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Robyn
Archer
Platform Papers No. 4: The Myth of the
Mainstream: Politics and the Performing
Arts in Australia
Currency House, $12.95 pb, 70 pp, 0 9757301
0 X
Helen
Reddy
The Woman I Am: A Memoir
HarperCollins, $29.95 pb, 358 pp, 0 7322
8035 4
IN
1964 the Australian television show
Bandstand set up an annual talent contest
called Bandstand Starflight International.
In its first year, one of the national
finalists was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl
called Robyn Smith, who later changed
her surname to Archer. The following
year, the contest was won by a 24-year-old
professional singer called Helen Reddy.
Reddy and Archer were both born in Australia
in the 1940s, to parents who were themselves
entertainers. Both have had successful
careers as singers. Both are associated
nationally and internationally with
feminism, and have been so ever since
the mid-1970s. Reddy has won a Grammy,
hosted her own US prime-time tele-vision
variety show, and had three number one
hit singles in the same year. Archer’s
lifetime of work in singing, music theatre
and arts festival directorships has
earned her formal honours in Australia
and Europe: she was made Officer of
the Order of Australia in 2000 and Chevalier
du l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
in 2001. And this year they’ve
each published a book.
Archer’s long essay is a brilliantly
written, intellectally shining and occasionally
very funny piece of polemic by a practising
artist and old lefty with a sharp contemporary
eye and an argument about the nature
of art and its relationship to the government
on the one hand and the population on
the other. It engages directly with
the mood and culture of contemporary
Australia. It is the fourth in a series
of quarterly essays on the performing
arts, Platform Papers, being published
by that admirable insti-tution the Currency
Press.
By contrast, Reddy’s chunky celeb
memoir, cliché-ridden and under-structured,
is intellectually non-challenging and
politically naïve. It is a discontinuous
narrative full of personal anecdotes
and musings, tales of the famous, scraps
of intriguing celebrity gossip, a lot
of extremely interesting stuff about
life as a professional performer, and
some arrestingly shrewd insights buried
in a morass of California New Age ‘wisdom’,
some of which goes beyond the realm
of the merely batty into the realm of
the truly barking.
It is probably a mistake to trash other
people’s enthu-siasms, much less
their beliefs, particularly when some
of one’s own might also be regarded
as a bit dotty. But passages like this
will stop even the most tolerant reader
cold: ‘The baby boomers, the generation
that followed World War II, were now
in college. Many of them were souls
who had reincarnated after dying in
that war and they were determined not
to have their lives cut short again
so soon by another one.’ Reddy
claims to have foreseen the death of
Bobby Kennedy, and is given to calling
certain people ‘earth angels’,
by which she seems to mean that they’re
nice. She takes even the most slender
coincidences as signs and portents.
At one point, she writes ‘it came
to me via my sixth sense that Wallis,
Duchess of Windsor, had been King Richard
III’.
If there’s something very California
about all this (including the ongoing
fascination with the British royal family),
then there is also, more generally,
something very American about the fact
that Reddy seems to have had an irony
bypass. Not only does she carry around
a grab-bag of New Age metaphysics, but
she is uncritically accepting of the
values and terminology of American show
business: stars are ‘big’,
acts are ‘top’, suburbs are
‘exclusive’.
But she can also be extremely shrewd
and sharp, especially about exploitation
for monetary gain. There is, for example,
a fascinating analysis of the layout
of Las Vegas casinos and the hideousness
of accommodation designed to force the
hapless guest out of her room and back
down into the casino. Reddy’s own
seemingly limitless credulity about
all matters New Age is in sharp contrast
with her hard-won, hard-nosed realism
about the business, the practices and
environments in which, as an entertainer,
she made her name and career. On the
subject of feminism, in which cause
her anthemic song I Am Woman probably
raised more female consciousnesses than
any other single phenomenon, she is
properly disenchanted with the US: ‘If
you had told me thirty years ago that
in the United States in the year 2004,
no female presidential candidate had
ever been nominated by either of the
duopolistic parties … I would not
have believed you.’
As far as these two books are concerned,
however, it’s not feminism but
music that provides an almost spooky
moment of congruence. Archer’s
argument about the ‘mainstream’
is too complex and detailed to summarise,
but one of its key points is the importance
of experimental art, particularly art
that questions, blurs and crosses the
traditional boundaries of genre. She
says of the Australia Council that:
A
conservative view of the arts still
dominates and is reflected in the
division of the Performing Arts into
the discrete sectors of Theatre, Music,
Dance, Visual Arts and Opera. The
fact that these generic borders have
disappeared in the best and most successful
work all over the world means nothing
to these bureaucrats, who are restructuring
according to their preferred view,
no matter how out of step they may
be with the ways of artists in the
twenty-first century.
Reddy,
though her remarks are confined to the
field of music, makes a startlingly
similar observation of her arrival on
the American music scene forty years
earlier:
As
I had always been a jazz fan, I tended
to dismiss rock or folk artists as
three-chord wonders who couldn’t
change key without a capo. In other
words, I was an élitist musical
snob. Now I was seeing and hearing
rock musicians like The Blues Project,
who were fusing genres, electrifying
acoustic instruments and knocking
down musical walls I hadn’t known
were there.
Archer’s
essay seems to have been written at
least partly in response to the Australia
Council’s ‘proposed restructuring’.
Since it was published, the Australian
Council has confirmed that, as feared,
the New Media and Community Cultural
Development Boards are both to be abolished,
though this question had to be asked
three times before it got a direct answer
from the person on the other end of
the phone when I rang the Council on
May 8 to check. Archer maintains, rightly
of course, that the proposed changes
will bring the Council further into
line with the Howard government’s
‘mainstream’ mindset, the
fostering of a relaxed and comfortable
Australia that doesn’t bother its
sensible head about flaky, élitist
things like innovation and originality
in art.
Finally, as though its intellectual
energy and passionate engagement with
contemporary Australia were not enough
to recommend Archer’s essay, some
of it is drop-dead funny as well —
like this classic paragraph lamenting
the dumbing-down of Australia and its
manifestation in the increasing impoverishment
of our language:
The
subtlety of language, which should
be the most prized gift of humanity,
is abandoned. As passengers leap at
midnight from the good ship Apostrophe
into the icy waters of misinformation,
the wreckage they cling to is captained
by talk-back radio jocks and newsprint
‘opinion’-mongers …
They cling on in hope, but, alas,
the rescue boat steered by Don Watson
— now, in my fantasy, looking
a bit like George Clooney in The Perfect
Storm — may be too far away.
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