essay
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY ESSAY
READING THE WEATHER
Morag Fraser
START WITH THE MEN FROM THE BUREAU of Meteorology. They are as good a gauge as any. I mean the ones who turn up each morning on local ABC radio and who use the quaintly formal language of their profession -- precipitation, rain-bearing systems -- not the television weather persons, who are decorative filters not authorities, and who would have even oncoming storms seem enticing.
We used simply to call them the men from the Weather Bureau. I regret the loss of the homelier term, not only because Bureau of Meteorology is impossible to say but because its predecessor had a genial familiarity that suited the informal precisions and probity of the Terrys or the Wards who come on air for a few minutes each day to let us know that the temperatures will top out a little higher than the forecast maximum or that we should be out into the paddocks right now because there's a sheep alert on and the Campaspe is rising. They are one of the staples of Australian life. No side, no spin. No vested interest. They deal in such large matters -- acts of God as the insurance forms put it -- that their utterance must sometimes be grave. But wry too because they know they work in probabilities and the weather gods have it in for them as for us. And that we who listen will forget a hundred days of accurate forecast but blame them for the one downpour that comes out of a clear blue sky. I always thought it was a savage slur that the balaclavaed exponents of a particular brand of twentieth century domestic terrorism should have been called the Weathermen. Unfair. These are our dependable men. The nation's barometers. Ever tried to bribe a barometer? You can smash its glass in but you can't suborn it. Same with the men from the Bureau: they have nothing to gain and nothing to lose from telling the weather the way they see it -- through complex instruments and out of long experience. On the evidence. They are small lords of the empirical who speak a language that begins in their particular knowledge and ends by fusing with our general experience.
That touch of drizzle will have cleared away by noon and although the cloud will lift it still won't be as good as the feel of yesterday's sun on your back.
The men from the Bureau are an institution. And, just at this particular moment, Australian historians are another. Not all of them, but enough to prompt the question, why? Why such public prominence and pervasive influence when academic history seems beset as most humanities are, and the subject is near terminal in so many schools?
Does it have something to do with a renewed hankering after evidence, after credible narrators in an age of free-wheeling information? Or with a millennial anxiety about who we are and where we are going? I don't know, but the phenomenon is intriguing enough.
Some historians notably demonstrate a readiness to look backwards and forwards as well as at the intricacies of their own chosen moment or period. Here is one famous example. It is from Paul Keating's speech given in Redfern Park in 1992, the Year of the World's Indigenous People. Keating's advisor and speech writer at the time was Don Watson, historian and author of Caledonia Australis, Scottish Highlanders on the frontier of Australia.
However intractable the problems may seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure -- any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and the dispossessed is to risk being dragged down. That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.
Caledonia Australis was the book that first gave me any clear sense of my own heritage in this country. Those bones in Gippsland that now mix with the bones of murdered, dispossessed, occasionally befriended Aborigines were my Scots ancestors, who had their own tales of dispossession to drive, if not justify them, and who were both savage and sympathetic to the indigenous people they encountered. But it was not moral outrage that I took from Watson, it was history -- detail, grating fact, evidence, the traces of complexity in both event and human motivation. I remember particularly his prefatory note berating the 1970s' history classroom treatment of Aborigines as different from the treatment, say, of the gold rush -- not a factual investigation but 'a moral one, a good work-out for young consciences'. In schools, Watson complained, 'much as they had been at the end of the encounter on the frontier...the Aborigines were handed over for spiritual instruction'.
In the Redfern speech, there is a fusion of rousing indignation (as you'd expect on such an occasion) and history and a conclusion derived from evidence. But there is one further element: a quality of imaginative understanding -- the leap you'd ask of a good historian.
We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians -- the people to whom most injustice has been done?...
The Redfern speech is now an historical document in itself, and all Australians know how contentious its use of 'we' has become, how disputed the 'act of recognition' under the political leadership that followed Keating. Keating/Watson must have had some inkling of the reaction that would inevitably come because it is anticipated in the speech: 'I do not believe that report [of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody] should fill us with guilt. Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion. I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit. All of us.'
It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask -- how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
That openness of heart is a moral reflex but also an historian's virtue -- as it is a citizen's. It is a quality that Inga Clendinnen exhibits -- a willingness to go as far as is possible into the mesh of another person's being. Not always willingly but necessarily, if one is to do justice to their history. The willingness is habitual in, for example, historian Greg Dening. Clendinnen explains some of the complexity of the process in 'Beginnings', the first chapter of her 1998 award-winning study, Reading the Holocaust. She analyses her historian's paralysis when at first she could not break into her subject:
I felt guilt about my bafflement because I suspected its origins: that it arose because my reading of the Holocaust had been no more than dutiful: that I had refused full imaginative engagement. I had felt a similar repugnance before. I had circled the Aztecs of Mexico for years before I decided to write about them, because I was unwilling to commit myself to the full pursuit of a people for whom the ritualised killing of humans was, in some seasons, a daily event. A decade of reading and thinking later, I thought I at least understood what the Aztecs had been up to.
