The Resident Judge reckons 2/10/09

…that a “fully automated table game” in a casino is a poker machine.  It’s a poker machine if it’s in Bayswater or Box Hill or Melton, but somehow or other if it’s at Crown Casino, then it’s ta-da!! a “table game”. How convenient, seeing that Crown Casino has a limit of 2500 poker machines.  Let’s just read that again. Two thousand, five hundred poker machines.

The Resident Judge Reckons 1/10/09

Well- not reckons, but does wonder.

The pre-sentence hearings are currently underway for the men accused of the bashing murder of Liep Gony.  The case is being reported in considerable detail in the newspapers.  Surely these two men could then turn around and claim that they could not get a fair trial in Melbourne.  Why are pre-sentence hearings reported anyway?

‘Talking Books: Novel History’

I found a terrific site called ‘Backdoor Broadcasting Company’, which contains a number of free podcasts from seminars, many of which seem to have been held in London.

The ‘Talking Books: Novel History’ seminar was held at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University College, London on 6th June 2009 and what a delight to hear something so current! What wonderful times we live in – I could barely be back here in Melbourne writing this now if I’d actually attended it!  The seminar was introduced by the historian Joanna Bourke who started with a quote from Sir Leslie Stephen that historical novels were either pure cram or pure fiction.  The question is, however, how can historical novelists and the historical profession more generally attempt to remain true to the core, brittle narratives and images emanating from a complex and perplexing past?  She introduced Hilary Mantel and Sarah Dunant, both of whom have recent historical fiction releases.  Hilary Mantel writes about real characters: Sarah Dunant’s characters are composites, but both approaches rely on archival research to flesh out their characters.  The best historical novelists, Bourke said,  like Mantel and Dunant can teach historians that there can be a different kind of fidelity to individuals in history, one that acknowledges the power of motives over the power of institutions, and the role of contingency as well as causality.

Hilary Mantel’s academic background is in law, not history.  Her historical fiction draws on authentic characters- her most recent book Wolf Hall centres on Thomas Cromwell; her Place of Greater Safety (which was released in  1992  but written much earlier) presents different revolutionary characters as a collage throughout the French Revolution:  Camille Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre.  She dislikes, but grudgingly accepts the term ‘historical fiction’ because it raises expectations that its practitioners will have something in common.  She sees her writing more as contemporary thinking about past events; she writes about real people who happen to be dead.  Historical fiction, she says, is a way of re-creating what has slipped from the historical record and of seeing justice done by giving a voice to the voiceless, and representing the mis-represented.  Her work emphasizes the role of chance and contingency, where historians are more often wedded to causal links.  What she writes of could be true: she excludes impossibilities and refuses to rearrange history to suit the dramatic process.

Sarah Dunant, on the other hand, was trained as an historian at Oxford University some 30 years ago, where she was discouraged from making up what we didn’t know.  She was taught the grand narrative of big events, prior to the changes of historiography beginning with Christopher Hill that raised questions about women, the poor, the other.  This more recent historiography gives rise to the potential for a new sort of historical novel.  Her characters did not actually exist: they are composites, based on deep secondary research which has delved deeply into the primary sources.  As an historian, it is the fidelity of this research that gives her confidence to develop her characters, using her sources as a pointillist painter might in representing a larger painting.

The two historical novelists were followed by John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL, author of a number of works on fiction, the fiction industry and best-sellers.  In contrast to the earlier speakers, he questioned whether fiction could recover the past, and claimed that fiction dies if you overload it with too much material (something I tend to agree with).  Good historical fiction, he says, defines our relationship with the past- it tells us about where we are.

I’ve been grappling with the perils and pleasures of historical fiction for some time- some of the posts on this blog reflect this :  the 21st sensibility and unwise (and modified)  claims to better understanding debated with Kate Grenville’s The Secret River; the right to traduce a reputation of a true-life individual while disavowing a work as ‘historical’ in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting; the ‘flim-flam’ of biography in Louis Nowra’s Ice;  the hedgehogs and foxes suggested to Isaiah Berlin by Tolstoy’s War and Peace; the deceptive selectivity of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke;  the distinction between ‘voice’ and ‘ventriloquism’ in Rose Tremain’s Restoration.    I keep reading historical fiction because I enjoy it, but every time I’m drawn back to the questions of technique that keep arising and that I never can quite answer.

