There ought, of course, to be no such hierarchy, as there ought to be no poverty, or no war. If a thing is good, as Flaubert wrote, it is good; be it a novel or a five-hundred-word article on a football match. All good writing—whatever form it appears in—deserves respect, but respect isn’t a coin you gain by robbing someone else. Mordue’s argument merely turns the snobbery he rightly resents upside down: fiction bad, non-fiction good.
Mordue talks of the sales success of non-fiction. But the picture here is complex. When publishers say non-fiction is booming, they more often than not mean the likes of The Liver Cleansing Diet or The Guinness Book of Records. There is little new in this. Jacqueline Kent, in her biography of the doyen of Australian editors, Beatrice Davis, notes that one of the most successful titles for Angus & Robertson during the 1950s was Sheep Management and Diseases.
None of the literary non-fiction books Mordue cites as great successes have sales anywhere near those of our major novels. In the last three years, when Mordue would have Australian fiction dead, we have seen the phenomenon of the two most successful literary novels in Australian history, Tim Winton’s Dirt Music and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, both selling in excess of 200,000 copies. These would be remarkable figures for literary novels in Britain, the USA or Germany, which though the largest book markets in the world, sell far fewer literary novels per capita than Australia.
Yet sales tell us nothing other than the obvious and can never be taken as the yardstick of worth. After all, two of the biggest publishing failures of the 1850s in the USA were Melville’s Moby-Dick and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, books that have since been recognised as some of the great works of the modern era.
Serious non-fiction speaks to contemporary issues and can have great immediate impact. But longer term it tends to fade. Could this be why Patrick White’s Voss (1957) matters to us now in a way that Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) no longer does? Or why My Brother Jack (1964) continues to reverberate long after Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964) has been relegated to the abyss of intellectual history?
It is unlikely any of the non-fiction books Mordue cites will be in print a decade from now, when Winton and Carey will continue to be read and shape our sense of ourselves. But this no more renders these non-fiction works unimportant than poor sales of a new novel now might indicate its ultimate irrelevance.
Writing is not a world composed of hostile nations but a large house full of many rooms, all or any of which writers and readers ought to and do visit. Revealingly, most of the non-fiction writers Mordue cites have also written fiction, often with great success.
But in an Australia where it is deemed an ever greater virtue to erect and guard a border than to cross back and forth between different worlds, Mordue has set himself the task of rolling out the razor wire by doing what people always do at such times: deplore the undesirable nature of what is being locked out.
Ever one for the shock of the obvious, Mordue claims contemporary non-fiction represents ‘a radical hybridisation of style affecting literature internationally and sending our old generic orders into meltdown’.
Language suffers even more in this sentence than truth, for good writing was never imprisoned in ‘generic orders’. From Plato to Herodotus, from Bede to Machiavelli to Gibbon, the use of poetic devices and storytelling techniques to describe or analyse reality was commonplace. What results crosses borders and escapes categories. Is Ecclesiastes theology or poetry or the greatest short story ever? Is Bernal Díaz’s medieval account of the conquistadores, The Conquest of New Spain, first-hand reportage or, as Carlos Fuentes claimed, the first South American novel?
It is true that in any given year Australia produces few good, far less outstanding novels. In this it has much in common with the USA, Germany, France, and any other country you may wish to name. It is also readily apparent that, like other countries, we continue to publish a large amount of mediocre work. But the number of dreary first novels, weary later novels, and pompous tomes by old hacks threatening to asphyxiate rather than entertain the reader in their bed seems, relatively speaking, no worse than in previous decades.
None of this amounts to evidence of the decline of Australian fiction. What matters, all that matters, is that during this same time some good and some very good novels have also been written in Australia. To list is to exclude and having no wish to offend I won’t. But I would argue that the last decade has seen more good novels than any preceding equivalent era in our history; that, far from our fiction being dead, this has been a golden age for Australian writing.
Paradoxically, though, there has been a collapse of belief in the worth of our fiction writing, and here Mordue is only echoing a number of writers before him, particularly Modjeska, who has written how once she used to read every Australian novel that came out ‘but, one after another, they disappointed and irritated me’.
All this makes Mordue ‘wonder if there was a growing conflict between the nature of “art” and the project of engagement in this country?’. Is there, he further muses, ‘some missing connection, a breach in fiction’s ability to commune with a public it had somehow forgotten or left behind?’
Having slain the Australian novel, Mordue proposes a model for its resurrection, again taking his lead from Modjeska. The vehicle? An American novel: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
The Corrections is not a bad book. It is a conventional realistic novel of a type some Americans have been rewriting since Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). Overall, it is reasonably written, passably edited, and has several things to say about the USA that have been mostly said before. It is intolerable in being presented as a great book, which it is not.
Colonialisation is not just a process, it is also a state of mind, which demands one willing to be colonised as much as a coloniser. As a contemporary Australian novelist you begin to feel somehow ashamed. The deployment of more playful forms, the use of fable or allegory or historical elements, is seen to be a creative failure, a retreat. The liberating possibilities, the political edges of story are denied. You sense a collective loss of nerve, a fear of using the full arsenal of fictional techniques to confront fully our experience.
