Meanjin Vol 71, No 3

By Meanjin Quarterly

With the September edition of Meanjin we welcome Spring at last, and with a new season we take you to new places, show you new perspectives and consider new solutions to old problems.

Under the revived Meanjin Papers masthead we feature Patrick McCaughey who takes a second look at the wildly diverse Australian art of the 1960s, we bring you Rebe Taylor on the vexed and painful question of Truganini’s status as the ‘last’ Indigenous Tasmanian, while Helen Ennis writes on the life and startlingly beautiful work of Australian Photographer Olive Cotton. Paul Daley visits the battlefields of the Somme and wonders how best to deal with the enduring human remains left by war. Back home, Ben Eltham reports on the troubling disconnect between funding the Arts and funding Arts infrastructure, Chris McAuliffe writes on the end of cultural cringe while James Bradley has a ghostly encounter in the night time.

We bring you a stunning gallery from photographer Lucy Parakhina and new memoir from Lorna Hendry, Lily Keil and John Kinsella.

There is new fiction from David Francis, Mark Welker, Michele Freeman, Lex Hall and Marion Halligan, as well as poetry from Eileen Chong, Craig Billingham, Mark Mordue and much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Dec 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780522862768

Book preview

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Contents

No. 3, 2012

Editorial by Sally Heath

Perspectives

with Barry Jones and Mark McKenna

Essays

The National Confessional by Rebe Taylor

Disturbing the Bodies by Paul Daley

Living the Dream: The Contemporary Australian Artist Abroad by Chris McAuliffe

The Space of Biography: Writing on Olive Cotton by Helen Ennis

The Afterlife of Books by Maria Tumarkin

The state of Australia’s performing arts centres, and what it tells us about the state of the Australian arts by Ben Eltham

Encounters with the Uncanny by James Bradley

Meanjin Papers

‘Enjoy Your Diversity’: The 60s Revisited by Patrick McCaughey

Fiction

Parts Unknown by David Francis

What Remains the Same by Michele Freeman

A Funeral for Eddie Moon by Mark Welker

The Thirteenth Heat by Lex Hall

Eating Oysters by Marion Halligan

Memoir

No Money, no Honey by Lily Keil

Sunday 8 February 2009—the Morning After by Robert Kenny

Lennard River Snack Stop by Lorna Hendry

Autography 5 by John Kinsella

Poetry

By Sea They Come by Ciaran MacLennan

Owls by Philip Hammial

Leap Year by Eileen Chong

Turning Point by John Foulcher

The Future of Genetics by Andy Jackson

Father; At the Market by Dimitra Harvey

Scent; Universe by Libby Hart

Waiting for the Train by Craig Billingham

Damp by Mona Zahra Attamimi

Driving Out; Georgia O’Keeffe’s Dog by Helen Parsons

I’m thinking of you by Mark Mordue

The Horse of Achilles by Peter Skrzynecki

Contributors

Editorial

Sally Heath

A great deal of hype surrounded federal Treasurer Wayne Swan’s declaration that he was a Bruce Springsteen devotee (who would have thought?). But Swan’s devotion to The Boss wasn’t the end of the story. He went on to enlarge the discussion of economic policy to its necessary but seldom explored endpoint: the type of society we want, the lives we aspire to, the culture we want to create.

‘It is culture’, he said, ‘perhaps more than anything else which influences our values, which in turn shape the type of society we want to build and the sorts of lives we want to lead.’

It was heartening to hear finance put in this context, no doubt about it. But there could be more: actions to match the fine words. The Treasurer has the power to back Australian culture with the driving force of what Springsteen might call ‘Detroit muscle’, or as we might more plainly put it, money.

Australia’s National Cultural policy has been twenty years in the making; twenty years in gestation but never delivered, thanks to a lack of budgetary support.

The culture, meantime, struggles in an unforgiving and changing world. New chair of the Australia Council’s Literature Board, Sophie Cunningham, wrote recently that in the light of the annual rash of publishers’ requests for grants ‘it was obvious to Literature Board members that our available funding for publishing activities in Australia is inadequate’.

