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from rosemary dobson and alex miller to philip hodgins
and sonya hartnett.
alan gould has published twenty-three books of fiction, poetry and essays. His third novel, To the Burning
City, won the 1992 National Book Council “Banjo” Award, his seventh novel, The Lakewoman, was shortlisted for
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won the 2006 Grace Leven Award for poetry.
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J une 2014
No. 507 Volume LVIII, Number 6
Letter
Chronicle
foreign affairs
economics
freedom of speech
history
society
education
science
art
theatre
film
first person
stories
books
ryan
Poetry
2 Malcolm H. Brandon
3 Keith Windschuttle
5 The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War Daryl McCann
12 The Tactical Myth of Palestinian Identity Brian Wimborne
14 The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty Peter Smith
20 Mona and the Rich Old White Males Kerryn Pholi
24 The Imperialist War That Wasn’t Mervyn F. Bendle
31 The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese Hal G.P. Colebatch
40 It Pays to Choose Your Ancestors Carefully Peter Murphy
44 Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family John Prineas
52 Lesser and Greater Faults in Australian Education Geoffrey Partington
58 The War of the Roses: Disturbances in Gene Land B.J. Coman
64 Bill Gibson, Cochlear Implant Hero Julia Patrick
66 What Is Art? Gombrich, Popper and Anderson Tronn Overend
74 A Great Australian Private Collection Douglas Hassall
77 Different Stages Michael Connor
80 Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House Christopher Heathcote
89 The Two Films of Gaslight Neil McDonald
94 Short Takes XV Alan Gould
97 New Morning Morris Lurie
100 Au Poor Libby Sommer
102 Arazou Paul Greguric
106 The Universe Within by Neil Turok Brian Dethridge
108 The British: A Genetic Journey by Alistair Moffat Robert Murray
110 Mary Reibey’s Newel Post Peter Ryan
10: Shadows and Reflections Stephen McInerney; 11: From Adelaide to
Alice Springs Gary Clark; Tribute to Three Masters Andrew Lansdown;
18: An invitation to goosestep Robyn Lance; 19: The Murray Marilyn Peck;
23: Wedding car Elizabeth Smither; 39: Consecration Andrew Lansdown;
43: The wedding party of animals Elizabeth Smither; 50: Beneath the
Mountain Ash Paul Williamson; 51: Three poems Stephen McInerney;
56: What the woodwork reveals Robyn Lance; Clash Andrew Lansdown;
57: Two poems Victoria Field; 63: Two poems Elizabeth Smither; 73:
Putting on her face Robyn Lance; 76: Pear John Ridland; 79: To Daniel
Timothy Tim Murphy; 88: The Three Graces Robyn Lance; 91: A Tray
of Frozen Songbirds Pascale Petit; 92: Four poems Pascale Petit; 99:
The Ballad of the Gangster Paul Kelly Joe Dolce; 101: Three poems
Tim Murphy; 105: Marilyn’s Coat Marilyn Peck; 109: Schooled
Brad Jackel; 112: Woolshed Wedding Paul Williamson
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2
We Put Up with It ...
Sir: The people who champion
so-called anti-hate-speech laws
talk as though Aboriginal and ethnic groups are uniquely targeted.
The truth is that any hate speech
directed at these groups is trivial
by comparison with the venomous
abuse and generalisations that have
been hurled at the white people of
Australia. Here are some examples.
Sun Herald, June 20, 2004:
“In her new book Whitefella Jump
Up, writer Germaine Greer has
called for Australia to embrace its
Aboriginal roots to heal the ‘devastation’ of more than 200 years of
white settlement. Greer, who has
lived in the United Kingdom since
the 1960s, said Australia’s ‘sophisticated recreation lifestyle’ has
created a spiritual wasteland and
pushed the lucky country to the
brink of environmental disaster.”
Canberra Times, November 11,
2002, columnist Ian Warden: “The
fact that there is someone like Alan
Jones, and that his points of view
are so sickeningly awful and yet
are so stupendously popular, is a
cause of great pain ... This would
be a better, smarter, wiser, kinder
and more exciting country if he
didn’t exist and/or if there weren’t
hundreds of thousands of dull and
gullible sheep-like people to be led,
baa-ing in unison, by slick shepherds like him.”
Canberra Times, January 23,
1998: “Sydney environmental activist Peter Garrett, speaking at an
Australia Day address, said that
native title needed to be addressed
without provisos or hidden agendas. Until it was, ‘we shall remain
what we have always been: a people
without a soul, not a nation but a
community of thieves’.”
Canberra Times, August 29,
1985: “White people should get out
Quadrant June 2014
of Australia and New Zealand and
leave these countries to the indigenous people, Maori academic Ms
Pauno Hohepa, a lecturer in women’s history at Auckland University,
told the conference yesterday …
She said the whites of Australia and
New Zealand were the product of
the ‘riff-raff, flotsam and jetsam of
English culture’.”
“Australia” by A.D. Hope:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest …
Without songs, architecture, history;
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth …
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her; a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores ...
Imagine what would happen if a poet or some other commentator said there was a river of
immense stupidity flooding Italy’s
monotonous tribes from Venice to
Palermo; or if some academic said
black people should get out of the
United States and leave the country
to “indigenous people”. The selfrighteous activists would yell their
heads off about “racism”, “bigotry”,
“xenophobia” and the other empty
phrases they use as a substitute for
honest argument. Their pretence
that everybody should be judged by
the same standard, and that colour
is no guide to the worth of a person,
rings hollow in view of their record
over many years.
If it is good enough for ordinary
Australians to put up with such
abuse, then it is good enough for
Aboriginal and ethnic groups to
put up with far milder criticism.
Malcolm H. Brandon
Merimbula, NSW
C h r o n i cl e
K eith Windschut tle
L
ast month the Liberal-National Party governments in New South Wales and Victoria
declared their opposition to Federal AttorneyGeneral George Brandis’s proposal to repeal Section
18C of the Commonwealth’s Racial Discrimination
Act, which prohibits acts “likely to offend, insult,
humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of
people”. Victor Dominello, the NSW Minister for
Citizenship and Communities, and Matthew Guy,
the Victorian Minister for Multicultural Affairs and
Citizenship, lodged formal submissions opposing
any change and put out a joint media release to influence their federal colleagues to support their stand.
Both said they considered it vital that the
Commonwealth did not weaken protections in place
against racial vilification. Mr Dominello produced a
legal opinion from Arthur Moses SC warning that
the protection Australians now received from racial
vilification would be narrowed and, in particular,
protection against Holocaust denial would be lost.
Moses advised: “A new legislative right to engage
in racial vilification in the course of public discussion would, for instance, open the door to Holocaust
deniers to publish their opinions on websites and on
social media in the course of ‘public discussion’.”
However, technology has rendered this argument
redundant. Anyone who Googles “holocaust denial”
will find no less than 5.4 million internet offerings.
The first page alone of Google’s search results offers
writings from some of the worst contributors to
this sleazy business, including the historian David
Irving. It also links to at least forty YouTube videos
where various American and European commentators can be seen and heard pushing the same line.
Amazon.com will sell you almost any anti-Semitic
book in the genre, including Mein Kampf and The
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. And on social
media, well, the only rule there is anything goes.
It is true that, within the Australian jurisdiction, some individuals have been punished, such
as Frederick Toben who in 2009 received three
months in jail for contempt of court for failing to
remove Holocaust denial material from his website.
However, the law is a very sluggish instrument. It
took the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council six
years of appeals and counter-appeals to defeat Toben
in the Federal Court. Yet today, he has still not been
silenced. He now has his own entry in Wikipedia,
complete with references.
Outside authoritarian states like China and North
Korea, the internet has largely rendered censorship
of political opinion impotent. Any Australian politician who pretends he can protect an ethnic group
from views that are likely to offend or vilify its members is promising something he cannot deliver.
But if this is true, why bother to repeal Section
18C? Why not let it remain in the Act to discourage,
however inefficiently, a few would-be imitators of
Frederick Toben and his ilk from going public?
Some context is required here. The 1995 amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, of
which Section 18C was one of the new clauses, did
not arise from any need to curb a sudden outbreak
of racial abuse and intolerance in Australian society.
Instead, they derived from an international political
and intellectual movement of which Australia was
only a small part.
In the 1990s, most Western countries adopted
laws similar to Australia. Their aim was to suppress an array of opinions they argued would cause
offence to people from racial and religious minorities. The principal exception to this was the United
States, whose constitution specifically excludes laws
to restrict freedom of speech. Nonetheless, during
the administration of Bill Clinton, his government
worked to embed the notions of multiculturalism and
ethnic diversity into the American polity. Clinton
declared this represented America’s third “great revolution”, after the first, the War of Independence,
and the second, the civil rights movement.
Behind it all stood the United Nations, which
claimed the era was one of escalating racism, new
forms of discrimination and rising ideologies of
intolerance. The UN and its agencies offered jurists
throughout the world new grounds for legal adventurism and new scope to pursue careers. The result was
a new round of legislation in most Western countries
limiting freedom of speech on grounds defined over
the previous two decades by various UN agencies.
They included such UN “normative instruments”
as the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on
Cultural Diversity, the 1995 Declaration of Principles
on Tolerance, the 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial
Prejudice, and the 1978 Declaration on Fundamental
Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass
Media to Strengthening Peace and International
Quadrant June 2014
3
chronicle
Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights
and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incite­
ment to War.
Under the Keating government, Australia dutifully stepped into the role prescribed for it by passing
into law the amendments that are now in dispute.
In his recent book, How We Invented Freedom,
Daniel Hannan observes the irony of the timing of
these laws. Throughout the Cold War, there had
been absolute freedom of speech in most Englishspeaking countries, but once the menace of communism was gone, the same countries abandoned one of
the core principles for which they had been fighting.
Hannan writes:
of non-western peoples.” Faced with the petition
and a letter from the Council on American Islamic
Relations denouncing Ms Hirsi Ali as a “notorious Islamophobe”, Brandeis President Frederick M.
Lawrence withdrew the invitation. Historian Jeffrey
Herf, a Brandeis PhD holder, wrote an open letter
to Lawrence accusing him of cowardice:
Before 1989, people in English-speaking states
liked to tell each other that, unlike the poor
wretches behind the Iron Curtain, they couldn’t
have their collar grabbed by a police officer
for saying the wrong thing. Yet they are now
regularly arrested for such offences as quoting
Bible verses that might offend gay people, or
being rude about jihadi extremists.
These last two American incidents are worth
recording because they demonstrate how heavily
ironic it is that some people in Australia are justifying the retention of Section 18C on the grounds of
preventing anti-Semitism. Yet the truth is the most
demonstrably effective and enduring preventive of
this prejudice is still a legal and political regime that
preserves freedom of speech.
In fact, the history of Holocaust denial itself
proves it. The most effective single demolition job
on David Irving’s historical works was performed
by Cambridge historian Richard Evans in 2000.
For the defence in Irving’s defamation case against
American academic Deborah Lipstadt, Evans spent
two years checking the scholarship behind Irving’s
works on Nazi history. He found Irving had used
forged documents, ignored conflicting evidence,
and misquoted historical records. Evans’s evidence
in court and in his book Telling Lies About Hitler not
only cost Irving his case, it systematically destroyed
the credibility of the entire genre of Holocaust
denial.
Proving the falsity of strongly held beliefs like
this is never easy. It can only happen in a climate
of unrestricted speech and unfettered research. It
also needs institutions that provide the necessary
resources. The real problem for Australia today is
not the law but the fact that these conditions are so
rare. Institutions that were once bastions of freedom,
especially our universities, have, under the influence of the intellectual tendencies discussed here,
betrayed their calling. Like Brandeis, many of them
shun open debate under the pretence of protecting
the vulnerable from oppression. They oppose rather
than welcome dissent, and are openly politically
partisan.
The repeal of Section 18C would be a small but
helpful gesture in turning back this tide of intolerance and restoring some of the principles of free
expression that Australian society once regarded as
its cultural bedrock.
The result is that Britain, which had enjoyed an
uncensored press since 1695, in 2013 formally brought
in a system of state regulation. In Australia, the
Gillard government attempted to do the same thing,
but fortunately failed. In 2007, author Mark Steyn
was taken to court in Canada for writing disparaging things about Muslims, and in 2011 Australian
journalist Andrew Bolt was convicted of causing
offence to Aborigines.
In April this year, two more examples involved
writers well-known to Quadrant readers.
Daniel Pipes, the President of the Middle East
Forum in Philadelphia, found his website had been
banned from access at the British Library in London
on the grounds of “Religion, Intolerance”. The algorithm that generated this ban was only changed after
Pipes and a number of readers wrote to the library
in protest. Yet the same algorithm had continued to
allow readers access to a range of anti-Semitic, radical Islamist and jihadi websites, including Tawhed,
Al Qaeda’s own Arabic-language website which
promotes writings by Osama bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri.
At the same time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somaliborn critic of Islam, forced into hiding after attempts
on her life in Holland, had been invited to Brandeis
University in Boston to receive an honorary degree.
However, a petition organised by a Muslim professor and a student accused her of being “a divisive
individual”, asserting: “We cannot accept Ms Hirsi
Ali’s triumphalist narrative of western civilisation,
rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness
4
That the president of a university founded by Jews
in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust
should have rescinded an honor to a woman who
has had the courage to attack the most important
source of Jew-hatred in the world today is a
disgraceful act and failure of leadership.
Quadrant June 2014
Da ry l M c C a n n
The Looming Prospect
of a Second Cold War
A
fter Russia’s annexation of Crimea in
March, President Obama had this to say
about President Putin in an interview on
CBS News:
He’s been willing to show a deeply held
grievance about what he considers to be the loss
of the Soviet Union. You would have thought
that after a couple of decades that there’d be
an awareness on the part of any Russian leader
that the path forward does not revert back to
the kinds of practices that, you know, were so
relevant during the Cold War.
In April 2005, on Russian national television,
Vladimir Putin lamented that the dissolution of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics left tens of
millions of his fellow countrymen outside Moscow’s
command. The break-up of the Soviet empire, he
said, was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of
the century”. Clearly, President Putin’s understanding of “the path forward”, which aims to reconcile
the reach of the Soviet empire with a born-again
Holy Mother Russia, contrasts sharply with six
years of President Obama’s multilateral New World
Order.
What informs Putin’s foreign policy is not a universe away from the xenophobia and imperial ambition that drove the Kremlin’s foreign policy at the
commencement of the Cold War: a form of exceptionalism that can only be checked by American
exceptionalism in concert with regional allies.
Stalin’s Plan A for Germany, much like Putin’s
Plan A for modern-day Ukraine, amounted to the
“Finlandisation” of the entire country. Stalin made
his move in early 1946 when he ordered the merger
of “his” KPD (Communist Party of Germany) with
the SPD (Socialist Party of Germany) in the Soviet
Zone. When the SPD in the three Western-occupied
zones did not follow suit but backed instead the
concept of an American-sponsored West German
state, Stalin had to fall back on Plan B: quitting the
Allied Control Council, opposing currency reform
in Trizonia, laying siege to West Berlin, founding
the German Democratic Republic and giving the
green light for Kim Il-Sung’s T34 tanks to cross
the Korean 38th parallel. The Kremlin’s geopolitical aspirations set off the Cold War and embroiled
America in a lethal rivalry. Today, tragically, we
might be witnessing the emergence of parallel circumstances in Ukraine.
There are three ways the world can be spared a
Second Cold War but, unfortunately, the first has
gone by the board, the second is mostly dormant
and the third might have come too late to deter
Putin’s adventurism. In the first scenario, postSoviet Russia would have adopted the normative
practices of a Western-style liberal democracy—
as per Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis—and by doing so renounced traditional Russian
imperial ambitions. The astonishing growth of genuinely autonomous media outlets during the Boris
Yeltsin era (1991–2000) persuaded many observers
that Russia was set to embrace Western-style freedom. Independent-minded reporters, such as Anna
Politkovskaya, found not only their liberal voices
but also the means to be heard. For the first time
since the conclusion of the Russian civil war (1918–
21), journalists—entire newspapers and television
stations, in fact—were not mere marionettes for the
Kremlin.
Nevertheless, during the Yeltsin years the
Russian economy experienced a meltdown as it
made an unruly transition from a Soviet-style command system to private enterprise. Yeltsin’s steep
cuts to welfare, the raising of taxes and reduction
of state subsidies to industry were meant to counter
the liberalisation of prices, but all to no avail—the
financial system went into a tailspin while inflation
skyrocketed. Russia’s one-time lovable rogue may
have been re-elected in 1996 and yet by the time he
handed over the reins of power in 1999 to Vladimir
Putin, head of the Federal Security Service (FSB),
Yeltsin was as unpopular as Mikhail Gorbachev.
Quadrant June 2014
5
The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War
The linchpin of Yeltsin’s economic strategy dur- the mood of the Russian population to be one of
ing the 1990s had been privatisation. Regrettably, “brooding anger” on account of “20 years of perstate enterprises finished up as giveaways to the ceived Western slights and condescension since the
powerful. Assets in industry, energy, finance, tel- collapse of the Soviet Union”. As a result, Russians
ecommunications and the media found their way did not disapprove of one of their intelligence agents
into the hands of those with connections to the old assassinating Alexander Litvinenko, a trenchant
Soviet nomenklatura. Anna Politkovskaya saved her critic of Putin, in the heart of London two weeks
greatest condemnation not for Boris Yeltsin but for after Politkovskaya’s slaying. The Russian public
his successor. In Putin’s Russia (2004), Politkovskaya thrilled at the story of the alleged assassin, Andrey
claims that “Putin’s new-old nomenklatura has Lugovoy, returning safely to Russia after complettaken corruption to heights undreamt of under the ing his mission in a way that made “fools of Britain’s
Communists or Yeltsin”. Moreover, Putin’s exploi- James Bonds”.
tation of the Second Chechen War (1999–2009)
Alexander Litvinenko, who died from poloniumeffectively polished off democracy in Russia.
210-induced acute radiation syndrome, had co-writIn the chapter of Putin’s Russia titled “Our New ten Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within (2003), an
Middle Ages, or War Criminals of All the Russias”, attempt to substantiate the accusation that Putin’s
Politkovskaya depicts the Second Chechen War FSB allies were responsible for the September 1999
(and its toll of 25,000 to 50,000 dead
bombings of Russian apartments.
or missing) as a cancer that affected
Lugovoy’s guilt remains in disevery part of Russian society—the
astings observed pute, but a telling postscript is that
judiciary, human rights, the politiPutin made Lugovoy a member of
the mood of the
cal opposition, the army, the police,
the Duma, thus guaranteeing him
Russian population immunity. Putin also spurned every
the various intelligence agencies,
the media and, most important of to be one of “ brooding attempt by the British government
all, the psyche of the general poputo extradite Lugovoy to the UK for
anger” on account of trial.
lation. Politkovskaya, like Marsha
Gessen and so many other Russian “20 years of perceived
Most Russians, contended
investigative journalists of the time,
Hastings, care “amazingly little”
Western slights and that Putin curtailed free speech
came to believe that it was the FSB
that perpetrated the Russian apartcondescension since and “systematically dismantled the
ment bombings resulting in the
fragile instruments of democracy
the collapse of the
death of 300 civilians. It was this
created by Gorbachev and Yeltsin”.
Soviet Union”.
supposed “false f lag” operation
As David Satter argued five years
that swung Russian public opinion
later in It Was a Long Time Ago and
behind Putin and his ambition to
It Never Happened Anyway (2012),
go to war again in Chechnya. The rumour, whether the Russians have retreated into a traditional form
true or not, may have enhanced his image in certain of statism in which “nothing is higher than the goals
quarters because it marked him as the kind of ruth- of the state”. They are prepared to sign away their
less strongman who could save Russia from itself.
individual sovereignty and “submit to the superePolitkovskaya claims in Putin’s Russia that by rogatory claims of a de-ideologised state” on the
2004 her country had fallen into the “Soviet abyss” understanding that Tsar Vladimir safeguards them
and for a journalist to survive in Russia required from home-grown and foreign malevolence and that
“servility to Putin”. For any remaining contrarians, his potency portends the resurrection of the Russian
Putin’s “guard dogs” were ready with “the bullet, poi- empire.
son or trial”. On October 7, 2006, four bullets struck
Hastings did not envisage a Second Cold War
Politkovskaya, one to the head. Oleg Gordievsky, resulting from Putin’s hostility towards the West,
a covert agent of the British Secret Intelligence but declared that the “notion of Western friendService who defected from the Soviet Union in 1985, ship with Russia is a dead letter”. His assessment of
warned the world that the FSB was now operating Putin’s Russia was not one the European Union or
straight out of the old KGB handbook.
the Americans were ready to hear:
H
M
ax Hastings’s virtuoso essay “Will We Have
to Fight Russia in This Century?” (2007)
made the connection between Vladimir Putin’s
emboldened despotism in Russia and his steppedup anti-West rhetoric from 2003. Hastings observed
6
The best we can look for is grudging
accommodation. The bear has shown its claws
once more, as so often in its bloody history, and
its people enjoy the sensation. We may hope that
in the 21st century we shall not be obliged to
Quadrant June 2014
The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War
fight Russia. But it would be foolish to suppose
that we shall be able to lie beside this dangerous,
emotional beast in safety or tranquillity.
Only those who had been the direct victims of
the old Soviet empire—the Poles, the Estonians,
the Georgians, the Romanians, the Moldavians, a
majority of Ukrainians and so forth—appeared to
be alert to the perils of Russian revanchism.
E
dward Lucas’s The New Cold War (2008) goes
further than Hastings’s article. As his title suggests, Lucas is ready to claim that Putin’s ambitions—even at this relatively early juncture—are
akin to those of the Soviet empire. While the
countries of the European Union slumbered and
America focused its intention on the War on
Terror, Putin was hatching plans to resurrect the
time-honoured Russian ambition of dominion over
Eurasia from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Key to achieving this objective, warned Lucas, would be Russia
wielding its natural resources like a lethal weapon
against European countries. And it is true that gas
has not been piped to Europe from the Russian hinterland in accordance with normal market practices.
The supplier, Gazprom, behaves like an arm of the
Russian state:
The Kremlin wants to prevent European
countries diversifying their sources of energy
supply, particularly in gas. It wants to
strengthen its hold over the international gas
market. It wants to acquire “downstream assets”
distribution and storage capability—in Western
countries. And it wants to use those assets to
exert political pressure.
Lucas likened Putin’s geopolitical mastery over
his European counterparts to “a battle-hardened
chess grandmaster playing against a bunch of inattentive and squabbling amateurs”.
“The ‘New Tsarism’: What Makes Russia’s
Leaders Tick”, the second-most critical chapter
in Lucas’s book, decodes the political glossary in
contemporary Russia, exposing the understanding that exists between the Russian people and
Vladimir Putin or the “First Person”. For instance,
the word gosudarstvennik, which is often applied to
Putin and his coterie, can be translated as “statist”,
a mildly derogatory term in Western parlance, and
yet for Russians something far more patriotic: “A
gosudarstvennik cares about the state’s prestige and
strength; he believes it to be an expression, perhaps the highest expression, of society, culture,
even of civilisation.” The advancement of Russia’s
derzhavnost (“great-power-status”) drives not only
Putin but also his Russian devotees.
The year 2006 saw the introduction of a new history guide for secondary school teachers, A Modern
History of Russia, 1945–2006: A Teachers’ Manual.
The First Person personally endorsed it. The Soviet
empire, Putin would like us to believe, was no “Evil
Empire”—even if (say) the Poles might beg to differ. Edward Lucas, back in 2008, even worried that
the Kremlin would reverse its official position on
the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which Soviet NKVD
agents slaughtered 22,000 Polish prisoners, including 8000 Polish officers. Only in the twilight days
of the Soviet Union did its authorities own up to
the fact that the Nazis had not been guilty of this
crime against humanity. In November 2010, thankfully, the Duma approved a declaration censuring
Stalin and other Soviet officials—but that has not
been the end of the matter.
President Putin, in his 2010 meeting with
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, acknowledged that the decades-old attempt by Soviet officials to “cover up the truth about the executions”
had been “cynical lies”. However, Putin then proceeded to assert that “suggesting the Russian people are to blame for that is the same kind of lie and
fabrication”. The best that can be said about Putin’s
statement is that it constitutes a half-apology and
a disingenuous one at that. According to Putin’s
narrative, the atheistic communists who killed the
innocent Poles were the same criminals who carried out the Great Purges (1936–39) resulting in the
murder of innocent Russians. Ipso facto, the Russian
people were no less the victim of the excesses of
Stalinism than were the 22,000 blameless Poles
executed in the Katyn forest.
At the time, Tusk put the best spin on it he could,
describing his meeting with Putin as “crucial” and
a “turning point” in Russo-Polish relations, even if
he did admit to a “slightly different” understanding
of the significance of Katyn. That “slightly different” outlook is why Putin’s annexation of Crimea
in March has sent Poland, Estonia, Romania and
other Eastern European countries into high alert
to defend themselves and deter any further Russian
encroachment on the sovereignty of Ukraine. Julian
Assange, along with other leftist types, has fobbed
off Putin’s seizure of Crimea as an “existential” geopolitical necessity for the Kremlin, ignoring the fact
that Russian revanchism is an existentialist threat
to Eastern Europe. The Eastern Europeans will
turn to America for support, just as West Germans
sought American help in the late 1940s.
“How Eastern Europe Sits on the Front Line of
the New Cold War” is the most prescient chapter
of Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War. Right there
in black and white is Lucas’s warning that Putin
Quadrant June 2014
7
The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War
planned to reassert Russian control over the “Near
Abroad”. As early as 2000, Putin was defining any
form of “discrimination” against the 25 million
“Russian citizens” who lived abroad as “one of the
military threats facing Russia”. A year later he was
broadening the definition of Russian citizen to “any
Russian-speaker with a pro-Kremlin orientation”:
generating, in effect, geopolitical leverage—or a
potential fifth column—in almost every neighbouring country, from Estonia to Ukraine and beyond.
And that was just the start of it: “Kremlinfinanced think tanks have been set up in Ukraine,
the Caucasus and Moldova, coupled with media
outlets, Internet websites and networks of academics.” In short, Putin has been waging a political,
social, diplomatic, economic and propaganda campaign against Atlanticism (the US-European partnership) and Eastern European self-determination
for over a decade while the West, divided and distracted, turned a blind eye.
T
America, for instance, was given permission to
utilise ex-Soviet military bases in Central Asia
for the Afghanistan War. Putin opened a military hospital in Kabul in December 2001 to service
wounded NATO personnel and Afghan civilians.
The Moscow theatre siege in 2002 and the Beslam
hostage crisis in 2004 seemed to confirm the view
that Islamic terrorism had made unlikely partners
out of Russia and the USA. Significantly, this is
the period when Anna Politkovskaya wrote Putin’s
Russia and rebuked the West for looking at the
words and deeds of Vladimir Putin “through rosetinted spectacles”.
Ultimately Bush did lose his rosy point of view.
Six years after relinquishing power, he had this to
say about his one-time counterpart:
Vladimir’s a person who in many ways views
the US as an enemy … I felt that he viewed the
world as either the US benefits and Russia loses
or vice-versa. I, of course, tried to dispel him of
that notion.
he great hope of the USA and Old Europe was
always to bring post-Soviet Russia into the fold
Putin would no doubt insist that it was Bush’s
and develop a strategic partnership that would confine the Cold War to the twentieth century. The Iraq War that turned everything pear-shaped. He
might argue that America’s use of
early rapport between President
force to topple Saddam Hussein’s
George W. Bush and President
regime was a unilateralist act—
Vladimir Putin, combined with
utin has been
or, at least, done without Russia’s
the unexpected and shocking terwaging a political, endorsement—and this rendered
rorist attack on America in 2001,
convinced many that a genuine
social, diplomatic, the nascent Russo-American strategic partnership null and void.
post-Cold War strategic partnereconomic and
There is an element of truth in such
ship really could be forged between
propaganda campaign a narrative, but it tells only a part of
Washington and Moscow.
story.
Bush’s first meeting with Putin
against Atlanticism theMore
likely, Ukraine’s Orange
came at the Ljubljana Summit in
June 2001. His warm words for and Eastern European Revolution was the breaking point
the Russian leader surprised many self-determination for in Russia’s relationship with the
States. Putin had presumed
observers at the time: “I looked the
over a decade while United
that an unwritten understanding
man in the eye. I found him to be
with the West designated Ukraine
very straightforward and trustworthe West, divided
a part of Russia’s sphere of influthy and we had a very good diaand distracted,
ence until the end of time. The
logue. I was able to get a sense of
turned a blind eye. Orange Revolution challenged that
his soul.” Though he was less effunotion. Erupting after the allegedly
sive, Putin’s body language and
rigged 2004 presidential contest
general demeanour at the summit
contrasted with the frosty relations that existed gave victory to the pro-Russian candidate Viktor
between Russia and America during President Yanukovych, people-power challenged the results
Clinton’s final year in office. There was, never- of the election. Putin, according to all reports,
theless, a caveat to Putin’s determination to treat looked on in horror as Viktor Yushchenko and
America as “Russia’s partner”. He warned that “any Yulia Tymoshenko proceeded to assume the posts
unilateral action” on the part of Washington would of president and prime minister of Ukraine respectively. Later, Putin was able to turn the tables when
“complicate” matters.
The Bush–Putin relationship grew in the after- “his man”—Yanukovych—became prime minister
math of 9/11. Putin promised to support Bush’s in 2006 and subsequently president in 2010. The
War on Terror in any way he could—and he did. situation appeared to have resolved itself in favour
P
8
Quadrant June 2014
The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War
of the pre-2004 status quo.
During the time of the Orange Revolution, crucially, Putin believed that any move on the part of
Ukrainians to exist beyond the remit of Moscow
must be the product of meddling Western intelligence agencies (often disguised as civilian NGOs)
who colluded with local ultra-nationalists or
Russophobes (with, naturally, pro-fascist or even
pro-Nazi sympathies). Such is the paranoid worldview of an old KGB hand. Dealing with such a
fearful and mistrustful Russian leader was always
going to be tricky for the United States and the
West in general—no less awkward, perhaps, than
dealing with a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev. Only
American strength of purpose has the capacity to
inhibit Russian adventurism.
B
arack Obama believed he understood the key to
eliminating Russo-American antagonism when
he entered the White House in January 2009. The
remedy for reversing the enmity between the USA
and the Russian Federation was to be found in the
origins of the Cold War. Indoctrinated in New Left
ideology, Obama knew it was not only mutual fear
and suspicion but also Harry Truman’s bad faith
that kick-started the Cold War after the Second
World War.
The solution, in the mind of Obama at least,
must have seemed relatively straightforward: conduct yourself with humility and repentance and
immediately make provisions to remove US troops
from Iraq. Putin was bound to come aboard the
peace train. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even
presented the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei
Lavrov, with a gift-wrapped red button—pinched
from a hotel jacuzzi—to symbolise the resetting
of relations between Moscow and Washington.
Only belatedly did the American delegation realise that the lettering on the button translated as
“overcharged” rather than “reset”. The Americans,
to the unconcealed glee of the Russians, squirmed
in the media spotlight—and have been squirming
ever since. Four years of an accommodating Obama
failed to win over an unbiddable Putin. In October
2012, just before his re-election, Obama was overheard on a “hot” microphone promising Putin’s
proxy, Dmitry Medvedev, that he could be “more
flexible” in his second term if that would help.
Medvedev politely agreed to pass the message onto
Putin.
Too much “flexibility”, in fact, is the third reason the world has found itself revisiting Cold War
scenarios. If the Russian Federation had evolved
into a normative liberal democracy rather than
the world’s first bona fide mafia state, a “supersize
model of the KGB” as Masha Gessen describes it
in The Man Without a Face (2012), then Obama’s
first-term flexibility might have been just the ticket.
He dropped the missile shield program promised
to Poland and Czechoslovakia, took US forces out
of Iraq, remained silent when Gazprom modulated
westward gas supplies to the rhythm of Russia’s
foreign policy, turned the other cheek after Putin
accused him of the “planned murder” of Muammar
Gaddafi, and meekly endured Putin’s undisguised
contempt every time they met in public. Did Obama
ever comprehend what he was up against before it
became too late to chasten the First Person? This is
Putin, over a decade ago, justifying Russia’s unrestrained brutality in Chechnya:
It’s like with a dog, you know. A dog senses
when somebody is afraid of it, and bites. The
same applies here. If you become jittery, they
will think that they are stronger. Only one
thing works in such circumstances—to go on
the offensive. You must hit first, and hit so hard
that your opponent will not rise to his feet.
The first six years of Obama’s presidency did
not pass entirely without Russo-American collaboration. On May 9, 2010, American soldiers participated in the Moscow Victory Parade alongside
Russian troops for the first time. That same year
the USA and Russia conducted an anti-hijacking
exercise called Vigilante Eagle. America and Russia
often co-operated in fighting piracy and terrorism
in Afghanistan, although Obama has now signalled
he will be removing the US military presence there.
The optimists might argue that Obama worked in a
productive way with Putin when they enticed Iran
to the negotiating table on the subject of nuclear
weapons. However, Russia can live with its principal ally in the Middle East going nuclear, but
the United States and its Middle East allies cannot. This was never a recipe for a successful outcome, and even less so in the shadow of the crisis
in Ukraine.
Tony Blair, in his role as UN Middle East
envoy, now asserts that the greatest danger to
the West is not Russia but “the threat of Islamic
extremism”. The former British leader is currently
encouraging America to increase co-operation with
Russia (and China) in the fight against Islamic
extremism irrespective of “other differences”—
in other words, the crisis in Ukraine. As long as
Obama remains in the White House, though, Blair
is probably whistling in the wind. The Kremlin
remains dumbfounded by Obama’s embrace of
the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, not to
mention his close association with Turkey’s Prime
Minister Erdogan, who provides aid and comfort
Quadrant June 2014
9
The Looming Prospect of a Second Cold War
to Al Qaeda types in Syria. It might have been
due to narrow economic self-interest—the creation
of a Russo-Libyan OPEC-style cartel for gas
producers—that Putin wanted Muammar Gaddafi
to remain in power. Yet it is not only Putin who
would like to know why America has done so little
to impede Al Qaeda-aligned extremists thriving in
the post-Gaddafi landscape.
T
he ideal of a strategic partnership between
Russia and America, which would reduce
the chances of a Second Cold War, has become
less likely over the past six years. The primary
guilty party in this unfortunate turn of events is
Vladimir Putin, the upstart KGB opportunist who
has exploited the fears and disappointments of
the Russian people in order to satisfy his despotic
impulse and resuscitate the darkest aspects of
Russian history: imperial ambition and xenophobia.
His reconfigured version of Russian exceptionalism
means that Ukraine has every chance of playing
Ground Zero in a new Cold War, reprising the role
Allied-occupied Germany performed in setting off
the original Cold War. An over-confident Putin,
who has so far outplayed Obama at every turn, is in
danger of overstepping the mark in Ukraine—just
as Stalin did in post-war Germany.
A new generation of revisionist historians wait
in the wings to caricature the massive demonstrations that toppled Viktor Yanukovych as the work
of Western-sponsored provocateurs, and Putin’s
actual provocateurs as the voice of the people. But
Angela Merkel and the EU did not bring things
undone in Ukraine. The vast majority of Ukrainians,
including most of those in Eastern Ukraine, would
prefer to associate with the West rather than accept
kind Mr Putin’s altruistic offer of membership
in his proposed four-nation Common Economic
Space, even with subsidised gas thrown into the
bargain. Obama, as a result, is between a rock and
hard place. The less he does to support the freedomloving people of Ukraine and the Baltic states, the
more ambitious Putin will become; conversely, the
greater the push back on Obama’s part, the more
the usual anti-America crowd in the West—plus
a sprinkling of so-called paleo-conservatives—will
mock The One’s original ambition to be the twentyfirst century’s foremost healer-in-chief.
Daryl McCann wrote “The Lethal Ideology of
Holocaust Inversion” in the May issue. He has a blog
at http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au.
Shadows and Reflections
Stirring on the couch this August afternoon,
a big log breaking open in the stove,
I wake to reflections in the cabinet’s glass,
of sloping roofs, a line of winter trees
stripped to the bone and shivering in the breeze,
one branch brushing lightly against the window.
I could, with a pane of frosted glass, transform
that gesture into art: the kind I’ve seen
in sunrooms when I’ve stepped in from the snow:
iced-windows like a Chinese folding screen
on which was spread, like ink, a delicate shadow.
Glancing from my book, I’d note the stages
of the branch’s perfect shadow on the glass,
the shadow’s perfect pattern on my pages,
an aching thing that yet could not be broken,
brushing against the window’s fragile ice
like one who’d brush the sleep from dreaming eyes
when I was young, until I’d reach for her
who now, from her long sleep, will not be woken.
I wake today, but long for another winter.
10
Stephen McInerney
Quadrant June 2014
Tribute to Three Masters
at Gichuji Temple near Lake Biwa, Otsu
From Adelaide to Alice Springs
This is a kind of double-edged pilgrimage
out into the vast clean country
in a train that takes its name
from those early settlers in the desert
who knelt towards Mecca amongst
salt bush and gibber plain.
As it travels through Port Augusta
I think of camels in woven jewels
of chanting men in mud-brick mosques
despised by cattlemen for not drinking
and despising those who still
sing and hunt beyond the edge of town.
In the morning we pass over the Finke’s dry bed
where borders and laws slice through language
where man-sized goannas hunt
and wedge-tailed eagles glide amongst clouds.
In Alice I talk, read and drink: at Bojangles
shake the gentle hand of a man from community
and yarn with a bush scholar in a Ned Kelly beard
about blood, payback and whitefella law.
And from others unaware of history’s ironies
hear again those fantasies of revolution
that have kept people out here imprisoned.
1
Basho’s Grave
Relieved to arrive
at last at Basho’s place of
burial … and yet
as I stand before his grave
grieved at how little I’m grieved.
2
Issa’s Style
In the old pond near
Basho’s grave, a small turtle
rides a big one’s back:
a subject suited perhaps
more to Issa than Basho.
3
Buson’s Rabbits
Buson, no rabbits
scampered across Lake Biwa
when I gazed on it.
Though in truth I was in want
of both saké and moonlight.
Andrew Lansdown
Hung-over I pack my four wheel drive and head out
to where the old people learned of canvas and brushes
where they began painting the dream that created them
that created kangaroos, honey ants, emus, rain and sky.
To where young necks are laced with tins and ropes
and the genitals of children weep.
I know that despair is what I will find
amongst these people’s lives and within myself.
Yet in this desert of the mind
I will dig the springs of our abdicated depths
sustained by this sense of inwardness
and softly spoken words of dream-life
that are my reassurance.
Gary Clark
Quadrant June 2014
11
B r i a n W imbor ne
The Tactical Myth
of Palestinian Identity
F
ollowing the rise of the arch-terrorist Yasser
Arafat to the leadership of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation in 1969, there was
a push to convince the world that Palestinians are
a unique people of Arab origin who had inhabited
the lands of Israel for thousands of years. The uninformed and gullible believed it, and leftists still
promote it.
In fact, there are no such people as Palestinians
and there never have been. If anyone doubts this
they should consider the following statement made
in 1977 by Zahir Muhsein, a PLO executive committee member, during an interview with the Dutch
newspaper Trouw:
The creation of a Palestinian state is only a
means for continuing our struggle against the
state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality
today there is no difference between Jordanians,
Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for
political and tactical reasons do we speak today
about the existence of a Palestinian people, since
Arab national interests demand that we posit
the existence of a “distinct Palestinian people”
to oppose Zionism.
Nor was there ever a state called Palestine or a
Palestinian culture or a Palestinian language. Like
the Jordanians, Palestinians are a recent creation.
If truth and justice prevail over revisionist history
promoted by the Left, there never will be a state
called Palestine in place of Israel and the word will
remain no more than the name of a geographical
region.
T
he Roman emperor Hadrian, in an effort to
destroy Jews once and for all, renamed the
territory of Judea (the present-day West Bank),
Palaestina, after the Philistines, an Aegean people
who had conquered the coast of Canaan. They
appear in the Old Testament as depraved pagans
and have long since vanished from history.
12
Hadrian’s intention was to eradicate memory of
the Jewish people whom the Romans exiled from
their homeland as punishment for having rebelled
against them in 130 AD. Nevertheless, a handful of
Jews remained in Israel, and their descendants have
been a Jewish presence ever since. In fact, Jews are
the only group of people to have lived continuously
in Israel for the past 3700 years.
With the fall of the Roman empire, a host of
interlopers took over the region called Palestine—
Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Crusaders and
Mamluks—but they never created an independent
country. Even under Ottoman rule (1517 to 1917)
Palestine did not become a state.
Following the defeat of the Ottomans in the
First World War, the term “Palestinian” most often
referred to the region’s Jews, not least because so
few Arabs were prominent in the British mandated
territory of Palestine. For example, there were the
Jewish newspaper the Palestine Post and the Jewish
Palestine Symphony Orchestra (later the Israel
Philharmonic Orchestra).
Present-day Arabs who call themselves
Palestinians are relative newcomers to the region.
The earliest Arabs arrived in small numbers in 632
as part of the Muslim invasion. However, they had
no historical ties to the ancient land of Israel or the
territories of Judea and Samaria (popularly but mistakenly called the West Bank).
In Jerusalem, Jews have been a majority since
the 1840s. In 1899, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem,
Yusef Diya al-Khalidi, said, “Who can challenge
the rights of the Jews in Palestine? Good Lord,
historically it is really your country.”
In addition to the early Muslim invaders, large
numbers of Arabs from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and
Iraq settled in the region in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, attracted by the commercial
opportunities opened up by newly-arrived Jewish
settlers, mainly from Eastern Europe and Russia,
pursuing the Zionist dream of re-establishing their
homeland and transforming it into the biblical land
Quadrant June 2014
The Tactical Myth of Palestinian Identity
of “milk and honey”.
they are exempt from serving in the Israeli Defence
In 1948 about 1.2 million Arabs lived in Force. Only in Israel are Palestinian Arabs treated
Palestine. However, with the invasion of the terri- humanely and their rights recognised.
tory by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq on
UN Resolution 181, passed in 1947, spoke of
the day the modern state of Israel was founded, the the founding of a Jewish state and an Arab state.
demographics of the region changed quickly. Large Yet the prospect of there ever being an independnumbers of Arabs fled to escape war and because ent Palestinian Arab state is about zero. This is not
false tales of Israeli atrocities, spread by the invad- because Israel opposes a two-state solution (in fact,
it has consistently favoured it) but because no Arab
ers, caused them to panic.
However, instead of being welcomed and helped country seriously supports it. To do so would mean
by their brother Arabs, they were herded into con- recognising the right of Israel to exist.
centration camps, to be used as
A Palestinian state at peace
pawns in the Arabs’ neverending
with Israel is anathema to most
attempts to liquidate Israel. Jordan
Moreover, peace between a
arge numbers of Arabs.
offered them some comfort but
Palestinian state and Israel would
Arabs from Egypt, be a stumbling block to Iran’s ambieven that was intermittent.
If Arab invaders had succeeded
tion of becoming the region’s domiSyria, Lebanon
in destroying Israel, it is unlikely
nant power. Only the existence of
and Iraq settled
that the Palestinian Arabs who
Israel thwarts Iranian imperialism.
had taken flight would have been
Consequently, the sight of
in the region in
allowed to return to their homes.
Mahmood
Abbas negotiating a
the nineteenth
There is no love lost among Arabs.
peace deal with Israel, under presand twentieth
The spoils would have been shared
sure from Obama and Kerry, is a
out among the victors; the people
pathetic
farce and the actors know
centuries, attracted
we call Palestinians would have
it. The slightest compromise by
by the commercial Abbas would effectively sign his
received nothing.
opportunities opened own death warrant. The farce of
o appreciate the plight of the
negotiations
up by newly-arrived Palestinian-Israeli
Palestinians it is important
proceeds largely for the benefit and
Jewish settlers.
to understand that the Arabs are
amusement of the rest of the world.
largely a tribal people whose first
There is an even deeper reason
loyalty is not to the nation-state
why an Arab peace with Israel is
but to their families, clans and tribes. They see unlikely. According to Muslim law, once a territory
Palestinians, not as brothers, but as landless aliens. has been under Islamic control, it may never revert
People in the West who pity today’s inhabit- to ownership by non-Muslims. It is the Islamic verants of Gaza and the West Bank would do well sion of the Brezhnev Doctrine, under which a comto remember who put them there—not Israel, but munist country must never be allowed to revert to a
their fellow Arabs.
non-communist one.
Leftists who call for the destruction of Israel
Meantime, the talks will go on, terrorist attacks
and its replacement by a Palestinian state should on Israel will proceed under Iranian and Syrian
compare Israel’s one and half million Arabs who directives, and Palestinian Arabs living beyond
enjoy the benefits of full citizenship, to Palestinians Israel’s borders will continue to wallow in the
in Arab countries who are looked upon with con- ordure created for them by their fellow Arabs.
tempt. Israeli Arabs hold seats in the Knesset, run
successful businesses and serve in Israel’s civil and Brian Wimborne wrote “The Inexorable Expansion of
diplomatic services. Unlike most Jewish Israelis, the Welfare Class” in the May 2013 issue.
L
T
This project has been assisted by the
Commonwealth Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Quadrant June 2014
13
P eter S mith
The Questionable Equations
of Thomas Piketty
P
aul Krugman, in his review in the New York
Review of Books, described Thomas Piketty’s
book as a “magnificent sweeping meditation
on inequality”. Christopher Croke, writing in the
Australian, described it as “magnificent”. Numbers
of other laudatory reviews can be found, particularly from those who look at economics from the
Left. But from whatever standpoint, the book is a
tour de force in its presentation of historical data—
clearly painstakingly sourced and constructed by
Piketty and his colleagues—on income and wealth
going back to the eighteenth century in some cases;
across the major countries of Western Europe,
and the United States and Canada, and “outlying”
countries, including Australia and New Zealand. It
will undoubtedly provide a rich source of new data
for researchers and PhD students. Unfortunately
that is the full extent of its value.
Thomas Piketty is a French economist at the
Paris School of Economics. From his PhD onwards,
obtained at the LSE in the early 1980s, he has specialised in the subject of income and wealth distribution. He spent some time teaching in America
at MIT before returning to France. Apparently
his work with Emmanuel Saez, a fellow French
economist who now teaches at the University of
California, Berkeley, provided ammunition for the
Occupy Wall Street movement by drawing attention
to the wealth and income of the so-called one per
cent (“the top centile”). Piketty is on the left side of
the political fence and this is evident throughout his
book. Nevertheless, numerous digressions aside, his
approach is largely analytical rather than polemical.
Piketty bases his analysis on what he, at a complete stretch, calls the two fundamental laws of
capitalism. The first law is that the share of national
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty (translated by Arthur
Goldhammer)
Belknap Press, 2014, 696 pages, US$39.95
14
income flowing to capital (α) is equal to the rate of
return on capital (r) multiplied by the ratio of the
stock of capital to income (β). Thus α = r × β. I have
used the same symbols as in the book.
Thankfully, Piketty doesn’t like the intrusion of
mathematics into economics, so his resort to algebra is of the simplest kind. If, say, the rate of return
on capital is 5 per cent and there is six times as
much capital as annual income, then capital’s share
of national income will be 30 per cent (6 × 5 per
cent); with the balance going to labour (in a simplified world of just capital and labour contributing to
the generation of income). The equation is in fact
an identity. But it is an identity that Piketty works
hard in concert with his second law, covered below,
to explain economic forces. In fact, he works his
so-called laws much too hard to be at all credible.
His first law takes on explanatory power because
his scrutiny of the historical data across time and
countries points towards the return on capital (r)
being relatively constant at around 5 per cent. What
this means, if his data and his reading of it are correct, is that the share of national income which
accrues to capital largely depends on the size of the
capital stock relative to national income. The more
the capital stock builds, the less share of national
income will go to labour; and as capital is tightly
held so inequality will rise.
