Mon - May 25, 2009
A fond adieu
Today at a moment of my own choosing I close down
this blog. It's the sixth anniversary of my first blog entry, which was on the
day of Peter Hollingworth's resignation as Governor General of Australia. I was
in my early 50s, my mother-in-law Mollie was living with us, as well as with
Alzheimer's. We had a cat, and both boys were living at home. Things have moved
on.
iBlog, the software that introduced me to blogging, was produced by a one-man concern, and the one man has shut up shop. I've been a wee bit nervous continuing to use it knowing that Sarat wouldn't be there if it ever gave up the ghost, as it has before. Apple is about to stop supporting HomePage, the software that's integral to the site where I keep this blog. Again, I could keep on using the address, but even having irrelevant support leached away creates an unsettling insecurity.
So after six years, 1164 entries, 27,500+ hits and 1390 comments, I'm turning off the life support.
I will carry on blogging, though, on WordPress, in the best anagram I could manage of Family Life: Me Fail? I Fly! Please come over and say hello.
If this is your first visit here, by all means have a look around. Browse. If you want to comment, click on the Feedback button and send me an email. HaloScan has ceased to be, and Comments are no longer possible here.
iBlog, the software that introduced me to blogging, was produced by a one-man concern, and the one man has shut up shop. I've been a wee bit nervous continuing to use it knowing that Sarat wouldn't be there if it ever gave up the ghost, as it has before. Apple is about to stop supporting HomePage, the software that's integral to the site where I keep this blog. Again, I could keep on using the address, but even having irrelevant support leached away creates an unsettling insecurity.
So after six years, 1164 entries, 27,500+ hits and 1390 comments, I'm turning off the life support.
I will carry on blogging, though, on WordPress, in the best anagram I could manage of Family Life: Me Fail? I Fly! Please come over and say hello.
If this is your first visit here, by all means have a look around. Browse. If you want to comment, click on the Feedback button and send me an email. HaloScan has ceased to be, and Comments are no longer possible here.
Posted at 07:41 AM
Sun - May 24, 2009
SWF: The weekend
I suppose I have to admit I had a great time at
the Writers' Festival, and that my initial negative take on the program turned
out to be ill-founded. Mind you, I didn't go to the olive oil tasting. But there
was a list as long as my arm that I wish I could have gone to -- the main
instance being that I didn't get to a single Children's or YA
event.
Before I talk about events as such, I should mention the exhibitions/slide shows:
• Sarah Rhodes had a series of photographs of Australian artists on the wall of the Heritage Pier -- if you missed them you can see them on her website. I love the one of Dorothy Napagnardi.
• There was a slide show of Juno Gemes's photos of writers. She's the official photographer-in-residence of the Festival.
• MTC Cronin had an intriguing installation: three of her poems on pillars alongside goldfish bowls containing objects that resonated with the poems, plus three paintings on easels. I believe there was a talk as well, but I missed that. This was presented by the Red Room Company, and they're planning three more such installations around Sydney over coming months.
• Poets Paint Words was a slide show based on an event at the Newcastle Art Gallery last year, where a number of poets read works inspired by or otherwise relevant to paintings in the gallery's collection. The paintings and poems in the slides were from last year's event, and it didn't work brilliantly when I saw it, because the slides for most of the poems clicked over well before I had time to read them. On the Gallery's web site, however, they can be read at leisure. Bob Adamson and Brett Whiteley make a great pair.
In the sessions proper, I had a bit of a Muslim day, starting with the wonderfully urbane Mohammed Hanif talking about A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Asked what led hi to write it, he explained that like all first novelists, he wrote it because he was bored in his day job. He explained, further, that like all first novelists, he wanted to write an autobiographical love story, but as his life had been very dull he had to find something else. First novels also have to have a mystery and a party, he said. He was almost as wonderful as the book. I asked my only audience question, and was very brief: I asked him if I was right in sensing that beneath the humour it was an angry novel. He said that, like all first novelists, he was too busy working out how to write each paragraph, figuring out what was going to happen next, and working out how to make everything work to have feelings like anger, but he went on, graciously, to say that if a reader found anger in the book it came from the repressed anger of the times it was set in. Or words to that effect. Probably his most interesting remark, though was in response to a question about how his book was received in Pakistan, given its homosexual content: he explained to us well meaning ignoramuses (my description, no his) that Pakistan is a very complex place, with a thriving civil society as well as the fundamentalism and tribalism that makes the headlines. In some parts of the countries, girl bands attract large, enthusiastic audiences; in others, women have been killed for singing in public.
