(1978)
Day One: Brisbane Airport.
A huge Coca-Cola sign. A billboard, advertising jeans, shows a woman with her hands over her breasts, with the slogan: “Every Guy Should Have A Pair.”
When we entered Australia, at Darwin, in the middle of the night, we were sprayed for bugs: two tanned Qantas men, spray-can in either hand, striding down the aisles of the plane. “Bugless we are,” proclaims Australia, “and bugless we will remain.” So you can eat with confidence the lettuce in your sandwiches of rubber cheese.
Brisbane has hibiscus in bloom, humidity, tropical palms, and flying foxes, which swoop about in the dusk, attacking the fruit trees. People here don’t find them picturesque. The houses are raised bungalows, with tin roofs and open, lattice-walled areas underneath. Downtown Brisbane is seedy in a 1930s Graham Greene way. The people we talk to tell us that Queensland politics are incredible: public demonstrations are banned, and the police do whatever the premier tells them to. They never thought it could happen.
Strikes are frequent, productivity is low, and there’s been a major drought; so the farmers all over Australia are in trouble. Someone blew up three people outside the Sydney Hilton, but no one knows who. The government talks of “stringent measures.” In West Australia, there’s a movement to break away and form a separate country. Not everything here is foreign.
Day Two: The Flight to Adelaide.
Wrinkled hills, some dry-looking squares of farm; sinuous, dragony rivers, and a few lakes or ponds ringed with white. Mars-red hills, then the scrub forest of the South Australian coast. I realize I know almost nothing about the geology (my good intentions about reading up beforehand came to nothing). Who did what to the land, when? I know there were convicts, but where and so what? Australians seem to know more about Canada than we know about them. They had the Commonwealth drilled into them, they tell me.
We arrive at the Adelaide airport to find that our one piece of luggage, along with Galway Kinnell’s and that of an entire string quartet, has disappeared. We aren’t worried; there aren’t many places it can go. At the hotel, which also has a Graham Greene air, I settle down to read the Adelaide Festival literature and try to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here. The festival has a modern Festival Hall with several theatres in it, and auxiliary space all over town. It imports operas, orchestras, musical comedies, plays, quartets, ballets, from America, England, Japan, Europe; the Kabuki Theatre is here, and For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.
Then there’s Writers Week. It’s supposed to start tomorrow, but you can tell from the coloured brochures that it doesn’t loom too large in the minds of the festival organizers. There’s a small separate programme, though, which promises various delights: The Orlando Winery Luncheon, sundry doings at the Writers’ Pavilion, various readings and book launchings, and some papers on current Australian writing. The logo on the front of the programme shows a line of heads, each with a pencil behind the ear, mouths wide open as though devouring the words “WRITERS’ WEEK.”
Day Three: A Side Trip.
The Orlando Winery Luncheon. Winery luncheons are a regular Writers’ Week feature. We wait for our buses at the Parade Grounds near the Writers’ Pavilion, which is a large red-striped open tent. The men are in casual summer shirts, the women in sundresses and hats. Jennifer Rankin, an Australian poet we met earlier in London, says she can tell the male overseas writers at first glance. I thought it might be the white-rat pallor, but no, she says, it’s their feet. We looked hard at all the available feet, including Galway Kinnell’s (USA) and Richard Murphy’s (Ireland), and yes, she’s right, though you can’t put your finger on it.
We pass up the first two buses, which look full, only to be told that the third one is indefinitely delayed because the Australian Literary Council hasn’t arrived. We stew on the tarmac till they turn up, wearing little green hats, like gnomes. (Should the Canada Council be given such hats? It makes identification easier.)
When the Council have settled themselves, we move off through the parklands and rivers that surround Adelaide’s city core, then past some older houses with white scrollwork balconies and into the suburbs: Kentucky Fried Chicken, neat bungalows, well-watered gardens. Outside the city, however, the land is parched. The leaves of the trees are still green, but the ground is dry and brown.
After an hour and a half, we reach the Barossa Valley, a wine-producing area settled by Germans. Miniature Rhine-land castles, Lutheran churches, taverns with barrel signs. The buses stop at Orlando’s, and the writers disgorge onto Orlando’s green lawn, dotted with upended kegs, each bearing an umbrella, a plate of German sausage, and three bottles of wine. We scuttle from umbrella to umbrella, avoiding the scorching sun.
The premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, is here to open Writers’ Week. He used to be an actor, and he makes a very classy speech about the importance of literature. He sounds as if he means it, and probably does; the Chief Justice here writes poetry. South Australia, we are told, is a far cry from Queensland. Here the government is both Labour and liberal, and the arts flourish. (I try to imagine Bill Davis making an equally passionate speech on this subject; fail.)
After the speech the food comes out and we crouch under an umbrella eating magnificent pears and plums, discussing past and current trends in Australian poetry. The search for the “genuinely Australian,” the pull of “international” literature, the definition of the Outback (where almost nobody lives) as the “real” Australia, the shift towards “urban poetry.” Australians have more ties with England than we do, but the God of many Australian painters is New York. There’s a heavy post-Creeley clique in Sydney, apparently, among whom avoiding capital letters is mandatory. “Rationalizing English,” they call it.
We end up talking, as writers tend to, about publishing. It’s been flourishing here since about 1965, but I’m still not clear what “flourishing” means. Then we move on to critics. There’s a good deal of resentment if you go to England and make good, but at least they’ll take you seriously then. On the other hand, they don’t like it if you get too big, and Patrick White has been trounced rather nastily. As one writer put it, “They cut tall poppies here.”
Wheels within wheels, literary operators, tiny animosities, crab-like jostlings for position; cultural politics played out with veiled compliments and sneers; groups, anti-groups, loners. Paranoia thriving like suburban roses.
We arrive back feeling dizzy and wizened. Despite our precautions we are sunburned. Think about convicts: no hats or umbrellas. Think about sunstroke and feel I have it. The sun really can kill you, they say. The aborigines think the whites are crazy to oil and fry their skins the way they do. They themselves sit under trees.
Day Four: Friendly Street.
Tonight I go to my first reading, held in the Pavilion; it’s given by the Friendly Street Poets, an Adelaide “group.” This term is used loosely: styles range from tight lyric to pop mod. There are two audiences: those who sit inside the tent and can hear, those who sit outside and can’t. The ones who can’t hear make use of the cash bar, which is in operation just behind the tent. It’s fashionable with some of these to shout things at the readers. I ask who the shouters are and am told they are from Melbourne, as if this explained everything.
The last reader is a woman, and they give her a particularly hard time: whistles, catcalls, cries of “We love you.” It’s a kind of music-hall atmosphere, which she’s able to handle for a while by flipping remarks back at the jeerers. At the end of the reading there’s a scuffle over the mike. Some of the young sprouts want to seize it; much shouting, cries of “Shuttup” and “Now you’ll hear some good poetry.” The audience drifts away. The definitive thing about a tent is that you can’t throw anyone out. Richard Murphy, the Irish poet, even more white-faced than usual, says he hopes they won’t be at his reading. Consider taking some dead mice and old cabbages to my reading, to hurl in self-defence. Am told the performance this evening is not all that typical; am also told foreigners didn’t understand the genuine Okker bluff-bloke style.
Day Five: AusLit.
In the Writers’ Pavilion, a survey of current Australian literature: fiction, the media, non-fiction in the morning; children’s literature, drama, poetry in the afternoon. I can’t go in the afternoon because it’s my turn to baby-sit Jess, but I sit under the red canvas in the morning, scribbling down names and bits of commentary. The fiction commentator feels they’ve had enough of something called “the kitchen sink school” and approves of recent “international,” “experimental” trends. This seems to mean that fantasy and discontinuous form are in, and Brautigan, Pynchon and Vonnegut are causing ripples, if not waves. The aboriginal culture has not made much impact on the more recent Australians, though the reviewer feels that interest in things aboriginal is on the increase. (Reading the papers and literary magazines: there are a few aboriginal writers writing in English, and some small native-rights groups which have adapted the rhetoric of American blacks. But the aboriginals are even more outnumbered in Australia than the Indians in Canada, and they’ve made much less headway.)
