interpretationsinterpretationsinterpretations Journal of the English

Transcription

Journal of the English Teachers Association of Western Australia
Volume 44, May 2011
interpretations
Page
Page 2
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INTERPRETATIONS
2011
Volume 44
Journal of the
English Teachers Association
of Western Australia
Editor
Jo Jones
Curtin University
Good writing can be defined as having something to
say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say,
one should remain silent. Silence is beautiful at such
times.
Edward Abbey
Editorial correspondence should be addressed to
The Editor, Interpretations
ETAWA
PO Box 8463
Perth Business Centre WA 6849
[email protected]
Page
Interpretations is a journal committed to:

issues of specific relevance to West Australian English teachers

issues of a more general or academic nature

exploring the relevance of current theories about English

teaching and reading practices for classroom teachers and teacher educators

encouraging debate within the field of English education

publishing articles by established educationalists

publishing articles by English teachers
The journal is issued free of charge to members of the English Teachers Association of Western
Australia and affiliated associations.
It is available on subscription to other people and organisations. Enquiries to (08) 9427 0878 or PO Box 8463 Perth Business Centre WA 6849.
ISBN 978-0-9806296-9-9
PO Box 8463
Perth Business Centre WA 6849
Phone (08) 9427 0878
Fax (08) 9427 0879
Page 2
CONTENTS
Editorial
3
Politics in the Classroom: Our Voices
4
Storymen
Linda Bishop
7
English 3A: Language and Identity
Wendy Cody
11
The Jerk With A Heartache: Why studying songs is more
important the studying poetry
Leith Daniel
16
Policy is not a dirty word ...
unless it is preceded by “performance pay”
Katie Fielding
24
History and the Novel: Refusing to be Silent
Jo Jones
30
Revisiting The Classroom
Julie Easton
37
Interpretations scholar
John Kinsella’s Anti-Pastoral: A Western Australian Poetics of Place
Marthe Reed
39
Fear in Peter Weir’s Australian Films: A Matter of Control
Theodore F. Sheckels
47
Professing the Popular
Andrew McCann
55
Is English an Emancipatory Discipline?
Ian Hunter
63
Conference 2011
Capturing Creativity: Conference Details
Cover Image
Jumbo & Zap
X-ray man-machine pointing a ray-gun at
the amphibians 2010
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Acquired with he support of Calypso Mary Efkarpidis
© Jumbo & Zap
66
Interpretations 44, 2011
Editorial
Jo Jones
Curtin University
in!) Katie Fielding explores the issues
surrounding performance pay in a thoughtprovoking consideration of Labor and Liberal
policy over the last six years. I hope that my own
essay on the politicised topics of history and
literature in recent Australian historical novels
sparks useful discussion in schools. It is with
great respect and affectation that I present the last
essay in this section, Julie Easton‘s reflections on
her recent teaching experiences in Broome. As
many of you would know, Julie has been an
inspiring and innovative educator for a number of
decades; both in teacher education courses at
Curtin and in the secondary classroom.
The Interpretations Scholar section of this
edition includes articles related to broadly
political concepts within the study of literature,
including the relation between individual, culture
and location in Marthe Reed‘s discussion of place
and the anti-pastoral in John Kinsella‘s wheat-belt
poetry, and Theodore Shekels‘ exploration of fear
in Peter Weir‘s Australian films. Two articles by
Andrew McCann, one of the most theoretically
informed and politically circumspect intellectuals
writing on Australian literature today, explicate
late-modern Australian machinations of social
and cultural power. Finally, a short piece by Ian
Hunter deals directly with the paradoxes of
English teaching and idealistic conceptualisations
of emancipation.
A number of the writers included in this
edition (and previous editions) of Interpretations
will have presented at the annual WAETA
conference at Perth College in May. We hope
you enjoyed the conference. We will include a
full report of it in the next edition.
The theme for this edition of Interpretations,
politics in the classroom, is partly inspired by my
recent discovery of a controversial, but
illuminating body of theory by Ian Hunter, who
writes about the political realities of English
teachers, and by my own long standing interest in
the way our own personal politics shape our
teaching practice and opinions. As we approach the
Australian curriculum, teachers are particularly
conscious of the political dimension of subject
English and the dangers of pedagogy and practice
put to nationalistic purposes. How do these
understandings manifest in the classroom?
The first article in this edition consists of
collection of voices from a diverse group of WA
English teachers. They have responded to the
issues of teaching political concepts, politicised
analytical methods and whether or not teachers
should directly attempt to influence students‘
views: on one hand we seem the last bastion of real
ethics and, on the other, we are indoctrinators of
social norms deluded enough to believe we hold
the conceptual keys to liberation and selfrealisation. A number of educators, including
ETAWA president, Wendy Cody, and Chair of
Australian English at the University of Western
Australia, Philip Mead, have provided insights into
the different facets of this vexed subject.
In this edition of Interpretations it is our
pleasure to include Linda Bishop‘s work on
Hannah Bell‘s publication The Storymen, for which
Linda received the $3000 ETA travel scholarship .
Her article is an energized and sensitive
exploration of teaching Indigenous forms of story
in a conventional Western classroom
Wendy Cody and Leith Daniel have also
provided useful and thought-provoking resources
and ideas from their own teaching experiences.
Wendy provides her refined ideas and course
material on the feature film Avatar. Leith embarks
on a characteristically inflammatory call for the
end of poetry in schools. (If you disagree, write
Thank you.
Jo Jones
Editor
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Western Australian
educators discuss
politics in the
classroom: Our Voices
what teachers are required to spend the vast majority
of time on in the classroom is whatever happens to
be dictated by the curriculum. Research has
demonstrated that whichever way curricula have
been constructed they invariably carve up modern
subject English into three broad components:
aesthetic cultivation, rhetorical instruction and
ethical training. The various definitions of ―politics
in the classroom‖ that are usually put forward fall
under the category of ethical training (although there
are other tasks that would also classify as ethical
training).
The way subject English was assembled in the
late 1800s has left current teachers with the legacy
of a ―social mission.‖ This social mission usually
takes one of two predominant forms: one is the
attitude that we are to educate students so as to
prevent them from mistakenly enjoying ―bad‖ texts
(the inoculation approach, which we could align
with Leavis), or the other attitude in more recent
times is that we are charged with rescuing students
from their having already begun to enjoy these texts
(an approach that is usually argued around fairly
simplified readings of Louis Althusser.) Both of
these positions are centred on the concept of
resistance, and this is of course where something
like ―politics in the classroom‖ becomes an issue for
teachers. We see this played out in the tools of
modern critical literacy: we teach students to be
critical of ―underlying values and attitudes‖ implicit
in texts, to express their ―personal opinion‖ on a
text‘s worthiness, or to identify factors from their
―personal context‖ which impact upon their
―interpretation‖ of a text‘s meaning. While these
activities comprise very solid ethical training, they
have a tendency to dominate classroom time and
Educators were invited to write short statement about
their ideas on the type of role politics should have in
the secondary English classroom. The following
responses conveys a range of opinions held on the
subject and the depth to which educators reflect on
these issues; hardly a surprise when enabling students
to determine the workings of power is often at the
heart of the English teaching ethos.
The following questions were provided as a stimulus:
What place does politics have in the secondary
English classroom?
Should teachers bring their own personal politics
to the classroom?
Do teachers engage in the political dimension of
texts to the detriment of other skills and
knowledge that is part of subject English
and/or Literature?
Do student sometimes adopt an inauthentic
leftwing politics for assessment, because of a
perception of leftist political bias?
Stuart Bender: doctoral candidate at Murdoch
University and has been an English teacher in a
number of High Schools in Perth.
Firstly, I believe that English teachers have a
responsibility to facilitate the development of
students‘ cultural awareness and their attitudes toward
the world as this is an important (though not
dominant) aspect of the English curriculum. However
this does not mean that the task of the English teacher
is to save the world one group of year 9s at a time.
While it‘s certainly fun to appeal to the kind of
Romantic ideations of the English teacher found in
Dead Poets Society, I think we have to be careful how
far we extend these kinds of discussions. After all,
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want to know a teacher‘s opinions on matters.
However, good judgement has to be exercised to
avoid backlash from parents and others who may
believe that a teacher is trying to indoctrinate their
child. To discuss personal politics in the context of
a particular text, for example, makes perfect sense.
It also depends on how you define ―politics.‖ If a
teacher is open about how and why they vote in
elections, then this needs to be treated with
discretion. While it is generally accepted that
teachers ought to avoid bringing their personal
politics into the classroom, where it is relevant and
pertinent, there are ways of doing it appropriately.
So much depends on the context, the texts and the
dynamics of the classroom – and on the teacher
too.
Do teachers engage in the political dimension
of texts to the detriment of other skills and
knowledge that is part of subject English and/or
Literature? (Or, is there too much emphasis on
politics to do detriment of other important
areas?)
It is possible to sideline syllabus concepts and
content in favour of exploring the political
dimension of a text, although a teacher would find
out quite quickly the disadvantages of doing this.
Students‘ external examination scores would
reflect the deficit, even if school-based marks did
not, depending on the marking criteria used at
classroom level. When teaching the difficult
concept of reading practices, it may well be
possible to dwell disproportionately on text, writer
and reader ideologies, but surely in teaching
students to then reproduce their thinking in written
form, teachers need to provide them with the skills
they need. To teach students about the politics of
texts also requires the teaching of key syllabus
concepts, and for students to be able to
demonstrate their understanding of those concepts,
they need to be able to communicate well in
written and oral form.

occur at a huge deficit to the other two thirds of the
English curriculum: aesthetic cultivation and
rhetorical instruction.
In my view, discussions about politics in the
classroom should be addressed more towards ways
of limiting the amount of time dedicated to such
practices (however they might occur) so as to open
the space for the development of teaching methods
which address the entirety of the English curriculum.

Wendy Cody: president of ETA WA. Also Head
of Department at Padbury Senior High School
What place does politics have in the secondary
English classroom?
Since the implementation of the new WACE
English course I have taught the top pathway of
units. In discussions with Stage 3 English students it
has been impossible not to go down the political
path in at least some way. When studying a unit for
English 3B in the past three years, my students have
focused on matters relating to global climate change,
genetic engineering including cloning and a range of
other contentious issues. The texts I have used as
lenses through which to explore these issues and
ideas have demanded of students a political reading,
as well as other readings including an
environmentalist reading.
To claim that there is no place for politics in the
classroom is to deny the necessity for students to
explore the intricacies of people and politics, which
is a process involving groups of people making
collective decisions. In broad terms, politics are to
do with social interactions, without which we can
not function, and without which it is not possible to
explore texts, contexts and concepts.
Whereas I do not believe that teachers have the
right to impose their political views on students, they
have every right to explore political views of
fictional characters and people, themselves included,
while considering ideologies, values and attitudes.
Contextual understanding is fundamental to both
English and Literature, and to omit attention to
politics, even at its most generic level, is
counterproductive and unrealistic.
When discussing controversial, provocative text
types such as speculative fiction and non fiction
dealing with contentious matters such as climate
change management, it would simply not be possible
to skirt around the political imperatives operating
within such discourses. You can‘t leave out the
politics of a subject such as genetic modification.
Should teachers bring their own personal
politics to the classroom?
Further to the previous comment, it is valid to
bring your personal politics to the classroom
provided you do so in a balanced, contextualised
way. Students are naturally curious and are bound to
Leith Daniel: teacher at Kolbe Catholic
College
Should teachers bring politics into the English?
I have to answer this with an emphatic yes. And an
equally emphatic no.
As teachers we are obliged to share our politics.
After all we‘re educated rolemodels and sometimes
we‘re the most educated rolemodels in our
students‘ lives. We, in our role as teachers, are
meant to produce use citizens. And obviously part
of that is to make them morally, socially and
politically aware. That‘s what critical literacy is
about, isn‘t it? And if we do it properly, we make
them question even us, and eventually form their
own opinion.
However, on the other hand, we should never
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very important not to become ―part of the
machine‖ when you work in a school and I agree
with this. We should be offering students
alternatives rather than narrowing things.
Politics has a place to be discussed and
dissected as with anything else that relates to
power. Just trying to make students aware of the
ways in which power functions to empower some
and disempower others is a starting point. It really
depends on how comfortable teachers (and
students) are about discussing and studying these
sorts of topics. I tend to think of it as relating to
governments and viewpoints etc.
As a teacher, I focus on skills — probably to
the detriment of other areas! Getting students to
discuss their political beliefs is always an
interesting way in or out of a text. I try to choose
texts that challenge their beliefs and encourage
them to think about moral/ethical questions, such
as the current debates on (un)sustainability. All
your questions about them being ―lefties‖ etc and
oversimplifying texts are so interesting. Sometimes
we teach texts in such a ―dead‖ way that these
things happen and students don‘t get to see how
dynamic power and politics can be. Studying
engaging texts and giving students room to
disagree seem to generate more ―authentic‖
discussions and assessments.

never choose texts because of their overt political
messages. When I first began teaching, the
documentaries I chose were all about issues that I
felt were important for students to learn. Bowling
For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, This Divided State,
OutFoxed. What I discovered however, was that by
doing my actual job, I was teaching the students to
identify the bias and the actual manipulation that
goes on with the techniques of documentaries. As a
result, the students weren‘t just questioning the
techniques of the documentary maker — they were
questioning the morality of the documentary maker
and therefore rejecting wholesale the message I
wanted them to learn — the reason why I chose the
friggin film in the first place.
I think if we want to teach them a moral (which
is entirely apposite to political) lesson, then we teach
a text which we don‘t agree with — usually
something from the mainstream media or culture.
Then we teach them to deconstruct it, identify the
underlying message and then give them the
opportunity to dismiss it themselves.
Or to answer the question another way: Of
course we need to teach them politics in the
classroom, otherwise they‘ll just learn about it in the
streets. And if anyone‘s ever seen vox-pops for
anything, you know how dangerous that could be.

