An article of mine on the state of Ozlit was published at Online Opinion yesterday. I’m reproducing the text over the fold as it may also interest LP readers.
Is Australian literature suffering a slow and painful death? The study of Australian literature is certainly suffering a decline in popularity. Australian readers donât feel the need to pick up local product over others. The idea of a national literature in Australia is fast becoming a very small idea indeed.
A glance at the latest Ladbrokes odds for the Nobel Prize in literature reveals a single Australian name – that of Gerald Murnane. The sparsity of Australian names is not surprising. Combined with a number of events in the Australian literary world in the past months, it is clear that the reputation of Australian literature in its home country is on the nose.
Weâve seen a couple of journalists submit a chapter from a Patrick White novel to various Australian publishers who all rejected it, apparently not recognising it as a hoax or appreciating the writing itself. The Institute of Public Affairs included Patrick White’s Nobel award on their list of âAustraliaâs 13 biggest mistakesâ? as they believe it led to reckless and wasteful arts funding that reinforced political correctness at the cost of ability.
Within the space of a week, a car driver and a crocodile wrangler were granted state funerals while the death of an accomplished Australian writer was all but ignored.
The only high point has been the appearance of two Australian writers (Kate Grenville and M.J. Hyland) on the Booker Prize short list.
Aside from all this poor PR for Australian literature, perhaps a more salient development is the decline of the study of Australian literature in Australian universities, as a literature in its own right.
It has been known for some time that the study of Australian literature has lost popularity. Thereâs no future in studying it. At least, that’s the message incoming students are given when enrolling in university English departments (or their equivalent).
In The Weekend Australian on September 30, 2006 – 1 October David Malouf expressed his concern that serious study of Australian literature is just not being taught:
Fifteen or 20 years ago, every university in Australia taught something called Australian literature. Now no university – there might be one left in the country – teaches Australian literature. That whole notion that there was a literature which you read has gone. A serious consideration of what Australian writing is has gone.
(The University of Sydney Department of English maintains Australian literature as an area of study and has a Chair of Australian Literature).
The story in publishing is much the same: a national literature is not a priority. As Malouf points out in his interview, readers are not as parochial as they once were, there is no automatic allegiance to local product. Of course, if it doesnât sell, itâs not going to catch the eye of publishers.
There could be a number of reasons for Australians turning away from Australian literature: poor quality, poor publicity or lack of support from local publishers. The fact is, the readership is declining and serious study is almost non-existent.
One must ask then: is the idea of a national literature of any importance? Do we need it anymore?
There is an obvious change in the way in which we conceive of ourselves as a nation. The whole idea of “nation” has loosened. We operate on a global level in economic and political terms. The nature of the Internet has made national borders redundant in terms of the limits of communication. The domestic political scene of the last ten years has favoured the individual. The Howard Government has successfully changed the way in which we conceive of ourselves as a nation. That is, we are individuals first and a nation second.
As well as putting ourselves first, our idea of “Australia” is now built upon old ideas spun for new political purposes. These ideas are bedded in stories told during another time. These stories have been drained of their original power and now operate as hollow platitudes.
The lack of interest, both general and academic, in Australian literature is alarming for the simple reason that fiction is fast becoming one of the few areas where truths are told. Despite the reading publicâs fascination with non-fiction, the stories told in fiction, especially in those texts considered part of a national literature, are part of the culture itself. Non-fiction can tell us only so much about ourself. Literature in its fictional form can take us beyond mere knowledge to a deeper understanding where imagination is allowed to run riot. It is also fast becoming the one place where writers can ask questions they are not allowed to ask elsewhere.
If an entire nation gradually wears down its stocks of literature, if it doesnât read stories about itself, if it, god forbid, forgets how to tell stories, what are the implications?
Take for example the case of Bernhard Schlinkâs The Reader. Although this book speaks in universal themes of love and forgiveness it has particular resonance for Germans in that it explicitly deals with the idea of guilt in post World War II Germany. It asks questions about how Germans themselves deal with the wartime actions of individuals within small communities. It also speaks to those outside looking in on a post-war Germany and not knowing how much to remember and how much to forget.
It doesnât achieve all these things through dry statement of fact, it achieves these things through a simple story. If there is a continued or even accelerated disinterest in Australian literature in this country, who will tell our stories? Who will be there to read them? Will it even matter?
The implications of a general disinterest in the nation’s literature is something that may not be seen for a while. What happens in ten years time when we don’t have a picture of ourself? Is it important to have a national literature? Or will reading fiction soon become a border-less pursuit that speaks to individuals and societies on a larger scale than nations?
I dunno, is the nation disinterested in telling stories about itself?
It certainly isn’t disinterested, as you say, if those stories are populist myths writ large about croc hunters and racing car drivers, as you say above.
It’s not disinterested filmic or mini-series style serves about itself.
Just maybe Aust lit.
And where does the rise in non-fiction sales fit into the picture? Surely some of those titles concern telling national stories.
And what about the interest in Sarsaparilla – the Oz lit, culture, media blog of which you’re a part?
If there is a lack of interest in conventional Aust lit, it may in part be a reflection of how far the publishing industry is prepared to support it (whether they think Aust lit will sell, if they’re prepared to run titles-of-quality-likely-to-have-smaller-sales, etc). Lord knows, there’s now more CW and mentorship programs than you can shake a stick at these days.
I don’t think the nation is not interested in telling stories about itself, it’s the lack of ‘serious’ study of such stories that has me most concerned. I am interested in whether this has wider cultural implications down the track.
Things like Sars and the fantastic reaction of ‘online’ folk to the Patrick White ‘hoax’ are certainly cause for celebration but unfortunately these things have limited influence at this point in time. I, no doubt like many, would love to see such things as the start of something more widely read and influential. I think the potential for an international readership on a blog like Sars will assist with this. We still like to get a little O/S approval after all, cultural cringe has not disappeared completely.