What remains are Mordue’s exhortations for engagement, that tired cry of the mid-twentieth century, used by Mordue to decry all fiction not narrowly realist in the manner of Franzen. It would consign to worthlessness so much literature that we deem as essential: from Ovid to Dante, from Shakespeare to Kafka to Borges. But then, as writers through the ages have known, reality is never accurately depicted by realists.
It is not that Mordue’s argument abounds in shortcomings. It is that it misses a movement of much larger significance: the loss of belief in our own stories. And Mordue’s piece merely contributes to this crisis of belief rather than seeking to understand it.
It is as if we have for several years been asleep, in a torpor, no longer the lucky country but the lost country. What has happened to us? In Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai’s pre-war elegy to the Austro–Hapsburg Empire (or, more precisely, Mitteleuropa), the novel Embers, only recently rediscovered and published to acclaim in English, we read the following:
‘My homeland,’ says the guest, ‘no longer exists. My homeland was Poland, Vienna, this house, the barracks in the city, Galicia, and Chopin. What’s left? Whatever mysterious substance held it all together no longer works. Everything’s come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded.
Why is it that people are feeling that Australia has been so wounded? Why do we feel betrayed by Australia?
For Australia is no longer an idea with which all Australians wish to identify. Australia is the Tampa, refugee internment camps in the desert, a government taking us into a war in which none of us believe. Australia is angry and confused, lost and unknown to itself, its lips collectively bound by a copper wire o
f shame, a country careering erratically through a world at once recognisable but no longer familiar.
We define ourselves, our culture, as failures. Instead of measuring our own work against our own experience to see whether it is wanting or worthwhile, we hold it up against the work of other places and ask only if it accords with fashion.
I have read essays imploring Australian novelists to write more about money in our novels, again, in order to be like the Americans. So much offensive idiocy and prescriptive stupidity has not been heard since the days the lecterns of Eastern Europe grew greasy with the nonsense of cultural commissars insisting on how only social realism adequately described socialist reality.
‘Art is a veil,’ as Wilde observed, ‘rather than a mirror. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.’
But in Australia it is becoming ever harder to draw the moon down with a scarlet thread of ink, to illuminate a neon night with a blinking cursor. To write novels in Australia that are not death masks of styles long since dead elsewhere has for some time been to suffer a long sneer directed at your work. I’ll choose to disagree that only the prison house of contemporary American realism is an acceptable literary style. We need our stories as fabulous lies speaking to our truths, not the dull provinciality argued for by some, the sorry retailing of facts as fiction.
I could finish with a hopeful story, of how Australian publishing is a cultural success story, perhaps our greatest, that for some peculiar reason we choose not only to ignore, but to denigrate. In an era when national cultures suffered greatly from globalisation, ours grew stronger, in no small part because of our publishing industry over the last thirty years.
But telling such a story now feels a vanity, for that was a time, a short time, which one senses is already now receding, where writers and books were deemed central to the idea of Australia.
For all the success I have described, the book world is changing rapidly. First-time Australian novels, and novels by lesser-known writers, are selling less and less. In part, changes in retailing are driving this. But in part it is a loss of belief in our own stories. The sense that there are no Australian novels worth reading drives a downward spiral of less and less publicity, promotion and support. Booksellers stop ordering, publishers start cutting lists, and writers cease writing.
Yet Australia needs new stories. It is not enough to describe and report who and what we are, necessary as this is. We also need to reimagine and reinvent ourselves, knowing that reality is our invention, not our destiny. Now more than ever, we need new dreams of Australia. And for that we must recognise the ongoing centrality of novels, and we need to build a larger, more generous house of Australian writing for this to occur.
This is no nationalistic argument, for good writing, good art are ever anti-national; rising beyond them, opposing fundamentally the nonsense of national pretensions with the mess of life. But we do need to be honest—about who and what we are, about what we have achieved and what we have not. And for that we need novels, in all their playfulness and novelty.
As the drumbeats of war build to their inevitable crescendo, it is worth reflecting on what has happened in Australia over the last several years. Could it be that the arguments Mordue advances are the cultural corollary of Howard’s obsequience to American policy? That we are witnessing a profound loss of belief in the value of our own world and the art we might make from it, not dissimilar to what crippled Australia a century ago?
More than ever we need to recognise the worth of our own fiction that tells us what might become of us, that offers a vision from within as well as without, a fiction that is of our hopes and our nightmares. And those novels will necessarily be as diverse as sand in their forms, in their playfulness, in their invention. Australia remains a dream that we might yet make our own, if we only have the courage and wit to imagine it so.
On the other hand, perhaps the prime minister is right and we need this war. From Sheep Management and Diseases to Anthrax for Humans, it’s been a long way round for the old country, but it must warm some hearts in the Lodge, if few places else, that we are finally getting back to who we truly are, sans literature, sans identity, sans foreign policy; a nation no more but a colony of toad eaters once again, in awe of, and in servitude to a new imperium.