Clare Macfarlane: Teacher, Perth College and
ETA Council member
My Year 10 class responded to the question,
―What place does politics have in the secondary
English classroom?‖ with:
―I like it when teachers talk about their political
beliefs because they give other ways of thinking
about things around me.‖
―English teachers love to talk about politics and
the government, but not as much as S&E teachers.‖
―It‘s a bit off when teachers give one way of
thinking about topics and don‘t get you to explore
the options.‖
―Political debates in the classroom are great
because they help you to be clearer about what you
mean and supporting it.‖
―We always talk about religion, class and gender
– sometimes it would be nice to try and appreciate
the writing.‖
Some ideas:
This is a really hard issue to write about because
it feels like English teachers have been painted as
being too political for a long time — especially with
all the flack that the Courses of Study copped for its
―postmodern‖ sentiments. I think it‘s unavoidable to
bring your politics into the classroom, whether they
are ―invisible‖ because they fit with the institution or
not is another thing. One of my colleagues said it‘s
Professor Phillip Mead: Chair of Australian
Literature, based at UWA
One of the most important things in my
thinking about teaching, that I think of as
―political,‖ is the practice of how we induct,
introduce, train, inspire, students into the discipline
of literary studies, or English. This can‘t be done in
the same way at all levels, so it‘s always a
challenge to think about what‘s the most
appropriate ways, e.g., in first year, at Honours
level, and with postgraduates. And it involves
multiple facets: methodology, scholarship, reading
techniques, theory, institutional practices,
disciplinary history, sociology of knowledge. All
of which have to be differentiated, staged, made as
transparent as possible for the relevant level. The
political questions are: how best to introduce
students to a critical awareness of knowledge?
How to give students the ―professional‖ training
that will allow them the best access to literary
studies knowledge? In some ways, I steer away
from ―appreciation‖ and even ―love‖ of literature
— literature is the best catalyst for that — although
there are many things conveyed subliminally, nonexplicitly. The political thing, though, is how we
operate within, and with, the institutions of
knowledge, not how we display our love of
literature.
6
The Storymen
Linda Bishop
Head of English, Prendiville College
in consultation with Hannah Rachel Bell
―Storymen is a quite extraordinary book. It
explicates Mowaljarlai‘s cosmology vividly.
It has Winton ruminating publically on his
own creative processes and how they might
intersect, quite unconsciously, a Ngarinyin
mindset where his deeper preoccupations as a
spinner of yarns is concerned. The
development of the landscape and story
motifs is richly suggestive. And Bell‘s
Ngarinyin reading of Cloudstreet is
unprecedented
and astonishing.
In
sum, Storymen is a remarkable journey
through two mindscapes profoundly defined
by the land and the stories it leads them to
conjure.‖ (Rod Moran, writer and literary
editor of The West Australian)
deeply, the focus of Unit 3A ENG: Language and
Identity, and Unit 3B ENG: Language and Ideas. In
particular I was concerned to select texts that
afforded students the opportunity to make
connections and identify differences between text
types, cognisant of the Curriculum Council‘s
observation and comment, ―Text categories are
used for convenience only. Many texts fall into
more than one category. Students learn that the
boundaries between text categories are blurred and
subject to debate.‖ (Curriculum Council English
Syllabus p6) With this in mind, I wanted to find
appropriate texts that would maximise students‘
exposure to literature that would encourage them to
appreciate their own heritage and the heritage of
other cultures.
When planning my Stage Three English course I
wanted to create curriculum that reflected and really
engaged with the spirit of the Western Australian
Curriculum Council document: English: June
2009—for teaching 2010 (2008/15969[v11]. While
there are consistencies in this document with
previous curricula, I was challenged to address more
Unit 3A ENG asks that students study how
identities are expressed, constructed, represented
and critiqued through language in order to
―critically interpret the relationship between
particular uses of language and texts on the one
hand and conceptions of identity on the other.‖ I
decided to feature Indigenous ideas of ―identity‖
Linda Bishop has more than thirty years’ experience as an education practitioner and administrator. Her expertise includes
the specialist teaching of Literacy, English, English Literature and Drama across all sectors from Years 1 to 12. She is currently Head of English at Prendiville College in Perth, Western Australia, a position she held at other urban and rural colleges in the state.
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offered an accessible discourse relating to
traditional Indigenous views, language, visuals and
issues.
which necessarily took me to Indigenous uses (and
expression) of language. This proved more difficult
than I anticipated because when I began the hunt for
appropriate texts in 2009 there were some resources
listed that reflected Indigenous issues and
contemporary experiences, but there was a dearth of
available material that reflected the source of an
Indigenous concept of identity. Of course, the
recommended focus for Unit 3B ENG, Language
and Ideas, where students are asked to ―explore the
way language is used in relation to ideas‖ and how
this varies among particular fields, genres, and
discourses, knits very neatly with the Unit 3A ENG
focus. However, in light of my choice to incorporate
a strong Indigenous strand throughout my program, I
was again challenged to find authentic, informed
resources that satisfied cross-referenced curriculum
requirements.
In her book, Storymen, author Hannah Rachel
Bell records and explores the worlds of two artists
– one a storyteller from an ancient culture and law,
the other from the contemporary modern world of
literature – to unravel a journey of inquiry about
beliefs, story and culture on the same Australian
continent.
We meet Ngarinyin lawman Bungal (David)
Mowaljarlai OAM (c1926 – 97) who spent his life
as a bridge-builder between mainstream Australia
and the traditional peoples in the Wanjina lands of
the remote Kimberley region. A charismatic
speaker, innovator, artist and writer, he inspired
people worldwide with his wisdom and vision. He
was an informant and translator to many nonindigenous people and contributed to the world‘s
understanding of the indigenous.
I chose an Indigenous focus for personal and
professional reasons. The personal element is
because, while I was born and raised in Western
Australia, I never undertook Indigenous studies, I
know few Indigenous people and, as a consequence,
my knowledge and understanding of Indigenous
culture is close to abysmal. In this, I sadly represent
the rule rather than an exception. Yet it is the
foundation culture of my country. Like most aware
people, I have kept reasonably abreast of political
issues that impact on Indigenous people — Stolen
Generation, Land Rights, dysfunction in remote
communities — but these have not informed me on
the ideologies, philosophies or cosmologies within
Indigenous Australian populations, nor given me a
deep sense of their traditional relationships with
land. The professional element of my choice is the
belief that students are, not only similarly ignorant
of traditional Aboriginal culture, but that their
perceptions of Indigenous people are unfortunately
skewed and scarred by overwhelming negative
reportage and personal experience. I wanted to
redress this perception by exposing students to a
more positive, grass-roots experience, if it was
possible, but I needed access to inspiring and
informative textual support to achieve this aim. I
hoped to then choose other visual, narrative and oral
texts in which Indigenous identity formation, ideas
and issues could be explored.
During the last four years of his life he created
a body of paintings and sketches — the story of
Ngarinyin cosmology that shapes and informs
Hannah Rachel Bell‘s story. The photographs of
his brilliant and meaningful artwork, never before
seen in public, colourfully illustrate the book.
We also meet Tim Winton who has published
more than twenty books for adults and children and
has been awarded the Centenary Medal for services
to literature and the community. An activist for
environmental inclusiveness and respect, he sings a
song very familiar to indigenous peoples of the
world. He admired Mowaljarlai enormously,
considering him one of Australia‘s greatest
visionaries.
Bell asks the question: What do the artistic
works of acclaimed author Tim Winton and
eminent Ngarinyin lawman Bungal (David)
Mowaljarlai have in common. She writes that they
both reflect a sacred relationship with the natural
world, the biological imperative of a male rite of
passage, an emergent urban tribalism, and the
fundamental role of story in the transmission of
cultural knowledge.
In her four-decade friendship with Mowaljarlai
and the Ngarinyin people, Bell had to confront the
cultural assumptions that sculpted her way of
seeing. The journey was life changing. When she
returned to teaching in 2001, Tim Winton‘s novels
featured in the curriculum. She recognised an eerie
familiarity between his works and those of
Mowaljarlai, and thought Winton must have been
influenced by traditional elders to express such an
―indigenous‖ perspective. She wrote to him, and
the result is four years of correspondence and an
excavation of converging world views – exposed
In late 2009 I could not believe my good fortune
and became extremely excited when I came across a
new publication, Storymen, by Western Australian
writer Hannah Rachel Bell, (2009, Cambridge
University Press). How many of our teaching
decisions are serendipitous! I had already chosen
Tim Winton‘s Cloudstreet, Jack Davis‘ No Sugar
and the film The Tracker as the texts I would use to
teach the course and here was a book that not only
referred deeply and explicitly to Winton‘s work, it
also promised to be a mix of genre and conventions,
including letters between Winton and Bell, and
8
to speak to my students about her book and how
the ideas in the book were also reflected in
Cloudstreet. I was thrilled when she agreed to
come and speak to my students as I knew I could
never extract meaning from the book in the same
depth as the author could.
through personal memoir, letters, paintings and
conversations. Hannah Rachel Bell has woven the
stories of Mowaljarlai and Winton into her own
remarkable, personal memoir.
I was totally engrossed during my first reading
of the book and was not disappointed in what Bell
had promised, that ―through an exploration of the
oral records and painted works of Mowaljarlai and
the books and letters of celebrated writer Tim
Winton, Storymen charts an uncanny confluence in
the source, nature and character of story in two very
different cultures would be revealed.‖ My appetite
was already whetted so imagine my deep delight
when I began reading and my connection with the
book was strengthened when I discovered I had
taught Claude and Gideon, David Mowaljarlai‘s
sons, when I taught at Guildford Grammar. (You
would have thought with a surname like Mowaljarlai
I would have made the connection earlier!) Here was
another reason to use this wonderful resource — I
had a personal connection. I could not wait to share
this book and its ideas with my students but where
would I begin to unpack the complex ideas as there
was not any teaching material available to even get
me started?
As preparation for Hannah‘s visit students
were asked to read and take notes in their journal
on the following excerpts:
 Mowaljarlai‘s lingo talk of our relationship
with day and night (page 127)
 Traditional Ngarinyin and makeshift male
rite of passage (pages 182 – 193)
 Winton‘s makeshift male rites of passage in
his fiction (pages 203 – 212)
 Cloudstreet, a case study in confluences of
cultural stories (pages 218 – 232)
Students were provided with the booklet
―Creative Nonfiction‖ and asked to read, highlight
and annotate it. Students were also required to take
notes of any ideas they had, or issues they would
like to raise for general discussion with Miss Bell
and to have text references ready and questions
framed clearly. Questions were handed in to me a
couple of lessons before her visit to ensure that the
most widely canvassed issues and ideas were
raised in class.
What follows is how I went about exploring
with my students the ideas in Bell‘s book.
Students were asked to read the book at their
own pace by week six of term one and keep a
journal of their responses to the following:
I had commenced the year with Cloudstreet,
and following on with Storymen proved to be a
logical decision. The black man in the novel had
been problematic for students, and previously I
have had difficulty adequately explaining his
presence. Bell‘s exploration of Indigenous
spirituality gave the students a powerful and
meaningful insight into the existence of such
―spirit-men‖ that clarified the black man‘s role in
Winton‘s story.
Design elements:
Cover
Colour palette
Layout
Headers
Font types
Genres:
Photographs
Paintings
Lingo stories
Memoir
Correspondence
Analysis
A feature of Storymen is the frequent use of
Aboriginal English. Hannah has observed that
Indigenous people rarely have the opportunity to
tell their own story in their own way. As Bell says,
The challenge has been to combine
rigorous, objective, evidentiary,
academic
scholarship
with
authoritative, experiential, subjectively
derived yet intellectually processed
knowledge. I have opted to include the
Indigenous voice, expressed in its own
structure, style, syntax, and cadence, to
speak for itself. I then explicate
meaning from my own experience of
shared time, place and space with the
Ngarinyin, and the knowledge gained
from this long-term experience of living
in relationship.
This approach
represents a significant departure from
While this was happening I made contact with
Bell to see if she was receptive to helping me clarify
my thoughts about the ideas in her book and how I
might go about exploring these ideas with my
students. Not only was Hannah receptive, she was
overwhelmingly generous with her time and ideas
and provided a comprehensive booklet on creative
nonfiction. She and I worked through the booklet
and edited the subject matter, modified the questions
and generally collaborated on the content. At this
point Hannah mentioned she was coming to Perth at
about the time my class would be studying the text
and I enquired as to whether she would be prepared
9
conventional scholarly discourse; yet, by
exploring a living hunter gatherer society
through personal relationship and
experience, greater understanding of
these societies in the deep past can be
enhanced.
• The Indigenous “lingo” voice
Bell applies a range of voices and techniques
to penetrate some of the most pressing issues
confronting the global community today:
• Intercultural relations, including cultural
appropriation
(Journal of Archaeological Method and
Theory)
• Gender
When Hannah spoke to the class she read aloud
the passages that students had been asked to read
and take notes on. Reading and taking notes on the
stories was a dry, academic approach to stories that
demanded to be spoken, not read. It was with the
reading aloud in the ―Aboriginal lingo‖ that brought
the stories alive for the students; the selected
passages were not simply amusing parodies as
Aboriginal lingo is too often perceived. The students
took the stories seriously and discussed them
intelligently and with great sensitivity.
• Spirituality
• Identity and belonging
• Rites of passage
• Environment
• Neo tribalism and contemporary society
• Post modern education
• Beliefs, values and attitudes
This very accessible, often humorous, deeply
personal and insightful reflection on the
significance and place of story and storytellers in
contemporary society is a ground-breaking work in
the Fourth Genre and as Bell says:
This ended the first hour of the class. On the
next day the class was ready to break into small
groups to engage in thoughtful, meaningful
discussion with regards the Threads and Issues as
identified in the Creative Nonfiction booklet.
Stories root themselves in place, people
and events; they inspire and accuse,
reveal ancient wisdoms, universal truths
and hot gossip … In story we can dwell
in the sublime, slide through time, sense
the Divine…
Discussion was animated and intense and as
students had so much knowledge to draw from, their
discussion was erudite and informed. This took an
entire lesson and could have gone on for much
longer but, as always, the demands of getting
through material overtook the wisdom of allowing
students to fully explore their ideas — something I
will program for more completely in the future.
Apart from being an intriguing book that
touched me personally I found teaching from it a
really rewarding experience and know that it
touched the lives of my students. It achieved
everything, and more, that I had set out to achieve
in developing my curricula and I could not have
been happier with it as a text for exploring the
concepts, outcomes and content of the Stage Three
English Course.
After all of this reading, discussing and note
taking students were given the topics for their oral
presentation, and a topic for the analysis of a set of
images from the book, which was to be completed at
home. Finally, after all of this analysis and writing,
students completed an in-class assessment.
When students had completed their assessments
I was thrilled with the level of understanding they
revealed and the sensitivity of their responses; I
could only hope that they would have the
opportunity in the examination to reveal the depth of
their knowledge.
Storymen is a beautiful full colour production
which takes readers on a journey of enquiry with
Hannah Rachel Bell into the origins and depths of
story and storytelling. Storymen features:
• Self-reflection through
between Bell and Winton
correspondence
• Artworks and stories by Mowaljarlai
• Personal memoir and anecdote
• Critical analysis of Winton novels
10
Programme for
English 3A:
Language & Identity
Wendy Cody
Head of English, Padbury Senior High
ETAWA President
identities are expressed, constructed, represented
and analysed, through written and visual language.
We will examine the relationships between
people‘s sense of identity and the way in which
they use language and view themselves, other
people and the world in which they live. You will
learn to interpret the relationship between
particular uses of language and texts, on one hand,
and conceptions of identity, on the other. You will
develop oral, visual and written language skills by
learning to produce texts in a range of genres,
which explore, produce, challenge and/or subvert
conceptions of identity.
What is identity?
The focus for this unit is language and identity. We
will examine the representation of identities
associated with race, nationality and ethnicity and
intersections of these. Other examples of identity
which will not be covered in this unit, due to lack of
time, include age, gender, class, religion and
occupation. Identities are viewed as social constructs
that are very closely bound up with social, political
and linguistic contexts. They are the product or
result of how societies behave, think and believe.
Depending on the context, a society will construct
different perspectives of identities. For example, a
father in some cultures assumes a more ―serious‖
identity than in others. To some, the identity given to
a mother is the most important. Prior to the 1950s
the concept of a teenager did not exist, yet now there
is pronounced and widespread understanding of this
form of identity.
In this unit we will study the ways in which
Everyone has an identity, as obvious as this
sounds. We are all identifiable as one or more of
the following: a son, a daughter, a mother, a father,
a wife, an employee, an Australian and so on. We
have ceremonies which help to highlight who we
Wendy Cody has been teaching since the mid-seventies and is instrumental at her current school in curriculum
development, literacy planning and policy and ICT education. She has actively worked to support members in advocacy
roles, the most recent of which is her participation in consultative workshops in relation to the National Curriculum.
11
are, many occurring at significant stages of our lives,
such as christenings, engagements, weddings and
graduations. For example, the western tradition of
weddings contains many ways in which society
―pigeon holes‖ or labels the bride, portraying her as
a commodity which can be passed on from father to
groom. This is reflected in the ―giving her away‖
part of the ceremony, which many people still
practise – and not just in western society.
An identity is a kind of label by which society
comes to understand us and how we understand
ourselves. We assume our identity without thinking
about it really, although it is quite possible and
common for someone to deliberately take on a
certain identity. Many stories are founded on the
concept of ―mistaken identity,‖ which is a very
frequently used devise in comedy, for example, from
Shakespeare‘s plays to television sitcoms. People
―assume‖ or take on an identity when they wish to
hide, such as in crime stories, or on other occasions
when it suits them. A person who is bullied at school
may decide to take on an identity unlike their true
self, in order to put up a protective front.
The concept of disguise and assumed identity is
certainly not foreign to us. Indeed, the whole notion
of acting – on stage and on screen – relies on
assumed identity. An example of how the identity of
a fictional character changes within the one narrative
is from the film Avatar, whose main character is
Corporal Jake Sully. Jake assumes over the course of
the film the identity of the Na‘vi people, adopting
their values and beliefs. As he does so, he sheds his
former identity, not just literally when he is
―morphed‖ into his avatar, but psychologically, as he
grows beyond the ways of the humans. John Dunbar,
the main character in Dances With Wolves,
undergoes a very similar transformation of identity.
One of the worst things that can happen to us is
to lose our identity. There was a story not long ago
of a man who had an accident and suffered amnesia.
He was reunited with his family after a long process
to identify him without any help from him, and he is
now slowly learning all about who he is. It is almost
impossible to imagine what it would be like not to
know who you are. Perhaps this could be a way for
us to begin to understand what it must have been
like for children to be removed from their parents, or
for people to be captured and enslaved, their identity
stripped from them.
Categories of identity
is one who is admired – for good or bad reasons.
Fame and infamy
Our society reveres people who are famous and
infamous. (The word ―infamous‖ does not mean
―not famous,‖ as you would suppose; it means
renowned for a bad reason). Examples are Adolph
Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. Ned Kelly has
assumed folklore proportions of heroism – to some
people, and sadly, so too have Bin Laden and
Hitler, whom some people admire. Most recently,
Shane Warne‘s infamous off-pitch antics have
earned him a great deal of notoriety, for all the
wrong reasons, yet many are happy to lionise him
for his outstanding sporting prowess, particularly
now that he has retired from international cricket in
a hail of praise. The Federal Government even
engaged him to help repair the damage to our
international reputation, in the eyes of India,
following a series of violent incidents involving
Indian people in Melbourne. We can ―identify‖
with Warne and others who fall from grace in
similar ways and tend to be forgiving, at least in
most cases. The reaction to the case of Ben
Cousins wasn‘t quite as forgiving though. We are
capable of forgiving people for being human and
therefore fallible, particularly if they are good at
what they do, as is the case with Shane Warne.
Being identified because of your fallibility is a very
human trait. We seem to prefer people who are
capable of falling from grace, but of course it
depends on how far they fall, from what height and
on what it is that causes the fall.
Many stories about infamous characters
continue to be popular, which may seem
surprising, although we do admire qualities such as
bravery, arrogance and physical prowess. The
Pirates of the Caribbean's Captain Jack Sparrow is
just one of many fictional and actual pirates who
attract notoriety – fame for being bad. Society
seems to have quite a fascination for infamy,
villainy and notoriety, as ironic as this may be.
You should be able to recall other villains from
literature, film or elsewhere, fictional or actual.
Our society is so focused on the notion of
―being someone‖ that it has become quite easy to
be categorised as a ―nobody.‖ We hear this
expression often in the film and entertainment
industry when an ―unknown‖ person is cast as a
character. Some people are almost disappointed to
go to a film which does not list any ―stars‖ in its
billing. The Beatles sang a song called ―Nowhere
Man‖ and there have been films based on
anonymity – being anonymous without identity –
such as The Invisible Man. In schools there is an
unwritten code of conduct or behaviour, whereby
students earn status – they become a ―somebody‖
who has the respect of his peers. It is often quite
difficult to know what one has to do to earn this
kind of acclaim and to be identifiable in an
We identify people according to many
categories and criteria, such as those listed above.
Some others include wealth, health, body type and
intelligence. We identify people in many ways and
place great value on the notion of ―identity‖ or
celebrity. We even refer to people with a degree of
fame using the word ―identity‖ – e.g. ―a prominent
local identity.‖ A ―celebrated‖ identity or personality
12
feminine — and we are inclined to ascribe
stereotypical roles, behaviours and social
expectations to each sex. For instance, we expect a
woman to be ―feminine,‖ which means more than
just having two X chromosomes, but we have
come to believe that being feminine means certain
things — certain ways of behaving, dressing,
thinking and so on. The same goes for what we
believe about being masculine. Strictly speaking,
masculinity is ―maleness‖ — having one X and one
Y chromosome. However, being ―masculine‖ to
many people means being ―manly‖ – being ―a
man.‖ It means being muscular, heterosexual and
behaving in ―masculine‖ ways. Most people have
shared understandings of what this entails, often
without quite being able to articulate those
understandings.
Recently on television the construction of
homosexuality has undergone considerable
reinvention, with programs like Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy and Will and Grace. In each of these
programs homosexuality is celebrated. Gay rights
have assumed far greater significance over recent
years, in contrast to not that long ago, when to be
gay meant to be happy and cheerful. We are far
more tolerant now of homosexuality, although we
do tend to focus on stereotypes still, such as the
―butch‖ lesbian or the ―camp‖ gay. The extremely
popular comedy duo in Little Britain satirise not
only being homosexual, but some people‘s focus
on and preoccupation with the stereotype. Daffyd,
―the only gay in the village,‖ is an example, as is
Sebastian, aide to the Prime Minister in another
sketch. Ironically, but perhaps not so unexpectedly,
some viewers miss the point about the object of the
satire, and continue to have their own beliefs about
the very things that the satire is trying to have
corrected. It should be clear to readers and viewers
of satire that it is aiming to change something
about our attitudes and behaviour. Shows like Little
Britain aim to encourage viewers to be tolerant,
and choose to use satirical humour to do this.
Unfortunately, if the point of the satire is
misinterpreted, the aim is unsuccessful, and people
just find the text funny, not understanding the
point.
The way in which a writer represents people,
groups or behaviours provides a kind of social
commentary. Sketch comedy does this, but
virtually all texts provide commentary in one way
or another. Texts can be thought of as political
sites, because they communicate values. Politics is
all about people. The representations offered
should be understood as only the writer‘s version
of reality. Others should be possible if a different
ideology was operating in the text. Readers and
viewers may also adopt different ideological
perspectives and reading practices. We need to be
able to explore the ―discourse‖ — the language of
accepted way in a school context. Being different
can be a good and a bad thing.
Being anonymous is often seen as being ―safe.‖
An extension of anonymity can be seen in our love
of masks. People have been attending masquerade
balls for centuries. We enjoy donning masks which
change our identity and enable us to hide behind
them for a while. We also like stories about people
who change their identity, wearing mask, a cape, a
hood or some other form of disguise. You should be
able to think of a great many examples, such as The
Mask starting Jim Carrey, The Legend of Zorro and
the Batman comics, films and television series.
Many people like to ―make their mark‖ in the
world. Depending on our own context, we place
value on certain kinds of people. Currently, we seem
to admire coolness, although just what is defined as
―cool‖ changes often, depending on social contexts.
We identify whole generations and sub-generations
— Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y,
for example. The concept of the teenager is
comparatively recent, having ―begun‖ shortly after
World War II in Britain and then in the USA. It is
interesting to note that the Y Generation has now
been followed by a new one, but it doesn‘t yet have
an ―official‖ name. Some call it the Z Generation
and some call it the eGeneration or the iGeneration.
We like to put people in categories – to label and
classify them. We like identity. Those whom we
regard as heroes say a lot about the kind of society in
which we live. The outpourings over the death of
Steve Irwin are an example. If a less ―identifiable‖
conservationist with less obvious popularity were to
die he or she would most likely attract much less
grief and public emotion.
Texts and identity
In film, television, literature and non-fiction, we
come to understand identity through the use of
language — verbal language in written texts and
visual language in visual texts. In novels and other
fictional texts, characters are constructions. They are
shaped through their behaviour, their actions, their
ideas, thoughts and values, through what they say
and how they speak, what other characters feel and
say about them and through various other means.
They are constructed in terms of their identity, as
belonging to a particular race, ethnic group, gender,
occupation, class etc. Texts should not be read as a
―mirror‖ of their historical and social contexts, but
as constructions — as versions or interpretations. In
Victorian novels and Shakespearean plays, men
were revered and privileged by comparison to
women. The majority of fictional characters over the
centuries have been male, most often represented in
quite ―traditional‖ ways, echoing and reflecting
values and beliefs of various periods.
Gender is a social construction of identity. It
includes the notion of sexuality – as masculine or
13
or ―inferior.‖ Marginalisation happens when one or
more people are (often quite literally) pushed to the
margins or excluded. They are sidelined. If you
think about it, often when a person talks about
someone who is different, what they really mean to
say is that the different person is not as good in
some way. Human beings have a very deeply
rooted need to feel that they are better in at least
some way than someone else somewhere. This side
of our nature is not far beneath the surface, and has
been the focus of many stories, fiction and
nonfiction. Lord of the Flies by William Golding is
just one example. There are elements of this in
Avatar, as well, and to some degree in almost any
text which involves some kind of conflict. The
main character of The Kite Runner, Amir, spends a
significant part of his life believing he is better
than his childhood friend Hassan.
History is littered with examples of behaviour
and policies which illustrate our need to
differentiate. Some are examples of paternalism,
whereby the more dominant social group adopts a
―fatherly‖ role, making decisions for the ―others‖
in their ―best‖ interests, as a father would in a
paternal, fatherly way. The difference, though, is
that the more dominant, paternalistic group of
people would be depriving the other group of their
independence. Whereas the words ―paternal‖ and
―fatherly‖ have favourable connotations,
―paternalism‖ does not. It has come to be
associated with a kind of domineering,
condescending way of controlling, whereby those
in power do not permit those without power to
have any real say. Paternalistic governments make
out that they are acting for the good of the people,
but often the reverse is true. However, this differs
from complete segregation, which is another more
extreme form of differentiation.
An example of segregation at its most extreme
is Apartheid. In February 1990 President FW de
Klerk announced Nelson Mandela‘s release from
prison and began the slow dismantling of the
Apartheid system in South Africa, which had
begun officially in 1948, although racial
segregation had been occurring ever since whites
colonised the area. In 1992 a whites-only
referendum approved the reform process and in
1994 the first democratic elections were held in
South Africa, with people of all races able to vote.
A Government of National Unity was formed, with
Nelson Mandela as president and FW de Klerk and
Thabo Mbeki as deputy presidents.
It is important to realise that race is never
promoted in a neutral way in texts. No text is ever
completely neutral or unbiased and all texts are a
version of someone‘s ―reality.‖ This applies
equally to ―factual‖ texts such as history books.
The history of the Holocaust might read very
differently written by someone who endorsed the
a range of ways of thinking. The makers of a
program like Little Britain are clearly encouraging
us to explore ideologies quite separate from
mainstream ways of thinking about identity.
Depending on a viewer‘s own ideological
framework, he/she will make different meaning from
this TV series, not just to do with age, but as a result
of other factors such as upbringing, gender and race.
NB Television programs are NOT Stage 3 text types,
except as examples to refer to briefly. The above
examples are to help you understand the concepts
being explained here.
Race as an aspect of social construction enables
the visible characterises of a racial group to become
the basis for value judgements. When worth is given
to groups of people on the basis of culturally based
value judgements, the interests of some groups are
often promoted at the expense of others. This goes
part of the way towards explaining some peoples
preoccupation with skin colour. Because it is so
obviously visible, it forms a very clear basis on
which to make judgements about people with darker
skin, for example. Human beings have a shameful
history of promoting the interests of some groups
over others, often based purely on the colour of skin.
There are still some who believe that people with
dark skin are inferior to those with ―white‖ skin. In
some countries, such as India, the paler the skin the
higher up the ―caste‖ system they are. At the other
end of the scale, albinos have been represented very
negatively in texts such as The Da Vinci Code and
Tobias Whale, a character from a D C Comics
series.
As well as being a biological distinction or
classification — e.g. most Australians now belong to
the Caucasoid racial group and indigenous
Australians belong to the Australoid (now called
Australo-Melanesian) group — race is a social
construction. It is built around a set of cultural
beliefs, which may provide a means for society to
justify differences in treatment of different groups. It
was very firmly believed, by every colonising
power, that the ―native‖ people whom they invaded
(or ―civilised‖) needed to be treated differently. This
sort of thinking is how any aggressor justifies and
rationalises his or her behaviour. A dominant group
can regard itself as the norm against which others
who are in some way different, are measured. Thus,
a white explorer in a land peopled by blacks,
justifies to himself that he is in the right, as he is
bringing the trappings of white ―civilisation‖ to the
blacks, whom he regards with a mixture of contempt
and pity. (If he did not rationalise it in this way, he
most likely wouldn‘t be there in the first place).
Racism involves giving to a ―different‖ group
the status of ―other.‖ Tolerating difference is not a
strong point of humans in general. Those belonging
to the ―other‖ are often marginalised, so that
―difference‖ or ―otherness‖ come to mean ―lesser‖
14
can explore the ideology of racial superiority and
the issue of power operating in a text. We need to
consider the ―voices‖ of minorities within the
dominant culture, as well as writers whose
perspective is located within another culture and
which may offer an alternative value system.
Aboriginal identity
superior race theory of Hitler. There have been quite
different versions of events in Australia‘s history,
depending on who wrote them and when. All texts
are the product of selection and organisation of
information and ideas, and of the values and beliefs
of the people who produce them. All texts and all
readings of texts carry the values of the writer, the
reader and the societies in which the text is produced
and received (read, listened to or viewed).
T e x t s wh i c h ma y n o t n o t i c eab l y
―foreground‖ (promote or focus on) racial
relationships may nevertheless present the reader or
viewer with an image which carries and invites
value judgements. The dominant race may have total
narrative voice and the perceptions and positioning
of a second group may be ignored, giving a sense of
―normalcy‖ to the dominant view, privileging it. It
can be as simple as excluding people of a particular
group from the narrative, such that they become all
but invisible. Television has tended to overcompensate for this lately, with the almost ridiculous
token inclusion of certain character types. In many
reality TV shows there is a token older woman, a
token gay man, and variations of people who are
meant to show that the program is being inclusive.
Sometimes it is done quite blatantly but sometimes
naturally and more subtly. Some people have
interpreted Avatar as racist, claiming that the
victorious ones in the film are again the white
people, dominating the ―others.‖ This is quite ironic,
however, when you consider that the main character
Jake Sully is a white man who takes on the ways of
the Na‘vi and leads them in victory.
The same can happen in terms of representation
of gender, class, age and other forms of cultural and
social identity. And it can happen without our even
realising, unless we become critical thinkers, readers
and viewers, asking whose interests are promoted
and served in a text and whose are marginalised and
suppressed. A film like Rabbit Proof Fence makes it
very easy to work this out, but many other texts do
not. By exploring gaps and silences in a text we can
work out whose interests are being served.
More recently, there has been a marked increase
in literature and other texts which give voice to
previously ―silenced‖ groups. The Longest Memory
by Fred D‘Aguiar, even though it is about repression
through slavery in early 19th century America,
where the Africans are totally marginalised and
suppressed, gives voice to those people through its
main characters. This is partly brought about by the
context of the writer, who was born in London in
1960 to Guyanese parents (from Guyana in Africa).
His context, as well as that of the late 20th and early
21st century readers, produces quite different
readings from what would be the case had the writer
been contemporary to when the novel is set. Western
literature has traditionally been dominated by white,
male, European and Christian ideals. As readers we
According to official definition, the word
―aboriginal‖ is an adjective which describes people
with a prior or historical association with a land
and who maintain (at least in part) their distinct
traditions and association with the land and are
differentiated in some way from surrounding
populations and dominant nation-state culture and
governance. The word ―aborigine‖ originated from
Latin — ab origine — meaning ―from the origin or
beginning.‖ ―Aboriginal‖ is now quite often used
as a noun, like the word ―Aborigine.‖
Perhaps the most successful and well-known
film featuring Australian Aborigines is Rabbit
Proof Fence, which constructs the Aboriginal
characters sympathetically. North American
indigenous people – who used to be pejoratively
called ―Red Indians‖ but are now most often called
―Native Americans‖ – are featured in Kevin
Costner‘s film Dances With Wolves. This film
portrays two tribes – the relatively peaceful Sioux
and the comparatively savage Pawnee. Other wellknown tribes are the Apaches and the Mohicans.
Historically, film has tended to stereotype
Australian and American indigenous people. The
Western genre of film tended to characterise
Native Americans as ―savages‖ who deserved to be
wiped out by brave frontiersmen. Some early
twentieth century films portrayed Africans as
savages with low intelligence and as subjects of
ridicule and mirth.
15
The Jerk with a
Heartache:
Why studying songs is more important
than studying poetry
Leith Daniel
Kolbe Catholic College
―Writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis with the net down.‖ Robert Frost
―All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.‖ Walter Pater
Look at the Literature Syllabus text list and
under poetry you‘ll find something interesting.
Between a collection of Australian contemporary
poets and an anthology of poetry by Ted Kooser, the
Decalogue writers of the syllabus have placed the
anthology of lyrics by Paul Kelly.
I love Paul Kelly. I‘ve seen him live twice. I
have four of his albums (including the superlative
best of, Songs from the South) and I shed a tear
when Megan Washington sang ―Meet Me In The
Middle of the Sky‖ at the Triple J tribute concert.
And now I‘m told, since his songs have been
designated ―poetry,‖ I can, if I wanted to, teach his
lyrics in Literature classes.
I‘d rather eat my own toes.
Paul Kelly is not a poet. He‘s a songwriter, a
brilliant balladeer in the style of the classic bush
poets who used to be revered in Australia. But a
poet?
Look closely at his writing. His songs are
prose. Sure, they‘re chopped up like poetry, but
other than that… There‘s usually one metaphor
(usually repeated in the line that gives us the title
―Everything‘s Turning to White,‖ ―Beggar on the
Street of Love,‖ ―Deeper Water‖) and one simile or
cliché, (―His heart was singing like a low down
guitar,‖ ―And all around me felt all inside me‖
―Every dog will have its day‖). Occasionally you‘ll
get a song chock full of techniques but they‘re not
usually the ones he‘s known for.
The songs he is known for are the songs with
nothing much to talk about: ―To her Door,‖ ―From
Little Things Big Things Grow,‖ ―Everything‘s
Turning to White,‖ ―Dumb Things.‖ For the most
part, they‘re prose and cannot be talked about as
poems. Because they‘re songs. And songs have
music.
Songs aren‘t poetry in much the same way
Leith Daniel has reached his tenth year of teaching which would normally mean he'd be relaxing on a beach somewhere for
his long service leave. Unfortunately, after his fourth year of teaching at Newman Senior High School, he switched systems
to work at Aquinas College for two years, and then to Kolbe Catholic College.
16
that netball is not basketball. Sure there are elements
which are the same, and you can learn some skills in
one by playing the other, but you can‘t claim they‘re
the same.
Teaching songs without studying the music is
akin to teaching films by reading the scripts. What‘s
―From Little Things Big Things Grow‖ without the
burst of a choral, symphonic flourish at the end
emphasising and demonstrating its theme? What‘s
―Everything‘s Turning to White‖ without the
ambiguity of a male singing a female‘s role? What‘s
―How to Make Gravy‖ without the urgency and
desperation that it builds up to in the crescendo?
Ordinary prosaic short stories, that‘s what.
Songs have traditionally been treated by
English teachers in the same way that drug dealers
treat marijuana. You give it to your customers but
only until you get them relaxed enough to hit them
with the heavy stuff. Songs are a gateway text to the
harder stuff.
But even then, in English classes, teachers may
allow the student to listen once to the song, then give
students the lyrics of the song, entirely discounting
everything they‘ve just heard – despite the fact that
that‘s the way the song was meant to be experienced
in the first place.
My point is this: songs should not be used and
then simply discarded. Songs should be studied as a
text on their own. And trash the poems altogether.
Yes, I did say, ―trash the poems.‖
What is the subject English about? Truly, it‘s
never been fully defined, and when people try to,
they usually turn the discussion into a centrifugal
argument. People start preparing their idea for what
English should focus on, then start focussing on
what someone else said should be a focus, then they
argue with that focus as if it‘s the only thing their
opponent wants, then their opponents focus on their
focus, then they start arguing about the focus, both
forgetting to focus on what they agree on, until
they‘ve pushed each other away from any possible
agreement.
feelings and attitudes. It also talks about texts that
―form part of their daily…lives‖ and are ―produced
and disseminated by the mass media.‖ Songs fall
into this category.
It‘s about how to use language well, how to
be aware when it‘s being used against you, and
how it‘s been used notably in the past. It‘s this last
category that causes the most consternation: What
constitutes these notable uses? This was partly
addressed in a great article that appeared in a
previous Interpretations talking about the need for
poetry. The two main reasons were essentially:
1) It has the scope to provide (as Coleridge
once said) the best words in the best order.
However, a song does this as well. Perhaps
more so as the audience is meant to be
hearing it and not reading it, and so the
syntax, rhyme and rhythm are all predicated
on the ordering and sound of each individual
word.
2) It provides an intensive course on the
English language. Sure. But once again, a
decent song can do that.
In fact, for every reason provided in the
article, not one of them could not be addressed
with a decent song. The only reason that had me
slightly stumped was one that was not even
contained in her article. I met the author at the
National Conference in Hobart and asked her
straight out, ―Why poems and why not songs?‖
Initially she told me the same argument I addressed
before, about using songs to introduce poetry but
once she realised my revulsion at that idea, she ran
through the exact same reasons as her article until
she pointed out those two wonderful words:
―cultural capital.‖ This is the idea that some texts
are so important that they should be taught so all
the people in a certain culture can experience them.
Some would have us teach solely from the
canon, however that alienates far too many
students. The occasional dabble in the classics
should be required, but it should never be the focus
of high school English.1 And besides, if cultural
heritage is so important, why then when poetry is
taught in middle school years, the poems chosen
are usually so trite? They‘re often chosen to appeal
to the students and so any thought of ―cultural
enrichment‖ is effectively thrown out of the
window anyway.
Using this argument, poems should only ever
be taught if we‘re teaching the classics: ―Ode to a
Nightingale,‖ Shakespeare‘s sonnets, ―The Goblin
Market.‖ Anything else is entirely pointless.
And really. Few, if any, of the kids we teach
are going on to further careers or study which
requires any working knowledge of ―Paradise
Lost,‖ ―The Rape of the Lock‖ or ―Endymion‖ —
especially since we teach don‘t teach those
pictured: The last English CAC Meeting.
However, whatever else it is, English is not
about texts or text types. It‘s about the English
language.
The syllabus is all about students recognising
the English language‘s purpose, structure and many
uses. It talks about the communication of ideas,
17
classics, but instead the painfully-poor products of
twentieth century, would-be song writers.
After all, what is a late 20th Century poet but a
failed song writer? Is not the point of poetry to make
people see the ordinary in an extraordinary way? To
make the reader feel closer to the divine in the world
of mundane life? To possibly cast back the pall of
apathy from society‘s ignorant eyes and expose them
to the truth of the world‘s rampant injustice? Can‘t
songs do that?
The watered down poems usually taught by
teachers to students in English have less cultural
capital than my wallet. So why bother at all?
Poetry appears to be the basis of all word art.
Poetry begat drama, drama begat novels. But
according to an awesome crazed uni lecturer I once
had, poetry wasn‘t the original begatter at all. It was
song. Poetry was used as a sort of substitute for
music, still retaining all the aural qualities –
assonance and alliteration, rhyme and rhythm – that
we associate with much good poetry.
English should be and is about the use of
language in everyday life. Music is ubiquitous. Why
then are we not teaching it? As music?
In Stage 2, Year 11, I now teach song and
poetry separately. What‘s more, I teach poetry as a
starting point for teaching song, not the other way
around.
In Year 12, stage 2, we‘ve done away with
poetry entirely and now assign the students a mix
CD/playlist task (which follows).
This is not pandering. The tasks are still
demanding, they cover required outcomes and the
students will whine about the work. But it‘s still
teaching the essential concepts of English through a
text familiar and engaging to students. Teachers do
not co-opt students‘ culture but have now taken it
upon themselves to refine (or in some cases,
completely change) the taste of their students by
exposing the students to actual, decent music.
So, if you‘re interested, what follows is a
couple of assignments, a couple of handouts and a
couple of songwriters that should be part of any
canon when teaching music.
Jeff Buckley
I‘ve used the music and life of Jeff Buckley as
a parallel of John Keats‘ life. It‘s a short, tragic life,
a life defined by his non-relationship with his
father, 60s folk-singer, Tim Buckley. He‘s probably
best known for his version of Leonard Cohen‘s
―Hallelujah.‖ Yet his own songs are filled with
poetry that tells of his pain and disillusionment with
life. Apparently. And yet his three-and-a-half octave
voice adds a level of pain and misery that is only
usually achieved by reflecting on comedian Carl
Barron‘s success.
―Grace‖ from the album Grace
18
This is the title track of his debut album. It,
like ―Ode to a Nightingale,‖ tells of the author‘s
―love with death.‖ Life is compared to ―Wait[ing]
in the fire‖ and he‘s ―not afraid to die.‖ The
mellow feeling of the performance in the opening
is entirely counteracted by the intensity of the
crescendo built up to at the end.
―Dream Brother‖ from the album Grace
―Dream Brother‖ is a song with a beautiful
dream-like sound, that flows and shifts like a wind
through an open bedroom window on a warm
night. The opening seems to have someone
strumming a steel guitar who‘s just discovered
what a bottleneck can do, but then a more
controlled version kicks in, that leads to the
mellow, almost monotonous, melancholic voice of
Buckley which opens the song. More than this
though, it‘s a great text for showing the worth of
context in unlocking a song. It seems a little
impenetrable, opening as it does with the image of
a ―dark angel… shuffling in/…with his black
feathered wings unfurled.‖ Knowing however, that
his father, Tim Buckley, abandoned Jeff‘s mother
when she was pregnant and never really had much
to do with him later, and one of Buckley‘s friends
was considering leaving his wife for another
woman opens up the chorus‘ lines:
Don’t be like the one who made me so old.
Don’t be like the one who left behind his
name,
Coz they’re waiting for you, like I waited for
mine,
And nobody ever came.
gives the song so much more poignancy.
―Mojo Pin‖ from the album Grace
This is the opening song from Grace, and its
slow beginning sets the tone for the rest of the
album. It opens quietly, then steadily over the
course of the next six minutes builds to a frenzy
about his ―black beauty.‖ On the other hand, it
could be about drugs. ―Mojo Pin‖ being interpreted
as ―Magic Needle,‖ the ―wild horses flow‖ could
be about heroin (―horse‖ being a nickname for
heroin), and the general desperation of this tone as
the addiction kicks in could well be as reflective of
the desperation of an addict as Faith No More‘s
―The Real Thing.‖
―Morning Theft‖ from the album Sketches for
My Sweetheart, the Drunk
And then, when you think things in Buckley‘s
life can‘t get more depressing, a five year old
orphan has to strangle a bag full of kittens to feed
her three year old sister. So to speak. Buckley
drowns whilst in the middle of recording his
second album; the cuts are released as Sketches for
My Sweetheart, the Drunk. On the album, we find
the most depressing song in the history of the
―Lover, You Should Have Come Over‖ from
the album Grace
This is an extremely long song that follows
Buckley‘s formula of slow to loud structure. Hell,
it even begins with a funeral dirge and a reference
to funeral mourners in the rain, just to really heap
on the melancholy. What really lifts this song,
however, is the bridge near the end – a desperate
cry, trying to convince himself that he still has a
chance with this woman he let slip through his
fingers. In this quatrain there‘s an entire lesson in
poetic techniques:
It's never over, my kingdom for a kiss
upon her shoulder;
universe, ―Morning Theft.‖ Beautifully ambiguous
(is it an elegy or just a song expressing regret over a
stuffed-up relationship?) the pain that comes through
the speakers is palpable. Most of the song is just his
voice and an acoustic guitar. But to this day I still
get a shiver down my spine when he belts out the
penultimate line: ―I miss my beautiful friend.‖
―Forget Her‖ from the album Grace (The
Legacy Edition)
This is the closest Buckley came to a
mainstream, V, C, V, C, B, C song. And yet, he
removed it at the last minute from his debut; it took
ten years and the release of the ―Legacy edition‖ for
it to come to light.
Song Terms
The following techniques are designed to give the students the jargon to discuss the performance aspects of a song.
Term:
Definition:
Effect
Structure
How the song is separated into choruses,
verses and bridge. The typical pop structure is verse/chorus/ verse/chorus/
Creates familiarity or makes certain sections
stand out.
Verse
Stanzas; tend to provide more detail lyri-
This is where the meaning is built.
Chorus
A repeated stanza that holds the main
theme of the song; often it is more literal
and shorter than the verse.
Used to hook the listener in as this is usually the
part that a listener first hears and remembers. It’s
often simple, catchy and a higher volume.
Bridge
A verse that is usually of a different
tempo and/or pitch that breaks up the
Breaks up a song to avoid repetitiveness of the
song’s structure.
Tempo
The speed at which a song is played.
The tempo at which a song is played should
match the theme of the song. A shifting tempo
Pitch
How high or low a song is played.
The instruments or the singer’s voice can be at
different pitches. Very low pitches usually implies
Crescendo
An effect applied to a section of the song,
usually the end, where the pitch, tempo
and delivery of the lyrics increase to a
climax.
Often this is a repeated chorus, but the new delivery gives it a new sense of urgency.
Rhythm
The regular beats in a line of poetry.
Rhythm makes the poem flow. It contributes to
focusing the audience’s attention.
Sampling
When a section of another song is used in This is the aural equivalent of allusions.
Genre
Different genres have different implications.
19
If the singer doesn’t usually sing in a particular
genre, when they do, it often implies some extra
meaning. Heavy metal style means rage; hip hop
means “the street”; country means depression,
regret and uncomfortable feelings about one’s
the basis of comprehension tasks; all three extracts
speak of the power of music and the nature of mix
tapes.
Then I assign the actual task. The use of the
mix tape is not that important: it‘s essentially a
MacGuffin. However, we of course don‘t tell them
that. I encourage the students to put some thought
into it: have a clever or creative theme, make the
songs flow in an order, etc. Our job isn‘t really to
assess the mix tape themselves, but their analysis
of them. It doesn‘t have to be in essay form, though
it does have to be structured. I would recommend a
top-down approach (album review, thumbnail
reviews, song analysis) or top-up works as well.
Students create a „mix-tape‟ on a 80
minute cd of songs pertaining to a particular
theme. Accompanying this must be a 1,000 word
review. This review will include thumbnail
reviews of most of the songs, detailed
examinations of two of the songs, and a review
of the cd as a whole.
To complete this task you will need to:
It's never over, all my riches for her
smiles when I slept so soft against her;
It's never over, all my blood for the
sweetness of her laughter;
It's never over, she's the tear that hangs
inside my soul forever;
There‘s repetition, anaphora, rhyme,
alliteration, assonance, hyperbole, metonymy,
diction and connotation, symbolism, metaphor, and
allusion.
Mix Tape/CD/Playlist task 2
This task came basically from my love of two
books: the novel High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and
the beautiful expository text, Love is a Mix Tape by
Rob Sheffield. Both emphasise the importance of
music and the thought that goes into the true mix
tape (or cd or playlist, depending on your
generation).
You should begin with a week and a bit of
poetry analysis using song. Since the focus is indeed
on song, rather than poetry and song, you should
really make mention of how the music affects the
songs themselves.
For example, later in this tract you‘ll find a
song called ―The Diner‖ by Ani DiFranco. You can
talk about how a diner‘s ambient noise has been
used as instruments; you can talk about how the last
stanza has her voice modified so it sounds as if she‘s
talking on a phone; better yet, in the third stanza she
talks about the two cups of coffee on her table and
how the ―steam is writhing in one stream‖ and uses
her voice to imitate the action of the steam of two
cups of coffee writhing and twirling into the air.
Alternatively you can talk about the
performance of a song will change the meaning of it.
There are two main versions of ―Respect‖: the first
is Otis Redding‘s original; the second is the more
famous Aretha Franklin version. The first is the
standard blues/r&b borderline abusive husband
demand of a woman‘s respect for the man who
brings home the cash. The second, sung with a lot
more passion by a woman only two years later,
turned it into a feminist anthem using essentially the
same words.
The same could be done with ―Hurt,‖ by Nine
Inch Nails (NIN), and then Johnny Cash. Both are
accessible on Youtube. The NIN song is the original
and is an introspective whinge tune about regret over
drug use. Johnny Cash‘s is about the time he wasted
when he could have spent it with his wife. There‘s
only one word changed in the entire song, but the
meanings are quite different due to the performance
of both. Their film clips could also be used as part of
a visual task.
I usually follow this with a couple of extracts
from High Fidelity, Love is a Mix Tape and
Hornby‘s expository text, 31 Songs and use them as

Study a variety of songs.