The publishing industry is in transition. Times are tough, the market for the printed word is hard, a tricky environment that also demands creative thinking. Publishers are battling tough market conditions and the simultaneous imperative to devise new and imaginative ways of delivering the written word in a digitally focused world.

It is, as the Treasurer acknowledges, important work. Telling Australian stories and reinforcing uniquely Australian cultural values was never more critical than in this globalised and politically unsettled age.

As much as in any creative form, it is in the written word that the culture the Treasurer applauds is made; and it is here too that it needs to be supported in meaningful ways: not only by rhetoric, but by implemented policy and the dollars that follow.

Perspectives

Antarctica

Barry Jones

From March 1983 until July 1987 I had direct responsibility for Antarctica, as one of my diverse responsibilities as minister for science. I have had a long fascination with the subject, and Antarctic explorer Phil Law was a great mentor and encourager over many years.

James Cook was the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle, on his second voyage to the South Pacific, on HMS Resolution. In January 1773 he reached 71°10’ S. He crossed the circle three times and came close to—but did not sight—Antarctica.

A Russian expedition sighted Antarctica in 1820 but did not land, followed by British and American explorers in the same year. The date of the first landing on the Antarctic mainland is disputed, but it may have been as early as February 1821, by an American sealer, John Davis. The first mainland base, at Cape Adair, was established nearly eighty years later, in February 1899, by Carstens Borchgrevink, a Norwegian who sailed from Hobart.

In January 1909 Douglas Mawson and Edgeworth David located the South Magnetic Pole as part of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition. The pole, notoriously, moves quite rapidly.

In 1911 the Australian Government took a direct interest, under then prime minister Andrew Fisher, in funding Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which explored Queen Mary Land. Both Amundsen and Scott used Hobart as the forward base for their expeditions to the South Pole.

Australia claims 42 per cent of Antarctica, far more than any other nation. Only seven nations make territorial claims—Australia, Norway, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina and Chile. The claims are not recognised by other nations—but they are not contested either.

No part of Antarctica has been placed on the World Heritage List, because nominations can only come from state parties to the World Heritage Convention. However, Heard and McDonald islands and Macquarie Island are included because Australia claims sovereignty.

As minister I was, in law, administrator of Australian Antarctic territory, but I never wore a plumed hat. The round trip by sea to visit our three permanent bases, Mawson, Davis and Casey, would have required four to seven weeks, depending on the weather—far longer if the ship were beset by ice. I could not afford to be away from Australia so long when my budget proposals were under constant attack.

I cared very deeply for Antarctica—I still do—and I seized the opportunity to fly to Antarctica in December 1983 to visit the American bases, together with a group of members of Congress and scientists. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. My host was the United States National Science Foundation. From Christchurch, where the Americans had a forward base, I flew in a C-141 Starlifter to McMurdo, on the Ross Ice Shelf, where the United States had its largest base and research centre.

McMurdo, the Greater McMurdo Conurbation as the wags called it, was in New Zealand’s territorial claim. James Clark Ross, who sailed past but did not land, named it for Archibald McMurdo, one of his officers, in 1841.

Antarctica’s initial visual impact was profoundly disorienting, especially after nearly five hours in a darkened plane. I could see ultraviolet light tinting the snow. We are so conditioned to brown, green or yellow landscapes, and the alternation of night and day, that the uniform whiteness and perpetual sunlight seemed shocking.

We flew from McMurdo to the South Pole in a lumbering Hercules, visited the huge Amundsen–Scott Base, 3000 metres above sea level, and were filmed at the photographic pole, where visitors could drape themselves in their national flag. The temperature was minus 43 degrees Celsius, far colder than when Captain Robert Falcon Scott had been there. By walking briskly round the nearby geographic pole, I consoled myself that the 360-degree circuit brought me, at last, into Australian Antarctic territory, if only for seconds.

On Ross Island we inspected the hut at Cape Evans erected by Captain Scott in 1902, a prefabricated wooden structure miraculously preserved by the ice, full of artefacts and tinned food from the time of his fatal expedition in 1911–12.