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 2003
I ARRIVE with a coach-load of media in Glen Alpine, which the photographer sitting next to me describes as the Paris end of Campbelltown. A new estate, Glen Alpine is full of large two-storey brick houses with gable porticos and columns and faux-concrete drives bedecked with Federation finials—the McMansions so derided in inner Sydney.
The bus pulls up just around the corner from Mark Latham’s home—more humble than its neighbours—and fifty media decamp. Up at the Lathams’ there are uniformed police and stocky plain-clothes security dressed like models for a regional menswear catalogue.
Mark Latham’s backyard looks like a stage set of suburbia; coppice-logged retaining walls and in part modestly decked—homely not flash. Arranged artfully on the otherwise neat lawn are enough bats and balls to service Glen Alpine primary school, as if to make the point of blokes and boys and balls. Like a lot about Mark Latham’s presentation of himself, it seems a little overdone.
Is it possible that eighteen-month-old Oliver and three-year-old Isaac use all these? It seems churlish to ask such things, so instead I listen to Mark Latham say many of the things I am going to hear him keep on saying, about policy and mortgage-belt-ville and Mark Latham understanding, to which will be added the rest of the Latham litany—trust, truth, Mark’s mum and the virtues of private homeownership, masculinity, incentive, reading, his kids, and, of course, more policy.
In his backyard we have Mark’s children and Mark’s photogenic wife, Janine Lacey, and Mark, having finished with policy for the day, is telling us how the boys brought him brekkie and some prezzies, and now he says, pointing to a table with some trays of food, help yourself to the sambos.
A cameraman and a sound recordist pick up a football and pass it to one another, the only spontaneous act in an otherwise wholly orchestrated day, intended to demonstrate to us who have been bussed in the authentic suburban credentials of Mark.
Mark Latham divides Australia into tourists and residents. Residents are people who live near Mark. Tourists are people who read this paper and have no idea that the real (real being a word Mark likes) Australia is writ in the image of Mark’s romance with himself and his own story, a romance that in many ways seems to have become close to a political pathology, limited and limiting.
It’s a rerun in many ways of Howard’s elites, but then much of Mark Latham is. But many of the tourists, or insiders as he might also have it, are perhaps the group most intoxicated by Latham. The more he scorns and derides them, the more many of them wish to anoint him. Witness Margaret Simons’ latest Quarterly essay or Michael Duffy’s book on Abbott and Latham in which the latter writes in a tone almost besotted with Latham. For them Latham is both authentic and young. But authentic to what?
Latham is in many ways the embodiment of those he claims to despise: the ultimate insider, with party jobs and positions since he left university; a career politician anointed and helped by Whitlam, who views him as his heir; a bookish man who is said to be a loner.
At the end of that interminable morning in the backyard it occurs to me that nothing has happened. I mention this to a journalist sitting next to me on the bus as we head back to Sydney.
‘That’s right, mate,’ he says, as though I have just told him that the sun comes up in the morning. ‘Nothing ever does. It’s played out elsewhere.’
There is, in the Mark-babble I am to hear over the next few days I travel with the media pack, the thread of a story to be drawn out, and the story is Mark, and the story goes like this: there is a romance o
f the suburbs and I am both its song and its singer and its saviour.
If ever this romance of the Australian suburbs had an anthem, it was West Australian Dave Warner’s 1978 hit, ‘Just a Suburban Boy’. Summoning all the righteous wrath of the perennially wounded outsider that was de rigueur for such young male anthems, Dave Warner raged at how it must be easier for boys from the city. He cultivated suburban dag as a new chic. It didn’t work. Chubby men in Hawaiian shirts hadn’t since the Beach Boys. But his marriage of a punk anger to a distinctly Australian suburban experience that was at odds with the urban aesthetics of new-wave music resonated.
In interviews for rock magazines of the time Dave expounded on his theories of the suburbs and Australian identity, arguing that the inner-city world might be fine if you are Bruce Springsteen or an English new-wave singer, but in Australia it was meaningless. He condemned the patronising of the Australian suburban experience by the likes of Barry Humphries and argued for an art from the inside, rather than from outside looking in.
In the 1980s, Mark Latham’s favourite song was ‘Just a Suburban Boy’.
‘It was his song,’ writes biographer Michael Duffy, ‘about his people and his place.’
‘Of course, it’s not the same anymore,’ says Dave Warner when I finally track him down some days later. ‘Then we all shared something, but now it’s McMansions here and poverty there.’
Mark’s song these days is an often awkward mix of policy wonkery and blokey wankery, and, like so much else about the man, one suspects the result of conscious choice.
It doesn’t always work. Mike Carlton, on whose 2UE radio program Latham previously dropped the bombshell about bringing the troops home by Christmas, asks Latham a few days after I first see him in his backyard ‘to talk in plain English, no gobbledegook’. But that’s hard for Latham who seems to love policy, its language, its symmetry, its complexities and neat resolutions, its—one sometimes suspects—abstraction from real life.