Study a variety of reviews and extracts
from longer texts about songs, music and
compilations.

Choose and annotate a series of songs.

Compose a 1,000 review of the songs and
the cd.
To help the students out further I gave an
example of my cd, entitled Happy Happy Joy Joy.
It opened with:
Happy Happy Joy Joy is an album
designed to address criticism that no good
music can be happy – and, in particular,
the accusation that none of my music is
anything less than suicidal. As a result, the
songs have been chosen on the basis of
primarily the sound, with a secondary
consideration for the joy that’s expressed
through the lyrics. It does appear that
there is more creativity in depressing
music — obviously there are more
metaphors to describe pain and loneliness
than there are to describe joy — or maybe
when you’re happy you don’t have the time
nor inclination to sit down and be
introspective and come up with a brand
new way of describing your overwhelming
melancholy.
This could also explain why the
happy songs are filled with many more
nonsense words than depressing songs:
even Jeff Buckley couldn’t deliver “bam,
thwok, wokka wokka” in a depressing way
manner.
20
plates, a coffee percolator, cash register – are used
as instruments, but the crowning moment of
awesome comes when DiFranco sings about the
two coffees she has in front of her and comes to the
line: ―and the stream is writhing in one stream.‖
She holds the word ―stream‖ dipping her voice up,
down and seemingly sideways at one point to
perfectly mimic the action of the stream of the two
cups.
―Untouchable Face‖ from the album Dilate
See Interpretations volume 41.
―I Loved You (So What)‖ from the album
Living in Clip
One of my favourites, mainly due to the
lyrics. The imagery in this is incredible. It‘s an
atypical heartbreak song; atypical in the fact that it
completely avoids all clichés one would normally
expect in a heartbreak song. Inner turmoil is
expressed as, ―You‘re turned up to top volume/but
you‘re sitting there in pause‖; self-destruction is
―the mathematics of regret:/it takes two beers to
remember why/and five to forget.‖; the emptiness
of joy is described as ―when inspiration finally hits
you,/it barely even breaks your fall.‖
―Done Wrong‖ from the album Dilate
A great song that I use to demonstrate the
perfect amalgam of music and lyrics, ―Done
Wrong‖ is probably my favourite DiFranco tune of
all. The opening, ―The wind is ruthless, and the
trees shake angry fingers at the sky,‖ is one of my
favourite pieces of setting, personification, the
pathetic fallacy and symbolism, regardless of text
form. DiFranco demonstrates her skill with
language with her line: ―I‘m at the end of my little
rope/And I‘m swinging back and forth about you.‖
Either line apart, is a cliché. But placed together as
they have been, it implies an almost suicidal wish
in her depression that is never really implied by the
clichés on their own. These two lines I often use as
evidence in my arguments as to the poetic worth of
these songs. After all, isn‘t a poet‘s skill in making
us see ordinary language in a whole new way?
Taking two clichés and placing them in such a
deceptively simple way that we receive a whole
new meaning has to be evidence of a poet‘s skill.
The music in this song, however, transcends it
from a superlative poem into something resembling
art. The words ―done wrong‖ are grammatically
incorrect but have connotations of country music
wailing. The music in the song does this as well. A
slide steel guitar is played throughout, and she
effects the failing wailing of a country singer à la
Tammy Wynette at times. The delivery of this song
in this way emphasises the pain and hurt about
being screwed over time and time again, and the
fact it sounds like a country song, without actually
being a country song makes it far more effective
than if it was a country song.
These ―thumbnail‖ reviews went for about 500
words, then I finished with an in-depth analysis of
one particular song (―Peaches and Cream‖ by John
Butler Trio).
The task worked well, as the effort put into the
collection of songs demanded a intensity of the
Stage 2 students they wouldn‘t normally assign to a
task of an unfamiliar text type; whilst they were
desperately looking for any kind of meaning in the
vomitous, corporate-infected tripe they call music,
they applied the knowledge of music techniques
themselves.
The Essay
Using a myClasses page or thumbdrives
(supplied by the kids of course) they listen to and
study a number of songs that have been covered.
The songs I use are: ―Maggie‘s Farm‖ (Bob Dylan
and Rage Against the Machine), ―Respect‖ (Otis
Redding and Aretha Franklin), ―Across the
Universe‖ (Beatles and Fiona Apple), ―Blue
Monday‖ (New Order and Orgy),
―Hallelujah‖ (Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley),
―Hurt‖ (Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash), ―Mad
World‖ (Tears for Fears and Gary Jules), ―My
Way‖ (Frank Sinatra and Sid Vicious) and ―What a
Wonderful World‖ (Louis Armstrong and Joey
Ramone). Using notes taken on whichever pair they
wish, students will plan and write an essay response
to the following question:
The performance and context of a song is
just as important for making meaning as
the poetic devices in the lyrics. How true
is this statement in relation to songs you
have studied?
The point of the students choosing covers is to
have them demonstrate the point of this article —
that the delivery of a song changes its meaning.
―Maggie‘s Farm‖ by Bob Dylan is about the state of
folk music at the time he wrote it. Rage Against the
Machine‘s heavy metal delivery, harsh drum beats
and guitars imitating the sirens of emergency
vehicles can not possibly be argued about being the
same thing. Similarly, how can Louis Armstrong and
Joey Ramone be singing the same song despite the
lyrics being identical?
Ani DiFranco
I‘ve mentioned previously that I find one side
effect of my job is to constantly pimp for Ani
DiFranco. A true poet, she uses language like
Warney uses a cricket ball. Her songs are full of
poetic techniques that would impress Christina
Rossetti. And yet, the words on their own aren‘t
nearly as powerful as her delivery makes them.
“The Diner” from the album Out of Range
I usually begin with this, even though lyrically
it‘s one of her weaker songs. It‘s one of my top 3
favourite stalking songs, mainly due to the music.
Background noises – chatting, cutlery dropping onto
21
subject has always been that there is no set
content and so we should never fall into the
false comfort of ―never reinventing the wheel.‖
We should always be aware of the way
language is used in the students‘ own world,
instead of exposing them to something that we
know most will never get anything out of.
All without teaching them poems by the
guy who wrote Cats.
―You Had Time‖ from the album Out of
Range
There is nothing I can write here that will
come close to the peerless quality of Nick
Hornby‘s entry on this in 31 Songs.
―School Night‖ from the album reckoning
This is a song that took me a while to
―get.‖ But somehow, one day, it just clicked.
―School Night‖ is about someone who has to
make a decision about who to choose: two
people she both loves, but one of whom she‘s
already in a relationship with. I could just
reprint the lyrics wholesale here; it perfectly
demonstrates the idea of some crusty old white
guy I read about at uni who said to paraphrase a
work of art is to kill it. But I have to share this:
―What kind of scale/compares the weight of two
beauties:/The gravity of duty/Or the ground
speed of joy?/Tell me what kind of gauge/can
quantify elation?/What kind of equation/Could I
possibly employ?‖
What truly got me in this song was the
delivery of a single half-line. At the end of the
first ―chorus‖:
You’ll never know, dear
Just how much I loved you.
You’ll probably think this was
Just my big excuse.
But I stand committed
To a love that came before you
And the fact that I adore you
Is just one of my truths.
DiFranco gasps out the half-line: ―and so
I...‖ and then it dies out, as if she wants to say
what‘s to follow, but realises she can‘t bring her
to say it out loud; the pain, the embarrassment,
the immorality, the unfairness of everything she
wants to say, she‘ll never be able to live with.
And yet the second time she sings the chorus, it
all comes tumbling out. The song goes from a
perfectly-weighted song, to just line after line
with little regard for pause or pitch or rhythm as
her voice gets higher and more pained and the
words come streaming out in a cathartic release
of all her pent up previously controlled emotion
in a tumbling flood of pain and love and regret
and emptiness that she can no longer put a leash
around as it drowns the person she sings to. And
then it dies out as she realises just the extent of
her loss.
And so I...
As with pretty much all my writing, steal
what you need, ignore what you don‘t and
openly scoff at that which you disagree with.
My approach to English has always been
one of experimentation, arming and
evangelisation. The joy and beauty of our
1. ―English‖ not ―Literature.‖ Let me make that clear. I‘m
a supporter of the teaching of the subject ―Literature.‖
―English‖ the subject, is a different subject.
2. Such is the collaborative nature of teaching, I know my
colleagues Lisa Moller and Rose Mascaro both had
something to do with the development of this task, but I
don‘t know exactly what. The good bits are theirs I‘m
guessing.
22
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23
Policy is not a dirty word ...
unless it is preceded by
“performance pay”
Katie Fielding
Head of English, St Norbet College
Teachers are often criticised, from outsiders and
within the ranks alike, for their seeming dislike of
any form of change. However, most would point to a
recent history of change for change‘s sake and largescale curriculum policy shift with little support or
understanding of teachers‘ work as reasons for this
inherent mistrust of anything new. Others would
suggest that we aren‘t just whingers, that we are
happy to improve our practice and curriculum —
when and if it is needed. Still others point to political
pressures and desirable outcomes which, along with
the balance of power, seem to change every few
years as the source of our fatigue with educational
policy shifts. Whatever the reason, the Labor
government‘s proposed performance pay policy
seems unlikely to make a smooth entrance into
schools. But should it be so poorly received? Or are
we rushing to judgement, potentially squandering an
opportunity to both improve teaching practice in
Australia and to ensure that good teachers are
rewarded for their hard work?
Performance Pay Policy - The Background
At the 21st meeting of the Ministerial Council
on Education, Employment, Training and Youth
Affairs (MCEETYA) in 2007, the then federal
minister for Education, Julie Bishop, tabled a
proposed policy that would see teachers in
Australia rewarded with increased pay for their
outstanding performance. Bishop‘s background in
business has clearly had a large influence on her
policy decisions: Educated in South Australia,
Bishop achieved her Bachelor of Law from
Adelaide University in 1978 and practiced Law for
16 years. In 1996 she attended Harvard Business
School in Boston, furthering her education and
qualifications in Business and Management. In
1998 she was elected to the House of
Representatives as the Member for Curtin. Until
Katie Fielding has been teaching English and Literature for six years and is Head of the English Learning Area at St
Norbert College. She is currently writing her Masters (Education) dissertation, focussing on 1:1 laptop programs in
schools.
24
ways the Australian education system relies on
people deciding to become teachers as part of a
vocational calling, a desire to work with children
for the ―greater good.‖ As long ago as 2000,
Sharon Burrow, then Federal President of the
Australian Education Union, speculated that by
2004 the education system could be short of 35%
of the workforce needed to staff schools,
particularly in specialist disciplines. (The World
Today, 31/1/2000) In this interview, Burrow cited
stress, lack of community support and, importantly,
lack of appropriate remuneration for their hard
work as reasons that the field of teaching has fallen
into such dire straits. Julie Bishop's performance
pay policy was born, at least in part, out of a desire
to attract and retain quality teachers in our
education system. Bishop commented to the
National Press Club on February 7, 2007 that ―We
must move beyond the low salaries and artificial
salary caps supported by education unions in their
one-size fits all, lowest common denominator
mentality.‖ Currently, teachers‘ salaries are based
on seniority rather than performance and skills.
This situation in Bishop‘s and my own view is not
consistent with other industries. One can certainly
see why Bishop would consider the current system
of remuneration of teachers to be anomalous given
her background in Business and Law. At an
international seminar in 2007 on Teaching Policy
to Improve Student Learning, convened by the
Aspen Institute, it was apparent that of the
represented countries Australian teachers‘ salaries
plateau very quickly and at a relatively low figure
comparatively (ACER, 2007). In fact, by 9 years
after graduation an Australian teacher has reached
the top end of the standard pay scale. In the report
summarising the conference proceedings, the
speaker noted that, ―Creating a stronger connection
between individual teacher contributions and what
they are paid lies at the heart of redesigning
teaching for the next generation.‖ (Olsen, p5)
her appointment to the position of Minister for
Education, Science and Training under the Howard
government in January 2006, Bishop had no
qualifications in the field of education. The common
occurrence for ministers to be allocated portfolios
for which they have no experience or expertise is in
my opinion a smear on our political system.
However, it does raise the question of what
outcomes and focus party leaders are interested in
when giving out portfolios. Certainly Bishop‘s
business and legal background appears to have
influenced the creation of the proposed performance
pay policy, one based on efficiency and
accountability.
As with much policy that dictates significant
change to a system that has long been in place,
Bishop‘s proposal met with strong opposition and
general outrage within the ranks of teachers. Perhaps
rightly so: worries of colleagues competing
viciously against each other for monetary rewards
were voiced by various teacher unions, as were
concerns as to who would be assessing teachers‘
performance. Though it was met with harsh
criticism, Bishop‘s plan to implement a performance
-based reward system was based on pressing needs
in Australia: a desire to improve student outcomes to
raise our status within the OECD, and the necessity
of addressing the ever-increasing teacher shortage.
Furthermore, though Bishop is credited with, or
perhaps blamed for, suggesting the possibility of a
performance-based system of pay, as early as 2003
the Department for Education, Science and Training
(DEST) conducted extensive national research
before publishing a review of teaching and teacher
education which included an ―agenda for action,‖
outlining the need to revitalise the teaching
profession. (DEST, 2003) In order to do this, the
report recommended that, among other things,
―recognition, including remuneration, for
accomplished teachers who perform at advanced
professional standards and work levels should be
increased significantly‖ (Ingvarson et at, p29).
A system of performance-related pay would
seem to address Olsen‘s observations. Certainly
there is an element of performance pay embedded
in our current system across Australian states.
Teachers‘ salaries are directly influenced by their
number of years experience. Additionally,
advancing upwards through the incremental pay
scale supposedly depends on annual performance
reviews carried out by the school‘s principal.
However, as observed in the 2007 Australian
Council for Educational Research (ACER) study,
commissioned by Julie Bishop in the lead up to her
presentation to MCEETYA, in many instances it
seems that regardless of performance or attainment
of further skills and professional knowledge,
teachers are awarded their annual pay rise,
undermining the system as it stands. Currently
schools are, through their inaction, continuing to
Why the need?
Australia is currently suffering from what has
been described as a teacher shortage crisis. In the
short term, the half-year cohort alleviates problems
associated with a diminishing teacher supply and the
media would have us believe that we in fact have a
large over-supply of teachers; however, during the
period of 2012 to 2017 the trend will be towards a
major shortfall in teachers across both primary and
secondary schools. The shortage will likely be felt
most acutely in 2015 when secondary schools return
to full cohorts across all year groups. (DEST, 2009)
Additionally, for many years it has been recognised
that the teaching profession is simply not attractive,
in large part due to the fact that prospects in terms of
salary and recognition are not positive. In many
25
marks to outcomes to satisfy reporting
requirements, while unofficially instructing parents
to ignore the levels and bands their children have
received.
support substandard and mediocre teaching. Should
we really be criticising a proposed system that aims
to ensure that excellence is rewarded ?
But teachers are not only whingers, we‘re cynics
too, and I wonder whether this system could truly
sort out the problems our profession faces. The
principles may be sound but how would it actually
work?
One wonders whether a similar situation would
arise should Bishop‘s proposal of linking teacher
pay to increasing students‘ results came to fruition.
Would departments and individuals simply inflate
their students‘ results in order to meet the criteria
required to be granted a bonus? In his 2007 letter to
the editor of Professional Educator, titled
―Performance-Based Pay? No Way,‖ Ian
Broinowski humourously outlines the likely
scenario should pay related to students‘ results
become policy. “There are some tricks...make
sure you get the bright class. Do whatever it
takes: go to the endless strategic and policymaking meetings, make coffee for the principal
every day, sleep with whomever you have to, but
be sure you don‟t get the “F Troop kids.”” (p5)
He goes on to suggest that students would never be
challenged beyond their ability and that tests
should ―rarely go beyond the two times table‖ (p5)
as the auditors will only be looking at results, not
content. In fairness, Bishop‘s proposal is not as
simplistic as Broinowski suggests. The Minister‘s
office, when questioned about the idea that
teachers of low-achieving students, whose work is
often more challenging than that of those with
more advanced students, would not be able to
access higher salaries as their pupils would not be
able to demonstrate increased results, suggested the
policy was more about recognising ―value added.‖
That is, students‘ improvement over time was to be
measured, rather than simply achieving particular
arbitrary (one suspects) standards. However, the
question still stands as to whether or not ―value
adding‖ can even be measured or demonstrated
effectively (Cronin, 2007).
Bishop‟s proposal
Julie Bishop‘s performance pay policy, which
she had hoped would be in its trial stage by 2008,
proposed that teachers would be paid a bonus on top
of their base salary as a reward for increasing
student results. It also suggested that a further
method of assessing whether or not teachers should
qualify for this additional pay could be feedback
from stakeholders such as administrators, students
and parents. Bishop wielded the ugly weapon of
Commonwealth funding on February 8 2007,
indicating that she was prepared to use this to force
states to introduce performance pay schemes. Bishop
stated, ―As always, the leverage the Federal
Government has is the funding, but first I want to
make sure that the states are given every
opportunity...to work with me to introduce these
much-needed changes‖ (Sydney Morning Herald,
February 8 2007). It is an unfortunate habit of the
Federal Government to continue to use school
funding as a motivational tool; this kind of coercive
power rarely results in those lower in the hierarchy,
who are forced by necessity to comply, being
content and productive, and often ends in passive,
but forceful resistance to the policy itself as well as
any follow-on scenarios.
Basing a professional‘s pay principally on
increasing their students‘ results is fraught with
difficulty. Firstly, who would set the amount which
students must have improved for their teacher to be
paid a bonus? In Western Australia, teachers have
already grappled with the difficulty of State-imposed
measures of grading linked to Outcomes and we‘re
set to have to go through the pain of it all again
when the Australian Curriculum is introduced and
we are required to grade students against nationwide benchmarks. Anecdotal evidence suggests that
the standards against which students are measured,
both now and in our Australian Curriculum-driven
future, given to schools by the State government, are
grossly inflated, making it near-impossible for a
Year 9 student to achieve A grades, despite
demonstrating what any reasonable teacher would
describe as excellent results. In response, many
departments do, and are likely to, simply inflate
student results in order to ensure that their students
achieve the grades that their teacher‘s years of
experience tell them they deserve. Another popular
response currently is to arbitrarily link grades and
Perhaps one of the most contested points of
Bishop‘s proposal was her indication of the
possibility for the various stakeholders in education
being part of the assessment process upon which
teachers‘ pay would be determined. She suggested
that, along with the obvious participation of
members of the school executive such as Principals
and Deputy Principals, groups such as students,
parents and other teachers should take part in
assessing the individual teacher. It cannot be
denied that students, parents and other community
members have a vested interest in the quality of
teaching that is available at a school. However, this
suggestion instilled fear into the very hearts of
many teachers. Would it mean having to ―suck up‖
to pupils, ensuring that a teacher was well-liked by
the student body so as to receive a favourable
report when the appropriate time came, to the
detriment of fair and honest teaching? Would it
pose problems in dealing with parents who may
26
direction to placing appropriate and able staff in
particular schools, in practice it has resulted in
hugely increased workloads for administrators,
ridiculously officious selection criteria that are near
impossible for new graduates to succeed at writing,
and a lack of desire for anyone to go through the
process at all. As with this example, Bishop‘s
performance pay policy appears to be empowering
local sites and enabling teachers to access higher
salaries as a reward for quality teaching. However,
the true power lies at the Federal Government level
as it is they who dictate the way the policy is to be
implemented, using funding as their tool. Using
such coercive tactics as withholding funding is
counterproductive and results in dissent far more
often that it does in contentment. Interestingly, the
then treasurer Peter Costello ruled out any
additional funding for the policy, raising the
question of whether or not teachers could
conceivably be paid less than they do currently
(Della Bosca, 2007). Should this be the case,
thousands of teachers who are already vociferous
in their call for higher salaries will no doubt be
incensed.
question a teacher‘s judgements or methods? Even
the possibility of school executive being a part of the
process raises questions. Ingvarson, Kleinhenz and
Wilkinson suggest in their ACER (2007) report that
this situation could easily result in cronyism and
favouritism. Even if this was not the case in reality,
members of school executive would have to work
very hard to ensure that this was not the perceived
situation, potentially leading to an even greater
divide between classroom teachers and principals
and deputies. However, the report by ACER, which
broadly did not support Bishop‘s plan in its format at
the time, stated that ―a valid and reliable scheme for
assessing teacher performance for high stakes
decisions must draw on several types of evidence.
This is because such schemes need to encompass the
full scope of what a teacher is expected to know and
be able to do ...‖ (2007, p7-8) Despite the fact that
teachers may not be happy with the proposed
inclusion of students and parents in their assessment
process, it is clear that there needs to be a wide
range of people involved to ensure that all
stakeholders‘ needs are met. As is often the case in
policy, the ―devil is in the detail‖ and until this
aspect of the policy is fleshed out to the satisfaction
of all involved it is unlikely to receive support from
teachers who already feel as though their
professional practice is in question
Gillard‟s solution
In August 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard
announced her plan to reward top teachers with a
one-off payment of 10% of their annual salary. Her
plan, funded by a $1.25billion Federal Government
investment, would see teachers recognised for their
work based on criteria developed in line with the
new performance management system, ―Australian
Teacher Performance Management Principles and
Procedures,‖ which itself will be based on the
National Professional Standards for Teachers that
will be released this year. Assessment of teachers‘
performance will, according to Labor‘s ―Australian
Labor Agenda‖ (Australian Labor Party, 2010), be
based on lesson observations, analysis of student
performance based on NAPLAN and school based
information, parent feedback, participation in the
school community, and teacher qualifications and
professional development. It is currently being
investigated as to whether student feedback should
also be included in the identification of worthy
recipients. Despite being a new initiative for this
government, the similarities between Bishop and
Gillard‘s proposals are clear. For an accountable,
transparent performance pay scheme to be
implemented, all stakeholders need to have a role
in it. While this seems in theory to be a realistic,
positively focused scheme (Gillard‘s policy states
that teachers will not be punished with less pay for
―poor,‖ or at least standard, performance), one
wonders whether it will in fact encourage teachers
to remain in the profession or, equally if not more
importantly, if it will lead to better educational
outcomes for students. Many teachers already view
the NAPLAN tests and results as questionable at
Is it worth the pain?
As a way of empowering individual schools and
providing motivation for staff, Bishop‘s proposal for
locally administered performance pay schemes has
merit. Certainly there is a need to empower local
sites; giving schools the ability to determine
teachers‘ pay based on demonstrable skills, to offer
incentives for exceptional teachers to work and stay
at the school, and to weild some power in increasing
underperforming teachers‘ productivity is much
needed and would go a long way in improving a
school‘s reputation and outcomes. However, the
power ultimately lies with the Federal Government,
who control the purse strings, and the state
governments, who would likely set the external
standards used in assessing teacher performance.
While individual schools would administer the
program, governments would still be the ones
driving the system. School administrators would be
charged with ensuring the policy was enforced,
likely in the face of great resistance, while the State
and Federal governments would be able to, much
like the generals and officers of past wars, sit atop
their hill at a safe distance issuing commands and
making threats. This is a situation much like local
selection in Western Australian government schools.
While the policy to allow state schools to hire (and
supposedly fire) their own staff, without relying on
the overly bureaucratic and arbitrary Department of
Education‘s system of allocating staff to schools,
was hailed as a much-needed step in the right
27
contribute to a poor public perception of the
profession and the sense of apathy and
hopelessness that often accompanies this. Bishop
and Gillard‘s plans, therefore, may in fact have
some merit.
best and educationally baseless at worst, that they do
not appropriately reflect a student‘s true ability or
skill level. Additionally, given that NAPLAN results
are not released until November, it is difficult to
understand how teachers would be able to aim to
improve these results in a targeted manner in order
to increase their chances of receiving their bonus. Is
it therefore appropriate to base any aspect of a
teacher‘s pay on results garnered through this test?
Unfortunately though, after very public and
harrowing experiences such as the implementation
and failure of OBE (at least in its purest form), the
subsequent implementation of Courses of Study in
Western Australia, and the soon to be introduced
Australian Curriculum, teachers in this state seem
simply not ready for another change as significant
as this. In order for the policy to succeed, much
work would need to be carried out in advance to set
up accreditation bodies whose responsibility it
would be to unbiasedly assess teachers‘
qualifications, skills and performance within the
classroom rather than relying on direct
stakeholders whose personal agendas could cloud
their judgement of a teacher. Without this ability to
perform external reviews of teachers the system
would lack credibility both within the profession
and in the public eye. If teachers, or any other
employee for that matter, know that they are being
watched and scrutinised they will simply act in the
way that they know is desired. Their actual practice
will not be improved. The ACER report
commissioned by Julie Bishop in the lead up to her
presentation of the proposal at the 21st MCEETYA
meeting stated that much of the reason that
performance pay systems have failed in other
countries is that ―teachers lacked faith in the
fairness and validity of the school-based evaluation
process, objectives were ill-defined and funding
was inadequate. There were also concerns about
threats to teachers‘ collegiality, objections to
including student achievement as a measure of
performance ... and suggestions that schools were
cheating by misrepresenting students‘
results.‖ (ACER, 2007, p70) Little has been
reported about this policy since its release last year.
It will be interesting to see whether, like the
Liberal‘s Australian Curriculum policy to which
Labor signed up to in a rush of media-dubbed ―me
too-ism,‖ performance pay will also eventually be
implemented regardless of which party is next
elected.
Another aspect to consider is whether it is an
equitable policy. If teachers are expected to have a
high involvement in extra-curricular activities and
professional development in order to access the
bonus, does this scheme discriminate against those
whose time for additional activities, such as those
with families and other out of school commitments,
is limited? For any performance based remuneration
scheme to work, employees need to feel that they
have a decent chance of receiving the rewards – if
they don‘t they will likely not bother to try. There is
also no mention in the ALP‘s policy as to whether
teachers will be formally recognised for their
outstanding performance; while few would refuse
being rewarded monetarily, surely official,
marketable recognition is, in the long term, more
valuable. Only time will tell whether Gillard‘s Labor
government will be re-elected and this policy
enacted, and if indeed that will, with so much ―metoo-ism‖ in politics, matter anyway.
Conclusions
There is a great need to recognise any employee
for the good work that they do; this is certainly not
limited to the field of education. Without a sense of
achievement and recognition, any person will feel
undervalued and eventually take themselves, a
valuable commodity, somewhere that they are
appreciated. In the Australian education system, the
sense of teachers that they are undervalued and not
recognised for their ability to perform an incredibly
important function within our society is becoming
epidemic. Julie Bishop and Julia Gillard‘s proposals
for a policy that ensures that teachers are paid
according to their performance and skills is not a
new idea in Australia, nor around the world. A
highly visible and lucrative component of
Australia‘s society, the education sector is in great
need of revitalisation. Research by Leigh and Ryan
(2006) suggests that teacher quality in Australia has
in fact decreased over the last 20 years. This is a
hard pill to swallow for those in the teaching
profession, no-one likes to think that they may be
contributing to a problem such as this. However,
Leigh and Ryan do not simply suggest that teachers
themselves today are in some way less able than
their counterparts from the 1980s. Instead they lay
the blame at the mediocre entrance scores required
to enter a teaching degree and the unacceptably low
pay of those in teaching positions, both of which
Unfortunately, it seems that, more often than
not, policy is enacted with great speed, its
implementers eager to see actions and results as
soon as possible. In the case of Labor‘s policy, the
timing of the release of the policy is an attempt to
win votes in an increasingly conservative and
politically hostile nation. As Welch states,
―Policies are not made unless something can be
improved, something we value is threatened, or we
feel that there is a problem of some kind that
prevents certain specificed goals from being
attained.‖ (2007, p2) Do we as educators feel that
28
something is in fact under threat or could be
improved enough to garner our support for a
performance pay system? Given the wide-spread
stress and anxiety caused by recent educational
reform policies, as well as the historical mistrust
between governments, educators and administrators,
I suspect not.
References
Australian Labor Party. (2011). Australian Labor
Agenda. Retrived on January 10, 2011 from
http://www.alp.org.au/agenda
Broinowski, I. (2007, May). Performance-based