Reclaiming Anzac

I had hoped that the fetishisation of Anzac was a symptom of the Howard years, and that perhaps with a change of government, it might recede.   I think I’m about to be disappointed though: if anything it seemed just as fervent this year.

I’d been disconcerted by Rudd’s evocation of “The Anzac Spirit” at the bushfire memorial service- a characterization that was largely rejected by firefighters themselves, who under procedures revised after Ash Wednesday and the later fires in the Dandenongs,  deliberately withdraw from situations where lives are endangered- a luxury not extended to soldiers in battle.

ANZAC Day’s co-option by the AFL as a marketing opportunity is even worse. I was repulsed by the visits that AFL football teams made to the Shrine this week to soak up the ANZAC spirit to embolden them for the Anzac Day Round of football this weekend, and the pre-match images of war shown to players to gee them up for the game.  Mick Malthouse’s petulant response to Collingwood’s loss says it all:

I don’t think we played anywhere near (well enough) to capture the spirit of the Anzacs, and I think this is what makes this one of the most disappointing games I have ever been associated with…Unfortunately, I reckon we let the Anzacs down.  The whole game, not just (the final few minutes), the whole game, and Essendon showed true Anzac spirit, why we play here.

Some how, I don’t think the Anzacs themselves will be too fussed about the loss of a football game.  I’m sure that the diggers who played for Essendon before dying in war won’t feel too let down at all.  The whole solemn intoning of the sentimental nationalist pap before the ” invented tradition” of the fifteenth Collingwood/Essendon match (yep, that’s some tradition),  the marketing of the “Badge of Honour” football magazine,  and the crass slippage between “heroism in the trenches”  and “heroism in taking a mark” is manipulative and demeaning.

Thursday’s Age carried an edited version of a longer paper that Marilyn Lake delivered at Melbourne University’s free public lecture program hosted by the School of Historical studies. In this paper she challenges the funding of an ANZAC creation story provided  so generously by the Department of Veterans Affairs since 1996 that elides the controversy over involvement both during and after the war, that excludes on the basis of gender and race, and which silences other claims to Australian identity.

The comments posted to the Age website are revealing. Jack Jones, for instance, writes:

Typical academic perspective pandering to the lefty minority groups whilst ignoring the majority view and belittling past sacrifices made so she could actaualy be in a position to enjoy the opportunity to write such diatribe. Suggest you revisit your history lessons (if you had any) and go on a site visit to Gallipoli and see what it means first hand. Then come back and write an apology.

David Farmer writes:

Trust a left wing ‘academic’ to loose site of emotional reality! I’ve been to Galipoli and the sense of pride and spiritual emotion was enormous. It made me proud of our fallen hereo’s regardless of the success or idealogy that came with fighting for mother England. Time for a true blue Aussie reality check Marilyn Lake!

Yes,  Marilyn, it seems that you do have to go to Turkey to know what it means to be Australian, and learn some ‘real’ history while you’re at it, girlie.

In an otherwise worthy speech, the Governor-General has elevated our response to the ANZAC story even further beyond the call of national identity to that of  the spiritual:

We have a sacred trust to remain accountable to its legacy.

I’m not quite sure by whose authority it became “sacred”.

And all the shiny-eyed school children, brought to the Shrine breathlessly parrot that “the diggers at Gallipoli died for our freedom”.  Ah- freedom!- is that the same “Fridom” that G. W. Bush held aloft for us?  King, Country, Empire, British Liberty, Mum, my sisters, “the boys”, my house, our way of life– all these for sure, but “freedom” then didn’t necessarily mean the same as “fridom” now.