“The lack of interest, both general and academic, in Australian literature is alarming for the simple reason that fiction is fast becoming one of the few areas where truths are told.”
“It is also fast becoming the one place where writers can ask questions they are not allowed to ask elsewhere.”
Nonsense!!! This is the problem. Not with Australian literature, but the social milieu from which it is supposed to and has traditionally emerged. ‘Asking questions’ is not a problem! Get a blog! Ask as many questions as you want. Tell the truth, please, through inspriring and wonderful writing. Do it! Why do we need ‘Australian literature’ for this? To satisfy the indulgences of a very small target market?
From the books I have picked up from work, often the problem is with the questions being asked: They are irrelevant and the people asking the questions are living (bourgie?) lives that are irrelevant to the majority of Australians. People do not want to hear about ‘truths’ from these irrelevant people living irrelevant lives. This is all too precious!!! Writing has to work, it has no in-built charisma.
You are suggesting that the categorical form of ‘Australian literature’ is on the nose, and you critique the instutitions that critique the category or ignore it (right wing tards, universities) and critique the form itself. The problem is that there is no hypostatic category of Australian literature. Maybe ‘Australian literature’ is an indulgence that needs to get over itself. Write for a future and a people yet to come rather than appealing to some horrible national archaism (ie the german book) which most of the apathetic public rejects anyway for being too ‘political’.
Irwin and Brock versus Thiele. Maybe this is a good place to start. Look beyond your own valorisations and think about what the respective people actually did, and what their function is for other people as they are used in the media. Thiele has no function beyond straight grief of literary types and I imagine his family. My apologies for being brutal but a weekend magazine editor will read the situation like this: In terms of scale of the population directly affected by Thiele’s death, his death is irrelevant. Indeed, you might say, but his life was very important. Where are the newspaper stories written by concerned literary types celebrating his life? Yes? Where? Are you lamenting the lack of ‘buzz’, which can be created through any media channel, or the lack of ‘cultural authority’, which comes only from certain media channels?
The next wave of ‘Australian literature’ is not going to come from university types, but 30 year olds who, perhaps, have worked in the service industry their entire lives. The ones that opted out of the contemporary stupidities but do not have a ‘literature’ to voice a ‘truth’ of their own. It will be written in the stolen time between customers who buy two for one chocolate bars. It will be written by those who have weathered more battering in life than a flag pole on a windy day. The flag flying is frankly irrelevant.
The ‘decline’ of Australian literature is not because of the judgement of a population regarding the relevance of a cultural category, but the mobilisation of a particular social milieu.
Glen, I think you believe I have a more traditional way of looking at literature than I actually do. I don’t believe that OzLit is going to be resurrected by returning to the good old days when books were the only things that mattered. There are much broader ways of looking at Australian literature than just picking up a book. I realise I did not make this clear in the original piece.
Secondly, my concern around the ‘study’ of literature is not because I believe that is where the next crop of writers will come from. Nor do I think that writers, of any type, can operate in a vacuum. That is, I think you need to read to write. (There was a lengthy discussion on this a few months ago on LP). Being taught to write isn’t enough. If reading and serious consideration is in decline, then there’s a chance that writing will be in decline too. (And I include blogs and online magazines etc in the ‘serious consideration’ category, not just academic departments).
The obvious length restrictions on such a piece led me to ask a lot of questions without really answering them. My aim was to get people thinking about whether the conception of a national literature, in whatever form, is necessary. How important is such a literature in reflecting and shaping us as a national culture? Obviously at the moment it’s losing importance and has very little influence. We see ourselves as a culture reflected in the likes of Irwin and Brock, not in the characters or ideas in writing of any kind (bar mass-media outlets that both shape and reflect).
Regarding the lack of ‘buzz’ surrounding Thiele’s death: I wasn’t looking for buzz because I didn’t expect it to be there. I read some very decent pieces online, which, at least for me, offers much more than offline outlets in terms of literary, cultural and political pieces. I saw the lack for what it was, a reflection of the values of our culture and the place in which people get their stories about themselves, how they see themselves.
Of course, the things that shape our society have changed, this does not mean there is no place for literature, in whatever form.
I really liked the piece.
I think the key to the concept of a national literature is accurately grasped here:
Historically, the canonisation of national literatures was part of the nation-formation process and closely linked with the desire of the European state to homogenise culture within its territorial boundaries. So it’s a phenomenon – largely – of the 18th and 19th centuries – and (not by coincidence) closely associated with the decline of Latin as the language of letters and science. It was also accompanied by attempts to standardise a “literary” or “normative” dialect as the form of the language – and by the elimination or downplaying of dialects and other languages within the territory of the nation and vernacular or folk literatures. It reached its zenith in the institution of universal school education in the 19th century. So the project of a national literature has always been (in part – there are other ways to look at it) ideological, political and about power relations.
In Australia, the idea of a national literature really only had purchase between the (late) 60s and 90s – prior to that period, we were still in terms of our cultural imaginary a British colony and huge battles had to be fought within Universities to get Australian literature taught.
In some ways, it came under double attack – the wave of “theory” in lit, and discourses associated with globalisation – post-colonialism, hybridity, subalternity, etc.
Oddly, the culture warriors – though they want to revive everything else that was historically associated with national literature – uniformity in education, ideological purity in culture, one “correct” form of the written language etc, seem to show little or no interest in Australian literature. Perhaps because they – or their forebears – were never sold on an Australian identity distinct from those of the metropoles in the first place.
The German comparison is a good one – precisely what we don’t seem to do is to work through historical traumas and traumas of identity through our literature. Perhaps again that’s because the idea of literary value was derivative of a British notion of “good literature” and thus the inward voice has been privileged over literature as a means of intervening in and progressing public and national debates.
