The Literary Piano

In an article first published in 1986, Susan Sheridan puts forward an account of the relationship between masculinity, genre, nation and literary worth that it seems to me might still be at play in judgements about women and literary value. She argues that during the 1890s, and in subsequent accounts that cemented this period’s position in [Australia’s] literary history, critical discourse tended to mobilise the following set of oppositions:

independent and original vs conventional and derivative egalitarian and democratic vs class-bound and ‘aristocratic’ Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour and action vs emotion outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)

Most relevant to recent debates is an added set of terms that, Sheridan suggests, ‘were especially salient at the turn of the century but which have by now formed a scarcely noticeable sediment of common sense about what constitutes literary value’:

realism vs romance vernacular or folk vs popular or commercial.

Sheridan argues here that a set of ideas that came to define what it meant to be distinctively Australian were defined in opposition to a set of values that were identified with femininity and that ideas about what constitutes literary value in Australia are also gendered in favour of realism and the vernacular (à la Lawson and Rudd) as opposed to popular romance (à la Praed and Cambridge). These are, of course, false dichotomies but they have been compelling in discussions of Australian literature ever since the turn of the twentieth century.

[…] In reprising these arguments about the fate of women in the Australian literary tradition, I don’t want to suggest a deliberate project on the part of any of the judges of Australian literary prizes to occlude women’s writing. Rather, I want to pose the question of how far, in the difficult decisions about the relative merit of books in the running for such prizes, this older association between masculinity, nationhood and genre comes into play, especially in the case of a prize so explicitly bounded by the nation as the Miles Franklin Award.

It came to me when I was reporting the mad uproar over Bill Henson’s photographs a couple of years ago that I’ve been writing about panics all my career: how they are whipped up, do their worst and disappear leaving only wreckage behind. Perhaps I’m alert to the subject because I’m gay. When I was growing up, preachers, police, politicians and the press were still keeping panic alive about people like me. It has left me despising panic merchants, particularly those Tory fear-mongers who represent themselves as guardians of decency. The politicians I most admire are those who hold their nerve in the face of irrational fear on the rampage. I’ve come to believe the fundamental contest in Australian politics is not so much between Right and Left as panic and calm.

Labor drove the early fear of the Chinese, and Labor has been up to its neck at times in panics about Blacks and Reds, poofs and dirty books. Labor can’t claim to be always on the side of calm. This is an issue that goes deeper than division between the parties. It’s about the odd willingness of Australia’s leaders to beat up on the nation’s fears. They coarsen politics. They narrow our sympathies. They make careers for themselves in this peaceful and good-hearted country by managing, from time to time, to make us afraid. The last fifteen years have seen this country in states of exaggerated alarm over native title, Muslim preachers, Muslim rapists, drugs, terrorists both foreign and home grown, demonstrators in the streets and pictures of naked children on gallery walls. But we end the decade as we began in a full-scale panic over refugees coming here – as they reach countries all over the world – uninvited in little boats.

Change may mean you have to stop doing things a certain way; it doesn’t mean you won’t find better alternatives. Shifting is what industries do. To paraphrase a comment on my last article: “Conductors, guards, milkmen, dustmen, stable-hands, sail-makers, blacksmiths, riveters, SEC linesmen, deckhands, all lost their jobs when technology rendered them redundant. If you are not educating your children for a world where a working boiler exists only in a museum then you are the fool.”

Regardless of pollution, we’re still dealing with finite resources. They’ll run out someday, and someone’s going to need to make the transition. There’s no reason why this generation shouldn’t be the ones to put their hands up.

Australia can afford a carbon price, and needs to make CO2 pollution less simple and desirable for industry. No, a tax alone won’t save the world, but examples need to be set. Opponents hide behind the argument that we shouldn’t bother if everyone else isn’t doing it. Sure, there’s no point me personally not driving home wasted, because even if I do kill a couple of people, it’s hardly going to touch the road toll, man. I mean, overall. It’s a couple of per cent at most. Look how many people China are going to kill this year! No, I don’t want a biscuit. I’m driving.

It’s bewildering, then, that the arguments of all four lobbies - pokies, mining, tobacco, and polluters - have been accepted by media outlets, and therefore by a lot of people. Clearly they are the arguments of those with the greatest interest in nothing changing.

It was true that local characters and scenes slotted effortlessly into a global script. Muscled teenagers in big shorts crowded the nation’s shopping malls. On neat estates where every house replicated its neighbour, young women pushed strollers containing babies of such plush perfection it was difficult to believe they would grow up to eat McDonald’s and pay to have their flesh tanned orange. There was comfort to be derived from this sense that the nation was keeping up with the great elsewhere. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date?

But a stand of eucalypts in a park or the graffiti on an overpass might call up a vision of what malls and rotary mowers had displaced. Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion.

The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.

I miss some things about Australia. The living is much easier in Sydney than it is in New York. I remember the bleak February Sunday when The New York Times came out with an article by Ray Bonner on the pools cemented to headlands on Sydney beaches. Bewitching photos. Glorious photos. The phone rang all day. ‘Are they real?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are they private? Gated communities?’ ‘No. Public. For everyone.’ ‘Why are you living here then!?!’

I gave up Australian beaches and those swimming pools, but what I gained was best expressed by the magnificent travel writer Freya Stark: ‘Only with long experience and the opening of his wares on many a beach where his language is not spoken, will the merchant come to know the worth of what he carries and what is parochial and what is universal in his choice’. I gained another kind of beach altogether.