pay? No way [Letter to the editor]. Professional
Educator.5 ,
Cronin, D. (2007, April). Merit pay or standards pay
for teachers. Council of Catholic School
Parents Issue Analysis newsletter.
Davis, M (2007, February 8), Bishop shows hand on
teachers‘ pay. Sydeny Morning Herald.
Retrieved May 23, 2008 from http://
www.smh.com.au/news/national/
Della Bosca, J. (2007, April 10). Competitive pay
does nothing for students. Sydney Morning
Herald. Retrieved May 20, 2008 from http://
www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/
Department of Education Science and Training.
(2003). Australia’s teachers: Australia’s future.
Canberra: Department of Education, Science
and Training.
Department of Education, Science and Training.
(2009). Western Australian Teacher Demand
and Supply Projections. Canberra: Department
of Education, Science and Training.
Ingvarson, L., Kleinhenz, E. and Wilkinson, J.
(2007). Research on performance pay for
teachers. Australian Council for Educational
Research.
Leigh, A. and Ryan, C. (2006). How and why has
teacher quality changed in Australia. [electronic
version]. Retrieved on May 19, 2008 from
http://www.sprc.unsw.edu.au/seminars/2006%
20Program/Leigh.pdf
Olson, L. (2007, February 14). Reflections.
Education Week. Retrieved on May 24, 2008
from http://www.aspeninstitute.org/education/
Welch, A. (2007). Making education policy. In R
Connell, C. Campbell, M. Vickers, A. Welch,
D. Foley, & N. Bagnall (eds). Education,
Change and Society. UK: Oxford University
Press.
29
History and the Novel:
Refusing to be Silent
Jo Jones
Curtin University
In Yes We Canberra, a satirical commentary program
by the ABC‘s comedy group, The Chaser, was
produced to accompany the 2010 Australian election
campaign and included a segment titled ―Life at the
Top.‖ This segment showed what seemed to be
something like an indigenous version of a panel
discussion where four indigenous elders sat crosslegged on the earth in a Northern territory outback
setting and discussed the election issues. The
juxtaposition of this indigenous context, movingly
dignified in its simplicity, with the issues of the
campaign — broadband, low-level political debate,
funding for mediocre Australian films — made the toand-froing of election debate seem trivial and
startlingly self-centered. The Chaser, with (perhaps
unusual) sensitivity not only draws the viewer‘s
attention to the overwhelming disparity of economic
and social privilege in this country, but the complete
absence of any discussion of indigenous issues during
the 2010 election campaign — a troubling invisibility
that quickly begs a comparison to the 2007 Labor
victory and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd‘s
apology to Indigenous Australians that occurred
soon after. In the last segment of ―Life at the Top‖ to
screen before the election, one of the elders posed a
question concerning Labor‘s track-record on
Indigenous affairs. They respond:
Elder 1: What have they done?
Elder 2: They said ―sorry‖ to us once.
Elder 1: When was that?
Elder 2: Three years ago
Elder 1: And what about since then?
Elder 3: Lots of things. Every week they
remind us that they said ―sorry‖ three years
ago.
Despite the wave of optimism following Rudd‘s
apology it seems that very little in terms of social
justice for Indigenous Australians has changed. The
Jo Jones is currently completing a PhD at Curtin University of Technology on Australian historical novels written during
the History Wars. She has teaching experience at secondary and tertiary levels and has had work published in national educational and literary journals. Jo has worked as a WACE marker and examiner.
30
national past in various forums by historians and
novelists
have
encouraged
the
continued
consideration of not only the national past but, most
importantly, the ethically vital issue of social justice
for Indigenous Australians.
In his speech at the launch of Keneally‘s book,
Rudd describes the existing discussion of our
national history as ―arid and intellectual,‖ but many
Australians don‘t see it that way. In an August 2009
episode of the ABC‘s high-rating panel show Q and
A, broadcast from the Melbourne Writers‘ festival,
the audience-generated discussion focused largely
on history and the national, colonial past. The
conversation between writers Richard Flanagan,
Tara June Winch, Kamila Shamsie and politicians,
Labor‘s Lindsay Tanner, and Liberal Leader of the
Opposition, Tony Abbot (then Shadow Minister for
Families and Community Services), made for lively
and compelling viewing. Australian history in its
various representations, including politicised and
often controversial ones, clearly has currency in our
culture. Rachel Perkins‘ 2008 documentary series
The First Australians demonstrates that an audience
exists for the type of indigenous stories that are
generally considered as the unofficial part of
Australia‘s history. SBS‘s Australian version of Who
do You Think You Are? follows prominent
Australians as they track different genealogical paths
which, similarly, include stories of immigration and
colonisation. This energized engagement with
Australian history challenges Rudd‘s perception of
existing debates and his covert denial of the type of
cultural sentiment that accompanies the success of
these types of popular histories. When a Q and A
audience member asked: ―Do we struggle to talk
about our identity in any depth because we risk
feeling further implicated in the brutality of our
colonial past?‖ he communicated one of the most
vexed, complicated and critical questions that faces
the Australian nation. The question conveys not only
the regret that troubles fairminded non-indigenous
Australians, but also the difficulties involved in
discussion: that historical revelation and unfolding
interpretations are hard to mentally and emotionally
assimilate and even harder to respond to. How
should a nation act in the face of such a past? The
former (now retired) Finance Minister Lindsay
Tanner‘s comment on Q and A that ―the biggest
weapon you can use on these things is silence‖ can
be used as a rejoinder to Rudd‘s call for the end of
vital debates on Australia‘s history.
Almost two years after Rudd‘s lauded apology
on behalf of Federal Parliament to the Stolen
Generations it is time to revisit important questions
of history. Why does the past matter? What are the
effects of engaging with the stories and events of the
past? What roles do emerging representations of the
past have to play in our society? How does our
relationship with history matter politically and affect
what we do in the present? How can we act or live
absence of important discussion from public debate is
a sobering reminder of the continuing presence of the
thinly-veiled racism and social conservatism that
influenced the nation during the twelve year Howard
era. While it would be both unfair and inaccurate to
equate the Labor leadership‘s disappointing
reluctance to keep indigenous issues on the public
agenda with Howard‘s refusal to acknowledge the
type of past injustice brought out by (among other
investigations) the Bringing Them Home Report, a
little-discussed but noteworthy speech given by Rudd
at the launch of Thomas Keneally‘s Australians:
Origins to Eureka gives some indication of a degree
of historical and political denial that is, arguably,
prescient of the conservatism and instrumentalism of
many Labor politicians that the Australian public has
witnessed in the recent election campaign.
Statements made about history often work as
political touchstones and Rudd‘s key points were
illuminating in terms of his own and his government‘s
understandings and values. After Rudd‘s 2008
apology to indigenous peoples, one would be forgiven
for thinking he considers himself aligned with the
views expressed by then Prime Minister Keating in
his landmark speech at Redfern Park. Rudd‘s speech
represents Keating and allies in the History Wars
(debates about the extent of the damage and
destruction inflicted by settler society on Australian
indigenous peoples conducted by politicians,
commentators and historians) as being at the extreme
and fanatical end of a polarised debate and, in doing
this, parts company with an important cultural
movement peopled by distinguished intellectuals,
politicians and activists who have dedicated their
careers to increasing knowledge of national history
and attempting to bring about justice and reparation to
indigenous Australians. By positioning himself at the
moderate centre in terms of views on the national
past, squarely and simplistically between the
denialists and the revisionists (whom Howard
famously termed the ―Black Armband Brigade‖),
Rudd implies that ―true‖ or ―good‖ history is fixed
and apolitical — a notion which is at best naïve and at
worst a totalitarian weapon. Troublingly, he calls for
an end to the disputes of the History Wars when this
type of debate is, surely, crucial for a functioning
democracy.
It has been up to participants in other spheres of
Australian public and cultural life to keep Indigenous
stories and histories alive in the national
consciousness in the past decade, particularly in the
past two years, whether through the medium of
television, such as The Chaser, or through films such
as widely acclaimed Samson and Delilah. The
participation of public intellectuals, particularly
historians and writers, has also been crucial here.
While most current politicians clearly do not want to
re-enter the fray at this particular juncture and the
debates have died down to an extent, the continual
discussion of the more troubling elements of our
31
limitations with this type of liberal empathetic
engagement; however, it is surely necessary to
consider the role of such engagement in any analysis
of the relationship between history, politics and
culture. Secondly, imaginative relationships made
with the past through these fictions can potentially
enable an ethical engagement with ―difference‖ that
works in other and important ways than the kind of
connections made through non-fiction history texts.
Thirdly, fictions can perform a meta-historical
function, provoking an examination of the workings
and limits of our representations of the past in
traditional historical forms. And, finally, history is
constantly limited by what it cannot prove or reveal,
while fiction, through art, can enter events to an
extent beyond what is traditionally regarded as the
province of historical enquiry, engaging with the
force of human experience that exists beyond the
limits of traditional historical representation. These
may be events which, for various reasons, were not
recorded but endure in memory and traces.
Kate Grenville‘s 2005 The Secret River is a good
place to begin a discussion of individual novels
because this novel, and Grenville‘s statements at the
time of its release, became the crux of debate about
the differences between and relative merits of
history and fiction. The Secret River is also a useful
example of the historical novel in its traditional,
linear narrative form, one that has been popular and
influential in Australian literature. As with all fiction
(and history), the form of these narratives is
intrinsically bound to politics. At the heart of
historian‘s objections when The Secret River was
published was Grenville‘s reliance on empathy (an
emotional or moral category) as a path to historical
knowledge (an intellectual category). Among the
most controversial, and it must be said naïve,
statements Grenville gave about the story of
emancipist Thornhill (the character based on her
own ancestor Solomon Wiseman), was that by
visiting the locations at which events had occurred
and partaking in some similar experiences, such as
riding the gunwhale of a boat in rough weather, she
was able to access the responses of her ancestor and
those like him.1 In an act of transfer she suggests
that a similar process of experiential change occurs
when reading a novel. In her view, the reader can
vicariously experience nineteenth-century life (or
eighteenth–century life in her next novel, a type of
prequel to The Secret River, The Lieutenant) and
understand the experiences of those who lived there,
exposing colonial violence as a sequence of
miscommunications and misunderstandings, rather
than an intrinsic aspect of an often brutal, virulent,
and dominating political and social system.
By contrast, historians alert us to the variety of
human experience and how individual human
subjects are shaped by the very historical and
geographical specificity of existence. As Clendinnen
notes, the belief in historical insight accessed
ethically in a country founded on racial violence? A
strand of public debate that emerged out of the
History Wars is particularly relevant when
considering these questions. In a 2006 Quarterly
Essay, the historian Inga Clendinnen asked ―The
History Question: Who Owns the Past?‖ in which she
discussed the relationship between history and
fiction. Clendinnen‘s claim is that it is the scientific
and verifiable methods that give historians greater
authority on the past than writers of fiction texts, who
have laid various claims to historical authority. In her
view, fiction can delight and intrigue, but ultimately
provide little of real intellectual or political value. In
the debate that was generated around the historical
fiction question, historians including Clendinnen,
Mark McKenna and John Hirst, drew attention to the
limitations of the novel in representing historical
events. These statements made by the historians
rightly pointed out that chronology and veracity are
necessarily subjugated to the demands of narrative
and that, above all, novels rely on human emotion
and empathy rather than rational analysis to create
connections with people who lived in times past. The
historians are correct in their claims that literature
cannot compete with history on certain types of truth
claims; however, I would contend that different types
of historical fiction also have an equally important, if
different, role to play in questions to do with the
place and significance of Australian history in our
contemporary life.
Historical fiction is important in considering the
questions posed earlier. While the pursuit of
empirically verifiable versions of events is of great
value and has made important contributions to
Australia political and intellectual life, the connection
between the individual and the national past involves
an imaginative engagement that can be provoked by
histories but is also (and more traditionally) the
domain of fiction. Powerful and often deeply felt
links between the individual and the past, while never
providing direct access to the people and events of
that past, have the potential for enabling effects.
Fictional representations have a role to play in the
discussion about how the past can affect the present
in social and political ways. In fact, fiction is as vital
as history in keeping the important events alive and
well in the national consciousness, and has its own
valid claims to truth. For this reason it is important to
acknowledge that both fields play their own different
and important roles in defeating the dangerous
silence about the past that Tanner referred to on Q
and A.
What historical fiction has to offer Australian
culture differs from that of history in four ways.
Firstly, it encourages a consideration of the place of
the past and the imagination in political life. Indeed,
an individual connection with the past through fiction
and, in particular, the novel, has been part of the
workings of a liberal progressive agenda since the
eighteenth century. As I will explain later, there are
32
Put simply, these novels can be interpreted as
perpetuating the notion that the social codes and sets
of behaviours that seem appropriate and necessary
for one group can be applied to another without due
consideration of cultural, social and psychic
differences. While it is important to acknowledge
that Malouf and Grenville made every effort to base
their stories in historical truth and to be respectful of
the indigenous culture they are representing, the
novels remain largely ideologically determined by
the limitations of the traditional historical novel
form.5 In erasing differences between groups of
people, such novels thus effectively reproduce the
ideological beliefs they seek to contest.
This type of ambitious imaginative leap founded
in empathy which informs the traditional historical
novel assumes that we should not maim, massacre,
enslave, exploit or marginalise indigenous
Australians because, underneath a veneer of
dissimilarity, ―we‖ are all the same.6 These
assumptions also underpin a rather naïve and
politically problematic strand of the reconciliation
discourse in Australian culture — the belief that if
Australians could realise our fundamental
similarities and put the past behind us we could
move on. This is a way of thinking that reduces
reconciliation to a feel-good, guilt-assuaging
exercise for the benefit of non-indigenous
Australians that tries to affect spurious closure.
Recognising deep-seated difference is important. It
lends support to concepts like self-determination and
meaningful
consultation
with
indigenous
communities on indigenous matters. It makes
Australians question the assumptions and methods
of an initiative like the Northern Territory
Intervention. It may cause us to respond in outrage
when we hear, as we have recently, that consultation
in a number of Territory communities was
undertaken in such a way as to exclude the
indigenous community from fully participating. 7
On the other hand, the politically enabling
potential of humanist empathy, the foundation of
liberal democracy, must be acknowledged. This type
of liberal goodwill and the recognition of racial
inequity was made possible by a progressive race
agenda in the early 1990s, including the clear
acknowledgement of past injustice that led to the
Mabo decision. Perhaps what Australians need to
revise here is the type of empathy we aspire to have
as a nation. Rather than empathy that relies on
universal similarities, scholar and novelist Gail
Jones contends we should aspire to a concept she
attributes to theorist Dominic La Capra called
―unsettled empathy‖: this is where imaginative and
authentic connections are with those who are
different, but the assumption that full insight or
understanding can be gained is resisted (Jones
2004). Unsettled empathy is a difficult and ongoing
process where one is careful not to project one‘s
own culture/experience/belief system in the guise of
through the so-called reexperiencing past events —
what she calls a ―time-leap‖ — is not only impossible
but ideologically dangerous, drawing as it does on the
assumption that the knowledge and memories we
have from our own experience gives us direct
knowledge of the lives of others so very different
from our own (20). In this sense empathy, which
modern novels rely on to form meaningful
relationships with their readers, is not enough to
afford historical insight. According to Clendinnen,
such insight is achieved through an objective
appraisal of the past, albeit an appraisal informed by
sensitivity and compassion. Therefore, to tell a story
of an early nineteenth-century emancipist, relate the
details of his motivations and decisions, including the
decision to participate in a massacre of an indigenous
tribe, suggests we can access and understand someone
so historically and culturally different from white
Australians ( no matter how much we base the
narrative around historical details and events). The
unalterable otherness of individuals of past times is
erased in this type of narrative, as is race difference,
for example when Thornhill‘s wife, Sal, concludes on
her visit to the Aboriginal camp that their presence
there is morally compromised because the local
indigenous group are much more like the British
Thornhills than Sal has previously thought: ―They
was here…Their grannies and their great grannies. All
along…Even got a broom to keep it clean, Will. Just
like I got meself.‖ (288) It is the similarities here,
rather than differences, that provoke moral responses. 2
The ―time-leap‖ made by traditional realist
historical novels is also apparent in the more
stylistically complex work of David Malouf, such as
the acclaimed Remembering Babylon and The
Conversations at Curlew Creek, which can also be
construed as ethically problematic, revealing an
underlying reliance in the universality of human
experience that has, in the past, been co-opted to
underwrite concepts like colonialism and paternalism.
Malouf has made a number of statements similar to
those of Grenville about being able to re-experience
colonial times through the insight afforded by the
universal reach of empathy3 and conveys his stories
through an all-encompassing romantic-transcendent
poetic. In Remembering Babylon, for instance, while
the narrative of a Scottish settler family on the edge of
the colonial settlement in nineteenth-century
Queensland is historically informed and sensitively
rendered, the story hinges on the possibility of a type
of transference where settler characters gain profound
and indigenised insight and connection to place
through moments of heightened and mystical
experience. One of the central characters, Gemmy
Fairley, a castaway who has spent the last ten years
with an indigenous tribe, works (problematically) as a
type of conduit for indigenous experience and
understanding. As has been argued before, the very
materiality and specificity of existence, through an
investment in universal subjectivity, is erased here.4
33
archival
evidence
such
as
government
correspondence and records, sections of local
histories, stories of families conveyed by elders and
Harley‘s own imagined versions of events, informed
by these other sources. In accessing the stories
Harley (and Scott) comes up against a problem
evident in much contact history — that important
events went, deliberately and for different reasons,
unrecorded. One such event is recorded in a
complementary volume of family stories, cowritten
with Scott‘s Aunty Hazel. The volume tells of a
massacre that occurred around the turn of the
century that had been covered up, both by the white
pastoralist family who conducted it and the
indigenous group who were its targets. The
surviving people from the indigenous group left the
Ravensthorpe area where it occurred (Hazel claims
that even to this day no Nyoongah people live there)
and when asked of their origins often said they came
from Adelaide rather than be indentified with the
massacred group. It seems this was partly because
the trauma of the experience and loss was so painful
to recall. Only the stories remain, told in fragments
amongst kinship groups in the indigenous
community. In Benang, Scott re-visions a version of
this massacre, the brutality of the pastoralist
murders, the reluctant complicity of a white
ancestor, the inexpressible pain of Harley‘s
Nyoongah great grandmother who witnessed the
events and the aftermath, including bodies hanging
from a tree and the land itself responding in
sympathy and horror to the scene. This story may
never be part of a national history because of a lack
of empirical evidence or the understandable
reluctance of Nyoongah people to open up the story
to outsiders, but there is an important truth here. 8 It
is clearly an essential and defining story of both loss
and survival, as the Nyoongahs in the region endure
and connect to their ancestors through culture and
place.
Similarly, Alexis Wright‘s first novel, Plains of
Promise, set initially in a mission community in the
Gulf country, deals with the silences of history
where communities and individuals experience
devastating social and psychic breakdown in a way
that eludes record and memory. The damaged
central character, Ivy, abandoned by the indigenous
mission community because of tribal difference and
by the white clergyman who has repeatedly raped
her, disintegrates into mental illness and
dysfunction, with no sense of past identity and little
memory of the abuses she has endured. Historical
fiction thus provides the means to enter into these
spaces of experience that traditional histories regard
as speculative and conjectural and which thus lie
outside the scholarly domain. Entry into the past
experiences of the dispossessed necessarily involves
imaginative and speculative journeys which contain
their own truth.
Historical novels can be striking in the challenge
understanding. In Jones‘ novel, Sorry (2007), that
begins in the 1930s, her young, damaged and
sensitive protagonist Perdita realises at the very end
of the narrative the difficulties of accessing and
understanding the life and psyche of another, even if,
as in Perdita‘s relationship with her indigenous friend
Mary, you love them deeply. Throughout the novel,
constructed as a fable and allegory, Perdita has
recurring fantasies of falling snow, its delicate
evanescence figured in stark contrast to the red
vastness of the remote Pilbara where she lives. Even
in the most insightful individuals, the seduction and
blindness of whiteness and white privilege runs deep.
Perdita‘s eventual apology to Mary for a lifedestroying error achieves neither closure nor
redemption, but becomes an irresistible ethical
imperative. We are unsure of what it meant to Mary,
but we know it was necessary and important. Like
the national chronology of white occupation,
Perdita‘s story has pieces missing. It acknowledges
that the memory of events can be lost and that, even
when regained, such damage can never be atoned for
or completely understood but must be approached
with remorse and the intent to make amends. In this
way unsettled empathy, expressed through Jones‘
historical novel, is a more ethical way of approaching
difference. In Sorry the personal is clearly political
and demonstrates that way that the bonds of affection
and imagination made between the individual and
those who are different affects and changes lives. In
this way a tale founded skillfully in historical
realities, while still a fiction, communicates
knowledge of the past and political events and
systems, such as colonialism, imperialism and their
effects, in such a way that has clear contemporary
political and ethical relevance. Surely this is an
important and worthy form of communicating certain
types of knowledge about the past that contains
important truths.
Like Sorry, Kim Scott‘s Benang (1999) is rooted
in painful realities of earlier times in Australia.
Whereas Jones navigates the terrain of white remorse
and regret, Scott deals with the challenges of
indigenous survival, part of which involves
negotiating and re-negotiating relationships with
historical events and history itself. The Miles
Franklin Award winning novel self-consciously
exposes the limits of traditional history when coming
to terms with individual, cultural and national pasts.
In a web of stories largely derived from Scott‘s
Nyoongah family in the Esperance region of Western
Australia, Scott‘s protagonist, Harley, struggles to
deal with the new-found knowledge of both his
indigenous heritage and the racially motivated abuses
of his Scots-born grandfather by whom he was
raised. The structure of Scott‘s novel — a spiralling,
non-linear collection of stories spanning generations
back to initial white-indigenous contact — exposes
the limitations of relying solely on traditional
historical sources. The stories include fragments of
34
since. The eponymous narrator of the novel
announces from the outset that he is deserving of our
trust, but is also a professional and compulsive liar.
Rich in postmodern paradoxes, Gould tells his tale of
convict conniving, sensual pleasure and sheer
desperation. Through the character of Gould,
Flanagan ironically suggests that we are at our most
truthful when honest about the lies that we live with.
The novel reveals the way that history itself, like
other concepts of the Enlightenment, such as reason
and democracy, can be corrupted to the service of
their opposites: the irrational, libidinous and the willto-power are always ready to surge and grasp the
fragile political cultural construct we know as
civilization.
On ABC‘s Q and A Lindsay Tanner
acknowledged the inherently political nature of
history when he stated ―…the question of identity
and the past is all wrapped up in one fundamental
thing and this is that history is a living thing. It‘s not
settled, it will never be settled.‖ Engaging with the
past events and their interpretation is vital in
connecting with a national community. This also
includes facing the important and unavoidable
historiographical fact that stories shift with
interpretation and that even traditional, empirical
history is limited by the partiality and separateness of
experience. A consideration of these points is needed
in asking vital questions of the Australian nation.
Fiction has long been part of this critical and
imaginative process. Neither is this discussion
limited to the so-called chattering classes. Many
historical novels are of interest to a wide audience
and are even taught in secondary schools all over the
country.
Other nations with histories of atrocity and
violence have grappled with these questions for
longer, with fiction taking an important role, for
example, Bernard Schlink‘s bestselling The Reader
generated widespread discussion on ethical and
political issues about the German national past. They
do not exist merely ―to delight‖ as Clendinnen,
somewhat condescendingly, puts it (34). Like other
countries that live with spectres of history —
Germany and the holocaust, South Africa and
apartheid, the United States and slavery — Australia,
at a time of global political change, needs to ask what
type of country we wish to create in the twenty-first
century. Facing the events of the past and the
workings of history itself can lead to ethical action to
tackle issues and inequities of race. As Richard
Flanagan said in the same Q and A discussion, ―[this
argument] in the end, is not about our past. It is an
argument about our future.‖
they lay down to very notion of the impossibility of
historical representation — that sources are never
objective, tellers of stories never disinterested or
unbiased, as poststructuralist historiographers such as
Hayden White have emphasized.9 In fact, in these
novels, history is conceptualised as an abyss and, like
human relations themselves, often dizzying in its
unfathomability. This concept of history has been
compared to the Kantian notion of the sublime;
something the human mind can approach but never
fully comprehend. Rodney Hall‘s fascinating and
critically neglected historical novels of the late 1980s
and early 1990s, The Yandilli Trilogy, are narrated by
characters who are unstable, deluded, even
psychopathic, and strange events are glimpsed
through the fractured lenses of fragmented
consciousnesses. In Hall‘s Captivity Captive (1988),
based on an actual event in the Southern Queensland
outback town of Gatton, the details surrounding a
grisly crime unfold as the brother of murdered
siblings tells his tale. The more the reader learns of
the increasingly gothic traits of the Malone family, the
less likely is the truth of the official deathbed
confession of a neighbor that begins the novel.
Grotesquely inverting the national pastoralist myth,
the outback becomes become a place where the
traumas of settlement, and their less-than-heroic
effects, are pronounced. This is seen, for example, in
the inwardness of isolated family and social
groupings. In novels such as this, the notion of history
as a trajectory of progress is exposed as a shimmering
humanistic fantasy. Instead, history can be black and
opaque, as impenetrable as the psyche of the
individual who conceived and enacted this bizarre
unsolved crime. Neither are Hall‘s novels merely
relativistic exercises in postmodern playfulness and
reflexivity. If colonial tales are considered
instrumental in the making of a nation, Hall‘s work
(published in Australia‘s bicentennial year) is a highly
politicised warning against the dangers of isolation
and the self-destruction inherent in the power plays
that may lurk under the guise of national unity.
Like Hall‘s novels, the self-reflexivity of Richard
Flanagan‘s Gould‘s Book of Fish (2001) is bitingly
political. History itself is not safely sequestered in the
past, but shifts and morphs like the pages of Gould‘s
book itself that, within Flanagan‘s narrative, reveals
something different every time it is opened. History
permeates the present. One conspicuous example of
this is the way the deranged commandant of the Sarah
Island settlement, where Gould is imprisoned, pillages
the environment in a grotesque manifestation of
aggressive capitalism. This situation is not intended as
a faithful reproduction of the events of the penal
settlement but, rather, a comment on the way the
destructive alliance of big business and government in
Tasmania in the present emerged out of the
exploitative ideologies of colonialism and imperialism
of early settlement, and that have dominated Australia
(of which Tasmania is presented as a microcosm) ever
Notes
1 Grenville originally made this statement in an
interview with Romona Koval on Radio National‘s
The Book Show.
35
2 To be fair to Grenville, she attempted to amend some of
the more politically problematic elements of The Secret
River in The Lieutenant within the narrative. The
protagonist Daniel Rooke and the indigenous girl,
Tageran, become friends; however, the character of
Rooke ultimately recognises how little he can
comprehend the complexity and extent of Tagaran‘s
motives and experiences. He, importantly, begins to
accept uncertainties as an endpoint. I would still claim,
however, that Grenville ultimately runs into similar
ideological difficulties as in The Secret River as she
remains so reliant on the realist historical novel form.
3 This is cited in McKenna (3).
4 4 A number of critics have detailed their various
ideological objections to Remembering Babylon in the
last two decades. A useful overview of these
publications is provided by Randall (2004). Other
relevant articles include ―The Obstinacy of the
Sacred‖ (McCann 2005) and my ―Ambivalence,
Absence and Loss in David Malouf‘s Remembering
Babylon‖ (Jones 2009).
5 The ethical limits of realist form has been most
convincing argued by theorists Dominick La Capra in
History in Transit (2004) and Derek Attridge in the
companion volumes The Singularity of Literature (2004)
and J.M. Coetzee & the Ethics of Reading : Literature in
the Event (2004). I would also claim that, even through