What Piketty finds is that up to the start of the
First World War there was growing inequality of
wealth. He estimates this reached orders of magnitude of 90 per cent held by the top “decile” and 50
per cent held by the top “centile”. National income
(wage income plus the return on capital) was less
skewed. In France, for example, he estimates that
the top decile received 45 to 50 per cent of national
income. At the time, he estimates that the capital stock in France, Britain and Germany stood at
between 6.5 to 7 times national income. Hence, of
course, by “the first law” meaning that a large proportion of national income accrued to the relatively
few owning capital, who could then reinvest the
Quadrant June 2014
The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty
proceeds to further improve their positions.
he assumes 1.5 per cent a year—will be insufficient
Piketty asks what would have happened if this to create enough income growth to balance the savprocess had played itself out through the twentieth ings rate. The first and second laws will have their
century. Could democratic society have survived way. The ratio of capital to income will grow and
even more extreme inequalities? We will never produce growing inequality:
know, because a number of factors combined in
When the rate of return on capital exceeds
the first half of the twentieth century to destroy
the rate of growth of output and income
the capital stock. According to Piketty, two world
as it did in the nineteenth century and
wars, low savings rates, expropriations and govseems likely to do again in the twenty-first,
ernment controls reduced the capital stock by the
capitalism automatically generates arbitrary
1950s to only around 2.5 per cent of national income.
and unsustainable inequalities that radically
Consequently inequality was squeezed.
undermine the meritocratic values on which
However, Piketty does not see this as the natural
democratic societies are based.
order of things. As a point of departure he bounces
off a paper by Simon Kuznets written in the 1950s:
There we have his theory in a nutshell. A fleshier
“Economic Growth and Income Inequality”, in
which Kuznets suggests that inequality, like a bell part is that as the capital stock and the earnings on
curve, will rise as industrialisation takes off but it build, so inheritance will again start forming the
decline as people more generally participate in kind of influence on society and on the economy
that it had in the eighteenth and
industry. Piketty disagrees and sugnineteenth centuries. This will be
gests that the recent resurgence of
self-perpetuating and will underinequality since the 1970s—though
ou can’t assume
any delusion that reward is
still leaving wealth inequality much
that the saving rate mine
based on merit.
less marked than at the beginand income growth
ning of the twentieth century—is
here is more to Piketty’s analya portent of things to come in the
are independent
sis when it comes to the growtwenty-first century, unless countered by government action. It is variables. If the rate ing wages of CEOs and senior
executives. I will cover that later,
necessary to go to his second funof saving exceeds
as I will his solutions for counterdamental law of capitalism.
income growth for ing wealth and income inequality.
This law says that in the long
run the ratio of the capital stock to
a period it is more First to the central question: Is
there anything amiss with Piketty’s
national income (β)—on which, as
than likely that
analysis of the likely growth in the
I have explained above, the share
the application
relative size of the capital stock and
of income going to owners of capiits implications?
tal depends—is equal to the perof those savings
Within the restrictive theocentage of income that is saved (s)
will significantly
retical bounds of his model repdivided by the rate of growth in
resented by his two laws and by
national income (g). Thus β = s/g.
lift growth.
his assumptions there is no simple
Now there numbers of nuances
flaw. But—and it is a big but—
in the way the components of this
equation are defined but these are not so important, complex economic forces cannot be modelled with
except to say that the rate of saving is net of capital two simple equations, and therefore the inevitable
depreciation. The sense of the equation is straight- implications that he sees on the horizon are far
forward enough. If people save a lot then the capital from inevitable. For example, savings can’t go on
stock ratio (β) will tend to grow and this will pro- exceeding the growth in income (as represented in
duce growing inequality. But the central point that the second law) otherwise we would end up with a
Piketty makes is that with any given saving rate, superabundance of capital. As capital grows relalower income growth also lifts β; and Piketty sees tive to labour you would expect to see the price of
low growth ahead primarily because of very low to capital fall and so reduce the share of income going
to those who own it.
zero rates of population growth.
Piketty tries to counter this by assuming, on
Demography is in fact the variable which he
believes may undo the democratic social contract the basis of his interpretation of past data, that
by producing insufferable inequality. This is the the elasticity of substitution of capital for labour is
case because he believes that per-capita growth of greater than one. Simply put, this means that as its
income under even the most optimistic scenarios— price falls by, say, 5 per cent, more than 5 per cent
Y
T
Quadrant June 2014
15
The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty
more of it will be used in the production process,
thus increasing its share of national income. The
answer to this is that it is impossible to calculate
the elasticity of substitution of such a heterogeneous commodity as aggregate capital. Moreover,
common sense points to the elasticity of most components of capital becoming less than one at some
early point; otherwise we do end up in an unrealistic world of capital superabundance. Sometimes
common sense has to be used to trump untenable
economic theories.
Piketty also ignores the positive effect of savings on economic growth. He has income growing
below the saving rate as being a state of equilibrium
(that is, a state which has no tendency to change).
But, in fact, saving is likely to be applied to increase
growth. You can’t assume that the saving rate and
income growth are independent variables. If the
rate of saving exceeds income growth for a period it
is more than likely that the application of those savings will significantly lift growth. Milton Friedman
(in Free to Choose) says it well: “The accumulation
of physical capital ... has played an essential role in
economic growth.”
A more general case against the two laws is
that they operate only in the way described if it is
assumed that the shape and extent of technological progress don’t shake things up in unforeseeable
ways and if the competitive and regulatory landscape stays as is. Once scope is allowed for unpredictable technological progress and the possibility
of substantial product and labour market deregulation (not of course mentioned by Piketty) per
capita income growth might well exceed expectations. Additionally, technological progress, as well
as increasing economic growth, is often responsible
for the obsolescence of chunks of the existing capital stock; which would, of course, reduce the share
of income going to capital. In fact, it seems likely
that part of the reason for the relative decline in the
capital stock in the twentieth century was because
of rapid technological innovations. I could go on
but, in short, Piketty’s thesis does not survive realworld scrutiny.
Piketty’s two laws do not explain the complex
economic forces underlying the progress of capitalism and simply can’t be used to predict the future.
It is simplistic to think otherwise. It is also noticeable that Piketty fails to address the upsurge in
well-spread prosperity since the Second World War
that has accompanied a period of more or less stable inequality and then increasing inequality since
the middle of 1970s. After all, isn’t it much more
important that society becomes more prosperous
than more equal? Sometimes you might be forgiven
for thinking that those on the Left value equality
16
over prosperity.
It is understandable why Piketty worries about
patrimony becoming a gradually more important
factor in enshrining wealth among the relatively
few. This is particularly the case if you are mentally
occupying the languid worlds created by Austen
and Balzac to which he occasionally refers. But we
are not in that world. To quote Friedman again:
“Without the maintenance of inherited capital the
gains made by one generation would be dissipated
by the next.” It doesn’t matter how people acquire
wealth, everyone has the potential of gain, if it is
used either directly or indirectly, via investments in
stocks and bonds, to increase the productive capacity of the economy. Gina Rinehart is a good case in
point but many others could be identified.
A
s a completely separate matter Piketty examines the sharp rise in executive income since
the 1980s. This has meant that while inequality of
wealth is still far less than it was one hundred years
ago income inequality has, more or less, returned to
its former level. He notes that the rise in executive
income has been especially acute in the Englishspeaking countries, with America leading the
way; and that this trend will have a compounding
effect on wealth inequality. He says nothing about
bloated public service salaries.
Valiantly, Piketty makes a show of assessing
whether the very large incomes and bonuses paid
to senior executives of large corporations can be
explained by marginal productivity. In economics
wages (and the rewards to other factors of production) are supposed to be anchored in marginal productivity. Quite simply businesses maximise their
profits by hiring people up until the value they add
to profit comes close to their wages. Businesses in
fact have no way of making such fine calculations.
Nevertheless, the theory of marginal productivity expresses a matter of truth in so far as businesses that manage, by one means or another, to
act in accordance with the theory do in fact maximise their profits. It is a benchmark and a valuable
economics pedagogical device. Not surprisingly
though, and as he rightly should, Piketty rejects
any connection between marginal productivity and
the payment of multi-million-dollar incomes and
bonuses.
He concludes that the upsurge in executive
rewards can be best explained by executives having
greater incentives to negotiate harder for more pay
if the government extracts far less of it in tax. He
notes, for example, in contrast to the stability of the
top income tax rates in France and Germany (50
to 60 per cent) that the top rates in the USA and
Britain fell after 1980 from between 80 and 90 per
Quadrant June 2014
The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty
the primary purpose of the capital [global
cent to between 30 and 40 per cent, with Reagan
wealth] tax is not to finance the social state but
bringing the US rate down to 28 per cent in 1986.
to regulate capitalism. The goal first is to reduce
Executive rewards these days can be confronting
inequality of wealth, and the second to impose
for those of us not earning them. But we need to get
effective regulation on the financial and banking
above it. The sporting arena can be instructive. Sir
system in order to avoid crises.
Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester
United, retired last year. He was the most successPiketty’s view is that the authorities need much
ful manager in English football history. He was
reportedly paid the equivalent of $14 million a more extensive information on holdings and flows
year. He was replaced by David Moyse, reportedly of wealth in order to control the financial system.
paid $9 million, who has just been sacked after ten He believes that a global wealth tax regime would
months of a very unsuccessful tenure. You could say perforce produce that information. I threw in the
in retrospect that Moyse was overpaid. But was Sir extended quote on the second goal of the wealth
Alex? So far as I know, no one has made that claim. tax to illustrate that Piketty strays a good deal from
If a second Ferguson were to come along I am fairly his central subject at times, often into polemical
confident that he could command an even higher territory.
There is quite a lot of left-wing polemical stuff
salary than Sir Alex.
Now business is not altogether like sport. But in the book: on global warming; on the need to
there is a world of difference between, say, Coles redistribute petroleum revenues in the Middle East;
falling behind Woolworths or keeping pace or on the need to reduce income inequality among
nations; on “new forms of property
edging ahead. Obviously any numand democratic control of capitalber of businesses could be used as
ism”; on seats for workers on the
examples. Boards and shareholdapitalism will
boards of companies; on new forms
ers will be prepared to pay a very
continue to make
of participation and governance;
large salary to the person who they
on the “ideal society”; and so on.
the world more
think will bring success. Failure, as
However,
while this stuff nails
in sport, is painful and costly. It
prosperous. A freer Piketty’s colours
to the mast, with
needs to be imprinted in the minds
capitalism would
Marx also given twenty mentions,
of those on the Left that first-rate
businesses regularly become sec- bring more prosperity his thesis remains the analytical one
that capitalism has a “logical conond-rate businesses or go out of
business, usually because of poor still. If along the way tradiction very close to what Marx
management.
some do much better described”. That contradiction is
capitalism consists in building
Global competition is now
than others it is a that
up capital and in so doing creates
much more cut-throat than it ever
small price to pay. potentially destructive inequality.
was in the sedate past when techAt one level Piketty has provided
nology moved more slowly and
a valuable compendium of historiwhen transport costs and tariffs
insulated domestic industries. That, I think, is the cal data. However, that would not have sold well, or
most important reason why managerial rewards caused a stir. His polemical thoughts on new forms
have skyrocketed. Higher top tax rates might have of capitalism and democracy, and so on, are banal to
a dampening effect but is it likely that ways would say the least. No, what makes his book “interesting”
be found to circumvent more onerous tax rules, as are his two interrelated laws purportedly determinthey have in the past. Provided high rewards are ing the path of capitalism and its almost inevitable
not extracted at the point of a gun or by threats and creation, left to its own devices, of untenable wealth
intimidation we should all keep calm and swallow inequality.
As I explained above, the complexity of an
our envy.
evolving technology-based market economy caniketty’s solution to growing inequality whether not be captured by two simple equations comprisof wealth or income is, in a word, taxation— ing a few aggregates. Piketty’s thesis is simplistic,
certainly high progressive income taxes and inheri- and therefore none of his proposals to tax capital
tance taxes but, most importantly, he argues for a and control the economy are well-based. His whole
global annual wealth tax. He concedes that this will thesis is economic naivety writ large. I expect freebe almost near impossible to put in place but sug- market academic economists will do a thorough job
gests that it could be approached gradually region of dismantling it—if, of course, they think it worthwhile. In the meantime, for example, two brief
by region. He maintains that:
C
P
Quadrant June 2014
17
The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty
commentaries by Hunter Lewis and Peter Klein in
the Mises Daily give Piketty’s theory the short shrift
it deserves among free market economists.
Why then, you might ask, would numerous
renowned economists reviewing this book think it
profound? Why would they think that capitalism
and its future can be explained by a few aggregate
variables and two simple equations? The answer
is unfortunately without mystery. They are probably the same economists who live in the equally
simplistic world of aggregates created by Keynes.
Hayek aptly called this kind of economic thinking
the pretence of knowledge when none in fact exists.
We can relax. Capitalism will continue to make
the world more prosperous. A freer capitalism
would bring more prosperity still. If along the way
some do much better than others it is a small price
to pay. I will finish with a quote from Hayek (from
“The Atavism of Social Justice”) which I am confident no one on the Left will comprehend:
The market process ... corresponds to the
definition of a game ... It is a contest played
according to rules and decided by superior skill,
strength or good fortune. It is ... both a game
of skill as well as a game of chance. Above all,
it is a game which serves to elicit from each
player the highest worthwhile contribution to
the common pool from which each will win an
uncertain share.
Peter Smith wrote “How Money Has Changed, and
Why It Matters” in the May issue. His book Bad
Economics was published recently by Connor Court.
An invitation to goosestep
for Rob and RV
Wanna goosestep with me?
he says with a grin.
Wanna what?
Arms around shoulder and waist
we step
one, two, three,
and give a high-legged, knees-locked kick
to unwind the hefty roll of silver oblongs
attached to the old gate post.
We march until a hinge-joint ribbon glints
on the ground beside star pickets and wire strands,
ready to be stood, strained and tied
into a fence that will keep stock in or out.
His stride longer than mine,
I soft shoe shuffle to maintain the pace,
ill-prepared for can-can kicks,
ill-shod in garden clogs that catch
and threaten to trip and thus upend us both.
We pause to correct the netting’s course
and the rhythm resumes
one, two, three, kick.
This is the way, he says, your Dad and I
(my dad long gone,
a man bound to clients and the courts
who welcomed farm hand duties on weekends)
This is the way your dad and I did it
but without arms linked,
he says with a wink,
savouring now, as then, working outdoors
and a tick on the list at the end of the day.
18
Quadrant June 2014
Robyn Lance
The Murray: A Tribute
When reading a poem by Ian Mudie who wrote
The Murray’s single flow points no swift moral for
meandering hearts, in his Glory of the Sun
we caught a glimpse that day into another’s memory bank.
Ian Mayelston Mudie, born in nineteen eleven
had the right idea of the spirit of his place,
his Alcheringa. His ashes were scattered some place
on the Murray River in nineteen seventy seven.
We remembered the Murray at Mannum.
The hired houseboat, eight friends—four couples
late in life; who journeyed from all over interstate
by airplane, car and caravan, to reignite the yarns
of youth. Friends forever or so it seems.
To eat, sleep, drink, laugh and scoop up memories,
seeing past wrinkles, crinkles around eyes, to be together
one more time. But not the last time together.
We knew that it could never be exactly repeated
with just these days of soft arrivals.
The willows, greening the Murray’s banks,
where anchors and ropes would secure our floating house,
perhaps where Sturt’s oars dip in Murray’s tide.
The thrums, croaks and clicks of night-time, bedtime,
in a two-storied pleasure palace, lulled to sleep,
serenaded by natural musicians. Wine settled
in our individual en-suite cabins two up, two down,
with a spa bath in the middle upper deck where
the ladies would soak while the men would laugh,
accepting this boon, and tell their straight-faced tales
of glory without threats of contradiction.
You don’t look a day too old, you are … just right,
(in delight) Oh my! You devil you …
Came the time to leave and go our separate ways
into days of reflection, we knew we could safely bank
memorable memories, satisfactions, our last transactions.
This year, God willing, from Queensland,
there will be more water flowing down to Mannum.
And the green willows will watch the rushing flow,
the slow seeping of greening, spreading across
arid dry country, returning to memories, acknowledgment
of lives well lived. The Murray’s single flow …
Quadrant June 2014
Marilyn Peck
19
K er ry n P holi
Mona and the Rich
Old White Males
... the people who go on the most about freedom of
expression and it’s my right to say this and my right
to say that are usually old rich white men who parade
under the term libertarian ...
... this is actually all about the free market. This is
why I am bringing in the rich old white men ... It’s
about who has money and we’ve come to a stage where
freedom of expression is bought by money. It’s the
market. I don’t have $6000 to go and spend on an ad.
I don’t have rich—you know, rich, old, white men who
are racist who are going to provide the money for this.
—Mona Eltahawy, Q&A, March 31, in response
to the government’s proposed changes to
section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act
L
ike the award-winning Egyptian-American
columnist and international public speaker
Mona Eltahawy, I am not especially rich.
Nor am I old, or particularly “white”, or a man.
Despite these crippling disadvantages, I have had
many opportunities to express my political views,
and it has not cost me a cent.
It is simply not true to say that you need deep
pockets to fund your participation in public debate—
although if you act outside the law in the course
of your political self-expression, you might need
substantial resources to fund your legal defence. If
you defame an individual in making your political
point, then you might need very deep pockets
indeed. Or, if your self-expression entails damaging
another’s property (as in Mona’s case, when she
spray-painted over a subway advertisement that she
believed to be racist) then you may face expensive
legal consequences. If you can express yourself
clearly and persuasively, however, you do not need to
be a rich old white male (a “ROWM”) to have your
say. Nor should you need to resort to defamation,
vandalism, abusive slogans (such as “F**k Tony
Abbott” T-shirts) or BDS-type campaigns in order
to express a valid political point as a free citizen.
“Aha!” says a hypothetical Mona. “But Andrew
Bolt defamed and abused a number of Aboriginal
20
people in order to make his political point. Doesn’t
that mean his point was not valid?”
If they had chosen to do so, the Aboriginal
litigants might have brought a case of defamation
against Bolt, though the case might not have been
successful. The civil wrong of defamation was not
the test that was applied to Bolt’s actions, however.
It did not need to be proven that he had defamed
anyone for a guilty verdict to be found, because
we have a deeply stupid law that governs our
political self-expression. Section 18C of the Racial
Discrimination Act strives to ensure that the rich
white kids play nicely in the political sandpit with
the poor, brownish-coloured kids. In the Bolt case,
it was decided that Andrew was being a meanie
when he made fun of the Aboriginal gang’s sandcastle, so he was made to say sorry to Pat Eatock
and her friends. Some might argue that this in fact
demonstrates the value of laws such as section 18C,
in ensuring a degree of civility in political discourse,
and in lending a more equitable degree of political power to non-ROWMs. I would argue instead
that this positions the state as Supreme Childcare
Worker, compelling adult citizens to hold hands
and sing mindlessly in unison. Suppression of freedom of political expression does not give vulnerable
or marginalised people a greater degree of political
power—it simply makes children of us all.
If you feel you must break a sensible law to make
your political point, or invoke a stupid law (such as
section 18C) to suppress an opposing political view,
perhaps this does not so much demonstrate that you
are a victim of an unjust system, but rather that the
position you have adopted is untenable. Of course,
there are exceptions. Acts of civil disobedience have
been instrumental in the repeal of unjust laws such
as those enforcing racial segregation in the USA.
Civil disobedience can also highlight the need for
legislative and policy responses to support vulnerable groups, such as actions taken to promote legal
and material protection for women escaping domestic violence, before there was recognition that such
Quadrant June 2014
Mona and the Rich Old White Males
a problem existed or acknowledgment that women
should not have to put up with it. (Such actions
achieved success through engaging with and gaining the support of ROWMs; not through sitting
around complaining about their existence.) But to
suggest that some of us are so powerless that we
need to break the law, behave outrageously or silence
the views of others in order to exercise our right to
self-expression is plain silliness.
to expect the state to intervene to level the playing
field of political self-expression. All we can do is
sharpen our pencils, apply our intellect, express our
views as coherently as possible, and deal with any
consequences in our personal lives as best we can.
So yes, it would be nice to be one of these rich
and powerful people that Eltahawy has such a problem with, because then I could spend my time freely
doing and saying whatever I wanted, with fewer
repercussions. Or perhaps it would be nice to be one
am not an award-winning journalist like Mona of Eltahawy’s “old” people, speaking my mind from
Eltahawy, but I understand the difference between the safety of retirement. Would there be the same
“equal rights” and “equal access”. Eltahawy conflates level of interest in my opinions on free speech if I
the right to freedom of expression with access to a were a ROWM, rather than a “person of colour”?
megaphone to broadcast one’s views—confusing the Probably not.
right to speak with a right to be heard by an audiMona might argue that this is precisely the probence. The former must be a universal right, while the lem; that my access to political expression is not so
latter cannot be a universal entitlement, or the world much due to my ability to express myself clearly and
would be a very noisy place indeed. Eltahawy is persuasively, but because the views I am expresshardly the only journalist who feels
ing as a “non-white” person are to
she herself deserves more time on
the liking of powerful ROWMs. It
the megaphone, and she is not alone
been suggested that “non-white
ll we can do is has
in feeling that some other journalpeople” who support the proposed
sharpen our pencils, changes to section 18C must be
ists receive too much airtime. The
power dynamics within a particular
apply our intellect, moral degenerates or self-loathing
profession and a particular industry
aspiring to “whiteness”
express our views as sad-sacks,
do not necessarily mirror the politiand craving the acknowledgment,
cal landscape as a whole; although coherently as possible, validation and acceptance of “white
again, Mona Eltahawy would cerin particular.
and deal with any people”—ROWMs
tainly not be the first journalist to
Up to this point I have refrained
consequences in
presume that her world is the world.
from engaging with the diagnoses
Eltahawy says that “freedom of
offered
by amateur psychoanalysts
our personal lives
expression is bought by money”. In
to explain my own political selfas best we can.
some ways I agree, though perhaps
expression—diagnoses ranging
not as Mona intended. It can be
from “depressed” and “deeply disdifficult to manage the impact of
turbed” and “low intelligence” to
one’s participation in political debate upon one’s “attention seeking”, “pandering to the rednecks” and
private life and livelihood. We may be able to say “merely angling for a plum job with a right-wing
almost anything we like, but most of us still need think-tank”. I am addressing it now because I am
to turn up to work on Monday morning. When sick of the high-handed racism of those who assume
you express a political point of view, the first thing any “non-white” person who refuses to be patronised
everyone wants to know is which institute, lobby must be insane, stupid or corrupt.
group or think-tank you represent. Such interest is a
It is probably pointless for me to argue the
boon for the journalist and the professional opinion- reasons why I don’t believe that I—or any of my
maker, but not so great for the ordinary working “non-white” colleagues in this cause—am particuperson who just wants to have his or her say, because larly mad or especially dumb, as anything I say will
our employers are (understandably) uncomfortable inevitably be taken as further evidence of my insanwith any implied political associations that might ity or stupidity by people determined to believe this
affect public perceptions of their business. Rather to be so. But the suggestion that “non-whites” who
than say that freedom of expression is bought by money, support freedom of expression and the repeal of secit may be more accurate to say that the degree of tion 18C are, in fact, consorting with the ROWM
freedom we enjoy to express ourselves is subject enemy in exchange for personal gain at the expense
to the constraints imposed by our personal and of their coloured brethren cannot go uncontested.
professional circumstances. It makes no sense to Of course, almost everyone is too well-bred (or
blame those with more wealth or personal freedom perhaps too poorly-read) to utter the words “Uncle
for the inherent unfairness of life, nor is it sensible Tom”, but that’s the insinuation.
I
A
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21
Mona and the Rich Old White Males
Apparently my support for freedom of speech industry that is heavily influenced by the interests
would suggest that I either have a penchant for of ROWMs. Her livelihood depends directly on
wealthy, Caucasian male senior citizens, or that the her ability and willingness to say things that meet
ROWMs have something that I want—and that I the approval of ROWMs, and the things that meet
can get it from them by engaging in some public their approval are no doubt those things that sell
bootlicking. Let’s start with the appalling sugges- newspapers or attract clicks, and that will sit comtion that I might express certain views to secure fortably with advertisers.
validation from “white people”. It simply makes no
Mona is probably right to complain that the free
sense, given that I have cheerfully said things that market is a problem for her freedom of expression
I knew would annoy a lot of so-called white people, as a journalist, particularly if she is producing mateand plenty of brownish-coloured people too. Clearly rial that too few people are interested in paying
I do not crave the esteem of every white person sim- for. She may also be right to express concern that
ply because they are white (whatever “white” is sup- market forces sometimes compromise the ability of
posed to mean anyway). That leaves us with Rich, the fourth estate to hold our institutions to account,
Old and Male.
with quality investigative journalism losing ground
I think we can safely assume that by “Old”, to cheaper, easily digestible opinion pieces and infoEltahawy does not refer to impoverished and mar- tainment. It is not clear, however, how Eltahawy’s
ginalised pensioners living in boardprofessional frustrations demoning houses and nursing homes.
strate that free markets somehow
Rather, Eltahawy’s “Old” denotes
isgruntled activist- inhibit the ability of individual citiseniority, venerability, conservatism
zens to express their views, or that
journalists might
and authority. While those benefits
freedom of political expression is a
of ageing sound like nice things to
prefer us to believe right that is unfairly distributed to
have, I am in no hurry to claim my
favour ROWMs. It is also not clear
that we are neither how
share. With respect, they can keep
maintaining a law that limits
their “Old”. Now we are left with free nor competent to freedom of expression and that dis“Rich” and “Male”.
courages journalists from engaging
express our views for in
The ROWMs can keep “Male”
certain important policy debates
ourselves—because is supposed to improve the situation.
as well. I do not envy the supposed
benefits of being male—which is then we must look to
ltahawy’s assertion that freejust as well, given that I have no
dom of political self-expression
hope of ever sharing in any such them to speak, protest,
is open only to ROWMs sounds
benefits. And so that leaves “Rich”,
vandalise, hector,
like the complaint of a diswhich is the one quality it is hard
bully and obfuscate more
gruntled journalist than a political
not to envy. I would certainly like
on our behalf.
activist’s call to arms. I am sure she
to have more money, and it would
would happily accept the support
perhaps be nice to have come from
of any ROWMs who happened
a class and cultural background that
supported educational and career achievement, gen- to agree with her point of view, just as I gratefully
teel manners and straight teeth. Yet while wealth accept the support of anyone—ROWMs or othermay be enviable, I do not need to espouse certain wise—who agrees with my own views. I do not need
political views or to please ROWMs in any way in anyone else’s material or moral support in order to
order to sustain myself, because I have a job. It is a express my political views freely—none of us do.
good thing that I do not depend on the esteem of However, the support of influential others affords
ROWMs for my livelihood, since they have been me greater access to a megaphone than I would
very slow to offer me any material rewards for my otherwise enjoy. These influential others provide me
activities, and I receive no financial benefit from with this access because they like what I have to say;
and because I am a “non-white” person, my views
spending time in their company.
I am in the fortunate position of being relatively can sometimes have more political impact than
free to express certain political views if and when when ROWMs say the same things themselves. Yet
I want to, regardless of whether my views please despite their awesome power, the ROWMs cannot
anybody else. I say I am “relatively free” because I save me from making an idiot of myself. When I
am still subject to the constraints of time, personal take up the megaphone, I do so in the full knowlresources and consideration for the codes of conduct edge that my expressed opinions will stand or fall
that govern my employment. Eltahawy is in a dif- according to their merits. The ROWMs might be
ferent position. As a journalist, she belongs to an able to give me some guidance and grant me access
D
E
22
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Mona and the Rich Old White Males
to an audience, but they cannot make my arguments
more valid or protect me from my audience’s reactions. If my engagement in debate over freedom of
speech and section 18C is driven by a servile and
grasping “Uncle Tom”-like intention, then I would
have to be very stupid indeed, since grovelling to
ROWMs actually brings minimal personal gain.
In asserting that “the people who go on the most
about freedom of expression ... are usually old, rich,
white men who parade under the term libertarian”,
Mona Eltahawy has got it backwards. The people
who go on the most about freedom of expression
can be loosely gathered under the term “libertarian”.
Some of us are old, but not all of us. Some of us are
well-off, but not all of us—and the well-off amongst
us are not feared or resented for being more powerful, but are simply valued for being more useful. We
are various shades of flesh colour, and there are two
genders (at least) represented within our numbers.
The business of speaking up in defence of
freedom of speech—or in defence of any other
political position—is not a closed shop, with
access only open to rich, old, white males. We
are fortunate to live in a country where political
expression and participation are open to any who
are willing to apply themselves to the task of
expressing a clear and coherent opinion. Those of
us who are not particularly wealthy, accomplished,
well-bred or distinguished are just as capable of
applying ourselves to this task, though some of us
may require more practice and guidance to hone our
skills. Disgruntled activist-journalists might prefer
us to believe that we are neither free nor competent
to express our views for ourselves—because then
we must look to them to speak, protest, vandalise,
hector, bully and obfuscate on our behalf.
I remain wary of anyone—whether governments,
journalists or activists—who tells me that my
ability to engage in political debate as a free and
equal citizen is impaired by my gender, my “race”,
my age, my income, my class background, or any
other personal characteristic. I am especially wary
of those who would encourage me to view members
of a particular social group (such as “rich, old
white males”) in blanket terms of dominance and
oppression, rather than as a source of potential allies
in effecting social and political change.
Kerryn Pholi wrote “Silencing Dissent Inside the
Aboriginal Industry” in the December 2012 issue.
Wedding car
For your wedding we hired a 1926 Nash
in deep forest green, straight sides
like corsets pressed in and then some more
(the curved cars on the road looked askance
as if Rasputin had appeared among them
severe and poisonous and prim).
A white ribbon ran from the chauffeur’s window
to the flying naked lady. The wheel spokes gleamed
and measured each revolution like time
and though, today, someone else will ride in it
you are both still there on the back seat
with its sense of discipline, its stuffing
of horsehair not foam, your bouquet reflecting
the subdued light from the back window
as if it has thrown and caught itself.
Elizabeth Smither
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23
M erv y n F. B endle
The Imperialist War
That Wasn’t
A
century ago socialism was going to save
the world. War was a product of capitalism, socialists claimed, and as international
tensions ebbed and flowed they insisted that united
action by the international proletariat would make
any such conflagration impossible. This proved a
tragic delusion but it gave rise to a myth about the
origins of the Great War that continues to have great
influence on the Left and throughout academia and
popular culture. Consequently, for nearly a century
the Anzac tradition has been undermined by the
false assertion that the bloody sacrifices of the war
were merely episodes in an imperialist conflict that
achieved nothing at the cost of many young lives.
In fact this simplistic and nihilist view is a carefully
cultivated leftist falsehood whose origins lie in the
fierce ideological struggles over the nature and destiny of capitalism, imperialism and socialism that
consumed the international Left in the decades
leading up to the war, and in the Marxist-Leninist
orthodoxy that emerged after the war with the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.
That victory saw the establishment of the
Communist International, which operated under
the close supervision of V.I. Lenin, the leader of
the new Soviet Union, and quickly achieved political, financial and ideological domination over the
world’s communist parties. As earlier analyses, and
a new study, Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–
1943, by Fridrikh I. Firsov, Harvey Klehr and John
Earl Haynes, demonstrate, the Comintern set out
to entrench the idea that the Soviet Union and the
international communist movement were champions of peace and opponents of capitalism and imperialism, which were portrayed as the sole sources of
conflict and war. This campaign plunged so deeply
into mendacity that the German and other communist parties were even instructed to unite with the
Nazis “for the struggle against imperialism and war
[and] for peace and socialism”, as the Comintern
sought to portray Nazi Germany as a positive force
for world peace opposing the “imperialist” West at
24
the outbreak of the Second World War.
At the time of the Great War, the principal
text was Lenin’s 1917 manifesto, Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism, “the New Testament
of Marxism-Leninism”, as David Shub described
it in Lenin: A Biography (1966). Lenin’s book was
a highly derivative work that departed in major
ways from traditional Marxist analysis but nevertheless provided the doctrinal capstone to the Old
Testament canon of Marx and Engels, purporting
to reveal the apocalyptic destiny of capitalism, and
becoming “one of the most influential opinions
in today’s world”, as Adam Ulam recognised in
Lenin and the Bolsheviks (1969). It was a radical jeremiad depicting “an aggressive, bloodthirsty, racist, immoral capitalist class [exploiting nationalism
and militarism] to annex the world and subdue its
major competitors”, as Christopher Read observes
in Lenin (2005).
Despite its manifest inadequacies, Lenin’s theory of imperialism has flourished as a foundational
conviction of leftist ideology, colouring every area
of academic and cultural debate, including history,
sociology, politics, legal studies, radical environmentalism, and literature, which its contemporary
versions have themselves colonised as “post-colonial theory”.
According to Lenin, the war was an inevitable
part of the international class struggle and was to
be welcomed as the opening phase in the final crisis
of capitalism. As he declared in Imperialism,
the war of 1914–18 was imperialistic (that is, an
annexationist, predatory, plunderous war) on the
part of both sides; it was a war for the division
of the world, for the partition and repartition of
colonies, [into] spheres of influence of finance
capital.
Millions were sacrificed merely “to decide
whether the British or German group of financial
marauders is to receive the most booty”. Such
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The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
simplistic claims were patently wrong and are social democrats produced only exasperation, and
entertained by no reputable historians: for example, that no one paid much attention to the “little man
Paul Ham in 1914: The Year the World Ended (2013) with the narrow eyes, rusty beard, and monotone
states explicitly that “Colonial rivalry between voice, forever explaining with exact and glacial
Germany, Britain and France did not lead to war”, politeness the traditional Marxist formulas”.
while Max Hastings, in Catastrophe: Europe Goes to
Increasingly isolated in Zurich, Lenin became
War 1914 (2013) makes no mention of imperialism a shrill and desperate figure, driven to accost Herr
at all.
Nobse, the editor of a socialist newspaper, in the
Lenin’s interpretation became the orthodox street, grabbing him by the arm to explain “the
opinion on the Left because of the power of the inevitability of a world revolution”, as his deeply
Comintern in the crucial post-war decades, and embarrassed wife recalls in Shub’s account. Moved
because the thesis of a predatory, imperialistic to tears by the episode, she described how Lenin,
West became essential to Marxism-Leninism, the “with his trembling hand fastened on the button
state ideology of the Soviet Union, devised to legit- of Nobse’s overcoat, trying to convince the man of
imise its hegemonic role in international commu- the soundness of his position, looked very tragic”,
nism. It was reasserted vigorously
a “great white polar bear from the
during the Vietnam War period
Russian north”, imprisoned by the
when it was adopted by the New
ignorance
those who refused to
enin was certain accept his ofapocalyptic
Left in the universities to become
message of
he had grasped the Marxist redemption.
a bedrock assumption that is still
present throughout the humanities
Lenin’s messianic ideological
truth about the
and social sciences.
struggle had begun years before
inevitable trajectory and it was a conf lict fought on
efore the Bolshevik coup d’état
of history, and
several fronts. On the theoretical
fortuitously made Lenin the
level he was concerned that traditook heart from the tional
first dictator of the Soviet Union,
Marxism didn’t account for
carnage of the war, the failure of the Western working
he was a peripatetic Marxist theoretician and cantankerous activist convinced it presaged class to sink into economic misery
on the far left of the socialist moveand assume its pre-ordained role as
a continental class the
ment. Continually on the run from
Revolutionary Subject of the
the Tsarist secret police, and deeply
final
phase of history. Neither did
war and made the
immersed in the conspiratorial
it have much to say about the shift
communist apocalypse from industrial to finance capital
world of international socialism, he
inevitable.
waged an endless ideological and
in the advanced societies or about
political campaign against other
the world-transforming emergence
revolutionary luminaries for the
of imperialism. Nor did it identify
doctrinal soul of communism. This rivalry became an unambiguous place in the revolutionary scheme
all the more intense as the war seemed to herald for politically and economically backward nations
the final apocalyptic end of bourgeois civilisation like Russia. For Lenin, his theory of imperialism
and the advent of the communist utopia, in which provided solutions to these problems.
the last great leadership role in human history was
At the political level, Lenin was consumed with
there to be taken by those, like Lenin, who were the desire to preserve the revolutionary purity of
eager to play the messiah.
the communist movement, ensuring that it did not
Unfortunately for Lenin, his evangel wasn’t succumb to what he saw as reformist opportunism
getting across. He was certain he had grasped the or the illusions of bourgeois parliamentarianism,
truth about the inevitable trajectory of history, and promoted especially in Germany. Above all, he
took heart from the carnage of the war, convinced insisted most vehemently on the historically cruit presaged a continental class war and made the cial role to be played by the revolutionary vanguard
communist apocalypse inevitable. Nevertheless, operating on the Bolshevik model—that is, a milihis messianic proclivities, lifelong intellectual tant elite bound tightly together under a central
arrogance, irascibility, impatience and intolerance leadership dominated by himself, and dedicated
of other opinions had left him politically margin- utterly to pushing through the revolution when the
alised. As Barbara Tuchman recounts in The Proud messianic moment arrived.
Tower (1966), the president of the Second (Socialist)
All of these issues crystallised with the outbreak
International, Emile Vandervelde, observed how of the Great War, which created an unprecedented
Lenin’s denunciation of his fellow communists and crisis in the world socialist movement because it
L
B
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25
The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
revealed that a foundational principle of its existence—proletarian internationalism—was an illusion. This assumption about the cross-border
solidarity of the working class had been an item
of faith since the first Socialist International was
formed in 1864 and persisted after it collapsed
in 1876. It lived on within the far more powerful
Second International, formed in 1889, and played
an important political role until 1916 when that
organisation also collapsed. Both Internationals
refused to credit the power of nationalism and
insisted that, when the moment of military crisis
came, the workers would always look beyond mere
national loyalties to their true class interests and
that this would make a major war between industrialised nations impossible.
The sad tale of the Second International and the
approach of war can largely be told in terms of its
various congresses. There, the inevitable debates
on militarism and war ensured that the tensions
within the movement would always be highlighted.
Throughout its history the International struggled
to manage two fundamentally irreconcilable forces.
On one hand it retained an absolute commitment
at the ideological level to the ideal of proletarian
internationalism; while on the other it recognised
the need to tread carefully on the issue in the realm
of practical politics, where nationalism and patriotism attracted great support across all classes. It was
never able intellectually to confront the implications of this contradiction between the ideological
idealism that it professed and the political reality
that it actually had to deal with.
Lenin’s intransigent extremism always exacerbated this tension: he regarded international proletarian solidarity as a given, but wasn’t interested
in preventing an outbreak of war; rather he welcomed it as inevitable in an imperialist era and
believed it could be transformed into a continental
civil war between classes, overthrowing capitalism and bringing forth the communist utopia. He
therefore had nothing but contempt for pacifism
and his greatest fear was that the war would finish before it could be transformed into revolution.
He promoted his view relentlessly during the many
conferences held by the Left, even sending his wife
and mistress to those held for socialist women and
communist youth that he couldn’t himself attend.
There they argued his case while he hovered nearby
to direct their tactics, “firing off instructions at
every juncture and ensuring that … his trusty delegates split the conference, overriding the largely
pacifist sentiments of the women gathered there
by propounding Lenin’s highly inflammatory calls
for revolution and civil war”, as Helen Rappaport
recounts in Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (2010).
26
I
nternational tensions were high when the massive 1907 Congress of the Second International
convened in Stuttgart. Attended by 886 delegates
from twenty-five nations, it struggled desperately
to produce a workable policy on war and militarism, with debate lasting for six days, dominated by
the French and German delegations. The French
were divided, with one faction supporting the position that every country’s proletariat had the right
to defend its national sovereignty in the event of
aggression, while the other insisted that it was the
duty of the working class to use every means available, including protests, strikes and insurrections,
to prevent war. The German delegation dismissed
such posturing as delusional and not even discussible in Germany where the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) faced the ever-present threat that it could
be fined or banned and its leaders imprisoned if it
sufficiently irritated Kaiser Wilhelm’s militaristic
regime.
The final resolution at Stuttgart was carefully
worded to avoid provoking the regime or alienating
popular support. War was condemned as the inevitable result of the fierce global competition between
capitalist nations supported by “national prejudices
systematically cultivated in the interests of the ruling classes”. The replacement of standing armies by
democratic militias of “the armed people” was proposed as “an effective means for making aggressive
wars impossible”. Should war nevertheless threaten
or break out, the working class was entreated to “do
all they can [using whatever] means which appear
to them most efficacious”, to ensure peace. True to
form, Lenin, supported by the ultra-radical Rosa
Luxemburg, had a revolutionary rider added to
the resolution, stipulating that in the event of war
socialists were to exploit the situation “to hasten the
breakdown of the predominance of the capitalist
class”.
A similar story unfolded at the Copenhagen
Congress in 1910, which confirmed the existing policy
but added a tentative and ponderous addendum that
member parties “shall consider whether a general
strike should not be proclaimed if necessary in order
to prevent the crime of war”. Even this worried the
German delegates, who feared the SPD might
have its funds confiscated and that they might be
prosecuted for treason.
Four years and various special congresses and
conferences later, the issue had still not been
resolved although the ideal of proletarian internationalism still prevailed as a fundamental article
of faith. And so, as the war was about to explode
in 1914, Lenin expected even the reformist SPD to
oppose it, “if for no other reason than for fear the
working class will rise up against them” if they did
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The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
otherwise, as Shub relates. As it turned out, the
SPD did the opposite, following the other socialist parties and supporting their national governments, voting for military credits in the Reichstag,
while the masses embraced the war, exposing the
vacuity of “socialist internationalism”. Lenin was so
dumbfounded by these events that he insisted that
the copy of the paper in which he read the news
must have been a forgery concocted by the German
General Staff to mislead important revolutionaries
like him.
The truth was that he was far more preoccupied
with abstract theory than with the terrible
slaughter going on daily at the front: he never
was able to identify with human suffering in
all its brutal reality but only with the collective
masses in an abstract way.
Nevertheless, he felt compelled to denounce
the “bourgeois pacifist shitheads” attending the
Zimmerwald conference and proposed a resolution calling for an immediate European-wide class
war to be conducted under the direction of a new
ith the war under way, Lenin expounded revolutionary international organisation. This was
his own intransigent position in October rejected in favour of a far less inflammatory call for
1914. According to “The War and Russian Social peace without annexations or indemnities, and selfDemocracy”, the conflict was one for which “the determination for the peoples of Europe, without
governments and the bourgeois parties of all coun- specifying what this might entail.
Lenin attended the next confertries [had] been preparing for decence at Kienthal in April 1916 as a
ades”, and it had been caused by “the
growth of armaments, the extreme
ukharin argued leader of what had become known
as the “Zimmerwald Left”. This
intensification of the struggle for
that the proletariat radical
faction insisted that the
markets in the latest—the imperihad been bought
war had been caused by imperialalist—stage of capitalist developrivalry, and that all attempts to
ment”. This, in turn, involved the
off by higher wages ist
end it were counter-revolutionary
“seizure of territory and subjugaand the illusion of because they perpetuated the illution of other nations, the ruining of
competing nations, and the plunder democracy, and that sion that it was possible for capitalism to exist without war. The
of their wealth” in order to bribe
and pacify the proletariat, and cor- the true revolutionary correct position was to nurture the
revolutionary consciousness that
rupt or exterminate its leadership.
potential lay on
arise out of wartime misery
The only hope for peace lay with
the periphery of the would
and pursue the internationalist goal
the revolutionary vanguard exposing the true reasons for the war and imperialist system, in of the “unification of socialist peoleading the workers in “a civil war
the colonial regions. ples” through global class war. The
only peace program that revolutionagainst the bourgeoisie both of its
aries should promote was one that
‘own’ and ‘foreign’ countries”, as
he put it to emphasise the supposed transnational called upon the proletariat to turn their guns on
loyalty of the proletariat. According to Lenin, the their common enemy—the capitalist governments
workers dragooned into the trenches should turn that had brought the war about, and their militaristheir guns against their officers, unite in a revolu- tic minions.
Meanwhile, Lenin’s relentless campaigning had
tionary uprising, and transform the conflict into a
brought him to the attention of German military
continental class war.
After a year of war, leading left-wing socialists intelligence, which saw him as an asset in destagathered in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September bilising the Russian war effort, and they were pre1915, in the first of three conferences convened over pared to fund Bolshevik subversion. According to
the next two years to co-ordinate opposition to the Rappaport:
conflict. In a gesture of solidarity the French and
Russia, they knew, was the weakest link in
German delegations submitted a joint declaration
the Triple Entente. As for Lenin himself,
that the war was caused by the imperialist policies
capitulation to Germany was perfectly acceptable
of all governments and therefore wasn’t the affair
… if it precipitated the end of Tsarism in Russia,
of the workers. Lenin had spent the previous six
which he believed was a “hundred times worse
months on holiday in the Swiss Alps, hiking, baththan Kaiserism”.
ing nude in the rivers, cycling, and “picking berries
and mushrooms in the forest”, as Rappaport recalls.
Sustained by German support, Lenin buried
He did very little party work or writing and instead
himself in the Zurich public library during 1916
read the novels of Victor Hugo:
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B
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The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
to write Imperialism, laying down the thesis that
“capitalist states, in their pursuit for new markets
and colonies, would always settle their competitive
differences by war. Only the destruction of the
capitalist system … would bring an end to the epoch
of imperialist wars”, as Ulam recounts.
B
y the time the Stockholm conference took place
in September 1917, the Russian Revolution
had broken out and Lenin had returned to Russia
in a sealed train provided by the Germans, leaving Zurich to cries of support from his followers, and condemnation from those convinced he
had sold out and was little more than a German
agent. Nevertheless, the stance of the Zimmerwald
Left had hardened even more. Their delegates at
Stockholm were now instructed to condemn any
“capitalist peace” entered into by the governments
of the capitalist states, decreeing that “true peace”
would only be achieved through the creation of
socialist republics and support for the Russian
Revolution, which was a harbinger of mass action
undertaken on a global scale to achieve “the final
liberation of mankind”.
This position became ideological orthodoxy
on the Left once Lenin was ensconced as dictator
of the new Soviet Union and had established the
Comintern as the co-ordinating body of the world’s
communist and socialist parties. And at the core of
the new orthodoxy was Imperialism. Remarkably, for
a work that became central to the Marxist-Leninist
canon, Lenin’s book relied heavily on the work of
the liberal journalist J.A. Hobson, whose book,
Imperialism: A Study (1901), argued that “the economic taproot of imperialism [was] excessive capital
in search of investment”. Hobson was not a Marxist
but a left-wing anti-imperialist and an extremely
prolific writer on economic affairs who popularised the theory of underconsumption, according to
which the maldistribution of income in domestic
markets meant that capitalism would tend towards
economic crises because these markets were unable
to consume the goods and services produced by the
economy.
Hobson’s most inf luential idea f lowed from
this: that imperial rivalry grew out of the desire of
Western capitalists to find more profitable places
to invest as domestic competition and incremental
gains by the working class forced down their profits and depressed the return on capital. Investment
in the colonies was therefore undertaken because
labour, land and resources were cheap, while capital was scarce and could command super-profits.
Hobson also incidentally denounced the consequences of colonialism on the native populations,
suggesting complete decolonisation, and coming
28
“perilously close to recommending that the nonEuropean areas be allowed to stew in their own
juice”, as Ulam observed.
To give his argument the necessary revolutionary élan, Lenin also appropriated ideas from various
Marxist intellectuals, including Rudolf Hilferding,
Rosa Lu xemburg and Nikolai Bukharin.
Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) analysed the
shift from the competitive “laissez-faire” capitalism
that characterised Marx’s time to the monopolistic
“finance capital” system of cartels and trusts that
had emerged in the decades before the war. This was
seen by socialists as an increasingly polarised world,
“red in tooth and claw”, where “monopolies were
wild beasts stalking the entire globe for profit [and]
anything and anyone in their path was doomed”,
as Read recalls in Lenin. Like Hobson, Hilferding
explained imperialism in terms of the desire of capitalists for investment opportunities but didn’t think
this would lead inevitably to international conflict,
as the dominant capitalist powers, guided by the
magnates of finance capital, could reach agreement
to divide up the world among themselves.
Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913)
purported to complete Marx’s work by revealing
the exact mechanism by which capitalism proceeded towards its inevitable collapse. She argued
that capitalists were faced in their domestic markets with a lack of effective demand because the
proletariat was excessively exploited and therefore
lacked sufficient purchasing power to clear the markets of the commodities produced. This led capitalists to promote imperialism in pre-capitalist regions
where they could establish colonies and sell their
surplus produce to realise its inherent surplus value,
thus sustaining themselves. However, these regions
would inevitably be incorporated into the capitalist system, eliminating this option and causing the
system to collapse.
Bukharin completed his major work, Imperialism
and World Economy, in 1915, when the manuscript
was provided to Lenin, who appropriated its key
ideas. Bukharin drew on Hobson and Hilferding
but also emphasised the growing economic role of
the state and the emergence of “a new social form,
state capitalism, i.e., an economy centrally planned
and regulated on the scale of a nation state”, involving the extension of state control “to ever wider
areas of civil society and the intensification of
human slavery”, as Leszek Kolakowski recounts in
Main Currents of Marxism (1978). This made the system ripe for revolution because government control
was already pervasive and the socialists just needed
to seize power and take over the state apparatus.
