up enterprises. According to a representative of BookRepublic, the faith in start-up companies as the potential saviours of publishing rests on the fact that they represent the ‘post-Amazon generation’ of book entrepreneurs. Despite the dodgy nomenclature, there is some logic to the idea. ‘These are the entrepreneurs,’ explains the BookRepublic blog, ‘the agents, authors, engineers, developers who are giving birth to initiatives that combine content, technology and data.’ By leveraging the intellectual property they own (content), distributing this across multiple platforms and in various formats (technology) and paying close attention to the movement of these products in the marketplace (data), publishers can continue to make money even if that means getting used to the idea that they won’t be doing it by selling books.

Giovanni Bonfanti, a researcher from AT Kearney, dutifully reminds the crowd that ‘the publishing business today is not just about content’. Globally, e-book sales are increasing but the margins for publishers are shrinking. Publishers can’t expect to make money from e-books in the way they are used to making money from print books. Readers, Bonfanti says, are much more than just the buyers of books. They are, potentially, the sellers of books, the makers of books, the writers of books, the reviewers of books, the promoters and the publicists. If they are not too exhausted by all this, some may even get to read books! Bonfanti advises publishers that they need to embrace collaboration with tech firms that can help them develop new products and services that are not books: apps, social networks, e-reading platforms or self-publishing tools. This interest in developing publishing products that are not books helps to explain the emphasis on a vision of publishing ‘post Amazon’: publishers need to regain their footing in the market for information. A strategy that involves developing and providing services and tools that the corporate tech giants such as Amazon, Apple and Google don’t (yet) provide.

But what do these new tools and services look like? It is not easy to answer this question. Some are only in prototype. Others seem better described as simply business models. While it’s hard to get a handle on what the future of publishing holds, IfBookThen does offer a neat snap-shot of the present for start-ups: under forty, energetic, and proficient English speakers. They have studied the TED-talk YouTube channel back-to-front. They display admirable lateral thinking skills and know how to spin a catchy line. ‘This is about selling books to people who aren’t looking for them,’ says Anna Lewis in explaining her online reading platform, ValoBox. ‘It’s a pay-as-you-go book system,’ she continues, delivering two gems within minutes. Lewis’s idea involves breaking down a book into saleable chapters or subsections and making these available to readers to suit their requirements and devices. The model is something akin to iTunes selling single songs rather than whole albums—books, in bits—but the revenue model is even more interesting: when publishers choose ValoBox to manage the distribution of their e-books they are buying into a sales model in which readers are given a 25 per cent commission if they sell an e-book directly to their friends via online social networks. This is potentially exciting news for those who like ‘social reading’ (as the multiple apps and online networks devoted to virtual bookshelves and reader reviews are often called), although it seems to cast an even darker shadow over the sustainability of bookshops.

As the thinking behind ValoBox makes clear, these pitches—or, as they are euphemistically called in the program schedule, ‘case studies’—have been constructed to appeal to publishers looking for new ways to make money on their old investments in the industry. Some, like ValoBox, want to use social networks more carefully and artfully to target and stimulate groups of readers; others propose products designed to open up new avenues for sales by using footnotes, bibliographies and quotations as a site for in-app purchase of a publisher’s backlist.

The central message at IfBookThen is that the data readers generate while they read digitally is likely to be more lucrative for publishers than the sale of the reading material itself. The suggestion is that the sale of books is nothing (in financial terms) compared to the sale of new services and ‘story experiences’ that offer publishers ways to create revenue while collecting data they can turn into more revenue. This is something of a conceptual leap for traditional publishers, whose bread-and-butter business involves having exclusive rights to publish and distribute material they have come to understand as theirs. On paper and in beta app development the new products are obviously thoughtfully designed to cater to the interests of would-be-investor publishers, offering them clever ways to make money by mining reader data, but there is some doubt whether publishers regard this as the future of their industry.

To look around the room, it is apparent that these publishers are serious about the need to digitise. But ask them what going digital means and most think only in terms of turning the printed book into a set of electronic files available for use on mobile devices. However sensible it is to caution publishers that they must focus on more than this, it’s not clear that many in the room appreciate the suggestion, or even conceive of what formats and products exist beyond books.

At lunch I introduce myself to one of the publishers I had been sitting near in the auditorium. I ask her for her thoughts on the role of start-ups in her industry. She says she is enthusiastic about the opportunities collaboration might offer but isn’t sure her company would be prepared to get involved. ‘All our young people are moving elsewhere, anyway,’ she adds, as if the exodus of young Italians somehow disqualified the country’s publishers from moving with the times. I ask her about the prospects for local publishers, and the local digital economy more generally, in light of this. ‘It’s a problem,’ she says. ‘I want to tell you: I know we could do this. That we really could really lead the way, but I don’t believe it,’ she says, apologetically. ‘We are Italians! We don’t change our ways. Even when it doesn’t work, we don’t change. Look at politics! Look at the Church! We are tied to traditions we don’t even respect any more.’

This resignation to the state of things as simply ‘the way it is’ strikes me as peculiar, but something one of the industry pundits had said earlier in the day comes back to me: ‘as southern Europeans we haven’t been educated to acknowledge our errors’, he sagely told the crowd. ‘But that needs to change.’

I hear this, or something like it, several times over the few days I spend in Milan. Admittedly it is a time of taking stock in Italy, given the stalemate in politics and the sudden resignation of the Pope. IfBookThen represents an Italy that wants to step into the global, digital economy of start-ups, innovation, creativity and success (‘the conference about the future of publishing’) but is hampered from realising such ambitions by publishers’ reluctance to do anything differently. In the days I spent talking with publishers, startuppers and academics it was clear that everyone subscribed to some version of this theme: traditional publishers are slowly faltering, though they seem unable to countenance the fact. They have an opportunity to recover some territory if they change the way they work and think about their product. Yet the weight of cultural and social tradition also seemed to be a recurring theme.

South of the Border

Sally McLaren

It’s midwinter and the temperature barely rises above zero. The streets are icy but Seoul buzzes with a brisk energy. The culture has adapted—heated ondol floors, steaming spicy hotpots and underground shopping malls. Psy, the chubby rapper (and currently the second-most famous South Korean in the world after Ban Ki Moon), meets me at every turn. He’s grinning from the side of buses, trotting on giant TV screens and smugly immortalised on cardboard cutouts fronting shops all over the city. Spring is coming and so are tensions with North Korea, but in late January there’s a Psy-induced buzz emanating from Gangnam, a glitzy precinct south of the Han River. Not long ago this area was mostly rice fields. Now Gangnam is being celebrated for its nouveau-riche aspirations in Psy’s YouTube music video hit (1.5 billion views and climbing) ‘Gangnam Style’. So I have left the palaces, wide boulevards, galleries and quaint tea shops of northern Seoul to see what all the fuss is about.

Turning into Gangnam-daero, the main drag of Gangnam-gu ward, I’m almost mown down by a young hipster struggling to control his Harley Davidson. Fast and flashy, he mounts the footpath and bolts down a backstreet. Nearby there’s a large stage with a backdrop of ‘Gangnam Style’ in bright yellow letters and silhouettes of Psy doing his horsey jig. Although I’m still slightly reeling from my near miss with the Harley, a local soon asks me if I’d like him to take my photo in front of the stage. I strike a pose to be polite.

International food and fashion chains line Gangnam-daero, but it’s the cheap stuff: Giordano, Uniqlo and sportswear brands. Ugly nylon socks adorned with Psy’s grinning face are for sale at a street stall in front of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. I was expecting more affluence and more fashionistas. This part of Gangnam seems to attract cashed-up teenagers.