And rushing across the road to our next session, we were the 101st and 102nd in line for Irfan Yusuf in Conversation, so failed to make it into the room, which was licensed for 100 people only. This wasn't a total disaster: we sat in the sun beside the water and listened to the conversation in considerable comfort. We did miss the visual element: Yusuf's interlocutor Sudil Banami introduced him as a political heavyweight, and to judge from he laughter he made a show of taking the remark as a reference to his bulk; there was a bit of chat about flesh coloured headsets, and only when I saw these beige headsets in later sessions did I realise that a visual joke was being made by these two quite dark men. Yusuf was funny and smart and emphatic about the need for everyone to recognise the diversity of Australia's Muslim community. We bought his memoir, Once Were Radicals, which opens with thanks for George W Bush for inventing the comedy-god term Islamofascist.
Then onward ever onward for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation with Ramona Koval. We were right up in the gods. An interesting part of Chimamanda's talk was to inform us that Nigeria too has a functioning civil society. In response to one question, she reassured us that the US is also quite civil: that she doesn't expect to be stoned when her new book is released there next month.
In the late afternoon, we listened to Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro discuss their book about Martin Bryant, Born or Bred, raising and failing to lay to rest the ethics, and indeed legalities of using as source material a manuscript they had been given as part of aborted ghost-writing negotiations. An interesting session all the same. One of those that leave you glad of what you've just learned but not necessarily wanting to read the book.
At night, the charmingly enthusiastic Annette Shun Wah compered International Voices, where we were read to by Philipp Meyer (who read in that US-literary trance-like manner that very quickly lulled this reader to sleep), Tash Aw (who woke me up again, reading from A Map of the Invisible World), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (whom someone should tell not to read the same passage twice on the same day), Cees Nooteboom (a lugubrious older Dutchman who was charm personified) and Mohammed Hanif (whoread a very funny passage which ended on a ringing note of that repressed rage he says he wasn't aware of during the writing). How sweet it was to be read to for an hour and a half by such company.
Today was gloom and doom day: George (The Next 100 Years) Friedman painted a picture of a very grim future in which the climate change challenge will be met but US based capitalism will continue to gouge us all, and wars cold and hot will continue to plague us (He didn't mention plagues); Emmanuel (War Child) Jal sang and danced and recited verse about his life as a boy soldier and the joy of his survival; Mark (The Philosopher and the Wolf) Rowlands managed to be opaque and philosophically grim about the 11 years he spent living with his pet wolf Brennan (sp?). The last competes with the Germaine Greer evening for the nadir of my Festival. My companion walked out with 10 minutes to spare. I stayed, for reasons I don't understand, but then I was glad I did, because the meant Professor Greer's hold on the prize was secure. Seeking to clarify a point he'd been making about hope as not an altogether good thing, Mark Rowlands told us of an occasion when Brennan was a puppy trying to get a pit bull named Rugger to play with him. Rugger pushed Brennan to the ground and clamped his jaws around his neck. Where another puppy might have yelped desperately, Brennan uttered a sonorous growl, and Rowlands thought to himself: 'That is exactly the sound I would like to make when I know that all hope is gone and I am doomed.'
We chatted to friends, filled in our evaluations, listened wistfully for a few seconds to the outside loudspeakered version of a conversation about Creating a Participation Society, and were home in time to walk the dog for whom all hope has long been gone, and who growls peremptorily at an puppy who seeks her out.
Before I talk about events as such, I should mention the exhibitions/slide shows:
• Sarah Rhodes had a series of photographs of Australian artists on the wall of the Heritage Pier -- if you missed them you can see them on her website. I love the one of Dorothy Napagnardi.
• There was a slide show of Juno Gemes's photos of writers. She's the official photographer-in-residence of the Festival.
• MTC Cronin had an intriguing installation: three of her poems on pillars alongside goldfish bowls containing objects that resonated with the poems, plus three paintings on easels. I believe there was a talk as well, but I missed that. This was presented by the Red Room Company, and they're planning three more such installations around Sydney over coming months.