Bukharin also argued that the proletariat in the
advanced societies had been bought off by higher
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The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
wages and the illusion of democracy, and that the despite their appearance of erudition and theoretitrue revolutionary potential lay on the periphery cal daring. They failed to come to grips with the
of the imperialist system, in the colonial regions. economic and political reality of the world they
He analysed this situation in terms of the “uneven purported to understand, and intended to transdevelopment” of the imperialist system composed form through violent revolution. “In no sense was
of a chain of interdependent economies that could [Imperialism] a true account of the economic develbe attacked at the weakest link. This was a pivotal opment of the colonial territories,” observes Robert
idea that appealed greatly to Lenin as it provided Conquest in Lenin (1972). In particular, while there
a rationale for theorising that the revolution could was considerable foreign investment in the late
break out in the less-developed nations, including nineteenth century undertaken by British, German
Russia.
and French interests, most of this was directed
(Death stalked these theorists: after the war to other European states (including Russia), the
Luxemburg was brutally murdered by the German United States, Latin America and Australasia,
Freikorps; Hilferding condemned the Bolshevik ter- avoiding the regions of Africa and Asia that had
ror inaugurated under Lenin’s regime and was later been the site of high-profile imperial expansion in
killed by the Gestapo; and Bukharin rose to the the decades after 1870, and that were meant to serve
top of the Soviet regime only to be
as the “weak links” in the imperialexecuted by Stalin under that very
ist system. Moreover, in the case of
terror, asking plaintively of his erstBritain, foreign investment involved
lthough the
while revolutionary comrade, “Why
little net outflow of capital, being
arguments of Lenin financed from the re-investment of
do you need me to die?”)
profits. Super-profits also were rare,
and the others
espite Lenin’s recourse to these
with even the Rand mines in South
about the origins
Marxist luminaries, it is a
Africa generating an average rate of
of the Great War
striking characteristic of Imperialism
return of 4.1 per cent or less.
that it departs significantly from the
Most importantly, the cost of
had no empirical
work of Marx, upon which it is purrunning an empire imposed a sigportedly based. As even the com- validity they proved nificant burden on the domesmunist historian Eric Hobsbawm
tic economies. Consequently, the
to have potent
concedes in How to Change the World
working-class standard of living
ideological appeal. was comparatively high in countries
(2011), “Imperialism … contains no
reference whatsoever to the text of
like Sweden and Denmark, which
Marx and Engels”. Its most remarkhad no colonies, and low in France
able divergence is its marginalisation of Marx’s core and Belgium, which did have. As far as Britain was
conception of capital accumulation as the driver of concerned, Niall Ferguson points out in Empire
historical development. According to Marx, it is the (2003) that it might have reaped a “decolonisation
creative power of capital that propels capitalism in dividend” equivalent to a 25 per cent tax cut if it
the advanced economies to the very threshold of had disposed of its empire in the 1840s. In fact it
socialist revolution and gives the proletariat in those was the mounting costs of empire over the subsesocieties its role as history’s Revolutionary Subject, quent half-century that prompted Hobson to write
ushering in the communist utopia. Lenin, however, his book, putting the case that Britain’s available
disregarded this absolutely fundamental concep- capital would be better invested domestically.
tion—the very essence of “scientific socialism” that
Moreover, far from wanting war, finance capihad made Marxism so attractive to militant social- tal established a vast network of commercial relaists and intellectuals for half a century. Instead, he tionships that depended on political stability, not
arbitrarily transferred this world-transforming role conflict. Indeed, the prohibitive costs of pursuing
to the masses in Europe’s colonies and backward imperialist gains through war were obvious to the
nations like Russia. Later, after he became dictator financial and business establishment, as the Polish
of the Soviet Union, he discovered that its paucity banker and railway financier, Ivan Bloch, made
of capital made the transition to any semblance of a clear in an exhaustive study of modern industrial
communist utopia impossible, ushering in the series warfare, Is War Now Impossible? published in six volof brutal but ineffectual state-directed economic umes in 1898. In Germany, the larger banks, which
regimes that led ultimately to the deaths of tens of Lenin was convinced were promoting imperialist
millions of people.
adventures, had in fact made confidential submisThis tragic outcome exemplified the basic prob- sions to their government arguing against such
lem of all these Marxist analyses: they were wrong, expansion, denouncing those companies that were
A
D
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The Imperialist War That Wasn’t
involved as opportunists using the funds of adventurist investors.
N
evertheless, despite their fundamental disconnection from reality, the works of Lenin,
Luxemburg, Hilferding, Bukharin and their followers embedded in the collective consciousness
one of the central ideas of twentieth-century radical
thought: that the Great War was a conflict between
two opposing capitalist blocs, one led by England
and the other by Germany, driven by destructive
economic forces into a desperate fight for global
imperialistic domination, and that the millions
who had died did so not for any noble ideals but
merely to advance the interests of the ruling class of
the regime that they served. In fact, on the Allied
side they had committed their lives to the defence
of liberal democracy against a form of militaristic
authoritarianism that developed within two decades
into a rampaging, terroristic totalitarian state seeking world domination.
These theorists also promoted a more general
idea: that the apparent economic achievements of
liberal democratic civilisation are fraudulent and
gained at the cost of war and imperialistic rapacity.
They depict a zero-sum game played out on a global
scale, where the elevated standard of living enjoyed
by the citizens of the “core” societies of the capitalist
world system are the results of the systematic exploitation of oppressed people on its “periphery”. They
refuse to accept that such prosperity was produced
by the efficient application of capital, labour, land,
resources, technology and intelligence, painstakingly undertaken over generations within the core.
They also sought to “save the appearances” of
Marxist prophecy, explaining the absence of revolutionary fervour in the West by insisting that “superprofits” generated by imperialism made it possible
for the ruling class in the advanced societies to buy
off the industrial proletariat in the core societies and
bribe its leaders, creating a reactionary “labour aristocracy” and forestalling the revolution. Overall, in
this Social Darwinist fight-to-the-finish, the wealth
of the West is portrayed as little more than contraband, and the alleged impoverishment of the rest of
humanity trapped on the periphery is portrayed as
a crime committed against them and their human
rights. (Paradoxically, the latter notion is an intellectual product of the allegedly predatory West,
as is the critique of imperialism itself, a fact that
“Third World” radicals are reluctant to concede, as
Keith Windschuttle points out in “Liberalism and
Imperialism” (1999).)
Imperialism and the other works also promulgated another influential thesis, one that appeals
30
greatly to the alienated intelligentsia, especially in
the post-war period: the decadence of capitalism.
According to Lenin, imperialism was the “highest”
(that is, final) form that capitalism takes before it
plunges into revolution. This “moribund … parasitic
or decaying capitalism” had reached its inevitable
dead-end in imperialistic militarism, and the war
was a result of it thrashing about in its death throes.
Later, after the war, this thesis was modified to
assert that fascism was the political form that capitalism assumed in this final degenerate phase, and
this allowed Stalin, the Comintern, and communist
intellectuals to dismiss all capitalist societies, especially liberal democracies, as inherently fascist and
warlike.
These themes of degeneracy, decadence, militarism and fascism came to dominate the political and
cultural discourse of the Left in the inter-war period
and made it impossible to mobilise a united front
to combat the rise of Nazism. Like Lenin’s theory
of imperialism, it was a position resurrected by the
New Left in the 1960s, when it became very potent
ideologically, and it remains influential amongst
academics and the Left generally.
Although the arguments of Lenin and the others
about the origins of the Great War had no empirical validity they proved to have potent ideological
appeal. In Lenin’s time it was the British, French
and Belgian empires that provoked the animosity of the Left, while in the 1960s it was alleged
American imperialism in Vietnam that generated
radical rage. Ideologically, it became not only easy
but essential to associate the Great War with imperialism if Marxism-Leninism was to consolidate its
status as the radical orthodoxy in the burgeoning
universities.
In Australia the Anzac tradition came under
concerted attack in the classrooms and the streets,
while trestle tables in the student unions groaned
under the weight of ultra-cheap editions of
Imperialism and the rest of the revolutionary canon,
helping embed an idée fixe on the Left that exists to
the present day. Meanwhile, the monstrous crimes
of Marxist-Leninist totalitarian states like the
Soviet Union (which was itself the world’s biggest
empire), Communist China, North Vietnam, Cuba
and Cambodia were ignored, excused or denied, as
radicalised young academics undertook their long
march through the institutions, determined to confront capitalism, denounce liberal democracy, and
deconstruct all popular expressions of national identity, including, above all, the Anzac tradition.
Mervyn F. Bendle wrote “The Military Historians’
War on the Anzac Legend” in the April issue.
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H a l G.P. C olebatch
The Whitlam Government and the
Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
A
s the Vietnam War drew to a close in 1974 and
1975, the question of contingency planning
for large numbers of refugees was given no
consideration by the Whitlam government, which
had come to power in 1972. This was despite the longstanding probability, and then certainty, that the
Saigon regime would be defeated by the communist
North. Further, the fate of anti-communist South
Vietnamese in the event of a communist victory had
been raised many times in the long-running debate
on Australia’s military commitment to Vietnam.
One prophetic warning of massive refugee problems following a communist victory was made in
The Saving of South Vietnam, published in 1972 by
Kenneth Grenville, a pseudonym for Kenneth Gee
QC, a New South Wales District Court judge:
Occasionally an ingenious gloss is put upon the
theory of stopping the war by starving the South
of aid. Schemes are enunciated for receiving the
great flood of threatened people who would wish
to flee from the conquerors … “We must permit
massive immigration of refugees!” and suchlike
tripe. As if there is the slightest chance the
world would receive the three million (at least!)
South Vietnamese who already—according to
Colonel Le Xuan Chyen, Chief of Staff of the
5th North Vietnamese Division, who defected
in 1969—figure on Communist lists for death or
imprisonment.
The Australian Department of Immigration’s
Notes on Australia’s Immigration Policy in April 1973
did not mention refugees or refugee policy. In that
year Australia acceded to the UN 1967 protocol
which updated the UN convention on refugees,
defining refugees as persons with “a well-founded
fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group
or political opinion”.
Gough Whitlam served notice that his government would approve of a communist victory:
We believe that political, economic and social
changes in Asia will occur and are indeed
desirable. We believe Australia should not
intervene militarily even when the contest for
power and control over the change leads to
violence.
Even when the fall of Saigon became imminent, no real contingency plan for refugees existed.
Speaking on August 13, 1974, ALP Senator Mulvihill
revealed the vagueness and inadequacy of the government’s thinking:
I had a conversation with the Minister for
Labour and Immigration last week. We were
looking at a possible migrant intake figure and
the Minister’s words to me were: “Well, we must
always budget for 2000 political refugees.”
The question was raised of where such refugees
would be coming from but no definite answer was
forthcoming. This was despite the fact that the preparations being made for an all-out attack from the
North, such as the building of a network of hardtopped roads for tanks and tank assembly areas, were
obvious and could not be disguised. Australia had
access to US intelligence reports. ALP Immigration
Minister Clyde Cameron recorded in his memoirs
that the CIA were reporting in March 1975 that
Saigon might fall within a month. The Australian
war correspondent Denis Warner had published an
accurate account of the North’s military preparations, as they were then, in December 1973:
Fourteen North Vietnamese divisions, 600
tanks, and the longest-ranged, hardest-hitting
artillery ever brought to bear on a target in Asia
are either inside South Vietnam or crouched on
the Lao and Cambodian borders ready to spring
when Hanoi gives the word. [It will be an] allout offensive designed to end the 13-year war in
one massive conventional stroke.
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31
The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
Mr Alan Renouf, appointed by Whitlam as
Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs,
wrote of the short-lived peace settlement made
between Hanoi and Saigon on January 23, 1973, in
terms showing he did not take seriously any idea
of a settlement other than a military victory by the
North:
Clearly, North Vietnam had accepted [the
“peace” settlement] because it reckoned that once
the US was gone, it could take over the South
in a short time (this was also the USSR’s view
and no doubt China’s as well). Public opinion in
the US was such that Washington would prove
powerless to prevent such a development. It was
only a matter of time before North Vietnam
would gain its ends one way or another. Congress
cut off all funds for military activity in or near
Indo-China. This sealed South Vietnam’s fate.
However, there is no evidence that anything was
done by the Whitlam government to prepare for
the rescue of even those Vietnamese especially at
risk—for example because of their association with
Australian forces.
Seven years later, during a debate on refugee policy, ALP spokesman Mick Young told parliament
that at the time of the fall of Saigon South Vietnam
had had 1,200,000 soldiers, 200,000 police, up to
800,000 public servants and several hundred thousand people who had worked with allied forces.
Including wives and families, this meant up to
10,000,000 people would have reason to flee from
communist reprisals. These numbers did not include
private businessmen, capitalists and landlords. Denis
Warner estimated there were also 200,000 Chieu
Hoi, former communists who had defected to the
Saigon side, whose position was obviously particularly perilous. Further, land had been distributed by
the Saigon government to 837,000 peasant families,
placing them in a landlord, petit-bourgeoisie or kulak
class. Their position was also perilous.
In liberated Cambodia, of course, the population
was exterminated wholesale and on more far-reaching grounds, generally by torture, for crimes including looking happy and displaying indentations on
the nose suggesting they were intellectuals who had
worn spectacles. It was possibly, on a population
basis, the biggest genocide in history.
In the House of Representatives at the time of
the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge attacks,
the Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Cairns—long associated with communist “peace” fronts—stated:
The Saigon and Phnom Penh governments
should fall. That is the best solution, a quick
32
end with victory on one side or the other—it
would have been in everybody’s interest if it had
happened a long time ago.
The February 1975 ALP Federal Conference
directed the Whitlam government to allow the
Provisional Revolutionary Government of South
Vietnam (Hanoi’s short-lived puppet) to open
an office in Australia. Australian government
spokesmen gave the impression they believed
Northern victory to be a foregone conclusion. The
government cable to the Australian ambassador to
Hanoi at the beginning of April 1975 referred to
Hanoi’s “inevitable” victory. Still no preparations
were put in hand for evacuating at-risk South
Vietnamese. Whitlam gloatingly told parliament
on April 8, suggesting that South Vietnam was the
aggressor now getting its just deserts rather than
the victim: “These strongmen, these realists, the
men on horseback, insisted on a military solution.
So a military solution it is now to be. ‘Look at your
works, ye mighty, and despair’!”
An advertisement was published in the Canberra
Times on April 18, 1973, warning of the imminent
refugee and general human crisis. Signatories
included D.W. Strangman, an associate of the DLPNCC and private secretary to DLP Senator and
parliamentary party leader Vince Gair:
Many people are concerned about the desperate
situation in South Vietnam and the millions
there who now find themselves subject to
Communist oppression.
What awaits them? More Hue and TetOffensive massacres? More Katyn Forest
murders? The terrors of People’s Courts
and summary executions? No wonder the
Vietnamese fled from the North in 1954 and
tried again this month.
In the deafening silence of the postmoratorium, someone has to say something.
We REJECT Dr Cairns’ belief in
the historic and beneficial inevitability of
Communist victories.
We SUPPORT a continuing and vigorous
resistance to the spread of Communism.
We APPLAUD all humanitarian efforts to
alleviate the plight of the refugees and orphans.
We CHALLENGE the Government
to give a lead in organising the safety of the
many people who are on Communist DEATH
LISTS, particularly those who worked for the
allied forces.
We DEPLORE the withdrawal of effective
assistance to the South in the face of known
massive re-armament in the North …
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The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
On April 4, Opposition Foreign Affairs
spokesman Andrew Peacock and Deputy Country
Party Leader Ian Sinclair, speaking from Saigon,
were quoted to the effect that the government’s
silence “is part of a general pattern established by
this Government. It simply shows Mr Whitlam and
his Ministers are washing their hands of a situation
they find embarrassing.” Peacock, Sinclair and the
Country Party Member for Riverina, Mr Sullivan,
also called attention to the plight of the Cambodian
people.
Whitlam was quoted in the Age of April 14,
1975, as saying Australia’s security and long-term
interests were not affected by the political colour
of the rulers of Saigon and never had been. He
did not mention the humanitarian crisis or the
danger which pro-Western, including Australianassociated, Vietnamese faced.
Malcolm Fraser was quoted on April 22, 1975,
as saying the government’s response to South
Vietnam’s situation was “petty and miserable”,
and that he believed Australia could and should
be doing very much more. Mr Peacock, also
speaking on April 22, took up the specific issue of
the Whitlam government refusing to issue visas to
South Vietnamese seeking to escape. He said this
was marked by inhumanity and “would be a scar in
our history in Asian relations”. He continued:
Rather than make special arrangements to
assist relatives and dependants of Vietnamese
citizens in Australia—mainly as students …
the Government has re-introduced … criteria
which will allow less than 200 Vietnamese
citizens into Australia … It was known that
five weeks ago recommendations were drawn
up by the Australian Government in relation to
wider categories of Vietnamese for permission to
enter Australia … It is obvious that the Prime
Minister has personally cut back the suggested
categories of five weeks ago to the barest
minimum, and delayed his announcement until
it is virtually too late to allow any Vietnamese to
enter Australia … the closure of the Australian
Embassy will make impossible the lodging of
nominations for Vietnamese to enter Australia
and the consideration of nominations.
In an interview published in the Age on May
2, following the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh,
Dr Cairns said he greeted the end of the war with
relief. He commented on the likely fate of anticommunist Vietnamese along the lines that they
would be dealt with as “collaborators” and that many
people believed that reprisals against them would be
justified. Cairns continued:
A great deal of bitterness is generated in a war
of this kind. I know what happened in Europe
after the war there … I know there were
reprisals there and I know that collaborators
were receiving a fate that many believed justified.
There will be many people in Vietnam who will
feel the same way about collaborators there too.
Cairns was plainly not unduly upset by the
prospect.
D
uring the Northern attack, Australian Labor
and Left spokesmen uttered virtually not one
word of condemnation for Hanoi’s blatant aggression, or word of sympathy for the plight of the
South. There was almost no talk of the suffering of
the people of South Vietnam, which had been a leitmotif of the Left’s “anti-war” rhetoric in the recent
past. The Left tended to refer to Saigon in terms of
hatred and contempt. And yet South Vietnam was,
while suffering from some corruption, by any measure a far freer and more pluralistic society than the
totalitarian North. Its people did not want conquest
by the North, as the hundreds of thousands of refugees a few years later were to prove, and had fought
bravely against it for years.
Many of its public servants and soldiers were
upright and dedicated. It was a recent military ally
of Australia and more than 500 Australians had
died to defend it. A large part of the population
was Christian or Buddhist. It had never been the
aggressor in the war. One can only assume that the
hatred shown to it by the Left and much of Labor
was partly a matter of Australian politics and partly
reflexive anti-anti-communism.
The positions put by spokesmen for the main
Australian parties closely paralleled the debates in
parliament. When Senator Sir Magnus Cormack
stated in the Senate, “There is a vast body of terrified people moving in the south of the Republic
of Vietnam”, Labor Senator Keefe, a member like
Cairns of the Soviet front, the World Peace Council,
took this as an occasion for mirth, interjecting jovially: “A bit like the Liberal Party.”
Labor Senator Gietzelt claimed it made no
more sense to talk of North Vietnam invading
South Vietnam than it would to talk of Queensland
invading New South Wales. Labor Senator John
Wheeldon, the Minister for Repatriation, ridiculed
the Saigon government as compared to the heroic
forces of the communist North:
What did we see in the dying hours of the
so-called Saigon Government? What did we see
of these heroic defenders of democracy? We saw
them doing the scoot as fast as their legs could
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33
The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
broke ranks and took a pro-refugee position.)
In 1975 the recent demonstrations and other
political actions by refugees from the Baltic
states over the Whitlam government’s pioneering
Senator Wheeldon omitted to mention that it is recognition of the incorporation of the Baltic
difficult to fight when one’s supplies and ammuni- states into the Soviet Union had served notice
tion have been treacherously cut off. Nor did he men- that, despite their often low political profiles,
tion the 18th Division of the Army of the Republic refugees from communist countries could have
of (South) Vietnam, which at Xuan Loc held its long memories, and in certain circumstances
ground for nearly a month, up to April 17, blocking could have a high degree of political solidarity,
the route to Saigon against at least
motivation, organising ability and
six vastly better-supplied North
public support. It seems likely that
Vietnamese divisions, spearheaded
the
Baltic demonstrations against
uring the final
by Russian tanks, which outnumWhitlam coloured his thinking
invasion of Saigon on the question of admitting
bered it by about seven to one.
The Labor Minister for Science,
in 1975 the Whitlam Vietnamese refugees.
Mr Morrison, also ridiculed the
government
South Vietnamese Army, which,
he 1976 report of the Senate
he said, had “scuttled” out of knowingly abandoned
Standing Committee on
Nha Trang. Use of a term like
Foreign
Australia and
South Vietnamese the RefugeeAffairs,
“scuttled” points to a psychologProblem, with memwhose lives were
ical-ideological compulsion to
bers from both Labor and the
“animalise the enemy”—and, of
Coalition, was of great significance
known to be in
course, to reinforce the notion that
in the Australian refugee debate.
the South Vietnamese were the danger because of their Its members concluded unanimously
enemy, although Australia under a
previous association that during the final invasion of
Coalition government had recently
in 1975 the Whitlam govwith Australian forces Saigon
spent hundreds of lives fighting on
ernment had knowingly abandoned
or for other reasons. South Vietnamese whose lives were
their side.
Morrison said during the debate
known to be in danger because of
of April 8 that to talk of refugees
their previous association with
“voting with their feet” aligned one with reaction- Australian forces or for other reasons. The thrust
ary forces throughout the world, rather as those of its findings was to be reinforced by the account
who during witch-hunts defended accused witches of Denis Warner, Not with Guns Alone, and also
attracted accusations of being witches themselves. by the memoirs of Clyde Cameron, the Whitlam
He said he was:
government’s Minister for Immigration of the day,
in the oddly-titled 1980 book China, Communism
absolutely staggered that anyone who pretends
and Coca-Cola.
to comprehend Indo-China would come
The Standing Committee found that, durback with the old Democratic Labor Party
ing the final communist offensive, the Whitlam
statement, the League of Rights statement, the
government had told the Australian embassy in
point of view that has been held by reactionary
Saigon to help only a token number of those South
forces in Australia and throughout the world,
Vietnamese whose lives might be especially endanthat old tired cliche about people voting with
gered, and had put such obstacles in the way of
their feet …
the embassy that such evacuation was in any event
almost always impossible.
In any case, he added, the men of the South
The committee’s findings had been anticipated
Vietnamese Army were “hard-faced profiteers and in a parliamentary question by Andrew Peacock
looters”—presumably in contrast to the soft-faced on April 8, 1975, and also in the National Civic
philanthropists driving Hanoi’s tanks.
Council’s News Weekly on April 16. The substance
These parliamentary comments establish the of Peacock’s question was that the Australian govWhitlam government’s general indifference to ernment was not making help available for the
the long-predicted refugee disaster at the time of evacuation of refugees and, unlike the case with the
Hanoi’s massive main-force attack. (Later, at the New Zealand ambassador, the Australian ambassatime of the “boat people” arrivals in Australia, dor was not allowed to make any moves at his own
ALP member Dr Richard Klugman was one who discretion. Mr Peacock said:
carry them, unlike Ho Chi Minh, unlike Pham
Van Dong, unlike General Giap, who never ran
away but who stayed and fought …
D
T
34
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The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
last Thursday, a Hercules aircraft was loaded
with foodstuffs, water, supplies and the like.
The RAAF cabled for directions that it could
take off. By Friday afternoon it still had not
received a cable indicating that it could do so.
The aircraft stood at Tan Son Nhut airport for
approximately two days fully loaded, with the
mire of human misery throughout Indo-China.
News Weekly claimed seven C-130 Hercules aircraft had been assigned to the massive refugee airlift from Da Nang at the request of Dr Kissinger.
Protests had been made by the North Vietnamese,
and Whitlam had at once changed the instructions.
He intervened again to remove the RAAF’s discretion to airlift as many civilians as possible to safety.
Whitlam issued instructions that the carriage of
“unauthorised persons” was henceforth prohibited.
That order had been varied only after the beleaguered South Vietnamese government had been
forced to turn its attention from its own disasters
to give “firm guarantees” to Canberra. News Weekly
continued:
The Australian Prime Minister used a
characteristically shoddy pretext.
The mercy flight of C-130s was mobbed at
Phan Rang airport by departing soldiers, as well
as civilians.
It was this that led to the specific order that
military refugees should not be carried.
The falsity of Mr Whitlam’s pretext was
revealed by the fact that the rest of the C-130
flights into Phan Rang were met by perfectly
orderly crowds and there was no repetition of the
first incident, which had been caused by terror
induced by the North Vietnamese rocketing
Phan Rang airport.
These allegations were to be broadly corroborated by Denis Warner. The committee found that
on March 19, 1975, seven RAAF Hercules had
been made available and others had been placed on
standby. A total of about 2000 Vietnamese had been
carried on internal flights in April and May. On April
22, two days before the Australian Embassy was closed,
Whitlam announced categories of Vietnamese who
would be eligible for temporary entry into Australia.
These included:
1. Spouses and children of Vietnamese students
at present living in Australia;
2. Spouses and under-21-year-old children of
Australian citizens subject to completion of
Australian citizenship formalities;
3. Vietnamese with a long and close association
with the Australian presence in Vietnam whose
lives were considered to be in danger (and whose
applications would be considered on a case-bycase basis).
Whitlam said these decisions had been taken
with regard to maintaining unity of families, therefore by corollary not principally with regard to rescuing those whose lives were in danger. Speaking
of these latter, he told parliament, “The number of
such persons is expected to be small.”
The committee reported that the Department of
Immigration and Ethnic Affairs had received 3667
nominations when the embassy in Saigon closed.
The embassy staff and seventy-eight Vietnamese
were evacuated by the RAAF on April 25. Thousands
more applications were received over the next few
days:
A list of 366 persons—consisting of 124
Vietnamese family groups and individuals who
had been approved for entry into Australia—
was cabled to Australian diplomatic posts in
[Asian capitals]. It included the 342 persons
mentioned previously and 24 others who had
been approved for entry to Australia on the
basis that their long and close association
with the Australian presence in Vietnam had
endangered their lives.
In the event, even these twenty-four were not
rescued.
The committee considered what the Whitlam
government had permitted the RAAF to do. It
claimed to be “puzzled” by the restricted use to
which RAAF aircraft were put. It was obvious that
Australia had initially intended meeting the calls of
the Saigon government and the USA for air transport assistance for a massive evacuation of people
to the ships at Cam Ranh Bay or to Saigon. From
April 3, however, Canberra limited the role of the
RAAF to transporting supplies only:
The Committee considers that Australia may
thereby have responded in a manner which
possibly caused unnecessary loss of life and
hardship through refusal to evacuate civilian
refugees from battle zones.
T
he committee concluded that Australia could
clearly have rendered greater humanitarian assistance. A witness told the committee that
Australia had responded to a request of the North
Vietnamese concerning use of the RAAF. The
committee said that though it had been unable to
substantiate these claims, Canberra had instructed
Quadrant June 2014
35
The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
on April 2 that the carriage of South Vietnamese
government officials was prohibited. Troops and
refugees were prohibited the next day and press representatives the following day.
In the absence of any other explanation, the
Committee is inclined to accept the view that
the Australian Government was open to being
influenced by attitudes of the DRV [North
Vietnam] concerning the use of Australian
Aircraft.
Considering that, a short time before, Australian
troops had been dying in an attempt to defend the
South from Northern aggression, this is a shocking
allegation.
The committee said the government had had
forewarnings of the likely course of events:
at the very least, three weeks’ warning had been
given to the Australian Government that it was
very likely the armed forces of [South Vietnam]
would be overwhelmed and that consequently
the defeat of the Government of the Republic of
Vietnam was imminent.
As early as April 1 the Australian government
had warned Australian nationals to leave Vietnam
while transport was still available. Two days later,
the Prime Minister had approved the evacuation of
all non-essential embassy staff, proving the government believed a collapse was imminent. Both the
Australian ambassador on April 1 and Washington
a few days later had warned of a serious refugee
problem.
In fact South Vietnam had been plainly doomed
following the US Congress’s withdrawal of military
aid and supplies after the phony peace agreement of
1973, and contingency plans should have been made
since that time. However on April 8, 1975, Whitlam
told parliament, “The suddenness of the collapse in
South Vietnam limited the scope and effectiveness
of any aid given by the Australian Government or
any other Government.” He continued:
Members of the Opposition have chosen to
belittle our efforts. For example the Leader
of the Opposition called them “too little,
too late”. The truth is that the Australian
Government met, as soon as it was received
from the American Embassy, a request from the
Government of South Vietnam for assistance.
The decision was taken to make seven Hercules
transport aircraft available together with other
aircraft currently based at Butterworth in
Malaysia.
36
In other words, Whitlam was admitting that
Australia had done nothing on its own initiative.
The committee found that:
In spite of these firm indications … little or
nothing of a practical nature was able to be
done either by Embassy officials in Saigon or by
Departmental officials in Canberra to assist those
who sought to obtain refuge in Australia. These
decisions were taken on 21 April and 22 April.
On April 25 the last Australian embassy personnel had been evacuated and the embassy closed. At
that time 3667 Vietnamese had been nominated
for entry into Australia, of whom 366 had been
approved, including twenty-four whose lives were
considered in danger. The committee pointed out:
the announcement of the Government’s
admission criteria came so late that it was
possible for only a few families to be contacted
and processed before the closing of the
Australian Embassy …
The committee went on to describe the procedures which were finally adopted by the Australian
government to save such individuals as had met
with its approval:
from the commencement of business on the
morning of 22 April, 1975, until noon on 24
April, the Embassy was advised by cable of 325
names of persons to whom the granting of an
entry visa had been approved by the Department
of Labour and Immigration. Although the
Committee was unable to ascertain how many
of these persons were able to be contacted prior
to the embassy’s closure, some 200 typewritten
letters were prepared in lieu of formal Australian
entry visas and either delivered personally or
posted to the individual’s last-known address.
By the time Canberra’s approval was given,
and irrespective of whether individuals were
able to be informed of the success of their
application, it was then too late for many to flee
by commercial flights or by any other means.
The committee was informed, however, that
individual members of the Embassy did their
best by preparing affidavits for some of the
Vietnamese with the most urgent and deserving
cases and passed them on to the American
Embassy with a special plea for assistance.
[emphasis added]
The committee found that while it would have
been possible to get these people out in time—
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The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
indeed this would have been a matter of “little difficulty”—the work of the embassy had been impeded
at a critical time because the evacuation appeared to
have been totally controlled by Canberra.
In regard to the typewritten letters given to
some Vietnamese, the committee found:
Although such documents were better
than nothing at all, the letter signed by the
Australian consul was insufficient to allow
five Vietnamese wives to collect tickets from
Singapore Airlines which had been pre-paid by
their husbands in Australia for flights departing
on 26 April.
They were also insufficient authority to
permit those who held them to board nearly
empty RAAF aircraft which departed from
Saigon during the final four days. Indeed the
committee is unable to explain why almostempty Hercules aircraft departed from Ton
Son Nhut airport taking some 34 Vietnamese
nationals without formal exit visas but leaving
behind a considerable number who had been
approved for entry to Australia and who had
been issued with a letter from the Consul.
A witness who left Saigon on the last aircraft
on 25 April and made last-minute inquiries
through the Embassy to discover whether some
Vietnamese whose lives might be in danger
could be included was informed that this was
not possible.
As an alternative, both the witness and
members of the Australian Embassy passed
lists of names, addresses and occupations to
the American Ambassador who promised to
do the best he could … the real value of these
type-written letters was that they enabled some
of the refugees who had been accepted for entry
into Australia to be air-lifted out of Vietnam by
American aircraft. [emphases added]
Actually, the Vietnamese who never qualified
for eligibility probably had a better chance of escaping with the Americans than those who waited for
Australian help until it was too late.
The committee pointed out that those who
trusted the Australian government were placed in a
vicious circle: the longer they waited for advice and
assistance from the embassy, the more remote their
chances of fleeing to safety became. The committee
was informed, for example, of one instance where
a wife had refused American assistance, believing
the Australians would effect her evacuation directly
to join her husband in Australia. After the closure
of the Australian embassy she found she could no
longer take up the previous offer. Other wives had
organised passages on Vietnamese ships but after
April 25 found it impossible to reach the coast. The
committee continued that:
It is apparent … that the Australian
Government generally refused until the last
moment to agree to use its transport resources
to evacuate Vietnamese nationals from South
Vietnam and Saigon … indeed, it was late
on 27 April that authority was given to the
Ambassador to allow him to offer seats out of
Saigon on a space-available basis, providing that
such offers could be made only to those Vietnamese
nationals possessing a valid exit-visa issued by the
Government of Vietnam. [emphasis added]
One is tempted to wonder if the motive behind
this policy was vindictive sadism, so far does it seem
removed from both humanity and common sense.
On April 8, Whitlam had referred to “unparalleled
chaos” in South Vietnam. On April 22, when it was
obvious that South Vietnam was ceasing to exist,
and its remaining officials were engulfed in disaster
and probably trying to escape with their lives, the
Whitlam government apparently expected them to
be issuing exit visas!
Apart from orphans (whose lives were much
less at risk than, say, army officers, civil servants,
police or Australian-associated Vietnamese) a total
of seventy-eight Vietnamese were rescued out of the
thousands who applied. These included thirty-four
nuns—again, not in the highest-risk category—
and just five of the “special cases” whose lives were
deemed to be in particular danger because of their
association with Australians. The USA took about
130,000.
A
ccording to Denis Warner, later broadly corroborated by Clyde Cameron, Whitlam took
personal control of Vietnamese refugee policy on
April 2 when the fall of Saigon was still nearly a
month away, while resistance by die-hards continued after that. After issuing peremptory orders to
close the embassy on April 23, Whitlam left for a
conference in Jamaica and could not be contacted.
Foreign Minister Don Willesee was also out of the
country in Washington.
Warner, who was still in Vietnam on April 25,
wrote of the Australians’ long-standing area of
responsibility, Phuc Tuy Province:
It was Anzac Day. This year, for the first time,
there would be no memorial service at Phuc
Tuy province for Australians who fell in the
Vietnam war … Scores of officials, ranging from
the province chiefs down to village and hamlet
Quadrant June 2014
37
The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
administrators, [had] worked closely with the
Australians. Now that the moment had come to
say goodbye, the Australian Government made
no effort to ascertain whether anyone in Phuc
Tuy wanted to leave, and no attempt was made
to help anyone escape.
The last Hercules flights left Saigon on 25
April. They carried, among other things, a
basket of cats for UN officials. Among others
left behind were the Vietnamese employees
of the Embassy. When the Embassy shut its
doors its books were up-to-date as of 6 p.m. on
24 April. They had been prepared by a woman
whose own life was thought to be endangered
and whose application for evacuation was
rejected by Canberra.
The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised on April
28, 1975:
Very many Australians must be deeply angry
and ashamed about the callousness of our
government’s scuttle from Saigon and its
abandonment—betrayal is not too strong—of
hundreds of Vietnamese entitled to expect our
assistance to flee the fate awaiting the markeddown enemies of Hanoi.
The committee concluded that the government’s
failure to rescue more Vietnamese had not been
caused by incompetence but had been deliberate:
we believe that by being in Vietnam Australia
incurred a residual responsibility, not to mention
a moral responsibility, to assist in the evacuation
from Vietnam of those who had assisted our
forces there and whose lives were believed
to be in danger because of that assistance …
in view of the Committee’s belief that the
Australian Government had been informed of
the gravity and magnitude of the situation in
South Vietnam some three weeks before the
evacuation of the Australian Embassy, we are
unable to come to any conclusion other than one
of deliberate delay in order to minimise the number
of refugees. [emphasis added]
On April 8, Ian Sinclair had asked Whitlam if
he knew of a television program on the evidence
of the murder of hundreds of South Vietnamese
officials when the communist forces had previously
occupied the city of Hue for a time during the Tet
Offensive, and then asked:
In view of these circumstances will he take
up the matter with the Government of North
38
Vietnam and with the provisional government
representing the Khmer Rouge to ensure
neither in Cambodia nor in South Vietnam will
similar mass executions occur?
Whitlam responded to the question contemptuously: “I did not see the programme referred to …”
This of course was not the point. Whitlam as Prime
Minister had better sources of information than
anyone else in the country. The point was in the
last part of Sinclair’s question: What was Whitlam
doing to try to prevent reprisals? Whitlam did not
even attempt to answer this but instead spoke of
how people had been shot by South Vietnamese
police. The impression could be that he considered
executions carried out by the North Vietnamese
were possibly deserved reprisals, or at any rate
understandable.
Senator Willesee on April 21 also made an
appeal to Whitlam to evacuate Vietnamese who
had worked with Australian forces. Whitlam
rejected this appeal out of hand and Willesee did
not use his powers as Foreign Minister—powers he
had been commissioned by the Governor-General
under the Constitution to exercise—to defy this
brutal and dishonourable diktat.
On April 21, when it was obvious Saigon would
fall, Sinclair asked:
Has the Prime Minister approved categories
of persons from South Vietnam to be admitted
to Australia as refugees? Do these categories
include those persons who face the prospect
of execution at the hands of the North
Vietnamese victors? Finally, will the Prime
Minister ensure before his departure on
Wednesday for overseas that he gives the same
expedition to visa applications from approved
categories of persons as was granted to refugees
from [the right-wing anti-communist regime
in] Chile?
Whitlam replied, in part: “The Government
of South Vietnam has for years discouraged people from leaving the country.” In a statement on
April 28 the Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs,
Mr Morrison, implied that the failure to save more
refugees had been the Saigon government’s fault:
We did not bring out as many refugees as
I and my colleagues would have liked. The
only Vietnamese who could board our aircraft
were those with exit permits from the Saigon
Government, and regrettably, the Saigon
Government has made it difficult for people to
obtain travel documents.
Quadrant June 2014
The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese
Of course, people in a life-or-death situation could
have been rescued without travel documents.
In 1980 Clyde Cameron published his memoirs,
China, Communism and Coca-Cola, which threw
a revealing if lurid light on the Whitlam government’s attitudes:
As Minister for Labour and Immigration my
position on Vietnamese migrants [sic] was this:
I rejected the “blood-bath” propaganda …
peddled by the Liberal and Country parties …
Whitlam put out an injunction of the processing
of all applications from Vietnam. He had no
constitutional right to assume the powers which
had been commissioned to me by the GovernorGeneral …
... on April 21, Don Willesee came to see
me with a request that I accompany him to
Whitlam’s office before Whitlam left … for
Jamaica … He wanted Whitlam to recognise
the realities of war and ease the restrictions
applicable to other migrants [for South
Vietnamese]. Whitlam refused and I supported
him, saying I saw no reason why we should risk
opening our doors to war criminals. But Willesee
argued that this was not the proposition he
was putting and stubbornly refused to budge
in his fight for what he regarded as a humane
approach. Finally, Whitlam stuck out his jaw
and thundered: “I’m not having hundreds of
f***ing Vietnamese Balts coming into this
country with their religious and political hatreds
against us!” Poor Don looked pleadingly towards
me for help but I replied: “No Don, I’m sorry
mate, but I agree with Gough on this matter.”
Indeed, not only did I agree with him, but I
could have hugged him for putting my own view so
well. [emphases added]
Cameron continued:
Willesee urged that Vietnamese facing
“summary execution, torture or other cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment from a
variety of persecutors” should be given
diplomatic asylum. Reminding Whitlam that
similar help had been offered during the rightwing military coup in Santiago, he further
stated that “the Hungarian leader Imre Nagy
was summarily executed by the Russians in
1958 after leaving the Yugoslav Embassy in
Budapest on a Soviet guarantee of safe conduct
out of Hungary”. He warned that the same
kind of thing could happen in Saigon. He
made a special plea for Vietnamese who had been
employed by the Australian Embassy, claiming
that we had a moral obligation to take them into
our arms. Whitlam rejected this plea out of hand.
[emphasis added]
This is not a story of mere bureaucratic incompetence, but of something infinitely worse. Labor
has yet to apologise for the Whitlam government’s
vindictive and morally blood-stained attitude to the
fall of Saigon, for the lives sacrificed to leftist ideology, and for one of the darkest stains on our national
honour.
This essay is dedicated to the memories of Professors
Patrick O’Brien and Kenneth Minogue. A footnoted
version is available at Quadrant Online.
Hal G.P. Colebatch’s two notable recent books
are Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists
Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II (Quadrant
Books) and Fragile Flame: The Uniqueness and
Vulnerability of Scientific and Technological
Civilization (Acashic).
Consecration
i.m. the Kyoto martyrs, 1619
On the wind’s tongue
the spring cherry tree places
a host of Hosts
to consecrate the place where
Catholics were turned to ghosts.
Andrew Lansdown
Quadrant June 2014
39
P eter M ur ph y
It Pays to Choose
Your Ancestors Carefully
T
he Son Also Rises could well have been subtitled “a critique of wasted breath”. After
1945, Western countries became obsessed
with social mobility. The Left talked about access
and equity. The Right talked about opportunity.
Governments of all stripes spent trillions of dollars
to increase social mobility. The lesson of Gregory
Clark’s fascinating book is that it was all pointless.
Social mobility is no greater in the West today than
it was in medieval England. Upward mobility in
Sweden today is no better than in the eighteenth
century. Nor is it better in contemporary Sweden
than in the United States. The wealth of East Asia
exploded in the past half-century. Modernity came
to Asia aggressively. But this had relatively little
impact on who climbed up or slid down the social
ladder. Neither huge spending on higher education
nor even mass-scale totalitarian murder of millions made a difference. All government schemes to
increase social mobility end in failure.
This does not mean that social mobility does not
exist. Individuals, families and social groups rise
and fall over time. But the time scale is very long.
Social mobility is glacial. It occurs at a snail’s pace
over centuries. Yet states, encouraged by social science, invest massively in the expectation that they
can effect major changes over short periods. This is
an illusion. Across two generations, between parents and their children, churn occurs. Children do
better or worse than their parents. But the net result
of millions of movements up and down the social
scale is only ever incremental change to the longterm underlying social pattern.
We can compare the wealth, income, education
and occupation (WIEO) of parents and children. If
The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of
Social Mobility
by Gregory Clark
Princeton University Press, 2014, 384 pages,
US$24.95
40
the two are perfectly correlated then we can predict
everything about a child’s social position from the
parents’ social position. No mobility, up or down,
occurs in this case. The correlation coefficient is 1.
Conversely, 0 represents complete intergenerational
mobility. In this circumstance, nothing can be predicted about a child’s outcome from their birth.
Social science conventionally looks at mobility data
across two or three generations. That data shows
significant changes in WIEO. Looking at the historical short-run creates an illusion. Suppose there
is a strong, 0.75, correlation between one generation
and the next. Using regression analysis, 50 per cent
of the child’s position can be predicted from the
parents’ WIEO. Repeat that for a couple of generations, and family WIEO quickly regresses to the
social mean, in three to five generations.
Nothing lasts, it seems. Except that it does.
Clark’s remarkable insight is that the strongest
correlation of generations is not that of parent and
child but between grandparent and grandchildren,
or great-grandparent and great-grandchild. Thus
a child from a high-status group may slide down
the social ladder but there is a high chance that the
child’s child or the grandchild’s child will slide back
up the social scale. Novelists and ordinary people observe this all the
time. Social science screens it out, in part because
social science has a progressive bias. Social democrats and social liberals desire a correlation coefficient of 0. They deplore a correlation of 1. Yet social
reality over the long run is actually much closer to 1
than 0. That is true across a thousand years of data.
A hundred years of social democracy has made no
difference to the historical pattern.
Clark uses a biological metaphor to explain
what happens. He points to the studies of adopted
children. The WIEO of the biological parents of
these children is a massively better predictor of
adult socio-economic status than the WIEO of
the adopting parents. Thus family environment
is a minor cause of mobility. The major cause
Quadrant June 2014
It Pays to Choose Your Ancestors Carefully
is inherited traits. But Clark notes that these
operate in two ways. The first is the phenotype of
individuals. An individual’s inherited traits interact
in contingent ways with one another and with the
social environment. Distinct personalities emerge,
and vary across generations. The second way of
looking at traits however is the genotype of families.
Some families have very powerful traits, which play
out in individuals across generations in different
ways. Traits will recede and dominate, clash and
combine, negate or underscore each other and the
surrounding social environment. Sometimes the
results are brilliant, sometime disastrous, but more
often than not above average.
above average. Eventually this will regress to the
social mean. All elevated positions erode over time,
but it takes centuries, and even in some cases, millennia. Even snails move faster. Take the case of the
high-status surname group of the post-Norman-era
English indigenous elite: the Berkeleys, Hiltons and
Pakenhams. From 1170 to 1350 the incidence of these
names at Oxford and Cambridge is four times their
incidence in the general population. It then takes
to 1980, six centuries, for that rate to regress to one.
Another rare surname group derives from landowner names appearing in the Inquisitions Post
Mortem (IPM) for the years 1236–99. This was a
mix of Norman and English names: the Barclays,
Stanleys, Keynes, Mainwarings and Mortimers.
lark has found an ingenious way to map long- Clark tracks that cohort from 1440 to 1858 through
term social mobility. He identifies rare high- the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
status surnames. He calculates the
(PCC), the old probate court of
incidence of these names in the
upper-class England. The incidence
general population, then compares
of IPM rare surnames in the PCC
either free-market registry
that with the incidence of the surinitially is eight times more
names in key professions (medicine opportunity nor left- common than its occurrence in the
and law), in property and income
general population. By the midliberal regulation
tax registers, and the registers of
nineteenth century, four hundred
makes an iota of
major universities. He and his coyears later, that has dropped to
investigators draw on a large body
difference. Surname around twice as common. The longof data from England, Sweden,
run correlation coefficient between
groups that begin
the United States, Japan, China,
generations of IPM names is 0.84.
well maintain their The Keyneses do not quickly fall
Taiwan and Korea. They find rare
surnames that are uncommon
and the Smiths do not rapidly rise.
status over the long The
among the general population but
Keynesian welfare state made
term. Low-status no difference to this social law.
that frequently occur in tax, property, university and professional
Social structure is durable. It
name groups rise
registries. They track these names
erodes only very slowly over time.
over centuries. They find that the only very gradually. Its characteristics resist, ignore and
incidence of the rare surnames in
defeat progressive social policies.
the registries declines over time but
States might as well take the multidoes so slowly. For successful rare surname cohorts, ple billions they spend on social mobility and burn
the correlation between generations is typically 0.75 them in a bonfire for all the effect they have.
over the long run. Sometimes it is as high as 0.9.
he evidence that Clark uncovers is intriguing.
This happens under almost all imaginable circumEven if the reader is not interested in the social
stances, modern and medieval. That means that the
sum effect of all of the participation, equity, access science, what Clark reveals about the history of surand opportunity schemes of social liberalism and names is eye-opening. Take the case of the very rare
surname Pepys, made famous by the diarist Samuel
social democracy is zero.
The Maoist dictatorship in China killed seventy Pepys. The name group emerged from obscurity
million people in the name of revolutionary equality. when one of them enrolled at Cambridge in 1496.
Yet the long-term correlation coefficient for Qing Since then at least fifty-eight Pepyses have enrolled
era elite surnames (the Shens) from 1912 to 2008 is at Cambridge or Oxford, most recently in 1995.
0.8—highest for professors (0.9), 0.8 for company The occurrence of the name in the general populaboard chairs, 0.74 for central government officials. tion would have predicted two or three enrolments.
Neither mass murder nor the era of mega-growth The nine Pepyses who died between 2000 and 2012
after Mao had any profound effect on the historic left estates with an average value of £416,000. This
pattern. Rare samurai surnames in Japan likewise was more than five times the average estate value
remain socially influential. High-status surname in England in the period. This surname group has
groups begin at a point in time with WIEO vastly maintained a high status over seventeen generations.