the narrative of both Remembering Babylon and The
Conversations at Curlew Creek contain moments of
heightened experience and transcendence, the form
remains essentially realist in terms of the construction of
characters and the ―well-made‖ action of the plot.
6 For an illuminating discussion on the limits of the
liberal ideology of reconciliation see Atwood (2005).
7 A recent report — the ―Will They Be Heard‖ report —
has evidence to support the claim that indigenous groups
were unable to participate effectively in community
consultation in the Northern Territory Intervention and
that much of the bureaucratic language and systems
made the process inaccessible. See http://
www.abc.net.au/pm/ content/2009/s2751206.htm for
further information.
8 The Nyoongah peoples‘ treatment of this site of
massacre is further explained in Scott (2007). Also,
further insights into this scene are offered in Emmet
(2007).
9 It seems that Australian historical fiction writers‘ have
never used the defense that history, like fiction, has its
own problems of realist form which, in traditional
histories, prematurely forecloses on meaning and
interpretation. One might speculate that this is, firstly,
because the writers have a great deal of respect for the
work done by (particularly revisionist) historians and,
secondly, because they would not wish to undermine the
politically effective allegiance between revisionist
history and a progressive Indigenous rights agenda.
Works Cited
Attridge, D. 2004. J.M. Coetzee & the Ethics of Reading:
Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of
36
Chicago Press.
——.2004. The Singularity of Literature. London:
Routledge.
Attwood, B. 2005. ―Unsettling Pasts: Reconciliation and
History in Settler Australia,‖ Postcolonial Studies 8.3
(2005): 243–59.
Clendinnen, I. 2006. ―The History Question: Who Owns
the Past.‖ Quarterly Essay 23.
Emmett, H. 2007. ―Rhizomatic Kinship in Kim Scott‘s
Benang.‖ Westerly 52: 173–183.
Flanagan, R. 2007.‖Out of Control: The Tragedy of
Tasmania‘s Forests.‖ The Monthly May. http://
themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-richardflanaganout-of-control-tragedy-tasmania-s-forests-512.
Grenville, K. 2005. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text
Publishing.
Grenville, K. 2008. The Lieutenant. Melbourne: Text
Publishing Company.
Hirst, J.B. 2005. Sense and Nonsense in Australian
History. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Jones, Gail. 2004. ―Sorry-in-the-Sky: Empathetic
Unsettlement, Mourning and the Stolen Generation.‖
Imagining Australia. J. Ryan and C. Wallace-Crabbe
(eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 159–72.
51
——. 2007. Sorry. Sydney: Vintage.
Jones, J (forthcoming). 2009. ―Ambivalence, Absence and
Loss in David Malouf‘s Remembering Babylon.‖
Australian Literary Studies 24 (1).
La Capra, D. 2004. History in Transit: Experience,
Identity, Critical Theory. Ithica, NY and London:
Cornell University Press.
MacIntyre, S. and A. Clarke. 2003. The History Wars.
Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
McCann, Andrew. 2005. ‗The Obstinacy of the Sacred.‘
Antipodes 19.2: 152–59.
McKenna, Mark. 2005. ‗Writing the Past: History,
Literature and the Public Sphere in Australia.‘ The
Australian Financial Review, December 16: 1–2, 8.
Q and A. 2009. Television Program. Sydney: ABC
Television, August 7. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/
txt/s2662208.htm
Rudd, Kevin. 2009. ‗Launch of First Volume of Thomas
Keneally‘s Australians: Origins to Eureka. Speech
presented at the National Library, Canberra, August
29.
Scott, K. 1999. Benang. North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts
Centre Press.
——. 2005. Kayang and Me. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts
Centre Press.
——. 2007. ‗Cover ‗em up with Sand.‘ Meanjin 66 (2):
120–125.
Shipway, Jesse. 2003. ‗Wishing for Modernity:
Temporality and Desire in Gould‘s Book of Fish.‘
Australian Literary Studies 21 (1): 43–53.
The Book Show. 2005. Radio Program. Sydney: ABC
Radio National, August 17. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/
arts/writing/stories/s1414510.htm
White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Maryland:
The John Hopkins University Press.
Revisiting
The Classroom
Julie Easton
Curtin University
―teachers need to be lion tamers not educators,‖ I
had gladly taken up the offer of a semester‘s work
in a regional highschool, stating blithely, that after
16 years away from the coal face, such a stint
would serve as professional development and give
me the opportunity to see if the advice and courses
I had been delivering to pre-service secondary
teachers at Uni were relevant in a contemporary
classroom.
It was vital that I learnt the names of the
students as quickly as possible. ―You there,‖ ―Who
me, miss it wasn‘t me,‖ ―I wasn‘t talking,‖ ―I‘m
only tryin‘ to put rubbish in the bin.‖
My first attempts at calling the roll resulted in
shouts of laughter and thinly disguised derision, as
I struggled with the plethora of unfamiliar names.
Where were the Johns and Kates of yesteryear?
The names on the roll seemed to come from a
different age, a different country. Some befitted
The classroom shook and reverberated around me.
Fourteen year old youths, some sporting pencil thin
moustaches, towered over me. Chadeen, a handsome
Aboriginal teenager, danced in front of me, feet
resplendent in white and black, gleaming shoes,
reminiscent of those worn by Fred Astaire an age
ago.
―Go on Miss, ‗ave a go,‖ he invited as he feinted
and sparred, feet scarcely touching the ground. From
the back of the room a voice boomed repeatedly, ―I
‗aven‘t had me pills today, miss,‖ whilst along the
window side of the room, sulky sex kittens painted
their nails with white out and glowered at me
through glitter laden eyelids.
I must be mad, the thought passed swiftly
through my mind as I struggled to gain a
resemblence of control. Fancy leaving a cushy
education lecture room for this! Shrugging off
comments such as ―kids have changed,‖ and
Julie Easton is one of Western Australia’s most respected and senior educators in the fields of secondary and tertiary
teaching. She currently teaches education undergraduates at Curtin University.
37
The siren shrieked and my ebullient students
jostled and shouted outside the door. I let them in
directing them to get out their files and pens.
Suddenly one read the statement on the board. ―Eh
what‘s this Miss, who says so, they‘ve got to be
jokin‘,‖ he shouted, nearly falling off his chair in
indignation. Immediately others read it and the
room erupted in protest.
―I quite agree, I don‘t want to come to school
on Saturdays either,‖ I said, although, you know,
there are many countries in the world that do have
Saturday school.‖
―Well we‘re not ‗aving it ‗ere Miss, it‘s just not
fair,‖ was the muttered rejoinder, echoed around
the room. ―No way I‘m coming Miss,‖ ― is it for
real?‖
―Not yet, but I think it is being seriously
considered,‖ I replied. ―If you really feel strongly
about this we could all write to the Principal
expressing our opinion and stating our reasons for
opposing this measure. If he is to take us seriously
and pass on our point of view to the Education
Department, we must make sure we set out our
letters correctly and clearly state our arguments.
It‘s not good enough to simply rant on and say it‘s
unfair. We need to brainstorm our reasons for
opposing it; we need to state what we do on
Saturdays that is more important to us than going
to school.‖
They needed no second bidding. Out came
sheets of paper to brainstorm the reasons and draft
the letter. Looking over their shoulders I read how
most of the indigenous students considered it
essential to spend time with their family and
extended family: many of them engaged in
traditional activities, hunting and fishing. Others
cited the need to work and play community sports.
All felt it essential to have time to simply chill out,
to listen to their music and be with friends – not so
different from my thoughts. I smiled as I read the
P.S. on one fellow‘s letter. After listing, politely,
the reasons why there shouldn‘t be school on
Saturday, he added, ―Anyway, when the Eagles are
playing, I just won‘t come‖
I modelled how to set out a formal letter on the
board along with the appropriate salutation and
ending: correct spelling, capital letters and correct
punctuation a must! And no slang. Heads were
down and pens scratching: ―Hey Miss, how do you
spell...,‖ ―Do I need to start a new line?‖ ―Can you
check this, please, Miss‖
Eventually all of the letters were drafted, edited,
word processed and off to the Principal‘s office. In
due course they received a personal, considered
reply.
Writing with a real purpose to a real audience
on a topic which was relevant to them engaged
them every time…thank goodness!
Soapie stars; Sharlene, Kaysahn, Lo-arna: others
resembled exotic flowers; Trezalia, Kaiastah,
Hanako. Even familiar names were spelt quite
unexpectedly; Jaimiee, Ashlieae, Jaidie: report
writing will be fun, I thought fleetingly. To further
fluster me, in one class I had Jayden, Kaiden and
Braydon, the latter given to braying loudly at any
remotely amusing incident.
I quickly abandoned the attempt to present a
friendly presence: it was clear that it would be either
them or me and I was too old to let them dictate
terms to me. The honeymoon period ended abruptly.
Standing erect and very still, I gave the class my
kelpy eye dog stare and said in a quiet voice, ―If
anyone is not in their seat and absolutely quiet by
the time I count to three, there will be no recess for
any of us.‖ I sensed them sizing me up: is she
bluffing, does she really mean it, can she...will she
keep us in and miss Her morning tea? Once uttered,
a threat must be carried through; students need
boundaries, a teacher must be fair and consistent.
Advice given to my students over the years echoed
in my mind as I waited for silence and compliance,
unsure I would achieve either. It didn‘t take too
many ―ins after class‖ to convince the students that
threats were followed through, and missing biscuits
at morning tea was a plus for my diet.
Perhaps more than the behaviour management
challenges posed by this class, were their poor
literacy skills and a marked reluctance to write. The
boys in particular considered that a five or six word
written response – in the form of an incomplete
sentence, sans punctuation and with highly original
spelling, was quite sufficient and that I should be
pleased with their effort. The girls tended to decorate
their pages with hearts and glitter and enjoyed using
the lower case for proper nouns and the personal
pronoun ―I.‖ Each i was dotted with what resembled
a cumulus cloud or a large loveheart. Blue or black
pens were discarded in favour of coloured, mostly
pink, fine line textures – also glittered!
How could I ignite interest in reading and
writing? How could I make English relevant to these
children to whom school seemed to a purely social
arena, where friendship cliques formed and
reformed, where love/lurve was fallen in and out of
regularly, where voices broke and turned from
squeaks to manly roars, and where image and
panache amongst peers seemed to dominate all
waking thoughts. The lack of literacy skills paled
before such concerns in these kids‘ minds, such life
skills seemed a long way removed from the
immediacy of tomorrow or the weekend.
One evening I had a brainwave. On arriving at
school next morning, I went quickly into their
classroom and wrote in bold print on the whiteboard:
SATURDAY SCHOOL TO BE COMPULSORY
FOR ALL WESTERN AUSTRALIAN
HIGHSCHOOL STUDENTS.
38
John Kinsella’s Anti-Pastoral:
A Western Australian Poetics
of Place
Marthe Reed
University of Louisiana, Lafayette
First published in Antipodes, June 2010, 24 (1).p.91-97
A desire to know where we are, what our relation is
to that place and how to understand ourselves in that
context, is a most ancient and uniquely human
attribute, perhaps even a necessary one. For poet
John Kinsella, his place rests in Western Australia‘s
wheat country, the area surrounding York where his
family farmed, where he visited as a child and
worked as a young man (Phillips, ―Glen Phillips
On . . .‖). The Avon River Valley is a predominantly
rural, agricultural district devoted to the production
of wheat, sheep, and barley. A dry landscape, it
enjoys less than three hundred millimeters of rain a
year; even so, more than seventy-five percent of the
basin has been cleared to support agriculture.
Widespread clearing of the land has led to rising salt
levels in many waterways, and overgrazing has
contributed to erosion. The hills and granite outcrops
of the Avon Valley shelter woodlands that are a mix
of jarrah, marri, wandoo, and powderbark, while
flooded gum and swamp bark grow along the rivers.
Many small native mammals were common in the
area until introduced foxes and cats reduced their
numbers. The understory of the forest harbors blue
leschenaultias, dryandras and donkey orchids, and
there chuditch may still occasionally be found.
Among the endemic parrot species are Carnaby‘s
Black Cockatoos, Galah Cockatoos, Western
Corellas, and Ringneck Parrots (―twenty-eights‖),
though like all native species the bird populations
are heavily dependent on the native vegetation that
has largely been cleared for agriculture. A
landscape radically altered by European settlement,
it has only recently experienced attempts to
ameliorate the condition of the terrain, which has
become inhospitable not only to native plant and
animal species and emptied of its Aboriginal
inhabitants, but which also has increasingly
become unproductive and barren, unsuited to the
agricultural purposes for which it was originally
razed.
MARTHE REED, an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, earned her PhD from the University of
Western Australia. A poet also, she has published two books, Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010) and Tender Box, A
Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink) and two chapbooks, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations (Dusie Kollektiv).
39
apprehension and connection to place occurring
within that ―phenomenological reverberation . . .
[situating us] in the presence of a miniscule
phenomenon
of
the
shimmering
consciousness‖(xxiii). The poem affords the
possibility of an experience of place, even when
outside the place itself. This experience unfolds as
a result of a process David Malouf describes as
imaginative engagement with place: by taking in
place and allowing place to affect him, the poet
then gives something of himself back to place in
the creation of the poem (35). Within the liminal
space of the poem, Kinsella forges a connection to
place via loss and longing.
KINSELLA AND THE ANTI-PASTORAL
Critic Rob Wilson describes Kinsella‘s antipastoral, ―rooted in a harsh Western Australian
landscape of denuding and dispossessing,‖ as a
―politicized category of perception calling out for...
[the] antisublime‖ (139). Responding to the
destruction of rural Western Australia by its EuroAustralian ―occupiers,‖ Kinsella‘s dark vision of
place recognizes in agriculture, as it has been
practiced in Western Australia, nothing of the
European idyll of Arcadian happiness. Emblematic
of Kinsella‘s anti-sublime, The Silo: A Pastoral
Symphony—a depiction of the mores, values,
anecdotes, yarns, loves, stupidities, courage and
recklessness of the people who inhabit that part of
Western Australia‖ (Haskell 90) —presents a dying
world destroyed at the hands of its European
usurpers. In the poem ―Parrot Deaths,‖ the speaker
holds a rosella crushed under the wheels of his car
in a place where the only trees left for the parrots
to shelter in are those that line the road. The poem
juxtaposes scoured, harvested fields with the ―thin
Shadows‖ of trees: the only green the ―emerald‖ of
the parrots‘ feathers, smashed against glass, or
crushed by the trucks ―on their way to the
silos‖ (Kinsella, The Silo 99). The sunset‘s gold
forlornly recalls the wheat borne by those trucks
and the money it brings to the pastoralists, while
the ―orange, or blood-red sunsets‖ recall the
parrot‘s blood and brilliant plumage, where they
crept onto the farthest margins of their marginal
habitat to harvest grain spilled from speeding
trucks. Formally, the arbitrary nature of the stanza
structure, firmly fixed as triplets, reinforces the
arbitrariness of the destruction depicted in the
poem, while the enjambment after ―gold‖
heightens the culpability of profit-driven
agribusiness that acts with such disinterest in the
place from which those profits are harvested.
The Silo witnesses a world doomed by the
failure of vision of its Euro-Australian inhabitants.
In ―The Sinking Sand,‖ the salt that rises as a result
of deforestation destroys the usefulness of the land
for farming as surely as the sand swallows the
poem‘s protagonist. Kinsella depicts the
John Kinsella figures his kinship with the
Western Australian Wheatbelt, an example of what
Glen
Phillips
describes
as
a
―home
landscape‖ (―Harrowing‖ 111), in Blakean
corollaries of innocence and experience. In the first
of these, Kinsella depicts an inborn sense of
connection to place, indeed possession of place — a
sensibility founded in the ancient roots of the
Western tradition: ―Be fruitful and multiply and till
the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish
of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every
beast that crawls upon the earth‖ (Alter 19, emphasis
added). This cultural inheritance and its historical
enactment within Australia form an integral part of
Kinsella‘s awareness with respect to place:
attachment to place paired with a will to own and
control it. This possession of place is figured for the
poet in his youthful taking of parrots from York in
bags for sale in the city, and in shooting parrots,
crows, foxes, and rabbits: a sense of permission and
desire to harvest, of ownership in that Biblical sense
of dominion. Kinsella‘s early sense of place is
visited ironically: what began as a sense of
identification with the rural family‘s pastoralist
tradition and with the land from which a living was/
is wrested, is translated into its mature, more
discerning counterpart. From the vantage of
experience, childish possession of place is
understood as corrupt. Instead, Kinsella‘s poetry
evokes a longing for place, as well as a concentrated
looking at and attending to place and history, in
which the ―innocent‖ connection to place is
understood as an expression of the violence of the
pastoralist and the past. As Pingping and Phillips
observe, Kinsella ―re-read[s] Australian landscapes,
centering on farming practices of earlier settlers
from a new perspective—the ecological impact on
the nonhuman . . . by human beings‖(3); in so doing,
he ―invites readers to seemingly indulge the . . .
[European] pastoral myth in an Australian setting,
and then he dismantles it and smashes the illusions
of the readers, revealing the darkness of ―pastoral‖
in this different continent of Australia‖ (2).
Kinsella‘s poetry, work Gary Clark describes as an
eco-anarchist critique of colonization and land
degradation (439), depicts a lost Eden and the tacit
conviction that this land, violated by Europeans and
violently dispossessed of its first inhabitants, may
never belong to him as it belongs to the Aboriginal
peoples who lived in ecological and spiritual balance
with place.
What remains for Kinsella is the possibility of
communion with place as it is figured in the poem
itself. The poem becomes the site of recovery of the
Edenic experience, taking on the character of a
Foucauldian heterotopia of crisis in which the poet
and reader are not physically in place but enter a
kind of psychic liminal space: the imagery in the
poem, as Bachelard asserts, resonates in the
consciousness, causing a change of being—the re40
The speaker in these poems is not exempt from
the ravaging of place. Dennis Haskell describes the
collection as ―something of an exorcism,‖ an
engagement ―going back to a self that is not quite
finished‖ (94), wherein Kinsella sketches his own
childhood delight in terrorizing and possessing
place:
Death was a fantasy
made real
in the bush enclaves
of my uncle‘s farm. (50)
The city child‘s fantasy of the pastoralist life is
played out across the passage of years, the
speaker‘s understanding of his beliefs and actions
evolving and eventually transformed. The poem
―Shootings‖ has a loose form with short W. C.
Williamslike lines ending in nouns, emphasizing
the substance of the poem‘s narrative: fantasy,
real, enclaves, far, Vermin!, password, touching,
gun, heart, shooting, is, me, up, holidays, hungry,
trophies. The child seeks to place himself in the
pastoralist world, yet in so doing cuts himself off
from the place onto which the pastoralist world is
grafted, dooming himself to outsider status. In the
third section, the speaker nearly dies of sunstroke
while shooting native birds. Kinsella warns that
place is not to be taken for granted, nor its dangers
recklessly ignored, alluding to soil salinization
awaiting the pastoralist communities who
recklessly clear the land on which their economy
depends. As ―Shootings‖ proceeds, the speaker‘s
evolving awareness achieves its culmination in a
final shooting enacted out of mercy. The speaker
now empathizes with the creature in his gun sight,
acknowledging both life and death, the suffering of
the injured ram akin to his own: ―I measured its
breath / and for once / looked death / straight in the
eye‖ (52). Death is no longer a game played out as
a means of claiming place, but a morally charged
moment wherein he must decide who he is by how
he chooses to act. Thence forward, the tone of
―Shootings‖ is that of horrified recognition of
disease at the heart of the pastoralist world:
shooting rabbits with high-powered rifles induces
madness; harvest workers amuse themselves by
shooting at point-blank range foxes trapped in a
barrel; city children delight in the ―sprung‖ bladder
of a butchered sheep.
In the ninth section of ―Shootings,‖ the poem
turns further away, as the young speaker ―placed
the barrel / of a gun with a hair trigger / against
[his] tongue‖(54). In the midst of this ―experiment‖
with self-destruction, metaphorical for the
pastoralist history with respect to place, the speaker
is suddenly confronted by the fox. He cannot turn
away his gaze, or understanding, from the wild
creature: the fox
sat at my feet—
too close to shoot
Wheatbelt‘s doom: all traces of the original
vegetation, in particular the trees, having been
removed, the land, at first profitable for growing
wheat, is eventually destroyed by rising salt, leaving
the pastoralists a wasteland of their own making.
Like the poem‘s ill-fated protagonist, the
pastoralists‘ bodies, metaphorically buried in debt,
sink into economic and environmental desolation.
Finally only their heads remain at the surface,
baking in the sun as their feet rest on a sheep
carcass: potent emblem of the usurpation and
destruction of the land by pastoralist industry,
displacing native animals and disrupting the
traditional life of the original inhabitants. No
suggestion of renewal or hope animates this poem:
―so you wallow / in turgid limbo, access / to the core
denied‖ (91). The final image implies another
reality, utterly unavailable to the white pastoralist:
the heart of this arid country, its spare strength and
beauty, so well suited to the wandering huntergatherer, and so inimical to the predatory mores and
methods of contemporary agri-business.
Darkly foreboding, ―Parrot Deaths: Rites of
Passage‖ pursues the harvest of death, its language
one of suffering and loss: impending, dampening,
illegal, shifting, torpor, torn, dead, tarnished,
stained. The ―eucalypt sun /. . . fizzes and winces
with impending / rain,‖ the weather threatening ―the
orange hearts of king parrots.‖ Doom hangs over the
narrative. Overloaded trucks spilling their loads
along the ―scimitar roads‖ lure the rosellas, the
trucks‘ illegal tonnage a macabre compensation for
the ―torn bodies of the fallen‖ parrots. The title
menacingly plays with the double entendre: rites and
rights of passage, wherein the parrots ―plunge into
the dead eyes of a semi,‖ grim emblems of the
trucks‘ right of way through their country, carving a
path with the sword of their will and unmediated
greed. The speaker ―whisper[s] prayers of
deflection‖ (101), an act implicitly desperate,
hopeless. This poem and ―The Sinking Sand‖ both
appear in the section titled ―Rites of Passage,‖
intimating the centrality of violence as a marker of
Euro-Australian society with respect to place.
Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep defines a rite of
passage as safely transitioning an individual from
one life state/role to the next (Turner). However, in
Kinsella‘s poems, the separation is figured as a fatal
one: no new state is achieved in the unfamiliar,
transitionary state/place, except perhaps a state of
heightened awareness of relationship to place,
environmentally and historically. Instead, the rite of
passage stalls, leaving the speaker and culture in a
state of unresolved crisis, poorly adapted to the
Australian landscape that defies the European model
imposed upon it. ―Parrot Deaths: Rites of Passage‖
implies doom for both place and culture: the
―orange, golden and emerald // hearts‖ of the place
reduced to a meaningless sacrifice, ―litter‖ (101)
along Wheatbelt roads.
41
fore and aft, lopes into expanding flight.
(44)
Here is a rare moment of acceptance by and
communion with place. Each couplet records a
moment of attention to place, as the speaker
attunes himself to where he is, moving hesitantly,
awaiting permission from this place and its
inhabitants. The heron eyes him curiously as if in
interest; then the speaker enters by means of the
chat‘s song, his own quiet, intense attention to the
place, and is accepted by the river—emblem of
place—like the white swans, interlopers of this
place as well, who ―locate themselves perfectly.‖
Swathed in that ritual water like a new infant at
baptism, the speaker is located again in place.
―Skippy Rock, Augusta: Warning, the
undertow,‖ from Peripheral Light: Selected and
New Poems, similarly conveys a sense of delight in
place, the rich detail in the lines of working in
tandem with the explicit danger of this place.
Those details, beyond warning, transcend their
didacticism, offering an experience of place that
simultaneously delights and respects, wonders and
counsels. Awe for this place, where the Southern
and Indian Oceans tumultuously meet, belies the
title of the poem. The title speaks to caution, while
the poem itself loses sight of the purely cautionary
for immersion in the pleasures of place. In the first
section, Kinsella sets the place with the challenges
of the oyster catchers who make their living along
this perilous coastline, though by the second
section, the details and tone give way to
unimpeded pleasure, even in threat:
A black
lizard rounds & snorts
the froth capillaried
up toward the dry-land‘s
limestone, hill-side (23)
This tone of delight continues past the wrecks
the lighthouse warns against, and in the third
section ends in the midst of the crashing,
destructive power of the waves without losing sight
of their extraordinary, if terrifying, beauty:
Tenebrous lash
& filigreed canopy
of dusk-spray, undertow
of night. (25)
Where the imagery threatens, the sounds of
Kinsella‘s language brighten: the long ―e‖ sounds
that dominate the first stanza above are set against
the gnarling, sweeping water. The playful image of
the lizard works antithetically to the threat of the
crashing waves, as does the delicacy of the
capillaried froth. Even the limestone of the dry
land is writ with life by the waters, hollowed like
marrowbones. Experience of place in this poem
comes to the reader via the paired intentions of
caution and delight, wonder never bowing before
it ran
straight through me. (54)
The speaker is transformed as the fox moves
through him, underscoring his superfluity. Shooting
will not suffice; something more is required. In
section ten, the anger of the pastoralist‘s voice turns
upon the ―mangy‖ fox, a product of European
vanity, and by section eleven, the speaker‘s own fear
at last is evident. Hunting that fear, he functions as
emblem of Australian pastoralism and its selfdestruction: ―Downwind you approach / your
upwind life. / Smell yourself. / Fear stinks‖ (55).
The recognition of the speaker‘s moral culpability is
complete, underscored by short, emphatic statements
that structure this section, the evidence as
inescapable as the blunt language. In the final
section, the speaker turns irrevocably away from the
pastoralist‘s naive owning to the opposite extreme of
veganism as penance for past crimes. The tone
becomes confessional, quasi-religious: a new sense
of self is born. The sustained, longer lines of this
section embody that new voice. He ―embrace[s]‖ the
world he had sought to destroy, outsiders like
himself, the fox and the rabbit, as much as the
natives—the parrots he once brought home
suffocating in Hessian sacks. The poem‘s longest
line comes in the penultimate position, listing the
particulars of place, the line so long it must spill
back from the narrow confines of the page, its
thought completed in the final line of the poem:
I empty the breech and drain the powder.
I break the sights and seal the barrel.
I renounce the hunt, the flesh, the kill.
I embrace the sting of a cold morning,
the flight of the parrot, the bark
of the fox, the utility of the rabbit. (55)
―Shootings‖ maps a progress of understanding
from unconscious possession of place to respectful,
even worshipful recognition of place as distinct and
unpossessable in the pastoralist sense. The repetition
of ―I‖ statements at its close, each stepping the
speaker and reader progressively through this
epiphany, underscores this rising self-awareness. By
poem‘s end, where ―I‖ is most present in the poem,
the speaker matures into an awakened sensibility—
an affirmation of awareness and responsibility that
cannot be blinkered by the ambitions and ignorance
that once held sway over the speaker‘s sense of
place. Here the rite of passage is complete, the
speaker successfully transitioned from one state of
being into another.
Employing the same motif, in ―Avon River
Inventory. Winter,‖ the speaker delights in the
specificity of place, indeed enters place by means of
that delight:
The hooked necks of white swans
locate themselves perfectly.
A lacustrine dart bobs, marks space, pulls its
head
42
greed, exploitation, ignorance, indifference to
nature or the environment‖ (Pingping and Phillips
5). Anger takes a more prominent role in these
poems than in the earlier anti-pastorals, though the
sense of connection is more fully present, also. In
the juxtaposition of speaker and pastoralist
perspectives, each of the five acts affords a
window of attention on particular aspects of place.
Act 1 sets the scene, focusing on creatures of the
places, native and non-native, weather and seasons,
and the relationships between them. ―A Version of
the New Arcadia‖ suggests that the role of the
human lies with memory and observation, being in
place rather than acting on place wherein the
possibility of communion arises: the movements of
light and air, the flights of insects and bats, the
swell of water are of ―the same flesh‖ (Kinsella,
New Arcadia 35) as the land.
Act 2 focuses on the birds of the wheat country,
its dominant form of native animal life: the white
cockatoo, rufus songlark, willy wagtail, elegant
parrot, red-capped robin, twenty-eight parrot,
crested bellbird, hawks, and galahs. The eclogue
that closes this section pairs the twenty-eight (often
shot by the pastoralist as ―pest‖), an omnivorous
sampler of orchard fruits, seeds, nectar, even
flower stalks, with the territorial magpie, notorious
for swooping at the heads of the unwary. The
cheeky parrot and the fierce magpie trade defiance
and braggadocio, yet at the heart of each voice lay
assertions of both belonging and fitness to place.
Unfazed by the pastoralist tendency to shoot
parrots—‖We make the fl ashiest targets‖ (73) —
the twenty-eight declares, ―I stake a claim / and
humour myself,‖ knowing how to find ―blood / of
the shoot, dead under / rose hips and wattle
blooms‖ (72). The magpie testifies to its bold
nature, aggressively spearing locusts and akubras
with equal èlan (73). In each voice, also, resides
distain for humankind. Magpie: ―they nationalise /
their fear. Proprietary, / they compensate with clear
-felling‖ (74); twenty-eight:
―Port Lincolns‖ they‘d have us
just wandering a little North
of the Stirlings, walking the line,
night-flying when we should be settled. (74)
The Euro-Australian, as seen from the ―Eclogue
of the Birds,‖ is ignorant, fearful, destructive. Outof-place.
Act 3 focuses attention on fire: its ecology,
threat and management, the ritual cutting of firebreaks, scything of grass, the dread of wild fires
burning out of control. Fire facilitates the sprouting
and growth of native species, on the one hand, and
wipes away crops and buildings, on the other:
―running through late-harvest crops / ready to fall
into the mouth of the header‖ (94). Indeed, the
eucalypts‘ oily leaves add ferocity to these fires. In
this binary, the land and the pastoralists are in
threat, nor threat easily forgotten in the enthusiasm
of wonder. Together these paired intentions map a
new experience of place.
THE NEW ARCADIA: ECLOGUES OF EDEN
AND ITS LOSS
The New Arcadia extends Kinsella‘s antipastoral, the dedication of the book acknowledging
―the traditional owners of the lands‖ while asserting
his own desire to ―write‖ the land, the poet affirming
two fundamental constituents to his project: to
recognize the authority of the Nyungar people with
respect to this place and to construct a basis for his
own. Based in a personal engagement with place,
Kinsella‘s New Arcadia re-implaces (Casey, passim)
Western Australia in the poetry, quite literally
writing the land. Kinsella‘s epigram, taken from Sir
Philip Sydney‘s The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia, ties ―happiness‖ to ―following the course of
nature.‖ Kinsella‘s collection, borrowing from
Sydney‘s description of lost Arcadia, parallels that
loss with the losses suffered in Western Australia in
the European-Australians‘ refusal to adhere to the
qualities and limitations of the place they inhabit. In
writing the land, Kinsella follows its course, adheres
to its nature. Kinsella adopts a language that ―reads‖
as well as writes place: ―scansion of grasses‖ and
