Editorial

Has JFK Come to Oz?

In the current nomination mania occupying the Democratic Party in the United States, Hillary Clinton and husband Bill have been accused of plotting to putting their dream of establishing a ”Clinton Dynasty” ahead of forerunner Barack Obama’s chances of being elected President. It’s no more than a rumour, but it does point to a cult of personality that has persisted in America ever since the Kennedys.

It’s essentially a left-wing liberal pipe dream. Ironically, John Howard was seduced by it to the point that he thought he was invincible. Now, the idealists in the ALP are trying to impose the mystique on Kevin Rudd, but the threads don’t fit well. Mr Rudd lost no time in qualifying the liberal dream with some pragmatic decisions such as watering down Peter Garrett’s influence on the environment with Penny Wong’s appointment as Minister for Climate Change and Water. Minister Wong has already applied a break to Australia’s about-shift on climate change. Anticipating the release of a very conservative budget that puts controlling inflation ahead of new investment in social programs Mr Rudd was more than a little amused to remark that the Opposition is attacking him from the Left.

JFK he ain’t.

The silence about arts related matters during the campaign was deafening, and nothing has changed much since. Anyone who doubts this should have a look at Ben Eltham’s assessment on newmatilda.com where he remarks that: “so far our Arts Minister is showing far less reforming zeal for the sector than many had hoped for.”

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Peter Garrett chose power over idealism in joining the ALP rather than the Greens. And he doubtlessly prefers to be a watermark on the front bench rather than being on the back bench.

Most significantly for publishers and authors, Eltham comments that: “Garrett has ignored certain parts of the sector (new media arts, publishing, festivals), and faces significant challenges in other parts (the future of the major performing arts sector, the need for an over-arching Australian cultural policy)”.

What does this mean for the arts in Australia? The battle continues. There are no signs of a renaissance in funding at the Australia Council, and I predict the arts will not be mentioned in the upcoming Budget. Which is probably a good thing since it is traditionally a “soft” area that no one will run to the barricades to defend against cut-backs.

Be ready for sympathetic nods and winks from Mr Garrett for the “creative arts industry” but very little in the way of concrete support.

This steady-as-you-go attitude will continue to hamper innovation in the arts and our ability to display our wares on the global stage.

Still, we shouldn’t ignore the positive things the New ALP has done since coming to power. Just the other day I heard that the Government will provide a free bowel cancer testing kit to everyone over 50.

I might need it..

— DR

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Focus

LH: This turns on the standard phrase, suggesting instead that what we can see does not require ‘belief’ – belief is connected to the unverifiable, so in some ways this statement is self-evident, in others it points to a genuine human need: the need for faith, often in that which is beyond proof or definition.  It is the very improvability of the thing that is essential – what has been referred to by mystics as ‘wordless knowledge’.

EH: I like how you’ve linked the poems together with similar themes, even starting with the ‘fall of man’, and ending with the ‘nature of flight’. Did you conceive the collection in this way, or did you find a structure after the poems had been written?

LH: I began the collection with the idea of the ‘love letters’, last letters from men at war, which I wrote around the same time as the poem now entitled ‘the possibility of flight’, a dramatic monologue in the voice of a man who has jumped from one of the Twin Towers. They came together as the precursor and consequences of war, raising the question of inevitability. 

Gradually, this notion of possible escape began to take over as the poems emerged and there were increasing images of birds connecting in to the collection.  Each poem that has gone in has been measured for its suitability to this emerging theme, among others, in an amorphous way. The collection is intended to be read in order as a loose sequence with enough space for the reader to be able to find his or her own narrative within it.

EB: You use musical terms, numbering and layout throughout your piece (such as libretto, legato and even musical bar lines). Why did you structure your piece in this way?

LH: One of the theme pieces in the collection is called ‘libretto’.  As I was writing, particularly about the politics of fear, I felt a sense of orchestration, of a certain rhythm emerging in the stories, similar to the patterns we seek in our own lives.  This tied in with the natural relationship between poetry and music, and the strong rhythm that was developing in my poetry at the time of writing – regularly incorporated internal rhyme so that the reader would feel held within the more difficult poems.  I

was also interested in the relationship between metanarratives such as we find in mythology, and which are perpetuated in opera, and the way they seemed to be reflected in the emerging narrative of the stories I was researching - a kind of opera of life, and our constant seeking of the libretto. The structure naturally followed.

EB: You seem passionate about war and the politics of fear – and in particular the ‘fabric of rhetoric’ concept. How did this influence your choice of subject, and could you explain a bit of the background behind this concept?

LH: Many of the poems were written around news items on the Internet connected to the war on terror.  One of the main ideas running through the collection is the notion of obtaining meaning out of a series of random events and I applied this to the news articles, creating a notion of a mythology behind the war on terror that could be gleaned from headlines etc.  Is there a narrative here? 