C
N
T
Quadrant June 2014
41
It Pays to Choose Your Ancestors Carefully
The roll-call of persistent surnames is impressive. science, is no explanation of either social mobility
Tim Berners-Lee is a descendant of a prominent or enduring socio-economic status patterns. Family,
early nineteenth-century family. The great-great- on the other hand, is a powerful conduit. Parents
grandfather of the left-wing Guardian newspaper can’t ensure that their children do as well as they do.
editor Alan Rusbridger was the well-to-do land But the fortunes of high-achieving families often
steward to the Duke of Richmond. Sweden is still rally in later generations. The traits of the family
the acme of social democracy, yet rare aristocratic genotype persist across generations, appearing,
surnames (Gyllenstjerna) and old Latinate clerical, disappearing and reappearing. Winston Churchill
academic and merchant family names (Linnaeus, (1874–1965), was the descendant of the great general
Celsius) from the eighteenth century remain socially John Churchill, the 1st Earl of Marlborough (1650–
prominent. They have higher taxable incomes 1722). Winston’s mother was a Jerome, a New York
than the average and a significantly higher rate of French Huguenot family. Winston’s son Randolph
participation in the learned professions and the was (shall we say) a disappointment. He had
universities. Sweden’s free university tuition and something of his father’s drive but not his discipline.
high taxation have made no difference to the longhe tantalising mystery left unexplained by Clark
term dawdling pace at which surname groups return
is how and why prominent surname groups
to the social average.
In the United States intergenerational social come into being. This is a question not of inheritmobility rates are equally slow. Neither free-mar- ance but of origins. It is hard enough to understand
ket opportunity nor left-liberal regulation makes how social aptitude is passed on; it is even more
an iota of difference. Surname groups that begin difficult to understand how it begins in the first
place. Looking at Clark’s evidence,
well maintain their status over the
it is possible to start to make some
long term. Low-status name groups
guesses
about the origins of sucrise only very gradually. This conace, that marker
cessful surname groups by considfirms what everyone already tacitly
knows. Descendants of Ashkenazi of nineteenth-century ering the shared characteristics of
these groups across time and space.
Jews (the Goldmans), Sephardic
pseudo-science, is
Literacy is a common theme. The
Jews (the Baruchs), the colonial
no explanation of descendants
of highly literate (which
Dutch rich (the Vanderbilts), the
Puritan New Englanders (the either social mobility also means tiny) religious groups
Clevelands), colonial Ivy League
or enduring socio- achieve and maintain high socioeconomic status. That is true of the
names (the Rutgers) and Japanese
economic status
Egyptian Copts, the Ashkenazi
immigrants (the Ishidas), having
established a high status, retain it. patterns. Family, on Jews, the New England Puritans,
French Protestant Huguenots,
You can put them in internment
the other hand, is a the
and the Dutch Republic’s mercancamps, like the Japanese-Americans
powerful conduit. tile Calvinists. High levels of litduring the Second World War, and
eracy point to social exclusiveness
it makes no difference over time.
through achievement. Exclusiveness
No amount of entrance quotas
and diversity programs in universities and no tsu- is also often the converse of exclusion. In fact, exclunami of “tax the rich” and equality campaigns have sion may be more closely associated with achieveany discernable effect on the net long-term social ment than inclusion.
This is true of high-achieving non-assimilated
result. Social patterns, as in the nature of patterns,
persist. The position of surname groups with historic endogamous religious minorities in the Muslim
low socio-economic status changes at a listless pace. world, such as Assyrian and Armenian Christians
This is true of pre-Civil War African-Americans and Zoroastrians. The same applies to the caste(the Merriweathers) and French-Canadian immi- exclusiveness of various Christian minorities in
grants (the Gagnons). The participation of these India or to the Banias, the Indian occupational
name groups in the legal and medical professions is caste, whose off-shoots are inf luential in the
very low. The socio-economic standing of African- United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
Americans has declined during the term of the You can find online sites advertising “Bania IT
first African-American President. Tellingly, Barack Software Engineers Matrimonial Grooms and
Obama’s father was a Kenyan. Contemporary black Brides”. Egyptian Christian Copts today are the
Africans have a better representation among US most sociologically over-represented cohort among
US doctors. Their ancestors were a dhimmi group
doctors than do white Americans.
Race, that marker of nineteenth-century pseudo- in Muslim Ottoman Egypt. They were punitively-
T
R
42
Quadrant June 2014
It Pays to Choose Your Ancestors Carefully
taxed second-class citizens who still ended up possessing half of Egypt’s wealth by the end of the
Ottoman era. They then lost much of that property
when Nasser nationalised it.
But, as Clark observes, material fortune in one
historical moment tells us almost nothing about
long-term social fortune. Winning a lottery, for
example, makes little difference to one’s children’s
WIEO. Grants, give-aways and hand-outs have
no lasting effect on who has what. It is clear that
neither the direct inheritance nor grants of WIEO
are significant. Nor is the key difference religion in
the broad sense. High-status surname groups often
overlap with religious groups. But religious membership is just as likely to correlate with low social
status.
What religion and high status do appear to share
is literacy. The same may also apply to secular highachieving surname groups. It would be interesting
to see a study of persons like Robert Fitzharding
(c. 1095–1170), the effective founder of the Berkeley
family dynasty, one of England’s most successful.
This merchant financier of Henry Plantagenet was
an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who thrived in Norman
England. He founded St Augustine’s Abbey in
Bristol and a family line that even today still owns
much of its eleventh-century lands. Fitz is Norman
French for “son of ”. Harding is Old English for
hardy, brave or strong. If hardy-brave-strong character traits can be inherited, that would be very
useful in the ever-shifting sands of high politics
especially if combined with an inherited capacity
for literate life. The founding of an abbey suggests
a literate disposition. The result, a mix of hardiness
and literacy, is a powerful thing.
The illusion of social liberalism and social
democracy is that public policy can over-write this
complex story of inheritance, trait and personality.
Modern liberals in England thought they could tax
inheritance out of society. They couldn’t, any more
than free university tuition or the attempt to liquidate social classes in China could. Society is not
progressive. It is conservative. It does change but
it changes slowly. Through change, continuities
assert themselves. From agrarian to industrial to
post-industrial society, technology, art, occupations,
tastes and judgments changed. Yet through even
the most momentous transformations, some things
remained quietly impassive.
Peter Murphy is Professor of Creative Arts and Social
Aesthetics at James Cook University.
The wedding party of animals
The old cat with the tumour on his brow
will wear a waistcoat and a bow-tie.
The tumour, removed, re-grows and blends
into the tigerish stripes of fur.
The farm dogs too, who at another wedding barked
furiously from a barn as rings were exchanged
will hopefully sit near the cat, adorned
in neck ruffs, a dickey, and a tie.
Impossible to tell the bride it may not be
perfect or even possible on the day.
The tumour, black and shiny, is no excuse
not to chase. A tangled tie may droop
underneath a paw. The animals’ role
may be mayhem but entertain
the guests with champagne in their hands
showing animals’ love is unashamed.
Elizabeth Smither
Quadrant June 2014
43
J ohn P r ine as
Surrogacy and the
New Misbegotten Family
I
n 1965, at the tail end of the baby boom, the
maternity block at Crown Street Women’s
Hospital was as busy as ever. It was twenty years
since the war and the first of the Baby Boomers
were now coming into labour. The echo of the baby
boom had come, but neither the echo nor the hospital were to last. Within a few years the hospital was
closed, the buildings were demolished, and out of
mind went the memory of the place where so many
families had been made.
What happened to the labour ward admissions
register? It must be stored away somewhere in some
government archive. Perhaps it could be retrieved,
to be put on display in a new museum dedicated to
the disappearing “traditional family”. The register
was a massive tome and it needed its own solid timber reading stand. Located just inside the swinging
doors of the delivery suite, it lay there, open and
inviting, for the stream of new arrivals. They often
came charging through the double doors at around
three in the morning.
New arrivals were admitted one to a line down
the left of the page. Along the line of each admission, handwritten progress notes in neat copperplate
(before the age of computers) followed the labour
across the page to the discharge instruction, which
was boldly indicated by “HOME” or “BFA”. There
were about forty names down each page. About half
of those deliveries were destined to go home, the
rest became BFAs.
Medical students crowded about the register by
night and day. Confining themselves to the BFAs,
they studied the “form” like punters at the races.
Then, all together, they scrambled for this or that
delivery room to watch the coming of a newborn.
Grasping a pink or blue (and hopefully never
grey) baby by the neck, grappling with its soggy,
slippery body and manipulating, manoeuvring and
gently easing it into the world without squeezing or
dropping it is all that it takes to deliver a baby. After
all, childbirth is the most natural thing in the world.
Actually, the BFAs were always complicated ...
44
When a BFA labour was nearing delivery, when
the baby’s head became visible at the birth canal and
birth was imminent, it was then that the bedside
nurses moved quickly to throw a large pillow across
the patient’s abdomen to prevent her from seeing
what was going on at her nether end. Then the overbearing nurse on the right with the one on the left
of the bed would together lean forward and encircle
the patient with open arms. Clasping her in a supporting embrace, they would hold her to steady and
comfort her. They would wipe the beads of sweat
from her brow and whisper frothy little nothings in
her ears. They would goad her tenderly but firmly
through the hardest stage of labour.
As the strain and pain reached crescendo, she
was coaxed along with the refrain “Push, dear,
into your bottom” and she needed this instruction
because she was delivering blind. The emphasis on
the “push” would occasionally bring in, as if on cue,
the attending students in a light-hearted chorus of
“Push, dear, into your bottom”, rendered at just the
right tempo for the midwife to pull the baby clear
and switch off the pain.
That sudden release left the drugged and incoherent patient staring open-mouthed at the ceiling,
whereupon the nurses’ embrace became tighter, set
for restraint in case she started thrashing around,
or if she came back to her senses too quickly and
attempted to reach out, to dislodge the pillow, to
catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the product of
her ordeal, the limp and soggy mass that was hastened out of the room before it gasped for air.
The students crowding the exit doorway were
focused on the midwife, who clamped and cut
the cord and relayed away the baby faster than the
poor mother could reset her mind. All the students
straightened up and smartly stepped aside to make a
passage for delivery by the wardsman of the bundle
to a place outside where the newborn cry could rend
the air without disturbing the equanimity of the
confinement suite. Half the student body livened up
enough to hurry out to watch the registrar induce
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Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
the newborn’s cry ...
As for all those babies stolen so easily from their
Sometimes the delivery didn’t run smoothly and mothers, they would become another generation for
a shrill or moaning plaintive cry, “My baby!” chased everybody to feel guilty about and for heartfelt apolthe Baby For Adoption out the door and the patient ogies to be made and for prime ministerial tears to
had to be restrained and consoled. Most times, the be shed forty-seven years later. But in 1965 that poor
BFA was transported “unannounced” out of the wardsman was only doing his job. He was helping
confinement room and the nurses smiled and nod- to farm the babies out to good Christian couples
ded approvingly to the patient as they cautiously and who were unable to conceive, who were deemed by a
warily relaxed their embrace with their customary: strict selection panel to be fit, willing and capable of
“Everything’s going to be all right now, dearie.”
giving an adopted child the best possible chance in
The patient was already spaced out by the pain- life in a stable and loving family environment. The
killers and the long labour. Now she was tired and babies spent no time at all in the nursery. Without
light-headed as well after all that pushing, strain- fuss, they were bundled up and whisked away. Their
ing and hyperventilating. Still, she managed to adoption by deserving childless couples had already
return a nod or two in the direction of the nurses been arranged.
and sometimes even a vacant smile of achievement.
The babies had to be adopted out. The natural
The nurses would then nod and
order demanded it. The natural
smile and caress her some more and
order decreed that every baby that
while everybody was smiling and
was
in the hospital had to go
he babies spent no homeborn
nodding, the midwife went about
to a natural family. A natural
time at all in the
the undercover business of removfamily began when a man married
ing the afterbirth, dropping it into nursery. Without fuss, a woman. The couple then proa bucket and taking that and a few
duced children in the normal way
of the remaining students quietly they were bundled up or, failing that, used adoption as a
away. Those scholars were keen to
and whisked away. natural and time-honoured way of
perform the post-natal examination
starting a family. There were all
Their adoption by
of the placenta.
sorts of families in the world and
deserving childless it was acknowledged that unnatuAfter all the evidence of the
patient’s travail had left the room,
couples had already ral families had their reasons for
after the obstructing pillow had
being. However, for the vital tasks
been arranged.
been removed and the birthing area
of nurturing and raising children,
tidied up, the patient was left to rest
only the natural family could raise
quietly in bed. That was an opporchildren naturally.
tunity for the students who were still there to come
All of this had to be impressed upon the pregaround and polish up their bedside manner. They nant country girls and it was good that the chemwould approach the patient and introduce them- istry of gestation had sensitised them to the kind
selves. They would engage her with smiles and ask of chanting that the big city hospital was good at.
her how she felt. Professing interest in her case, they Crown Street wasn’t just an obstetrics hospital. It
would praise her for her sterling effort and make made families. The pregnant “public” patients who
small talk about anything except the baby that was were sent there couldn’t help but notice the hopeful
not there.
childless couples outside the nursery window.
The patients also spent some weeks in the hostel
n 1965 that sort of confinement was “not uncom- before delivery, so there was plenty of time for them
mon”. A patient was admitted into hospital to be to be coaxed and nudged along Crown Street’s famrelieved of a BFA. Crown Street was a major obstet- ily circle of values. However, if the constant chantrics teaching hospital and it delivered babies to and ing of the staff didn’t convince a patient and she still
from everywhere. Young unmarried women were quibbled about having a BFA, the hard word was
sent from country towns on an extended holiday to put on her.
the big city once their heaviness could no longer be
In 1965 it was considered to be a self-evident
concealed under layers of clothing.
human right for a child to have a mother and a
The young women were billeted near the hos- father. Crown Street asserted that right on behalf
pital, and after confinement they were sent back of its babies because the mothers could not or would
home—sometimes back to school, and back behind not do it for them. Human-rights awareness was
their usual desks without fuss or disruption to the pretty raw in those days. But the hostel staff were
class. Occasionally, they were greeted by a testoster- very good at explaining the rights of the child to the
one-mediated guffaw from the back of the room.
mother who was about to lose her baby. “It is best for
T
I
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45
Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
the child, my dear.”
And for the patient’s family. The family didn’t
need another mouth to feed and the government
didn’t pay pensions to unmarried mothers. Abortion
on demand was illegal. So the babies had to be
delivered instead.
In 1965 the family was thriving and Crown
Street posted its proud spirited contribution to
family health with a large canvas, “Our Family”,
which hung like an advertisement outside the social
worker’s office. Another nearby maternity hospital
welcomed visitors with an icon of the Madonna
and Child reverentially displayed on an easel near
its front entrance. But at Crown Street it was The
Family as it might have been painted by Norman
Rockwell that was the object of devotion. The family was highly esteemed in those days. It had just
brought forth the boomer generation and for that
masterly achievement everybody was singing praises
of the family.
A photographic exhibition, “The Family of Man”,
which opened at the New York Museum of Modern
Art in 1955 and toured the world for some years,
seized upon the popular enthusiasm for heaping
praise upon the family. In that eye-catching panegyric, family portraits from all over the world were
gathered together. The eye of the camera had “penetrated beyond man’s worldly accretions, his superficial mien and social consciousness” to expose the
“universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life”. Thus the family from Kansas and the
family from the Kalahari in juxtaposition revealed
“the essential oneness of the family throughout the
world”. There was a nonchalant “salt of the earth”
composure in the eyes of those families, no look of
foreboding for the day (very near) when they would
be “deconstructed” into anxious nuclear fragments.
The Crown Street family portrait could have
been the template for that bygone exhibition. That
family boasted four generations of proud, happy
and healthy-looking folk of all ages with the latest
addition to the extended family sitting in the lap of
the elderly matriarch at the centre. There were her
children and her children’s children, all with their
spouses and their smiling children about them.
The happiest faces in the picture were of the little ones. Born of their mothers and beaming like
their fathers, these confident-looking kids could be
seen grinning impishly, and boasting without being
heard: “I have a Mum and a Dad and they are right
there behind me.”
T
he Crown Street family is tightly drawn and
cohesive. Its pedigree is exclusive, its bloodlines
streamlined. The family blueprint can be sketched
quickly and deftly into shape. Little squares and
46
little circles for males and females. Horizontal and
vertical, marriage and begetting lines. A quick line
drawing of the extended family reveals at a glance
where and how everybody fits in.
Living families are never as neat as that. Families
tend to be chaotic and the family diagram would
declare as much were it to be drawn completely and
accurately. There are many things to do with family
that people will whisper about but prefer not to put
on paper and certainly not in diagrammatic form.
There are black sheep, bastards and village idiots
everywhere, and there are the products of consanguinity and incest that nobody wants to talk about,
let alone see presented diagrammatically.
The family tree diagram lives and changes with
the family. In recent times, its branching and rebranching have become bewildering. Unconventional
begettings are turning family diagrams into printed
circuits and an orgy of surrogacy is melting down
family diagrams into bowls of spaghetti and meatballs. Soon there will be no visible lines of descent
to fret about and a man will not dither if he fancies fathering a child with his mother’s defrosted
gametes.
Surrogacy is a great invention. It presents the gift
of parenthood to the couple who did not dare to
dream that one day they too would become parents
and cradle in their arms a baby of their very own.
But surrogacy also presents the gift of parenthood
to any man who wants to have a child for just his
own pleasure.
Men do want to be fathers. The desire for fatherhood is a normal human instinct. It is the driver for
the survival of the species. But nature has made the
struggle for survival vexatious for gay men by making all men dependent upon women.
In his pursuit of fatherhood the gay man has had
to endure endless humiliations throughout history
and in all cultures. He has had to live a life of pretence. While at times he has been successful in a
Darwinian sense, he has always been left to nurse a
discontented love for evermore.
And then came surrogacy.
T
he battle of the sexes has been raging since the
day Man led his recalcitrant family out of the
cave. But now the row has become nasty because
the new feminist has hatched up some seriously
progressive ideology with a dismal “Nature is bad,
nurture is good” mantra which promises to undo,
not just the natural family, but much more besides.
As soon as her boomer cohort was old enough to
have a say she started desexing everything in sight,
not missing even the lowly manhole cover. She stuck
her nose behind the school toilets to catch the kids
learning about themselves and she marched them
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Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
off to sex education classes for instruction into the affirm their love by ejaculating into test tube A of
correct understanding of sexuality and gender. She the IVF kit they bought from the chemist. They can
insisted that all genders be equal and she has levelled then pop their chosen egg into the mix, courier the
the playing field to make it all so. She has mandated conceptus to IBF and after about nine months the
that there will be no boys-only games any more and firm will deliver a battery-farmed baby.
no boys-only clubs any more.
Making a baby for oneself is easy nowadays. Now
She has decreed that boys don’t need to be pre- that the industry has gone offshore to where womb
pared for manhood. Laudatory references to boy- hire is dirt cheap, surrogate farms are growing
hood and manhood are discriminatory, unacceptable babies like cabbages, or in IBF’s case, like coconuts.
and must be expunged from the language. There is
IBF is a surrogate reproduction servicing firm
no such thing as “manly virtue”, and all mentoring which recently listed in the health-care service secof boys by men is pederasty at best.
tor of the All Ords. The customer does the “servicIf a deprecating opportunity presents itself, she ing” and IBF gestates and delivers the baby. IBF
will put the boot in. In sex education for exam- has established a reproduction facility on a nearby
ple, the teacher will discuss paedophilia and she tropical island paradise. The facility has a motelwill note in passing that the Scientific American has style hostel where the wombs (docile native girls)
reported that there is no such thing
are billeted and a battery of delivas a female paedophile. In school,
ery rooms hidden away at the rear
boys are wearing the dunce’s hat t takes an Olympian- of the premises. Thoughts of Crown
and taking the Ritalin. At the end
Street may spring to mind with this
sized ego to wilfully arrangement
of the day, the kids go wandering
but the comparison
home in unisex uniforms and genfabricate a new life, doesn’t really carry.
der confusion.
Like a forlorn hope, IBF Island
mould it into a child is embraced
The father figure is out of date
by its barrier reef. It
and all the while
and the absent father is becommay wrap around itself a medicoing the norm. Men make children
ignore the other half legal firewall or even an iron curwithout rite or ritual and then
tain but it will be all to no avail.
walk away. Children pass through of that child’s nature. One day and in time, IBF’s sins
childhood without a man having
But there are plenty will come of age and they will turn
touched their lives. The family docask questions. One woman is
of men who have such and
tor dares not lay a fatherly hand on
known to have sued the doctor who
towering egotism. delivered her, years after the event,
the shoulder of a troubled teenager
lest he set off an explosion of botbecause he had given her “unlawtled-up anger. The boy may have
ful life”. Her gay parents had sepanever known a father, but he’s got all the facts on rated, leaving her at home alone, to ask the mirror
paedophiles, they’ve taught him those at school.
on the wall, “Who am I?”
Just as the Family of Man is becoming a failing
Doctors are hypersensitive to the risk of medicoenterprise, the gay couple, sensitised by a newfound legal complications in their work, and thoughts of
family-making potency, emerges from the closet being sued lurk at the back of every consultation.
and clamour for the right to marry, to have and to However, the risk isn’t random. It depends on the
raise children, to exemplify the two-father family to kind of doctoring one indulges in and it is well
families that have known no father at all.
known that an elective procedure is always riskier
The lesbian lifestyle is stable in ways that the gay then a life-saving intervention.
couple can never hope to mimic. Even so, having
Obstetrics has an overall high medico-legal comtwo mothers is worse than having no father at all plication rate because people “elect” to have beautiful
when it comes to turning a boy into a man. Also, and healthy babies and furthermore, they “elect” to
for building up a girl’s confidence, one father does it have them without any discomfort or inconvenience
better than two mothers combined and he does it, to themselves. This makes even an ordinary delivery
seemingly, without even trying.
a hand-sweating procedure and that’s why it comes
with a fixed rating of 55 iu on the MLC scale, irrehere are no homosexuals in the most recent spective of the experience of the accoucheur.
edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
The MLC index is a function derived from comof Mental Disorders. There is, however, a nice new puter modelling analysis of the “electivity profiles”
entity called “androphilia”.
of various medical and surgical interventions. The
An androphiliac couple can now go into any index is charted on a scale from zero to 110. Low“ovarium” and purchase an egg. They may then risk procedures fall towards the bottom and the
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Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
index maxes out at 110 iu for the most dangerous
(for the doctor) interventions. The MLC index is a
useful clinical tool for giving pause to doctors when
they go chasing challenging procedures up the scale.
Actuarial tables based on the MLC index rank
external cardiac massage at the bottom of the scale
with an MLC of zero. That is because people actually smile about their broken ribs when they emerge
alive from that procedure. By comparison, breast
augmentation surgery has a calculated 85 iu. This
might seem high for such a superficial operation but
it’s not overvalued because, when you think about
it, the surgeon is really operating on the client’s ego.
No procedure has greater electivity then the one
that enables the gay man to make a baby for himself.
It registers a red-hot 110 on the MLC scale. Saving
a life is one thing but making a life is quite another.
The MLC score decorating this gay conceit should
be taken as a red flag by all family-making enterprises to (at least) pause and contemplate Crown
Street.
I
BF is serviced by an elite clientele from the most
advanced Western nations. These people are in a
league of their own with regard to the size of the
ego. It takes an Olympian-sized ego to wilfully fabricate a new life, mould it into a child and all the
while ignore the other half of that child’s nature.
But there are plenty of men who have such towering
egotism and they heed no red flag in their mixed-up
pursuit of family bliss.
One egocentric musical celebrity bragged, to a
mob of reporters, “I need someone to love in my
old age,” when he was taking delivery of his newly
minted son. In an interview for Fathers and Babies
magazine he reminisced on the sudden and unexpected passing of his beloved mother and he became
dewy-eyed and grieved openly for the harshness of
the fates which afforded him just a frozen egg, delivered from some Third World ovarium, with which
to sire his son. “I wanted to have my mother,” he
lamented to the media.
At a recent promotional seminar, an IBF executive was asked how big was its potential market. The
executive shrugged his shoulders and with a gesture
of supplication that wiped the expert grin from his
face replied, “I don’t know.” It appears that IBF’s
clients are (nearly) all gay and you can’t count gays
the way you count ordinary people. Today’s gay
man may yesterday have had “wife, kids, the full
catastrophe”.
When asked if IBF would be a good stock to hold
in a “mum and dad” super fund portfolio, another
executive was quick to impart his confidence for the
future of the company: “Imagine the economic benefits to millions of ordinary women who won’t have
48
to interrupt their careers to have babies in the oldfashioned way!” Hold IBF for the long term was his
advice: “Because every hen wants to be a rooster.”
In the meantime, battery baby-farming stocks
have a low yield since they are dependent on a gay
market which aspires to no more then token fatherhood. Gays are not into increasing the population.
You won’t see a gay couple with their three kids
walking in the park.
Currently IBF has no choice but to promote itself
to gay couples and singletons desiring a beloved for
mentoring. Prospective couples are lured by the offer
of a tropical island holiday at the company’s resort.
Aspiring fathers can take a restful holiday in the
last three weeks of their pregnancy while taking
in the company’s “Parenting for Fathers” seminar.
That five-day intensive program introduces and
deals with the special issues and challenges of nontraditional parenthood. Early registration is advised
for this essential educational experience. There is
also available a post-natal hands-on workshop in
“practical fathercraft”.
All of IBF’s enculturation programs are designed
to the highest international standards by the company’s multi-disciplinary team of experts. IBF is
internationally recognised as an ethical health-care
provider and a centre of excellence for the delivery
of the family of the future. It is currently developing
an entry-level program for the man who is reorienting from ordinary family life to gay fatherhood and
family.
“Making the Family of the Future” is the mission statement of IBF. On the day that a couple
takes delivery of their newborn, they will receive
their new baby’s birth certificate embossed with this
affirmation and the names of the definitive parents
of the child. On discharge from the facility the new
family will receive a complimentary gift voucher for
their infant’s first round of immunisation shots.
All of this family-making business is exciting
and challenging for any nervous first-time parent
but for the newly contrived “Family of Men” there is
also apprehension. After all that the couple has gone
through and all that they have had to endure to come
with child and give birth, their little one will begin
life with a disadvantage. It will be stigmatised as
illegitimate and disparaged as a “battery farm baby”
by a deeply conservative family culture which denies
the fathers the human rite of marriage. Their child
will join about 70,000 other little innocents belonging to monogendered nuclear families in California.
For the modern-day miracle baby, the happy
homecoming is yet to be. But attitudes are changing. The World Court and the American College of
Paediatrics, for example, have been quietly intimating: “It is no disadvantage for a little boy to have no
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Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
father if he has two mothers and there is no depriva- Mardi Gras. The caravan shoved off from outside
tion when a little girl has no mother if she has two the Museum of Natural History, which houses a
fathers. All’s well, so long as the putative parents splendid “Hall of Primitive Cultures”, and it is now
of the children provide them with the appropriate gallivanting its way towards the old showground a
measure of parenting.”
few kilometres away where it will peter out in and
This intelligence is reassuring. It means that the around the cavernous exhibition hall.
gay community’s struggle for matrimonial rights
As the riders head for that cave screaming “Gay
and legitimacy for its children has strong support Marriage!” placards galore emerge from the dyke
and will inevitably succeed. It is now time for the exhaust. In rainbow-coloured and meaningful ways,
legislators to move into the twenty-first century and they leave no doubt as to what they want or when
do the right thing by recognising the new facts of they desire it. But then what will they do with it?
family life.
My! How those little miracle babies are thrivActually, the new facts of life have already ing in the care of their mentors. They have come a
arrived in California, the ACT and various other long way to attend this nuclear family friendly event
Orwellian jurisdictions. In those semantic wonder- and it is wonderful to see how many other friendly
lands the anti-axiomatic is the new
nuclear families are attending either
normal and marriage lines gaily
as participants or as spectators.
unite. The black sheep and his mate
The rich, the famous and all
hey are all together,
are all smiles in the family photo.
those
beautiful people, marching
loudly and gaily
From now and forever they are
in priapic solidarity, have given the
cheering for the
married parents and partners and
big tick to the Sydney Mardi Gras,
the fruit of their union can be seen
disestablishment of gaily marking it as the world leader
dangling legitimately in the family
in the genre. Turned-on people are
marriage and the
tree diagram.
now coming from far and wide.
The progressive Western world
“Oh, look! there goes that
disappearance of
will discriminate no more! The
famous gay celebrity dad who sings
the old-fashioned
family will become democratic,
in the Queen’s English and plays
family for good.
inclusive, and it will be seen to celthe piano and there’s his little son
ebrate everybody’s right to family
Titan. Isn’t Titan just a chip off the
with issue, however engendered and
old block!?”
irrespective of sexual preference, sexual orientation
“But Titan’s smile seems distant and unfocused.
or gender identity and in any parental number or Are all trophy babies like that?”
combination thereof.
“His dad tells everybody that Titan smiles just
All families are now equal and no families are like his grandmother, but I wouldn’t know about
less equal than others. All families will have the that.”
right to share in the sanctity and the blessings of
“Now who’s that other guy cuddling Titan in his
marriage (whatever they may be) and marriage will arms?”
be redefined. Marriage is, or may be: “The union
Here comes the giant wedding cake, tottering
of a man or a woman to a woman or a man or a ...” terribly. It’s all patched up and worn out. But anyThe new non-discriminatory and open-ended defi- way, it won’t be needed after this year. Remember
nition, however worded, will accommodate unions the tuxedoed little gays who used to grace the top
long denied by thraldom to the ancient and exclu- tier? They’re gone, replaced by a couple of gynaesive family of man. Now and again people will be philic natal males (drag queens) and they’re not just
able to effect unions, have babies and make families standing there holding hands. They are kicking up
as naturally as in the days before the family of man their heels and waving high the rainbow flag and the
took its fateful leave of the stone age cave.
banner of the interlocked squares. They are making
merry in gender dysphoria and sweeping the air in
herd of leather-jacketed dykes-on-bikes thun- victory salute.
ders down Sydney’s Oxford Street. They rev
The crowds go wild as the cake cart goes passpast, each with her partner clinging tightly around ing by. People are pressing the barricades. They are
her waist, and in the sidecars they are carrying fewer stretching out and waving their chosen little flags
than 2.2 kids each. These families of women are all like mad. Some of the celebrants are lesbian and
flying the banner of the interlinked circles. And others are completely gay. But they are the few; the
there are hundreds of them. The dykes are sputter- many of the agitated are just ordinary people, the
ing down the road to gay ... oblivion.
sons and daughters of lapsed and fractured families,
Tonight is the night of the Gay and Lesbian remnants and radicals of unstable nuclear families
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Surrogacy and the New Misbegotten Family
and fugitives from the oppressive and politically
uncool family of man. They are all together, loudly
and gaily cheering for the disestablishment of marriage and the disappearance of the old-fashioned
family for good.
By now the cake has all but rattled by and alas,
contingents of the clever few are surging into view.
They are the people who command the language,
the ones who tell you what you think on the passing of the meaning of marriage. Marching like the
silent remnants of an old battalion, the very clever
people from “My friends call me Aunty” are sweeping benignly by. Don’t be fooled, there’s nothing
avuncular about that lot. They are Godfathers, here
to pay their respects at the fall of the Family of
Man.
And here comes an afterthought. A contingent of High Court judges, looking like a muddle
of gays in drag and moving like the shaking palsy.
You wouldn’t think they could make up a full bench
whatever their number. Yet they are preparing to
pass judgment on the squaring of the circle. Be
assured that however they frame their decision, they
will only serve to dispel whatever mystery there is
still left lingering in the meaning of marriage.
The frolicsome adoring crowds are now jumping
the barricades. They are joining hands and becoming one with the merrymakers. One big extended
family it is now, strolling and ambling gaily along to
the brave new world of freedom from the oppression
of the family of man.
In the distance, the caravan veers sharply and
is lost to view behind a right turn. It is heading
out of the light and back towards the cave wherein
everyone will belong to everybody and everybody
will love anybody and nobody will need to look up
to the stars any more.
John Prineas is Honorary Professor, Department of
Medicine, the University of Sydney, and Adjunct
Professor, Departments of Neuroscience and Pathology,
UMD-New Jersey Medical School. He was made an
Officer of the Order of Australia in 2011 in recognition
of his research into multiple sclerosis.
Beneath the Mountain Ash
The winding track is lightly muddy
this soggy Belgrave spring. Scrub
to the side is dense and unyielding.
Eucalypts rear their shaggy, honey trunks
to stretch above and straggle. A crimson
rosella darts nervously from a hollow;
there is almost no birdsong
now the nests are charged with eggs.
On the dam below, pacific black and wood ducks
cruise with moorhens beneath a shore
lined by giant columns of mountain ash
that rear like images from past millennia.
Along the valley floor a muddy creek
snakes past snags and undercut banks.
On its sides yellow flowers stare from groundcover
at the two hundred metre line of pale, pure lilies
that stutter to the dam then scatter behind the bulrushes
as if dabs of a colonial sense of beauty.
50
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Paul Williamson
A Summer Night, Kiama
In the round night cicadas
match the pulsing of the stars
with their song. The priceless ceiling
of Sainte-Chapelle this evening
seems curiously small
with rare, intricate detail
as it settles its French dome
on my New South Wales home:
there is just enough blue
in that black to make it true.
From the evening’s warm cocoon
little bugs of the risen moon
like angels receive their wings
and flutter on a thousand things,
in the waters of the bird bath
at the end of the garden path,
making a fragile stained glass
from lemon tree and bottle brush,
which live in the cool reflection
with a life not quite their own.
On First Reading Motion’s Larkin
Taking Larkin’s own advice
about starting biographies a little way in,
so as to avoid the analysis of a boring childhood, I begin
Motion’s biography of Larkin
at chapter five, page thirty-seven. Oxford. Yet as Larkin said,
it’s not the Oxford of Charles Ryder
devouring the Marchmains’ plovers’ eggs, or Sebastian with his teddy bear. That Oxford seems as far away
as childhood does from me today.
I sit remembering it for ages,
for about as long as it would have taken to read the first three-dozen pages,
which might have been all there was of Larkin.
If there weren’t so many pages in it,
death could come at any minute.
Quadrant June 2014
At a Tangent to the World
We’d take our coffee under
fig trees or cypresses,
sheltering from the winter
back home, and find some peace
in the goats’ tocsin bells,
crumbling houses, doorways, paths
through green-and-orange hills,
mauve mountains further back;
each moment, each day that passed
was something that we’d lack
but always try to recover,
from then on, in one another.
I’d glance up from my book
in bed, and might recall
olives, bread, the look
of sunlight on a wall
in Yiayia’s whitewashed room;
you, your memory stirred
by the smell of lemons, loam,
or the sound of falling stones
dislodged by the herd,
would recall the rare peach tones
of the hotel in Kiato,
and wander to the window.
And linger there a while,
not knowing what to say,
unhurried, in profile,
on my final day,
as curtains like a mist
ghosting off the scree
opened an autumn vista:
stars above villages
all the way to the sea,
and orchards lit with oranges
in valleys below …
that must be filling now with snow.
Stephen McInerney
51
G eoffr e y Pa rtington
Lesser and Greater Faults
in Australian Education
T
he federal Education Minister, Christopher
Pyne, is justifiably concerned that some
teachers are biased and unfair, knowingly or
unknowingly, in their presentation to students of
controversial issues. Yet this is part of the paradox
of freedom. We want to teach what we believe to be
true, and fear the effects of those who teach what
we believe to be false, even if those who teach it
are sincere.
Many issues are essentially contestable. Men and
women of equal intelligence, experience and integrity may legitimately come to different and even
incompatible conclusions from studying the same
evidence. This does not mean that anything goes.
David Hume was surely right in noting that the
consistent appearance of phenomena is not a logical basis for certainty that tomorrow tides will still
be influenced by the relationship between Earth
and Moon, but he also argued that common sense
compelled us to assume that our experiences of the
past are the most reliable basis for our expectations
of the morrow.
Australia needs neither a national curriculum
nor a series of compulsory curricula devised and
enforced by the states. There is every justification
for discussion of relative significance and importance of kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing,
but not for preventing qualified teachers from making their own decisions about classroom priorities.
Specimen syllabuses Yes! Compulsory curricula
No!
Conflicts between relativism and objectivism
may be separated into disputes about facts and those
about values. Although on some matters the facts
are unsure and disagreement is justifiable, there are
far more that can be relied upon. Teachers are justified in instructing students, or explaining to them,
that in our system of notation six plus three will
be nine tomorrow, as it was yesterday and is today,
or why increased printing of currency by governments without increases in productivity leads to
price inflation, and so on.
52
Kuhn’s identification of “paradigm shifts” did
not undermine the case for objective knowledge of
phenomena outside individual objectivity, but provided further assurance that error can be reduced,
if not entirely eliminated, by patient study. With
conflicting values there is rarely much likelihood
of their being significantly reduced by further evidence or even if every relevant fact were known
and acknowledged to be true. This is not a matter
for despair but is in fact the very basis on which
pluralist, open societies are founded. What we can
reasonably expect is that different perspectives and
their underlying values should be presented fairly.
A solution to the apparent values dilemma
may lie in contingent relativism or, it could also
be termed, contingent absolutism. This approach
accepts first-order or prima facie moral values, but
understands that these may conflict with each
other: truth-telling and avoiding unnecessary pain
are often hard to reconcile. It acknowledges that
our choices are often not between good and evil but
between lesser and greater evils. Should we resist
evil rulers if anarchy or civil war may follow their
overthrow? Should there be tighter controls on the
use and distribution of dangerous drugs if further
restrictions may raise prices and encourage more
smuggling and other criminal activity?
Contingent relativism accepts that what is right
in one situation may not be right in another, because
the action may in context strengthen or weaken a
first-order value such as freedom or security. This
is not mere casuistry. We should oppose “an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth” as the basis of our
own judicial system, but in the laws of Hammurabi
of Babylon the idea was intended to restrict revenge
killings. We may judge torture and slavery differently if they are milder alternatives to killing captives, just as we may regard torture as the lesser evil
if the sole purpose is to extract information that
might save many lives from a terrorist atrocity, or
the life of a child at the hands of an abductor.
Bias then is a relatively minor issue compared
Quadrant June 2014
Lesser and Greater Faults in Australian Education
with two more recent threats to the very basics By 2000, as Richard Fox observed, “Constructivism
of learning and teaching that have gained a grip now appears to dominate the view of learning
on many of our schools. The two extreme devia- articulated in the educational literature, at least in
tions from sensible learning theory and practice are the Anglo-Saxon academic world, and especially in
Constructivism and Direct Instruction. Each of the domain of teacher education.” Constructivism
these, although in opposite ways, exemplifies how expanded to be almost a total educational theory.
reactions against perceived faults may easily lead to Nearly all its supporters were opponents of corporal
greater faults, especially when the ideas and prac- punishment, setting and streaming, and advocates
tices attacked are over-simplified for mockery.
of “deep green” environmentalism. Another high
Constructivism, like other child-centred edu- correlation was perhaps fortuitous: when discussing
cational theories, emerged in opposition to what learning how to read, most Constructivists were
seemed depersonalised and excessively organised enthusiasts for whole-word approaches.
classrooms, in which technology
Constr uctiv ism
proved
was weakening the relationship
concertina-like. On the attack
between students and teachers.
oo much flexibility Constr uctiv ists arg ued that
The faults of what existed were
“learning is an active process”
may undermine
often exaggerated and many
and denounced as reactionary
structure and
Constructivists condemned past
classrooms characterised by
education in general as attempts
and reading; but on the
continuity, but too listening
to pour information into young
defensive they often conceded that
much rigidity may listening and reading may be active
minds. “From the textbooks of the
teachers to the exercise books of
processes. On the attack, they
stifle independent
the students without entering the
asserted that “the way in which
thinking. Such
minds of either” was a common
science ideas are constructed by
quip.
pupils reflects the nature and status
considerations,
Several very different ways of however, seem seldom of science as public knowledge”
teaching or promoting children’s
and constitutes a valid “alternative
to worry either
learning can be highly successconception” of science. In retreat
ful (or a downright failure). In my
Constructivists or they claimed they were only
experience the best teachers are
concerned to vindicate the active
advocates of Direct role of the student in learning.
not all set in one mould but share
a willingness to vary the balance
On the attack, they argued that
Instruction.
between the contributions to learn“knowledge” (not knowledge,
ing made by teacher and student
of course) does not and cannot
in explanation and questioning, between consoli- represent independent reality. When attacked, they
dating what is already at least partly understood might concede that independent reality sometimes
and posing fresh challenges. The age and ability forces us to change our ideas.
of students, the overall structure of the school, the
Two key slogans of Constructivism were:
behavioural atmosphere of the classroom and the
Learning is an active process. Yes, but not only
state of mind of the teacher are among the elements an active process and only then given an unuthat influence just how the teacher tries to teach sual definition of activity. Many Constructivists
and the students to learn. Too much flexibility may are inconsistent in whether they classify reading
undermine structure and continuity, but too much and listening as merely passive modes of learnrigidity may stifle independent thinking. Such con- ing. Reading provides another classic example of
siderations, however, seem seldom to worry either conflicting evaluation. The child-centred generConstructivists or advocates of Direct Instruction. ally argue that children will only begin to learn to
read in earnest once they understand the use and
purpose of reading. Yet in fact even more children
Constructivism
only begin to see its point after they learn to do it.
onstructivism made significant progress in Sometimes, however, inconsistency may save the
Western education during the 1970s. In some day. Many teachers like the sound of their own
ways it seemed a fusion between child-centred voices and it is the rare Constructivist who consistideas and relativist versions of Neo-Marxism. ently remains a passive bystander.
Britain, USA and Canada were prominent in early
Knowledge is constructed. Constructivists became
Constructivism, but New Zealand and Australia divided broadly between those who hold that
were even more influential Constructivist pioneers. knowledge is personal and constructed by each
T
C
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53
Lesser and Greater Faults in Australian Education
individual and those who argue for its social construction. Individual constructivism is based, New
Zealander Beverley Bell claimed, on the basis that
“knowledge is the personal construct of an individual and does not exist externally to be transmitted”.
Some educators were attracted by what they saw
in Constructivism as acceptance of the importance
of identifying misconceptions in students’ thinking as part of the process of fostering better understanding, but constructivist scepticism as to whether
external reality can itself be apprehended may
undermine basic learning processes. The problem
of the biased teacher is small compared with that of
teachers who decline, on fair-sounding grounds, to
instruct the children in their charge. Biased teaching is deplorable, but over the generations many
students have reacted successfully against bias and
developed their own ideas, whereas Constructivism
may provide students with inadequate information
to support or refute propositions.
Although teachers should take account of children’s experiences outside school, there is often no
direct line from personal experience to scientific
understanding: many basic concepts of modern science, such as atoms, hydrogen, neutrons, genes and
DNA, are outside the realm of everyday perception. Were this not so, everybody would long ago
have advanced to scientific understanding, since all
experience the natural phenomena around them.
Contrary to Constructivist claims, lasting learning requires initiation into rules and principles,
accompanied by appropriate techniques. If knowledge cannot be imparted and can only be acquired
by direct personal construction, how can children
ever master complex conceptual schemes that have
taken generations of experts to establish?
Other teachers who view themselves as progressive or radical are attracted to Constructivism
by what seem egalitarian values in reduction of
teacher-power and enlargement of students’ own
contribution to their learning. However, as the
Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered,
children from well-informed families that employ
“extended language” frequently in the home are
put at an even greater advantage compared with
students with little cultural capital at home, a
restricted code of language and in consequence
greater dependence on schools and teachers, if the
teachers fail to play an active part in instruction.
Evidence of the growing ascendancy of
Constructivism was provided by the Australian on
February 4, 2004. One of the winners of the paper’s
$40,000 Australian Awards for University Teaching,
Professor Laurie Brady of Sydney University of
Technology, was reported as condemning “a culture
of education that inflicted learning upon pupils”.
54
He added that “thirty years ago, teaching was
regarded as the transmission of knowledge. Now
it is active and personal experience.” Brady was
right that thirty years earlier many teachers still
tried to inflict learning upon pupils and to transmit
knowledge. Were it up to him, none, rather than a
declining few, would be doing so today.
Flinders University illustrates the dominance
by Constructivism over some two or three decades. Not long ago the aim of Curriculum Studies
Mathematics 1 (R-7) was stated to be:
To assist students to gain an understanding
of the processes of learning and developing
mathematics, to apply this understanding to
the development of concepts and processes
in elementary mathematics and to investigate
activities which will enable children to construct
mathematical concepts and processes in both
school and non-school settings.
“Learning outcomes” sought are “recognition of the differences between mathematics and
numeracy” and “knowledge of the conditions and
approaches which enhance the constructive learning
of mathematics”. In Curriculum Studies Science,
“methods and resources based on a constructivist
view of learning will be illustrated and discussed”
and success in the assessment requires “preparing
(and justifying) plans that are consistent with contemporary guidelines and practice”. Acceptance of
constructivism seems to be a condition of passing
such courses, even though the maths course claims
that it is “developing a critical stance to issues and
practices in learning mathematics”.
Few student teachers enrolled in Maths and
Science teaching methods courses had passed
Year 12 maths, physics or chemistry at school!
Somehow, people who know little about mathematics or science, but who have been on courses
about Constructivism, were thought more likely to
be effective teachers than people with considerable
substantive knowledge who had not been initiated
into Constructivist pedagogy. Were this the case,
there would be no such thing as “shortage” subjects, since initiation into Constructivism would
enable all of us to teach anything.
Direct Instruction
D
irect Instruction (DI) is the mirror image of
Constructivism. Whereas Constructivism
rejected excessive teacher control and direction,
DI attracted by its apparent capacity to bring some
structure and order to the abysmally low standards
of Aboriginal education. The fundamental reasons
Quadrant June 2014
Lesser and Greater Faults in Australian Education
for this malaise lie, of course, outside the educa- schemes often produce very good results that are
tional system. Broken homes, poor diet, alcohol not sustained when extended beyond the initial
and drug abuse, avoidable damage to hearing and participants. Those he has chosen to head DI in
sight, domestic violence and the like ruin the lives Cape York seem capable and energetic. With the
of large numbers of Aboriginal children.
spotlight of publicity on them and well-publicised
However, the educational establishment bears support from prime ministers, this dedicated
its share of the blame because:
team produced promising results. Patrick Mallett,
• Aborigines are constantly told that the the principal of the largest of the Pearsonremaining shreds of their traditional cultures and inspired schools at Aurukun, wrote, as cited by
languages are rich and valuable for their futures, the sympathetic Nicolas Rothwell, that he “came
so that the preservation and strengthening of quickly to realise that DI was a miracle that had
“Aboriginal identity” should be the prime educa- dropped out of the sky, and the people here were the
tional objective.
best I’ve ever worked with. We’ve stumbled upon
• Very little criticism is made of individual stu- the solution to what has been perplexing the rest
dent errors for fear of reducing their self-esteem. of Australia.” Would that he were right! However,
Criticism of families and communities is construed Rothwell conceded that there was “disquiet when
very often as racism, not accepted, in public at least, some of the figures from Aurukun showed a mild
as accurate and worthy of serious
decline in some subject areas”.
response.
DI is an extreme, or highly
• There are insufficient incenconsistent,
of programmed
t is hardly surprising learning; ifvariety
tives of either the “stick” or “carrot”
followed exactly, as
that Noel Pearson in the schools developed by Noel
type to persuade many Aboriginal
students to engage in demanding
and his educational Pearson, it has the advantage of
and difficult work at school. Many
being almost teacher-proof, since
advisers, desperate every
Aboriginal students believe, probstep, virtually every word, is
ably correctly, that they will be
set down; and no time is wasted on
to find a radical
looked after by the Australian govteachers’ digressions. And little, if
alternative to
ernment if they never even look for
any, scope is provided for student
work. They consider they deserve educational anarchy, initiative.
much more than they get because
The historically aware will see
looked outside
once the whole of Australia
a similarity to the “Monitorial”
belonged to them but was stolen Australia for advice. or “Lancasterian” systems that
from them.
dominated elementary education
• Generations of failed promises
in England around 1800. The most
about the effects of higher educational expenditure expert Lancasterian teacher claimed to be able to
have fed Aboriginal scepticism about any signifi- teach a thousand children more effectively than
cant benefits from extended education.
other teachers could teach a hundred. About thirty
• Truancy, hard to reduce let alone eradicate, older and brighter boys and girls (usually aged
is made a justification for lack of continuity in eleven to thirteen) were selected as monitors. They
instruction, since so few students have attended all assembled around the teacher, who taught them
lessons in particular sequences.
two or three facts. The monitors then dispersed
• Committees and commissions of inquiry and each taught these same facts to a group about
consist largely of the people now in control of thirty-strong. Once they were satisfied that the
Aboriginal education who are largely responsible new facts had been learned, they returned to the
for making bad situations worse.
teacher for the next facts. Periodically the teacher
• It is hard to find Australians, irrespective of checked that the monitors had been accurate.
their racial background, who can be trusted to
Obviously this was not a system that encouraged
be open and candid in any investigations about creativity or independence of thought, but it proved
Aborigines.
far more successful than commentators today
It is hardly surprising that Noel Pearson usually allow. It was adopted in Britain when
and his educational advisers, desperate to find a there were few suitable teachers available and little
radical alternative to educational anarchy, looked money, but Australia today has ample numbers of
outside Australia for advice. Pearson became teachers who possess at least paper qualifications
convinced that the American National Institute in higher education and have undergone teacher
for Direct Instruction has the answers, but he may training. Attempts to turn around a deeply flawed
not have allowed for a “Hawthorn Effect”: Trial system have to start somewhere, but DI should be
I
Quadrant June 2014
55
Lesser and Greater Faults in Australian Education
seen as only a short-term emergency policy that
may get a few more Aboriginal children learning
a bit more than they do at present. Excessive
praise lavished on so restricted a scheme may well
jeopardise attempts to achieve a sensible balance
between the under-teaching of Constructivism and
the spoon-feeding with small cutlery of DI.