Indeed, good piece Georg.
The real zenith for ‘national literatures’ is of course the Norwegian language, more or less a creation of the ninteenth century, and of the heroic proto-geek Ivar Aasen—to whom Australia can only reply with Professor Afferbeck Lauder.
My guess is that it’s alive and well and calling itself by a different name. Sorry Glen, but you can’t blame the Right for this one; I fear the Left or what would call itself the Left is the culprit here, at least inside the unviersities: much scorn poured on anythin that looks like a nationalist project, even more on anything that calls itself ‘literature’ (elitists, bourgeois, etc etc sigh.) I know this because I was there, being forced by the attitudes of some of my colleagues out of the teaching and research field I knew best. (Student demand had very little to do with this, BTW.)
I’ve taught Aust Lit at five different universities and I’ve got too much to say about this issue to make either a coherent or a sufficiently succinct comment here, but I will point out one salient fact: ‘Australian litereature’ as an entity in the universitites, at least, is (was?) a comparatively recent phenomenon. People like Vincent Buckely and Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Andrew Taylor (the latter two of whom are still well alive and kicking) set it up at Melb U in the 1960s against enormous opposition.
When I was an undergraduate in the 70s it was being taught as a subject option at Adelaide U by someone who was regarded as having a harmlessly eccentric passion for it. The Association for the Study of Australian Literature, then as now an overwhelmingly academic association, had its first conference in 1978, set up by a bunch of embattled younger academics who were absolutely determined to teach Aust Lit in spite of sometimes bitter opposition by their Eurocentric and usually English academic seniors. (‘There’s no such thing as Aw-stralian Littera-choor, haw haw.’)
Georg, I nearly gave myself a hernia last week writing three book reviews. One was of the 2005 Miles Franklin winner Andrew McGahan’s new novel Underground, one was of Melbourne art historian Janine Burke’s The Gods of Freud (nonfiction: user-friendly art and cultural criticism/biography) and one was of the new David Malouf, promo for which is what you were reading. All three of these books are really good. If you look at what was published in Australia in the 1970s, you wouldnt find three books of this quality in a year, much less be reviewing them all in the same week.
During said week, I also ran into someone else who’d been there in the packed-out room that Kate Grenville gave a talk in at Adelaide U a couple of months ago about the Booker-shortlisted (as you point out) The Secret River.
Don’t worry about Australian literature. It’s fine. It’s just calling itself something else.
Sorry, X2 — for the crossed comments and for the typos. Mark said
On the first point, practically every ‘imaginative’ writer (I mean the poets, playwrights and fiction writers as distinct from the nonfiction writers, and actually this applies to nearly all of them too) are to the left of centre, like most artists. The culture warriors, with the exception of Dame Leonie Kramer who interestingly is a major figure in the history of Aust Lit as a cohesive ‘subject’, don’t want to have anything to do with it.
(And no, Les Murray is not a culture warrior, more a law unto himself.)
And one of the reasons for that is connected with the second point. Not work through historical traumas and traumas of identity in our literature? But we do! Marcus Clarke was already doing this in th 19thC. Thea Astley’s 1974 novel A Kindness Cup (famous, prizewinning, and set in schools, back in its day) is probably still the definitive novel about Aboriginal massacres. The 40s and 50s were full of social realist and socialist realist writers of fiction: John Morrison, Frank Hardy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, I could go on and on and on and on.
The problem is that literature, like every other God-damned thing, has become an instant commodity and contemporary young readers have no way of knowing it has a history.
Which is precisely why the lack of teaching and learning is a concern.
I do hope you’re right PC and that it is just living under another name these days.
I’m going to listen to David Malouf tonight and am hoping he may touch on some of the ideas he raised in the interview.
I don’t have much to add to the discussion here, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
Of course the reason I don’t have that much to add to the discussion is that despite a love for reading and wordsmithing being obviously my prime gift at school, almost everyone except my English teachers discouraged me from treating literature seriously, as something that was worth studying in depth and a field in which to pursue expertise.
“You won’t be able to do anything with it except teach”, they said, as if teaching was not exactly inherently unworthy, but very definitely second rate compared to a career in the sciences or financial sector. The idea that literature could inform and enrich other fields of endeavour was never even presented to me.
I’m not a huge fan of the Western Canon idea or ‘ literature in one country’ either come to think of it but we do have a great tradition of literary hoaxes here. Before Ern and Ethel Malley there was Mort Brandish and who can forget who was taken in by Helen Semi-Demidenko?
Tragedy is easy – it’s comedy that’s hard, they say , so we must consider ourselves blessed. I even seem to recall the idea of Aussie aristocrats being laughed out.
Teach the story of Aussie humor and you can’t lose – maybe a little urine perhaps but you can’t lose.
PC – I should clarify that I was talking in terms of “working through” issues of identity what’s on offer now. There are of course some great examples – as well as those you mention, Amanda Lohrey’s fiction and Rodney Hall’s wonderfully weird Kisses of the Enemy spring to mind. My impression was the combined influence of publishers’ priorities and the way CW is taught had led to a turning towards stories with an “inward voice” rather than a public purpose. I hope that’s wrong – that view is formed more from reading criticism than actual contemporary Ozlit.
Im with Tigtog – an interesting discussion to which I am unqualified to add much of note.
Other than to to say: change the thread title to “Australian film” and IM not sure the debate would be so lengthy. That Jindabyne was stylised theme-harping rot (scary Oz landscape mandatory Bud Tingwell = raving critic viewer coma).
Much blame lies utterly corrupt/ hopelessly inept funding organisations like Quinceland’s risible Pacific Film and Television Corp.
Now there’s a sector that needs a good shake-up.
I would like to add that they have a subject ‘Australian Cinema’ at UQ in EMSAH … my wife teaches it along with Tom O’Regan.