The media paper is by a newspaperwoman, so much of the commentary concerns the state of journalism. Tom Wolfe is news here. Radio is given good marks, television bad ones. Television is American-dominated, and indigenous TV drama declining.
The good news is the film industry. This, we are told, is in the midst of a revival; in fact, there are several Australian feature films playing to good audiences right here in Adel-aide. One Australian tells me, “Look, we just said to the Americans, ’We love your films but we can’t let you control distribution any more.’”
In the afternoon, while Jess sleeps in the bedroom, I sit in the bathroom —of necessity our writing place during this tour —writing my paper for the next day. I squeeze out three pages of notes on the usual Canadian obsessions. I’m supposed to be talking about Influence and Independence, with emphasis on Survival, which has somehow penetrated here.
In the evening we get a baby-sitter and go off to see an indigenous Australian film. (Actually we went off to see some Polish experimental theatre, but it was sold out.) We choose the nearest movie, The Mango Tree, starring Geraldine Fitzgerald. A pleasant film set in a small town at the turn of the century. (“All Australian films are about the past,” someone told me.) A boy with a strong mother and a dead father has perceptions, sees death through an episode with a sadistic religious fanatic, has an affair with his French teacher, leaves the town after his mother dies. It’s shot slowly, with considerable attention to detail. (Like many Canadian films, it seems to be saying, “Look at this, you don’t see this much in the movies,”) or: “This may look like a frontier Western town, but please note that it’s an Australian frontier Western town.” The pacing and even the subject-matter are more reminiscent of, say, Why Shoot the Teacher and Who Has Seen The Wind than of American films.
After that, we run across town (it’s a small city; you can indeed run across it) to see an Australian group called Back to Bourke Street. Bourke Street is a street in Melbourne where live music-hall variety shows once flourished, and Back to Bourke Street is a celebration and send-up of the original Australian popular songs that were sung there. Four talented actor-singers caper through songs with such titles as “Kangaroo Hop,” “My Home Down Under,” and “I’m An Aussie Through & Through.” At last we feel we’ve found the real Australia.
(Wherever I was, and whatever I was looking at, there was always some Australian around to tell me that this wasn’t the real Australia—I had to go to Perth, or Melbourne, or Sydney, or somewhere else. Which reminded me of Canada. Margaret Whitlam, the enormous, hearty wife of Gough, who has been a folk hero ever since being deposed, had the last word to say on the real Australian syndrome. “We’re all real here,” she growled, “and we’re all bastards.” Which also reminded me of Canada.)
Return to the hotel, having memorized the chorus to “Is He an Aussie, Is He, Lizzie, Is He an Aussie, Is He, Ay?” Feel I have achieved Cultural Insight. The Australians have their own landscape, their own songs, and their own language. What more do they need?
From this time on I become fascinated with Australian slang, which is as vigorous, distinctive and rich as any. It was developed by the main (though unwilling) settlers, Cockney English and Irish, both great wordsmiths. Much of it is unprintable. Of the more printable phrases, I like jellyblubber (for jellyfish), dickhead (for fool), Ozzie, mozzie and cozzie (for Australian, mosquito, and bathing costume, respectively).
Day Six: Influence and Independence.
Today, after I burble about the real Australian film I’ve seen, I’m told by everyone that this was a lemon, a melon, and every other derogatory fruit imaginable. Commercial junk, they say; not the real Australia. I should have gone to see Picnic at Hanging Rock.
In the morning I’m part of a panel on “Influence and Independence,” during which representatives of five other colonial cultures also state their views. I regurgitate statistics on Canadian publishing and paraphrase Survival. Alistair Campbell from New Zealand says they used to resent Australia but can’t be bothered any more. Ee Tiang Hong, from Malaysia, is a surprise. “I learned the English language the hard way,” he says. “I began by saying ’I am, I am, I am,’ and went on to say, ’I am a man, I am a man.’ So I owe both my existence and my gender to the English language.” In his view, English in ex-colonies is not always the language of oppression; at the moment, since its use is almost forbidden by an extremely nationalistic government, it is practically a language of political protest.