―motifs of heat‖ (19); lizards in the fallen jam tree
―tail-less / implication of words / grubbing for
transcription‖ (24); bats ―floating in hearsay‖ (34);
magpies, ―lexicographers / of the flyers‖ (72); the
white-faced heron‘s ―grammatical neck, an accent
from an unfamiliar / language‖ (88); the speaker
must ―borrow words / from before I could speak, the
tones of wandoo and mallee, / intricacies of roots,
and palettes of gravel‖ (142) — all of these, ―sounds
we‘re / not trained to hear‖ (103). The poet‘s eye
and ear learn the language of place in order to code
it in the poem, a language inherently visual but a
language nonetheless, for Kinsella, essential to
following place and bringing it to, re-implacing it
within, the page. Even when Kinsella voices despair
at this task — ―My speech / is dribble from the
snottygobble‘s foliage, / its anchor only in name or
language‖ (104) — the struggle to move beyond
vocabularies of place to a true knowing/connection
lies at the heart of his project.
Composed in five ―Acts,‖ The New Arcadia
narrates a parallel set of engagements with place,
this ―new‖ world so alien to its colonizers. Written
from the vantage of living in the Wheatbelt of
Western Australia, Kinsella juxtaposes his
understandings with those of the pastoralist, a
juxtaposition heightened by his eclogues, voices of
place dialoguing with/ against one another. Kinsella
composes a prosody of grief that maps a gradient of
co-informing understandings, shifting from senses of
love/oneness to possession/violence, anger at that
violence, and grief at pastoralism‘s ―prejudice,
43
not all remediable. Much of the remainder of Act 4
engages in other, related mappings: ―Map: Land
Subjected to Inundation,‖ ―York-Spencer‘s Brook
Road,‖ ―Quellington Road,‖ ―Mokine Road.‖
These mappings record devastation and anger: ―the
salt,
wonderland,
wanderlust
/
comeuppance‖ (131); ―the infinitesimally / small
reserve crowning Needling Hills, which the now—
/ ―owners‖ / won‘t let us climb‖ (131); ―grazing
diminishing species of plants,‖ ―avatars and
hucksters‖ (132); ―roadside drainage, scorched
river, cored-mountain range‖ (133), the river ―a
fraction of its deep-hold self‖ (134); all of these
realities, ―architectures / of a violent
sublime‖ (136).
In the poem ―Mokine Road,‖ the ―map‖ takes
form from a vocabulary of grief and fury: rage,
threats, twisting, bunkered, “built of nothing,”
infectious, chemical, hazing, bruising, lacerations,
drinking problems, chemical imbalances, resentful,
fighting, biting, ash, slash, cull. Against this litany
of dysfunction, Kinsella asserts that ―The sun [is]
almost an anti-psychotic‖ (139). Even when
scorchingly intense, the Western Australian sun
becomes an antidote to disturbance. Against this
mapping of destruction and grief, the speaker asks,
―Where else am I to home in on?‖ (136) This land
is the place of origin where sense of self arises,
even amid the grief inflicted on that place. The
closing eclogue meditates on the parallels between
farm culture in the Avon Valley of Western
Australia and the treatment of place in Knox
County, Ohio: in each, the ―map‖ imposed on the
land is oblivious to what it overwrites, each voice
confident in the righteousness of such ignorance in
the pursuit of profit. Kinsella pushes at the edges of
these mappings/authorities, asking what lies
underneath, what is lost in the bargain.
In Act 5 Kinsella focuses on the central
catastrophe of agriculture in the Wheatbelt: salt.
The pastoralist‘s plague, salt destroys the soil for
crops as for pasture; it makes the water useless to
drink and nearly useless for cleaning; it climbs in
bitter crystals along the wet over houses and sheds,
eating them away. Yet, Kinsella asserts, salt is
―part of the place‖ (172), and there is ―no
alchemy / or surprise attacks‖ in its appearance
when farmers clear the land of ―melaleucas / and
flooded gums, the big drinkers‖ (171). For
Kinsella, the salt is an ―inverted bogey-man,‖ a
kind of place-justice, settler culture having doomed
itself; even their graves are marked with salt (173).
Against such retribution, the return of native
orchids where soil has been rehabilitated ―[adds]
taste / to a prisoner‘s diet‖ (175) of cleared land,
the voices of small birds and nightjars rise over the
noise of earthmovers (174), and ―The purpleveined / spider orchid is a nerve centre,
powerboard
/
we‘ll
plug
into
from
direct conflict, fire simultaneously the agent of
fertility and destruction. Kinsella underscores this
conflict in his eclogue between the farmer and the
young bloke, where the fear and anger of the farmer
against the presence and unstated but understood
authority of the young Aboriginal man erupt in
threats of violence from the pastoralist — ―I‘ve a
good mind to give you a hiding and shut that noise /
that‘s spewing out of your mouth‖ (98) — against
the unflinching faith of his challenger: ―no matter
what you‘ve done to choke the gullies / They‘d
speak out in language that‘d just be noise / to
you‖ (98) but would carry the voices and laments of
his ancestors nevertheless. Kinsella asserts an
unfailing communion between native people and the
land, which he juxtaposes against the violence and
destruction of its white ―owners.‖ Anger dominates
the tone of this section: at the crop duster ―strafing‖
―fallout‖ (―Crop Duster,‖ ―Crop Duster Jerk-off: A
Poetry of Abuse,‖ ―The Shitheads of Spray‖); at the
hypocrisy of the ―dead beyond the roots‖ pastoralists
(91); at the racism and violence of the pastoralist
toward the first owners (―Eclogue of Presence‖); at
―the wanking machines‖ that fuel ―the cream
separator, / centrifuge making heavy / water‖ (105);
at the ―coprophilia of industry / and growth‖ (108).
In this scalding discourse, sex and violence are
inextricable, as profit from poison or death from
―growth.‖ In the final eclogue of Act 3, Kinsella
brings this tension to a fevered pitch, juxtaposing the
voices of the ―Vigilantes‖ against their ―Victim,‖
exposing the violent current of xenophobia within
settler culture: in this case, against ―a wog
bastard‖ (119) who feeds abandoned cats ―so they
would eat less parrots‖ (122).
Act 4 follows the motif of driving, a motif that
opens each of the ―acts‖ and focuses attention on
maps, roads, and travel, travel being the
quintessential Australian act: pursuing the long,
seemingly uninhabited distances that separate each
township and city from all others. It is in these
―Reflectors‖ or ―Drives‖ opening each act that love
is most apparent, revealed in the speaker‘s anxiety
over his lover. In ―Reflectors: Drive 4,•h the speaker
asserts, ―We‘re all connected / to this place, and all
as uncomfortable / about how close we feel‖ (128) to
one another as to the land. This discomfort arises
from how ―Monetarism and ownership collate
place‖ (129), even when ―The traditional /
custodians are heard‖ (128). As the lover drives, the
speaker ―maps‖ her progress toward him, past ―For
Sale‖ signs, pastures, native bush. In so doing he
maps his own anxiety and discomfort about
ownership of land that belongs ultimately to others,
spiritually if not also materially, and the rankling he
feels about superficial ―possession‖ of place versus
relation founded in ―Communion, correspondence,
negotiation‖ (127). Kinsella maps a territory of
feeling:
love,
longing,
doubt,
frustration.
Communion with place suffers disturbances that are
44
has come, and thus central to his poetics lies a
―dismantlement of the pastoralist myth‖ (Pingping
and Phillips 2) that has afforded that devastation.
In attending to the tropes and activities of the past,
Kinsella‘s anti-pastoral poetry of place pushes the
reader into a direct engagement with the losses
accrued upon the land as into a deeper awareness
of the consequences of wealth generation that
makes little effort to fully account for its costs.
Caught up in the leashes of history, Kinsella places
the reader with himself into a landscape of loss and
delight, proffering a relationship that challenges
the hegemony of wealth, supplanting it with an
intimate awareness of the interconnectedness of
humanity to the places we inhabit. Kinsella‘s antipastorals convene a liminal space, a heterotopia of
crisis, within which Heidegger‘s poesis is active,
affording for poet and reader alike a new techne,
the ―rediscover[y] of the art of dwelling‖ (Rigby
430) in place.
WORKS CITED
wherever‖ (178). Where place transcends violence
or returns from erasure, Kinsella‘s poetry lifts into
the possibility of hope. The final eclogue between
bride and groom is accompanied by the calls and
songs of native birds: harbingers of luck (194) that
―Cut into you, but in a sickly / sweet kind of way. A
choir, / that only cuts a bit‖ (195), the sound of a
―flock of pink and greys / coming over the hills‖
heralding the union even when their ―rhythms don‘t
complement / the wedding procession‖ (196). This
couple, outsiders in the town, is soothed by the wild
songs of the native birds, which don‘t ―fit‖ the
settler culture, yet suit this bride and groom who
marry themselves to place as well as one another. In
the union of lovers and of lovers to place, Kinsella‘s
poetry expresses the possibility of communion
between descendents of settlers and the place in
which they live. In the book‘s closing eclogue, the
lovers, in following the ―course of nature,‖ taking
pleasure in the alternate rhythms that galahs bring to
the wedding, are able to find happiness.
An exploration of the language(s) of place,
human and other-than-human, pastoralist and
antipastoralist, The New Arcadia speaks a return to
the natal place for Kinsella, drawing the speaker into
the possibility of renewal and communion, even as
the poet challenges and critiques the dominant
discourses of violence and wealth extraction. In
these poems, Kinsella adopts for place a
Heideggerian sense of poesis, one that, according to
Kate Rigby, ―extends ultimately to a whole way of
life. As such it is itself a form of praxis: that of
knowing how to dwell‖(430). In reading place, as in
writing place, the poet finds both probity and the
sacred: as Kinsella asserts in his ―Envoy,‖ ―Among
the murk I will find things to worship‖ (201).
CONCLUSION
Descendant and inheritor of an alien culture
transplanted to Australia, Kinsella‘s experience of
place is that of the outsider. As he writes in ―The
Search for a Culture,‖ ―I am haunted by [Ian]
Britain‘s point regarding Germaine Greer, that
―[h]er abiding conviction has been that Australia is,
was, and ever shall be someone else‘s country.‖‖
Harrowed by the cruelty to the land and its original
inhabitants enacted by his ancestors and by the laws
and behaviors of contemporary Australia, Kinsella
finds himself alienated from the ground of his sense
of identity. His love for the rural realm of the
pastoralists, and for those who struggled to wrest a
livelihood in that realm, stands at odds with the
political and ecological realities upon which
Australian pastoralism is based: his wheat country
―an invaded space, from a farming perspective, a
land
that
has
been
ecologically
devastated...‖ (Kinsella qtd. in Mengham 285).
Kinsella‘s love of the land, of the people who now
inhabit it, is overbalanced by the cost to the land and
Aboriginal people at which this pastoralist tradition
Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A
Translation with Commentary. New York:
Norton, 2004.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996.
Casey, Edward S. Representing Place: Landscape
Painting & Maps. Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 1998.
Clark, Gary. ―Environmental Themes of Australian
Literature.‖ A Companion to Australian
Literature Since 1900. Ed. Nick Birns and
Rebecca McNeer. Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2007. 429.43.
Foucault, Michel. ―Des Espace Autres,
Heterotopias.‖ Web. 2 April 2004. http://
foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/
foucault.heteroTopia.en.html>.
Haskell, Dennis. ―Tradition and Questioning: The
Silo As Pastoral Symphony.‖ Fairly
Obsessive. Ed. Rod Mengham and Glen
Phillips. Nedlands, Western Australia:
FremantleArts Centre Press, 2000. 89.102.
Kinsella, John. The New Arcadia. New York: &
2005.
—— Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems.
Selected and introduced by Harold Bloom.
Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts
Centre Press, 2003.
—— ―The Search for a Culture.‖ Web. 11 May
2005. <http://www.johnkinsella.org/essays/
searchculture.html>.
—— The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony. Fremantle,
Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre
Press, 1995.
Malouf, David. A Spirit of Play. 1998. Sydney,
45
NSW: ABC Books, 1999.
Pingping, Liu and Glen Phillips. ―Radical
Pastoralism: John Kinsella‘s Great ‗Pastoral
Trilogy.‘‖ Landscape 3.1 (2009).Web. 14
December 2009. <http://
www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/
landscapes/radicalpastoralism.pdf>.
Mengham, Rod. ―An Interview With John Kinsella.‖
Fairly Obsessive. Ed. Rod Mengham and Glen
Phillips. Nedlands, Western Australia:
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000. 284.98.
Phillips, Glen. ―Glen Phillips On The Work Of John
Kinsella.‖ Web. 15 December 2004. <http://
www.johnkinsella.org/essays/onkinsella.html>.
—— ―Harrowing Paddocks: John Kinsella and
Neopastoralism‖ Fairly Obsessive. Ed. Rod
Mengham and Glen Phillips. Nedlands,
Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre
Press, 2000. 103.18.
Rigby, Kate. ―Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)
possibility of Ecopoiesis.‖ Muse. New Literary
History 35.3 (2004): 427.41. 13 December
2009. <http://muse.jhu.edu>.
Turner, Victor. ―Rites of Passage: A Few
Definitions.‖ 8 July 2008. http://
faculty.mdc.edu/jmcnair/Joepages/
rites_of_passage(1).htm>.
Wilson, Rob. ―From the Sublime to the Devious:
Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific.‖
Boundary 2 28.1 (2001):121.51. 14 Dec. 2009.
<http://muse.jhu.edu>.
46
Fear in Peter Weir’s
Australian Films:
A Matter of Control
Theodore F. Sheckels
Randolph-Macon College, Virginia USA
First published in Antipodes, June 2010 24(1)
Many have noted the prevalence of the emotion of
fear in Peter Weir‘s Australian films. In dealing with
this fear, commentators have directed their focus at
the world external to that which Weir‘s characters
inhabit. The commentators have asked what is it
―out there‖ that these characters are so afraid of. As
is the wont of all good scholars, they have attempted
to discern an answer that unites Weir‘s oeuvre.
Certainly, an argument can be made that Picnic at
Hanging Rock (1975) and The Plumber (1979) can
be connected based on a fear of sexuality;
furthermore, an argument could be made that
Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living
Dangerously (1982) can be connected based on a
fear of the harsh realities of war, be it world war or
civil war. However, little connects the other two
Australian films, The Cars that Ate Paris (1974) and
The Last Wave (1977) with each other, and little
connects those two earlier films with any of the
other films Weir directed in Australia.
Jonathan Rayner identifies unity in Weir‘s
Australian work in its ―constant theme of the
individual
confronting
an
authoritative
establishment or an enigmatic or illusory
world‖ (21). Michael Bliss posits that the unifying
idea is ―the psychological dislocation that results
from a confrontation with upsetting forces or the
unknown‖ (24). Although sufficiently general to
provide some unity, both answers prove
inadequate. Rayner‘s answer is split between two
outside forces, authority and enigma, and, then,
rather than explore either of these senses of what‘s
―out there‖ and threatening in Weir, Rayner‘s
discussion of the films per se shifts to, first, their
stylistic unity—noting such elements as lack of
closure and a mystical mood—and, second, their
bridging of American and European approaches to
cinema. Bliss‘s answer is also split, this time
between the upsetting and the unknown. When
analyzing the films, he takes a pronounced
THEODORE F SHECKELS is Professor of English and Communication at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. He is
current President of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies.
47
On several occasions and in several different ways,
the town of Paris unites to ―caution‖ him.
Arthur is not, however, the only threat to
control in Paris. ―The cars‖ might be said to have
eaten Paris insofar as they have taken over its
economy, but that is not the only sense in which
the film‘s title is true. There may be a horror-film
truth beyond metaphor. ―The cars,‖ the literal
automobiles, decked out in menacing punk
detailing, also seem to be threatening the town.
They patrol the perimeter, keeping people bunched
as if for the kill, and they even invade the town‘s
center, sending an even more ominous message. As
Rayner notes, the cars are much like marauding
outlaws (or Indians) in a subverted American
Western (41-44). Unlike Arthur, who threatens
control by perhaps revealing Paris‘s evil
enterprises, the literal cars threaten control by what
seems a circle-and-destroy mission that precedes a
devouring attack.
Most viewers of the film see the cars as a threat
to the town‘s status quo orchestrated by its youth.
They have decked out the vehicles bizarrely, and
they are driving them. However, as Sheckels
argues in Celluloid Heroes Down Under, there is
no evidence in the film that the menacing vehicles
have drivers. Indeed, as Marek Haltof has noted,
the vehicles do indeed ―have lives of their
own‖ (16). Weir‘s film may well be more of a
campy horror movie that offers a satirical
commentary on the predominance of the
automobile in Australian culture than one featuring
youth rebellion, and the cars themselves, much as
in Stephen King‘s Christine, may be the threat. The
monstrous cars may then be preparing to eat Paris.
As is typical in Weir‘s films, Cars ends without
a clear resolution. The structure may well be
collapsing: Paris may well be dissolving, leaving
its denizens without a clear sense of their role. The
focus in Weir‘s Australian films is not so much on
structure‘s collapse—and certainly not on its
aftermath. Rather, the focus is on the prescient
sense of fear that precedes collapse as well as the
panicked fear of the collapse at its onset. A
definitive answer as to what‘s ―out there‖ is
irrelevant. Weir wants viewers to feel the loss of
control, not offer an intellectualized cause/effect
explanation.
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Picnic—a much better film, of course—follows
a similar pattern. The viewer is taken back in time
to the moment when the nineteenth century turns to
the twentieth and to a posh girls‘ school,
Appleyard College. The school does indeed, as
many have noted, seem out of place on the wild
Australian continent: a bit of high-brow British
formality imposed on a natural landscape.
However, the school does provide structure. The
Freudian turn that is too simply intellectual for a
director who rebels against, as Bliss grants, the
academic (13) in favour of depicting feelings that
cannot be systematized in any single way. Weir is
undoubtedly a director who ―reads around,‖ but he is
also undoubtedly a director who prefers creating a
puzzling mood to presenting any system—Freudian,
Jungian, or otherwise. He might well borrow an idea
or two but not a system.
However, if the focus were shifted away from
what is ―out there‖ to the characters‘ own worlds, a
coherent answer emerges. The characters have all
structured their own worlds in such a way that they
maintain control. They have done so because, only
in such controlled environments, do they have a
clear identity. What they then fear is losing
control—and, then, identity—when these structured
worlds collapse. All six of Weir‘s Australian films
feature this particular dynamic. Fear in Weir then
has little to do with what‘s ―out there‖; rather, it has
to do with the characters‘ tenacious hold on what,
from their point of view, is ―in here‖—in
themselves—out of fear that its collapse will send
them tumbling into an abyss. That abyss, although it
may be mirrored by the external events in the films;
is more an intrapersonal phenomenon: without
control and without the identity control provides,
Weir‘s characters feel as if all is collapsing. Weir
wants his viewers to share their feeling, not pinpoint
a definitive external threat.
Recognizing this dynamic provides a unity to
Weir‘s six Australian feature-length films, as the
following film-by-film discussion will show.
THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS
Cars, the earliest of the six films, is in some
ways the most bizarre example of this dynamic. The
viewer is taken to the fictitious town of Paris, a place
highway drivers stumble into only by ―accident.‖ As
it turns out, the accidents are not actually accidents;
rather, they are orchestrated by the town‘s residents,
who feed on the parts they extract from the wrecks.
This mining of automobile parts has become the
town‘s industry. Both drivers and passengers, should
they survive, are either hospitalized and subjected to
bizarre medical experiments, or they are integrated
into the Paris community.
The film‘s central character, Arthur, is so
integrated, to the point of being virtually adopted
into the mayor‘s family. However, he does not
embrace entirely what is going on in the town.
Viewers see how awkward his adoption is, and
Arthur very much communicates to viewers that he
feels this awkwardness. Because he refuses to fit
into Paris‘s bizarre social structure completely, he
becomes, in the eyes of some, an outside force that
could undermine the structure that Paris has erected
to sustain itself. He is then a threat, a person to be
feared. He thus becomes the subject of intimidation.
48
loosening of them. An early scene depicts the girls
lined up and tying each other‘s corset; Minnie, on
the other hand, is without her corset when with her
lover but, upon Mrs. Appleyard‘s summons,
hurriedly puts it back on and ties it up tight. She
must put transgression behind and quickly bind
herself within the college‘s structure. On the rock,
the viewer sees the lost girls remove shoes and
stockings, but, out of sight, Irma also evidently
removes her corset. It is not found among her
clothes when she is found, and no one sees fit to
speak publicly about this looseness. Appleyard,
prim and proper, is symbolized by the in-place
corset (as well as the intact hymen, which
characters seem unduly concerned about). The
body must be controlled. What evokes fear in those
who have internalized Appleyard‘s strictures is the
loosening, and, although the loosening is certainly
sexually suggestive, it is both vaguer and more all
encompassing than literal sexuality. Clothes may
fall; social class barriers may fall; the walls that
separate humans from ―venomous snakes and
poisonous insects‖ in nature may fall.
What evokes fear is all of these and more; what
evokes fear is anything and everything that might
challenge the structures the film identifies with
Appleyard. Sexuality is part of the puzzle, but it is
too easy an answer. The characters‘ obsession with
the found girls‘ virginity is a clue that this answer
is too easy, for Weir certainly does not want
viewers to accept the analysis offered by those
entrapped within the Appleyard or Appleyard-like
world. The girls are still intact; therefore, all should
be well if the threat were purely sexual. Weir wants
viewers to discern something broader ―out there‖
that threatens, not feel compelled to define it. Weir
wants viewers to focus more on the feeling of
collapse that causes characters to become, one way
or another, unhinged.
Cars was based on Weir‘s own screenplay,
based on a story he co-wrote with Keith Gow and
Piers Davies. Picnic, on the other hand, was based
on Cliff Green‘s screenplay adapted from Joan
Lindsay‘s popular 1967 novel. There are, of
course, differences between screenplay and novel;
however, Green does offer an adaptation that is
rather true to the novel. He does, however, sharpen
the focus of the plot on Appleyard. In the novel,
the effects of Hanging Rock and the incident on
February 14th on a wider range of characters are
depicted: there is a sense of some mysterious force
spreading its power out farther and farther from the
epicenter of the Rock. This broadened focus
emphasizes that force, whatever it might be. The
film‘s somewhat narrower focus emphasizes more
the very structure, Appleyard, that epitomizes
control, its collapse, and the feelings of those under
the college‘s control as it weakens.
teachers know their place; the students know their
place; and, most importantly, Appleyard College‘s
headmistress knows her place, as well as everybody
else‘s. Their places, however, are threatened by a
number of forces—some much more amorphous
than others. The school, for example, seems to be
encountering financial difficulties, difficulties that
increase as the film proceeds; and the girls are
growing up, with their innocent St. Valentine‘s Day
festivities no longer seeming quite as asexual.
The real threat, of course, is Hanging Rock itself.
As many have noted, there seems to be a link
between the rock and sexuality. We never know
what the link is, precisely, and I would argue that
Weir does not strive for precision. Haltof‘s (and
others‘) stress on the phallic peaks and vaginal caves
(29) seems to reach for a simple symbol where Weir
offers only suggestions. There are, however, enough
hints—for example, in the girls‘ and their
mathematic teacher‘s partial disrobing despite the
dictates of Victorian propriety—that an earthy
sexuality is undoubtedly suggested by the Rock. It is
clearly part of what the Rock evokes, but the Rock is
not that simple.
Although one is tempted to focus on those who
have disappeared on the rock and figure out what
actually happened to them, the film‘s true focus—I
would argue—is on the characters who must deal
with the mysterious disappearance. Those who were
initially within the highly structured world of
Appleyard react in fear. When one of the girls is
found and, then, returns on a brief visit to the school,
the remaining girls react negatively. Rather than
embrace their nearly lost schoolmate, they shy away
from her, as if scared of her. Then, they almost
maniacally attack, wanting to know what happened.
Mrs. Appleyard, on the other hand, increasingly
isolates herself. She seems frozen in fear as events
unfold and parents begin withdrawing their
daughters because of the presumed deaths and the
assumed lack of due care on the part of the school.
A counterpoint to the structure imposed on lives
by the school is the life led by servants Minnie and
Tom. While the school‘s atmosphere either represses
or displaces sexuality, these two delight in it while
the students are away and Mrs. Appleyard is not
carefully monitoring their behavior. The inclusion of
these characters is not just comic relief. Nor is it
Weir‘s way of commenting on the difference
between upper-class and working-class attitudes
toward sex. Rather, it highlights both the repressive
quality of the school and its fearful attitude toward
any behavior that might undermine the rigid
structure of Appleyard. What the servants do clearly
is transgressive within the Appleyard College
structure. Class allows them to transgress; however,
they must do so clandestinely, in fear of discovery.
Corsets play a role in the film, underscoring this
opposition between strictures and the threatening
49
that of The Last Wave by design. The Plumber
(again, with screenplay by Weir) was directed for
the television screen. Whether television suggested
a higher degree of directness or not is impossible to
determine, but The Plumber does present the same
essential dynamics in a manner less subtle than
either Picnic or Last Wave. The structured
existence of the central character, Jill, is easier for
the viewer to see. As is the threat and the fear it
evokes.
The couple in the film are academics. The man
is so very absorbed in his anthropological work
that he is inattentive to his partner‘s needs. Without
much affection and attention in her life, she
devotes herself to her academic work. Basically,
the two are trapped in a cold shell of academic
inquiry. Just as Weir chose the law in The Last
Wave as the entrapping life, he chooses academe
here. Both professions are depicted as cold and dry
and stiff, death-like compared to the threatening
alternative presented in the film (Rayner 107).
Their research tasks involve human subjects, and
these tasks could—should—therefore, connect
them with ―life.‖ However, they maintain a chilly
distance. This life that they have chosen to lead has
very clearly structured their existence, imprisoning
them somewhat in emotionally unsatisfying roles,
what Haltof terms the ―sterile lives of
intellectuals‖ (19). Both then are typical Weir
protagonists. The film could have focused then on
both, but Weir chooses to center the film on the
woman.
And into her life comes the plumber, Max. He
comes from a social class lower than hers. He,
therefore, represents different values than the ones
her life is structured around. Among these different
values is sexuality. Much like Hanging Rock, he
exudes it. He is not necessarily a menacing figure;
however, from her repressed point of view, he
definitely is. The sexual dimension of The Plumber
is stressed by the story she tells of an encounter
with an Aboriginal man during a research trip. Like
the plumber, he began to be perceived as a threat.
Whereas in the finished film the sexual nature of
his threat is only hinted at, in an earlier draft of the
screenplay he exposes his erect penis to her and,
thereby, evokes her frightened response (Kinder
17). However, neither the Aboriginal man‘s nor the
plumber‘s threat is narrowly sexual: the film is not
about potential rape or potential seduction. These
possibilities might be in her mind; however, the
plumber‘s threat is broader. He does represent a
physicality of which frank sexuality is a part, a part
that she has virtually eliminated from the life that
she has chosen to live. He also represents the
attitudes of the social class that she, as a member
of the intellectual elite, feels she has risen above.
Max‘s bantering comments are quite frequently
focused on the class differences, and, although he
THE LAST WAVE
Picnic makes the matters of structure and control
obvious—Weir‘s film more so than Lindsay‘s novel.
Appleyard College is an imposing structure and,
although it is losing control, it still exerts it—and
thereby defines who people are—in the film‘s
beginning. The Last Wave, based on a screenplay
Weir co-wrote, is less overt in presenting this same
dynamic. Weir‘s choice of a contemporary setting
and realistic approach—not a period setting and
highly iconic approach—requires the viewer to
discern how structured life is in David Burton‘s
world. The difficulty seeing so is undoubtedly
because that world is very close to the viewers‘ own:
viewers are not distanced by many decades as in
Picnic. The choice of the legal profession for the
central character is shrewd on Weir‘s part. The law
is thought of as highly structured. That structure
seems to inform the affluent white society we see in
the film.
That world is threatened from beyond. The
weather turns weird. Thunderstorms strike in the
country without there being clouds; black hail falls
in Sydney. Aboriginals seem to have an intuitive
understanding of what is happening. That fact
intrigues David, but he is also unnerved by both the
unusual occurrences and the Aboriginals. They
threaten—him and Australia—in a way he cannot
articulate. When he discovers that he might have
access to their understanding because he may be
related to an ancient South American race, he feels
further threatened. Control is slipping away: he may
no longer really know who he is, and he may no
longer know what reality is. The distance that
develops between David and his family is
symptomatic. Structure is dissolving; identities are
endangered. An apocalyptic moment seems upon us,
even though life goes on as if all is normal in
Sydney.
Many fault The Last Wave for its final scenes.
With money running out, the last wave comes with a
whimper, not a bang. In a way, however, the anticlimactic wave, as well as the very dark scenes in
Sydney‘s sewers, lends the film‘s resolution the
appropriate indeterminacy characteristic of Weir‘s
films. If the wave were a tsunami of proportions not
experienced in modern times and had actually been
depicted on the screen, then Weir would have
directed a disaster film of Hollywood proportions.
The wimpy wave compels the viewer to pay more
attention to the character‘s fear that his structured
life is collapsing around him than to a literal
apocalypse. The wimpy wave draws attention to
David Burton‘s psyche, not to either the nature or
size of the catastrophe facing Sydney or Australia or
the world.
THE PLUMBER
The scale of The Plumber is much smaller than
50
on the mateship that (quickly) develops between
Archie and Frank, but, more broadly, it is focused
on what I would term Australian normalcy. The
film is divided neatly into three acts. The first
occurs in Western Australia. There, we would
expect normalcy. The viewers see life on a station,
mates, and a strong competitive spirit. These are,
of course, Australian norms. After the footrace
where Archie and Frank meet concludes, a parade
recruiting for the Lighthorse suddenly appears. At
this point, the viewer senses the war intruding.
People had been reading about and talking about
the war in Europe, but it was not a real presence.
The intrusion is both ominous and comic. The
giant horse that rolls onto the carnival grounds
evokes the Trojan horse, thereby suggesting both a
lengthy conflict and, perhaps, the waste that
eventually befell Troy and will eventually befall
the ANZAC troops. At the same time, the giant
horse evokes laughter among viewers as well as
delight among those in the film. This mixture of
the ominous and the comic continues into the
film‘s second act.
In that act, the ANZAC troops are in Egypt,
ostensibly for training. But what we see are not
military exercises that might evoke the disaster at
Gallipoli that is to come. Rather, we see a football
match between soldiers from Western Australia
and Victoria and the ANZAC troops on the loose
in Cairo entertaining themselves in many ways.
The only hint of warfare per se is one military
exercise—infantry vs. unmounted lighthorse—that
the men turn into a joke, most falling on the ground
pretending to die melodramatically.
Throughout the Egyptian scenes, the emphasis