Pearson’s team uses the American version of DI
without alteration. There is very little likelihood
of Aboriginal children acquiring at school both
adequate contemporary knowledge and traditional
lore. DI distinguishes between “Class” (designed
to “deliver literacy and numeracy”), “Club” (lessons
in sport and music) and “Culture” (a subject that
includes local languages and traditional and environmental knowledge and has a syllabus drawn up
locally). Twenty hours a week are devoted to Class,
but Club and Culture have only optional lessons
that “extend the school day by ninety minutes”.
Rothwell comments that “attendance is almost
universal”.
It is sensible to concentrate on the sphere of
“Class”, but it is unclear whether the supplements
for “Club” and “Culture” are designed to placate the
advocates of Aboriginal languages and traditional
beliefs in the schools or are seriously intended. In
reality they must either be diluted close to nothingness or undermine the main objective. Aborigines
cannot gain equality or prosperity by spending their
time trying to perpetuate a set of cultural remnants
of little more relevance in mastering modernity
than the myths of the Celts or Saxons.
Constructivists were wrong when they claimed
that mainstream education was based on the bucket
theory of learning in which students are merely
passive receptacles, but that charge is certainly justified when used against DI.
Geoffrey Partington is retired from his work as a
teacher educator, and now lives in Melbourne. His
most recent book, Making Sense of History (Xlibris),
was reviewed in the May issue.
What the woodwork reveals
Walking with a limp, a lockstephopstep
that jolts hip and frame down Main Street
I see an unnoticed-until-this-day array of hobbling, rollicking,
movement-challenged gimps like me,
the Zimmer-pushing halt and lame.
A phenomenon first experienced to this extent
when pregnant and, surely,
half the eligible population in the Capital and the burbs
was enceinte
or postpartum with babe in arms or pram.
Like to like.
Limp to limp.
Baby blimp to blimp.
Clash
Bemused, I hobble on.
Robyn Lance
Recalling the rut,
the giant moso bamboos
clash with each other,
echoing the percussion
of wild stags in collision.
Andrew Lansdown
56
Quadrant June 2014
Breathing Time
after the installation Tempo para Respirar
(Breathing Time) by Brazilian artist Maria
Nepomuceno, Turner Contemporary, Margate
My feet lie like two blue fish on a coil of blue
rope,
as if some fisherman’s dragged them from the
turbid
sea outside. I think of standing in the blue
volcano,
being swept away in the lava of blue beads.
Instead, I sit and breathe, let part of me float
skyward
to rest in the empty chair swaying somewhere
towards
heaven. We’ll all leave our empty chairs on
earth. A plant
made of rope climbs the wall of my memories.
The Mexican hats are not mine, although I
remember
someone wearing one once. Perhaps I’ll lie in
the red hammock,
take my first breaths again in the embrace of its
stripey vulva,
held firm on its emphatic red elephant’s foot.
Yes,
I’ll spend time breathing there, just as I’m
breathing
here, now, writing this, then I’ll leave
everything,
never having stood in a blue volcano, what
remains
of my breath hanging somewhere on a chair
near the ceiling.
A Cornishman Addresses His Metal
You riddler of the landscape, erector of engine
houses,
you currency of now redundant stannery
towns,
you oxidised element from Group Fourteen
co-habiter with germanium and lead. You
has-been.
You with your Great Flat Lodes, your well
buried seams.
You counterfeit silver, you soft, worthless
bender.
You, who can’t stand up on your own, relying on others,
pimping yourself with pewter, alloyed with
copper.
You gave us work and took our lives. You
inhabiter of granite,
you lurker, you luck-deliverer, you with your
Knockers.
You elude us in mines that cave in, collapse,
flood with the tide,
we died for you, cried for you, left home for
you, wanted you
hated you, needed you, found you far away,
sweated for you.
You, our shiny past, our lost fortune, our
exploited land, its pride.
Victoria Field
Note: “Knockers” are mythological “ little people”
who inhabit the tin mines in Cornwall, making
mischief or protecting miners
Quadrant June 2014
57
B.J. C om a n
The War of the Roses
On the Disturbances in Gene Land
I
nternational Darwin Day was held on February
12. It is a recently established feast day for the
non-deluded. Celebrations were held in many
localities including Costa Rica, where inhabitants
and visitors at Sloth Creek enjoyed a day of “Darwin,
thought, reason and fun”. I would have thought that
the first three activities precluded the fourth, but
that’s just me perhaps. They might have chosen a
better-named venue too. The event is managed globally by the American Humanist Association. No
surprise there! In London, the event was chaired
by Professor Richard Dawkins. No surprise there
either. I have a suspicion that anyone turning up in
clerical garb would not be made to feel welcome.
Unless, of course, that person had a copy of Bishop
Robinson’s Honest to God prominently displayed. For
Catholic clerics, a conspicuous volume of Teilhard
de Chardin might just pass muster.
I mention all this by way of background. The
establishment of such a secular feast day might lead
you to believe that the celebration bespeaks of a
united appreciation of the great man and his theory. It is not so. If you thought that the sort of verbal pugilism exhibited between Darwin’s Bulldog
(Huxley) and Soapy Sam (Wilberforce) was consigned to the dustbin of history, you are very much
in error. Today, wars over Darwin and his theory are
not just continuing, but are of increasing ferocity.
There is, however, one major difference between
then and now. Soapy Sam’s opposition to Darwinism
was of a religious nature, but today’s opponents
are, for the most part, godless. This is not a battle
between science and religion: it is a battle between
rival factions within Darwinism. And like Legion,
they are many. I hesitate to say that it is a battle
within science, because I am not at all convinced
that the various parties always argue from a purely
scientific point of view. Indeed, I’m not sure there
is such a thing.
In fact, the Darwin wars are really a subset of
the more general science wars which reached their
peak a couple of decades ago. The heart of the
58
matter is a turf war concerning the objectivity of
science and what counts as being “scientific”. Put
in over-simplified terms, the old science disciplines
tend to be on one side and the newer social sciences
on the other. This is not just an ideological matter.
Funding and status are at stake. These days, unless
you can demonstrate that what you are doing is
“scientific”, your likelihood of attracting funding is
very low. Ask any of the refugees from the former
Humanities departments in the universities.
In some respects, the science wars resemble the
history wars but, as will become evident, simple
comparisons are unhelpful. Although both conflicts involve what might be termed postmodern
influences and a strong presence of New Left ideo­
logy, the science wars, especially as they apply to
Darwinism, are more complicated and any simple
characterisation of Left/postmodern approaches as
relativistic compared to the supposed objectivity of
their opponents is quite incorrect.
Right at the start, I need to make my own position clear. Having now laboured through a good
number of books and articles dealing with the general matter of evolutionary theory and its application to human nature (Wilson, Ehrlich, Dawkins,
et hoc genus omne) I find myself in general agreement
with the late David Stove, the Sydney philosopher,
whose book Darwinian Fairytales first appeared in
1995. He had no difficulty accepting the fact of evolution, but the various theories were another matter. I concur and thereby must describe myself as a
lapsed Darwinist. The term connotes not so much
a total break as a slow falling away or inattention to
devotional practices, and is thus far less serious than
the term apostate, which usually involves some form
of vigorous denial. With this distinction in mind,
the reader might understand that, in classing myself
as a lapsed Darwinist, I am not thereby committing
myself to the ranks of the Young Earth Creationists
or sundry other groups who are vigorous in their
denial of evolution. I should also add that my lapsed
condition has nothing to do with any religious
Quadrant June 2014
The War of the Roses
belief, although I class myself as a Christian. The
Christian doctrines in which I believe have nothing
to say about natural selection, genes and random
mutation.
argued and this includes the essays contributed by
the Professors Rose themselves. Both of the Roses
have published widely and are well regarded by their
peers. This is reflected in the fact that they were
able to attract a diversity of talent in this volume,
f your knowledge of evolutionary theory comes including Stephen Jay Gould and Mary Midgley.
simply from watching David Attenborough on To be sure, there is a spicing of feminist/leftish
the television or reading press reports on the lat- analysis but I found most of the essays reasonably
est utterances from Richard Dawkins, or Daniel even-handed.
Dennett, or even our own Tim Flannery, then any
Alas Poor Darwin is a sustained attack on a
notion of disturbances amongst the White Coats particular grouping of evolutionary thought called
will come as a surprise. To really get a feeling for the evolutionary psychology, or EP for short (one
scope and intensity of the Darwin wars, you need of the essays has the marvellous title “EP Phone
to dig deeper. You could go to the various specialist Home”—an allusion to the need for the devotees
scientific journals where most of the hand-to-hand of EP to return to the real world). I use the term
fighting is taking place but this is an arduous busi- grouping because there are many rooms in the EP
ness, made all the more tedious by
mansion but their occupants are
the need to translate the peculiar
by no means a harmonious family.
terminology used by evolutionary
hat Evolutionary What justifies the collective title
biologists/psychologists/socioloof EP is a shared view that human
Psychology asks you nature
gists. A far better option is to find a
(including aspects such as
to believe is that the memory, perception and language)
book where a more general account
of the various protagonists might theory explains war, is a product of evolution. The brain
be found. Of course, it is too much
is an information processing device
male aggression,
to ask for a non-partisan account—
that evolved way back in the Stone
they don’t exist. In ordinary wars,
Age. Different neural mechanisms
love, altruism,
they say, we usually get only the
that we recognise today evolved
marriage, rape, our in
victor’s account, but in the Darwin
early ape-persons (I tread carewars there are no victors and we appreciation of beauty, fully here). More accurately, they
tend to get many accounts. Even so,
are a product of natural selection
our preference for
some are better than others, and I
during the Pleistocene, when our
want to concentrate on one exam- landscapes with open prehistoric ancestors are said to
ple which at least has the virtue of vistas, and so on. In have roamed the African savangiving a reasonably clear account
nah. What this means for us today
of the battleground. This is Alas fact—let’s be honest— is that our behaviour is directly
Poor Darwin, edited by Hilary and it explains everything. linked to those neural structures
Stephen Rose and published back
that developed back in the distant
in 2000. There are fifteen essays by
past. What it also means, for the
academics (most are professors) in sociology, genet- devotees of EP, is that this approach is “scientific”
ics, animal behaviour, psychology and philosophy. compared with what they see as the dubious status
It is not my intention to provide a full review of of all other approaches.
the book. Rather, I wish to highlight some of the
Now, if you think all of this appears to be
material contained in it which, I think, is critical to acceptable, consider the consequences a little more
understanding the Darwin wars and their impor- carefully. What EP asks you to believe is that the
tance. Whilst the book is now somewhat dated, theory explains war, male aggression, love, altruI believe most of the issues under contention are ism, marriage, rape, our appreciation of beauty, our
unchanged.
preference for landscapes with open vistas, and so
First, a word about the Roses. They have form, on. In fact—let’s be honest—it explains everything.
if you know what I mean. Hilary Rose is described If you think I am exaggerating here, let me quote a
on the cover blurb as a “feminist sociologist”, whilst couple of examples from the “scientific” literature.
Stephen has been described by an admiring colBack at the turn of this century, biologist Randy
league as “the last of the Marxist radical scientists”. Thornbill and anthropologist Craig Palmer pubEven the Guardian once described him as “a polem- lished a book called The Natural History of Rape. In
icist on the left”. This is a case of the pot calling the it, they argue that rape is an adaptive strategy by
kettle red—or pink, anyway. But I have to say that which otherwise sexually unsuccessful men propathe material in the book is well written and well gate their genes by mating with fertile women.
I
W
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The War of the Roses
Here they were merely echoing the sentiments of
the sociobiologist David Barash, who some twenty
years earlier had written, “If nature is sexist, don’t
blame her sons.”
The second example comes from an article published in Psychology Today in 2007. Here, two practitioners of EP, Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa,
explained why men like blonde bombshells. For
clarity, it will be necessary for me to quote at a little length:
Until very recently, it was a mystery to
evolutionary psychology why men prefer
women with large breasts, since the size of
a woman’s breasts has no relationship to her
ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist
Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence
heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with
age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make
it easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and
her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting
why men find women with large breasts more
attractive.
Alternatively, men may prefer women with
large breasts for the same reason they prefer
women with small waists. A new study of Polish
women shows that women with large breasts
and tight waists have the greatest fecundity,
indicated by their levels of two reproductive
hormones (estradiol and progesterone).
Blond hair is unique in that it changes
dramatically with age. Typically, young
girls with light blond hair become women
with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to
mate with blond women are unconsciously
attempting to mate with younger (and hence,
on average, healthier and more fecund) women.
It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in
Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as
an alternative means for women to advertise
their youth, as their bodies were concealed
under heavy clothing.
Bernard Levin once discussed the possibility of
a new “shortcut” symbol or word (similar in function to sic or ibid) which indicates, “I have not made
this up”. Such an abbreviation applies to the above.
By now, you may be getting just a glimmer of an
idea why Hilary Rose, amongst many others, is not
enthusiastic about these EP theories.
“But surely,” I hear you say, “these are just a
few cranks at the extreme end of EP?” Not so. The
crankiness goes all the way down, and for one simple
reason: when you make an a priori assumption that
evolutionary theory explains everything, you are
committed to doing just that. Hence, for instance,
60
the respected godfather of sociobiology, E.O.
Wilson, finds that our liking for pleasant gardens
with lawns, water features, abundant flowers and
fruiting trees and, perhaps, a distant prospect of
Eton College, all hark back to the Pleistocene when
we appreciated good foraging spots close to water
and with a clear view of approaching enemies (in
which case, I should replace Eton with the LSE).
He knows, too, why men have a preference for
women with high cheekbones, a thin jaw, large
eyes and a shorter distance between mouth and
chin and between nose and chin—we have an
exaggerated view of those features in women which
are indicators of youth, virginity and the prospect
of a long reproductive period. Again, I have not
made this up.
And now it’s time to move on to some of the
considerations of EP which lie outside the province
of “straight biology”. Earlier in this essay, I warned
that there are no non-partisan accounts of EP.
When it comes to the political ramifications of EP,
the Roses have decidedly strong views. Amongst
other things, they feel that EP has been used to
justify the horrendous programs of the Right.
During the 1980s, they penned a joint essay showing how sociobiology was culturally underpinning
“the Thatcherite attack on the welfare state”. Now,
we must grant them their initial feminist/Marxist
positions for, in EP, there is no such thing as “the
view from nowhere”. Even so, I do find it hard to
fit Denis and Maggie Thatcher into any Darwinian
picture. Denis was hardly the epitome of male
aggression and Maggie was certainly not known
for submissiveness. Concerning hair colour and
other more delicate matters, I have no data. But,
to be fair, the influence of Darwinism in politics is
not without some historical evidence. Everyone has
heard or read about Social Darwinism and Herbert
Spencer. And everyone, including the Roses, knows
that Marx and Engels were greatly attracted to
Darwin’s theory. The point is that ideas have consequences, often outside their own particular field,
and this is especially true of Darwinian ideas.
At a broader level, as the Roses correctly point
out, the terms “Darwinian” and “evolutionary” are
now applied to almost every province of human
endeavour. We have, as well as evolutionary biology
(the type species, so to speak), evolutionary medicine, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and even
evolutionary economics. And, of course, we have
the evolution of the universe. As for “Darwinian”,
its features and methodologies are now invoked to
explained advances in computer technology, expansion of internet companies and even the growth
and competition of rival scientific theories. What
the Roses fail to mention is the enormous boost
Quadrant June 2014
The War of the Roses
given to the whole Darwin business by television to kick another person’s dog. For practitioners in the
nature shows and how, by this means, it has seeped social sciences, the worst possible insult is to imply
into popular culture as a theory of everything. that what they do is not science. The EP faction,
Darwinism is now certainly a great deal more than as well as many in the more traditional sciences,
a theory in biology.
uses this insult regularly. Back in 1994, scientists
The baleful influence of the EP nonsense has Paul Gross and Norman Levitt published Higher
a very long reach indeed. Jonathan Gottschall, an Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with
American literary scholar and EP fellow travel- Science. It was a very palpable hit and the Roses, in
ler, has written on Homer’s Iliad (The Rape of Troy: particular, took it hard. Even the title has a bite,
Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer, 2008). suggesting as it does a sort of Darwinian analogue
Here, as he tells us, he “experienced
of Higher Criticism. This was no
the Iliad as a drama of naked apes
leather-glove slap but a mailed
… Intense competition between
he Darwin wars fist. Soon after, the physicist Alan
great apes, as described by both
Sokal published a hoax article in
Homer and by primatologists, fre- are all about differing Social Text, an academic journal of
conceptions of the
quently boils down to precisely the
postmodern cultural studies. It was
same thing: access to females.” Yet
another palpable hit, the scientific
nature of scientific equivalent
again, I have not made this up.
of the Ern Malley affair.
inquiry and, as a
Forget about the talking horses;
Now the defenders of scientific
forget those lines in Book 7 (421– corollary, of scientific purity certainly have a lot going
32) when the Trojans and Achaians
for them. There is a good deal of
respectability. And rubbish
gather to bury their dead; and,
coming from social sciespecially, forget this line—“There
ences. In the January-February
it is here that a
is nothing alive more agonised than
issue of Quadrant, I made mention
real Darwinian
man / of all that breathe and crawl
of “happiness studies” as an examstruggle for resources ple. The trouble is that the forces
across the earth”. It’s all down to
raping women. Sic transit gloria
of scientific purity have been contakes place—
mundi.
sistently undermined by the EP
funding, university crowd (who suppose that they fight
s I intimated above, the real
under the same banner) whose own
professorships,
source of the Darwin wars
“research” often amounts to little
appointments to
has little to do with straight biolmore than pure speculation—“And
chairs, and so on.
ogy, despite appearances to the
why beholdest thou the mote that
contrary. The mutual detestation
is in thy brother’s eye, but considflowing between Richard Dawkins
erest not the beam that is in thine
and E.O. Wilson (age has not wearied them) might own eye?” The examples I have quoted earlier in this
be the stuff of legend, but it is incidental to the essay are just the tip of the iceberg. As Hilary Rose
main game. No doubt their particular conflict has rightly points out:
its origins in the Palaeolithic when cave-persons
For those conscious that scholars of prehistory
fought over access to food, water, mates, or a hill
work with highly fragmentary evidence, from
with a view. Mind you, both of these persons have
shards of bones, fossils, and very occasionally
enjoyed rich pasturage over their long careers and
entire bodies preserved by ice or some geological
the concept of some sort of Darwinian struggle for
quirk, the belief that late twentieth-century
scarce resources somehow doesn’t ring true. No, the
people can know the human psychological
Darwin wars are all about differing conceptions
architecture of our early ancestors with any
of the nature of scientific inquiry and, as a coroldegree of certainty and accuracy is difficult to
lary, of scientific respectability. And it is here that a
take seriously.
real Darwinian struggle for resources takes place—
funding, university professorships, appointments to
In any case, the whole attempt to reduce conchairs, and so on.
There are many ways to provoke a conf lict sciousness and mental actions to physical explanabetween humans, not all of them recognisably tions (which is, at base, what a lot of EP is about)
Darwinian. In the olden days, it was enough to is fraught with problems. There have been powerful
administer a gentle slap to the face with your glove. critiques of this from philosophers such as Thomas
Amongst Australian drovers, as Banjo Paterson Nagel (The View from Nowhere; Mind and Cosmos)
astutely observed, the surest way to ensure a fight is and David Stove (Darwinian Fairytales) and from
T
A
Quadrant June 2014
61
The War of the Roses
scientists themselves. The mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski has produced a very entertaining account titled The Devil’s Delusion.
T
here can be no question that the science wars
and the Darwin wars in particular have had
a negative influence on the standing of science in
society. Hilary Rose correctly identifies this but
then supposes that it has been feminism and environmentalism, working in tandem, that have done
much to challenge the pretensions of scientific
reductionism. I would have thought that these two
influences were minor compared to modern science’s
capacity for self-harm. The self-harm in my view
arises because of the consistent habit of the White
Coats to make premature announcements of their
successes. Every other week on the television news or
in the papers, we have reports of new breakthroughs
(usually cancer cures) or of new evidence confirming
some impending doom—climate catastrophe, super
bugs, ocean acidification, collapse of fish stocks.
Like the very super bugs themselves, the general
populace eventually develops, via adaptation, an
aversive response. People no longer take much of it
very seriously. When you send out mixed messages,
combining ecological catastrophism with promethean claims of salvation via new technologies, and
then fail to deliver, what else can you expect?
The premature and “golly gosh” announcements
of success or of impending doom arise for one simple reason—Darwinian struggle for scarce funding.
This is the era of short-term, results-based funding
and you either produce the goods quickly or you
starve. The whole landscape of scientific research
has changed utterly in the last fifty years. When I
began as a young research biologist in pest animal
research back in the 1960s, funding was rarely a
critical issue. There were cashed-up industry funds
(Wool Board, Wheat Board, Australian Meat and
Livestock Corporation, and so on). CSIRO enjoyed
an immensely high reputation and was well-funded.
Most of the states had their own government
research stations and, most importantly, there was
a willingness on the part of the funding bodies to
put money into long-term, basic research. For their
part, the universities also enjoyed generous research
funding. Like many other young graduates of my
era, I was encouraged by my employer to return to
the academy and study for a higher degree. Science
never had it so good.
Perhaps I could repeat a little true story, published
in a Quadrant article of mine many years ago, which
62
demonstrates the (excessively) high standing of science back in those days. For many years, I worked
at a regional research centre in Victoria. There were
pasture scientists, sheep and cattle specialists, and
even people to advise on such lowly tasks as poisoning rabbits or spraying Paterson’s curse (I was such
a one). One specialist, a colleague of mine, was a
soil scientist. He once visited a farm to help with
a soil erosion problem and, in the course of general
conversation, the topic got around to geology. “See
those volcanic rocks,” he said to the old cocky, “they
are Pliocene, six million years old.” Now it so happened that, some eight years later, another colleague
of mine from the old Department of Agriculture
visited this same farm to advise on pasture treatment (for red-legged earth mites, as I recall). They
drove past the same rock outcrop. “See those rocks,”
said the old cocky, “they’re six million and eight
years old.”
There is a final irony in all this. Readers must
now consider the awkward position confronting
those fundamentalist Christians long accustomed
to the ridicule of the EP mob (and their opponents)
and, of course, to that of the general media (Kick a
Fundo for Science—or the ratings). Suddenly, they
behold the spectacle of their long-time enemies falling upon each other in mortal combat. Should they
rejoice or take pity? Certain of the Church Fathers
were of the opinion that the spectacle of the suffering inflicted on the damned in hell would add to the
happiness of the souls in heaven. But Schadenfreude
is hardly a Christian virtue. There are theological
problems—taking delight in the suffering of others
is not in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount or,
for that matter, in the spirit of certain books of the
Old Testament—“Rejoice not when thine enemy
falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he
stumbleth” (Proverbs).
Besides, there is a more general problem for
Christians, nicely summarised by Tertullian: Omne
enim spectaculum sine concussione spiritus non est.
(There is no public entertainment which does not
inflict spiritual damage.) It is worth adding that he
made this observation eighteen centuries before the
advent of reality television and the ABC. This is
a powerful argument for the efficacy of Christian
prophecy—and for getting rid of the ABC.
B.J. Coman is the editor of Connor Court Quarterly
and the author of the essay collection A Loose Canon.
He contributed “The Enduring Problem of Monkey
Business” to the January-February issue.
Quadrant June 2014
Morning blackbird on the lawn
The raised square of lawn edged with stone
makes a flat stage. The radio releases
Eine kleine Nachtmusik and a blackbird appears.
You’d swear he knows stage directions. Stage
right
then three bold hops, a glide, a pause
timed as ballet music is
always surprising you with its pauses, its
way of not quite following the beat
(the blackbird exits and runs behind the
curtain)
then boldly reappears, up stage centre
listening for a worm underneath the music
the worm of sorrow and weeping, someone
said,
that the discerning can always hear in Mozart
“Listen and you’ll hear Mozart screaming”.
Just an old sage, a bigot, I thought, but now
the bird, levering up a worm, is concentrating
as if there’s something deeper even than music
deeper even than the beauty that covers
everything.
Ironing shirts
A friend, paying for hospitality once
ironed a great quantity of business shirts
of the husband of the hostess.
Over the back of the dining room chairs they
hung
stripes and plain, finest Egyptian cotton
until the room was full of arms
and necks: she left the fronts unbuttoned.
The scent of ironing outdid the bowls of
flowers
on table and dresser and a bowl of potpourri
while I, watching, marvelled at
a sort of swimming with the iron
a familiarity as it raced
along a sleeve or down a placket
having first flattened the seams
and done the collar, yoke and cuffs
of different styles and depth. It seemed
an intimacy with a man greater than
a diary or appointment book. Thin stripes
or wider, one was pink, washed out
like blood, rinsed and re-rinsed until
it barely blushed, though still stood out
among the white shirts for a week.
Finally the iron was set at ease. Folding began.
The dry air resumed its accommodating damp
the chairs were cleared as if from cloaks
and six flat shirts on either hand
were taken off to rest on shelves.
Quadrant June 2014
Elizabeth Smither
63
J uli a Patr ick
Bill Gibson,
Cochlear Implant Hero
T
he cochlear implant, that wonderful little
electronic device, has brought many thousands out of their silent world and is now
recognised as life-changing technology for the deaf.
But it was not always so.
That so many Australians have been given the gift
of hearing is due to the surgical skill, perseverance
and dedication of an extraordinary man: Professor
William Gibson, simply known as Bill. To further
a cause he profoundly believed in, he overcame sustained and sometimes vicious opposition from doctors, the health profession generally and, strange as
it may seem, from the deaf themselves.
Surgically inserted in the ear, an implant does
not “cure” deafness; it is a prosthetic substitute for
hearing that does the work of the damaged hair
cells of the inner ear, the cochlea, to send sound
signals to the brain.
Before the French priest Michel de l’Epée
devised sign language in the eighteenth century,
demonstrating that deaf people were no less intelligent than their peers, they were written off as imbeciles. The nineteenth century saw the first hearing
aids, based on Alexander Bell’s invention of the telephone. They were cumbersome and unsatisfactory
and although there have been enormous improvements over the years, they cannot reproduce high
frequencies and can only amplify residual hearing;
the result was that the deaf continued to use sign
language combined with lip reading. Those born
deaf or who became severely deaf through injury
or illness remained virtually forgotten, trapped in
their isolated world with huge limitations on their
working and social lives. This was the situation until
the early 1980s when Bill Gibson became aware of
the cochlear experiments.
With a family background in medicine, Bill
Gibson says he “didn’t really consider any other job”
and as a young graduate he soon became attracted
to otology (ear surgery) “because of the exciting
advances that were occurring”. Among these was
Melbourne professor Graeme Clark’s research
into cochlear implants, work that was derisively
64
dismissed in England. Frustrated by the attitude
of his English colleagues, and understanding the
potential of Graeme’s work and with Graeme’s
encouragement, Bill Gibson accepted an invitation
to apply for the Professorship of Otolaryngology
(ear, nose and throat; ENT) at Sydney University.
With his wife and young family he arrived in
Australia in 1983.
Despite Clark’s early cochlear implants having
been successfully commercialised, the Melbourne
ENT hierarchy regarded Clark as eccentric, if not
crazy, and his work futile—they considered the
idea of following speech without lip reading and
sign “ridiculous”. Gibson had to tread carefully. But
the University of Sydney was open to individual
research, and encouraged by a small group of farseeing supporters at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital,
Gibson received the green light to go ahead: two
patients received the first cochlear implants in 1984.
Gibson talks of “enchanting moments” seeing the
wonder, amazement and joy on the face of patients
when, with their new implant, the deaf realised they
had moved into a hearing world.
He had accepted that questioning and understandable reservations follow any new medical advances, but he had not been prepared for
the damning response when, as Sydney’s newly
arrived professor, he was invited to speak at the
ENT’s annual Toynbee Dinner. “My mention of
the implant project,” he says, “brought an absolute
avalanche of criticism.” The following year Gibson
showed a film of the first demonstration worldwide
of his cochlear patient carrying on a telephone conversation. The doyens of medicine greeted it with a
frosty, embarrassed silence.
In the early days, money was always tight for a
base for the cochlear team where they could assess
patients’ suitability and hold follow-up visits. The
first was a classroom used at lunch hour at the
Chatswood Public School; a cupboard stored their
equipment. Then, following a small government
grant, a rented house was available at Narrabeen
and then Chatswood; there the neighbours took it
Quadrant June 2014
Bill Gibson, Cochlear Implant Hero
into their heads that Gibson was running a brothel
and he had to front up and explain himself before
the (fortunately sympathetic) Willoughby Council.
At the time of the brothel debacle, a disgruntled
colleague was behind claims that Gibson had misappropriated funds from EAR (Ear And Related
Research Foundation). Threatened with legal
action, he had to endure four months of interrogation by a committee of inquiry to account for every
dollar spent. He felt, he says, “fairly secure, as I had
never even claimed a bus fare from the EAR foundation”. He was completely cleared and told he was
“the squeakiest clean professor in the university”.
But staring him in the face had been the probability
of a return to England if an error had been found. It
was a stressful and unhappy time.
B
y 1986 the cochlear team had successfully carried out twenty implants for adults and Gibson
says he was “desperately keen” to perform the surgery on children born deaf. He believed that if
they received an implant before the age of eighteen
months, speech would naturally follow hearing. For
Gibson, early surgery became the new goal.
But many organisations of deaf people believed
that it was wrong, even evil, to operate on the young
“before they can decide for themselves”. Activists
even referred to it as “cultural genocide”. Proudly
aware of their own special identity as a minority
using sign language, they saw implants as a challenge and affront to their culture from the hearing
majority. The professional establishment—audiologists, paediatricians, teachers of the deaf and
those with vested interests—were in equally strident opposition to Gibson’s plans. The Profound
Deafness Study Group was formed, and Gibson
soon became aware that their main aim was to dissuade him from proceeding.
Support from his own small team, the ecstatic
reaction from patients, and his unwavering determination to pursue what he knew was right kept
him going. Gibson’s quiet and unassuming manner
belies the strength of will that drives him, and in
1987, he says, “in gross contradiction to the wishes of
the Profound Deafness Study Group”, he performed
the first implants on three young children who had
been deafened by meningitis. One went on to an
honours degree at Sydney University and is now a
lawyer, but at the time Gibson received “a barrage
of mail” condemning what he had done.
But continuing success brought its returns: longoverdue recognition and acceptance of his work had
begun, and in 1996 the New South Wales Health
Department allocated a wing of the old Gladesville
Hospital as the permanent home of the Sydney
Cochlear Implant Centre. “At the time,” Gibson
says, “I never imagined how rapidly everything
would progress over the next ten years. By 2002, a
thousand patients had received cochlear implants.”
It was clear now that everyone—apart from a few
stragglers—was listening, and Gibson’s new goal
was to identify babies born deaf to give their parents the opportunity for them to have an implant.
In the past, it was a shattering moment for parents
to be told that their child had been born deaf, as
there was absolutely nothing that could be done.
With Gibson’s persuasion and encouragement, New
South Wales initiated the most successful earlydetection program in the world; it is now Australiawide. Now, with a cochlear implant, children born
congenitally deaf, but with no other disability, can
go to a regular school and lead the life of a child
with normal hearing.
Hearing speech is usually thought of as the main
benefit of an implant, but hearing other sounds for
the first time can be equally dramatic and liberating. A young motor cycle fanatic, aware only of
his machine’s vibrations, was excited beyond belief
when he was actually able to hear the roar of the
engine.
With well over 3000 Australians, many of them
children, having received implants, the Sydney
Cochlear Implant Centre is expanding across the
state to avoid making families travel to Sydney.
With surgeons and staff, seven centres are fully
operating from Parramatta to the ACT and a centre
in Darwin is well under way.
B
ill Gibson is, of course, delighted with the continuing success, but, never one to rest on his
laurels, he is now channelling his efforts towards
overseeing research into the cause and a cure for
Menière’s Disease. This condition (“disease” is a
misnomer) of the ear results in sudden and sometimes extreme attacks of giddiness, often accompanied by violent nausea, and has defied medical
knowledge since the condition was first identified
in France in 1861 by Prosper Menière. Sydney now
has the first laboratory in the world dedicated solely
to research into Menière’s Disease.
Despite worldwide accolades for his work on
cochlear implants, Bill Gibson retains the compassion and humility of a man with the common touch.
Every month you’ll find him organising a sausage
sizzle outside Woolworths in Balmain on behalf of
his Rotary Club because, he says, “I enjoy rolling up
my sleeves and giving my free time to help worthwhile causes.” It’s just another dimension of what
he’s been doing all his life.
Julia Patrick contributed “The Radical Ambitions of
Green Sustainability” to the September issue.
Quadrant June 2014
65
T ron n O v er end
What Is Art?
Part II: Gombrich, Popper and Anderson
Gombrich: The search for objectivity
T
wo young émigrés who fled Vienna just before
the Second World War were the philosopher
of science Karl Popper and the art historian
Ernst Gombrich. In London they became lifelong
friends, later knights, and members of the Queen’s
exclusive coterie—of twenty-four—the Order of
Merit. Together they attempted to develop a realist
solution to the problem of objectivity in aesthetics.
Gombrich applied a Popperian understanding to try
to avoid foundering on the rocks of relativism. Does
this enable him to navigate past the shipwrecks of
Tolstoy and Plato?
One obvious course is to rest the realist case on
the conjectures of connoisseurship, the canons that
are uncovered in the history of art. These canons
are the works of art themselves. It is the object of
connoisseurship—the thing the connoisseur looks
at—not the subject and relation of evaluation, that
Gombrich considers. “Canons and Values” (in E.H.
Gombrich, Ideals and Idols, 1979) is a copy of his
correspondence with Quentin Bell, an art critic.
Bell begins by pointing out that the canon must
include the innovators. Whistler, for example, is
included because of all his imitators. Yet, and this is
the crux of the matter, Bell goes on to say, “it may
not always be clear who is painting the best paintings”. Gombrich’s reply to this is the admission that,
even with Michelangelo’s greatness, “I select him
for my canon on the grounds … of faith and hope.”
Gombrich even suggests that, in the end, he might
be advocating nothing more than “a retrograde step
towards an ‘Academic’ interpretation of art”. This
raises the issue of whose views are to be consulted in
the formulation of the canon. Bell’s rejoinder is this:
The trouble is that by making the canon
acceptable to myself I may have made it
unacceptable to you. To the true Canonist the
canon is the ark of the covenant; I have turned it
into a public convenience, which is not quite the
same thing.
66
Gombrich then admits that every generation
revises the canon. This conclusion to the corres­
pondence provides no answer to the relativist.
Although there is the suggestion that they have
avoided, somehow, “a complete relativism” (in Bell’s
words) or a “radical relativism” (in Gombrich’s), they
are forced to admit, to quote Bell, that “fashions of
our day and even, to some extent, those of the past”
are perceived “through a distorting glass … which is
ever moving in front of our eyes”.
Is the canon, then, one of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms? Gombrich thinks not; and a second argument follows this path. He prefers to follow Popper
and see objective knowledge as based on trial and
error, on conjectures and refutations. Just as science
is “kept on the boil” by this process—not nobbled by
the “normal science” of a paradigm—in the history
of art, canons can be seen as conjectures:
The canon is our starting point, our guiding
theory about that aspect of image-making we
call mastery. It may be no more infallible than
other theories can ever be …
In accepting a canon as a tentative theory,
Gombrich believes he ceases to be the “complete
relativist” and “subjectivist” and sides with tradition:
In fact we may feel that as far as the peaks of
art are concerned, it is not so much we who
test the masterpiece, but the masterpiece which
tests us.
In Popper’s philosophy of science, objective
knowledge requires not only the bold conjectures
of a canon, but also the conditions that, if met,
would mean the refutation of the canon. It is not
simply verifiability, but falsifiability. Unfortunately,
Gombrich does not extend his analysis to this crucial step. Undoubtedly the canon is critical, but it
remains unclear on what rational grounds it might
even be rejected as a “public convenience”!
A third attempt turns to what Popper calls “the
Quadrant June 2014
What Is Art?
logic of the situation”. This Gombrich first outlined
in The Poverty of Historicism (1969). In art, Gombrich
unpacks it in these terms:
It is always illuminating to explore the situation
in which the artist found himself, the options
he had, and the decisions he made within the
tradition in which he was bound to work.
In “The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to
Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Styles and
Taste” (first published in The Philosophy of Karl
Popper, 1974) Gombrich quotes Popper’s description
of this “logic” as working though the social context
of art, “something like an analysis of social movements”. To illustrate, Gombrich examines how fashions, styles and taste evolve in an artistic milieu. He
does this by telling of his experiences in Paris early
in the twentieth century. Impressionism was the
dominant style. He was upbraided by his friends for
suggesting that shadows are grey. Walking through
the Latin Quarter, he readily agreed that they were,
indeed, purple. Ten years later, he was then told:
“Do not paint what you see, paint what you feel.”
Subsequently, one member of the group attended
a lecture on mineralogy at the Sorbonne. The topic
was crystallisation. From this was born the “magic
word, destine to become a talisman of modern
painting ... A new theory of art was being constructed, based on the idea of crystals being primitive forms of all things.” Here was the evolution of
a social movement. It was exemplified in the change
in styles from Impressionism to Expressionism to
Cubism.
This story of art is a very different one from
the psychologism of Kant, a theory of art based on
personal, disinterested, judgments. For Gombrich,
the expression, “I like it”, rather implies, “I believe
that is the kind of thing my group accepts as good.
Since I like my group, I like it too.” Art as “selfexpression”, whether interested or disinterested,
is “total nonsense”. So too is art conceived “as
the expression of the age”. Hegel’s historicism
involves the logical progression of the zeitgeist. The
philosophy of history unveils a series of discrete ages.
Without going into the mechanics of this dialectic,
art is one manifestation of this changing spirit.
It begins with the architecture of the pyramids,
then the sculpture of the Greeks. The paintings in
the Christian Age of Faith follow, but then yield,
in turn, to the less tangible in poetry. The final
synthesis is abstract philosophy. These historicist
speculations, unfortunately, throw little light on
any particular period or its evolution. The change
from Impressionism to Cubism, for example, finds a
simpler sociological cause.
Hegel mistakenly thought he had found objectivity though the logic of the dialectic, but what of the
“logic of the situation”? Does Gombrich’s sociology of styles provide objectivity? From Gombrich’s
perspective, not entirely: “We grade a work of
art within a style, but we refrain from pronouncing about the value of different styles.” Gombrich
calls this “stylistic relativism”, for which he has
no realist answer. This is not a species of cultural
relativism, however, because styles are sometimes
cross-cultural. And he also disputes Peter Winch,
and those who contend cultures are incommensurate. In “Understanding a Primitive Society” (1964)
Winch argued that the concept of Zande witchcraft
could not be translated into an objective anthropology. Counter to this, Gombrich contends we have
made significant advances in translating Egyptian
culture, for example, and we can certainly translate
and make intelligible different styles from an objective standpoint.
Take the case, again, of the change from
Impressionism to Cubism. Cubism was very different from Impressionism. Quoting two eyewitness accounts of the origin of this social movement,
Gombrich points out that the two masters—
Picasso and Braque—were neither mathematically
nor philosophically literate. They painted first, and
then, only later, dressed up their explanations. Leo
Stein—a comrade and American art collector—put
it this way:
There was a friend of the Montmartre crowd,
interested in mathematics, who talked about
infinities and fourth dimensions. Picasso began
to have opinions on what was and what was
not real, though as he understood nothing
of these matters the opinions were childishly
silly. He would stand before a Cézanne or a
Renoir picture and say contemptuously, “Is that
a nose? No, this is a nose”, and then he would
draw a pyramidal diagram. “Is this a glass?”,
he would say, drawing a perspective view of a
glass. “No, this is a glass”, and he would draw a
diagram with two circles connected by crossed
lines. I would explain to him that what Plato
… meant by “real things” were not diagrams,
that diagrams were abstract simplifications
… that Platonic ideas were worlds away from
abstractions. A second contemporary, an art dealer, DanielHenry Kahnweiler, “recalled that in 1908 Picasso
had told him that he wanted an engineer to be able
to construct the object depicted in his paintings”.
Maybe, Gombrich further mulls, “the search for
alternative methods of representation had led him
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What Is Art?
to books on isometric drawings or similar devices theory—what he calls error elimination—then the
which he wished to incorporate in his paintings”.
new problems that arise from this process. The more
At any rate, Kahnweiler translates the Cubist interesting and different the new problems, the betmovement as part of the great representational ter the initial theory. These are called “progressive
project in the history of art. It was a language that problem shifts” and knowledge is said to evolve by
could be interpreted and critically understood. With this process. If few or no problems are generated,
Impressionism we can accept, after assimilating the this is called a “degenerative problem shift” and
“dabs” and “patches”, a new way of seeing nature. the theory is discarded. In failing to produce new
With Cubism, the new “geometrical impressions problems, the research program is abandoned on the
disappear completely as soon as familiarity with the grounds that it does not provide a way forward.
new methods leads to the correct process of ‘readIn art, we also start with a problem. Indeed,
ing’”. That few have learnt this language, and that Constable viewed painting as a science, much
most prefer the language of Impressionism, is beside like the physics of his day. His problem was chithe point. The art historian is not
aroscuro. It was not dissimilar
“obliged to endorse every ideology
to the problem that occupied the
that has ever blossomed into art”.
Impressionists,
like Rembrandt and
arl Popper puts no
Indeed, “fallacious ideas can result
many others before. Constable was
weight on feelings trying to “achieve the impression
in admirable pictures”.
in his analysis. “The of light and depth by modulating
The social analysis of styles in
Gombrich’s hands is enlightening.
tone”, what he called the “evanesexpressionist theory cent
It shows that, sociologically speakeffects of nature’s chiaroscuro”.
of art is empty,” he Part of his schema, or theory, was
ing, Cubism is no more mysterious
than Impressionism; that it was says. Self-expression, to change hues and introduce more
part of the culture of Montmartre
than was conventionally fashemotion, is trivially green
and formed a perfectly intelligible
ionable. The Hay Wain, painted in
language that could be accepted
1821 and exhibited in Paris in 1824,
true of all human
or rejected. Such analysis, howled French artists to “lighten their
behaviour, and it
ever, cannot confirm the aesthetic
palettes”.
is not a distinctive
significance of the movement. His
The social movement of
“stylistic relativism” unavoidably
Impressionism,
which took its name
characteristic of art.
prompts him to make a final appeal
from Monet’s painting Impression,
to Popper. Can his philosophy
Sunrise (1872), was inspired by the
“restore the independence of art from social pres- bright and simplified mass of colours found in the
sures and vindicate the objectivity of its values”?
Japanese wood block. A change in the medium was
A fourth, and final, way forward is incompletely also the invention of the lead paint tube. This portexpounded in Gombrich’s book Art and Illusion. In ability enabled en plein air painting. New problems
Popper’s philosophy of science there are no such arose. The effects of light and haze, dazzle, even
things as pure observations. Every observation is glare, could be explored. Monet’s iconic series of
theory impregnated. Similarly, in art, Gombrich twenty-five haystacks (1890) painted over three seaargues, there is no such thing as the “innocent eye”. sons—summer, autumn and winter—were reworkThe painter does not paint what he sees, but sees ings and refinements to a schema that explored
what he paints. The painter inherits, or adopts, a optical effects. This led to progressive problem
schema by which he attempts to capture that part shifts. Remaking involved exploring the effects of
of reality that is consistent with the tradition he is fractured brushwork, blocks of bright colours, the
working within. Over time the illusions are refined rendering of blue trees and red grass. This was furor corrected. For Popper every question implies a ther reworked by the new problems of the Neotentative theory. For Gombrich:
Impressionists. Experiments with dots (Seurat) and
dabs (Pissarro), horizontal brush strokes—“a vortex
This description of the way science works is
of lines”, as Gombrich describes it—(Van Gogh),
eminently applicable to the story of visual
then the cylinders, the sphere and the cone that
discoveries in art. Our formula of schema and
explored form and structure (Cezanne). Seurat’s
correction, in fact, illustrates this very procedure.
new theory attempted to create the illusion of more
luminosity by a method called pointillism. His
There are four elements in Popper’s description “cromo-luminarist” theory required you to step back
of the evolution of objective knowledge. The initial to allow the colours to meld.
problem, the tentative theory, the refinements of this
As Gombrich points out, the “testing” of these
K
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What Is Art?
new theories was first the shock, then the acceptance and delight of this new language: “The visible world could after all be seen in terms of these
bright patches and dabs of paint.” It even became
a case of “nature imitates art”. Gombrich observed,
“As Oscar Wilde said, there was no fog in London
before Whistler painted it.” What began as a “school
of smudges and spots” became an admired progressive research program.
If Gombrich had developed this Popperian analysis of problem shifts within an artistic tradition, he
might have been more clearly in a position to revise
his “stylistic relativism”. Styles could be analysed
and compared on how progressive or regressive the
tradition turned out to be. Reputations would fall
under considerations of technique. What reworkings or revisions are made? In science, this is error
elimination. In art, it is refinement to the schema.
Particular artists could be considered in terms of
what questions they are addressing, if they come
up with new solutions and then further questions,
or if they degenerate into addressing the same old
problems and coming up with the same old solutions. No error elimination, no fresh problems. On
these grounds, I think Quentin Bell would be on
stronger ground in making out his case for the merit
of Whistler over his imitators.
Popper: Art and self-expression
M
any commentators have extolled Paul Cézanne
in the rise of cubism. To Edmund Capon,
recently the director of the Art Gallery of New South
Wales, he is “arguably … the most influential figure
of twentieth-century Western art”. Small wonder
a Cézanne was his last major acquisition for the
gallery. Capon further observes that Cézanne was
neither Impressionist nor Post-Impressionist. Their
problems of changing light were not his. According
to Capon, Cézanne speaks of sensation and feelings,
“two complementary instincts informed by mind
and by intuition”. On this reading, there are only
some small steps to Tolstoy.
This is not a starting point for a Popperian understanding of art. Karl Popper puts no weight on feelings in his analysis. “The expressionist theory of art
is empty,” he says. Self-expression, emotion, is trivially true of all human behaviour, and it is not a distinctive characteristic of art. It is obviously true that
the artist can be emotionally moved by his work,
that he might strive to convey this emotion to his
audience. Indeed, the artist might even harness this
emotion as a kind of test to the “success or fittingness or the impact of the (objective) work”. But it is
always the work itself, the object, that elicits these
emotions, and to confuse affect and object is to fall
into the relativistic confusion of Tolstoy. When the
subject and relations of emotion are elevated, it is
a slippery slope to irreconcilable debate over emotive response and intuition. An investigation into
the object—the work of art itself—is exchanged for
the stock-in-trade of the subjectivist.
Capon is on surer ground when he explores this
object—the composition, structure and harmony—
and remarks that Cézanne “dissected, disassembled
and then re-assembled his subjects—and in doing
so imbued the individual components with extraordinary strength, logic and credence”. This is another
way of describing Popper’s process of error elimination. An alternative interpretation of the meaning of
“sensation” for Cézanne might elaborate this realist
point.