• Poets Paint Words was a slide show based on an event at the Newcastle Art Gallery last year, where a number of poets read works inspired by or otherwise relevant to paintings in the gallery's collection. The paintings and poems in the slides were from last year's event, and it didn't work brilliantly when I saw it, because the slides for most of the poems clicked over well before I had time to read them. On the Gallery's web site, however, they can be read at leisure. Bob Adamson and Brett Whiteley make a great pair.
In the sessions proper, I had a bit of a Muslim day, starting with the wonderfully urbane Mohammed Hanif talking about A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Asked what led hi to write it, he explained that like all first novelists, he wrote it because he was bored in his day job. He explained, further, that like all first novelists, he wanted to write an autobiographical love story, but as his life had been very dull he had to find something else. First novels also have to have a mystery and a party, he said. He was almost as wonderful as the book. I asked my only audience question, and was very brief: I asked him if I was right in sensing that beneath the humour it was an angry novel. He said that, like all first novelists, he was too busy working out how to write each paragraph, figuring out what was going to happen next, and working out how to make everything work to have feelings like anger, but he went on, graciously, to say that if a reader found anger in the book it came from the repressed anger of the times it was set in. Or words to that effect. Probably his most interesting remark, though was in response to a question about how his book was received in Pakistan, given its homosexual content: he explained to us well meaning ignoramuses (my description, no his) that Pakistan is a very complex place, with a thriving civil society as well as the fundamentalism and tribalism that makes the headlines. In some parts of the countries, girl bands attract large, enthusiastic audiences; in others, women have been killed for singing in public.
And rushing across the road to our next session, we were the 101st and 102nd in line for Irfan Yusuf in Conversation, so failed to make it into the room, which was licensed for 100 people only. This wasn't a total disaster: we sat in the sun beside the water and listened to the conversation in considerable comfort. We did miss the visual element: Yusuf's interlocutor Sudil Banami introduced him as a political heavyweight, and to judge from he laughter he made a show of taking the remark as a reference to his bulk; there was a bit of chat about flesh coloured headsets, and only when I saw these beige headsets in later sessions did I realise that a visual joke was being made by these two quite dark men. Yusuf was funny and smart and emphatic about the need for everyone to recognise the diversity of Australia's Muslim community. We bought his memoir, Once Were Radicals, which opens with thanks for George W Bush for inventing the comedy-god term Islamofascist.
Then onward ever onward for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in conversation with Ramona Koval. We were right up in the gods. An interesting part of Chimamanda's talk was to inform us that Nigeria too has a functioning civil society. In response to one question, she reassured us that the US is also quite civil: that she doesn't expect to be stoned when her new book is released there next month.
In the late afternoon, we listened to Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro discuss their book about Martin Bryant, Born or Bred, raising and failing to lay to rest the ethics, and indeed legalities of using as source material a manuscript they had been given as part of aborted ghost-writing negotiations. An interesting session all the same. One of those that leave you glad of what you've just learned but not necessarily wanting to read the book.
At night, the charmingly enthusiastic Annette Shun Wah compered International Voices, where we were read to by Philipp Meyer (who read in that US-literary trance-like manner that very quickly lulled this reader to sleep), Tash Aw (who woke me up again, reading from A Map of the Invisible World), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (whom someone should tell not to read the same passage twice on the same day), Cees Nooteboom (a lugubrious older Dutchman who was charm personified) and Mohammed Hanif (whoread a very funny passage which ended on a ringing note of that repressed rage he says he wasn't aware of during the writing). How sweet it was to be read to for an hour and a half by such company.
Today was gloom and doom day: George (The Next 100 Years) Friedman painted a picture of a very grim future in which the climate change challenge will be met but US based capitalism will continue to gouge us all, and wars cold and hot will continue to plague us (He didn't mention plagues); Emmanuel (War Child) Jal sang and danced and recited verse about his life as a boy soldier and the joy of his survival; Mark (The Philosopher and the Wolf) Rowlands managed to be opaque and philosophically grim about the 11 years he spent living with his pet wolf Brennan (sp?). The last competes with the Germaine Greer evening for the nadir of my Festival. My companion walked out with 10 minutes to spare. I stayed, for reasons I don't understand, but then I was glad I did, because the meant Professor Greer's hold on the prize was secure. Seeking to clarify a point he'd been making about hope as not an altogether good thing, Mark Rowlands told us of an occasion when Brennan was a puppy trying to get a pit bull named Rugger to play with him. Rugger pushed Brennan to the ground and clamped his jaws around his neck. Where another puppy might have yelped desperately, Brennan uttered a sonorous growl, and Rowlands thought to himself: 'That is exactly the sound I would like to make when I know that all hope is gone and I am doomed.'