And right there on the EMSAH B.A. course program is:
Three and a half subjects!!! Looks like a ‘program in Australian Literature’ to me.
Forgive me for venturing into a subject I know next to nothing about*, but may I suggest that the perceived ‘crisis’ of Australian literature may have come about, simply because the genuinely ‘heroic’ period of Australian literature has yet to be?
Think about it without prejudice for just a mo’. Australia is still a very young country, historically speaking. Just going by my own country’s analogous record, if we had stopped and stayed content with the literary stylings of Longfellow and a bit of E.A. Poe (which we didn’t even know was kool until the French told us so), that woulda kept us from bashing through to the native weirdness (and I DO mean WEIRDNESS!) of Melville and Whitman and Dickinson, to say nothing of Stevens and Pynchon and Lovecraft and O’Hara.
So maybe Les Murray, for all his saintliness, is still only your nation’s Longfellow. Keep writing! Keep reading! Keep freaking-fucking-out! Who knows what great native Australian zaniness lurks in your national future?! You Australian Writers! Get up off the couch, and do your fucking jobs already!!!
As a great Yank Symbolist once put it, a guy who was not ashamed to acknowledge his debts to other literatures…
“Try to run.
Try to hide.
Break on through
TO THE OTHER SIDE!”
Oh, wait, excuse me. I was thinking of the bloke who wrote “Casey at the Bat.”
Don’t know if I’m reading you properly Georg but I’m a bit worried that your contrasting of Thiele with Irwin and Brock simply replays the old high/popular culture divide. Did Thiele embody or write about Australia in a way that is somehow more authentically Australian than the narratives articulated around Irwin and Brock? I’m not convinced. If it’s Australia that you want to talk about then any of these figures will provide plenty of fodder for debate, but if it’s Australian Literature that’s your concern then the comparison isn’t necessary.
***
I’m rather looking forward to McGahan’s new book. If there’s an author that has consistently addressed contemporary ‘Australia’, all the while with an eye on the myths of Australia, then in my reading experience, he is it.
Galaxy, I was using Irwin/Thiele/Brock as an example of the way in which literature seems to not be shaping Australian stories. I don’t see Thiele as providing anything more ‘authentically Australian’ than the other two, I was making an observation as to the role and the importance of OzLit in shaping our ideas about ourselves.
Irwin/Brock vs Thiele is a very imperfect comparison at best. I’m sure if, say, Peter Carey met an untimely and action-packed end it would be quite the cause celebre.
Agree Galaxy – McGahan is the only Australian fiction writer I hang out for… Love all his work, esp. the White Earth & Last Drinks.
I do wonder though if the earlier stuff is a bit less universal; ie did I love 1988 & Praise because I was living in a squalid New Farm, Brisbane hovel then, like his character?
Any news on the next one?
I’ve seen it in the bookshops, haven’t read any reviews yet. Will pick it up when I get a chance.
Last Drinks was just fabulous – did a very good job of capturing a BrisVegas era as well as raising some important ethical and political questions. And a page turner…
glen’s comment above seems to call for something akin to the grunge lit of the mid 90s. Which of course was always a constructed marketing phenomenon as much as “self expression” by inner city urban types working their way through uni in bottlos or retail (what glen – despite the poststructuralist veneer, seems to regard as having “authenticity”).
McGahan’s work – out of all the Justine Ettlers et al – has endured.
Hmmm. Can I be a heartless bastard and say that the Thiele books I was exposed to as a child (Pinquo and several others) seemed to be very formulaic extended fables that went along the lines of:
* Group of children have random anecdotal adventures somewhere in Australian bush.
* Somewhere during the anecdotes, warning about the dangers of human intervention in nature is made (old geologist mentions dangers of oil drilling, farmer talks about the danger of cigarette thrown out of car window, etc. etc. etc.)
* Anecdotal random adventures resume.
* Environmental disaster strikes through human stupidity and hubris, requiring heroic efforts to save one or both of a) the children, or b) one of their animal companions.
Nearly as predictable as an Enid Blyton book, albeit with the indoctrination aimed at the noble cause of environmental consciousness rather than the wonders of the British class system.
Get all your Reviews of Andrew McGahan’s New Novel needs met here.
(I got my timing mixed up — this was actually written a month ago.)
Crook link, Ms Cat.
Ahem. Or here.
(I’ll give up if this one doesn’t work.)
Okay, it’s officially them not me. That link should work later, not that we won’t all have moved on by then. It’s in Australian Book Review and at their site, anyway.
Admin: all fixed!
Thats a great review, and I’ll be buying it tomorrow!
Why, thank ya. My reviewing skills are a bit better than my Interwebs skills.
I wonder where David Malouf got the impression that Australian literature isn’t being taught or studied in Australian university literature departments. I’m not asking that in a snarky way, I really am curious. There is Tyro Rex’s evidence, and at the university I belong to, La Trobe, we have a recognised research strength in Australian literature and culture, and plenty of courses in Australian Lit – The Contemporary Australian Novel, Inventing the Bush, Australian Historical Fiction, Growing Up in Australia to name a few that come immediately to mind. We don’t offer every subject every year, though, so if you looked at our web page today you’d only see one or two of the courses, and you would not know from a quick look at the course names how many of the other courses, like Womens Writing, or Poetry and Desire, or Autobiography and Life Writing, or Resituating Modernism, include big sections of Australian literature.
I myself taught an Austlit subject in first semester which covered an enormous range of stuff from Charles Sturt’s journals to migrants’ narratives to Such is Life to Baynton, Lawson, Paterson, to Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge, to Dot and the Kangaroo, right up to Robyn Davidson crossing the desert by camel.
And the students loved it.
I suspect part of it, Laura, is the new emphasis on internationalisation, international “impact”, and international journals as markers of research quality.