Connected with this is the idea of the metanarratives inferred by governments and the media, a post-secular mythologising, as a by-product or direct intention of the politics of fear – the way in which paradigm shifts are orchestrated to enable the actions of those in power, and the day-to-day experience of this. I see myself writing very much from necessity, in that each poem is a visceral response to what concerns me in the world, and an attempt to comprehend and sublimate these recurring thoughts.

EB: How much research was involved to provide the historical and cultural context for your poems?

LH: For the war poems I researched each period, both for historical content and the style of the poem e.g. the WWI poem was based on a Wilfred Owen sonnet form, the Vietnam poem on Ginsberg’s Howl.  My interest in philosophy also fed into the collection, particularly the work of Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Baudrillard and Camus, with regard to ideas such as the simulacral nature of perception as a result of increased media exposure and the notion of the Panopticon, the omniscient eye, as well as the search for meaning and narrative amidst the absurd.

EB: You write in “Duet”, ‘There’s no war here - just pledges to illusion a CNN of pareidolia’. This is a very clever metonymy. Have you seen any other examples of pareidolia at work in our society?

LH: Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, the phenomenon of seeing connections or images where they ‘normally’ don’t exist, such as seeing Jesus Christ in a piece of toast.  Here I was putting words into the mouth of Baudrillard, the recently deceased French philosopher, who claimed that the first Gulf War was not really a war, there was no true enemy, and that the media was complicit in this, implying that the war on terror is an illusion, even an act of faith of the most disastrous kind.  I thought this was an interesting idea to apply to other aspects of the politics of fear, such as the ‘paradigm of prevention’ - this dualist notion of seeing the enemy everywhere, of seeking out the bogeyman – which could be construed as an example of pareidolia within current political policy.

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[Assistant Editor, Children's Titles, Anna Bartlett interviewed Goldie Alexander about her upcoming picture book Lame Duck Protest with IP Kidz]

AB: Your parents migrated to Australia from Poland, and as a child you spoke very little English. At what stage of your life did you feel comfortable enough with the English language to become an author?

GA: I learnt English pretty quickly once I was sent to kindergarten aged 3. From then on English was always my first language. All my further studies focused on literature, and I spend the first half of my working career teaching in Victorian high schools. Though I 'played' with becoming a writer, I didn't take it seriously until some twenty years ago when I was asked to write a series of YA books for "Dolly Fiction".

AB: You started off as a high school English and History teacher. How has this experience influenced your writing?

GA: When I first started writing for young adults, very little was being published for Australian readers. This meant that much of the material I used as a teacher sometimes didn't relate to the actual experiences of my students. I suspect that I went into writing for kids because I had been working with them for 25 years. I was able to combine my love of English and History in many of my novels, even the first which I wrote under my own name. That was "Mavis Road Medley" and explored Melbourne in 1933 when my parents turned up here.

AB: You write a lot of historical fiction, but also science fiction and fantasy. To some this may seem an unusual combination. How do you explain it?

GA: I write mystery and crime too. To tell the truth I get very quickly bored and I'm always interested to try something new. History, sci fi and fantasy all share one important factor in that all depend on creating other worlds, other times, other settings. All grist for the imagination. Also, writing contemporary realism, stuff quickly goes out of date. Think clothes, pop groups, electronics.

AB: 'Lame Duck Protest', your latest book, to be published by IP, is a picture book. What interests you most about this form?

GA: In a story picture book the text must leave room for the illustrator to 'write the other half'. I have always considered these the hardest to write because so much must be left out. Every word counts. But I enjoy the challenge. Besides, a successful Story Picture Book encourages little ones to enjoy hearing and reading stories. I think that's fundamental to growing up.

AB: In 'Lame Duck Protest', the characters stage a protest over the proposed opening of a shopping centre in their local reserve. How do you avoid didacticism in projects like this?

GA: I suppose by using a 'lame duck' as my metaphor. I like the idea of a ducking imprinting Zoe as her mum and even following her into the toilet. I think kids would find this funny. Humour deconstructs any didacticism.

AB: You've had a lot of pets throughout your life. Why did you choose a duck as the focal character for this book?

GA: This was a challenge put out by my co-writer Hazel Edwards. We passed a sign saying LAME DUCK PROTEST and she challenged me to write a story using that title. I also like ducks! More to the point, I am surrounded by proposed developments, some totally inappropriate. This is my way of fighting back.

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[Anna also interviewed Edel Wignell about her fractured fairytale Long Live Us! currently in production with IP Kidz]

AB: You grew up on a sheep farm in northern Victoria. How did this setting influence your writing?

EW: I'm comfortable writing stories set in the country, though I haven't written many. My first collections, titled A Boggle of Bunyips and A Bluey of Swaggies, arose from my interest in the folklore, beliefs and practices of country people, including the Koori families in my district.