Mt Erebus, Antarctica’s highest volcano at 3794 metres, was pluming behind. Killer whales (Orcinus orca), up to 10 metres long, were chasing seals onto the sand. Emperor penguins strutted. The sea was black. The sun blazed. No words could express my heart-stopping exhilaration.

On another day I observed that Mt Erebus had become completely obscured by white-out, and the only mountain to be seen was the nearby Mt Terror, with a configuration similar to Erebus. An Air New Zealand DC-10 had crashed on Erebus in November 1979, killing all 257 people on board. The crash had been caused by a white-out, when the pilot, who was off course, believed he could see Erebus in the distance, just before impact.

The McMurdo Dry Valleys is an ice-free area of 4800 square kilometres. High-velocity katabatic winds prevent snow from falling, and the landscape resembles Mars. The wind over thousands, probably millions, of years has carved powerful sculptures, ventifacts, from the rock. I photographed scores of them in the Taylor Valley and Bull Pass and sent copies to the sculptor Henry Moore. He was amazed by their stark beauty and invited me to visit him in England.

We also visited New Zealand’s Scott Base and the beautiful Lake Vanda, a glacier. Later I climbed to the top of Observation Hill, overlooking McMurdo, and slithered much of the way down.

I became increasingly preoccupied with greenhouse, ozone depletion, southern oscillation (El Niño) and marine biota issues, and Antarctica contributed vital information on all four. Drilling long ice cores provided an accurate history of climate change and atmospheric composition for centuries; holes in the ozone layer were first detected by the British Antarctic Survey in 1981; El Niño had a devastating impact on years of drought in Australia; and marine biota was threatened by overfishing.

In January 1964 Sidney Nolan visited Antarctica for eight days in the company of Alan Moorehead for the New Yorker. Later in the year he produced sixty-eight paintings over twenty-five days, averaging less than three per day, fewer than might have been expected. His Mt Erebus is one of his most powerful works. Nolan wrote: ‘[One] could feel this instantaneous fear at the first sight of [Antarctica], that it could annihilate one, but this was overcome straight away by the sense of wonder in it … Your fear and your wonder are mixed up and it’s difficult to separate them.’

There is outstanding, often terrifying, beauty in Antarctica, and the sense of isolation can be completely disorienting. Nature appears to be in complete control. But after the oil rigs attack the Antarctic coastline, as they surely will, the most southern continent will seem as fragile as nature generally is on the others.

One of my passions as minister with responsibility for Antarctica was to send artists down there. The first three were Jan Senbergs, Bea Maddock and John Caldwell. Maddock was injured in a fall on Heard Island in her 1987 visit. I also sent down my friend Stephen Murray-Smith to report on morale, and he inevitably became known as Schmidt der Shpy, or Murray-Schmidt der Shpy. He wrote a valuable report and also published Sitting on Penguins: People and Politics in Australian Antarctica (1988).

On Bastille Day 1987 there was a major reorganisation of government departments and the title of Minister for Science became more of a letterhead filler than an office. I found myself as the back legs of the horse in the new super Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce. Responsibility for Antarctica passed to Senator Graham Richardson as minister for the environment.

Losing Antarctica was a bitter blow, but I cheered up a little in 1988 when the international Antarctic Place Names Commission approved the naming of Barry Jones Bay (69°25’ 30 S, 76°03’00 E) in the Larsemann Hills area.

Saving the Antarctic from mining, at least for a fifty-year period, was an outstanding personal achievement by Bob Hawke as prime minister. It was all his own work. Gareth Evans and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thought, at first, that it was mission impossible. Timing was important and there can be little doubt that the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in March 1989 was a major setback for the proponents of mineral exploration. Hawke, the great persuader, sought and followed Jacques Cousteau’s advice, lobbied very effectively, won the support of Michel Rocard, the French prime minister, and then president George Bush Sr, securing international agreement in June 1991 in the Madrid Protocol, overcoming concerns by the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.