Same problem strikes Australian studies (which, as you’ll know, tends to be a mix of politics/ history/ cultural studies) – the international wings are minor, rather tinpot affairs run by weird enthusiasts with dodgy webpages, and the best fora are, of course, domestic.
Laura’s right – I think we need a roundup of exactly what’s being taught where for a discussion like this to continue usefully. UQ, for example, bless ‘em, have always been very strong on Aust Lit, as T. Rex’s evidence shows. I think maybe it’s a popular perception among non-academic literati that Aust Lit is in decline — Hilary McPhee was saying something very similar on Books and Writing not long ago — but the actual course and subject numbers might disprove that.
Nah, Its cos kids only study Forward!: Heroes of the Long March and How Kim Exceeded the Tractor Quota while Thwarting the Imperialist Running Dogs in high school lit classes.
You forgot Improving soya bean yields through the rigorous application of the Thoughts of Chairman Mao in science classes. Oops – that’s another topic.
Interesting question Georg, I think the idea of our changing view as a nation is an interesting one, e.g. I recall Professor Jill Roe’s talking about how Miles Franklin’s nationalism (a part of her work often perceived negatively these days when it is taken out of context) was an attempt to move beyond outdated conceptions rooted in British heritage that resisted attempts to perceive places in their reality (as Peter Carey’s Badgery from “Illywhacker” quips about this emulation of Britishness: “It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen.”)
Of course with a little more national confidence, allowing for more distant ties with Britain and the widespread contempt for the monarchy such an idea seems reduntant. And it is possible that as Malouf notes, that we no-longer have this nationalistic connection, which has both its advantages and setbacks, and this may mean less of a connection towards a national body of work, which may require works that are based on different urban realities that somehow offer a fusion with a need to maintain a local connection. But there is definitely still a need for work that documents this local connection that offers different perspectives in such a saturated space.
“The domestic political scene of the last ten years has favoured the individual. The Howard Government has successfully changed the way in which we conceive of ourselves as a nation. That is, we are individuals first and a nation second.”
I doubt this is the case, I believe it has been a longer-term phenomenon, while there are plenty of valid criticisms of our PM and the lazy jingoism of his speeches on history could be one of them, I think this is the result of larger changes within the community and has zero to do with the cultural bore wars (which are generally quixotic enterprises, which to succeed would involve an act of persuasion instead of vilification – an act that the people who see themselves as combatants would be unwillingly to entertain, as it would mean disbelieving their image of personal gallantry – and in the need to entertain different perspectives needed to be able to communicate honestly, would require getting beyond the ego-centric assumptions the cultural warriors so treasure. Also long-term it would lead to such voices having no purpose, better to keep fighting a non-existant enemy than cede ground.)
The Patrick White hoax is interesting if we contrast with American literature. One of the most studied writers of American writing, Herman Melville was disappearing into obscurity, until the appearance of Matthiesan’s “American Renaissance” and other such works in the early 20th century that attempted to build up a body of American work that resurrected “Moby-Dick”, that horror-writer so appreciated by Baudelaire mentioned by j_p_z, James, Hawthorne etc. Imagine a world without Melville or Patrick White and it would be much the poorer, White’s work being out of print does horrify me. So maybe there is a need to find different ways of structuring the reading of Australian experience in a new way to encourage a new generation of enthusiasts. I know personally, my connection with Australian writing has usually been a bond sundered through the strength of writing of certain authors, rather than an easily defined point of identification. I’m speculating but maybe as a youngun it is the manner that Australia was presented as a caricature of naive development that provided some form of resistance to encountering Australian work, in the manner that its depiction seemed to forgo a more critical imagining that avoided recognition of the complexities of place that surrounded me. It just seemed on first impression too easily co-opted into national mythology, and that such an image seemed to be at the expense of character, style and narrative.
Stephen, it was DH Lawrence who spectacularly resurrected Melville, a good twenty years before Matthiessen. It is an urban legend the Patrick White’s novels are out of print. Not all are in print but most are, and much easier to get than huge swathes of fiction of comparable age.
Yes, the critics raved about that one Gummo. State School Self-Criticism Weekly declared that “spontaneous demonstations of gratitude and joy are expected!”.
Six of seven of White’s novels are in print, but quite a few are not – “The Solid Mandala” “The Burnt Ones” etc
Laura, your right I’m not particular focused on chronology, I was assuming that Matthiessen’s work was based in the late 1920s/early 1930s, turns out it was published in 1941. Although I was trying to group together all the critics that were building a study of national literature together – it is kind of ironic that an outsider like Lawrence beats them to the punch.
A really enjoyable discussion. I haven’t got the qualifications to comment seriously, beyond saying that a quick trawl through the web sites of a few arts faculties (I looked at U Syd, UNSW and UNE – they all had some offerings, and Sydney’s seemed quite comprehensive) seems to indicate that there’s quite a healthy number of subjects being taught around Australian literature. Malouf is a fantastic writer, but that claim just seems completely wrong.
Stephen we’re going off topic but I have a deep obsession with that book of Lawrence’s and the essay on Melville in particular. It impresses me almost to the point of being afraid that Lawrence somehow on his own managed to see straight away what Melville was.
Georgina says: “Within the space of a week, a car driver and a crocodile wrangler were granted state funerals while the death of an accomplished Australian writer was all but ignored.”
By golly I get angry when I hear that sort of elitist talk. For a start Steve Irwin’s family declined a state funeral, so you haven’t even got the most basic facts right. Secondly, Irwin was quietly buying up and conserving some very unsexy aspects of our ecological heritage, like Brigalow scub, before he died. We mustn’t confuse the on-screen buffoon with the man himself.
Mainstream media reporting is a product for the consumption of the general public. Thiele’s death rated only a perfunctory mention in the MSM because the punter’s weren’t that interested. The MSM isn’t to blame for this state of affairs.