We chatted to friends, filled in our evaluations, listened wistfully for a few seconds to the outside loudspeakered version of a conversation about Creating a Participation Society, and were home in time to walk the dog for whom all hope has long been gone, and who growls peremptorily at an puppy who seeks her out.
Posted at 11:32 PM
Sat - May 23, 2009
SWF: More poets
I'd planned to go to quite a few things at the
Festival yesterday. I was going to listen to Chloe Hooper, David Marr, Benjamin
Gilmour, and have another dose of Norman Doidge. But life and work got in the
way. I did sneak off for the 10 o'clock Poetry Reading in the intimate Bangarra
Mezzanine room, and the Harbour outside the louvres turned on a reasonably
lovely downpour, a sweet accompaniment to the poems about storms that one of the
readers treated us to.
Anthony Lawrence kicked off the session by telling us about the three men on the panel -- Lawrence, Bob Adamson and the younger US poet Devin Johnston -- going out fishing in the Hawkesbury last weekend in Adamson's boat, talking about poetry and butcher birds, throwing a piece of squid to a passing osprey, only to be regally ignored. My woman companion was delighted and touched by the obvious camaraderie and affection among the three of them. In fact, she commented on it during the brief question time at the end and asked if this was characteristic of poets, as opposed to, say, novelists. The reply had to acknowledge the famous feuds among poets including a recent one in which two of the members of our panel actually had an AVO taken out against them. But even that, Anthony Lawrence said, was fun, even if they were sending 80 harassing emails a day.
Back to the reading. If J S Harry cut a fine crone-like figure on Thursday morning, Bob Adamson has to be a male equivalent. He is an excellent performer, very natural and relaxed, and serving the poetry beautifully. Anthony Lawrence, apart from telling of the fishing trip, read us some notes about his take on nature poetry: he doesn't aim to describe things, animals, birds observed closely, but to write poetry in which (and I wrote this down as he said it) 'the subject is forced into the service of language'. He then read some intensely personal nature poems that made me realise I had no idea what he meant by that. Devin Johnson might have seemed like a ring-in, being from the USA and all, but he was clearly a huge fan of Adamson as well as a friend, and his poems about places like Chattanooga and the Wabash were in sweet harmony with the others. As he read, one of his hands would rise up as if of its own accord and conduct, sketching the rhythms of his lines in the air. He read a wonderful poem, 'Marco Polo', that moved seamlessly from his infant daughter babbling at the night sky to Marco Polo wandering the Mongolian desert. I can't find it on the web, and I didn't catch the name of the book it's in -- sorry!
I'm writing this on Saturday night after a full day at the Festival. But my report on today will have to wait. it's tiring work being a punter at an event like this.
Anthony Lawrence kicked off the session by telling us about the three men on the panel -- Lawrence, Bob Adamson and the younger US poet Devin Johnston -- going out fishing in the Hawkesbury last weekend in Adamson's boat, talking about poetry and butcher birds, throwing a piece of squid to a passing osprey, only to be regally ignored. My woman companion was delighted and touched by the obvious camaraderie and affection among the three of them. In fact, she commented on it during the brief question time at the end and asked if this was characteristic of poets, as opposed to, say, novelists. The reply had to acknowledge the famous feuds among poets including a recent one in which two of the members of our panel actually had an AVO taken out against them. But even that, Anthony Lawrence said, was fun, even if they were sending 80 harassing emails a day.