is once again on Australian normalcy. The men are
at war insofar as they are in uniform and thousands
of miles from Australia, receiving the training that
will supposedly allow them to fight across the
Mediterranean. The men, however, do not act as if
this is their situation. The structures that defined
their lives back home still dominate their thinking.
Their mates, their inter-state rivalries, their
Pommie-bashing, and a streak of the larrikin
characterizing most of the soldiers, these are what
film viewers see, not a prelude to combat.
Mateship is, of course, not the only element of the
life these soldiers are trying to hold onto; however,
as Haltof notes, mateship is dominant in the film
and it does provide a strong idealistic counterpoint
to the outside world, which is depicted as
aggressive, dishonest, and ultimately deadly (59).
This outside world, however, is very much in the
film‘s background throughout its first two acts.
In the third act, the men‘s attitude gradually
changes. The dramatic shift in music from that at a
ball thrown by ANZAC nurses for the corps‘
officers to Albinoni‘s ―Adagio for Strings and
Organ‖ as the troops cross the sea in the dark alerts
initially treats her as if she is beyond making such
distinctions, he increasingly acts as if she is, and, as
the events of the film prove, she indeed is. He is
very alien to the structure that defines her, and, as a
result, she feels threatened by him. The role of Max
is deftly played so that television viewers see him as
a threat but, nonetheless, are not sure he is a threat.
He definitely makes comments to her that are truly
inappropriate, but viewers are not positive as to
whether he is menacing or joking.
The Plumber is not the bizarre film that Cars is;
however, the plot does take a bizarre turn. This
plumber turns his work in the couple‘s apartment
into a seemingly never-ending job. He makes the
bathroom his turf and proceeds to work and work
and work on the pipes there. He encamps there to the
point that the couple no longer feels that the
bathroom is theirs. In fact, at one point in the film,
they feel compelled to invade it in order to rescue a
foreign guest from its clutches. The scene is comic,
but darkly so. Viewers laugh at the absurdity of the
moment; however, they also sense that there is a
desperation to the couple‘s plight and action,
especially Jill‘s.
The plumber and all that he stands for is a threat.
In fear, she reacts. Whereas other Weir characters
simply allow fear to overwhelm them and their
structured lives to collapse, Jill uses the power she
has to thwart the threat. She plants a wristwatch in
the man‘s vehicle and, then, makes sure that her
husband reports a robbery and the authorities find
the stolen article in the truck. The plumber then is
carted away, and she is once again safely in her
structured world. Has the plumber—and all that he
stands for—disturbed her and altered her? No doubt
so. However, in the film, she recedes safely back
into the chilly but safe structure that had
characterized her life.
GALLIPOLI
The Plumber is the least expansive of Weir‘s
Australian films. Its physical limits reflect both its
budget and how Weir conceived of television films
as opposed to movies. Much more expansive are
Weir‘s two war films, Gallipoli and The Year of
Living Dangerously. World War I and civil conflict
in Indonesia offer Weir a broader canvas upon
which to present his theme. The theme, however, is
virtually the same as in the earlier films: structure
defines and imprisons; threats to it evoke the
characters‘ fears.
As many have noted, Gallipoli is not as much
about war per se as one might expect: actual fighting
is relegated to the film‘s last ten or fifteen minutes;
the audience‘s expectations—at least the Australian
audience‘s expectations—of a movie celebrating the
valorous ANZAC troops in battle are thwarted in
Weir‘s story and David Williamson‘s screenplay
adapting it. The bulk of the film is instead focused
51
press does not possess the safety in Indonesia that
it might in the United Kingdom, the United States,
or Australia. The reporters also think they can
accomplish something: that they can, through their
reporting, shape political events, not just passively
observe them. They think they are immune; they
think they can purposefully act. Two scenes
demonstrate well Guy‘s particular naiveté. In one,
he rushes to cover the collapsing nation, fully
believing that his press credentials will keep him
safe. He ends up beaten, in danger of losing sight
in one eye due to a detached retina. In the other, he
travels to a countryside retreat with Kumar and
meets Tiger Lily. In a dream, it comes to him that
they are both active in the Communist Party and
could have killed him at any minute. These naive
assumptions are sufficient ground for criticism of
Guy; however, many of the other reporters can be
faulted for more than just naiveté. Their lives in
Indonesia are far worse, for some think that their
immunity from the consequences of their actions
there extends so far as to allow them to exploit
sexually the impoverished people of the country.
Some buy Indonesian women for one dollar per
night; at least one turns to boys.
The reporters are analogous in the film to Billy
Kwan. He has also structured and defined his
existence. He is a ―divided‖ man because he is both
Chinese and Australian; thus, he thinks he can step
back from Indonesian reality. He is also a dwarf;
thus, he assumes that he must forego the romantic
relationships possible for one of greater stature. He
is, then, allowed to step back and observe
objectively the relationships of others. Billy,
however, defines himself as more than an objective
observer. Yes, he observes, but he also believes
that his objective stance permits him, like a
wayang puppet master, to manipulate events in
both the political and the romantic realm. He has
connections within the political, and he can put the
reporters in contact with people who want to use
the reporters to sway events one way or another. Of
course, Billy thinks, by choosing who to connect
with whom, he is controlling matters. Furthermore,
Billy thinks he is setting up and then steering the
developing romance between Guy and Jill. In an
especially suggestive scene, he shows Guy his
shadow puppets. Although tied to Indonesian lore,
they very clearly represent Guy and Jill and, in the
serving dwarf role, Billy himself.
Billy occasionally dresses up as his hero
Sukarno, thus establishing for the viewer the
analogy between the two. Sukarno is also held to
be a puppeteer, keeping the competing right-wing
and left-wing political forces in the nation at bay
while trying to help its impoverished people.
Unfortunately, Sukarno is just as unsuccessful
controlling events as Billy. Furthermore, like the
reporters, he proves to be exploitative of, not
viewers to a dramatic change. The men, however,
pick up on the change only gradually. As Bliss
notes, the scene in which they swim in the sea off
Gallipoli effects some change (92). In their naked
innocence, they frolic in the water; then, bullets and
shrapnel fly. The water-slowed projectiles are
initially ineffectual against the men, but then one
strikes. Blood is in the water, and the men begin
learning that they are not on a great adventure but at
war.
Fear begins to set in. As combat draws nearer,
exhilaration and fear mix. Then, as the reality of
combat sets in, fear becomes dominant. Both the
night before and that very day the men ―go over the
top,‖ the mood is somber. The men, of course, fear
death, but the way it is depicted visually suggest that
Weir wants the viewers to understand the feared
death in less than explicitly literal terms. The men
are huddled on the cliffs; the threat is ―over the top.‖
It cannot be seen; it can only be guessed at. The
partially indeterminate nature of the threat shifts the
viewer‘s focus from the deaths that await to the
tangible fear seen on the cliffs of Gallipoli. Viewers,
of course, will see soldier after soldier cut down by
Turkish machine gun fire, but the stronger focus is
on the men‘s feelings before the order to charge
comes. Their safe Australian world has collapsed.
Alone and without a trace of Australian irreverence,
they stare at the emptiness that is before them.
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Gallipoli, despite its emphasis on mateship, in
the end presents the soldiers alone. Ironically,
although the film is about groups of men, we are
drawn by Weir‘s visual images to the individuals as
they prepare for death. In groups playing football,
roaming Cairo, swimming in the sea, they celebrate
the structures that control and define their lives, but,
alone, each man faces the collapse of those
structures. The Year of Living Dangerously is more
complex. Viewers see in the reporters a group that
thinks it can control, as well as two men, Billy Kwan
and Indonesian leader Sukarno, who also think they
can control. Both the group and the individuals are
overwhelmed by the events in Indonesia (presented
less clearly than in Weir‘s source) as the Sukarno
regime collapses.
The reporters are in focus early in the film. They
hang out at the hotel bar, and they are very much
colleagues as well as journalistic rivals. When
Australian reporter Guy Hamilton joins them, they
welcome him with a fraternity-like mix of hazing
and camaraderie. These reporters, of course, must
know that the nation is slipping into chaos.
Nonetheless, they act as if their world is safe from
any dire consequences that might come with chaos.
As the film proceeds, viewers begin to sense that the
reporters‘ view is naive. They act as if the nation
they are posted to is as safe for journalists as the
nations they hail from, but the reality is that the
52
focus somewhat from the external source of the
characters‘ fears to their illusions and their feelings
when control begins to collapse. We do know that
the process of transforming this work from fiction
to film was contentious; what we do not know is
whether the screenplay was intended to transform a
political novel into one that, in line with the
previous five films by Weir, focuses on the fear
one experiences as control and identity slip away.
Whether intended or not, this difference in effect is
the most striking difference between novel and
movie, more so than the superficial plot changes or
the necessary elimination of the third-personlimited narration of journalist ―Cookie.‖
IDENTITY
Peter Weir‘s Australian films are focused on
control, proven largely to be illusory, and the fear
of its loss. One might argue that humans globally
feel this fear. We need structures in our lives, and,
if we lack them, we lose important moorings. To
varying degrees, we drift, and, sometimes, that
drift can suddenly accelerate and we fall into an
abyss. But is there any particular Australian ―take‖
on this human drama?
Speaking of another Commonwealth nation,
Canada, both Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood,
in their role of literary historians, have suggested
that Canada‘s writers and, more generally,
Canada‘s people, do not know where they are.
Long under Britain‘s shadow and now under that
of the United States, they lack an identity.
Australian commentators often speak of a ―cultural
cringe‖ that seems to reflect similar shadows in
Australia. First, Britain; now, the U.S.: these
nations dominate so much that one‘s worth as an
artist depends on acceptance in these places, not
one‘s own Australian place. This ―cringe‖ may
well extend beyond artists: Australians in general
may look abroad so much that, like the Canadians,
they lack a strong identity.
Lacking a strong identity, Australians need
control more so than others. Control achieved
through the various structures that characterize life
gives them identities that allow them to move
forward. But, because the need is more deeply felt
than elsewhere, there is a high level of fear that
control will lapse and structures will collapse. The
fear that is reflected in Weir‘s Australian films,
then, is quite Australian, albeit not uniquely so.
Weir reminds his audiences that we only think
we have control. There are ―things‖ beyond that we
can barely fathom let alone define. His focus,
however, is not ―out there‖; rather, it is on how this
realization affects his characters. That the effect is
foremost in the director‘s view is illustrated by the
irrelevance of a progression we do indeed see in
these films. Cars and Picnic take place in or near
small rural communities; The Last Wave and The
Plumber in the city (although the latter is rather
beneficent toward, his people. Sukarno is neither the
masterful puppet master nor the noble leader.
As the political situation worsens, Guy
Hamilton, as the link between the reporters‘ story
and Billy‘s story, becomes the focal point of Weir‘s
film. The reporters recede into the background as
their hotel bar world and their illusion of control
collapse. Billy himself self-destructs. He finds he
cannot control Guy and Jill. This disturbs him. He
also finds out that Sukarno is not the hero he had
assumed when the child of an impoverished woman
he had been caring for dies. Billy then abandons his
supposedly objective stance and unfurls a banner
asking Sukarno to feed his people. Billy is shot by
Sukarno‘s security police and pushed from a hotel
window to his death below in response to what was
more Billy‘s human cry than a political one.
There are, however, political cries aplenty facing
Sukarno. Indonesia is slipping into civil war. Guy,
caught-up in the midst of it, has to get out—as well
as get Jill safely out. The film at this point becomes
more of an action-adventure one. That genre shift—
from a mix to a single, easily identifiable Hollywood
type—may well have been a nod at the American
market and its generic expectations and preferences.
Weir—I would suggest—is more interested in how
the film gets to this point. It gets there because all
structures have collapsed, because all those who
thought they had control—the reporters, Billy Kwan,
and Sukarno—found that control illusory.
This emphasis may well explain why the end of
the film does not feel like the romantic end of some
similar Hollywood products. Guy and J ill get out,
but, rather than anything resembling a happy ending,
viewers feel their sense of having survived as well as
a kind of emptiness. That emptiness results, first,
from the unresolved tension between them (because
Guy betrayed a secret Jill told him for the sake of a
good story) and, second, from their inability to make
sense of the situation before them.
The ending, despite its ambiguities, is clearer
than the ending Of C.J. Koch‘s 1978 novel from
which Weir, Williamson, and Koch adapted the
screenplay. In the novel, it is not entirely clear
whether Guy experiences a reunion with Jill or
dreams it. However, much of the political story is
clearer in the novel than on the screen. As a result,
when one reads The Year of Living Dangerously,
one can focus on the external threats facing the
reporters, Billy Kwan, and Guy Hamilton. The
screenplay transforms a very political novel that
describes, in detail, the competing forces within
Indonesia in 1965 into a film that keeps the political
somewhat hazy. We know enough to follow the
story but not enough to diagnose the threats at a
given moment as emanating from this group or that.
The result is a much hazier sense of threat in the film
than in the novel. This change effectively shifts the
53
claustrophobic); and Gallipoli and Year in the
international arenas of the eastern Mediterranean
and Indonesia. Given this increase in the size of the
arena, one might expect the threat and the felt sense
of threat (and fear) to increase. The threat does
increase somewhat, although one might argue that
Cars, Picnic, and The Last Wave are potentially
more apocalyptic than either of the war movies. The
fear, however, remains the same: the characters,
facing the collapse of that which structured their
being, react with similar anxiety. All of Weir‘s
viewers, I would suggest, would share this fearful
effect if their worlds were about to fall apart.
Australian viewers, however, feel it more fully, for
the human need for control—and, through it,
identity—is stronger in Australia given its historical
and, in some ways, continuing colonized state.
Weir‘s attention to control and the fear that
accompanies its loss is thus a very post-colonial
focus. His films do not, however, confront and write
against any empire. Rather, they present one of the
felt realities of being colonized.
WORKS CITED
Bliss, Michael. Dreams Within a Dream: The Films
of Peter Weir. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
2000.
Haltof, Marek. Peter Weir. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1996.
Kinder, M. ―The Plumber.‖ Film Quarterly 33.4
(Summer 1980): 17.
Rayner, Jonathan. The Films of Peter Weir. 2nd ed.
New York: Continuum Books, 2003.
Sheckels, Theodore F. Celluloid Heroes Down
Under: Australian Film, 1970-2000. Westport,
CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003.
54
Professing the Popular
Andrew McCann
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire USA
First published in Australian Literary Studies, 23 (2), 2007.
The Australian’s so-called ―Patrick White hoax‖ of
July 2006, a dramatic confirmation of what Mark
Davis has called the ―decline of the literary
paradigm,‖ spoke to the fears of many people with a
professional investment in Australian literature and
Australian literary studies. Of course, it was
designed to do this. As Davis writes, ―the book
pages of broadsheet newspapers have set themselves
up as nostalgic guardians of a (mid-list) literary
culture at odds with both the ―postmodernist‖
academy
and
the
new
commercial
imperatives‖ (l03). Chapter Three of White‘s The
Eye of the Storm was submitted to a representative
group of editors and publishers under the name
Wraith Picket. The response indicated that the Nobel
Prize winner‘s chances of getting published today
would be very slim indeed. There was clearly a
yearning for a good story behind the experiment;
The Eye of the Storm is not White‘s most accessible
work and the results of the exercise might well have
been different had the Australian used The Twyborn
Affair or Riders in the Chariot, both of which raise
issues more likely to resonate with contemporary
readers. Still, what was disconcerting about the
results of the hoax was not simply the fact that no
one seemed to recognise White‘s prose (especially
baffling given the obviousness of the pseudonym
and the clue in the title of the manuscript, The Eye of
the Cyclone), but the naturalness with which
publishers from a diverse range of presses could
simply appeal to commercial viability as a
rationalisation for their decisions and their
ignorance. Never before, it seems, had competing
conceptions of value — commercial value and
aesthetic value — been so far apart. If the results of
the White hoax are anything to go by, however, to
posit a gap between commercial and aesthetic value
might already express something a bit anachronistic.
As a description of how contemporary publishers
and media networks understand the issue of value, it
might be more accurate to say that commercial value
and aesthetic value have never been closer, that
commercial value has subsumed aesthetic value so
thoroughly that the opposition no longer exists —
value can only be articulated through the logics of
the marketplace.
I do not quite believe this. Certainly the literary
paradigm seems to be alive and well in French,
German and Spanish language publishing, and in
those parts of the Anglosphere (Britain and the
USA) large enough to sustain literary readerships in
Andrew McCann currently works at Dartmouth College in Hampshire. He has a PhD from Cornell at spent at number of
years at the University Of Melbourne. Andrew works primarily on nineteenth-century British literature, Romantic and
Victorian, though much of his research is concerned with the ways in which colonial print-cultures adapt this material.
55
the midst of market rationalisation.1 But even if we
take the results of the White hoax as confirmation of
the local marginalisation of one conception of
literature, it would be wrong to turn this into a claim
about a more general ―crisis‖ in literature‘s viability.
In fact, the marginalisation of a conception of value
narrowly linked to modernist aesthetics has,
ironically,
reinvigorated
both contemporary
Australian fiction and criticism. Far from heralding
the end of a resistant literary culture, the pressures of
the commercial seem to have summoned one into
being. If the apparently autonomous aesthetic
disposition of White‘s modernism has not fared well
in the current climate of commercial rationalisation,
the same cannot be said for literature with a more
explicit political orientation. Never before, it seems,
has political writing critical of the government, its
policies and a prevailing sense of neoconservative
status quo appeared to be so attractive. Linda
Jaivin‘s The Infernal Optimist, Andrew McGahan‘s
Underground and Richard Flanagan‘s The Unknown
Terrorist (dedicated to David Hicks) all point to a
perceptible shift in the field of Australian literary
production, a shift away from the aesthetic as a form
of resistance towards a much more direct and
sometimes
didactic
engagement
with
a
contemporary political climate defined by
neoconservative, neo-imperialist and narrowly
nationalist approaches to both foreign policy and
domestic issues. Given the events of the last five or
six years, it would be obtuse not to expect fiction to
become more politically engaged. The three
novelists I am focusing on here are certainly not
alone in their sense of commitment. What
distinguishes their novels of 2006 from recent books
by Rodney Hall, Eva Sailis and even Christos
Tsiolkas is the fact that their political engagements
seem to emerge alongside their engagement with and
appropriation of popular idioms and genres. All, in
other words, at least implicitly phrase their claims to
political effectiveness through a refusal of
autonomous aesthetic forms and a reproduction of
what might be called (after Jacques Ranciere) the
popular gestus.2 I am using this phrase — popular
gestus — because it is just as clear that none of the
novels I am talking about belong easily or naturally
to what Ken Gelder has called the ―field‖ of popular
fiction (though they may not quite belong to the field
of literature as Gelder discusses it either).3 They all
allude to the popular in a gestural, performative or
strategic manner without necessarily occupying or
embodying it in a way that implies an understanding
of the logics of genre or a relationship to popular
networks of circulation and validation.
The current political situation, in which neoimperial imperatives are reshaping both foreign
relations and domestic policy in a way that is
eroding the rights and security of populations in
general, but especially those populations most at
the mercy of global capitalism‘s inequalities,
makes this an urgent undertaking. While this
situation is not unique to Australia, Australia‘s
―metrocolonial‖ predicament — it is both
thoroughly Western but also marginal to transAtlantic political culture and sensibilities — has
allowed public expressions of dissent that would be
hard to imagine in the United States.4 McGahan,
Flanagan and Jaivin all demonstrate this, and
indicate one very important way in which the
norms regulating Australian public culture can also
help distinguish its fiction from the American flood
that is so often cited as a factor in the demise of
local literary culture. At the same time, literature‘s
imitation of the popular foregrounds what I think
are quite pressing questions about the normative
potential of both literature and the forms of cultural
production from which it is routinely distinguished.
How do formal and stylistic shifts impact upon the
affective potential that makes it possible to talk
about literature as a world-making or
consciousness-raising activity? And perhaps more
pressingly, is it possible to reimagine the politics of
textual production in a way that does not simply
reproduce an outmoded opposition between
literature as a conservative cultural dominant, and
other, apparently more democratically engaged,
forms of cultural production?
Underground, The Unknown Terrorist and
The Infernal Optimist all unfold in ways that are
clearly sensitive to issues of audience and
accessibility. This gives them the sense of
intervening into a public debate, and of trying to
motivate critique and to galvanise a readership. It
is in this sense that they also manifest a turn away
from conceptions of literature as a priori
autonomous from other areas of social and cultural
production. Perhaps to the dismay of their authors,
this also puts them in line with recent cultural
criticism indebted to the work of Pierre Bourdieu,
according to which well-meaning attempts to posit
the aesthetic as a way of resisting the marketplace
are politically self defeating, if not complicit in the
consolidation of an elitist disengagement from the
everyday in favour of disinterested and abstract
aesthetic experience. In his recent Overland essay
―Politics and Monomania: the Rarefied World of
Contemporary Australian Literary Culture,‖ Ken
Gelder manifests this Bourdieu-inflected approach
when he calls for a fiction that engages with
commercial logics in order to generate a popular
critique of neo-liberalism, a ―critical political
realism‖ (52) that refuses the rarefied and elitist
conception of aesthetics that he brands ―Tory
There is, needless to say, an obviousness about
the shift I‘m discussing here: political efficacy is a
function of circulation, which means that politically
engaged writing must also perform what are
recognisable as popular, if not commercial idioms.
56
The
eventfulness
of
McGahan‘s
Underground, coming only a year after The White
Earth won the Miles Franklin, is all about the
confluence of politics and popular, if not
commercial forms. The novel is linked to a website
jointheUnderground.com) run by Allen and
Unwin, which is partly an exercise in marketing
and partly an exercise in political mobilisation. The
site includes reviews and sample chapters, but also
links to the Australian Electoral Commission,
crikey.com, Amnesty International Australia and a
range of advocacy groups like the Refugee Council
of Australia. It also includes an author statement in
which McGahan explains his move away from the
―high moral seriousness‖ of The White Earth in
terms that clearly see literature as compromised in
its ability to engage with immediate political
realities: ―normally I‘d be wary of being so overtly
political with a novel. But this no longer seems the
time to be polite or indirect in fiction, or to be
artfully diffident. It‘s time to confront the danger
of what‘s going on here, head on.‖7 While this
conviction downplays the intensely political
dimension of his previous novel (a point I will
return to later), the formal qualities of
Underground also embody the sense of urgency
McGahan foregrounds. McGahan‘s narrator, Leo
James, is defined by his popular voice and idiom.
The novel‘s demotic humour and its imitation of
the action and thriller genres all point to its
concluding orientation to the Australian people as a
normative subject travestied by the climate of
conspiracy and state-authorised terror that drives
the text. By the end of the novel McGahan‘s
narrator has emerged as a kind of Australian
everyman. With Leo James imprisoned in
Parliament House, where he reads a hundred years
of Hansard, the novel finishes by offering a paean
to a lost democracy, to the ―power‖ of the
Australian people now subsumed and administered
by the society of the spectacle in which media and
government collude in, as McGahan writes, ―this
George Orwell nightmare‖ (273). The odd thing
about this is that the rest of the novel is extremely
unsure where the line between popular identities
worth preserving, and a vacuous, administered
identity that merely reproduces the ―people‖ as a
homogenous, politically manipulable abstraction,
can be drawn (a problem, incidentally, that also
lingers at the back of The White Earth). In other
words, the problem that haunts so much leftoriented cultural criticism is the problem
reproduced in Underground: when are the people
(in a quantitative or descriptive sense) really the
people (in the normative sense)?
style‖ (48).
One problem with this position is that the
proximity of the popular to the commercial, the
sense that the former emerges through the latter,
essentially reifies the very categories it might have
wanted to displace. Hence the fetish of disinterested
aesthetic autonomy (White‘s modernism, say)
translates class privilege into a cultural hierarchy
that implies an unbridgeable rift between the
bourgeois and the popular habitus, yet true to the
taxonomy of this hierarchy, the popular can never
disentangle itself from the forms of the market. Its
claim to agency and originality is accordingly
cancelled by a kind of cultural determinism.5 This is
not exactly Gelder‘s position, because his emphasis
on the capacity of diverse readerships to engage
critically with the logics of the marketplace also
suggests a more flexible capacity to make meaning
within or through administered commercial logics.
As he argues in his study of the logics of popular
fiction, the idea that popular fiction merely
embodies the ideology of consumer capitalism
ignores all the ways in which its readers are ―careful
discriminators‖ (Popular Fiction 36), savvy about
generic co-ordinates and often in possession of
highly specialised knowledge: so not passive, but
active, even subversive consumers. If this evocation
of critical consumption seems like a legitimisation of
a market now understood as liberatingly fragmented
rather than repressively homogenous (though these
may well amount to the same thing), Gelder also
acknowledges that few, if any of us read exclusively
through a single set of cultural logics, which makes
pretty much all readerships unstable, ephemeral, in
their own way quite abstract (often a projection of
accounting practices and sales figures as much as
tangible forms of sociability and interaction). Given
this set of circumstances, it makes little sense to try
to derive a normative dimension from what is, most
often, quantitative data, yet that seems to be what
Gelder wants to do. Thus popular fiction is
―democratic‖ in a way that literature with a much
smaller readership could never be. The problem here
stems from the ways in which the normative, the
descriptive and quantitative dimension of the term
―democratic‖ can get confused: hence we have the
unlikely scenario in which high sales figures or other
indicators of circulation can generate claims about
political legitimacy and resistance in regard to a
putative cultural dominant (literature).6 It is
precisely this dilemma that fiction engaging with the
popular in the interests of its politics ends up
foregrounding. McGahan, Flanagan and Jaivin all
invite us to speculate on fiction‘s relationship to the
normative valences of terms like ―the popular‖ and
―the democratic,‖ and all at least implicitly raise
questions about the political effectiveness of textual
forms that are oriented to the entertainment of their
readers.
The novel‘s conflicted attempts to work
through this issue are always its subtext and
constitute a large part of its appeal. The absurdity
of a cricket match between Australia and the USA
57
Bodies lay everywhere in the fading
light. Wailing. Mourning. A figure
violently kicking another figure that lay
unmoving on the ground. Unreal, unreal,
unreal. Except that I’d seen it all before,
such an aftermath. This was my fourth
time now. And as ] rose to my feet, a part
of my brain reflected with cold rationality
that the nausea and the revulsion and the
sweat of fear turning into a deep chill . . .
it was all getting worse with the
repetition. (153)
(the US are 2 for 3 after the first over) activates a
sort of primitive nationalism with which even
dedicated Patrick White readers will identify. On the
other hand, a spot Citizenship Verification Test in
the new Australia can ask questions about
Bradman‘s batting average and the legality of Trevor
Chappell‘s underarm delivery. The novel‘s
engagement with the issue of the popular follows
this pattern. Popular identifications are undermined
as soon as they are summoned; the novel oscillates
between a lingering, parochial pride and a kind of
embarrassed, comic sense of abjection. The only real
exception to this, the only point at which the reader
is invited to identify unambiguously with an image
of the popular, occurs in the part of the novel that
plays out in the Brunswick Ghetto, which even as a
prison compound still bustles with the unpretentious
cosmopolitanism of Sydney Road as we know it
(only with helicopter fly-bys and an absence of
street lights).
―Fear turning into a deep chill‖ might
describe Leo James‘s reaction to yet another
massacre, but, as the scene‘s unreality seems to
make clear, this is not exactly how the reader
reacts. In fact the narrative voice, largely because
of the speed with which it moves from objective
description to interior reflection, has the effect of
distancing us from, if not desensitising us to, the
violence. If the repetition of ―unreal‖ brings to
mind T.S. Eliot‘s The Wasteland (Unreal city), that
might be because the echo draws out what the
novel has to omit in order to perform its popularity:
a sense of distance from the velocity of prevailing
commercial discourses that habituate us to violence
like this. Underground, quite self-consciously I
assume, reads like a forced overdose of tabloid
television: a sort of deadening, but madcap
oscillation between violence and a disconcerting
kind of banality — ―Hey presto-September
11‖ (99) — that finally succeeds in reinforcing the
affective impoverishment of the cultural forms it
imitates. This has little to do with popular fiction
per se. It is more a matter of the frenetic tabloid
culture based on sensation and repetition, horror
and exhaustion. The novel‘s ambiguous
relationship to its own consumability, in other
words, permeates its formal characteristics as well
as its content.
McGahan‘s political views (on Howard, Bush,
immigration and the ―war on terror‖) emerge very
clearly. What is not quite as clear is the kind of
affect that attaches to these views in a novel that so
thoroughly affiliates itself with a sense of its
consumability. I am not claiming that Underground
