As the Twig is Bent by Terry Lane (Dove Communications, Melbourne 1979)
This book (ex Aquinas College, Ringwood) was actually a genuine find. In it, Lane presents interviews with sixteen prominent Australians about their childhood. One of them is the historian Manning Clark of whom Lane writes:
…Manning Clark has bbecome an outspoken critic of Australian Society in his books, articles, speeches and broadcasts, expressing a profound pessimism about the future. The events of November 1975, ‘that year in which the money-changers and accountants – the men with a passion for interest rates as dionysiacal as the passion of some men for “other things” – were to have their terrible day of triumph’, have left him deeply disturbed. Because of his defence of the Whitlam government … there was a storm over his commission to broadcast the Boyer Lectures on the ABC in 1976. An attempt to censor the lectures before they were recorded was thwarted when it was made public.
Of course that sort of thing couldn’t happen in these comfortable and relaxed times. On to an excerpt from the interview – Clark’s gloomy concluding remarks:
Perhaps my childhood was always at my elbow, as it were, helping me to dream the dream that one day I might put down on paper the story of why we are as we are and why, wherever I am, whether in Moscow, London, New York or at harvard, I know deep down where I belong and that Australia is always for me the ‘shire for men who understand’.
But it is also a place where many people seem to belong to a different world from mine. Some of them are provoked to great wrath by what I try to say. That too has been part of what Henry James called my ‘complex fate’. There is one side of me which believes all those shouters and mockers will gradually fade away, but another part tells me they are with me forever in Australia – that Australia belongs to them.
Some days I feel the same about the blogosphere. Others, I’m embarrassed to find myself counted among the shouters and mockers. That’s just part of my ‘complex fate’.
Australia…I remember a place that w/ a big dream…where people turned their heads & heard ‘the scream’. A nation of a ‘first people’…the initially sowed.
And then came the machines. the disruptors. the diversionary tactic…the divide. how could communication devices construct/create so much difference…& the children of men & women fought in the grand wars…took themselves to the edge of ‘apocalypse’.
and the organic farmer…the poet…the wind reader…the animal talker…the friends & lovers of a seemingly eternal time, became divided.
the moment it landed.
in 4, perhaps 5 places.
it speaks thru the mobile phones…it turns friends & families against each other.
‘the October surprise’ is almost upon us. in the addiction to the MECHS, to the devices that control us…WE look for an answer…in a PARTY…confused we shift by the day.
BUT, WE miss the obvious…WHAT CHANGED US????
What was introduced in the past century???
What is the MATRIX????
Who warned us about 2001?
Who are we? Who are you?
Do you really know yourself.
Have you ever walked away from your mobile phone, your computer, your radio, your TV, your…have you ever felt the SILENCE????
Do it today…do it now…do it before the OCTOBER SURPRISE (by Karl Rove).
And you shall see…& SO, it shall be.
This is hopelessly pessimistic nonsense! I remain an upright militant optimist – so long as we have the wwweb – because the right are falling back in dissarray.
We have them on the run in three critical areas.
1) The illegal aggressive invasion of SW Asia and associated war crimes.
2) The stolen generations and associated hate speech, seditious incitements to racist violence and rampant holocaust denial.
3) Global warming and the threat that represents.
By my estimation we have been winning since May LAST YEAR!
The future is progressive and positively leftist representing a creative and productive dielectic between democratic and libertarian socialism with the red fascists pushed even further into the outer darkness…wait…hang on a miniute…who am I kidding with all this guff; We’re screwed.
Gummo, I went to Aquinas for four years. That must be a yellowy old book by all accounts. Went back there recently to see a local production of Footloose.
Nice little post, nice quotes. Sometimes people listen to each other though – don’t they? The sounds of silence were big in my day.
There is a funny article in this weekend’s Age about the iPod not really ‘shuffling’ – I am about to return a Creative Zen player to the shop as a last desperate act contre la materialisme, in favour of a return to silence. The thought of communicating subconsciously with a piece of software regarding my musical choices is not a nice one. At least when one blogs, one talks to PEOPLE.