Although, having said that and to contradict myself completely – I was interested to see if “freedom” rhetoric was common during WWI. I went to the “Despatches from Gallipoli” section of the NLA site, and conducted a word search for “Freedom”  and found only a reference to press freedom in reporting the war, which seemed rather ironic.  But a word search of newspapers on the NLA website turned up this hither-to unpublished poem, written by a Mr Gilbert Crawford, a reader on the night staff of the Daily Mercury Office,  Mackay Qld- safely on home soil, but eager to encourage men to hear Freedom’s call.

I hear a voice a’calling and its note is one of pain

Don’t you hear that voice a’calling out to you?

Tis the voice of nations ravished, Freedom crushed and honor slain

Can’t you hear that voice a’calling out anew?

Chorus:

Don’t you hear that voice a’calling, calling clear as tocsin peal?

It is echoing throughout the whole world wide.

T’is the voice of Freedom calling from beneath the tyrant’s heel

The sons of Freedom calling to her side.

I hear a voice responding from the heart of sunny France

Don’t you hear her answer sent to Freedom’s call?

And the tenor of her message makes men’s pulses throb and dance

Have you no response to make to it at all?

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

I hear a voice responding and it sounds now loud, now low

Don’t you hear it in the shrieking Arctic wind?

T’is the Russian National Anthem, rolling o’er the fields of snow

And the might of Russia’s millions rolls behind.

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

I hear a voice responding by the Meditterean shore

Don’t you hear the sons of Italy reply

And ’tis swelling ever louder o’er the din and battle’s roar

As Freedom’s hymn goes mounting to the sky

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

I hear a voice responding from across the Atlantic waves

Don’t you hear them  as they come to play their part?

‘Tis the warsong sounding lustily of Canada’s proud braves

Don’t their warsong wake an echo in your heart?

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

I hear a voice come swelling o’er the burning desert sand

Do you hear the sons of Africa respond?

And a pealing echo answers it from India’s coral strand

Don’t these voices make your recreant heard despond?

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

Where the Southern Cross is beaming comes another voice that swells

Don’t you hear the answer of your own Home clime?

‘Tis the slogan of the Anzacs welling down the Dardenelles

And their war song echoes down the tide of Time.

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

And another voice comes pealing through the starry night

Don’t you hear the eager Banzai of Japan?

‘Tis the men of Nippon marshalling to battle for the right

Can’t these voices stir your soul to play the man?

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

Won’t you hear those voices calling, they are calling close and clear

Won’t you also take your place beside the brave?

To Freedom’s earnest pleading do you still turn a deaf ear?

Will you bear the coward’s brand into your grave?

Chorus: Don’t you hear that voice? etc…

I hear a voice that rises now supreme above them all

Don’t you hear it through the battle’s awful roar?

‘Tis the voice of Victory swelling up to Heaven’s highest hall

As the Tyrant’s ramparts fall, to rise no more.

Last chorus: Don’t you hear that voice a’calling, calling clear as tocsin bell

It is echoing through the whole world wide

‘Tis the voice of Freedom calling, and the notes of triumph swell

From the sons of Freedom rallied to her side.

- NORTHERN TERRITORY TIMES AND GAZETTE 27 JULY 1916

No doubt, this is all part of the conscription debate of the time, and Freedom is depicted as a feminized  figure calling to the Allies at a national level,  even ‘the sons of Africa’ and those ‘from India’s coral strand’.   What ever it is, it’s not the personal freedom our “me-me-me” culture tells us we are entitled to.

I have been to the dawn service at the Shrine, and found it a sobering and yes, emotional experience.  In April 2003, I went with my teenaged children to a local ANZAC ceremony on the Gold Coast, where we were holidaying at the time.  With a heightened sense of being a nation contemplating war, I wanted to show my respect for older men and women who had responded- for whatever reason- to their country’s call for action.  I wanted to acknowledge the waste, the pity, the tragedy of war.  And so, it was with mounting anger that I sat as the gathering was harangued by the local RSL president about the commie hippies who were protesting Australia’s involvement in the war to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction that were going to destroy freedom for us all.  In the end, I stood up and left.