When I wrote the junior historical novel, The Long Sticky Walk, I was able to identify with the family caught in a disastrous flood because my district suffered a similar one and I walked several miles through floodwaters each day to catch a bus to school. The chapter book mysteries, Missing and What's in the Red Bag? are set on the New South Wales coast, and the thriller, Hands Up!, is set in a Victorian National Park.

AB: You've been involved in drawing, painting and gold and silversmithing. Do you see any relationship between your work in these areas and your writing?

EW: Being involved in the arts, encourages a vivid imagination which is helpful to a writer. When I write, I visualize both the characters and the action. Writing a picture-story, I imagine how the illustrator may interpret it, and I omit segments of text that I know will be illustrated.

AB: You write for both children and adults. Which do you find it easier?

EW: Writing for adults is like having a conversation with adults – mind meets mind, and the language is appropriate. Writing for children is more difficult because one has to take into account the maturity and experience of a particular age group. It's important to remember that children read fiction primarily for entertainment, so there's no place for didacticism. The writing should be subtle and leave space for the imagination.

AB: Your novels often contain elements of folklore or fantasy, and, in your latest picture book, 'Long Live Us', we see fairy-tale characters and their stories becoming intertwined. What is it about fantasy that makes it appeal to children?

EW: Children, like adults, love to escape the real world. In fantasy everything is possible: exhilarating adventure, amazing characters, improbable and impossible achievements... The pleasure of a fractured fairy tale, such as Long Live Us!, for children aged 6-10 years, is in seeing characters that have been familiar since early childhood, behaving in surprising ways in an unpredictable adventure. The illustrations add another level of enjoyment, for they add a strand of humour that isn't unexplained until the last pages.

AB: 'Long Live Us' is a humorous story – fairy-tale characters attend an Annual General Meeting, Goldilocks teams up with the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch and the Troll to outwit the Goodies... How difficult is it to get the balance right between writing stories that will entertain children and those that have an important message?

EW: This story was a response to seeing a notice of a Fractured Fairy Tale Competition, so I wasn't thinking of an important message. I focused on creating a way to link several fairy tales in a humorous fashion. When it won, I thought it could be a successful picture-story.

Stories have been told forever by means of myths, legends, folktale and epics, and the constant theme throughout the centuries has been: Good versus Evil, with Good always winning.

If there is a message in Long Live Us!, it is that stories created to teach reading (such as the 'John and Betty' series in the 60s) are likely to be totally boring (and may even turn kids away from reading) because the tried and tested story elements are missing. But that's a message for adults, not for children. When children are learning the mechanics of reading, they need, more than ever, to listen to entertaining stories read by parents and teachers. And I didn't have that message in mind when I created the story.

AB: You've written over 90 books for children. Do you think you'll ever run out of ideas?

EW: Story ideas crowd in constantly. Every day the newspaper includes several incidents that can be 'story starters' or inspiration for the creation of a poem. Writers are observers. The germ of a story can be observed in the shopping centre, on public transport, anywhere and everywhere. So the answer to the question is 'No!'

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[David Reiter cornered David Gilbey about his poetry collection Death and the Motorway and his feelings about being in the role of author rather than editor.]

DR: People probably know you first and foremost as an academic. How have you managed the balance between your “day job” as an academic and the urge to write poetry?

DG: Balance? What is balance? I seem able to achieve it only in short bursts, between greater stretches of crowded. However, I’m comforted by William Blake’s claim that ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. I guess I’ve always liked reading and studying poetry – fondling language and utterance is so engaging, intriguing – there
seemed such an endless array of voices and styles from Eliot, Donne, Hopkins and Shakespeare in one hemisphere, to Slessor, McAuley, Wright and Murray in our own. In a sense, studying these (and others) made me feel daunted – they are so good in so many ways I wondered if I could possibly write anything of such subtlety, complexity or impact – and if ‘Kubla Khan’ is a fragment, then I’m condemned to be an eternal mariner! Their words are part of what has produced my shaping imagination.

But being involved in Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, hosting writers to give readings and workshops, talking with writers about the processes of drafting and editing, and having been mentored by Kate Llewellyn, Geoff Page, Susan Hampton has showed me ways of valuing my own words, and eased me, almost obstetrically, into a shift from “literature” to “writing”. Sometimes reading and teaching is quite suggestive – of phrases, images, styles – and in the midst of marking, or preparing a lecture or tutorial, I’ll sometimes get an idea of something that might turn into a poem. I try to forget about the “greatness” of my models when I’m scribbling, but I think it helps when I’m editing – to know what those whose conversations I want to join, are saying.

DR: Though you’ve been writing poetry for many years, this is your first collection. How did you decide which poems to include in the collection and which to leave out?