is work of genre fiction — it has none of the
technical accomplishment of John Le Carre‘s recent,
equally politically engaged novels. In fact, we might
take Le Carre‘s Absolute Friends as a useful point of
comparison. Whereas that novel mobilises the
conventions of the espionage genre to launch a
critique of contemporary neo-imperialism that
catches the reader off guard, Underground mobilises
a critique of neo-imperialism to launch a thriller that,
very quickly, proceeds independently of its political
motive. A couple of dozen pages into the novel we
have absorbed its politics and the only thing holding
our attention is the question of the details of the
conspiracy that has sold Australia out to the
Americans. The narrative unfolds, in other words, as
an abstract exercise in conditioned reading. Once we
know that something ―big‖ has happened, a desire to
get to the truth takes over. The readability of the
novel is a function of this very conventional
structure, which the novel itself struggles to live up
to. Aside from one genuinely brutal moment
(involving Osama bin Laden), Underground‘s
concluding revelation guides a politics of global
paranoia, what Emily Apter calls ―oneworldedness,‖
toward the kind of comedy that effectively
undermines its always tenuous plausibility.8
Like Underground, Flanagan‘s The Unknown
Terrorist is largely concerned with the ways in
which the government and the media administer
popular consciousness in the interests of a
xenophobic,
anti-democratic
agenda.
A
contemporary retelling of Heinrich Boil‘s The Lost
Honour of Katharina Blum, which links it to
another epoch in which terrorist threats motivated a
vitiation of free speech and civil liberties
(interestingly the same link is present in Absolute
Friends), The Unknown Terrorist tells the story of
a stripper, known as the Doll, and her victimisation
at the hands of a predatory and fundamentally
corrupt media. As the Doll comes to understand the
forces conspiring against her, she also understands
her own xenophobia in the mirror of the society
now persecuting her. Like Underground,
Flanagan‘s novel is also one of political
enlightenment in which the protagonist comes to
All of this takes place in prose that is
frequently emptied of its affective potential. In fact
this is something to which the novel draws our
attention, almost by way of apology, at the start of
its second section when, after another bloody
shootout between government forces and dissidents,
the narrator comments on his numbness:
58
pool. The past was a garbage bin of
outdated appliances: the foot spa; the
turbo oven; the doughnut maker and the
record player, the SLR and the VCR and
the George Foreman grill. The past was
an embarrassment of distressing colours
and styles about which to laugh: mullet
haircuts and padded shoulders, top
perms and kettle barbecues. (7)
grasp the falsity of her own experience in the grip of
a pervasive culture industry.
The Unknown Terrorist is another attempt to
reproduce the popular gestus — in the tropes of
pursuit, police procedure and conspiracy. And as
with McGahan‘s novel, the idea that a prize-winning
author has been forced by political realities into a
more populist genre and format is part of its claim
on our attention. The novel is also linked to a
website (theunknownterrorist.com) that includes a
trailer in which its cinematic adaptability is clearly
advertised, partly on the basis of an aesthetically
regressive attempt to absorb the reader into the
action: we get a fast-paced series of stills evoking
Sydney in the grip of the ―war on terror,‖ some
footage of a pole dancer, and snatches of text from
the novel‘s back cover (―five days, three unexploded
bombs‖) culminating with the apparently pressing
question, ―What would you do?‖9 It is the same
formula we are used to from episodes of the
television series Twenty-Four. Despite this, the
novel itself seems more obviously conflicted about
its popular affiliations than Underground. It is also,
emphatically, a lament: a lament for the loss of faith
in culture itself as a redemptive force. The vacuity
and abjection that linger through McGahan‘s novel
are the notes on which Flanagan concludes. The
Doll‘s story closes with the failure of narrative to
deliver its characters and its readers from a quotidian
hell that is as culturally vapid as it is politically
vicious. Her story, like the online trailer, is a ―string
of images,‖ with neither the ―scent of place, nor the
hope of home. Nor did it have the reassurances
stories sometimes can have and perhaps ought to
have‖ (315). Sydney looms large in this novel, but it
is finally a city of the dead inhabited by the drones
and fodder of global capitalism: bored cops,
prostitutes, beggars and people traffickers. But even
here we are not really allowed the visceral jolt of
conventional grunge fiction; Flanagan‘s city is more
a matter of mundanity than either horror or
obscenity. He lets one of his minor characters sum it
all up: ―in his heart he feels there is something
intolerable in continuing to live for an unspecified
number of years more and the dominant, undeniable
feeling in his soul is boredom‖ (317).
Of course this is far closer to Patrick White
than to Twenty-Four. What The Unknown Terrorist
attempts to show us is not only that this nightmare,
the culture industry at its worst, renders us all
potential victims of our own redundancy or
vilification, but that it is fundamentally vapid. It is
not about values, democratic or otherwise, it is
simply about the abstract freedom of the
marketplace in which people can be manufactured
and traded like everything else.
Flanagan’s novel incorporates aspects of the
popular gestus into its formal texture, but it also
wants us to understand that its formal imitation of
the world it describes is constitutive of a realism
that is ultimately about demolishing our illusions:
―Realism is the embrace of disappointment, in
order no longer to be disappointed‖ (9). The pathos
here, the sense of realism as the most melancholic
of genres because it meditates not just on the loss
of hope, but the loss of our ability to mourn it, is
powerfully reflected in the novel‘s fascinating take
on high culture. Chopin lingers throughout the
novel as a sign of a high culture that is not
sufficient to save the Doll or anyone else from the
poverty and violence of quotidian experience. In
the home of the people smuggler and drug dealer
Frank
Moretti,
for
example,
cultural
connoisseurship is presented side by side with, and
is in fact inseparable from, the crude accumulative
instinct and violence of capitalist endeavour.
Moretti literalises Waiter Benjamin‘s seventh
thesis on the philosophy of history,10 nowhere
more so than when he has the Doll strip to
Chopin‘s Nocturne in F Minor: ――It is,‖ Frank
Moretti said, ―a high point of western culture.
When the terrorists have destroyed everything,‖ he
told her, ―there will still be Chopin‘s Nocturne in F
Minor, and people will marvel forever‖‖ (135).
The notion that the idealism of high culture cannot
survive the violence and impoverishment of
Flanagan‘s world both unfolds in the pages of the
novel and explains Flanagan‘s move away from the
fabulistic, magical realism of Gould’s Book of
Fish. The Unknown Terrorist is ambiguous about
this trajectory, as if the price of political relevance
is a proximity to the popular which it would
perhaps rather not have to pay. But in a world
where high cultural forms merely embody the
cultural capital and ethical decay of drug dealers,
people smugglers and other advocates of radically
While the novel is ultimately about the
violence of an administered society and the
processes of marginalisation and exploitation it
rationalises in the name of self-defence, this sense of
boredom is pervasive. Earlier in the novel Flanagan
describes a world of ―suburban verities‖ that
registers, as does McGahan‘s novel, profound
ambiguity at his proximity to the popular:
the house, the job, the possessions and the
cars, the friends and the renovations, the
resort holiday and the latest gadgets digital cameras, home cinemas, a new
59
but it is held back by the fact that Zeki, despite his
compassion, does not have the linguistic or cultural
resources to let the text manifest this in a tangible
and material manner. He does not seem to speak
Turkish and his cultural co-ordinates are
claustrophobically parochial. His verbal comedy
might also be Williamson‘s, and his ―infernal‖
optimism a telling reference to the sort of
sensibility that never allows political realities to
shake its faith in national identifications. If the
reader is made uneasy by the rapid oscillation
between tragedy and comedy, this unease might
well be the point. The loss of literature‘s autonomy
vis-a-vis other forms of entertainment also forces it
to negotiate traumatic experiences inside
discourses that are designed to preclude high levels
of reader discomfort. The novel‘s title seems an apt
summary of the political stasis we risk in these
circumstances. What could be more ―infernal‖ than
the ability to smile through the catastrophe?
deregulated commerce, what choice is there?
Jaivin‘s The Infernal Optimist is more
specifically focused and less explicitly polemical
than the two novels I have just touched upon, yet its
relationship to a politics of advocacy is jus t as clear.
In it a long-time Turkish-Australian resident who
has been lazy about gaining citizenship ends up in
Villawood detention centre and faces deportation.
Cameron Woodhead described Zeki as an
―antipodean Ali G‖ (25). We see Australia‘s current
immigration regime through Zeki‘s first-person
narrative, which makes the novel as much a comedy
as a political critique. The novel in fact draws
attention to the Ali G tie-in: ―Zeki, you are so Ali
G‖ (136). This the most obvious way in which it
attempts to perform its popular affiliations. Jaivin‘s
brilliant management of Zeki‘s voice, which is
crude, endlessly inventive in its grammatical and
lexical failings, but also, finally, sympathetic and
compassionate, drives the book and ensures its
readability. In a number of places though, especially
early on, the comedic dimension of the novel sits
oddly with its political intent. Despite Zeki‘s
solidarity with his fellow inmates, his voice, at least
initially, struggles to provide a textual correlative to
alienation, violence or trauma. When these do
emerge, and frequently they do, it is by way of a
kind of reportage that is either disconcerting in its
understatement, or undermined by Zeki‘s idiomatic
virtuosity: ―What I learned about the asylums was
that they was only here cuz they was running from
heavy shit, like ethical cleansing and Saddam and
torture, what be real torture like with electrical
shocks and sensible deprivation and broken bottles
up the Khyber...‖ (56-57). Elsewhere it is Jaivin‘s
marginal characters — such as Azad, a Kurd with a
poetic sensibility — who carry the burden of the
novel‘s affect ―Azad said her eyes were ―like liquid
sadness,‖ what just proves he‘s a poet‖ (59). Yet this
sense of the novel‘s politics being restrained by its
comic veneer seems to change the further we read.
As the violence of detention becomes more pressing
for Zeki‘s fellow inmates, his comedic routine also
seems to falter against moments that register, albeit
fleetingly, the tragedy of suicides, sex slaves, torture
victims, broken families and abandoned children. At
these moments we can see that the novel‘s comedic
element is clearly strategic.
This sort of wordplay raises the issue of
idiom. Though it seems less explicitly political
than the moments of polemic in both Underground
and The Unknown Terrorist, Jaivin‘s use of idiom
does open up another important approach to the
confluence of the popular and the political in recent
Australian writing. Zeki‘s voice clearly has a level
of inventiveness that is productive of textual
complexity and this also adds nuance and insight to
the text‘s take on questions of identity (frequently
Zeki‘s imprecision with English generates very
precise political insight). The question of linguistic
alterity, in a novel that is clearly aligned with the
multicultural, is tricky. The Infernal Optimist
produces an ostensibly popular voice in order to
gesture beyond it to the limit space at which our
perceptions
of
linguistic
normalcy
and
monolingual security might be unhinged. But it
also stops short of this space. And here we can see
a very tangible sense in which the logic of the
marketplace limits the political valences of Jaivin‘s
novel. The Infernal Optimist is a monolingual text
trying to imagine the possibility of an idiom
capable of unsettling the culture responsible for the
xenophobia the novel attacks. Jaivin, a sinologist
and a translator as well as a commercially savvy
novelist, is clearly engaged with some of these
issues. Her novel prompts one to wonders what a
multilingual literature would look like. Loosing My
Espanish, by the Cuban-American novelist Herman
Carrillo, is written in a diasporic idiom that
wanders between English and Spanish, but in the
US, where Spanish is widely spoken, this does not
really compromise its marketability. Unfortunately
this kind of novel, one that assumes and enacts
multiculturalism, rather than simply longing for it,
still seems unlikely in Australia outside of forms of
textual experimentation that, from a commercial
perspective, would look positively ludic.
The novel‘s use of comedy is also part of its
engagement with the issue of national identity, and
the degree to which we understand this through a
particular sort of persona. The novel‘s epigram is
John Williamson‘s ―I’m Fair Dinkum”: ―I‘m fair
dinkum, bloody oath I am, I‘ve loved the smell of
gum leaves, since I was in a pram.‖ Zeki is every bit
as ―fair dinkum‖ as Williamson, though the Ali G
dimension also revises our sense of what this might
mean. Through Zeki‘s voice the novel anticipates a
multicultural, tolerant, even multilingual identity,
60
unfolds in a more conventionally literary idiom
that preserves the affect — the shock — of its
revelations, and works hard to ensure that these
carry the weight of its political insights. The same
can be said for Kate Grenville‘s The Secret River.
Nothing in that novel, and nothing we already
know about colonial violence, can prepare us for
its shattering conclusion in which settlement‘s
complicity with genocide is laid bare. In both
novels political effectiveness is a function of a
more stylised and patiently orchestrated process of
foreclosure and disclosure that also unsettles our
relationship to notions of character and their moral
and epistemic underpinnings. The violence and, in
the case of The White Earth, the phantasms of
colonial history interrupt this relationship, and thus
revise our experience of reading by radically
recasting some of the assumptions on which it has
been based.
In all three of the novels I have discussed here
central characters revise their relationships to takenfor-granted notions of identity as a result of the
oppressive regimes they encounter and their own
self-recognition as victims. They are all stories of
political awakening embedded in popular genres and
idioms. Gelder‘s Overland essay presciently
imagines the possibility of a leftwing literature that
repudiates autonomous aesthetic form and critically
appropriates commercial logics in the interests of
explicit political critique (53). The novels I have
touched on here fill that bill. Yet in assuming the
confluence of the political and the popular, it is just
as clear that they also go some way towards
destabilising or questioning that relationship, not just
because of their own uncertainty at the normative
valences of the popular idioms they assume, but also
because of the difficulties they encounter in
rendering political critique coterminous with their
status as entertainment. As the online trailer for The
Unknown Terrorist indicates, one of the underlying
assumptions of the culture industry is that the reader
enters into — in fact loses him or herself in — the
experiences of principal characters. The explicitness
with which the novels I have touched on here
present their political content makes it difficult to
imagine a reader docile enough to participate in the
process of political awakening that the main
characters in these novels undergo. The result is
either that our investments in these narratives
develop independently of their politics, or that the
narratives themselves end up being coincidental to
cognitive processes that largely precede them. With
no intrinsic relationship between consciousnessraising and narrative form, the very idea of the
―political novel‖ risks a peculiar kind of redundancy
vis-a-vis its own consumption. In this respect, the
case of The Infernal Optimist is perhaps more
complicated than that of Underground and The
Unknown Terrorist, because its comedic use of
idiom is inseparable from its complex interrogation
of national identity. Whatever their other merits,
both McGahan‘s and Flanagan‘s novels rest on
already highly mediated views of politics as
conspiracy that have run their course well before the
narratives themselves.
At stake here are not simply matters of taste,
pleasure, or formal coherence. The distinction
between securely literary novels that deal with
colonial history and more popularly oriented
novels that deal with immigration, terrorism and
the politics of the mass media probably says
something quite important about the different
discursive registers and the different temporalities
of reading in which we process aspects of
contemporary political experience. This is where I
am inclined to locate the distinction between the
literary and the popular as it emerges in the novels
I have discussed. At issue here are the ways in
which different kinds of texts, by performing either
proximity to or distance from the market , construe
a different sort of political cognition. On the one
hand, we have the literary as the forum for the
patient working through of a specifically national
problem structured around the dynamics of
foreclosure and disclosure. On the other hand,
fiction that orients itself toward the popular or the
popular gestus often engages, more polemically,
with another set of issues that are fundamentally
embroiled in transnational geographies of
circulation, media networks and forms of causality
with which the literary novel (imagined as a genre
identified with a specifically national habitat) has
never dealt particularly well. The different
valences of each do not allow us to construct an
opposition between the literary and the popular that
implies anything politically normative. On the
contrary, acknowledging the ways in which each
mode of production engages differentially with the
political also forces us to confront the difficulties
contemporary consciousness encounters in the
totalisation of its own historical experience. That
Australia‘s persistent denial of Indigenous
sovereignty might have a lot to do with the current
climate of political paranoia and xenophobia
suggests the need to question, at least
I do not think we need recourse to anything as
extreme as Brechtian Verfremdung effects to
demonstrate that literature can be an effective
political mode precisely when it sets out to construct
more complex and varied relationships between
reader and character than those that commercial
logics seem, rather reductively, to assume.
McGahan‘s The White Earth is a good example of
what I have in mind here. The novel brilliantly
examines Queensland‘s violent past and the political
formations that emerge from its ruins. It is hard to
imagine a more politically committed work of
literature, yet unlike Underground, The White Earth
61
Carrillo, H.G. Loosing My Espanish. New York:
Pantheon Books, 2004.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters.
Trans. M.B. Debevoise.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
Davis, Mark. ―The Decline of the Literary
Paradigm in Australian Publishing.‖ HEAT 12 New
Series (2006): 91-108.
Flanagan, Richard. The Unknown Terrorist.
Sydney: Picador, 2006.
Gelder, Ken. ―Politics and Monomania: The
Rarefied World of Contemporary
Australian Literary Culture,‖ Overland 184 (2006):
48-56.
___. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a
Litera‖)} Field. London: Routledge, 2004.
Grenville, Kate. The Secret River. Melbourne:
Text Publishing, 2005.
Jaivin, Linda. The Infernal Optimist. Sydney:
Fourth Estate, 2006.
Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London:
Verso, 2005.
Le Cami, John. Absolute Friends. Boston: Little
Brown, 2003.
McGahan, Andrew. The White Earth. Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 2004.
___. Underground. Sydney: Allen and Unwin,
2006.
Ranciere, Jacques. The Philosopher and His Poor.
Trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew
Parker. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.
Valente, Joseph. ――Double Born‖: Bram Stoker and
the Metrocolonial Gothic,‖Modern Fiction Studies
46.3 (2006): 632-45.
Williamson, John. ―I‘m Fair Dinkum.‖ 1984 [The
Smell of Gum Leaves). Home among the Gum
Trees. EMI, 1997.
Woodhead, Cameron. ―Light and Dark in
Villawood.‖ Rev. of Linda Jaivin, The Infernal
Optimist. Age 6 May 2006: A6, 25.
provisionally, the normative claims that advocates of
the literary and of the popular both continue to
make.
NOTES
1 Indeed, as Pascale Casanova‘s The World
Republic of Lellers demonstrates, the literary
paradigm is still central to metropolitan
conceptions of print culture, especially outside
of English-speaking centres.
2 Ranciere uses the term throughout The
Philosopher and His Poor.
3 See Ge1der, Popular Fiction: The Logics and
Practices of a Literary Field, 11-39.
4 I have plundered the term ―metrocolonial‖ from
recent work in Irish literary studies. Joseph
Valente, for example, uses the term to refer to
Ireland‘s political integration into Great Britain
after 1800. I am using the term less literally to
refer to the sense in which certain colonial or
postcolonial spaces reproduce metropolitan
norms so thoroughly that their difference vis-avis imperial or neo-imperial power relations
becomes difficult to specify.
5 This point is essentially Ranciere‘s, See his
brilliant, but opaque, reading of Bourdieu in The
Philosopher and His Poor)65-202.
6 Emes to Laclau touches on this range of issues
when he insists that a ―Fascist regime can
absorb and articulate democratic demands as
much as a liberal one,‖ and then emphasises that
his own use of the phrase ―democratic demands‖
is not normative, but strictly descriptive. (125)
7 ―Why I Wrote Underground.‖ <hnp://
wwwjointheUnderground.com.au/author.html>
Accessed 24 Aug. 2007.
8 For Apter, the term ―oneworldedness‖ refers to ―
a delirious aesthetics of systematicity; to the
match between cognition and globalism that is
held in place by the paranoid premise that
―everything is connected.‖‖ (366)
9 See <http://www.theunknownterrorist.com.au/>
Accessed 24 Aug. 2007.
10 ―There is no document of civilization which is
not at the same time a document of barbarism.
And just as such a document is not free of
barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in
which it was transmitted from one owner to
another‖ (Benjamin 265).
WORKS CITED
Apter, Emily. ―On Oneworldedness: or Paranoia as a
World System.‖ American Literary History 18.2
(Summer 2006): 365-89.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essay and
Sketches. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York; Schocken
Books, 1968.
Boil, Heinrich. The Lost Honour of Katharina Slum.
Trans. Leila Vennewitz. New York: McGraw-Hall,
1975.
62
Is English an
Emancipatory
Discipline?
Ian Hunter
Griffith university
Reprinted from Australian Humanities Review, April 1996.
attention and for re-setting thresholds of inhibition.
The problem is that many teachers are uneasy
about presiding over the process of moral training,
and they are not helped by those teacher educators
who see the process as a sinister form of coercion.
Neither is this problem helped in the least by those
intellectuals who, charged with high-voltage
―dialectical‖ theory, presume that it can be solved
by coining oxymorons like ―emancipatory
authority.‖1 According to this principle the teacher
is supposed to be able to exercise moral power
over the formation of students
while
simultaneously allowing their inner potential to
develop without normative intervention. All that
can be said for such magical principles is that their
inherent implausibility is not enhanced by the
odour of bad faith that surrounds them.
These problems are symptoms of the genuine
difficulty that we have in understanding the
reciprocity of freedom and discipline in the English
On one side of this question we find those who
regard English as an essentially libratory project—
one whose core was once invested in the creativity
of the child and in the openness of literature, but
which is today more likely to be found in the
repressed potentialities of the working class or
women. On the other side there are those who have
observed that, no matter how progressive the
English class becomes, it continues to deploy a
sophisticated technology of surveillance and
discipline. This see-sawing has produced some bad
consciences and some desperate solutions.
Among the bad consciences are those
progressives who have found that, when it comes to
problematising undesirable behaviours—such as
those associated with sexism or racism—it is not
enough to appeal to creativity, and that the working
class may be just as guilty as anyone else. In fact the
English classroom is a sophisticated mechanism for
picking out such conducts as objects of moral
Ian Hunter is an Australian Research Council Fellow in Humanities at Griffith University. This piece is extracted from the
April 1996 issue of Southern Review.
63
formulation as early as 1913. It was at this time
that J.A. Green published an influential series of
articles arguing that the teaching of classic texts to
elementary school children bred only rote learning
and insincerity of response. If English was to reach
such children then it had to begin with their
everyday language, including comic books: ―The
boy at school who is desperately bad in his
compositions uses language effectively at home or
in the playground, and his schoolwork would
improve rapidly if he could be led to feel the
"reality" of the life he was leading there.‖4
Such formulations have of course become
second nature to us, and it is only a small step from
them to today‘s apparently emancipatory uses of
popular culture in the classroom. All the more
reason to remind ourselves that the combination of
elicitation and correction, spontaneity and
supervision was there from the beginning. In
Green‘s words:
Under its [English‘s] influence new
worlds are being opened out to the boys;
new interests are being awakened These
things mean inner growth, the
development of new needs which call
for a more varied, a more delicate
instrument of expression . . . Here the
boy reveals himself and the teacher may
find out whether he has really reached
him or no.
At the same time the inner self revealed through
this self-expressive exercise is typically one in
eminent need of supervision and transformation:
Even a rapid perusal of these typical
papers shows clearly that the great
majority [of students] live in quite a
different world from their teachers. Here
are dwarfed little selves whose
emotional life is bound up with local
gossip, the excitement of football, and a
humour so crude that their teachers find
it difficult to see any fun whatsoever in
it. (24) 4
No doubt there will be some prepared to smile
at these last remarks for their quaintness or to
denounce them for their repressiveness. But to
react in either way is to misunderstand the
problem. It is not any particular moral or cultural
content that characterises the English lesson, but
the reciprocity between self-expression and
supervision that allows students to take on new
social norms ―freely,‖ by problematising
themselves. Hence it is beside the point that Green
disapproves of football. Today many teachers
disapprove of sexism, which may or may not entail
the condemnation of football. The objects of moral
problematisation vary, although within certain
limits. What remains constant is the pedagogical
lesson. This difficulty is compounded by the use of a
notion of freedom (as self-determination) that may
be far too metaphysical for the reality it is supposed
to comprehend. We can attempt to get a clearer view
of this perennial difficulty by briefly looking at an
episode in which it has recently resurfaced: the use
of popular culture in the English classroom. One of
rationales given for this tactic is that popular cultural
texts run less risk of imposing repressive norms on
students and are more open to a diversity of cultural
backgrounds than are texts drawn from the high
cultural canon. At the same time, teachers
advocating the libratory use of popular culture will
often point to the dangers of its uncontrolled use and
will routinely require students to problematise their
usual modes of consumption. But this only seems to
reactivate the standard anxiety: How can the use of
popular texts as an incitement to free expression be
compatible with their use as a means of observing
and correcting conduct?
Let us consider a typical if refreshingly candid
expression of this anxiety. A recent article by Beavis
on the use of popular culture in the secondary
classroom suggests that this strategy of ―starting
from where the learner is at‖ first emerged in the
1970s. It then goes on to catalogue the worries
attending this tactic and to propose a resolution:
Introducing it [popular culture] for formal
classroom study raises an interesting set
of caveats and bear traps. What happens
to a text when it is coopted in this way?
How do students‘ relationships with those
texts come under pressure or change, if
classroom study entails the harsh light of
analytic criticism of what may previously
have been pleasures and attitudes left
unexamined
deliberately?
If
the
consequence of bringing such texts into
the classroom is merely to teach students
to disdain and disown this part of their
world in favour of something ―better,‖
the attempt is probably best never begun
[A] focus on popular texts ought to be
more exploratory than judgmental,
critical in the best sense and respectful
ultimately
of
different
reading
2
preferences and positions.
Are we right in suggesting that, for all its
candour, this response has still not done justice to
the problem? Let us begin with an historical point.
The strategy of ―starting from where the learner is
at‖ emerged not in the progressive 1970s but in the
reforming 1830s, where David Stow was already
insisting that teaching should give up all formality
and situate itself in the playground, ―the principal
scene of the real life of children.‖3 And the tactic of
using popular culture to engage the interests and
reveal the character of working-class children in the
English classroom had received its definitive
64
Committee of Academic Standards panel,
English, identifies an exclusionary high cultural
canon as a major problem but fails to mention
the pedagogy in which canons—progressive or
conservative—are carried.
relation in which the problematisation takes place.
To think that this problem can be resolved by
being ―respectful of ultimately different reading
positions‖ is to avoid the issue and to ignore the
form of pastoral discipline that lies at the heart of
English pedagogy.5 English emerged as a practice of
moral training in which large numbers of children
were required to undergo moral problematisation
and transformation. To suggest that the exercise of
pastoral power involved in this procedure can be
erased in favour of a process of free selfdetermination simply ignores the reality of the
teaching milieu. Moreover, it fails to take sufficient
note of how productive this exercise of power has
been. In assuming the persona of the pastoral guide
in order to get students to question their own
conduct, teachers are not repressing their students‘
inner capacities; they are forming and augmenting
such capacities by requiring their cultivation.
It is possible to say therefore that, to the degree
that freedom is identified with the capacity to govern
one‘s own conduct, then English has indeed
functioned as an emancipatory discipline. It is
equally true though that emancipation here cannot
mean free self-determination, because this capacity
is formed through a pastoral discipline that
individuals are compelled to undergo and whose
cultural rarity puts it beyond collective choice.
English teachers should therefore feel quite
comfortable in exercising this sort of moral
discipline. Given the anxieties and obscurities
generated by the metaphysical concept of
emancipation, however, it is probably best to drop
the term altogether and concentrate instead on the
specific capacities actually formed by pastoral
pedagogy.
Notes and References
1. We owe the term to Giroux, H. (1989).
"Schooling as a Form of Cultural Politics:
Towards a Pedagogy of and for Difference.‖ In
Giroux and Mclaren, in Giroux, G. & McLaren,
P. (1989). Critical Pedagogy, the State, and
Cultural Struggle. New York: State University of
New York Press.
2. Beavis, C.(1994) "On Not Being Homer: Popular
Culture in Lower Secondary English,‖
Interpretations 27,58-77.
3. Stow, D. (1850). The Training System, the Moral
Training School, and the Normal Seminary,
London: Longman, Brown and Green.
4. Green, J. (1913). "The Teaching of English,‖ The
Journal of Experimental Pedagogy and Training
College Record, 2, 14-25, 201-9.
5. This lesson is still perhaps yet to be learnt by
those who have identified the critique of English
with a critique of the canon. It is worth noting
that this later critique has recently attained
official status. The Australian Vice Chancellor‘s
65
Notes to Contributors
1.
Full-length of contribution: 1000-6000 words.
2.
Letter/Opinion piece 100-1000
3.
Do not apply any other than basic formatting.
4.
All contributions are to be sent to:
Jo Jones
52A Swansea Street
EAST VICTORIA PARK WA 6101
or email to [email protected] or [email protected]
5.
Contributors should be aware that their audience is English teachers in secondary
schools and teacher educators.
6.
Contributors should provide a brief biographical note for publication. This should
include:
7.

author's position and institution

special interests in teaching/education

contact details.
Copyright for all papers published in Interpretations remains with the author.
66

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