At the end of his life, in a series of letters to the
young painter and critic Emile Bernard, Cézanne
talks of his paintings as “experiments”, as “research in
nature” and as a “proof of theories”. Like Constable,
his labours appear as science: “I believe in the logical development of what we see and feel through the
study of nature, never mind about the techniques”
of painting. Roughly along the lines of the British
Empiricists, Cézanne assumes sensations come from
nature. They are sense data that comprise our perceptions. The problem for the artist is to capture this
nature. This is what he means by the “realisation of
nature”: “In order to make progress in realisation,
there is only nature, and an eye educated by contact with it.” Even in his letter to Louis Aurenche,
where emotions are mentioned, it is the “sensation
of nature”—where the object enables perception—
that is “the necessary basis for all artistic conception”. Certainly he goes on to say that “our emotion
is no less essential”, but this is not something that is
spontaneous, immediate or easy. It is “acquired only
though very long experience”. It is for this reason
that, although Cézanne calls “sensations” his stockin-trade, this does not lead to Expressionism, but a
schema of a different sort.
That Cézanne left many of his works unfinished
is well known. The experiment failed; he could not
re-assemble these works to the satisfaction of the
schema; he could not achieve a “realisation of nature”.
To more clearly show his importance, a comparative
study of the unfinished with finished works would
be instructive. Such analysis might show under what
conditions his “mosaic theory of representation”
works—where the shapes cohere into a “convincing whole”—and under what conditions the schema
fails and they are left unfinished. There is one reference in his letters to this problem. In explaining his theory of perception to Emile Bernard—a
member of Gauguin’s Pont-Aven school, and later a
Symbolist—he remarks:
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What Is Art?
the sensations colorantes that create light are the
cause of abstractions that do not allow me to
cover my canvas, nor to pursue the delimitation
of objects when their points of contact are subtle,
delicate; the result of which is that my image or
painting is incomplete.
Amusingly, and treading on Bernard’s toes, the
letter ends with a pointed dismissal of the neoimpressionist’s penchant “that outline (everything)
in black, a defect that must be resisted with all one’s
might”.
Further exploration on these themes, no doubt,
could draw out the distinctiveness of Cézanne’s
schema—for example, in his still-life painting, the
overcrowding of surfaces, tilting of flat planes, the
mixing of perspectives, and how this was assimilated and adapted by Picasso to produce radically
different problems around ambiguity. Following
Capon, Jeffrey Smart could be seen as a counterpoint to this problem shift. In his work we find
a very different notion of ambiguity. Capon has
remarked that although his realism comes from the
High Renaissance of Piero della Francesca, Smart
also follows Cézanne, where:
subject matter is merely the building blocks
of composition … Like Cézanne, Smart’s real
interest is to put the right shapes in the right
colours in the right places.
Unlike Picasso’s ambiguity, stemming from
form, in Smart’s case:
We … find it slightly disturbing and hard to
believe that practical and mundane fixtures, like
roads and railways, should be elevated to the
status of semi-mystical icons.
Picasso and Smart are two very different
developments from Cézanne. A Popperian method
of problem shifts could explore why Picasso’s
research program turned out the more progressive;
why a neo-della Francesca realism is regressive. Or,
such an investigation might draw a quite different
conclusion. Either way, such an analysis would be
a path that leads away from Gombrich’s stylistic
relativism.
Anderson: Art and values
E
ven though the analysis of problem shifts is a
promising way forward, Gombrich leaves it only
as a suggestion. It was never systematically worked
out. He remained troubled with the relationship
between facts and values, and how this impinged
70
on objectivity in the arts. Popper’s first formulation
of this problem is mentioned in The Open Society and
its Enemies. Discussing Plato, on nature and convention, a dualism arises with “the impossibility of
reducing decisions or norms to facts”. G.E. Moore
had labelled the confusion of facts with values “the
naturalistic fallacy”. Like most English philosophers
in the first half of the twentieth century, Popper
appears to accept this doctrine. His summation was,
“It is impossible to derive a sentence stating a norm
or a decision or, say, a proposal for a policy from
a sentence stating a fact.” The principle rested on
the validity of the argument. It is invalid to derive
an ought (norm) from an is (fact). “I believe in the
impossibility of reducing decisions or demands to
facts.” There was, however, a qualification, because
Popper also goes on to say, “they can, of course, be
treated as facts”. And again: “Our dualistic thesis
then becomes … proposals are not reducible to facts
(or to statements of facts, or to propositions) even
though they pertain to facts.”
This dualism has always been a problem for aesthetics. The area for study is the norms of beauty.
If these norms were not matters of fact, how could
they be discussed objectively? Popper’s positive resolution to this impasse was to sidestep the dualism
by contending that it is still possible to investigate
the problems of aesthetics in the same manner that
it is possible to investigate the problems of science.
Both follow the same path of problem shifts in the
evolution of objective knowledge. As to the dualism
itself, he always remained equivocal. Towards the
end of his life, in a reply to pleas from Gombrich, all
he could do was to quote Gombrich back to himself.
The dualism is addressed only in metaphor. It is the
story of a Berlin professor writing against the Nazi
purges at the universities. Upon publication of his
protest, he spends the night with friends listening
to chamber music—the place of value—whilst waiting for the Gestapo knock at the door—the facts.
Fortunately, it did not come. And Popper concludes:
“I cannot think of a better illustration of the place of
value [chamber music] in a world of facts [the knock
at the door].”
Facts and values reside in the same world. “Art
has a place in this world of facts.” But there remains
an implied conceptual, ontological—it is not at all
clear—distinction. By following Popper, this distinction precluded Gombrich from developing a
theory of aesthetics. He always thought his descriptive accounts ultimately rested on evaluations, or
norms, which were not in some way matters of fact.
The realism of John Anderson—Challis Chair of
Philosophy, Sydney University, from 1927 to 1958—
argues against this and other dualisms. In ethics,
this means a purely descriptive study expunged
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What Is Art?
from prescriptions. A theory of ethics is an account
of what is the case. Certainly the moral world is full
of prescriptions, and other relations, but these are
simply described as part of the rich social fabric, and
should not be confused with an objective description
of ethical qualities, such as sociality, the productive ethic, and other examples Anderson explores
in his account of the good. Moral demands, and
other abstract relations connected to these qualities,
remain the subject matter of sociology. The source
of relativism in ethics is the confusion of these relations with the object itself. This is the main reason
why a positive science of ethics has not come about.
The naturalistic fallacy is avoided in this position
because the speech acts involving norms and decisions—prescriptive and proscriptive utterances, for
example—do not enter into the account. Ethics is
not a study of what ought to be, but what is.
Anderson’s position in aesthetics is an extension
of his arguments against relativism and dualism. It
could be taken as the basis for a positivist argument
against Tolstoy’s reduction of a work of art—the
object—to its social context—the relations of communion. It could also be the basis for an empiricist
argument against the dualism of Plato, and also the
implicit dualism found in the realism of Popper and
Gombrich.
Anderson’s papers on aesthetics are brief. They
are collected in Art and Reality (1982). It is through
arguments against the positions he is exposing that
he works out his own alternative theory. Most of the
more detailed analysis deals with literature, where
the tenet of his theory of art—the development of
theme—is more obviously and clearly applied. This
is because literature and music occur over time.
Music, for example, relies on the memory of the
listener piecing together the elaborations and transformations of theme. Depending on the complexity,
much re-listening may be required for familiarity and ultimate enjoyment. Plastic arts, however,
primarily occur in space. Although they too must
have a theme, the notion of development is more
problematic. Anderson has very little to say about
painting, and it is not at all clear why “wholeness,
harmony, and radiance” might lead him to admire
Cézanne, say, over his contemporaries.
The foundation of Anderson’s aesthetics is taken
from James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. Here Stephen briefly enumerates “the
qualities of universal beauty”:
Aquinas says … integritas, consonantia, claritas.
I translate it so: Three things are needed for
beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance …
First … the aesthetic image is … self
bounded and self contained … you apprehend
it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You
apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas ...
Second … you apprehend it as balanced
part against part … you feel the rhythm of its
structure … you feel now that it is a thing … the
result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.
That is consonantia ...
Finally ... You see that it is that thing which
it is and no other thing. The radiance … the
whatness of a thing.
Anderson says little about wholeness, harmony
and radiance. For Anderson’s purposes, a better
synonym of integritas might have been integrity, as
wholeness suggests an investigation into how the art
object is integrated. Anderson has more to say on
the second, harmony. In painting this might have
related to the balance of the composition. Anderson,
however, stresses the structure of the work and this
leads to his central concern, the development of
theme. A work of art:
must not be simply a collection of bits and
pieces. It must be built round some theme
forming what I have called the structure of the
work. In the case of literature and music this
theme is often enunciated quite early in the work
by a significant phrase of words or notes; in the
plastic arts by a significant shape, or mass, by
focusing on which we get the structure which
has been built up around it.
Of the theme, the artist may be vague or even
confused. Like the unconscious mind that manifests
itself in dreams, he might not even be aware:
and it is here that the discerning critic can
help us, so long as he is free as possible from
the vices that beset so many people concerned
with the arts e.g., sentimentalism, romanticism,
representationism …
The structure and theme of a work of art is
summed up in Joyce’s aesthetics:
The significant phrase in music is repeated
with variations in pitch, in volume, in rhythm
etc., just as the significant shape in the plastic
arts (the square, the oblong etc.) is repeated in
various ways … yet all working together to form
an articulated structure of “wholeness, harmony
and radiance” …
Such elaboration is only a very incomplete skeleton of a positive theory of aesthetics. Not much
is established in the plastic arts. It would require
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What Is Art?
a Gombrich, an art historian, to add flesh, and
many more bones, to Anderson’s argument. In
Matthew Arnold’s words, it would require a much
better acquaintance with “the best that has been
known and thought in the world”. Such a theory
would be based on contingent identity statements
on, in Anderson’s words, “what has been considered beautiful throughout the ages, what has stood
the test of time”. Without more explication, in the
plastic arts Anderson does not get us much beyond
David Hume—a connoisseur’s understanding—or
Gombrich—notions of the canon.
Conclusion: Progress and regress in art
I
nspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, Karl Popper
was a writer of fugues. If progressive problem
shifts in music did not stop in 1750, they certainly
did not extend much beyond the death of Mozart in
1791. So far as music is concerned, Popper’s alarmist
response to modernity has a similar tone to that of
Plato and Tolstoy. The basis of his critique, however, is not moral outrage. There is no conflation
of aesthetics with morality. As a realist, he would
also have no truck with Tolstoy’s relativism, and in
The Open Society he systematically rejected Plato’s
idealism. This position of Popper is based on an
erudite understanding and training in music. One
of the two oral exams for his PhD was on music
history. Arising from his musical experiences in
Vienna, and his views on the “poverty of historicism”, Popper came to find the idea of progress in
music problematic.
The Hegelian dialectic, and the inevitability of
progress, was adopted by Wagner, introduced into
music, and presented as a “spirit of the time”. On
Wagner’s own estimation, he was ahead of his time,
the “unappreciated genius”, only understood by the
connoisseur. Popper disputes Wagner’s expressionist
music as progress, just as he was critical of the antiexpressionist movements that opposed it, those of
serialism—atonal twelve-note music—and musique
concrete—synthesisers and recordings from nature.
Although these were reactions against romanticism,
Popper also rejected them for lacking melody, harmony and rhythm.
Popper’s understanding of music, outlined in
his autobiography, proceeds as follows. In music,
according to Popper, the discovery of polyphony
was peculiar to Western civilisation and was just as
significant as the other great human achievement,
the rise of science. It occurred sometime between
the ninth and fifteenth centuries. We cannot be
sure, because counterpoint singing and harmony
may have been an accident, or mistake, made by
a church congregation. It was then introduced as
72
a compatible second melody that could be sung
in conjunction with the original. The oddness of
Popper’s position is that this progressive problem
shift, something that occurred over 500 years ago, is
sufficient. Unlike science, “In music such inventions
as counterpoint revealed almost an infinity of new
possibilities and problems.” Evolution is somehow
circumscribed. This is because, in music:
There is always the danger that newly realized
possibilities may kill old ones: dynamic effects,
dissonance, or even modulation may … dull
our sensitivity to the less obvious effects of
counterpoint …
Since J.S. Bach, the problem shifts in music have
been regressive:
What I really accuse many of the “modern”
musicians of is their failure to love great music—
the great masters and their miraculous works,
the greatest perhaps that man has produced.
The modern musicians he speaks of were the
Schoenberg Society, in Vienna. They began as
Wagnerians, then set about to oust Wagner, “as if
someone had smeared the score of Tristan while the
ink was still wet”, in the words of Michael Hall.
Popper had been intimately acquainted with this
modernist movement. However, like Tolstoy, he
came to believe that Wagner was “the main villain of
the piece”. Returning to Plato, Popper suggests that
the poet or musician is likely to be either a “skilful
deceiver” or “genuinely inspired by the gods”. Bach
was on the side of the gods; Wagner, and those after
him, were the skilful deceivers. The explication of
expressionism in the modernist movement follows:
If we take the theory of inspiration and frenzy,
but discard divinity, we arrive … at the modern
theory that art is self-expression, or more
precisely, self–inspiration and the expression and
communication of emotion.
Anderson is in agreement with Popper at this
point. Expressionism, he said, “the interpretation of
works in terms of the soul-states of the artist may
be regarded as a particular form of romanticism”.
And romanticism, for Anderson, is a veil for the
error of illusions. Like Popper, he condemns this as
“extrinsic appreciation”, of trying to “estimate works
by something outside the works themselves”. Like
Popper, he accepts that emotions are present in art,
but the objectivist point is that, in Popper’s words,
“the artist and his audience are emotionally moved
by the work of art”. It is “the musician struggling
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What Is Art?
to solve musical problems” that moves us, and it is
upon these problems or themes in the structure of
the work that aesthetic judgments are made.
Although Gombrich shares his friend’s prejudice
in music, as a historian of art he would be hard
pressed to accept Popper’s errant views on problem
shifts. He accepts that his own “conservatism” in
music is “dogmatic”. He likes recognisable tunes,
and he dislikes “contemporary experiments”. In this
sense, Popper and Gombrich’s repugnance of the
modern is a return to Plato and Tolstoy. Certainly,
the profanity of twentieth-century art is more
difficult to navigate than Bach’s sacred fugues, but
neither Popper nor Gombrich is really in a position
to deny progress. Gombrich admits as much:
I must grant the possibility that, despite the
historicist nonsense talked by Schoenberg’s
champions, there are fascinations in the serialist
game which long efforts and familiarity would
reveal.
In the plastic arts, of course, Gombrich is the
happy chronicler, neither conservative nor dogmatic.
The striking feature here is that in the twentieth
century, mimesis has been “rejected as a worthy aim
of art”. The history of art has been an evolution from
sacred pictographs to profane photographs. Today
the importance of the discovery of photography “can
hardly be overrated”. The old illusions of the artist—his niche in society—are now better provided
by the entertainment industry, posters, advertising,
film, even “virtual reality”.
Plato was always wrong in denying the artist
was a maker of things. Even then, architecture and
sculpture would have been hard for him to explain.
Today, however, and starting in the late Renaissance,
says Gombrich:
The claim to be a creator, a maker of things,
passed from the painter to the engineer—leaving
to the artist only the small consolation of being a
maker of dreams.
In the twenty-first century, even if this is the
boundary of art, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams,
published at the beginning of the twentieth century,
is a very large canvas to fill.
Dr Tronn Overend is the author of Social Idealism and
the Problem of Objectivity. The first part of this article,
on Plato and Tolstoy, appeared in the May issue.
Putting on her face
Dressed in brassiere,
half slip and pearls,
my mother starts the ritual
that absorbs her girl.
Hair clips press kiss curls
in front of each ear,
hot rollers tame tresses
of unruly brown hair.
Rich pale pink lotion
Oil of Olay
patted from palms
to her skin every day.
Dusting of powder
from petit point compact,
curve of mascara
in liquid blue-black.
A cursory kiss
on white tissue fold,
leaving its imprint,
crimson and bold.
She envelops the child
in a hug of perfume,
the smell of which later
takes her back to that room
to run through the replay
of a scented embrace
and the going-out ritual
of putting on her face.
Robyn Lance
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73
D ougl as H assa ll
A Great Australian
Private Collection
A
s the London critic David Ekserdjian recently
noted in his book A Choice of Art Books, “the
inexorable rise of the virtual image on our
computer screens, tablets and mobile phones would
appear to have done nothing to diminish the flood
of gorgeously produced art books being published”.
Gavin Fry’s recent book The Peter Elliott Collection
of Australian Art is further proof of that happy fact.
Dr Peter Mervyn Elliott AM is a prominent
specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics based in
Sydney. For his professional work and achievement in his clinical and research contributions to
medicine, he has been extensively honoured, in
Australia and internationally. In private life, however, he has been a great collector of Australian art
including contemporary Aboriginal art, Pacific and
Melanesian tribal art, as well as of European sculpture and antiques.
This book is a magnificent volume, lavishly illustrated with very good colour reproductions carefully
chosen to illustrate one of the finest private collections of its type to have been assembled by an individual in Australia in the last sixty years or so. Dr
Elliott cemented his early interest in art collecting,
initially absorbed from his parents, in an exemplary
fashion, which he relates as follows:
In 1952, when I was in my final year at
University, I met Rudy Komon, who had
opened an antique shop in Bronte Road. I
went to the shop at the suggestion of my father
and the result was the purchase for him of a
Gruner painting and some Meissen porcelain.
It did not take Rudy long to become one of
the great art dealers in Australia. Rudy had
an enormous influence on the advancement
of contemporary Australian art in the 1960s
The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art
by Gavin Fry
The Beagle Press, 2013, 188 pages, $85
74
and ’70s. He encouraged and guided many
important Australian collectors who were lucky
enough to have walked into his now legendary
Paddington gallery.
Komon was indeed a major positive influence on
Australian art. He often expressed his views very
directly. One fondly recalls, for instance, at the
opening of the Australian National Gallery (now
the National Gallery of Australia) in Canberra in
1982, he stood, a little apart from the crowd, with
his glass of white wine and delivered himself of the
judgment that its grey walls were simply “too dark
for the pictures to be seen best”. Komon’s influence
upon Dr Elliott’s collection is clear from this book.
In particular, Dr Elliott himself has noted:
As a collector, I did not go out to chase elusive
masterpieces at auction or in the secondary
market, but found it more interesting to look
at and buy the work of emerging artists in the
galleries that supported them [for example,
Rudy Komon’s Gallery earlier on,] more recently
Utopia Art Sydney, Damien Minton Gallery
and Darren Knight Gallery.
Thus Dr Elliott, through Rudy Komon’s gallery,
later run by Ray Hughes, met and collected the works
of such major Australian artists as Fred Williams,
Frank Hodgkinson, Leonard French, Arthur Boyd,
Jon Molvig, Bob Dickerson and William Robinson,
among many other Australian artists.
The Elliott collection ranges wider than just
painting, to include Australian and Asian indigenous art, sculpture and Asian blue-and-white porcelain; but the book focuses upon the collection of
Australian paintings, following an exhibition of
them at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in August
2011. A further exhibition of “Masterpieces from the
Peter Elliott Collection”, curated by Dr Lou Klepac,
was held at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery during the recent summer. The introductory pages of
Quadrant June 2014
A Great Australian Private Collection
the book illustrate some of the tribal art objects
and Asian porcelain, as well as some of Dr Elliott’s
pictures in situ at home. Dr Elliott admits that his
wife Jane (also a medical practitioner) “was often
critical of my acquisitive nature [but] she accepted
that this was an inherited trait and took equal and
genuine pleasure in our collection”. The good doctor echoes the situation of many a collector of art
and objets—but not all spouses are so amenable. In
his scholarly and perceptive introduction, Gavin Fry
has recorded:
Peter Elliott, half seriously, suggests the love
of and collecting of art is almost a pathological
condition within the Elliott family. His
grandparents and parents certainly had the bug,
he had it in the extreme and his children seem
to be afflicted with the condition. Growing up
in a house filled with inspiring works of art can
predispose a person to a state where the thrill
of the chase can sometimes outweigh the final
result, the work on the wall or the antique on
the mantelpiece. For the true collector it is both
an intellectual and an emotional exercise. The
presence of certain works in a collection will
immediately suggest the next work needed to
complement the whole, the missing link required
to make the groupings more understandable. At
the same time being confronted with a work can
bring about an almost visceral need, a desire to
acquire and live with that particular picture or
object that can overpower good sense, financial
rectitude and domestic harmony. For Peter
Elliott, that passion reached the point where
the latest acquisition remained wrapped up
and hidden in an obscure corner of the house,
or office, until he could break the news to his
forgiving and ever-practical wife.
The tremendous roll-call of Australian artists
included in this collection range from Norman
Lindsay works, in oils and watercolours, dating
from 1918 to 1948 and including not only some of
his piratical scenes, but also the very fine Portrait
of Rita (1925); to works such as Henry Mulholland’s
oil South Coast Painting of 1998 and Kylie Stillman’s
paper work Superb Blue Wrens of 2009. In between,
one finds a collection of works by other distinguished artists painting in Australia over the past
hundred years.
Some of the works that strike me as especially
notable and memorable include the luminous oil by
Frank Hodgkinson Before the Burn, Arnhem Land
1985 in hues reminiscent of the Scottish Colourists
or William Frater, Emily Kngwarreye’s very fine
acrylic My Country of 1994, and Rover Thomas’s deft
ochre painting Bedford Downs Junction of 1985. Two
very good Gruner pastoral landscapes: At Lindisfarne
(1920) and Hydes Creek Morning (1938) are reproduced in the generous plates. Lloyd Rees’s wonderful misty-blue view of Morning on the Derwent (1971)
captures something of his earlier drawing style and
his later diffuse manner, combining these elements
into a piece of real magic. Dobell’s Storm, Wangi
(1952) and Old Golfer (early 1960s) are typical of his
landscape and portrait styles. Drysdale’s pen drawing of Dave (1967) and oil A Study of Andy Mac (1968)
are likewise images typical of his portrayals of outback Australians.
Then comes a sequence of remarkable landscapes
and seascapes by Lance Solomon, who is perhaps underrated today, but whose Pastoral Coastal
Country (1950) and Pleasant Day (1946) must conjure
up, for anyone who lived on Australia’s eastern seaboard at that period, memories of hot, golden days
and a plenteous, timbered land. Two of Solomon’s
seascapes here capture so well not only the distant gradations between sea and sky reminiscent of
Gruner’s seascapes, but also the spray and softer sea
mist. I first saw these reproductions in this book
in a well-lit upper room overlooking Sydney, on a
sea-misted day upon the harbour, just as in these
works. Worthy also of special mention is the spare
but evocative oil by David Strachan, Head of a Child
with Bird (1968). Clifton Pugh’s Dance of Crows
(1960) is now justly seen as “iconic”. Fred Williams’s
Lysterfield Landscape (1966) is not only representative
of his interpretation of the Australian landscape,
but is, in itself, a warm and appealing work indeed.
Charles Blackman’s Jumping Children (1961) is not
only an example of his children series, but also itself
a delightful study in colour and movement. Len
French’s enamel Study for Third Chant No 3 (1965)
is another work that is both typical of a series and
also a luminous thing in itself. The Brett Whiteley
landscapes At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a
Jacaranda Gardenia Tree (1984-85) and 8 Miles Out of
Cootamundra 8.28pm 4/1/84 (1984) are major works.
G
avin Fry, who has provided the introductory
essay, is a distinguished writer on Australian
art, with a track record of scholarly assessments and
appreciations of Australian painting. Here he tells us
the story of Peter Elliott’s family background, his war
service with the Royal Australian Navy and his later
medical career and his beginnings and development
as a collector of Australian paintings. Fry discusses
the various artists, dealers and galleries through
whom the collection was assembled, starting with
Rudy Komon, giving us an immediate sense of how,
where, when and why the collection was formed.
One practical collecting point Fry makes is this:
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75
A Great Australian Private Collection
Peter Elliott has stuck to his father’s dictum that
“big is not always best”. In his collection there
are no really big paintings and fewer larger than
3 by 4 feet [90 by 120 centimetres]. There are a
number of good reasons for this. Smaller works
tend to concentrate the artist’s ideas and forms,
bringing them into sharp focus rather than
spreading the gesture wide where often scale
alone is the major determinant.
Fry also notes that “there are simple practical reasons too” in that domestic size may require
limits, but at the same time it will encourage “close
contemplation” of such works. One of Sydney’s art
dealers, the fondly remembered Beth Mayne, used
to stock mostly, if not exclusively, small works in her
studio shop.
In addition to the introductory essay and the some
121 pages of major plates, there are various smaller
colour reproductions of paintings in the book, along
with some photographs of works in their domestic
settings, as well as on public exhibition. Further, at
the end, there is an excellent and detailed catalogue
with notes on the 172 works in the collection. There
are also some pages of professional biographical
notes with some photographs and paintings of Dr
Elliott, and of his wife, family, naval and university
colleagues and other friends depicted over the years.
The standard of the physical production of this
art book with its scholarly introduction is of the
exemplary style now well established by the Beagle
Press as one of Australia’s leading art publishers.
It is very well bound, with a distinctive dustjacket
illustrating William Robinson’s painting Just before
Dark—Kingscliff 1996 with its striking, and most
Australian, perspectives of sky, land, beach and
water. The essay by Gavin Fry not only illuminates
the Elliott collection, but is also a joy to read.
This is a work that is a must for the shelves of
all who collect and esteem Australian art. It provides a log of the history of a great collector, who
has assembled and achieved a memorable and representative collection of the fine art of painting in this
nation over the past century or so. Books recording, illustrating and cataloguing major collections
in private hands are important for art history and
the appreciation of art, as recognised pioneer works
such as Douglas Cooper’s Great Private Collections
(1966) and Niels Von Holst’s Creators, Collectors
and Connoisseurs (1967) illustrate and attest. Virtual
images have their place, but cannot beat a good art
book like this, which is a just tribute to Dr Peter
Elliott’s long perseverance as an Australian collector.
Dr Douglas Hassall wrote on the current Elioth
Gruner exhibition in the May issue.
Pear This pear, battered by the soft pads
of gentle fingers—pickers, packers
lifting it out of the bin, and the supermarket
checker also careful—it looks so old, painted a dozen coats of greens, yellows, reds,
and bruises here and there, its label with a tab
that peels off cleanly, without ripping the skin—
this pear sitting here, or standing, if you prefer, on the bamboo chopping board, bears itself with the dignity
of one who can boast My great-great-great-grandpère
was painted by Cézanne. He had decomposed
(before Cézanne got the composition right)
into a mushy brown lump, though Cézanne still
saw him fresh off the tree, unblemished, ripe,
a Still Life, its life stilled as nearly forever
as man and pear may achieve together. 76
Quadrant June 2014
John Ridland
M ich a el C on nor
Different Stages
W
illiam Goldman looked at Brigitte
Bardot’s bottom and saw the future: of
movies, and theatre. Goldman’s 1969
book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway is a
classic account of a Broadway season. Goldman, a
screenwriter, playwright and novelist, saw the plays
and musicals—the good and the awful—swam
through the red and black ink of profits and losses,
and interviewed directors, actors, critics and audiences. In that single season, extraordinary by our
standards, were new works by Williams, Pinter,
Miller and Albee and a range of plays and musicals
which included Hair, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, There’s a Girl
in My Soup, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Little
Foxes, How Now, Dow Jones, Staircase, Plaza Suite,
Loot and George M! Goldman was a knowledgeable observer. His film writing credits include Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Marathon Man—
that’s the one with Olivier as an ex-Auschwitz
dental-drill-wielding Nazi, come from Paraguay
to New York, where he develops an intimate and
painful acquaintance with Dustin Hoffman’s oral
cavity. The Season comes from a time when writers
could still talk sense about theatre.
Bardot’s bottom, said Goldman, was “one of
the significant cultural events of this half-century”.
Roger Vadim’s film And God Created Woman was,
because of Bardot’s anatomy, an adults-only box
office success. Before this, argued Goldman, filmmakers believed “that all people had to like all pictures”. The lesson they learnt from the film’s success
was that fragmented audiences could be cultivated
and profitably grown. Goldman suggested it was
also a lesson for Broadway: plays aimed at specific
audiences would draw in new patrons.
Theatre-going has fragmented but not exactly in
the way he imagined, and it may not have increased
overall audience numbers. The less appealing facet
of fragmentation, but possibly its most important
element, was already present when Goldman was
writing. He asked a young man why he hadn’t been
to see a Pinter play on Broadway and was told,
“Frankly, I don’t want to be associated with that
kind of audience.”
Play-going is not solely about seeing a play.
Completely without any supporting research, I suggest that people who go to live dramas don’t go to the
theatre, they go to a theatre. The audiences at Belvoir
and Malthouse are not the people you see at the
MTC and STC, and obviously vice versa. Likewise
the audiences at amateur productions, commercial
musicals and independent theatre (indie theatre)
are different beasts—though there would be some
crossover between Belvoir, Malthouse and indie.
Our theatres are fragmented but not all the fragments are growing.
In Australia the smaller subsidised and indie
theatres know their audiences—who are very similar to the theatre-makers: younger, new class, politically impassioned. The same professionals also make
the theatre for the big subsidised theatre companies.
In this new setting they are from widely separate
generations, have very different life experiences and
do not share the same expectations for what makes
a successful performance as their audience. In this
environment the theatre-makers lack an instinctive
or shared understanding of their subscribers.
A concrete example of the disconnect is even
present in the architecture. New Sydney and
Melbourne main-stage theatres are difficult of
access for elderly patrons—cramped and badly
designed, with long unbroken rows of seats which
mean dozens of toes to be trampled on, they have
Escher-inspired staircases and cramped foyers
which resemble stockyard holding pens. Yet this
ageing demographic is fast growing and holds an
intelligent audience well worth cultivating. Despite
the very visible sexual imbalance in the composition
of the audiences, which is mostly older female, the
companies show little interest in attracting older
men—gay coming-out plays, football plays or combinations of the two are not quite the way to do it.
When the subsidised main-stage companies try
to attract new patrons they turn to a youth audience which doesn’t want to mix with their elderly
patrons and is already catered for by the vibrant
small companies. Unfortunately also, when they
Quadrant June 2014
77
Different Stages
somehow to be at least a little unintelligible.
think young audience they think sex and vulgarity,
This is because the audience that goes to a
not intergenerational appealing wit and humour.
Snob Hit must be convinced that the “average”
The subsidised nudity and sex onstage aren’t much
theatregoer wouldn’t understand it. Or,
fun when you are seated beside someone’s grandthird, like it. This third and last requirement,
mother. When a company like the MTC stages a
of course, is the greatest of all hypocrisies
successful season of independent theatre, as they
concerning the Snob Hit, because the people
have done with their Neon seasons, all they are
who go to see them don’t like them either.
really doing is temporarily bringing an audience
borrowed from Malthouse and the indie companies
The British element is no longer relevant. That
to fill one of their small auditoriums. The audience
won’t be sticking around to join the pensioners for the play marks a perceived cultural superiority
remains important. Indigenous theatre is a clear
upcoming seasons.
The smaller companies, especially Malthouse marker between cultural insiders and outsiders.
and Belvoir, are an onstage/offstage product. They Gay or “queer” theatre is another marker which
attract and keep audiences returning, not just with even defines generations of homosexuals. Oldthe plays they present but for the cultural capital fashioned homosexual pub drag was workingthey are selling. The audience members, simply by class—an observation made by UK theatre director
Neil Bartlett—“queer theatre” is
being present, feel they are part of
new-class snobbery. Even snob
a fashionable, youthful, committed
hits
no longer attract a univerand assertive cultural community. It
hy else would
sal audience but play to their own
doesn’t matter that individual plays
they pay far too
groups (probably with only a small
may be lousy; being there is the
number of free-moving ambassathing. Belvoir especially does this
much for far too
wandering between theatres).
very well. At the smaller theatres
little? And applaud dors
The River (a very White indigenous
the foyers are chatty and welcoming
bad plays, very
drama) played to STC middle-class
places—for initiates. They like being
women, Angels in America to Belvoir
there and are noisily advertising
bad plays, and
hipsters.
their own social superiority. From
Kosky plays?
Writing about theatre is also
an outsider perspective there is
fragmented. If he was writing about
a strong gay influence at Belvoir
theatre now, Goldman might find a
and feminist at Malthouse.
The latter may not be a successful element for paragraph for “Snob Crits”. Newspaper and online
running a theatre. Where feminism is strong the critics use something recognisable as English while
workplace is unhappy, and creativity f lees. Or academia has adopted feminist full-moon-speak.
perhaps it is a Sydney–Melbourne difference with Here is Australian theatre academic Professor Peta
traditionally cosmopolitan Sydney theatre versus a Tait on circus and physical theatre:
feminist academic and mummsy ABC-influenced
The cultural significance of body surfaces in
Melbourne theatre. The result is an introverted
physical theatre is evident in the changing
theatre (the same audience is courted by indie
shapes of exertion which confuse differentiation.
groups and influential small production companies)
In the execution of dangerous and risky tricks,
unconcerned with creating an Australian popular
the body sweats across the skin’s surface as
drama or playing beyond the chardonnay belt.
if it is leaking. [Elizabeth] Grosz writes that
At the MTC and STC, as patrons dodge the
“Body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate;
wheelchairs and buy overpriced drinks and programs,
their control is a matter of vigilance, never
they are also conscious of being part of a “good” and
guaranteed.” While she argues that the
high-minded cultural experience, asserting their
female body is conceived to be in a state of
social superiority over the uncultured—it may also
uncontrollable corporeal flow as “seepage”, it
be what wealthy people do. Why else would they
would seem that such “seepage” is especially
pay far too much for far too little? And applaud bad
socially regulated.
plays, very bad plays, and Kosky plays?
Goldman traced the inf luence of the 1960s
Writing like that has to be learned. The
“Snob Hits” on Broadway. The phenomenon was
Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and
then slightly different from what we know:
Performance Studies gave an award for the “Best
Postgraduate Paper” given at their 2013 annual
A second requirement of the Snob Hit [the first
conference:
was a British pedigree] is that it must manage
W
78
Quadrant June 2014
Different Stages
This paper effectively addressed the conference
theme through examining the collaboration
between Vulcana Women’s Circus and a group
of both deaf and hearing women in a physical
theatre production of an adaptation of the
Wizard of Oz.
Where The Season is really dated is that theatres in the 1960s promised entertainment, and their
patrons expected it, and theatre tickets cost $15.
Television history
T
here, on page 3, is the Reverend Mr Thomas
Hastie. I know him. On Christmas Day 1854,
just weeks after Eureka, he married my great-grandparents (James, thirty-four, Selina, fourteen) in a
settler’s hut in Horsham. The novel’s young heroine,
Sally May Lorne, has just refused his invitation to
attend the new school he has set up in Buninyong.
It’s an old-fashioned novel I’m reading. On the
now brittle cover a young woman is driving a carriage, a whip in her right hand, reins in the left.
Before her is a handsome young man on horseback.
He stares. Around about are a flurry of other characters, women and men, and a military redcoat peers
over the busy scene from the far right.
It’s op-shop found fiction, The Fury by E.V.
Timms, romance number eight in a best-selling
series of novels published by Angus & Robertson.
It’s an historical romance written before our history
writing turned sour Left. Edward Vivian Timms
died in 1960, having completed ten novels in his
Australian saga. The Queensland-born writer was
wounded in the Gallipoli landing and was on duty
at Cowra on the night of the mass escape.
In the desert of Australian history on television
these discarded books could be a base for
bringing life to the past. Filled with incident and
characters, they are strongly story-oriented. The
historical background is alive and imaginatively
detailed. Much of the factual detail comes from
period newspapers. Timms’s gold-rush Geelong
is laid out and explored with material from the
Geelong Advertiser, and brought alive with his own
enthusiasm for the world he was visiting.
Timms loved Australia. The books were written
in the 1940s and 1950s when we were still allowed
to be passionate about our country. His characters
can be hard and cruel but they are striving to create something worthwhile. Modern academia has
taken notice of the books, not for their storytelling,
but for his treatment of race.
Though the period language is dated, and the
stories melodramatic, the writing pulls the modern
reader along. The books have already served for one
historical television series: Luke’s Kingdom, a thirteen-part mini-series, was made in 1976. It starred
Oliver Tobias and two episodes were directed by
Peter Weir. A boxed set of the series is now available in DVD stores, and some of the episodes are
on YouTube.
Timms’s Australian Saga begins in the 1830s and
follows histories of settlement in Western Australia,
New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
John Adams, a 2008 HBO mini-series, suggested
a way that Australian history could be told on television. In the story of America’s second president,
based on the book by David McCullough, many
of the great events he took part in, costly to film,
happen offstage as the story looks in detail at his
life. It’s a sophisticated treatment that could work
equally well to open up our past on television.
E.V. Timms’s old books offer an opportunity to
step outside modern platitudes and catch up with
a different vision of Australia. If approached with
sympathy and imagination, not cynicism, they could
introduce the beginning of a new past.
To Daniel Timothy
When you have wheeled my chair
into the marshes where
mallards and teal descend,
I will be near my end
but still able to shoot,
to sip a little toot
out of my pocket flask
and more, no man can ask.
Tim Murphy
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79
C hr istopher H e athcote
Jacques Tati in the
Ultra-Modern House
A
s the distinguished guests queued to meet the
French president, André Malraux breezed
past the line, pushing the actor-director
and his wife forward. “May I introduce Mon Oncle,
Monsieur le Président,” the Minister for Culture
announced, a twinkle in his eye. Reaching out to
shake hands, de Gaulle addressed the visitor with
grave politeness: “Allow me to congratulate you,
Monsieur Tati, on having such a brilliant nephew.”
Those who overheard the gaffe momentarily froze.
Having won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film
with his latest work, Jacques Tati was the toast of
Paris, hence his invitation to the state reception. But
de Gaulle was unaware of who this celebrity was,
or the title of his acclaimed film, Mon Oncle. Then
Tati slipped into role and, clasping the head-ofstate’s hand, shook it with Hulot-like dignity. Other
guests could barely contain themselves.
Mon Oncle had been Tati’s Plan C. Following the
commercial success of his previous film, Monsieur
Hulot’s Holiday, he had wanted to make a comedy
about French conscripts in a wartime Berlin labour
camp. It would show them outwitting their Nazi
captors, secretly living it up in spartan quarters,
and undermining German munitions production.
Friends counselled him to shelve the project. The
mental climate in France was unsuitable.
Tati had an alternative plan. The Italian director Federico Fellini suggested filming a version of
Don Quixote, allowing the Frenchman the lead role
as well as participation in production planning and
decisions. Tati was eager. He wanted to play the
knight-as-fool. But Fellini never passed beyond talk.
Besides, the market was pressing for more of
Monsieur Hulot, a role played by Tati himself.
He was swamped with commercial offers for
appearances of his character in advertising and on
tele­v ision. People wouldn’t let up. And there were
incessant inquiries about another film, would-be
backers suggesting “Hulot in Love” and similar
themes—proposals Tati disliked intensely. Then
came the national newspaper poll where the gentle,
80
warm-hearted, faltering and entirely fictitious
Monsieur Hulot was ranked among the ten most
popular people in France. Tati felt himself being
backed into a corner.
J
acques Tati had a loose idea for a sketch. It would
play on un oncle d’Amérique (an American uncle),
the vernacular French phrase for a vain well-off person who humiliates less-fortunate relatives by flauntingly distributing largesse. The director wanted to
invert this term by using his Hulot character as a
“French” uncle: a figure with no money, no job, no
prospects, but who exudes Gallic geniality, tolerance and mild fun.
Tati’s biographer, David Bellos, explains that
the scene involved the relationship of a boy to two
family members: his industrious and affluent professional father, and his irredeemably disorganised and
playful uncle. The director had jotted down notes
on a setting. He would contrast two urban lifestyles:
to one side a traditional cramped and twisting old
quarter of Paris, as against a modern villa in one of
the newer suburbs.
Mon Oncle evolved from this raw sketch. The
film followed the Arpel family: husband, wife and
nine-year-old son. The Arpels are bourgeois in the
full sense. They are affluent and conventional city
people. Monsieur Arpel is the director of a plastics factory, his wife is extremely proud of their
new modern home in a trendy suburb, and their
boy Gérard attends a smart school. The family is
swathed in the trappings of material success.
Into the equation enters Madame Arpel’s brother,
Monsieur Hulot, an unemployed bachelor who has a
tiny room atop a peculiar old house in a traditional
quarter. He is valued as an honest trustworthy soul
in his close-knit neighbourhood, a decent member
of the Parisian community. But everything about
him seems to invert the Arpels’ lifestyle, down to
the way Hulot openly leaves the key above his flimsy
door. In contrast, their home is protected by a high
fence and electronic gate.
Quadrant June 2014
Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House
If young Gérard enjoys his uncle’s relaxed company—the pair have a strong bond—his middleclass parents view Hulot as a social embarrassment,
an idler without ambition. This mirrors the perceptions of a “progressive” post-war world which designates him as human surplus. So the couple aspire to
induct Hulot into their modern lifestyle. They want
to arrange a reputable job for him, and to matchmake a well-to-do wife.
Monsieur Arpel asks a favour of a business
associate, leading to Hulot being offered a job at
a chemicals corporation. But through a misunderstanding Hulot fails the interview for a clerical position before it begins: the personnel officer thinks
Hulot is a peeping tom. Then the Arpels hold a
small garden party where they try to pair Hulot up
with a preening local sophisticate. He is unable to
act the customary social games with her, indeed he
reduces the gathering to a shambles, damaging the
Arpels’ modern home. Finally, Hulot is assigned
a menial job on the factory floor at Arpel’s plastics firm. Unsuited to mindless work, he breaks the
machine that manufactures plastic pipe (it comes
out shaped like a string of sausages).
Hulot cannot be “modernised”. In despair, the
Arpels send Hulot to work as a sales rep in the provinces, while Gérard establishes the beginning of a
warm relationship with his father.
T
he rising novelist Jean L’Hote, who Tati asked
to assist on a screenplay, was perplexed. He
was given nothing when writing began—no plot
outline, no gags to build up, no set motifs to use.
Add to this a dramatic complication. As in his
last film, Tati wanted there to be almost no dialogue. Strictly speaking the pair were not writing a
silent movie—because, besides a measured musical
accompaniment, the film would use a soundtrack of
orchestrated noises from daily life.
The director was confident a story would emerge.
As a professional mime who had sharpened his craft
in pre-war vaudeville, Jacques Tati had been extracting material from daily life for decades: “observation
is everything”, he repeatedly assured L’Hote. So the
pair spent two entire years watching Paris. They
would meet early each weekday, then walk about
the streets, looking, and making precise notes.
They began by watching dogs. They noted how
dogs behaved when alone, on a leash, or with other
dogs; what dogs did on a street, in a market, on
waste ground. On the third week the pair watched
a loose group of domestic dogs determinedly go into
the ground floor of a Parisian apartment building
then emerge minutes later from a greengrocer’s shop
on the opposite side of the square. The dogs knew
some concealed way to cross beneath the bustling
traffic. Tati was enchanted, and L’Hote could see
how the substance for a Hulot film would come into
view.
Those dogs eventually punctuated the film. They
would appear at its introduction and conclusion, and
figure at transitional points to push the visual story
along, pressing the unseen humour of a street. There
is the dog on a leash that leads his drunken master
home; the dog which gets its owner to open doors;
the dog that bares teeth at a fish head protruding
from a shopping basket; and the dogs shrewdly
evading authorities trying to catch them. There is
nothing strained or far-fetched. What we see is
completely normal.
This approach tells in Tati’s depiction of daily
work. Comedy films habitually exaggerate and
embellish blue-collar toil to maximise laughs.
Modern Times has Charlie Chaplin labouring at such
a frenetic pace that he gets pulled into a vast engine;
I’m Alright Jack has Ian Carmichael so unwilling to
tear himself away from a process line that he vomits
into a spurious confectionary machine. These incidents may be hilarious, but they are ridiculous—and
forced.
Compare them to the factory in Mon Oncle.
Wearing a grey store coat, Hulot sits at a bare dispatch desk and takes occasional phone calls. He
is utterly bored in what is a dull, meaningless job
from the real world of work. Another labourer takes
a cigarette break, asking Hulot to keep his eye on
an adjacent extrusion machine. He agrees, but then
he nods off, and the unwatched plastics machine
produces too much bright red pipe. Hulot awakens,
panics, reacts. What happens is funny, and plausible. What he does is a normal mistake. This faithfulness—there is no other term—is unique to Tati’s
comedy.
T
hat alertness to the everyday saw the consumer
life of 1950s Paris spill into the film. There
was the inaugural “World Detergent Congress”
of September 1954, where “scientific experts” in
white coats and rubber gloves lectured Parisians on
domestic hygiene. This will be mirrored in Madame
Arpel’s behaviour: in her kitchen she wears rubber
gloves and uses tongs to cook an egg hygienically.
Then there was plastic, the wonder material of
the future. Tens of thousands of Parisians flocked
to a 1956 exposition publicising the plastics industry, where continuous demonstrations explained the
benefits of the new material. People were incredulous when plastic cups and bowls would be dropped
then bounce, not shatter like ceramic or glass.
Most popular was the long booth where a crowd
looked incredulously as a technician in safety suit
and futuristic cap fabricated brightly coloured hair
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Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House
combs from a mystifying machine. For weeks Paris
Tati was doubtful of the advantages said to be
was abuzz with excited talk about the exposition. embodied by an automated, progressive society: “life
Tati’s friend Raymond Queneau landed work to tomorrow will be inseparable from those twentywrite the script for an expensive documentary on storey buildings where a little chap will have to call,
plastics manufacture, Le Chant de Styrène (his title armed with a screwdriver, to mend the lift that’s
puns on “le chant de sirène”, the siren’s song).
broken”. In his gentle, good-humoured way, Tati
Monsieur Arpel not only manufactures plastics, was raising values that mattered to him.
the glamorous substance. Hulot works at the factory
He did not have to search far for a suitable locaalongside attendants who wear clear plastic smocks tion. His film was shot mostly around Saint-Maurand black goggles, gauntlets and boots, and who des-Fossés on the south-western edge of Paris. The
keep an eye on a fuming mechanism resembling the picturesque village radiated a warm, untidy atmosfeted device at the Paris exposition. And there is the phere, with its architectural mix of the sensible
scene in the Arpels’ kitchen when Hulot drops jugs and the dishevelled snuggled around a late Second
and cups on the floor, wanting to see them bounce. Empire main square. Saint-Maur required miniBut one is made of glass.
mal work, with only one mock-up
All was ripe for scrutiny, and
building being constructed there:
laughter. Tati’s father, who had just
acques Tati’s subject the dilapidated and meandering
retired from daily work, leased his was a transformation three-storey residence in which
shop to an ambitious businessman
Hulot lived. Otherwise, the visual
promoting the latest kitchen appli- deeply affecting post- ambience of the square was perfect,
and provided the setting to convey
ances. Tati and L’Hote made visits
war France, and
to inspect American inventions that
an old arrondissement where neighhe had a weighty
would be parodied in the Arpels’
bours spill into each other’s lives in
ultra-modern home. And when the message: “Everything a friendly, spontaneous manner.
director spent time in hospital, he
film crew also used the adjathat gave Paris its centThe
took note of the modern equipment.
suburb of Créteil for the exteThe controls for an X-ray machine charm and personality rior shots of the modern factory,
prompted the complex switches on
school, roads and mass-housing
is being spoilt and estate.
the Arpels’ kitchen cooker.
This new development was
torn down!” he said a forerunner of the grands ensemon Oncle is a comedy of reconon the film’s release. bles crowding out the periphery of
struction. The film’s framing
Paris. Créteil was a testing ground
images deftly press this point. The
for urban planners, offering acres of
opening credits are arranged on hoardings before graceless concrete apartment blocks set along ausa busy building site, with a concert of mechani- tere streets of relentless straight lines with intercal construction noises substituted for music. And, mittent efficient arcs. The contrast with the relaxed
nearing the end, the audience sees workmen knock- character of Saint-Maur could not be more extreme.
ing down a shabby cottage, rowdily clearing a town
Créteil was the civic response to a crisis. France
block for mass-housing.
had been in ruins after the war, with more than a
These were not convenient narrative devices. million buildings lost, including a sixth of domestic
Jacques Tati’s subject was a transformation deeply residences either damaged or destroyed. The counaffecting post-war France, and he had a weighty try also found itself harbouring 100,000 displaced
message: “Everything that gave Paris its charm and persons by July 1945, a figure that was climbing.
personality is being spoilt and torn down!” he said And cities were experiencing an influx of migrants
on the film’s release. The father of two school-age from France’s colonial possessions, especially from
children was uneasy for the community’s future:
North Africa. So there was intense pressure for the
government to deliver housing and employment
Gardens are being abolished … Take those
opportunities; in fact, modernising industry was
big blocks of flats they’re putting up in the
the national priority. Jean Monnet, who devised the
suburbs. They’re surrounded by lawns but
infrastructure underpinning industrial reconstrucchildren are forbidden to play on them. The
tion, had long preached the necessity to embrace
result: children go and play on waste ground
progress: “There will only be greatness when the
as they did in the old days. But what happens
French assume the stature to justify it,” he warned
when there’s no more waste ground left? A real
de Gaulle. “For that it is necessary to modernise,
child needs to break a window and get his ears
because the French aren’t modern.”
boxed by the caretaker.