DG: I wanted to have poetry from the various phases and foci of my writing in print so that when I am invited to read or perform, I have something to sell. Like most writers, my preoccupations and styles have changed. I wanted to get a “best of” my work in one substantial collection. So I selected (and edited) a few of the poems from Under the Rainbow (1996) and then looked hard at the various ‘foci’ of recent years: living and working in Japan; writing which emerges from being in Wagga; writing exploring writing, art, music; bits about and from family; then I was travelling and writing in Europe, UK and Ireland, China.

Writing is only ever partly “about” something, somewhere or someone – but particular locations and contexts do “produce” often intense language moments which sometimes become poems. I knew that some of my poems are particularly shaped by my sense of a speaking voice – inclined towards a performance mode. Others are more oblique, metaphorical. Some are particularly focussed on playing with particular styles. In practical terms, I asked my mentors and publisher for their suggestions and opinions about which were best.

DR: Death and the Motorway might seem like a rather racy title for a poetry book. What made you choose this as a title?

DG: At first I wanted ‘Syzygy’ but John Kinsella had used it. Then I thought I’d often liked two-word titles like John Tranter’s Under Berlin and David McCooey’s Blister Pack so I thought of ‘Pachinko Sunset’, a phrase from one of my Japan poems (in fact I’d started to tell people that was the title) – but it started to sound obscure, precious. ‘Death and the Motorway’ was the first title of a poem that my friend Peter Robinson suggested might be better off as ‘Ghostly Razzamatazz’ but it seemed a bit insistent.

Then, just before the manuscript came together, I received an acceptance from Southerly to publish ‘Death and the Motorway’, in its original version – that’s it! I thought. I tried it on a number of friends who agreed it was more pretentious than ‘Pachinko Sunset’ but had a more dramatic/ironic/comic cachet. ‘Who knows’ quipped one, ‘you might sell copies in car accessories or road safety contexts?’

DR: You spend much of your working time in Japan, and you’re fluent in Japanese. Has Japanese culture influenced your writing?

DG: I’ve been to Japan three times now, for a year each time, teaching English at Miyagi Gakuin University in Sendai. It’s been a considerable influence on my life and writing, almost picking me up and putting me down facing another direction, making me aware of myself, my words and my relationships with other people in new ways. As both more separate from Japanese and Australian culture as well as more intimately connected to minutiae.

It’s true that when you go to another country to live and work, and especially if the language is different, you become a different person and you feel your language differently. ‘english’seemed to me a much more contestable place and process. Some of my recent poems use the curiousities of ‘jinglish’ as part of their architecture. As well, there’s a whole new world of words, objects, ideas that are intriguingly unfamiliar and getting to know and use them is part of my imaginative embrace. Although, dutifully, I attended Japanese classes every week they were offered, and I learned hiragana and katakana, survival conversation and even managed to construct and deliver a couple of pretty accomplished speeches in kana, I’m by no means fluent. My Japanese is well known to be barbarous.

DR: You’ve been Editor of the literary magazine fourW for many years. How did it feel to be edited as opposed to editor?

DG: I liked the detailed attention to words and phrases and lines and welcomed it as a constructive ‘close reading’ of my texts. Often it helped me to see my work in a new light. It felt like a process of ‘value-adding’, certainly of affirming my enterprise as poet, even if there was criticism of particular bits. In fact I’d have been happy with a more extended scrutiny.

While writing is a kind of private act, language is nothing if it’s not engaged by some ‘other’. We need readers even if we don’t write with particular readers in mind. The editorial processes seemed to emerge fairly naturally out of a tutorial/lecturing experience and out of workshops which I’ve both attended and offered.

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Mr Peach and the Gold Mine

How did a person who describes himself as the “only surviving formation director of Genetics Australia, Bacchus Marsh, a former President of the Federated Chamber of Commerce of Queensland and a charter member of Lions International” come to write a book titled The Biggest-Ever Mining Swindle in the Colonies? It’s a long story—and almost as hefty as the book itself!

An historian more by inclination than training, John Peach is the brother of Bill, the well-known ABC journalist and anchorman, who provides an introduction to John’s book. But it was the Ross gold saga itself that would occupy years of research and writing on John’s part, uncovering a fascinating story of intrigue and corruption “at the highest levels” in the mining industry.

The hard cover book not only tells the story but also delves into the personalities of many of the figures involved, compiling hundreds of original documents as evidence of what actually happened. As the author says, in typically colourful language: “there is no doubt the story recounts a profusion of frauds, deception, avarice, overnight fortunes, gross injustice and ultimately some immense losses to mainly the innocent, and that many of the most prominent gentry, politicians and silks in the colonies were involved”.

We expect this book to raise the eyebrows of general readers as well as historians. It will be available exclusively from IP Sales and the author in August.

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