Back to the reading. If J S Harry cut a fine crone-like figure on Thursday morning, Bob Adamson has to be a male equivalent. He is an excellent performer, very natural and relaxed, and serving the poetry beautifully. Anthony Lawrence, apart from telling of the fishing trip, read us some notes about his take on nature poetry: he doesn't aim to describe things, animals, birds observed closely, but to write poetry in which (and I wrote this down as he said it) 'the subject is forced into the service of language'. He then read some intensely personal nature poems that made me realise I had no idea what he meant by that. Devin Johnson might have seemed like a ring-in, being from the USA and all, but he was clearly a huge fan of Adamson as well as a friend, and his poems about places like Chattanooga and the Wabash were in sweet harmony with the others. As he read, one of his hands would rise up as if of its own accord and conduct, sketching the rhythms of his lines in the air. He read a wonderful poem, 'Marco Polo', that moved seamlessly from his infant daughter babbling at the night sky to Marco Polo wandering the Mongolian desert. I can't find it on the web, and I didn't catch the name of the book it's in -- sorry!
I'm writing this on Saturday night after a full day at the Festival. But my report on today will have to wait. it's tiring work being a punter at an event like this.
Posted at 09:05 PM
Fri - May 22, 2009
SWF: Poets, brains, artefacts and matriarchs
Yesterday was immersion day for me at the Sydney
Writers' Festival. We took the tram to Pyrmont Bay and walked through the Rocks,
stopping at the clifftop next to Brett Whiteley's giant stork's egg for a hot
drink before descending to Walsh Bay, where the combined heads of the punters
were adding substantially to the albedo effect. Not that there's anything wrong
with that! It was great to be at a place with so many grey heads lending
distinction to the cause.
My festival day was bookended by glorious older women – J S Harry at the start with wild grey hair and arthritic gait belying the wit and grace of her reading, and Germaine Greer, stand up manquée seduced by her own charisma at the end. Together with Rabiah Hutchinson, the subject of a third session, they would make an impressive cast for a children's film featuring three scary but probably benign witches, say one based on a novel by Eve Ibbotson.
So, I started out with a poetry reading in the Bangarra Mezzanine, which at 10 o'clock in the morning is ideal for such an event. I found myself sitting beside Anne Bell, herself a fine poet for children, and possibly a contender for Fourth Witch (in her case, unambiguously benign). Judy Johnson and Stephen Edgar read beautifully, she in electric blue, he in academic beige. Then Jan Harry stole the show. I've found her poetry difficult on the page, but when she reads, it's delightful. She started with a 'nasty' piece on the 'pre-Rudd era', and among the other pieces was a stunning mock-heroic portrait of a security guard at a mall. Sorry, I didn't catch the name of either poem.
Norman Doidge was next, in conversation with Caroline Baum about The Brain That Changes Itself. We were in row AA, which is not right up the back behind row Z, in front of row A, so that our eyes were on a level with the artist's shoes -- and very fine shoes they were. Those who know me know that I rarely notice what people are wearing. This day was an exception -- though in this case I was helped not only by my angle of view but also by the woman on my right gasping, 'I want those shoes.' She didn't mean Norman's sensible brown buckled footwear, but Caroline's Pope-red zip boots. As if to rub salt in the wounds of the shoe enviers in the audience (and I found out later they were legion), she began the conversation by asking Norman why we should have come to his talk barefoot. Sadly he failed to decode the question as an invitation to talk about the bit in the book where he says that wearing shoes in urban environments leads one's brain to lose the ability to differentiate between areas on the sole, and answered that people probably came to the talk because they are interested in finding out about the world. That set the tone for the conversation: Caroline kept asking questions designed to evoke witty or profound responses, and Norman spoke quietly and seriously about whatever came to mind. I gave her full points for trying. And in fact, the conversation went well. I wold have liked more detail on exactly what a neuroplactician does that's different from other therapists, but it was wonderful to have my scepticism about the usefulness of drugs to cure 'mental illness' boosted by someone who is clearly a committed slave to the evidence.
This session gets my personal award for the Best. Audience. Question. Evah. I don't mean the very old man who asked if Dr Doidge would recommend his approach to restructuring the brain to someone over 90. I mean the one where a woman began by saying, 'I have a question, and it's something I feel very passionate about,' and went on, gloriously, with a plum in her mouth and not even a nod towards the notion of relevance:
At that point the microphone was kindly but firmly removed from her grasp. Dr Doidge, who had been looking a little bemused by all the attention, took on an even more introspective air. When Ms Baum asked him to give us five things to do to restructure our brains for the better, he bridled at the idea of telling us what to do, but relented enough to recommend exercise, learning a new language, doing posit science exercises for an hour a day -- though he seems to think that taking on a challenge you were passionate about (like blogging, perhaps?) would serve the purpose better than any Scientifically Proven Package. Find exemplary models, he said, and his final words of advice to this predominantly silver-haired audience: Dispense with foolish ideas that your learning days are over. I think that deserves a bit of bold face: Dispense with foolish ideas that your learning days are over.