Tati wanted to use the severe, functional qualities
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Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House
of Créteil’s streetscapes to suggest a humourless
modern suburb. And he was gratified to find the
community there shared this unflattering outlook.
Residents would come up to him to complain
about the morbid geometry of the area, the shoddy
construction of their flats, a lack of amenities, and
obstreperous local authorities. One man showed Tati
a “summons” the council had sent to him because
his children walked on municipal lawns. The people
who lived in the modern estate felt that, far from
being the utopia promised by urban planners, it
was nowhere near as comfortable as an old quarter.
Modernisation, for them, seemed more trouble than
it was worth.
T
hen there is “Maison Arpel”, the modernist
villa in which the affluent Arpel family lives,
a far cry from public mass-housing. This stylish,
flat-roofed, geometric home represents the definitive status symbol for the progressively minded.
There are no pictures on walls, no rugs on floors,
no homely knick-knacks in the pale near-empty
interiors where, as Madame Arpel chants, “everything communicates”. It’s a push-button dwelling
equipped with odd electric gadgets, as well as modish furnishings designed to catch the eye, not for
comfort (visitors sit awkwardly in wiry cone-shaped
chairs).
Outside is a stark and geometrised courtyard
with alternating rectangles of concrete, grass and
pebble-dash. A pair of meagre trees are clipped into
a rod-like row and espaliered against a wall. The
focal point of house and garden is a metallic fountain shaped like a marlin leaping up from a small
pond. At the press of a button this kitsch decorative
feature, which the accident-prone Hulot will later
break, spurts a tall jet of water.
The significance of “Maison Arpel” has been
missed entirely by film historians. This crafty pastiche
of an architect-designed villa in the International
Style was built on set at the Victorine cinema studios in Nice. Local audiences of the newly-released
film straight away spotted how it was having a dig
at a very public architect.
Le Corbusier—the nom de guerre of Edouard
Jeanerette—was among those modernist demigods who straddled French design, architecture and
visual art in the giddy 1920s. He advocated a refined
style which fused the values of Cubist abstraction
with Classical Greek proportion where all was
steeped in square, rectangle and circle. By middecade his name was synonymous with blank white
walls and flat roofs, with functional steel windows
and unadorned interiors, with chrome furniture and
stark geometric design. He specialised in creating
elegant modernist villas and apartments for the
well-heeled.
Le Corbusier courted controversy, crafting sage
pronouncements—“a house is a machine for living
in”—always publicising his design practice. There
were critics—Frank Lloyd Wright scorned one house
as a “white box on stilts”—although projects such
as Villa La Roche (1923) and Villa Savoye (1928–30)
were acclaimed as architectural icons. Still, it wasn’t
enough for the tireless self-promoter. Le Corbusier’s
ambitions were extending to urban planning. He
published books on the subject, and pressed civic
authorities to consider his utopian designs for extensive, multi-storey residential complexes to replace
French cities.
Opportunity came in 1945. He was approached
to devise an urban plan for Saint-Dié, in Lorraine,
which had been destroyed by the retreating
Germans. Local authorities were so pleased with his
proposal they commissioned Le Corbusier to design
and build eight Unités d’Habitation to house 10,000
people, plus civic offices and an industrial estate.
Favourable word travelled, and Le Corbusier was
summoned by Raoul Dautry, the French Minister
of Reconstruction and Town Planning. The provisional government needed a prototype mass-housing
complex, and needed it designed quickly as a model
for reconstruction. Le Corbusier was appointed to
develop a residential complex in Marseilles, construction to be completed by 1948. He was also made
chairman of a government Mission on Architecture
and Urbanism to liaise with reconstruction projects
in other countries.
But a vociferous public campaign in 1946–47
saw his innovative Lorraine complex ditched. The
community at Saint-Dié was against Le Corbusier’s
high-density civic plans, and the intended residents
loathed his bare concrete apartment blocks.
There was a similar backlash against his Unités
d’Habitation at Marseilles, where an ugly administrative drama would be performed before the
national media. There was public and municipal
opposition; a campaign by conservative architects;
an official report predicting health problems; then
legal action; the site had to be shifted, twice, followed by cost over-runs; the estate was reduced to
a single apartment block; and the project was completed in 1952—four years late! Across France the
political fallout led the government to shelve Le
Corbusier’s extensive urban plans for Strasbourg and
Meaux, and his projected mass-housing complexes
at Nantes-Rezé, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy-Vert
were reduced to single buildings.
Tensions were provoked by Le Corbusier himself. Take Marseilles, where his gridded grey tower
was dubbed in local dialect the “Maison du Fada”,
the madhouse. People were uncomfortable with the
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austere styling of an overbearing geometric build- strongly disliked Technicolor because it made coling finished in béton brutal (rough concrete). Le ours too intense. After shooting chromatic tests, the
Corbusier had also designed a standard ensemble for director settled on Eastmancolor as the best option.
the flats, including set interiors and mass-produced
This was a crucial decision, because Tati worked
modernist furnishings. And he expected his apart- with his designer Lagrange to match and blend
ments to be preserved, wanting rules to prevent shades which govern the drama aesthetically. The
occupants from redecorating.
pair agreed on two scenic palettes. In the old quarLe Corbusier was seen as an autocrat inflicting his ter where Hulot lives they favoured colours with
tastes on the common man. Academics and intellec- familiar associations, including foliage greens, pastuals reproached him for his stubbornness; not that tel pinks and warm oranges. A second palette, using
he listened. He was wounded, though, by Picasso, synthetic colours and metallic highlights against a
who visited the Marseilles Unité d’Habitation when prevailing cement grey, was devised for modern setcompleted. Pressed for an endorsement, Picasso sug- tings. The colours and sparse fixtures of home and
gested Le Corbusier come and build in his backyard plastics plant rhyme with each other, in keeping
a retaining wall from rubble.
with Tati’s scenario notes that the
This was the divisive background
house was a form of “factory”.
to public mass-housing when Mon
The most severe modern interior
he contemporary
Oncle was produced. As the conis the president’s office at the chemfurniture in the
tentious face of architecture, direct
icals corporation: his austere monohints to Le Corbusier were worked
chrome room, with its few shiny
Arpels’ home, and
into the film. The movie’s designer
steel fixtures, exudes a cold and
trendy attire worn by humourless efficiency. Otherwise
Jacques Lagrange roughed out
an idea for “Maison Arpel” from stylish women, offset the contemporary furniture in the
collaged photographs of modern
Arpels’ home, and trendy attire
the grey geometric worn
homes, shaping the interior and
by stylish women, offset the
surroundings with grey geometric surroundings with
garden from shots of Le Corbusier’s
iconic Villa La Roche and Villa
shrill greens, acid yellows and
shrill greens, acid
Savoye.
Ferrari red, as well as beige, black
yellows and Ferrari and fluorescent white. Men mostly
Besides parodying the style of
rooms and courtyard, and stressing
wear unpatterned business suits in
red, as well as
the machine aspect of the house,
grey
or black, with matching bland
beige, black and
there were sight gags tailored to a
ties and white shirts. The exception
fluorescent white.
French audience. The Arpels have
is Monsieur Arpel, whose coloura curious backless green vinyl settee
co-ordinated casual attire prompts
in the main room. Late in the film
several visual jokes. The family dog,
Hulot flips it on its side to sleep on it, the relaxing for example, wears a coat with the same scarlet-andform now mimicking Le Corbusier’s trendy B309 black pattern as Monsieur Arpel’s bespoke smoking
chaise-longue.
jacket.
The most f lamboyant sight joke involves
Sounds are orchestrated to match settings. The
“Maison Arpel” at night. Press cartoonists used Le old quarter reverberates with human laughter, arguCorbusier’s trademark large round spectacles to car- ments, singing, whistles, children’s calls, horses’
icature his face—those double circles of the archi- hooves and a trilling canary. Modern environments
tect’s thick frame glasses had featured as far afield lack these natural sounds. There we hear mechanias New Yorker cartoons. Tati and Lagrange worked cal clicks, engines running, whirrs, buzzes and the
this comic motif into a nocturnal scene where the repeated clatter of footsteps on hard surfaces.
“Maison Arpel” watches Hulot with giant eyes, an
Film critics often comment that Tati’s camera­
effect caused by silhouettes of the Arpels glimpsed work is conservative and unadventurous. He hardly
through two porthole windows. Across France cin- uses medium shots, and there are never close-ups.
ema audiences erupted into hearty laughter when As a mime, Tati wanted audiences to watch the
that image appeared on screen: the geometric characters’ body language: the entire figure is kept
machine house, a witty pastiche of his modern vil- in frame. But this can lead to confusion in multilas, has Le Corbusier’s goggle-round eyes.
figure scenes, like the garden party, where the camera doesn’t lead the eye and you may miss significant
ati’s film was shaped with care. For this, his actions.
first colour movie, he wanted film stock that did
Monsieur Hulot himself is not the conventional
not distract by glamorising props and settings. Tati protagonist of pre-1930 silent comedies. He does not
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instigate activity or incident like Charlie Chaplin’s
cheeky tramp. Instead, Hulot remains passive, deferential and absent-minded throughout, a goodnatured figure to whom things accidentally happen.
In keeping with this manner, Hulot does not collide
with authority. In a Chaplin film there would be a
confrontation with police; with Buster Keaton there
would be difficulties with a civic official; and Harold
Lloyd would have a moralising minister to contend
with. These encounters propelled silent comedy, and
were the cornerstone of slapstick. Tati has no need
of them, the only appearance of authority involving
a couple of motorcycle cops watching for stray dogs.
Nor does Hulot turn and face the cinema audience. Again this runs contrary to the early customs
of silent comedy, where at key moments the protagonist will face the camera and, through gesture,
address the viewer. With Chaplin it’s a form of wink,
a shared delight when he is on a winning streak;
while Keaton turns on us his stone face, that look of
fatal resignation when events conspire against him.
A connection is made between audience and comic
lead. But Tati has no need of this. Hulot is blissfully
unaware of being watched.
T
he Arpels’ unquenchable appetite for status
symbols leads to some sly Gallic jests about
cars. When the story begins, Monsieur Arpel
drives a dour grey Simca Vedette, a middle-range
French-made car which could be bettered. Likewise
he garages it in a bland utilitarian shed across the
garden from the family home. The Arpels separately organise surprises for each other as their
wedding anniversary approaches. Monsieur Arpel
purchases a new American-manufactured Chrysler
New Yorker, a three-toned statement in automotive
flamboyance, all green and pink and purple duco
with lots of gleaming chrome trim. Meanwhile, his
wife has arranged for an electric door, fitted with
stylish porthole windows and anodised aluminium
surrounds, to be installed in the home garage. At
the exchange of gifts, the couple are over the moon
with their costly indulgences.
Even if you don’t grasp the make of cars, there
is no missing the point when the family dog (a
pedigree dachshund, no less) accidentally trips the
electric eye that controls the new door, locking the
distressed couple inside the garage. They are trapped
in their lifestyle.
Hulot cannot afford a car. He strolls around
instead; although when required to get somewhere
urgently he hops onto a gauche VéloSoleX moped,
and later makes a hasty escape by hitching a ride
on the horse cart of a rag-and-bone man. Nor does
Hulot admire the Arpels’ expensive new car when
taken for a spin. It’s just a thing to him. When
Monsieur Arpel proudly offers him a cigarette
lighter from the dashboard, Hulot uncomprehendingly tosses it out of the car’s open window after
lighting his pipe.
For viewers there was already a touch of nostalgia to Hulot’s means of transport. In Tati’s previous
film, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, he puttered along in
a 1924 Amilcar. A more hilarious automobile cannot be imagined that this 30-horsepower French
jalopy with its backfires, squishy brakes and seeming mind-of-its-own. Small pieces drop from the
engine when it wobbles and bumps across cobblestones. Then, shrimping net fixed to the chassis like
a chevalier’s pennant, it wheezingly fails to crest a
gentle hill. However, local audiences would have
recognised the Amilcar as a lethal contraption that
could do 75 kilometres an hour. Isadora Duncan
had been killed in the sports model when her long
fluttering scarf caught in the rear spoked wheels,
jerking her out of the vehicle and onto the roadway
where she fractured her skull.
This is where a Gallic humour eases in. Paris in
mid-century had the highest automotive accident
rate in the world. Roads across France were an anarchic shambles. Partly this was due to outdated road
laws. Abstract doctrines of inalienable rights unaltered since the Napoleonic Code caused disastrous
traffic movement. Add French attitudes of entitlement and a universal delight in evading the law, and
the result was driver behaviour that cut a bloody
band across society.
The personalities affected by road accidents tell
us much. Albert Camus was killed in a car crash.
So, too, were his publisher Michel Gallimard, the
talented composer Louis Cahuzac, and the rising
popular novelist Jean Bruce. The elderly sculptor
Aristide Maillol was killed when his speeding car
rolled in a thunderstorm. The art dealer Ambrose
Vollard was fatally injured in his chauffeur-driven
car after it took a junction too fast and somersaulted lengthwise. The actress Françoise Dorléac
(Catherine Deneuve’s older sister) was immolated
when she lost control of her Renault 10 and it flipped
off the road then erupted in flames. The novelist
Françoise Sagan was crippled after crashing at speed
in her Aston-Martin. Simone de Beauvoir, a reckless veteran of numerous crashes, nearly lost her life
when rounding a bend at speed on the wrong side of
the road in her Simca Aronde. She clipped a truck
coming in the opposite direction (her biographer
Deirdre Bair had the gall to write that the other
driver struck her). In her worst accident, Beauvoir
hit and killed a pedestrian walking on the pavement. Alberto Giacometti, who did not drive, had
a permanent limp after being hit by a speeding car
while crossing a Parisian square.
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Tati himself had several collisions, the nastiest
Idlers were a favourite topic of conversation when
in May 1955 when he cut in front of a coach in his Jacques Tati and Raymond Queneau got together.
Peugeot Frégate. He was rushed to hospital with The pair would regale others with their opinions
a double fracture of his left arm, a broken knee, a that the right to do nothing much is a fundamental
bruised chest and concussion. Tati’s hair went grey freedom of ordinary folk; and they scoffed at preand he never recovered full rotation of his left wrist, vailing attitudes that only the rich are entitled to
having to wear his watch on his right arm. While inactivity. Tati and Queneau even contended that
resting and undergoing physiotherapy for six months idleness can be politically meaningful. The film
he penned the sketch that evolved into Mon Oncle.
Tati had originally wanted to make—about French
Set these facts about driver behaviour against the labourers fouling up German wartime production—
street traffic in the film, which smoothly flows in would have been a comic salute to idleness, proving
an automotive version of social conformism. This is that self-exclusion from the economy of labour is the
hardly the French pandemonium Tati would recon- noblest form of resistance.
figure as marvellous disarray in his late film Trafic of
French viewers recognised that Hulot retains
1971. Instead, to the sound of a steady drum patter, some of the mannerisms of a wartime zazou.
Mon Oncle has evenly spaced cars move in unison on Unheroic, lazy and anarchic, the zazous were
lanes of a broad clean roadway like
younger Parisians of the Occupation
formation dancers. They cut a trim
years who vented their opposition to
pattern in motion.
hat we are shown Vichy, the Germans and compliant
And there is so little variety in
authority through insolent idleness.
on these modern
the modern vehicles shown. Tati
Zazous slowed down the workplace,
had used a mix of old and recent, roads is not Parisian talking and getting staff to take
expensive and economical cars
traffic. “Mon Oncle” breaks. Zazous dressed casual to
travelling along the highway in
sloppy, often cutting trousers at the
is the dream of an shin to display vile striped socks.
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. But here
is sameness in the endless rows and
efficiently run and They disrupted the neighbourhood
columns of cream, grey and white
by playing decadent jazz records
socially aspirational loudly
French 1950s cars. The modern roads
with windows open. Hulot,
“progressive” city.
are filled with sedans and coupes
we should notice, has those highfavoured by white collar employees
cut trouser legs, those visible striped
and professionals; makes including
socks, that habit of annoying others
Simca, Peugeot, Panhard, Renault, Autobleu and with rag-time records played at full blast. He did it
a Marathon with its swept polyester bodywork. all in Tati’s previous film, too, where the characAbsent are the ubiquitous Citroën 2CV and Renault ter wore throughout the favoured zazou footwear:
4CV, those low-cost staples of the local automotive sandshoes.
industry; while the only traffic incidents, a rearThe hints of a 1940s zazou underline Hulot’s
end bump and splashing pedestrians, are caused by easygoing nature, whereas conventional attitudes to
battered old vehicles. What we are shown on these idleness are refracted through the Arpels. If they
modern roads is not Parisian traffic. Mon Oncle is view Hulot’s idleness as an embarrassment, they
the dream of an efficiently run and socially aspira- do admire the idle woman next door—because
tional “progressive” city.
she exudes wealth. These same attitudes clarify
Monsieur Arpel’s unease over Gerard’s relationship
on Oncle has a frank interest in idleness. The with his uncle. At home the father encourages his
people in the old quarter where Hulot lives do son to work and study, where the cheerful Hulot
very little, apart from socialising. There is the neigh- allows the boy to muck about and be idle. Likewise
bour downstairs who doesn’t bother to dress, drift- with Hulot’s lack of employment. Monsieur Arpel
ing sleepily to the café in pyjama pants and singlet, is pleasant and well meaning, although he values
and the street vendor who lounges at a table with a industriousness and ambition, so he simply cannot
glass of wine, allowing customers to select vegeta- understand his jobless brother-in-law’s contentment.
bles from his barrow across the square. Foremost
That chirpy street sweeper who never sweeps
among these idlers is a municipal street-sweeper, begs to be set against Madame Arpel, who comwho may be busy all day, although he doesn’t clear pulsively cleans and tidies everything in sight. She
the square. Not once do we see his birch broom cannot stop. When she first appears she is vacuumsweep the cobblestones. Instead, his working hours ing, then as Monsieur Arpel prepares to leave for
are spent gossiping with passers-by as he hovers over work she buffs his shiny leather briefcase. He starts
an unshifting pile of litter.
his car and moves off as she scampers alongside,
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zealously polishing the chrome and duco. Madame
Arpel fusses over things that are spotless throughout the film.
Surely the funniest images of idleness in Mon
Oncle follow the arrival of Monsieur Arpel and his
dog at the plastics plant late in the film. The dachshund trots on well ahead of his owner, and the staff
spring into activity, knowing their boss is following.
No one in the factory works until that dog passes by,
not technicians or labourers or typists. Except for
Hulot. He is carrying boxes—until he sees Arpel’s
dog. Then Hulot halts and gets down on the floor
playfully to greet the dachshund. Around a corner
swings Monsieur Arpel, pleased that his staff are so
productive, only to spy his brother-in-law sprawled
upon the floor, idle again!
F
ilm history treats Jacques Tati as an outsider,
a figure never assimilated into the profession.
There is good reason for seeing his maverick comedies as disconnected from the motion picture industry; however, thematic threads surely link his Jour de
Fête (1949), Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon
Oncle (1958) with European cinema of the period.
That suspicion of progress, and Tati’s stress on
small-town values, weaves through a sequence of
post-war Italian films, including Shoeshine, Germania
Anno Zero, Bicycle Thieves, La Terra Trembla and
Umberto D. The impoverished family of Bicycle
Thieves even lives in a cheerless mass-housing estate.
These disturbing films also depict community values
under threat in a modern world which cites progress
to excuse mercenary manipulation. The audience
watches common decency ground down by unfeeling administrators and unseen companies—a dramatic formula for the grim fatalism now categorised
as “Neo-Realism”.
English comedies, especially the Ealing productions, come closest to Tati’s approach. Films such
as Passport to Pimlico, Whiskey Galore!, The Titfield
Thunderbolt, The Smallest Show on Earth and Rockets
Galore similarly hinge on community resistance to
modernisation. These comedies represent small,
earthy communities where people are sustained by
neighbourliness, and progress is equated with moral
and spiritual decay.
In this vein, quirkier English films revere vintage machines and buildings. The renowned Titfield
Thunderbolt, an antiquated and decrepit steam
engine, is as comical as Monsieur Hulot’s Amilcar.
And the Bijou Cinema of The Smallest Show on Earth
is even more ramshackle than Hulot’s home in Mon
Oncle. In a cinematic version of the pathetic fallacy, both the Titfield Thunderbolt and the Bijou
Cinema are portrayed as having character traits: the
local community speaks of them possessing a sort
of charming dodderiness. Old rundown things are
cherished for the human qualities they encapsulate.
Like the Ealing comedies, Mon Oncle fears the
waning of a village culture. Indeed, there is an
unintended symmetry to Jacques Tati’s three principal films—Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1954), Mon
Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1966)—which sequentially draw the audience from one epoch to the next,
that is, from old France to modern Europe. And
their cumulative effect is a gentle sadness as community-oriented values decline in an urgent rush to
modernise.
This European mistrust of progress was anathema to Hollywood. In post-war American cinema
progress, instead of being a threat to the smalltown community, is represented as salvation. Only
the corrupt hinder the forces of progress. This is the
overt message of numerous westerns, culminating in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that film the
greenhorn Ransom Stoddard cannot work a farm,
cannot ride a horse, cannot handle a six-shooter:
but, as the agent of change, he is the positive figure.
The future prosperity of the frontier town, and the
broader territory, entirely hinges on his overcoming a figure symbolising the Old West, the thieving
gunslinger Liberty Valance.
If Mon Oncle weighs against progress, Tati does
not exaggerate or sermonise. He refrains from
unsettling his audience. Unlike films that would
appear in the next five years—with the oppressive
cityscapes of Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini—
there is no unease in his streets, not a hint of moodiness or anguish. Nor is the imposed rationality of
the modernist city the work of demons as in JeanLuc Godard’s Alphaville of 1965, or a figment of the
character’s disturbed mind as in Orson Welles’s
1963 adaptation of The Trial. Even when Tati moves
on to shoot an entire high-rise metropolis, with
his next film Playtime, the impression conveyed to
the audience is of monotony. Contemporary foyers,
offices and flats are identical, anonymous and lack
character.
In Tati’s view the modern city is not a menace. It
is over-ordered, and therefore boring. This is brought
out in Playtime’s nightclub sequence. Patrons in the
smart club go through the ritual motions of leisure
and pleasure, until Hulot is accidentally borne in
with a crowd. Then the chaotic fun begins.
W
hen Mon Oncle was released in 1958 the critical reaction in Paris was mixed. Leading the
negative voices was François Truffaut. He had previously extolled Tati’s work, classing the maverick
director as an “auteur” whose singular output was
not compromised by industry conventions (which
provoked intellectual curiosity, and all manner of
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Jacques Tati in the Ultra-Modern House
curious philosophical writings on his comedies).
This time the young critic argued that Tati had produced an uninteresting film by keeping his action
plausible. Other reviewers joined in, complaining
that Mon Oncle was formless because it lacked a customary conflict, climax and resolution. Some suggested Tati was a reactionary in refusing to accept
progress, and revelling in nostalgia. For them, Hulot
was a form of Luddite at odds with modern technology—although the historian James Harding points
out that this is not evident in Mon Oncle.
Perhaps their impatience was because French
film had reached a turning point. Within twelve
months Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, Godard’s
A Bout de Souffle and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon
Amour would appear on local movie screens. A cinematic new wave, as it would be dubbed, was about
to usher in an energised fascination for detective
stories, Coca Cola, jukeboxes, blue jeans and popular culture.
Nevertheless, the press loved Mon Oncle. It struck
a warm chord with French audiences, too, viewers
acclaiming Tati’s tender comedy for articulating
their feelings about a changing way of life. Beyond
its jokes the film dealt in social stresses touching
everybody. Domestic cinema attendances reached
two million, and kept climbing. Enthusiasm built
as the film travelled to other countries. Fan mail
arrived from around the world. Mon Oncle won a
special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and a
New York Film Critics Circle award. And there was
an excursion to Hollywood to attend the Academy
Award ceremony, where Mon Oncle had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
After Tati took the Oscar, an eager American
journalist offered to line up a meeting with Jerry
Lewis. The French director couldn’t care less.
Asked who from the movie industry he would
like to see, Tati replied, “Mack Sennett.” The
reporter was unfamiliar with the name. Still, true
to his word, he tracked down the veteran silent
movie director at a Santa Monica nursing home.
A meal was organised. On the day, Jacques Tati
arrived at the appointed time to find Sennett had
invited along three other elderly fans: Stan Laurel,
Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. The French
director was handed a glass of champagne, then
the distinguished company toasted the meandering
exploits of Monsieur Hulot.
Christopher Heathcote wrote about the Stanley
Kubrick film The Shining in the December issue.
The Three Graces, National Gallery of Scotland
Hobbemas and Rubens hang so high
they can only be viewed at a tiptoe stretch.
Visitors are locked into looking at crowded walls
When twelve chimes sound at ten past the hour.
Concessions are made for a clock
that’s ticked off several centuries.
From portraits, idylls and war, I turn
to where, unclad, unshod and unashamed,
(no hint of a blush on their bare white skin)
the Three Graces embrace.
Canova carved no more smooth, curved
marble flesh than that which serves them well.
Hour by hour the daughters of Zeus hold their sisterly pose
with not one twitch of the nose, twinkle of toes or forty wink doze.
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Robyn Lance
N eil M c D ona ld
The Two Films
of Gaslight
O
ne of the darkest legends from the so-called
golden years of Hollywood is the story of
how MGM bought the rights to the successful British film Gaslight (1940), destroyed all
the prints, and then created their own remake in
1944 by copying the original shot for shot. Like
most legends it is not entirely true. The first Gaslight
was bought and suppressed by MGM, but it was
not plagiarised by the writers and director of the
later film. The 1944 version does not seem like the
MGM studio fare of the period, where the look of
the films was dominated by the taste of the head
of design, Cedric Gibbons. Whatever the period or
the genre, he insisted on the sets being drowned in
white. However, ever since making The Women with
its gleaming white walls, and white and off-white
furniture in virtually every scene, director George
Cukor had in his quiet way been fighting against the
studio style. Design, he insisted, should reflect the
subject of the film, and Gaslight with its film noir
visuals and darkly oppressive settings proved to be
one of Cukor’s most famous victories.
Still, what MGM did to the British artists was
pretty brutal. The director, Thorold Dickinson, was
forbidden to show the 1940 Gaslight to producers—
his best calling card at that stage of his career—and
the film was saved only because he and the editor,
Sidney Cole, kept one of the prints. Years later,
when MGM’s rights had expired and the British
Gaslight was shown at the National Film Theatre
in the season of Dickinson’s films celebrating his
eightieth birthday, the film began to receive the
recognition it deserved. Earlier this year a blu-ray
transfer was released. So with the Cukor version
also readily available, we can now compare these
two remarkable films.
B
oth works are based on Patrick Hamilton’s play
Gas Light. First presented at the Richmond
Theatre in London, opening on December 5, 1938, it
was an immediate success. In quick succession there
was a tour, a radio production—the first of many—
and even a television version for the then minuscule British television audience. By 1941, renamed
Angel Street, it was running on Broadway, where it
stayed for two years. Reading the play in the Samuel
French acting edition, it is easy to see why it was so
popular. According to the original stage directions,
“the curtain rises upon the rather terrifying darkness of the late afternoon—the zero hour as it were
between the feeble dawn of gaslight and tea”.
In this setting the suave, good-looking Mr
Manningham questions his wan, haggard, sub­
servient wife about a missing picture that he accuses
her of having hidden before. After threatening his
wife with the madhouse if she cannot find a missing
bill, Manningham leaves for the evening. Then the
cook announces a visitor. He is ex-detective Rough,
“over sixty—greying, short, wiry, active, brusque,
friendly, overbearing”. Rough has been hunting the
man who killed the previous owner of the house.
The murderer is Mr Manningham. Rough assures
Mrs Manningham that far from being mad she is
being systematically driven out of her mind. After
seeming to leave “for the club” because he cannot
endure his wife’s insanity, Manningham returns to
search the boarded-up top storeys of the house for
the jewels he had failed to find on the night of the
murder. The play never leaves the cluttered living
room but Hamilton brilliantly deploys a range of
devices (including the famous rising and falling of
the gas lights) to build the tension that culminates
in a final tautly written confrontation between
husband and wife.
I have never seen Gas Light on the stage, but
as a boy it scared the living daylights out of me
on radio where these effects were only described;
so it is easy to imagine the impact the play must
have had in 1939, especially with Gwen FfrangconDavies as Mrs Manningham. She was one of the
great stage actresses of the era, famous for the Juliet
and Lady Macbeth she had played opposite John
Gielgud. In Britain and the USA (where Vincent
Price played Manningham) contemporary reviews
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The Two Films of Gaslight
vividly describe how the performers worked their
magic, drawing audiences into the claustrophobic
world of the play.
T
tension. Walbrook, called Mallen to account for
his Austrian accent, gives a bravura performance of
sadistic malevolence while Diana Wynyard as Bella
Mallen in a beautifully understated performance
suggests a quiet strength of character beneath the
anguish and bewilderment.
The opening-out of the play may have distressed
the playwright, but the writers and director succeeded
in placing the action in a wider social context that
remained faithful to the spirit of the original. In the
very fine essay that accompanies the disc, Henry K.
Miller argues that both the play and the film were
part of a current of anti-Victorianism epitomised
by the writing and publication of Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians. Dickinson wrote years later,
he 1940 film version scripted by A.R. Rawlinson
and Bridget Boland sacrifices this concentration on a single room to create a more fluid cine­
matic structure. Here one of the main influences
was Marcel Carné’s Hotel du Nord (1938), which had
been shown in London in 1939 along with the same
director’s Quai des Brumes (1938). Thorold Dickinson
was a great admirer.
Hotel du Nord was set in and around the hotel of
the same name in the St Martin district of Paris.
As with so many of the poetic realist films of the
period the hotel and even the canal it overlooked
I introduced into the film a large number of
were recreated in the studio by the great designer
Victorian touches from childhood memories of
Alexandre Trauner. Even though the detail of
my grandparents’ homes … and jumped at this
working-class life was meticulously recreated, the
chance to expose the worst side of the Victorian
visuals are all elegantly composed—the poetry in
male’s attitude to women.
the poetic realism, I suppose. In the opening the
camera cranes over the exterior of the Hotel du
Almost certainly the scene where Mallen reads
Nord, discovering two of the main characters as
they make their way to a bench beside the canal. from the Bible at the dinner table, the servants
standing respectfully apart, was
The next scene takes us inside the
Dickinson’s invention. The film also
hotel to a confirmation celebration
embodies a subtle critique of the
in which the camera unobtrusively
ergman, who
Victorian class distinction which
covers the action in a series of midobserved a patient was
still prevalent in 1940s Britain.
shots and tight panning movements.
In Gaslight, Dickinson’s camera having a breakdown It is the lower-class ex-detective
Rough (Frank Pettingell) who
explores Pimlico Square, stopping
in order to get
brings Mallen to justice, and the
at number twelve, then cuts to an
the character’s eye
hierarchical Victorian society that
interior. Hands come from behind
protects Mallen.
an elderly lady and strangle her.
movements right,
There follows a montage showing
goes further than
he British Gaslight is a disthe same hands searching drawers
Diana Wynyard
tinguished film and its supand cutting open upholstery, and
pression by MGM for so many
feet going up stairs. Then we see a
in portraying the
years is unforgivable. Nevertheless
distraught maidservant standing at
mental disturbance— the American Gaslight directed
the doorway calling for help.
Certainly this was influenced by
hunched shoulders, by George Cukor is in its own
equally impressive. The core
the Carné film, but Dickinson was
fear-filled eyes and way
of the film—a husband attempta montage director who believed
the foundation of film art was in outbursts of hysteria. ing to drive his wife insane so he
can search for jewels hidden in the
the editing. Real cinema, he wrote,
house—is the same. But the treat“builds the story with the camera,
taking the camera to the action instead of arranging ment of the situation is unabashedly romantic. The
the action before the camera”. Although coming wife, now called Paula, is the niece of the murdered
late to the project when Anthony Asquith was woman. Her aunt was a famous singer and the jewunavailable, Dickinson seems to have collaborated els were a gift from royalty.
In the opening scene we see Paula’s haunted face
well with cinematographer Bernard Knowles, who
had photographed Hitchcock’s Secret Agent and as she leaves the house in the fog-shrouded darkThirty-Nine Steps, and editor, Sidney Cole. Camera ness after the murder. One of the great strengths
movements don’t just capture the intense acting by of this second version’s script by John Van Druten,
Anton Walbrook as the malevolent husband and Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston and of
Diana Wynyard as his wife, but also create the Ingrid Bergman’s performance is that we see Paula
B
T
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The Two Films of Gaslight
as a healthy woman in love before Charles Boyer’s
Anton begins to torment her. (Essentially he is the
same character as in previous versions, but this version has a new set of names.)
In an early draft of the script, in the final
moments Anton tells Paula that he loved her all
the time. When this reached David O. Selznick,
who was acting as an uncredited special adviser, he
was horrified and quickly drafted one of his famous
memos arguing against using the line. When in 1980
I tried to question George Cukor about Selznick’s
influence he replied by attacking the then recently
published collection of the producer’s memos.
Selznick, however, was in a position to enforce his
views as he held the contracts of two of the stars,
Bergman and Joseph Cotten. His interference was
bound to be resented, but in this case Selznick was
right.
Still, Cukor and his writers were onto something.
By first showing Paula’s wooing by the coldly
manipulative Anton, the later cruelty plays like a
perverted love story. Boyer and Bergman are superb
in the sequences in which Anton convinces his wife
she is going mad. Bergman, who observed a patient
having a breakdown in order to get the character’s eye
movements right, goes further than Diana Wynyard
in portraying the mental disturbance—hunched
shoulders, fear-filled eyes and outbursts of hysteria.
Her rescuer, Brian Cameron, is no wily ex-detective
but a handsome assistant to the commissioner; the
kind of gentleman adventurer found in the John
Buchan novels and in spite of his American accent
played very well by Joseph Cotten with just the right
touch of knightly chivalry. Cotten is also able to
match Boyer in their confrontation scene:
Anton: I always knew you were dangerous to me.
Cameron: I always knew you were dangerous to
her.
Cukor worked instinctively and was no montage
theorist; his great strength was the direction of
actors. Nevertheless he had excellent visual taste,
and the style of Gaslight is clearly influenced by
William Wyler and Gregg Toland’s use of deepfocus photography in The Little Foxes and Orson
Welles’s Citizen Kane with its low-angle set-ups of
ceilings to suggest oppression. Cukor seems to have
persuaded MGM’s ace cinematographer, Joseph
Ruttenberg, to combine this deep focus with lowkey lighting, filling the frame with shadows in a
style that was later to be called film noir. The director
also had his way with the design, filling the set with
dark Victorian furniture and increasing amounts
of bric-a-brac as the heroine’s situation becomes
more desperate. Not that Cukor ignored the British
original. While he did not copy Dickinson, the
montage of hands searching was impossible to resist
and a similar sequence is used very effectively in a
different context.
So which Gaslight is the better film? There really
is no answer to this question. But for me, comparing
them like this enriches our appreciation of the
artistry of Thorold Dickinson, George Cukor and
their collaborators. It is just a pity it took so long for
us to be able to see both films.
A Tray of Frozen Songbirds
For our last meal together
my father takes out of the freezer
a tray of frozen songbirds.
He’s saved them up, these delicacies
with ice crystals in their beaks,
wings stuck to ribcages.
There are skylarks, blackbirds, doves.
He tells me how some were plucked
while still alive,
about the mist net at dawn,
how one nightingale was thrust
into a sack of discarded heads
and cried, then the poacher licked
the sticky lime from its plumes
tenderly, before slitting its throat.
He pours champagne as if it’s
the river of life.
We eat like two drunks
woken from dreams of flying,
me on his lap, singing the song
I’ve just learnt at school—Alouette,
gentille alouette, alouette je te plumerai.
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Pascale Petit
91
Arrival of the Electric Eel
Each time I open it it’s like I’m a Matsés girl
handed a parcel at the end of my seclusion,
my face pierced by jaguar whiskers
to make me brave.
I know what’s inside—that I must
unwrap the envelope of leaves
until all that’s left
squirming in my hands
is an electric eel.
The positive head, the negative tail,
the rows of batteries under the skin,
the small, almost blind eyes.
The day turns murky again,
I’m wading through the bottom of my life
when my father’s letter arrives. And keeps on
arriving.
The charged fibres of paper
against my shaking fingers,
the thin electroplates of ink.
The messenger drags me up to the surface
to gulp air then flicks its anal fin.
Never before has a letter been so heavy,
growing to two metres in my room,
the address, the phone number, then the
numbness—
I know you must be surprised, it says,
but I will die soon and want to make contact.
Emmanuel
In the last days, after all he said
and didn’t say, his iron tongue
resting in the open bell of his mouth,
the belfry of his face asleep,
I climbed the spiral steps of the tower—
up the steep steps of the bell cage, to the
bourdon,
the great bumblebee, Emmanuel.
I stared at that bronze weight, the voice of Paris,
as if it was my father’s voice
and I had climbed up his spine,
all thirteen tons of copper and tin,
the clapper half a ton of exorcised iron.
I washed the outside with holy oil for the sick,
the inside with chrism. Let all badness
be banished when he rings. Let the powers of
the air
tremble—the hail and lightning
that fell from his tongue on our last days
together.
I made the sign of the cross. His note
was F sharp, the hum
deep enough to reverberate through the rest of my life.
I stood upright in him.
I placed myrrh inside his mouth, incense
smoking like a last cigarette.
I praised him. I assembled the priests.
I mourned his death.
Storm clouds dispersed. Thunderbolts scattered.
I tolled in Sabbaths. I raised
my father’s life to its hoists and rang him until
I was deaf.
I proclaimed peace after bloodshed.
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Pascale Petit
Sainte-Chapelle
Just as a master glassmaker must rest the iron blowpipe
against his cheek between blows, so as not to suck
the flame into his mouth when he draws breath,
so must you let the sun pierce your window
and rest against your face. It also is a furnace,
one of many in the sky’s workshop,
Notre-Dame Father Speaks
Under the Seine I burrow,
through the medieval cellars of Paris,
from the Rue de la Huchette to
Notre-Dame.
Swimmer of sewers,
rat-father of jazz caverns and oubliettes,
haunter of nightclubs and dungeon
vaults,
trapdoor and manhole opener,
dancer of the catacombs.
I am the father who searches beneath
the water
and above the air, flying father,
ascender of four hundred steps
to the North and South Towers.
Father of the Chimera Gallery,
my names are Howler, Gnawer, Goat.
Eroded father, I lightning out.
I am the angel of the great nave roof
blowing my bugle.
Throat father, I gurgle forth.
I am a dove perched on a demon,
my beak always open.
My heart is a rose window.
Quarry father, stroller of the necropolis,
caretaker of the Quai St Michel,
resident of Les Argonautes hotel,
my gargoyle eyes see the insides of
things.
I am the gypsum and limestone father,
my left foot is a crypt
and my right a foundling hospital.
Doctor and priest father,
who heals as he wounds,
I go in and out of the realm of death
to where the sicknesses crouch.
yet the earth lets sunrays rest along its cheek,
drawing just what it needs to paint in light.
I tell you this after visiting La Sainte-Chapelle,
as you lie on your less painful lung, only
half-listening, concentrating on each inhalation.
But I persist, as if I could conjure the fifteen
fifty-foot-high stained-glass windows in your flat,
sand grain by sand grain, each grisaille detail
fused at impossible temperatures. I tell you
how cobalt can be added to raw glass to make blue,
copper for red and green, antimony for yellow.
How the panes are held in place
with lead cames and iron rods. How they have withstood
a revolution and eight centuries of storms.
It doesn’t matter that the trefoils and medallions
illustrate the bible and you are not a believer,
that there are fire-horses, a golden calf, plagues, wars.
The history of our species is up in that chapel.
As you lie there sleeping, the radiant colours
play over the altar of your skin
while the oxygen pump chugs its hymn.
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Pascale Petit
93
A l a n G ould
Short Takes XV
(from a journal)
15/10/03: Poetry and foreign relations
G
uests of the Egyptian embassy, we have converged for a bilingual recital of Arabic poetry
plus commentary. Here are diplomats from Morocco
to the Persian Gulf, immaculately groomed and
lotioned, sleek as Brancusi installations with brown
necks strangled by spotless collars. Here are local
politicians dressed in lumpy dark suits as for a
funeral parlour, searching the throng nervously
for what reactions might be expected from them
at this, of all things, a pan-cultural poetry recital.
And here we are. the poets, populous as ever, our
motley most heart-rending when it is clear we have
made an effort to spruce up.
By contrast, stunning are some of the women.
Two seats from my own sits one in scarlet gown,
her scimitar eyebrows, wide-open eyes and upright
carriage giving her the hauteur of a figure from an
Egyptian mural, the dignity of this ruined, alas,
by the unwise bravura of her headgear, which is
a felt crown with fold-over tentacles like the hat
of a medieval jester. I am here to focus you, no other
agenda has plausibility, her get-up announces. Who
on earth does she belong to?
Then, amid the concourse I spy our evening’s
energising spirit, tall, patrician A, anthologist,
envoy, bridge-builder between our nation and the
Middle Eastern cultures. She is robed in black but
for an orange chiffon scarf about her neck, her face
long and pale, her eyes shadowed by make-up.
The performances begin. Above all, they are
very well organised, but sadly undercharged in their
impact, as bilingual performance tends to be. Then
at interval A approaches me and, sotto voce, asks
what I think of the evening’s entertainment, this
“Journey of Poetry through the Middle East”.
“Very hospitable of the embassy to have arranged
it,” I reply blandly.
“Yes, yes! But …” and now A quickly scans the
room, then lowering her voice further ushers me
aside. “I must speak to you privately.”
94
So we stand apart while she eyes the throng of
guests like a schemer in a Jacobean melodrama and,
with an envelope placed before her mouth so that I
might hear her sidelong remarks while any onlooker
can only observe how our confab is blatantly
surreptitious, she confides that, incomprehensibly,
several important Arab poets have been ignored.
Ignored! And free verse! Free verse has been
effectively extinguished under all the meter and
rhyme we have just heard.
“Poets must be free,” A expostulates from
behind her envelope. Indeed, she promises, when
her own turn to speak comes round, she is of a
mind to be just a little “naughty”. She will trust
herself, perhaps, to a little joke. Yes, a little risqué
joke. Do I think she should be naughty? Yes, why
not, I encourage.
What on earth is prompting this conspiratorial
play-acting? The room is full of the Middle East’s
ambassadors and their wives, first secretaries,
local politicians, literary folk. Has she something
confidential to impart? Hardly. Ah, but does
she wish to be remarked in the act of imparting
confidential matters? This seems likely, for her eyes
flicker across the throng and maybe this prompts the
odd glance to be directed back our way. But if this
is the case, does she wish Alan Gould, local poet,
to be identified by these professional observers and
interpreters of meetings and manners, as a person
to whom confidential matters can be imparted at
international gatherings? Will I, by this, be initiated
into the mirror-corridors of the intelligencer? A
spook for poetry? Heaven knows what the fantasy
was. A presses me. “So you do think I should be a
bit naughty?”
“Definitely. Hang the expense,” I assure her,
whereupon we return through the trellis doors to
our auditorium.
And when it comes her turn to recite, her risqué
offering turns out to be not so very naughty—no
more than to rehearse Robert Frost’s well-exercised
quip about free verse and tennis, which appears to
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Short Takes XV
endorse rather than wallop the evening’s choice of
formal style.
Indeed, with the exception of a thirteenthcentury Persian poem about a cloak, the evening’s
fare has been interminable and over-explained. But
then, as in the days of visiting Soviet poets, poetry
is present here more to scent foreign relations than
inform them.
The evening ends with two of the embassy’s
servants singing a song from Upper Egypt. Now
this does have genuine vitality! The two fellows so
clearly enjoy their music with its incantatory rise
and fall, its reiteration, the two shallow drums
pulsing behind their voices. One has a dark Negro
head and is dressed in waistcoat and bow-tie. The
other is in a long robe of dazzling whiteness with
a squashed white hat atop. They release themselves
into the trance of the song, and their eyes are liquid.
2/12/12: The provisional
W
ithout God’s presence in how I perceive
the World, the experiences of my life form
a series. Where I include God in my sense of the
World’s presence, my sense of my experiences, while
not empowered to find their place in a Whole, is at
least alerted to the condition of Wholeness.
While I can think this without getting any further in being confident of the existence of Deity,
does it allow me to be a little clearer in the idea
that, if value can be attached to Life in anything
other than a casual way, the presence of Deity needs
vitally to be one of the conditions of that, not the
vision, but a workaday pro-vision?
12/12/12: To Byron, on my
apprenticeship
M
ilord, what has gone wrong with our times
with respect to the facility with English prosody? I have spent a month niggling at four stanzas
of ottava rima while, a mere two centuries ago in
your Beppo, Don Juan, and other performances, you
nattered wonderfully with this particular stanzaform for hundreds of pages. Between my faltering
and your facility hangs a hypothesis, The Bio-verbal
one might call it in seeking to explain the ecology
of both.
Milord, I note you snuffed it at just that age
when, in my own career, meter moved from being a
laboured mental construct for me to part of my nervous response to the world. And I recall how you
rebuked Trelawney when he praised this facility of
yours by insisting that all your poems were the slow
meditative work of years, grinding in some mental
mill long before they reached the page. Milord, we
differ, but grasp this common straw, this watch on
what the business of imagining does with us.
5/1/13: A Christian status
I
cannot know my own place in how things stand
until I can see clearly how I stand in comparison
to others.
At the same time, I cannot know this place sufficiently until I see how I might be valued by some
viewpoint without being compared.
To approach that, I need to know the sensation
of conferring value in addition to how it feels to have
value conferred on my own being.
This moral vibrancy emerges in human nature as
naturally as any other part of our speciation. I should
love my neighbour as myself. In many instances I
cannot; my neighbour can be un-neighbourly, my
self ditto. But I do learn where I might be once this
precept has been put inescapably before me.
10/4/13: The transference
M
y tree-lopping mate, P, has updated his IT, so
now has a superfluous iMac. IMacs! The sorcery of Gandalf and the aesthetics of Brancusi. P’s
is five years younger than my own old model, which
poignantly has kept its chic appearance through a
gradual mental decline. Yes please, I said, when P
offered the newer gadget, for it has a screen with an
area sufficient to need surveyor and theodolite. “But let me pay you something for this marvel,”
I tried. Nah, but I could refurbish the topsail schooner ship-model I sold him for $1000 in 1989. Sure,
mate.
O, but back then my modelling skills were
unspeakably coarse (on a par with Norman Lindsay’s
ship-modelling). The ship, built from a standard
two-masted topsail schooner plan, had been named
Helgi Magri after my Icelandic ancestor.
I collected my new screen, resumed possession
of the old ship. Quickly I saw this dear vessel (all
ship-models remain lifelong darlings to their makers) needed to be gutted, rebuilt and re-rigged with
the skills I have gathered during the last decades.
Shameful to aim at less for her.
So I gutted until the hull was a shell, aware the
destruction of each minute entails a month’s worth
of future micro-restoration. Hulk—saddest word
you can apply to a work of human hands creaturely
as a sea-going vessel. Now I shall refurbish. I shall
install a new beam-shelf and deck-beams, new
deck-planking from a suitable Australian timber
that will present a sea-worn facsimile. These planks
will be joggled into the margin plank fore-and-aft
until they resemble a pattern of marquetry. Already
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Short Takes XV
I will have fitted new waterways and scuppers,
relocated hawse holes and pinrails, amputated the
present “cruiser” stern to replace it with a transom
that will accommodate two derricks for a stern lifeboat. I shall discard the old, ridiculous deckhouses
in favour of half-sunk accommodations with proper
coachwork, ditto for the half-round companions
to the crew-quarters for’ard. Helgi Magri will have
a new cargo-winch/boom-crutch, a new binnacle
improvised from brass scrap complete with gimbals
in bright red (port) and green (starboard), made from
fake pearls salvaged from one of Anne’s necklaces.