In January 2009 we flew over Adélie Land and King George V Land in an Antarctic expedition organised by the Royal Society of Victoria to commemorate the centenary of finding the South Magnetic Pole. Qantas provided exemplary service but, disappointingly, there was far more cloud cover than expected.

Dublin Days

Mark McKenna

4 January 2011

Bleak winter. Pipes burst after the thaw, water restrictions all over the country. Ireland: a nation without tap water and money. The whole country consumed by the consequences of the crash, embarrassed to be dependent on Europe.

Ireland is technically insolvent and its people still appear to be in a state of shock. How could the government and the banks have let things come to this? A country that fought so hard for its independence now forced to relinquish it to the European Union. Newspapers talk of ‘hope’ and ‘opportunity’, ‘the chance to renew our democracy’. Editorials quote Yeats on the need to sustain a ‘national faith’ and Colm Tóibín on the lasting contribution of Irish literary culture. It’s as if writers were gods.

But was it only the corporate raiders and greedy financiers who were responsible? Did not all of Ireland rush to embrace the new religion spawned by the boom? Do not all its people bear some responsibility? Is the blame game little more than self-delusion? Who was vigilant about the activities of those in power?

7 January

This morning to the newsagency across the road. On hearing my accent the newsagent asked if I was from Australia. Yes, Sydney, I said. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he shot back, laughing. ‘Why in the fuck would you want to come here?’

For the Irish, Australia is an economic nirvana. Posters on noticeboards around the campus advertise Canadian, Australian or New Zealand work visas for Irish students. Yet another mass exodus of the Irish is underway. Although one student told me: ‘I can’t leave, can’t turn my back on my country.’

9 January

The faces on Dublin’s streets look so familiar to me. I have seen them in Australia. Only when you live here can you see the influence Ireland has had on Australia. Their humour: laconic, levelling; it cuts through the crap, turns back on itself. Yet underneath it lie hints of resignation. Their greatest fear is that they will not be makers of their own history.

15 January

After Sydney, Dublin appears humble. The architecture is modest, few grand statements. There is an all-pervading melancholy never far away, in the land, in the built environment and in the faces on the streets. Can’t quite put my finger on it. Something that is both defeated and magnificent at the same time, it always eludes definition.

The stillness of Dublin Bay. The grey wash of the city’s horizon broken only by the occasional church spire. At University College, Dublin, my office is situated in a featureless concrete block otherwise known as the Newman Building. Room D 111. From my desk, I look out onto a bleak courtyard. Beyond, through the office windows on the other side, I see other academics sitting in front of their computers, their screens glowing brighter as the darkness descends, such an impressive hive of industry. Everyone connected. Yet disconnected.

24 January

As the election approaches the Irish Government goes into free fall. Fine Gael will win easily. Meanwhile, the prime minister, Brian Cowen, resigns, other ministers resign too, the Fianna Fael coalition with the Greens in tatters. People are angry over the state of the country. The strength needed to haul the economy out of this hole will be considerable. Yet if any country can manage this feat it is Ireland. There is something indefatigable in the spirit of the people. They follow Beckett’s advice. Just go on. ‘Fail better.’

The other day, winds gusting up to 100 kilometres an hour tore down nearly every election poster. The faces of politicians looked up at me from stormwater canals, as if nature herself had decided where they should belong.

26 January

Asked by the International Students Association to give a lecture on Australia Day, I prepare a forty-minute presentation. To my surprise there are more than sixty Australian students studying at UCD. My talk is advertised and to be followed by a barbecue. On arrival, only the organisers are there. No audience in sight. I wait for an hour or so. Finally, the Australian students start turning up in time for the barbecue. My talk cancelled, I find myself drinking VB, sitting next to three students from Queensland, the Australian flag stamped proudly on their cheeks. In the background, the sound of INXS blasts from a set of makeshift speakers.

10 February

Traffic jams on the way to drop my daughters to school. Radio stations blurt out the delays on major arterial roads. ‘Fifteen-minute delay on the N11.’ Then we hear Michael Jackson or U2 for light relief. Drive Time. Or at least some of the time. Through the windows of cars crawling in the next lane, I see the kids in the back seat, their parents off to work. Far more common is the single driver, radio blaring, his fingers tapping the steering wheel as he sings along. I could be anywhere in the Western world. Only the Irish accents of the radio announcers tell me where I am. The mantra of economic growth. We all strive to be like one another. Even our differences look the same.

