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The new Oz lit - superficial, politically correct tomes

By Greg Barns - posted Thursday, 27 April 2006


Daniel Barenboim, the gifted and prolific conductor and pianist, recently declared war on muzak. The music of airports, call centres and supermarkets. The butchered classics that are piped relentlessly through our society every day.

Classical music deserves to be treated better than that, said Barenboim. He’s right.

And ditto, Australian literature. This country deserves better than to have its bookshelves filled with the latest, highly formulaic novel written by some bright young thing who is the product of a university creative writing course.

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Just as classical music is butchered these days to suit markets and consumers who have the attention span and intellect of a sheep, so it is with Australian literature.

It wasn’t always like this. Twenty-two years ago the last great Australian novelist, Xavier Herbert died. Herbert’s two great works, Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country, were sprawling canvases. In musical terms they are Mahlerian or Wagnerian. Passionate, eloquent, humorous and deeply humane, Herbert’s works tackled the running sore of white Australia’s treatment of the Indigenous peoples.

Today, no publisher would touch Herbert. His novels would be adjudged too long - Poor Fellow My Country is one of the longest novels in the English language.

The slick young marketers in publishing houses wouldn’t know what do with Herbert. After all, he could be irascible, arrogant, lecherous, drunken and frightfully undiplomatic. His feuds with people over many years were legendary.

And Patrick White, Herbert’s contemporary would be similarly dismissed. Like Herbert, White was a writer who crafted complex stories - again in a Wagnerian sense. And like Herbert, White could be cantankerous, bitchy and decidedly opinionated.

Today’s Australian novelists, the 30-something brigade growing fat on Australia Council grants, state government largesse and university residencies have nothing on Herbert and White.

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Their books are generally superficial, politically correct tomes that reflect the lack of life experiences and scholarship of their authors.

Compared with today’s Australian novelist, who generally has a taxpayer-funded sinecure in a university literature or communications studies department, Herbert had a rich and varied life. He spent years, in the 1930s, in the Northern Territory as a union organiser, government official and roaming this wild and treacherous frontier. Herbert was a political animal who embraced all manner of causes, including the Tasmanian dams issue, and whose letters to the likes of Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke (both of whom he hero worshipped) are wonderful rants.

White, on the other hand, was a patrician. But a man educated in classicism and philosophy. White’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1973 was due, in no small measure, to his brilliant intellectual capacity. This was a man who melded Greek mythology, Judeo-Christian mysticism, and Jungian psychology, into the novel form. White’s Anglo-Australian upbringing, his journeying through Europe and the Western Desert of Australia, allowed him the capacity to write novels such as The Tree of Man and Voss.

If Herbert and White’s output were akin to Mahler symphonies, then today’s Australian novels are generally in the category of muzak. Take Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. It is lauded by critics and readers, but why? It simply isn’t great literature, but a lightweight comedy celebrating ordinariness. It has no deeper meaning than that. And for this reason, it will be consigned to the dustbin of literary history in the not-too-distant future.

As will most Australian literature published these days. That’s because the authors generally have no grounding in classical education. They are slaves to intellectual fashion. They do not immerse themselves, in the main, in classical music, great visual art or even great literature. They do not study the philosophical movements that have made our world.

Instead they attend courses on feminist theory, structuralism and creative writing - as though the latter can ever be taught.

This is partly the fault of governments and our education system, but also of a generation that does not believe it important to establish for itself an intellectual framework within which to operate.

This is a generation of Australian authors that do not, unlike Herbert and White, seek answers to metaphysical questions.

What a pity that great Australian literature has succumbed to the level of mediocrity. That no individual will write big, sweeping and grand novels anymore. That literary muzak populates our bookshelves. And that book publishers spend all day hyping “the next big thing”, as they swan around writer’s festivals with their favourite groovy young author in tow.

Meanwhile, the Australian literary scene is a wasteland. A testament to a belief that ordinariness and mediocrity ought to be celebrated. That long epics such as Poor Fellow My Country and The Tree of Man are too time-consuming for the modern reader, and in any event they wouldn’t get it anyway because both books require some understanding of the essence of man.

It’s all very depressing.

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First published as 'Oz lit - written off as they say' in the Hobart Mercury on April 17, 2006.



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About the Author

Greg Barns is National President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance.

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