But there's no time to sit and absorb. Half an hour later, having eaten a panino en route, I was sitting in a theatre to hear Philip Jones, of Ochre and Rust (which I think is superb), and Ross Gibson, of The Summer Exercises (which I haven't read) talk about the way they extract, deduce or invent stories about inanimate objects. Philip is a historian with an understanding of teh importance of narrative, Ross a fiction-writer with a profound respect for historical fidelity.
And with even less time to spare -- because this room filled up 20 minutes before the session was due to start -- I went to Sally Neighbour talking about The Mother of Mohammed, her biography of Rabiah Hutchinson, a scary convert to Islam. I managed to get past the door nazi, actually quite a nice person, by saying, truthfully that my friends were saving me a seat. 'I'll let you in.' she said, 'but you'd better not be putting one over. I've got teenage sons, you know, so I'm not easily fooled.' I was vaguely flattered. This was another interesting session, and of course the book is tempting. Sally Neighbour, Four Corners journalist, has written an earlier book about Islamic activists in Australia, and apparently Rabaiah was mentioned once in passing in that. This Australian woman had become something of a legend: she used to be among other things a donkey stoker [does anyone know what that means or do I have to read the book?], she converted to Islam, went off to do jihad, joining Jameer Islamiah and choosing to live with the Taliban, married seven husbands and used her detailed knowledge of Islamic law to divorce as needed. Sally Neighbour was fascinated, tracked her down and interviewed her at length. The resulting book makes a clear distinction between extremists and terrorists. Rabaiah is certainly the former – she sings the praises of the Taliban and once cowed the leader of Jameer Islamiah into getting rid of his cane chairs by berating him for departing from the floor-sitting ways of the Prophet. But she insists, and Sally Neighbour believes her, that she is not a terrorist and has never advocated violence. In response to the inevitable question/comment from the audience about how wearing a niqab is dangerous and is gives backing to terrorism, she talked about how having conversed with many women covering their faces in this way, she has become much less alarmed by it. Most women wearing a niqab in Australia, she said, are Austraoian, and most wear it of their own choice, not because someone is forcing them to. It is just a piece of clothing.
We'd been intending to go to the next session in that room, but the line was already dauntingly long, so we grazed in the bookshop, persuaded our friend to buy a copy of Seven Seasons in Aurukun, and had a relatively leisurely dinner before An Evening with Professor Germaine Greer up town.
Professor Greer was advertised as presenting a lecture on ‘The Australian Way: The Influence of Australia and Australians on British Politics and Politicians.' As one audience member asked at the end, 'Why should we care?' That question wasn't answered. Professor Greer walked onto the stage to sustained applause, and evidently took that as an invitation to self-indulgence, or at least to indulge in attacks on Kevin Rudd (some on his policies, some on his supposed egotism, one on his upper lip), an the English (their housing, their weather, their Universities, so inferior to Australian ones in the 60s), on the superannuation system (which she was noticeably misinformed about), on the idea of home ownership. She's a very smart woman. She was witty, even sometimes funny, the audience kept bursting into applause. And if she'd presented her material as stand-up, it would have been excellent: 'If there is a double dissolution and an election, my bumper sticker will red simply, MALCOLM TURNBULL IS A BANKER'; 'Where I live in south-east Queensland there are no decent newspapers, so I have to get the Australian. They're still questioning the reality of climate change. They carry on debating it all by themselves!' 'Australians are resourceful. My workforce live on stale finger buns from the hot bread shop.' That last remark, not an exact quote, but close, prompted me to ask, but not so she'd hear me from my perch in the gods, 'Why don't you pay them?' IN fact, given that she referred to her 'workforce' a number of times as evidence for what 'Australians' think about various things, she really ought to pay them researchers fees. The man next to me asked, in a European accent of some kind, what she was a professor of. I said I thought it was English literature. 'Does she come from a very wealthy background?' he asked. I said I didn't think so. I guess he was trying to understand her loose-cannon arrogance.