Thus from my head and delectably, I bring the
shipwright vocabulary to my fret saw, files and pindrills in anticipation of the work I will do to earn
my iMac. How peculiar can the cover-employments
towards a livelihood in poetry get? And all my work
will recompense P for his superfluous gadget many
times over. But can a ship-modeller have ease of
conscience when he knows an imperfect opus has
proceeded from his workbench? Absolutely not.
Naturally I will go back to the Harold A. Underhill
plans in this, my second go at the Harold A.
Underhill standard.
My bench saw buzzes and the new deck-timbers
(one-eighth by three-sixteenths) peel away. What is
the wood-scent here? Celery top? Tassie oak? From
the gutting there is old lacquer in the nostril, a burnish of red cedar from original timbers.
6/5/13: Elizabethan Serenade
I
am not a Royalist. But I am, and fiercely, a constitutional monarchist, and this conflicts with the
larrikin republicanism of those folk with whom,
otherwise, I usually find common values of social
justice. So I must contest in my head what has
egalitarian appeal with how I feel my allegiance
to the crown keeps me loyal to an idea I value, a
dynamic between liberty and cultural cohesion that
has unfolded over five centuries. And yet, sensitive
as I know I am whenever sneers get directed at my
intellectual independence, how blithely I might dismiss that derision in favour of the veritable devotion entailed in being a Royalist, in being a runaway
enthusiast.
How so? When it comes to allegiance, the music
will always disarm the wrangling, whether dialogue
or soliloquy. If I listen, say, to Ronald Binge’s popular piece Elizabethan Serenade, find myself taken in
by the enchantment of its sunny calm and continuity, the brilliance of its pitch in accessible melody,
then I am ushered into a condition-of-being so
much more entirely than anything the republican
lobbyists and newspaper detractors can subvert in
96
me when they appeal to the practical or nationalistic
parts of my sympathy.
How do I know when a part of our constitutional fabric has a deep accord in my being? Not
when some deadness finds a moribund litany for it—
“God Save the Queen”, for all I welcome the idea.
It is when the music, light and popular as Binge’s
piece undoubtedly is, succeeds in locating the exactness and delicacy of the ground-note of what actually has unfolded for the essential character of the
Elizabethan sovereignty. Here was the exact welcoming note for 1953, and its resilient, upbeat note
has proved diamond, I reckon. Where does this
leave me? Left and royalist.
17/5/13: As it wears
O
f course! Each new evidence of free verse, like
a graffito, has some trivial necessity claimant
upon our tolerance.
And yet how pre-emptive is the distrust this adlib arouses in us. Here is sloth, we sergeants in the biz
assess the new intake. Here, riff-raff spawned from
the dementia of that old disciplinarian who insisted
the basis of decent art should at least include the rigour
a joiner brings to dressing timber, or the preparatory
maths an engineer brings to the physics of his bridge,
here is incompetence masquerading as the sensitive or the
exquisite-clever. Here is that lightning opportunism in
the more enervated intervals of “self ” expression. Here
is Dr Avid Wannabe turning art into a power-game
again, breeding arrogance and evasions.
You may dismiss the squad, sergeant.
2/9/13: Returning from a night walk
H
ow to charm one’s love? Find just that part of
wit that might have caused her mum or dad to
laugh outright.
6/9/13: Dennis sums it up
G
iven its broad sympathy, our Friday Table O’
Knowledge at Tilley’s was not so very animated
about tomorrow’s election overcast. But Dennis—
stalwart Laborite—caught our mood and, with it,
this hope for the well-being of democracy.
“I don’t care who wins tomorrow, so long as the
polls lose.”
This is the fifteenth in Alan Gould’s series of “Short
Takes”, which began in the September 2004 issue.
His essay collection Joinery and Scrollwork: A
Writer’s Workbench was published recently by
Quadrant Books.
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Story
New Morning
M or r is L ur ie
for Bob Dylan
I
got ripped off in a movie deal. You don’t want to know. I lived for a year in my
car.
You do want to know. O.K. It wasn’t a Rolls-Royce. Or one of those campervan
numbers either, built-in stove, shower attachment, hot and cold, flip up the table
in the back you’ve got yourself a double bed, all the comforts of home. Which I
did across Europe in a previous life, France, Germany, everywhere, including when it
was still called Yugoslavia, to give you some idea of when, and very nice it all was too,
but that’s not the story here. The story here is—
Oh.
The movie deal? Sure. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Coffee? A cigar? I
know, mmmmmm, a nice piece Hungarian poppyseed cake, fresh this morning, just
baked, you’ve never tasted—
O.K., O.K.
The movie deal. I’m talking about more than just badly burnt. I’ll give you in a
nutshell. I underwrote the demands of a borderline psychotic megalomaniac box office
guaranteed superstar who doesn’t even say maybe for less than twenty million which
in this case was suddenly forty and that’s my bargain price just for you ho ho, come in,
sucker, which I did, acting upon the considered advice of my close friend slash financial
advisor accountant who is I understand either fled of the country or in jail.
No, no. Let’s be kind. Let’s just say trial pending.
Name of Max.
Who naturally I wasted no time having him explain to me the full depth and
dimension of the mire into which I had been unfortunately and unforeseeably, his
shameless words, plunged, the scene of my unseating Max’s full-floor stunning view
hiccup-under-heaven glass tower office premises and place of business. Upon which I
visited, the minute I was safely distant of the foul building, such a nine/eleven scenario
of death and destruction supreme you have no idea, not a single survivor, save for the
receptionist, Mrs Frobisher, Nellie, with whom I had always enjoyed a pleasant premeeting chat.
Goodbye Max and good-riddance.
I drove home.
Was I angry?
The word is both inadequate and inappropriate, not to now say inapplicable and
irrelevant, other matters of larger import already occupying the majority of my mind.
“Honey, I’m home!” I called, my key in the front door.
I live alone. No wife, no dog. Divorced of the one, bereft of the other, Fritzie, my
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Story
darling dachshund, beloved and buried a year ago next August, impossible to replace.
Further, I have never seen the point of a parrot, courted the comfort of a cat.
Laptop.
Sleeping bag.
Toothbrush.
A bag was not difficult to pack.
From my library of a thousand volumes, fact and fiction, history, reference, established
classics, passing crazes, foolish fads, cookbooks, atlases, art, photography, crowded
shelves, I plucked out a single book, Huckleberry Finn, the green tuppenny tram ticket
that had marked my progress through its pages God only knows the number of years
since slid away, come and gone, waiting patiently my return opposite the title page, a
lodestar, if you like, the book, a mine, a memory, what a distance one travelled in those
days on a tuppenny fare.
To reread?
To ponder?
Or its company sufficient, no need to ask of it more?
I stood a last moment by the still open door.
Was I anxious? Apprehensive? Ambivalent? Afraid?
I pulled the door shut behind me without backward glance.
Yes.
Of course.
You imagine me not human?
All of the above.
And more.
My bag and sleeping bag placed quickly in the boot.
My laptop on the seat beside.
But you’ll need now I’m sure the exact particulars of my car, my vehicle, to feel it, to
see it, make and model, duco, finish, k’s on the clock, when last—
No?
Not interested?
Not the story for you?
Please yourself.
A Volkswagen.
A Peugeot.
A nippy little Ford, how’s that?
Whatever.
I switched on the motor, put it into drive.
Two streets, three, turned the corner, left, then right, where it comes out onto the
road.
And I hadn’t gone any distance, hardly any distance at all, I could hear the gears
going through their stages, the gaps in between, the pauses, working up, loosening up,
like a runner getting his mind and muscles in condition for the long haul, the peak, the
plateau, that smoothness that comes after, that release of boundless energy, limitless,
running free, and this thing came over me, this experience, this feeling, how to describe
it? it’s not a thing of words, I was suddenly—forget the car, the road, the driving—that
little boy again I had once been, that we all were, in my bed at night travelling in the
magic dark across deserts, through jungles, swamps and mountains, stormy seas, safe
and snug in the land of lions and tigers, fierce natives, earthquakes, arrows and spears,
cherished, inviolate, anywhere and everywhere in the world I wanted to be.
And then this.
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I recalled reading how Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic and been granted
audience by Edward, the then English king, and I don’t know if it was the king’s first
question or if it came later, but how the plucky aviator had managed his, um, Number
Ones was certainly of royal interest, if not outright concern, and I laughed, for there
was Lindbergh aloft over bottomless ocean, and me, behind the wheel of my car, going,
just going, my feet never firmer upon the ground.
The Ballad of the Gangster Paul Kelly
Quiet down children and please pay heed to me
I’ll tell you about Paul Kelly who was born in Sicily
in eighteen hundred and ninety he came to New York town
his Five Points Gang took control of the criminal underground.
Born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli he changed his name
when he immigrated from Italy pro boxing was his game
he took his fighting money and put it into whores
ran them in the Bowery and on the docks and shores.
Now the Irish gangs were dominant in the New York railway yards
the Ducky Boys, Dead Rabbits, Swamp Angels and Roach Guards.
Paul Kelly ushered in the rise of mixed-ethnic crews
he took them all: Italians Poles Russians and the Jews.
He recruited younger gangsters who later gained renown
Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone
he spent nine months in jail for assault and robbery
spoke English French Italian and Spanish fluently.
Paul Kelly was well-dressed sophisticated—a learned mind
endeared him to the socialites and politicians of the time
known as Gentleman Mob Boss on Lower Manhattan streets
his Little Naples nightclub was the in-crowd place to meet.
Now the dearest rivals to the Five Points Gang to come along
were Max Eastman’s Coin Collectors two thousand gunmen strong
Max Eastman was a Jewish bouncer and hired thug to boot
so a boxing match was arranged to settle their turf dispute.
Kelly and Eastman fought it out but it ended in a draw
a war broke out that was only settled by intercession of the Law
ten long years in Sing Sing forced Max Eastman to retreat
which left Paul Kelly undisputed mob boss of the streets.
So quiet down now children and please pay heed to me
I’ll tell you about Paul Kelly who was born in Sicily
in eighteen hundred and ninety he came to New York town
his Five Points Gang took control of the criminal underground.
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Joe Dolce
99
Story
Au Poor
L ibby S ommer
I
t’s twelve years now since the Australian Chinese Daily carried the following
item under Local News: “On the lower north shore, a housewife, aged sixtyone, committed suicide on Wednesday night by slitting her wrists and hanging
herself.”
It’s twelve years since everything changed.
It was Tsiang, Au Poor’s daughter, who found her mother’s body. It was Tsiang, my
son’s wife, who noticed blood leaking out from under the family’s garage door. May
Ling, their two-year-old daughter, was asleep in the house. Tsiang was the one who
found her mother hanging by her neck from a rope.
I’m worried about Tsiang, I said to a psychologist friend. The anger, the cruel
outbursts, her refusal to get help, and, now, the marriage breakdown.
The death of her mother is probably still too painful for Tsiang to look at, my friend
said. It’s not unusual when a parent suicides for the child to try to repress and silence
the feelings.
How would you ever recover from something like that?
Well, my friend said sadly, I would say one doesn’t recover, but one’s relationship
with it can change over time.
I knew Tsiang longed to see her mother again in the garden among the orchids and
the chokos, in the courtyard sweeping up leaves, at the front door waving goodbye, in
the kitchen cooking beside her aproned husband. Au Poor would have turned from the stove, stood there a moment, then brought
the boiled eggs and soy sauce to Tsiang in the next room. It was Tsiang’s habit to drop
May Ling off to her parents’ house and to eat breakfast there before going to work.
That morning, Tsiang was reading the newspaper at the dining table. She looked up
and took the bowl of eggs from her mother. Has the changed medication made any
difference? she asked. Do you feel any better?
I’m just the same, she said. Don’t you know? That counsellor is no comfort. I’ve
nothing to tell her. Eat your eggs, Tsiang. You need to eat. I’m just so tired. She died that afternoon.
What started me thinking again about the silence surrounding the death of Au
Poor, was one day walking my grandson home from school. He mused out loud: I
wonder how Au Poor died? Probably cancer, he answered himself. Or old age, he added
after a pause.
Your grandmother wasn’t that old, I said.
I didn’t add any more. I didn’t tell Alexander how hard it had been to find a counsellor
who spoke the Hainanese dialect. Eventually, after two visits, the woman had no name
for what was wrong with Au Poor. She even said there’d been an improvement.
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And I didn’t tell Alexander how his grandfather had given Au Poor a talking-to in
her coffin: You were silly to think you were causing too much trouble for us all. I asked May Ling why her grandmother had been called Au Poor, meaning the
grandmother on the father’s side, when she was actually May Ling’s grandmother on
her mother’s side.
May Ling said, Maybe because Au Gung (grandfather) didn’t have any sons. I said that perhaps their two other children, the ones who had died a long time ago,
back in China, before May Ling’s mother and her sister were born, were sons.
No, May Ling said. They were girls.
Do you know how old they were when they died? I asked.
I don’t know, she said.
May Ling and my son were sitting on his half of the family settee. They were
reading their books. They looked up and frowned at me. They were upset in case young
Alexander had heard the questions I’d asked. They shook their heads at me. No, they
didn’t know anything.
Everyone remembers her in their own way, my son said. Leave it be.
You were only two years old when Au Poor died, I said to May Ling. I remember
the next day when Mum and Dad asked me to come over and take you for a walk in the
stroller. I remember when we got back to Au Poor and Au Gung’s house, you mimicked
people crying. You couldn’t talk yet, but you mimed with your face what was going on
inside the house. I wasn’t invited in, so I dropped you off at the front door.
I don’t remember, she said.
Au Poor looked after you every day while Mum and Dad were at work. What do
you remember of her?
I don’t remember anything.
from Multum in Parvo III
The Preface
Rhina’s esteem in time of drought?
Devoutly to be wished for,
much like Montana’s cutthroat trout,
devoutly to be fished for.
Puppy Catastrophe
Who woulda thunk
that ditch hid a skunk?
Graham at 95
The Reverend Billy Graham
says we near the end of time,
and reaching for a rhyme
I am predicting mayhem.
Tim Murphy
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Story
Arazou
Paul G r egur ic
T
he two-storeyed building of mottled red brickwork, windows dappled
with morning sunlight, stood close to the road. There was a narrow
garden of acacia trees with their intense lime-green leaves, and the
bushes of forsythia with their yellow flowers grew along a blue paling
fence, jagged like the teeth of some beast. The school catered for girls of
the district—the neighbouring working-class and housing commission suburbs—the
many daughters of immigrants and some refugees, the labourers and shopkeepers,
cleaners, security guards, bus drivers, railwaymen and taxi drivers. And now the
girls were streaming along the footpath and through the gates, white blouses for the
juniors, blue tunics for the seniors, all with knee-length tartan skirts and some with
blue headscarves. Znnnng! went the bell. The serpentine of chatter along the street
quickened its pace to be inside the school grounds in time. A white-haired woman
screeched the gate shut and rattled the chains to padlock girls in for the day, and keep
the stragglers out to face reprimands for “lateness”.
Arazou was straggling behind the others. This may have been because school was an
interruption to her real world, her inner life. She was not interested in being instructed
on how to look at contour lines on a map to judge the steepness of a hill. She stopped
walking and considered turning around and walking home. Her mother and father
were not in the house because they were at work in the take-away shop. She could
stay home all day, or she could go into town. No. If the police see you on the streets
in school uniform during the day they question you and drive you back to school.
She should go home. But she would still be marked absent on the rolls. Eventually
her father would find out. There would be shouting and recriminations and threats.
Better keep walking then. The autumn morning was suffused with the sunshine that
glittered in her tresses of jet-black hair. The chatter in the street grew quieter as the
school filled. Nearly a thousand girls had arrived. Arazou had seen the gate closing
and rushed at it, only to be refused entry by the old woman, so Arazou snorted and
made her way over to the front steps, through the visitors’ entrance doorway, across
the parquet floor inlaid with the school crest, past two female mannequins wearing
full school uniforms, the knee-length blue tartan skirts, but one mannequin wore a
blue shirt with a tie around its neck, the other was in a white shirt. Both wore the
school cap. I saw Arazou pace down the corridor lined on one side with fifty-yearold wooden lockers, the other with framed certificates and artworks, mainly papiermache smiling cats and black-and-white framed photographs of buildings. To her, all
rubbish.
Arazou, like all young girls, contained an animating spirit that has become aware
that it inhabits a human form, and wants to celebrate this experience. This is why, for
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example, they create elaborate dances and play pointless games such as leapfrog and
skipping. So now, even though the first bell had already rung, there were half a dozen
twelve-year-olds on the asphalt twirling a long skipping rope. They were chanting,
“Apples on a stick, make me sick, make my heart go two-forty-six, not because I’m
dirty, not because I’m clean, not because I kissed a boy, behind a magazine ...” Arazou,
probably thinking this an incredibly stupid song, did not go around the skippers, but
walked into the middle of them, causing them to stop skipping in disbelief at the
audacity of this older girl, who simply kicked at their rope as it hit against her white
socks. And away she went, leaving them staring belligerently after her.
She stood at the open door of the classroom. Everyone was already seated and with
their books out.
“Why are you late, Arazou?” asked the teacher, who had an American Civil War
drooping moustache and the sad eyes of failure.
“Have you marked the roll?” asked Arazou.
“Yes. Hurry up and sit down,” he said, corrected his roll book with a pen, and
muttered to himself, “Arazou, that means ‘wishful thinking’ in Persian ... How do I
know that? That’s what happens when you teach these girls.”
Arazou looked around the room before finding a seat. Her peers, as usual, were
along the back row. She took her place amongst them. The teacher knew them well.
There was Sarah, notoriously lazy, whose mother had died a year ago, but who still
spoke of her every day as if she were alive, and there was Zaynab with her round face
and emerald eyes and quick temper under the tight blue scarf, and there was Yasmina,
tall and mostly silent, and possibly the leader of the little group. Arazou unzipped
her knapsack and laid out her things: pencil case, striped exercise book and little
black satchel. She ignored the lesson that was going on around her, instead sharpened
coloured pencils, scraped the shavings aside with her hand, drew shapes, coloured
and cross-hatched, shaped words, all the while with her lips sometimes puckered in
concentration, or her head tilted back in consideration of her work.
Zip went the little satchel, and out came the little pots and brushes and tubes, the
plastic box snapped open and was full of circles of colours, a miniature mirror inside
the lid. Then she twisted open one pot, twirled the pink powder onto a brush then
onto her cheeks, chin and forehead, then a pot of crimson was opened and brushed
over the apples of her cheeks, then a shade of plum was rubbed onto one then the
other eyelid, all the time she was stealing glances at the mirror and puckering her
Levantine lips.
The teacher had, in the previous term, nearly eliminated the habit of girls spraying
deodorant all over their clothes spasmodically during class. Deodorant, he hectored,
was for skin, not clothes, it can cause harm to asthmatics, and besides, this was a
classroom not a bathroom. The girls’ concession to this, to their ears, obvious nonsense,
was to slip out into the corridor. The sound of spraying would then be heard. Now he
was faced with the distraction of Arazou and her elaborate make-up ritual. It could
catch on, although he knew her friends in the class, those three, were forbidden to
wear make-up, at least to the Hesperian extent that she was now sporting.
“Arazou, put away your make-up,” he said, gently.
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” she replied with fury.
“I won’t tell you a third time. Stop putting on make-up.”
“Ahgh!” cried the maenad.
She swept the collection with her elbow into a jumble to the corner of her desk.
Each object was then placed gingerly on the floor. The teacher walked to Arazou
between the rows of the now mostly quiet onlookers. At fourteen they were still
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learning how to navigate a new event. This morning it was the novelty of being told
to put away make-up. The teacher picked up Arazou’s exercise book and looked at the
swirls and codes of a love talisman, or something.
“You were meant to be drawing and labelling a diagram of an atom.”
“How can I draw one if I’ve never seen one?”
“There’s one already drawn for you on the whiteboard,” the teacher explained.
Arazou drummed on the table with her fingers and gazed into the distance. “Okay,
you can go away now,” she said.
He paused, looking down at her, deliberating about something. An unexpected
silence ensued in the room. Then he returned to his desk. The classroom returned
to its usual noisiness and remained so until the bell signalled recess. The girls rose
from their seats, packed their things away while standing, and fled out the door. The
teacher went around the class pushing chairs in and collecting bits of discarded paper,
tossing them into the bin near the door. There on the floor was a black bag. What was
that? Who was sitting there? Ah, that was Arazou’s make-up kit. He scooped it from
under the chair and walked it back to his desk and placed it on his chronicle, a thick
red-covered book. He would return it to her on the way to the staffroom. The girls
always sat in the same areas of the playground and after a while everyone knew which
group sat where. He held the chronicle in one hand as a tray for the little kit, pulled
the door shut and made his way down the corridor. Junior girls sat on the floor along
the corridor cross-legged or splayed in his path. He stepped over feet. “Nice make-up
bag sir,” said one of the reclining girls. Out into the sun and into the back garden of
the playground. The garden was enclosed by a neatly trimmed murraya hedge and the
grassed area had a small gazebo, benches, a square of paving stones and a bird bath.
Sarah and her group were sitting at one of the benches talking all the while,
beneath an ironbark eucalyptus with its dark furrowed trunk and overhanging
branches, and a majestically tall ghost gum, its cream-coloured bark scratched to
human height with messages of love. A raven with its jet sheen, fan tail and little
white eyes hopped along the grass to find a morsel, which it did. From the branches
of the trees emanated a din: warbling, whistles and caw-caws, then a medley of
squawks as a pair of magpies swooped down to the raven and attacked, both in turn
striking it with a click of feathers as it ascended, with its piece of food, pursued its two
assailants, wings flapping, whoosh, whoosh. Then there was a cacophony from the low
hanging branches of the ironbark tree. Meanwhile, the teacher had just stepped into
the garden area as a rosella emerged from that tree. The bird had a bright green body,
red head and yellow cheeks. The teacher said to himself, “Platycercus, you can tell by
the colours ...” From somewhere in the garden a girl screamed.
Two girls in headscarves were dragging one of the school uniform mannequins
across the grass. It was the mannequin in the white shirt. It wasn’t wearing its cap
and had long black hair. Its arms were pulled along by the two girls, one of them
quite tall. The mannequin’s legs were writhing and when its skirt drew up it was
wearing black underwear. It screamed like a wildcat. The girls, now recognisable as
Zaynab and Yasmina, pulled the mannequin upright. It broke one arm free and tore
at Yasmina’s headscarf. The blue scarf fluttered to the ground. We all saw that she tied
her hair in a bun. The enraged Yasmina yanked at the mannequin’s arm to punish it.
A third girl, it was Sarah, walked towards the captured creature holding the green
garden hose, which the groundsman kept coiled near the tap. The water squirted in
an arc along the lawn as Sarah approached the struggling creature then sprayed water
into its face, which turned hopelessly this way and that. Its make-up washed into a
grotesque mask, the girl was released, but instead of running from the three she ran,
104
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Story
bent forward, lunged at a long tree branch that lay under the ironbark, grabbed it
and swung it horizontally back and forth at the three as they ran from her. Then she
dropped the branch in desperation, burst into tears, and marched at double pace to the
toilet block. The teacher called after her,
“Arazou!”
But she ignored him and disappeared into the open doorway of the grim brick
building, which is where girls like to cry in the mirror.
She did not come to school for the rest of the week.
Marilyn’s Coat
To look less like a gypsy,
the advice has been given to wear
other than lace-up shoes and to ditch the handbag.
Have you brown shoes? A brown handbag to match?
The handbag is chosen for convenience.
The shoes for comfortable walking,
Don’t look like a bag lady
was the thought behind the sisterly rebuke.
True, the coat’s an artwork; is enormous,
glamorous, creatively patch-worked with tassels,
gilt and random buttons, scattered.
It has been immortalised by its portrait
displayed on the National Gallery’s website
in one year of Portia Geech’s famous exhibition;
with me as Marilyn-mannequin wearing
fantasized white high-heeled shoes standing
between two potted pink spotted plants.
The artist,
portrait painter Laurie Paul, since deceased,
spent time creating her version of Marilyn’s Coat;
and the Marilyn, inside the coat,
had all the features of familial likenesses
inherent in the facial expressions of cousins galore.
I’ve not given up living up to it; I’m not sure she’s me.
I’m trying to be worthy of the coat; by wearing it in
gravitas for the label. It is not, as first suggested, a brown
coat. It is an Over-the-Top coat and it floats my boat.
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Marilyn Peck
105
Books
B r i a n D ethr idge
Ultimate Questions
The Universe Within
by Neil Turok
Allen & Unwin, 2013, 304 pages, $27.99
T
he title of this book is misleading. It is not a
New Age manual. It is about the history and
currency of ideas in the discipline of cosmology.
Neil Turok is a noted physicist and cosmologist
who first presented the contents of this book as the
Massey Lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in 2012.
Born in South Africa in 1964 of politically dissident parents, Turok was educated in East Africa
(as a refugee) and later in the UK as a physicist at
Cambridge. He researched at Einstein’s university,
Princeton in New Jersey, and now researches and
teaches in the Perimeter Institute in Toronto—
an institute set up to further the study of science
amongst young Africans.
He explicitly states that the answer to the world’s
ills is in science, its methods, its working hypotheses, and its accumulated set of theories, always to
be regarded as work in progress. We should never
be certain about anything, he says. We look for
beautiful and elegant mathematical hypotheses and
then test them to destruction. (Karl Popper comes
to mind.)
His view of causality is Humean: “A causes B”
means that when A occurs, B will occur too, either
contemporaneously or subsequently. Cause is constant conjunction. Like Hume, he sees nothing
wrong with the idea of an infinite and self-explanatory chain of causes.
As regards the development of a scientific
cosmology, Turok tells a familiar story nowadays,
as do (for example) Paul Davies, Richard Feynman,
Steven Weinberg, Alan Guth and Lawrence
Krauss. All are cosmology practitioners. They all
tell it well, and so does he, perhaps assuming a
high-school familiarity with physics. The Greeks,
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Wright,
Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Hubble, Bohr, Dirac,
Penzias, Wilson and Hoyle all get a mention. About
the Church’s handling of Galileo he is scathing. He
sees the issue as epistemological, empiricism versus
dogma, as well he might (this Catholic reviewer
concedes).
106
Turok shows how all of these scientists contributed
to the construction of our current “Standard Model
of the Universe”. This hypothecates a “Big Bang”,
a beginning to the universe as an atom-sized
pinpoint of intense energy, temperature 1032 Kelvin,
which underwent a short (10-35 seconds) period of
exponential growth or “inflation” involving 100
doublings and redoublings in size, a growth by a
factor of 2100, all of 13.7 billion years ago. This was
followed by a cooling, accompanied by the formation
of a soup of protons, antiprotons, positrons and
electrons, With further cooling about 380,000 years
into the lifetime of this ball of energy, there followed
the marriage of protons and electrons into hydrogen
atoms, the clumping of these simple atoms into more
complex ones, deuterium, helium and lithium, and
the perhaps simultaneous clumping of these atoms
into dust, into stars, and into galaxies. Within these
stars further more complicated atoms ultimately
conducive to life were synthesised and spat out. The
solar system dates to about 4 billion years ago. There
is considerable mutual reinforcement (says Turok)
between what is known of sub-atomic and atomic
behaviour (much of it via the CERN Large Hadron
Collider at Basle) and what we can reconstruct of the
early development of space-time itself, galaxies and
stars. (The keys to this reconstruction are Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity and Hubble’s Law,
which I shall not elaborate on.)
Turok’s presentation of the Standard Model is
a solid riposte to anyone tempted to subscribe to
the postmodern thesis of the relativity of truth. He
makes it perfectly clear how knowledge is cumulative and empowering, if occasionally subject to
upheaval. Newton’s and Maxwell’s theories of gravity and electromagnetics are given clear and extensive
treatment in themselves and in their consequences:
humanity’s power to travel in space, generate power,
propagate and receive radio television and computer
files, use X-rays and compute. Twentieth-century
theory (such as relativity and quantum theory) has
continued to open doors (global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, radar). Much of this is presented in a chapter justly titled “Magic that Works”.
His main point, however, is the strong mutual
reinforcement of astronomical data with sub-atomic
physics and chemistry to give a reliable picture of the
history of the universe. This certainly is remarkable.
Does this mean that the universe suddenly materialised out of nothing 13.7 billion years ago? Turok’s
answer is indirect. He posits an eternal pulsating
universe, but somewhat half-heartedly. He asks
other questions:
Why did the universe emerge from the big bang
with a set of physical laws that gave rise to heavy
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Books
elements and allowed complex chemistry? How
and why did consciousness emerge? Technology
is full of promise. Are these capabilities purely
accidental? Or are we the door-openers to the
future? Might we be the means for the universe
to become conscious of itself?
Turok toys with some of the answers that are
offered by many cosmologists at this point, including Teilhard de Chardin, about whom he is respectful but non-committal.
He considers the parallel-universes hypothesis
and the successive-universes hypothesis. Both of
these postulate the existence of a possible infinitude
of universes, either “parallel” in space or successive
in time, usually but not always having a naturalistic genesis from a prior universe, with each universe possessing a unique set of those constants of
nature—the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational
constant, the charge and mass of protons and electrons, Hubble’s constant and so on—that have the
power to determine the evolutionary existence or
non-existence of sentient beings.
The attraction of these is, (a) they are eternal;
(b) they explain why conditions are just right in our
universe for the engenderment of sentient beings
without resort to thoughts of Intelligent Design, or
teleology; (c) they can sometimes be explained in
terms of a mathematical theory already used in the
sub-sub-atomic realm known as string theory, or
(later) M-theory. These lines of argument are very
popular with the writers named above.
T
urok has put forward a theory of his own of
this kind, about a universe that “big-bangs”
and expands, then re-collapses under gravity, and
then “big-bangs” again after billions of years, with
slightly different values of G, c, e, H and so on. (We
live in the one naturally conducive to our existence.
There have been squillions of duds before this.) But
in this book, perhaps with a different audience in
view, Turok is not completely happy with it:
The mainstreaming of grand unification and
string theory, and the sheer pressure it created
to force a realistic model out of incomplete
theoretical frameworks so far has been
dissatisfying … [The question is] … “Who are
we in the end?”
(Grand unification theory combines sub-atomic
or particle physics with the genesis of the universe
as determined by astronomy.)
In his final chapter, “The Opportunity of All
Time”, Turok attempts to link his theme so far
with a vision of personal and social betterment.
He acknowledges that there is a horizon ahead in
time and in investigation, beyond which is a great
unknown, and which the human community will
confront, as Einstein said, “in its own good time”.
On the multiverse he makes his final judgment:
String theory’s lack of a definite prediction of
the vacuum energy, combined with the puzzling
observation that the vacuum energy takes a tiny
positive value, has encouraged many scientists
to embrace what seems to many of us like an
unscientific explanation: that every one of
these universes is possible, but the one we find
ourselves in is the only one which allows us to
exist. Sadly this idea is at best a rationalisation.
It is hard to imagine a less elegant or convincing
explanation of our own beautiful world than to
invent a near-infinite number of unobservable
worlds and to say that, for some reason we
cannot understand or quantify, ours was
“chosen” to exist from among them.
(Vacuum energy is the hypothecated source of
the energy necessary for the inflation of a new universe to occur.)
Turok has a brief flirtation with the idea mooted
by some that our universe is a virtual universe in
the computers of some super civilisation somewhere:
“The future battle for survival will be to program or
be programmed.”
There are other otherwise estimable theoretical
physicists such as Paul Davies who take this sort of
talk seriously too. But Turok is marking time here—
or perhaps accommodating himself to the promptings of a CBC producer?
Turok’s final conclusion is at odds with this temptation to super-speculate: “Science’s greatest lesson
[is that] for the purpose of advancing our knowledge
it is extremely important to doubt constantly and
to live with uncertainty.” In general I think it fair
to say that Turok prefers to have no answer to the
question of origins and purpose of the universe.
Is The Universe Within worth reading? It sometimes shows evidence of re-thinking from chapter
to chapter, as in the matter of the multiverse. But
it tells a sequential and accessible story about the
main developments in physics and cosmology from
the Greeks up until today. It provides some context
for mysterious things we have all heard of, such as
string theory and dark energy. It is clear-headed,
humble, humane, in the best sense questioning and
inquisitive, open to the future, conscious of the
social responsibility of science, convinced of the
centrality of science in education. I recommend it.
Brian Dethridge lives in Melbourne.
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107
Books
R obert M ur r ay
Farmers Went a-Wooing
The British: A Genetic Journey
by Alistair Moffat
Birlinn, 2013, 288 pages, $39.99
The Scots: A Genetic Journey
by Alistair Moffat & James F. Wilson
Birlinn, 2012, 256 pages, $29.99
H
istory, or more often pre-history, starts to seem
more like astronomy or merchant banking
when you get into the thousands of years.
These two racily written books are a progress
report on British—and occasionally Irish—prehistory and the dawn of written history, when
documentation was still very scarce. They go back
many thousands of years to the earliest human
habitation there and take it through to Norman times
a mere one thousand years ago, after which there
was more—though still inadequate—recording.
Acting like over-burden cut from an underground coal seam, DNA testing and archaeology,
with help from linguistic analysis, have in the past
generation uncovered a vast amount of information
about these distant times. Presumably much more
will be found as the work continues.
As often with mining, the early work uncovered
rich seams and Alistair Moffat’s books mainly add
detail to the research reported around the beginning of this century. Two of his important points
are that the arrival of farming in Britain about 6000
years ago involved a wave of immigrants from the
European continent; and the male newcomers made
a grossly disproportionate contribution to the population—because conquering men helped themselves
to the local women.
The earliest Britons were hunter-gatherers, like
the pre-contact Australian Aborigines. Early writers on the pre-historic past usually assumed, without much evidence, that a new wave, probably quite
large, of invaders introduced the islands to agriculture, which had begun in the Middle East perhaps
5000 years previously.
More recent work based on DNA and
archaeology has questioned this assumption,
because the mitochondrial DNA based on genetic
inheritance through the female line showed a very
large proportion of the population to be descended
from the hunter-gatherers. Researchers wondered
whether farming techniques had come through
one society copying from neighbours or from more
108
vague osmosis.
Moffat, working as well with Y-chromosome
DNA recording the male line, suggests the
explanation is that the farming immigrants were
mostly young single men, who set about wooing or
otherwise match-making with the local women. He
reports a male DNA marker representing a genetic
stream that appears to have originated in what
is now Iraq, the likely birthplace of agriculture.
The carriers of this marker appear to have moved
westwards over thousands of years, taking the
techniques with them but diluting their lineage
through the women.
He describes as “gene surfing” the process of
a new wave of men spreading their DNA far into
the existing population. The all-time star human
breeder is regarded as Genghis Khan, who today has
an estimated 16 million descendants, but tradition
names some startlingly fecund Celtic heroes too.
Agriculture also brought a very rapid increase in
populations. This is because babies born into a predominantly meat-eating culture had to be breast-fed
for several years until their teeth were strong enough
to eat with the adults. Breast-feeding mothers are
usually unable to conceive. The arrival of animal
milk and grain, however, meant the arrival of mush
or porridge and thus radically earlier weaning and in
turn much larger families. The generally better diet
also meant longer lives for both mothers and babies.
A population “explosion” followed, Moffat says.
These limitations of hunter-gatherer life also
explain the slow growth of the population of
Australia, which was still less than a million in 1788
after something like 60,000 years in this country.
There is also similarity where a new, more modern
culture that used the land more intensively arrived,
with faster expansion of the mixed race than the
original people. Genetic blending in early colonial
Australia was a mixture of customary, voluntary and
violent. History cannot easily untangle the proportions, though the indigenous Australian custom of
lending women to newcomers in return for gifts was
important.
Moffat sees, much like here, some violent conflict but also a lot of apparently peaceful settlement
and integration between the cultures. After thousands of years in Britain the hunter-gatherers were
roaming less and occupying fixed areas of land by
custom, much like our indigenous people.
Moffat sees Homo sapiens (modern humans) setting foot in Britain, in south-western England, as
early as 40,000 years ago, soon after Homo sapiens first entered Europe. Neanderthal people were
probably there 20,000 years before that. Both were
in very small numbers,.
The most severe part of the Ice Age then drove
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Books
people out again. Homo sapiens did not return until
about 14,500 years ago, when the Ice Age began to
lift. Numbers remained tiny and the climate unstable, but when weather more like modern weather
arrived perhaps 10,000 years ago the main forebears
of the British flowed in.
First came the hardy souls who had sheltered
during the high Ice Age in caves in the Pyrenees, in
southern France and adjoining Spain. They followed
their reindeer prey north as the ice gave way to a vast
grassy plain.
More people then followed from wider areas of
France and Spain and from Doggerland, the subcontinent that the North Sea submerged as fastmelting ice sent sea levels rising. Today it is better
known as the fish-rich Dogger Bank. Knowledge of
ancient Doggerland has increased enormously over
the past eighty years.
When the Roman conquerors arrived 2000
years ago—5000 years after the waves covered
Doggerland—a fairly continuous culture stretched
from about the future Paris to around Rotterdam
and across to Bristol. The continental section was
what the Romans called northern Gaul or Belgica.
They classed the English tribes as Belgae; some
apparently were recently-arrived boat people.
The inhabitants were, as they still are on both
sides of the Channel, a French-German genetic
mix, to put it very simply. Moffat says the slender
evidence points to them speaking a Celtic language.
Other historians think Frisian more likely. Still
spoken in the far north of the Netherlands and
adjoining Germany, Frisian is the language nearest
our own.
In those distant days when sea communications
were easier than on land, south-western England
and Wales were culturally closer to Atlantic France,
particularly Brittany but also Spain and Portugal.
Ancient Ireland had similar, but more distant links
there. The treacherous waters of the Bay of Biscay
were a factor, Moffat says. He sees the earliest arrivals from the Pyrenean caves speaking a distinctive
Basque language, akin to that still spoken there.
The farmers brought the Welsh and Irish versions
of Gaelic.
The Angles, Saxons and similar tribes from
Germany, who invaded around 1700 years ago,
mostly after the Romans departed, established their
dominance much as earlier invaders had done—
mostly single young men in moderate numbers mating fruitfully with British women. The same went
for the Vikings, two or three hundred years later.
In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Moffat covers
much similar ground but more specifically directed
at Scotland. Briefly, he says the Scots were less
genetically different from the English than people
at a Burns night would like to think, other than for
the more distinctively Irish admixture in the west.
Robert Murray is the author of The Making of
Australia: A Concise History, which was reviewed in
the May issue. Schooled
I have yet to meet a stripper
who didn’t think all men pigs.
I have yet to meet a thief
who didn’t think all were thieves.
I have yet to meet a copper
who didn’t think all were crooks.
I have yet to meet a liar
who didn’t think all were false.
I have yet to meet a cheater
who was capable of trust.
And I have yet to meet a teacher
who didn’t start to tell me,
from the moment that they met me,
just how much they had to teach me.
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Brad Jackel
109
P eter R ya n
Mary Reibey’s
Newel Post
M
any visitors to the Ryan living room,
going back to the early 1960s, would have
noticed, conspicuous in a corner of the
floor, a heavily weathered piece of dark brown old
timber—perhaps a small bit of firewood dropped
on its way to the grate? It was about fifteen inches
long, and squared off to about four or five inches,
and might have been the top of an old fence post,
cut into handy lengths to serve the family finally
against a winter’s cold.
Closer inspection showed it to be something
slightly more elaborate. Over a hundred years ago,
a skilful saw had created a flourish of thirteen
symmetrical facets at one end, rather like a cut
jewel. This, clearly, had been a newel post (Old
French: nouel, knob), either the topmost or lowest
support post of a stairway.
But it was a very special newel post indeed, from
an impeccable pedigree of distinction stretching
back to Australia’s earliest settlement and convict
transportation. Back, one might almost say, to 1792,
when a juvenile criminal named Mary Haydock
landed in Sydney to begin her seven-year sentence.
Her crime, back in Lancashire, had been to steal
a horse. She was then thirteen, and had been
disguised as a boy at the time of the offence.
Mary’s case was one where the often cruel and
futile convict system both redeemed the transported
wretch and also yielded society a valuable ultimate
benefit. After brief service as a nursemaid in the
household of one of the Rum Corps officers, Mary
married a smart and lively Irishman, a free man
and experienced businessman, through his earlier
employment with the East India Company in
Calcutta.
What a partnership began that day! When Tom
Reibey died in 1811, it had produced seven capable
children and a series of thriving business concerns.
They ranged from farms in the Hawkesbury valley
to seal hunting in Bass Strait, land development
in Sydney Town, a well-managed pub, and a fleet
of small sailing ships like a miniature merchant
110
shipping line. Mary, who was now running the
hotel and all the other businesses ashore, was well
up to dealing with the notoriously tough and tricky
Yankee, Chinese and Indian skippers who were her
competitors afloat.
Before long, this indefatigable woman was
spending generous portions of her time and her
money on the public good: on charities such as
the hospital, on education and schools, and on the
work of the churches. Anglican Bishop Broughton
regarded her highly. Governor Macquarie was
happy to receive her freely at Government House.
If you, reader, have an Australian twenty-dollar
banknote handy in your wallet, fish it out now, and
study the likeness engraved there: a direct, firm and
open face, I think it, behind the low-worn, round,
metal-framed spectacles, and beneath its period lace
cap.
Apart from her dignified city mansion, Mary
Reibey also had a house out in the sticks at Hunters
Hill. An unpretentious cottage with a corrugated
iron roof, it was her “retreat”, a place to put her
feet up. In those times, Hunters Hill was usually
reached from Sydney Town by boat across the water.
Several other houses, far grander than Mary’s, lay
scattered in this quiet stretch of bush and shoreline.
Alas, in 1948, the state government set its doom
on all that bucolic seclusion. It announced that the
long-discussed North-Western Expressway would
be built clean through it. This monster-work would
require extensive earthmoving and civil works,
with major bridges at Gladesville and Figtree.
Redoubtable campaigning by the National Trust,
all the way up to the High Court, held back the
jackhammers for twelve years, but by 1960 the jig
was up.
In Melbourne, where I lived, concern about this
apparently relentless advance of the bulldozers and
the disappearance of important local history was
less immediate than in Sydney. But I had by chance
to make a visit north on business, and was confident
that I would learn more there. Never was confidence
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Mary Reibey’s Newel Post
better founded! Within ten minutes of checking to the corner of Spring Street, where Victoria’s
in to my Sydney hotel, my old friend Cyril Pearl majestic Parliament House stood grandly just over
was on the phone: “Doctor Ryan! Since I hear that the road. Most of the intervening street front we
happy chance brings you now to the spot, would would have to traverse was occupied by the very
you consent to join me in a modest private project grand high-colonial period White Hart Hotel. We
touching the fame of that truly great early citizen, found that while we had lunched, all unsuspecting,
Mary Reibey?”
the wrecker’s men had started work on the old
“Yes, Cyril. What about lunch tomorrow?”
White Hart, and had already reduced the handsome
Cyril Altson Pearl (1904–87) was a remarkable ground floor bar—all massive mahogany counters,
Australian. Fifteen years an editor of daily polished cedar joinery, gleaming brasswork and
newspapers and national magazines for the elaborate glass—to a shattered shambles of shards
formidable (and occasionally absurd) Sir Frank and splinters. But through the choking clouds of
Packer (progenitor of Kerry); author of some twenty- dust we could see four tall cedar, glass-panelled
five published books; gentleman, larrikin, scholar, doors, apparently unharmed and propped against
tease, stirrer, historian, poet and man of courage. the wall. These we bought for a trifling five pounds,
As his friend of fifty years, it is
but we took the precaution of
pleasing for me to say that Pearl’s
getting a proper receipt from the
entry in Volume 18 of the Australian
new owners, the Windsor Hotel,
e were forever
Dictionary of Biography is “spot on”;
nearby.
retailing to visitors—
Patrick Buckridge (not known to
With two doors each, Cyril
as Cyril foresaw we and I had our relic of the fine and
me) depicts all Cyril’s sparkling
qualities with a sure touch.
famous White Hart Hotel. He later
would be—the tale moved
Cyril believed in the power of
back to live again in Sydney,
of their acquisition, where I noticed that his White
relics. Not in the religious sense
that, say a nail from the True Cross,
and the moral story Hart doors were safely hung in his
or an authentic chip from it, might
vintage colonial house in Ferdinand
that lay in their
embody in itself some immanent
Street, Hunters Hill. Back in
power actually to affect the course
Victoria, my doors were positioned
background—a
of events happening in the world relation which might to become the closures of two
before our eyes. Nothing so tranmain passageways, highly visible
scendental. But Cyril thought it have tempted the pen and much in use. We were forever
would be a good thing if we were
of Gibbon himself. retailing to visitors—as Cyril
more generally inclined to collect
foresaw we would be—the tale of
and to display all sorts of objects,
their acquisition, and the moral
sometimes quite commonplace things in them- story that lay in their background—a relation which
selves, but which had connections with interesting might have tempted the pen of Gibbon himself.
historical persons or events.
The great historian often proclaimed the inevitable
On ready view on all our mantelpieces, hall conjunction between corruption and democratic
tables and hearths, they would inevitably be forms of government—that you can’t have one
discussed; new facts would emerge, errors would without the other. That sardonic mind could
be exposed. There would certainly (he hoped above hardly have resisted the temptation to describe the
all) be arguments. The grassroots grasp by ordinary scenes that followed the safe passage in Victoria’s
citizens of their own history would be immensely parliament of—say—a lands bill for which the
strengthened. Too-facile acceptance of the clever squatters had bribed honourable members for their
books written by the clever people in university votes. Those members who had so obliged would
history departments would attract sterner scrutiny later put on their hats and troop down the lofty
before being swallowed whole.
steps of Parliament House, across Spring Street
Cyril cherished no grand delusion that some and into the bar of the White Hart. There, upon
lone, late intervention by him might avert the North- the shiny mahogany counter, would lie the bags of
Western Expressway. But he had no private relic of gold coin, from which the bagmen would count out
Mary Reibey or of her cottage, and he wanted one. sovereigns into grubby parliamentary hands.
He recalled to me another “relic operation”
Our newel post, so fully described already, says
which he and I had shared years before, when he all that is necessary about the results achieved after
too lived in Melbourne. One day, after lunch at the the several reconnaissance visits Cyril and I made
Italian Society Restaurant, near the top of Bourke in 1960 to the now-desolate site of Mary Reibey’s
Street, we turned right to walk the short distance cottage. Our family is now raising our relic’s dignity
W
Quadrant June 2014
111
Mary Reibey’s Newel Post
and identity by affixing a discreet metal plate setting
out its provenance. Brass, silver, bronze? is a hot
topic at this moment. Cyril’s role is recognised.
Meanwhile, in quiet moments, I ponder the
general validity and the utility of Cyril’s doctrine
of private relics. There is little doubt that the quality
and depth of our social context would gain, and
would gain today even more than in Cyril’s day. The
gee-whiz nature of modern instant-and-everywhere
communications progressively leaches warmth,
depth, subtlety and wonder from human relations.
Cyril’s private relics might well do a little—I
make no exorbitant claims—to slow the awful
dehumanisation of our world, perfectly described
by our great poet Alec Hope as a place where we are
all “drawing closer and closer apart”.
Woolshed Wedding
The muted silver corrugated iron shed is ample;
its window rims painted burnt burgundy.
Inside, the spine for the shearers’ combs waits
below rafters decked with strings of small white lights.
Structural columns are tree trunks, split or trimmed;
the wooden walls are hung with rusted farming tools
horse regalia, stencils for absent wool bales
newspaper cuttings from two centuries past.
Outside the back wall are weathered grey mustering pens;
nearby, sheep and cattle sparsely graze the fields to the dam
lined with trees and home for ducks and coot.
Mother waits at the shed, while in Braidwood town, the bride
and father pass the butchers shop that bears their surname.
A clydesdale drafthorse cross nobly draws their shiny
black open carriage with polished lamps and gold trim;
steered with leather harnesses through silver rings.
Buildings the party passes are traditional and well maintained
sandstone or old brick. Clusters have been rendered
and painted subtle colours. Shop fronts dot the main highway
from coast to city and glean the passing trade.
Slowly the horse trots along side roads past paddocks
lush from recent rain, towards the congregation
that stands in an arena rimmed by granite boulders and
giant rusted machines that had plowed and planted, harvested
and bailed hay. On lawn rough from former farming
the unselfconscious crowd waits, young and old, family and friends
wearing cheerful clothes in diverse styles.
Toddlers cling to parents, one mother lingers
metres away from her newborn held by her husband.
The celebrant stands before a long rusted bench
of former farm machine decked with rustic flowers
that sprout from preserving jars. Ambient pipes of Pan
play to bless the old and new fertility.
112
Quadrant June 2014
Paul Williamson
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