And I think that, for a while, I want to stand up and leave for Anzac Day generally as it is being manufactured and marketed at the moment.  I have not forgotten: I do respect.

Birthday girl

Happy birthday to me….

‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry

2008, 300p.

I really don’t like my chances of reading the Booker Prize shortlist before it is announced on 14 October, especially as this is the only one I have read!  I always try to read the Miles Franklin shortlist of Australian literature, and usually finish the night before it is announced! But the Booker is usually beyond me.

But I was excited about reading The Secret Scripture when I realised that it was written by Sebastian Barry. I read A Long, Long Way last year, and along with The Book Thief, these are the two books that have had me audibly sobbing whilst reading.

As with A Long, Long Way, this book is set in Ireland and takes for its main characters people, events and perspectives that are often overlooked.  Indeed, the main character of The Secret Scripture, Roseanne McNulty- or is it Roseanne Clear?- has certainly been overlooked.  She has been incarcerated in an asylum for about sixty years, and it is only at the age of 100, as the asylum is being deinstitutionalized, that questions are again raised about why exactly she came to be placed there, and by whom.   The story is told in alternating voices- Roseanne’s own testimony surreptitiously written on scrap paper and hidden under a floorboard, and that of Dr Grene, her recently-bereaved psychiatrist who has to decide on the appropriate placement for her when the asylum is closed.

Roseanne has truly been a victim of Ireland’s ‘big’ history in her own little life: all the distrust and hatred of religion and politics comes right into her most intimate and precious relationships.  She is a passive victim- perhaps to stop resisting is the ultimate defeat. Tragic things have happened to her,  often not of her own making, and yet there is a simplicity that shines through her. Or is there?  The major theme of this book is history- its evasions, its slipperiness and its unreliability.  And Dr Grene himself, who at first seems to be the anchoring ‘truth’ in the narrative becomes increasingly suspect as a narrator.  You find yourself wondering if either of these narratives- Roseanne’s and Dr Grene’s – can be trusted.

Barry has written about these characters, and their situations before.  Eneas McNulty had already appeared in his The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and was an officer in Thomas Dunne’s policeforce.  Dunne was a main character in Barry’s play The Steward of Christendom, and his son Willie appeared in A Long Long Way, and Willie’s sister appears in Annie Dunne.  So while each book is self contained as a narrative, there are allusions and resonances in Barry’s other work as well.  Of course, Barry is not the only author to construct an interconnected web of characters like this- Tim Winton does it too- and there’s a frisson of recognition when you make the connection.

In this case, Barry takes his characters from his own family tree.  He’s not the only writer to do that either-  Kate Grenville seems to be devoting herself to it  (her new book The Lieutenant pairs up with her earlier The Secret River) , and Peter Behrens (whose Law of Dreams I reviewed earlier)  also based his story on an ancestor.  On one level I can understand the attraction of recovering and making your own family members come alive again through your writing.  I guess that it’s a form of self-reflection, wondering whether certain characteristics have come through to you.  And there’s also the element of identification and indebtedness: that I am who I am because of them.  But all this seems very “me” oriented.  I think about the ‘celebrities’ on the increasing formulaic Who Do You Think You Are? wide-eyed with  wonder at their forebears’ lot and determined to squeeze every possible supposition out of the flimsiest of evidence- and culminating, always always always with trembling chins and tears at the injustice and hardness of other people’s lives. Ah, but they are OUR other people’s lives- hence our empathy and imagination wells up for them, when it has laid dormant for any other of the millions of other people who trod the same paths.

Not just characters- Barry also revisits his earlier work in his narrative voice too. The scene that affected me so much in A Long, Long Way was where the young boy stood up and sang Ave Maria- I don’t have the book here, but it was beautifully written with a sob of pain in each sentence.  Beautiful, beautiful writing.  And then, in The Secret Scripture, I found another lamentation which evoked the keening of his earlier work as well:

…that he hanged himself.  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, oh, oh, oh.  Do you know the grief of it? I hope not.  The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters.  That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house…..