Having said all that, it is a great pity that local storytelling is swamped by a tsumami of mostly American product. And I do mean storytelling, not literature, which is almost by definition elitist and exclusionary.
Surely you mean Yarns there Steve!
Lefty E, I do think that Praise and 1988 go beyond that moment of inner city Brisbane I-was-there identification.
I remember seeing AMcG on a BWF panel about crime writing, after the release of Last Drinks and there was another panellist who seemed incredibly bitter about McGahan’s success (He’d just won the Ned Kelly Prize for first crime novel. Let’s face it, every time he publishes, he wins something). She demanded to know where the novels were that had people in them who went to work, and she looked pointedly at McGahan. I remember sitting there thinking, how much Praise was about (un)employment and being disenfranchised by the experience of menial and exploitative work.
Re: 1988. Wasn’t that a very deliberate engagement with the whole bicentennial/national identity to the extent that it is supposed to be about mateship and a stoicism in relation to the harsh, Australian landscape? McGahan sends off two blokes into that landscape who end up damn near hating one another and being completely defeated by their environment, to say nothing of their impotence/lack of action when they witness the rape of an aboriginal woman–a moment that is both literal and figurative.
Georg, I think that Steve M makes the point I was trying to when he distinguishes between ‘story-telling’ and Literature. I’m a bit suspicious when Literature is proposed as the hallowed site of story-telling, as though other media and genres don’t have something as significant and important to impart.
(Just as a point of interest, I was scrolling through UQ in the media clips and saw that Irwin was about to be appointed a Professorship at UQ for his work with UQ scientists on crocodiles. Oh, and UQ has a dedicated Australian Studies Centre under the directorship of Prof. David Carter. Still, as a ‘discipline’ it’s future is shaky)
ANU has a major in Australian Studies and plenty o’ Austlit courses here.
Just wanted to say thanks for such a great discussion! Slightly off tangent, I read the review of Andrew McGahan’s new novel in the latest copy of ABR, and I am now determined to read it, so well done on the review! I also have a copy of 1988 sitting on my shelves, so I guess I should get a move on and read that.
Does anyone have the figures on changes in sales of ‘literature’ of all sorts over the past decade or two? My feeling is that when Australians bother to buy books now it is mainly crappy celebrity memoirs rather than literature of any sort. That said, I think that it is not time to call last drinks on OzLit just yet – we had two authors on the Booker shortlist this year (but no winner, alas) and we still have a good international reputation, probably the best it has ever been.
But that is just my 2 cents.
Which — Australian Studies or literature? Why do you say that? Does anyone have the actual stats on courses and subjects handy? The future of any discipline is in the hands of the people teaching and researching in it — we used to think medievalism and philosophy were doomed, too, but they’re both going gangbusters.
I’m not sure there’s anybody left who still thinks that. Those of us who think about these things at all know that literature is a carrier of ideology; the question is what you do with that knowledge, either as a writer or as a reader.
But it’s perfectly possible to understand the importance of popular culture without throwing so-called literature out with the bathwater, and see the importance of both. (I say ‘so-called’ only because the definition of it seems to be changing all the time — as is right and proper.) I don’t see why it need be proposed as an either/or situation.
Maybe Melbourne U wasn’t typical, but I certainly don’t remember Cultural Studies ever being any kind of embattled discipline there — people were clawing at the walls to get in right from the word go. As they also do to get in to Creative Writing courses. Of course there were certain sorts of anti-academic journos and politicians scorning it, as indeed they do ‘literature’ — but that’s something to be proud of, I would have thought.
My understanding of Georg’s original post was that she was lamenting that while popular culture was still keeping its end up in the ‘telling us stories about ourselves’ stakes, she didn’t think literature was. I’d dispute that latter bit, actually, and I would also question the validity of the knee-jerk lit-hating that was widespread on campuses in the 1990s. I thought we’d got past that, but then I haven’t been on campus fulltime for years. Damning it (and any other manifestation of high culture, like classical music) as ‘elitist’ has always seemed to me dangerously close to the PM’s brand of toxic populism.
What I do remember from the on-campus 90s is phalanxes of young male undergraduates scorning the evidence of the huge crowds that turn up to writers’ festivals that maybe ‘high-culture’ literature still has something to say to people, on the ground that most of these people were ‘irrelevant’ middle-aged women in straw hats. Frankly I have always thought this was evidence of their own sexism, ageism and botched individuation from their mothers, rather than having anything to do with literature.
Mark wrote: ‘McGahan’s work – out of all the Justine Ettlers et al – has endured.’
I think this judgement ignores Christos Tsiolkas’ ‘Loaded’ which is another grunge novel, and one which stands up just as well as McGahan’s debut.
The trope of the death of Oz Lit has been circulating for at least a decade now, if not longer. I attended the recent ASAL conference and it was very lively and there were no signs of Ozlit being dead.
I’d wager that there will be a movement back into Academic Ozlit courses, now that some of the hype of globalization has settled down. The Australian nation-state didn’t disappear in the 1990s – if anything its borders and myths were re-invented.
If there was a moment when a dominant notion of OZlit died it was during the mid-1990 – 1995 really – when Grunge lit was named and debated in the literary public sphere, and when Helen Darville was shaking things up. Sure there was marketing hype around McGahan et al, but what got lost in the debates circulating around these novels was that they were read literally, rather than as allegories. ‘Praise’ was often read as sociology, or as diary and journal entries. It’s become apparent that McGahan is and always was much more sophisticated then a mere chronicler. But there you go – Grunge was read as literal youth rebellion, and the field surrounding Ozlit seems to have ossified at this moment: there were sophisticated authors like Malouf, Moorhouse, Grenville etc and there were youngsters writing out of experience with their training wheels on.