I wish she'd talked about Shakespeare.
My festival day was bookended by glorious older women – J S Harry at the start with wild grey hair and arthritic gait belying the wit and grace of her reading, and Germaine Greer, stand up manquée seduced by her own charisma at the end. Together with Rabiah Hutchinson, the subject of a third session, they would make an impressive cast for a children's film featuring three scary but probably benign witches, say one based on a novel by Eve Ibbotson.
So, I started out with a poetry reading in the Bangarra Mezzanine, which at 10 o'clock in the morning is ideal for such an event. I found myself sitting beside Anne Bell, herself a fine poet for children, and possibly a contender for Fourth Witch (in her case, unambiguously benign). Judy Johnson and Stephen Edgar read beautifully, she in electric blue, he in academic beige. Then Jan Harry stole the show. I've found her poetry difficult on the page, but when she reads, it's delightful. She started with a 'nasty' piece on the 'pre-Rudd era', and among the other pieces was a stunning mock-heroic portrait of a security guard at a mall. Sorry, I didn't catch the name of either poem.
Norman Doidge was next, in conversation with Caroline Baum about The Brain That Changes Itself. We were in row AA, which is not right up the back behind row Z, in front of row A, so that our eyes were on a level with the artist's shoes -- and very fine shoes they were. Those who know me know that I rarely notice what people are wearing. This day was an exception -- though in this case I was helped not only by my angle of view but also by the woman on my right gasping, 'I want those shoes.' She didn't mean Norman's sensible brown buckled footwear, but Caroline's Pope-red zip boots. As if to rub salt in the wounds of the shoe enviers in the audience (and I found out later they were legion), she began the conversation by asking Norman why we should have come to his talk barefoot. Sadly he failed to decode the question as an invitation to talk about the bit in the book where he says that wearing shoes in urban environments leads one's brain to lose the ability to differentiate between areas on the sole, and answered that people probably came to the talk because they are interested in finding out about the world. That set the tone for the conversation: Caroline kept asking questions designed to evoke witty or profound responses, and Norman spoke quietly and seriously about whatever came to mind. I gave her full points for trying. And in fact, the conversation went well. I wold have liked more detail on exactly what a neuroplactician does that's different from other therapists, but it was wonderful to have my scepticism about the usefulness of drugs to cure 'mental illness' boosted by someone who is clearly a committed slave to the evidence.
This session gets my personal award for the Best. Audience. Question. Evah. I don't mean the very old man who asked if Dr Doidge would recommend his approach to restructuring the brain to someone over 90. I mean the one where a woman began by saying, 'I have a question, and it's something I feel very passionate about,' and went on, gloriously, with a plum in her mouth and not even a nod towards the notion of relevance:
I'm a dowser. Now you might not be aware that there are plans to build a desalination plant in Sydney, and it's completely udeless idea. I've written to Kevin Rudd and sent him twpo books explaining the value of dowsing, and he's returnied them withut even readaing them. I've also written to , you know, Midnight OIl, I don't remember his name, [on being helped out by a stunned looking Caroline Baum] yes, Peter Garrett, and he's also returned them unread. [On being patiently asked for her question] I do have a question, and it's this: What is wrong with the medical profession that they don't want to hear about dowsing? I've talked to one young doctor, and she just doesn't want to listen at all, even though her mother was a dowser.
At that point the microphone was kindly but firmly removed from her grasp. Dr Doidge, who had been looking a little bemused by all the attention, took on an even more introspective air. When Ms Baum asked him to give us five things to do to restructure our brains for the better, he bridled at the idea of telling us what to do, but relented enough to recommend exercise, learning a new language, doing posit science exercises for an hour a day -- though he seems to think that taking on a challenge you were passionate about (like blogging, perhaps?) would serve the purpose better than any Scientifically Proven Package. Find exemplary models, he said, and his final words of advice to this predominantly silver-haired audience: Dispense with foolish ideas that your learning days are over. I think that deserves a bit of bold face: Dispense with foolish ideas that your learning days are over.