8 March

Saw the ‘permanent’ Yeats exhibition at the National Library in Kildare Street. Yeats the beacon, Yeats the soothsayer, Yeats the founding father of Irish national identity, Yeats country, Yeats’s grave, Yeats documentaries, Yeats theatre. Tourists could be forgiven for thinking Ireland was a one-poet nation.

St Patrick’s Day

Killarney, 4 pm. The stench of vomit in the laneways behind the pubs. Groups of pissed men stumble through the streets, leering at women as they go. The art of public drunkenness. Paddy’s Day is for so many just another excuse to wipe themselves out. I had almost given up on the day when it was unexpectedly redeemed. Later that evening I walked into a small pub in Castlecove in Kerry. A group of no more than ten people stood at the bar, several children among them. After only a few minutes a fourteen-year-old boy unexpectedly stood and sang ‘Isle of Hope, Isle of Freedom’ and soon they all joined in. Then, as if scripted for my arrival, the boy sang ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. He sang for his grandfather, who at ninety-two years of age was celebrating his birthday and seated next to him. As they sang louder and louder I was moved to tears. After the scenes at Killarney this was a jolt and reminder. It was true after all. There is a deep vein of patriotism in this country. Hard won. Defiantly and proudly defended. No pride like Irish pride. No bitterness like Irish bitterness.

Walking the hills of Kerry the next day, the heather spikes cut my hand. The remains of ancient stonewalls are visible here and there in the bog. The soil spongy, so waterlogged in places I have to turn back and find a different way through. Climbing higher, the coast’s black shoreline stretches out below. Sprinkled about are new homes, gleaming white and empty, albatrosses on the headlands. Set against such fierce beauty, the folly of the boom is impossible to hide.

5 April

Dublin Bay. When the tide is out, the retreating water leaves a muddy film that stretches for hundreds of metres from the shoreline. White gulls hunt for food in the pools left behind while a few solitary souls venture out with their dogs, like Christ on the water, miracles of a kind. The tourists hurry by on their way to see the Martello tower in Sandycove, where Joyce stayed for all of six nights in 1904.

22 April

A nondescript town on the way from Dublin to Cork. The smell of burning peat fills the air. Depressed atmosphere. Sitting in a café with vinyl tablecloths and lino floors. Basic menu. Sandwiches and tea. Basic decor. Orwell could have walked through the door at any moment, notebook in hand. No attempt to fake café culture. Opposite me, a father and son wash down their plate of white-bread sandwiches (cut into triangles) with cups of tea. I could be in an Australian country town in the 1960s. Those faces again. The stark, no-nonsense simplicity. The complete absence of anything vaguely resembling style.

Here, for some reason, I remembered a recent stay in a B & B in Durham. Run by a lonely, widowed painter. She took me upstairs to show me the field below, once run by her grandfather in the late nineteenth century as a market garden. She feels that she must stay. Must carry on remembering. She is the last to remain. She remembers playing in the fields as a young girl. Now covered in weeds. She, who will surely die here, has no alternative but to stay. To stay in one place today is an act of defiance. To become the person others travel to see. The authentic one. The local. And what will become of our so-called global age? Are we merely the museum builders? History’s tourists? Will any future holidaymakers come to gaze at what we have created?

Early May

Sligo and surrounds: ‘Yeats country’. Ireland’s landscapes are written over and over, written into being, in fact, through literature. Australia has only one equivalent: Aboriginal stories. Of which more than 90 per cent of our population are largely ignorant. We walk over our country blind to its stories. We might have ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and a few other pieces of folklore but little else. Somehow ‘Patrick White country’, ‘Malouf country’ or ‘Winton country’ just doesn’t have the same ring. It jars, sounds almost comic. In any case it would be just another form of colonial theft. Centuries need to pass before Australia’s landscapes are claimed