I might sound a bit wacky and speculative but is it a coincidence that Paul Keating once said that for him nostalgia within the Left for Whitlam’s social democratic project was like an eczema that the ALP matured out of, and that in McGahan’s Praise Cynthia also has eczema? Was McGahan, like Keating, employing eczema as a symbol? If as Susan Sontag argues, Illness operates in our culture as metaphor, what might be the metaphorics of eczema?
Some largely ignored but excellent Australians novels of the last decade:
Anthony Macris’ Capital, volume one
Andrew McCann’s Subtopia
Kate Jennings’ Moral Hazard
Sylvia Lawson’s The Outside Story
Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe
I like your comments Ag, but you can’t honestly think Dead Europe has been ignored!?!
Laura wrote:
‘I like your comments Ag, but you can’t honestly think Dead Europe has been ignored!?!’
Fair call – substitute Dead Europe for Kim Scott’s Benang.
Well, Im now the proud owner of spanking crisp new copy of “Underground”. Arrived too early at the bookshop like a big ol’ nerd (which operates on on Fitzroy time and opens at 10). Happily, one of the employees I know was getting a coffee next door, and I blagged my way in!
I love getting hyped about a book. All too rare.
I can only speak for myself re Dead Europe: it’s been sitting on my shelf, unread, for months now. Just cant get excited.
Eczema: incredibly irritating, tortuous and unsightly allergic reaction, produced by an overactive or otherwise malfunctioning immune system. Plenty of lovely potential for metaphor/allegory there. Or you could say it was a disorder of the body’s borders, also a suggestive notion.
Moral Hazard was shortlisted for all sorts of prizes here and in the US, and won at least one of them, the $20,000 Christina Stead prize. Like Dead Europe, winner of the 2006 Age Book of the Year prize for fiction, it certainly hasn’t been ignored. Moral Hazard also has very little to do with Australia as such, so would have been unlikley to turn up on reading lists specifically on Australian topics.
You want an ignored but excellent Australian novel (and one that most certainly tells us the story of ourselves), read Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant.
Somehow I always find myself arguing a position I don’t mean to in these debates… I hope it didn’t seem as though I would throw out Literature with the bath water, I wouldn’t. (There has been a question over Aust Studies at UQ in recent restructures and programme reviews)
I suppose I interpreted the juxtaposition of Irwin/Brock with Thiele to suggest that Literature and its authors should necessarily be the dominant voice in what it means to be Australian.
Can I ask whether people think if Thiele’s death had evoked the response that Irwin’s did, and Irwin’s went virtually unremarked, whether there would be a similar level of lament about the mix of sources of the ‘stories we tell ourselves’?
Was Tsiolkas really considered “grungelit” though?
Mark wrote ‘Was Tsiolkas really considered âgrungelitâ? though?’
Tsiolkas disavowed the term grunge, as did McGahan and Jaivin. But novels like 1988, Eat me, and Loaded (along with Berridge’s and Ettler’s novels) were critically received through the term grunge, especially in the broadsheets: Murray Walden’s ‘Lit Grit invades Ozlit’(The Australian Magazine June 24-5, 1995) places Loaded into the grunge camp; Marjory Bennet, in an article, ‘The Grungy Australian novel’ also (The Sun Herald 24 September, 1995); Ian Syson’s “Smells like Market spirit’ in Overland No.142, puts Loaded into the Grunge lit box; and Tsiolkas even employs an epigraph by way of Nirvana’s Smells like Teen spirit to kick off his fourth chapter in Loaded.
Thanks, Ag.
I remember reading Syson’s article an age ago.
I teach Australian Literature at a university, but I had to leave Australia to do it. Culture has eaten itself, in this respect. What I mean by that is that the notion of ‘literature’ in iteself has been questioned in Cultural Studies (as elitist etc.) to the extent that the category is so vague as to be non-existent. I agree with David Malouf, however, its my experience that any ‘serious’ study of literature in the academy (beyond an examination of its ideological traces etc) whether Australian or otherwise, has largely disappeared. You are right to trace it back to a period of about 20 years ago, because that is when the rot started (albeit well-meaning.)
Ten questions about Australian literature:
1. Apart from retrospective views on Patrick White, was there a golden age of Aust Lit? I’d be amazed if first-edition runs of his books published well before his Nobel sold particularly well.
2. About ten years ago you couldn’t move for Elizabeth Jolley, ABC RN interviews with Elizabeth Jolley, theses on Elizabeth Jolley, etc. Now, you hardly hear of her. I haven’t read any of her novels, so for those who have – when was the last time you re-read any of her novels? Can’t remember any new author gushingly crediting Jolley as an inspiration (nor White, for that matter. Which new novelist – you don’t have to be young to be a new novelist – is following on from White?). Maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
3. There has been a lot of sneering at big-selling writers like Bryce Courtenay or Di Morrissey, but if we’re examining the semiotics of beer ads, if French theorists can embrace Hitchcock or Donald Duck, why hasn’t there been some genuine intellectual engagement with popular writers? Would the first theorist who tried get pecked to death by those who have waffled their way to paralysis in criticising a novel? It might be popular, but is Courtenay/Morrissey/McCullough etc. really shit, and why?
4. When you’ve pinned-the-ideological-construct-on-the-novelist are you really any better off in understanding a book, given that novelist and English lit students usually know fuck-all about politics anyway and have even less actual impact? How many of Patrick White’s pet causes actually got up? Or David Malouf’s? Or Les Murray’s (either the poet or the soccer commentator)?
5. Will Australia’s oldest most promising writer, Bob Ellis, actually produce something longer than 800 words, and if so will anyone who hasn’t shagged him care?
6. If you got an absolute freak of an Australian novel, one that both sells well (in Australia and overseas, including in translation) and is critically well-received, would it make a blind bit of difference to the State of Australian Literature?