But I have a little lamentation of my own- the ending.  Barry has unsettled us throughout the book over issues of truth and secrecy, and yet has tied up all the ends neatly and plonked it on our laps as a finished product.

So I have mixed feelings about the book.  The writing was beautiful; Roseanne was a haunting, tragic character; it is a very sad, sad book.  The ambiguity of truth, invention and forgetting keeps you wary and watchful as a reader.  But oh- the ending- (oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh….).

For Better or For Worse? Probably worse….

Oh no! I can’t believe it! For Better and For Worse, the daily cartoon strip that I have been following for all my adult life has finished!!! I’ve had my children with this cartoon strip!! Like Elly, I despair at the changes that are happening to my body without my permission!! I hated Deanna’s mother Myra with a vengeance!! What a good wife Iris has been to Grandpa Jim, somehow leaving space for them both to honour their now-deceased first spouses!! I was so pleased for Michael getting his book published, and so distressed when their house burnt down!! Dang it, I cried when the dog died rescuing baby April from the rushing stream!!

Much as enjoy a good wedding, though, Elizabeth and Anthony’s wedding day was dragging on a bit.  I had it all worked out- Elizabeth and Anthony were going to rush from the wedding service to Grandpa Jim’s hospital bedside when they heard about his heart attack (I was right, they did); he was going to wake from his semi-coma and see her in Grandma Marion’s wedding dress ( I was right, he did that too), then he was going to cark it right then and there (he didn’t).

But finished?? Is April going to settle down and become a vet after all?  Will Deanna and Michael have another baby for their country?  Will Elizabeth have a baby with Anthony?  How will she get on with her step-daughter?  When will Grandpa Jim finally cark it then?

Wait!  hold on…. there’s a follow up page that finishes off all the stories. Lynne Johnston, the creator is going back to the beginning and starting again.  Oh no.  Bad idea. I can see a shark circling.  Somehow the thought of having it warmed over and served up again is less appetizing… time to let go, I think.

Middle of the night meditations

The Resident Judge does not always sleep well. But one thing that will send her nodding off within minutes is the sound of voices on the radio, especially when they’re talking about something that she’d really be quite interested in if she…didn’t…drop…off…halfway..thr…….

It is not really a practice to be recommended, though.  Not only do I wake with the wires to the ear-buds wound several times around my neck, but I find that I really have very little memory of what I have heard.  I think that the great plan of the 1970s to learn subliminally while playing information while you sleep was a pile of hooey- and certainly rather impractical if you had to wake yourself up to turn the tape over.

Unless ABC Radio National has something that interests me, I listen to the BBC World Service which is rather repetitive because it has a news broadcast about every 15 minutes, but given that I’m usually asleep by the end of it, what I miss this time I will catch up with next time as my sleep cycle turns around again.

It does lead to some rather garbled reception of what I’m hearing, though. Sometimes when I open the paper the next morning, I recognize a news story that I might have heard in snippets.  I sometimes remember small details, but am not really sure enough of them to be able to vouch for their veracity. And sometimes- like yesterday- I’m actually able to check up on what I thought I heard and what I actually did hear.

Early on Thursday morning, I heard what I thought was a fascinating workshop discussion about meditation in Christian and other religious traditions.  The speaker, who was a Christian, led a guided meditation about darkness: the way that when you are walking in the dark, your eyes gradually adjust and you’re able to see things more clearly than you would have thought.  I thought it was wonderful- I let him take me, and I was able to actually walk through the meditation with him. Then, I thought the Dalai Lama responded…and by now I was actually waking up, and I was so impressed with this guided meditation that I resolved to find out what the program was by looking up the Radio National website that day.

Well, that’s what I thought I heard.