But there's no time to sit and absorb. Half an hour later, having eaten a panino en route, I was sitting in a theatre to hear Philip Jones, of Ochre and Rust (which I think is superb), and Ross Gibson, of The Summer Exercises (which I haven't read) talk about the way they extract, deduce or invent stories about inanimate objects. Philip is a historian with an understanding of teh importance of narrative, Ross a fiction-writer with a profound respect for historical fidelity.
And with even less time to spare -- because this room filled up 20 minutes before the session was due to start -- I went to Sally Neighbour talking about The Mother of Mohammed, her biography of Rabiah Hutchinson, a scary convert to Islam. I managed to get past the door nazi, actually quite a nice person, by saying, truthfully that my friends were saving me a seat. 'I'll let you in.' she said, 'but you'd better not be putting one over. I've got teenage sons, you know, so I'm not easily fooled.' I was vaguely flattered. This was another interesting session, and of course the book is tempting. Sally Neighbour, Four Corners journalist, has written an earlier book about Islamic activists in Australia, and apparently Rabaiah was mentioned once in passing in that. This Australian woman had become something of a legend: she used to be among other things a donkey stoker [does anyone know what that means or do I have to read the book?], she converted to Islam, went off to do jihad, joining Jameer Islamiah and choosing to live with the Taliban, married seven husbands and used her detailed knowledge of Islamic law to divorce as needed. Sally Neighbour was fascinated, tracked her down and interviewed her at length. The resulting book makes a clear distinction between extremists and terrorists. Rabaiah is certainly the former – she sings the praises of the Taliban and once cowed the leader of Jameer Islamiah into getting rid of his cane chairs by berating him for departing from the floor-sitting ways of the Prophet. But she insists, and Sally Neighbour believes her, that she is not a terrorist and has never advocated violence. In response to the inevitable question/comment from the audience about how wearing a niqab is dangerous and is gives backing to terrorism, she talked about how having conversed with many women covering their faces in this way, she has become much less alarmed by it. Most women wearing a niqab in Australia, she said, are Austraoian, and most wear it of their own choice, not because someone is forcing them to. It is just a piece of clothing.
We'd been intending to go to the next session in that room, but the line was already dauntingly long, so we grazed in the bookshop, persuaded our friend to buy a copy of Seven Seasons in Aurukun, and had a relatively leisurely dinner before An Evening with Professor Germaine Greer up town.
Professor Greer was advertised as presenting a lecture on ‘The Australian Way: The Influence of Australia and Australians on British Politics and Politicians.' As one audience member asked at the end, 'Why should we care?' That question wasn't answered. Professor Greer walked onto the stage to sustained applause, and evidently took that as an invitation to self-indulgence, or at least to indulge in attacks on Kevin Rudd (some on his policies, some on his supposed egotism, one on his upper lip), an the English (their housing, their weather, their Universities, so inferior to Australian ones in the 60s), on the superannuation system (which she was noticeably misinformed about), on the idea of home ownership. She's a very smart woman. She was witty, even sometimes funny, the audience kept bursting into applause. And if she'd presented her material as stand-up, it would have been excellent: 'If there is a double dissolution and an election, my bumper sticker will red simply, MALCOLM TURNBULL IS A BANKER'; 'Where I live in south-east Queensland there are no decent newspapers, so I have to get the Australian. They're still questioning the reality of climate change. They carry on debating it all by themselves!' 'Australians are resourceful. My workforce live on stale finger buns from the hot bread shop.' That last remark, not an exact quote, but close, prompted me to ask, but not so she'd hear me from my perch in the gods, 'Why don't you pay them?' IN fact, given that she referred to her 'workforce' a number of times as evidence for what 'Australians' think about various things, she really ought to pay them researchers fees. The man next to me asked, in a European accent of some kind, what she was a professor of. I said I thought it was English literature. 'Does she come from a very wealthy background?' he asked. I said I didn't think so. I guess he was trying to understand her loose-cannon arrogance.
I wish she'd talked about Shakespeare.
Posted at 08:05 AM
About this Blog
This started out as a patchy journal about family life with my mother-in-law, Mollie, who has Alzheimers and was then living with us. Mollie has moved, first into a "low-care facility" then, in July 2004, into a nursing home. As these and other events have overtaken us, the blog has moved on ...
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Published On: May 28, 2009 12:46 PM
Published On: May 28, 2009 12:46 PM