7. What effect has any Australian literature academic, including Dame Leonie Kramer, had on the study of this subject? Could it be that the central aim of the people described by Pavlov’s cat – to promote an understanding of and interest in Australian literature – has failed?
8. Given that Australian publishers are chock-full of English graduates, what role do they have in the parlous state of Australian Lit?
9. Could it be that Oscar Wilde was right when he said that books are simply written well or badly, rather than being moral/immoral or whatever, and that books written by Australians about Australia are simply not written well (despite a mushrooming of academic courses on how to write)?
10. There’s so little cultural output, yet such an intense culture war. If there was more cultural output, would the culture war abate or would it grow more intense? I think the intensity of the culture war is inverse to the amount of knowledge about culture – try and find a Liberal Student who studies the liberal arts – but I might be wrong about this too.
I think you’ll find that what we have now are literary studies of Australia, rather than studies of Australian literature.
“1. Apart from retrospective views on Patrick White, was there a golden age of Aust Lit? I’d be amazed if first-edition runs of his books published well before his Nobel sold particularly well.”
Probably the period from 1968 to 1988, poetry, drama and the short story intially, then the novel becomes prominent. Some factors in this ‘golden age’ would be: the cultural nationalism ascendant from the 1970s on; the expansion of universities; the lifting of censorship controls; increased public funding for the arts.
“3. There has been a lot of sneering at big-selling writers like Bryce Courtenay or Di Morrissey, but if we’re examining the semiotics of beer ads, if French theorists can embrace Hitchcock or Donald Duck, why hasn’t there been some genuine intellectual engagement with popular writers? Would the first theorist who tried get pecked to death by those who have waffled their way to paralysis in criticising a novel? It might be popular, but is Courtenay/Morrissey/McCullough etc. really shit, and why?”
David Carter and Ken Gelder, to name just two. Both seemed to escape becoming carrion.
“4. When you’ve pinned-the-ideological-construct-on-the-novelist are you really any better off in understanding a book, given that novelist and English lit students usually know fuck-all about politics anyway and have even less actual impact?”
Culture isn’t political? Are novels expected to be party political platforms?
“How many of Patrick White’s pet causes actually got up? Or David Malouf’s? Or Les Murray’s (either the poet or the soccer commentator)?
Les (the poet) was drafted into drafting the constitutional preamble by Howard. Poet, academic and founding editor of Quadrant, James McAuley had an enormous impact on the politics of Australian culture in the cold war period.
“5. Will Australia’s oldest most promising writer, Bob Ellis, actually produce something longer than 800 words, and if so will anyone who hasn’t shagged him care?”
I’d rather hear him speak or run as a Labor independent for Federal Parliament again.
“7. What effect has any Australian literature academic, including Dame Leonie Kramer, had on the study of this subject? Could it be that the central aim of the people described by Pavlov’s cat – to promote an understanding of and interest in Australian literature – has failed?”
Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin and Gareth Griffiths were highly influential in introducing post-colonial reading practices into Ozlit; John Frow a sophisticated cultural Marxism; Graeme Turner brought semiotics into
the reading ambit of radical nationalist literature; Sneja Gunew lead a reading practice that created a space for migrant and multiculturalist themes. Just a few that come to mind.
“9. Could it be that Oscar Wilde was right when he said that books are simply written well or badly, rather than being moral/immoral or whatever, and that books written by Australians about Australia are simply not written well (despite a mushrooming of academic courses on how to write)?”
Try Amanda Lohrey, Frank Moorhouse, Andrew McCann – aesthetically interesting and politically provactive novelists.
Well done ag. I thought these questions were a bit dorothy dixerish, but you’ve pwned them anyway.
I’d have nominated 1890-1910 as the Golden Age of Australian literature.
Nationalism again.
Christos Tsiolkas owes quite a lot to White, in my view.
Clearly, they are. If you’ve ever seen some witless novelist shrink before an earnest question which compares the antics of some fictional character to Phillip Ruddock, Stalin, Henry VIII or Pol Pot, too much weight is placed on works that are too frail politically to support the Message to which English lit graduates are expected to pin on them.
See? That had to be the least important, and certainly the least enduring, thing Murray ever wrote.
Tried them all. If any are Masters of Fine Arts graduates, they’re very quiet about it.
Fukc that. These are questions I’ve been trying to get straight answers to for twenty years. You shouldn’t have to wade through decades of Applied Blah or Marxist Dentisty in order to get some insight.
i think tsoilkas (i loved loaded) owes a lot to houellebecq, who in turn owes a lot to easton ellis.
Maybe that’s because they’re not straight questions.
They are all heavily loaded with judgements you’ve obviously already made, and bristling with unspoken assumptions about literary value. It wouldn’t matter what answers you got; it’s quite obvious from the way you phrase your questions that you’ve already decided what you think.
“i think tsoilkas (i loved loaded) owes a lot to houellebecq,”
Perhaps, but “Loaded” was published in 1995 while Houellebecq’s first book, “Extension du domaine de la lutte”, published in 1994, wasn’t translated into English until 1998.
And the feral antipodean hedonism of “Loaded” doesn’t seem to me to match up that clearly with Houellebecq’s lubed-up anomie set in neo-Ballardtopia.
as i sent it i (after long, hard day) remembered dead europe, not loaded, which i haven’t actually read. but dead europe i loved. and to me there were strong thematic and stylistic links to houellebecq (moralism dressed as nihilism; artfully freighting ‘philosophic’ discourse into conversations/memories etc) – except that for me, tsoilkas comes across as wiser than houllebecq’s ‘the sixties and materialism and capitalism has worked in tandem to ruin europe’ schtick – by looking at the ghosts in the darkness who were always there, and who look like coming back in numbers. houellebecq, who i admire, seems naive by comparison.