So, I was fascinated to find that I was actually listening to a program called “Encounter” that came on at 4.00 a.m.  I was right- there was an interfaith component,  it was about prayer and meditation, and the Dalai Lama was a contributor to it.  But where was the guided meditation that so impressed me? Here’s what the transcript says:

Margaret Coffey: Paul Murray, who then took one of Johannes Tauler’s 14th century sermons to explore the Christian notion of searching for God in prayer. It was a sermon built around a reflection on a passage from St Luke’s Gospel.

Paul Murray OP: Today’s Gospel, Tauler tells us, tells of a woman who has lost a coin and lit a lantern and searched for it. The woman in her great anxiety, Tauler informs us, turns her house up side down searching for the coin. But what, we might ask, does this searching mean?

First of all it refers, according to Tauler, to the two most ordinary ways in which people seek God – an active way, which entails the external performance of certain religious practices and good works, and a passive way which entails a beginning journey into the innermost self. Tauler writes, we must allow ourselves to sink into our ground into the innermost depth and seek the Lord there, as he instructed us when he said the Kingdom of God is within you.

Up to this point in his sermon we have heard for the most part about our searching for God but Tauler now goes on to speak about another more important searching. Earlier he had noted that it is eternal wisdom itself which has lit the lantern and now, he says, as soon as we enter our house to search for God, God in his turn searches for us – and the house is turned upside down. He acts just the way we do when we search for something, throwing aside one thing after another until we find what we are looking for. All of a sudden then we discover that the object of our search for God and of our search for wisdom is not some kind of passive divine truth, something which we are able to assess and possess with our own minds and at our own pace, but is rather something literally uncontrollable, a mystery of love our minds can barely begin to grasp, an urgency of attention to our most basic human needs and wants, a divine compassion and care for that very aspect of our lives which seems most hopeless and most lost.

Where was my guided meditation?  The light was there, and the darkness, and the looking…. but what had I done to it in my half-awake state? And yet, I felt so sure that I’d experienced it as a meditation- that I’d actually done the walking and the looking and the searching.

Or maybe it was just a glass or two of wine too many before bed?

Things to celebrate

1.  That I live in UNESCO’s second City of Literature. I KNEW that there was a reason that I live here!

2.  That the Abortion Law Reform Bill might actually pass.

3. That St Kilda’s  stupendous Robert Harvey will have a send-off at Telstra Dome this Sunday- and I may just go!

Position, position, position

Today’s real estate agents really can’t hold a candle to those of the 1840s.  Not only did they offer champagne lunches at THEIR auctions, but their literary and biblical effusions really do put modern billboards and advertisements to shame.

But they rarely mention the fact that perhaps the sunlit rolling plains and luxuriant growth might have been occupied by Aboriginal people previously.  Notwithstanding John Batman’s countermanded attempt at a treaty, the official policy promulgated by Governor Bourke at the time stated that aboriginal people could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown.  Indeed, there was little acknowledgement that aboriginal people had even been on a particular piece of land. However, I did find this advertisement in the Port Phillip Herald of January that surprised me.  It’s for allotment 16, block 28 in Lonsdale Street (now part of the inner-city grid of Melbourne)

Who is there remembering Melbourne in her infancy…who knew Lonsdale-street as it was, so lately the quambi of the savage, would imagine that a period almost imperceptible would exhibit the same Lonsdale-street as the centre of the white-man’s comfort, as the spot to which all love to congregate, yet such is the fact, Lonsdale-street once the centre of savage orgies, with nought to break the silence of the forest, but the wild yell of the Australian Cannible, sheltered by his Mia Mia alike from the heat of summer and the chill of winter, now exhibits all the most fastidious could desire…

I have no idea what a ‘quambi’ is- wait- yes I do!  ‘My baby name’ website gives the meaning as Aboriginal for ’shelter’ should you decide to name your baby boy Quambi, which is, after all the site’s 50584th most popular baby name.  But how appealing- the memory of ’savage orgies’ in the location, and the ‘wild yell of the ‘Australian Cannible (sic)’. As they say, position, position, position…