Jayanta Mahaptra from India says that in his country there are sixteen languages, with English being the seventeenth. His primary concern is not “Influence and Independence,” but hunger. So he reads some poems on hunger, putting down all of us who have dutifully addressed the topic proposed. Norman MacCaig of Scotland begins by saying that it’s one of the most unpleasant facts a man has to face that there are ten times as many Englishmen as Scotsmen; he goes on from there.
Fay Zwicky from Western Australia speaks last. She begins by referring to D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, in which he said that Australians had great dead empty hearts, like the continent, despite their outward boisterous amiability. She then wonders when Australia is going to write Moby Dick, laments its provincialism, asks when it’s going to stop nosing around for its identity and get down to it, and affirms its potential. This is all painfully familiar. Canada is lucky D. H. Lawrence never wrote a book called Beaver. If he had, he’d doubtless have commented on that rodent’s fabled habit of biting off its own testicles, thus defining us forever.
The audience is polite to us foreigners, but lights into Fay Zwicky with an energy that demonstrates she’s hit home. It’s pleasant for me to sit back and watch other people worrying an identity crisis, for a change.
Several astonishing questions posed by the Australians:
—Don’t I think it’s fortunate Canada is right beside the United States, and can benefit from the continual tension of having to define itself?
—Isn’t it wonderful to have winter? (The Australians are fascinated by the idea of snow. What is it like, they ask? Styrofoam, I tell them, only cold.) In Australia, they say, the weather is either so nice that you don’t want to write, or so hot that you can’t. They have a charming picture of Canadian writers holed up during blizzards with little oil lamps, writing masterpieces.
—How exciting to have the French. It must give such variety and richness to the culture. (I can see their point. Australia does tend to be rather uniform.)
—Aren’t Canadians tickled pink that they’ve produced a critic of world stature such as Northrop Frye? (They are upset when I tell them that it’s become almost an academic social knee-jerk to sneer at Frye. “We cut tall poppies,” I tell them.) Australians are just as worried about not having produced a Northrop Frye as they are about not having produced a Moby Dick. It’s strange to find oneself viewed as the possessor of a coveted cultural property.
I have to admit I’ve never before seen any of these questions from this point of view, exactly. I begin to feel euphoric about being Canadian.
But in the evening we go again to the Polish theatre and get in this time, and I come out cursing fate that I wasn’t born a Pole. The group is Cricot II and they performed a piece called The Dead Class, which is indescribable. I wonder why we spent the morning talking about what we talked about.
Day Seven: Another Crack at the Real Australia.
Today we skip classes and go to the beach, driven by Kate Jennings, a well-known feminist poet, and accompanied by Richard Murphy from Ireland, who is feeling quite ground down by it all.
We park the car in a deserted lot near a river filled with pelicans and cormorants, and climb dunes covered with unfamiliar grasses. Kate is jumpy about poisonous snakes —fear of reptiles is one of the first things a child learns in Queensland, where she’s from —so we avoid the stumpy, tail-less lizards. The beach is misty and deserted, with huge breakers rolling along it for miles and miles. Richard Murphy immediately sprints away and disappears; the rest of us scatter, as if by common consent that we’ve had too many words and need a rest. If this isn’t the real Australia, it’s at least part of it.
This was the end of Writers’ Week for me. I left with a list of names, a certain amount of guilt (why didn’t I know more?), and a feeling of having seen a surface which I’d barely scratched. After this we went to Sydney, where we found:
—a lingerie store called Boobtique.
—one of the best restaurants I’ve ever been in, Tony’s Berowra Waters, for which you have to book four months ahead. It’s worth it.
—a group of matriarchal feminists, many from the Anglican Church, who told me about the beleaguered state of feminism in Australia and presented me with a book called Dammed Whores and God’s Police, which sums it up.
—a men’s hairdressing establishment called The Stallions’ Stable.
—aboriginal rock carvings, explained lovingly by a park ranger. “Some people say, ’Oh, is that all?’” he said, disapprovingly.
—stunning beaches.
—the best fish & chips in the world, now that England’s have gone downhill.
—a billboard at the airport, showing a man on a motorcycle, with the wheel bulging out from his legs toward the viewer. A woman sits behind him, her hands reaching around to his crotch. The slogan: “Unsnap a Stud.” Advertising a soft drink called “Stud.”
It’s all the real Australia.