'Full imaginative engagement' is a discipline, not a wallow in someone else's misery or a vicarious slather in their evil. Or even in their goodness. Goodness is just as difficult to fathom as evil. But full imaginative engagement is not the norm in Australian public life at the moment. Rather we are encouraged to huddle, or manoeuvre in our mainstream boxes, praying all the while that the cardboard will keep out the infection of the other.
I watched Inga Clendinnen's 'full imaginative engagement' in operation one night. It has edges as sharp as a chiton's teeth. Which is what one wants from an historian -- a probing tool tough enough to withstand the abrasions of encounter.
It was early this year, on one of the many occasions when Clendinnen was talking in public about the genesis of her most recent, autobiographical work, Tiger's Eye. The audience was a general one, with a sprinkling of academic historians. They were enthusiastic -- Tiger's Eye seems to have struck a chord among the reading public much as Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father did. But it wasn't the heady dynamic of the moment that struck me, although that was remarkable enough. It was something Clendinnen said in response to a question about the Stolen Generation Report. Clendinnen's answer was as rich in historical context and sympathetic engagement as her Boyer Lectures had been. Remember the opening of those? -- 'I begin with the story of an incident on a beach. The place is the southwest coast of what we now call Western Australia. The year is 1801.' And then follows the unforgettable fragment of story about the Aboriginal woman briefly 'caught' by Baudin's expedition, a woman to whom, as Clendinnen puts it, 'no harm was intended', but to whom 'harm was almost certainly done'. On this occasion Clendinnen answered fully about the stolen generation, and with a caustic disregard for the political revisions that would see the word 'stolen' in quotation marks or shrouded in euphemism. But she also made a characteristic historian's comment about the shape of the Report itself, particularly about what she called the boxes which serve as sign posts or directives to understanding. They stuck in her historian's craw. Don't do the interpretation for me, for any of us -- that was the gist of her criticism. And it was profoundly reassuring, the more so because this was a sympathetic audience. And from one of those the last thing you wanted to take away is the warm glow of mutual assurance -- a rictus of the converted.
One of the most offensive reflexes of our current political regime is its assumption that it knows what its critics or its opposition thinks, and can pigeonhole or dispense with them accordingly. No engagement necessary. It's a paranoid response, and hardly democratic because it closes down debate. It is also one of the inevitable infections of an adversarial style of parliamentary democracy, though the current crop of incumbents have proved particularly susceptible. But politicians have no monopoly on it: it afflicts all groups, that ready assumption that your antagonist is brimming with motive and most of it malign. Which is why Clendinnen's caution about being stage-managed into a response -- particularly the one we might want to have -- was both salutary and gratifying. It was like a bond, a guarantee from one representative of one group -- the historians -- that you couldn't bet on them. So stay on your mettle. They will neither confirm nor deny your suspicions to order.
Clendinnen's caution is echoed daily by the new ABC Radio National Arts Program presenter, Michael Cathcart. Cathcart's mode is not inquisitorial but it is sceptical. He is an historian and it shows, particularly in a daily context of arts talk and arts news which can easily retreat (and so often has retreated) into hermetic codes and acritical excitement. Cathcart has an Alice quality about him that is both disconcerting and curiously enabling. I remember one particular interview, done on the gad as he was being toured through the huge outdoor forest installation (garden? wilderness? experiment? homage?) in the new Melbourne Museum. His guide was full of detail, explication, museological theory -- all in the best of faith. But why an introduced mountain ash forest here when there is a real one only a few kilometres away in the Dandenongs? Cathcart asked. Good question. And a correspondingly good answer followed, with a rationale that had obviously been thought through, but would not otherwise have been on the tip of the curator's tongue. And without the genial interrogation, those of us listening would have been left as we so often are, feeling vaguely irritated, wondering what the hell was going on and then drifting away because the questions we wanted answered were not forthcoming. There was a similar pattern when Cathcart asked the same curator what the ideology was. Not aggressively, but with the kind of importunate enthusiasm that prompts an answer not a defence.
Cathcart's style may be as much a personal quality (plus some excellent production assistance) as an historian's trademark. But the terrier instinct -- the going after fact, after clarity, the refusal to be awed or verballed into admiration -- makes for very good radio whatever its genesis.
Another characteristic that Cathcart shares with Inga Clendinnen, and with other historians like Ken Inglis or Henry Reynolds, is his ability to translate complex material in such a way that it becomes publicly accessible -- but without being minced or traduced. It might be a discussion of the current state ('the ideology'?) of contemporary dance, or a wide ranging and very edgy post-performance analysis of a contemporary opera. His March interview with librettist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway and opera director Saskia Boddeka after the Adelaide Festival premiere of Writing to Vermeer was vintage arts radio -- full of spark and tension, certainly far more revealing than I think Peter Greenaway could possibly have intended. Daring stuff, held together by Cathcart's piano-wire technique -- apparently artless, perfectly balanced. It was also, as all Cathcart's programs are, intuitively turned outward, to an audience, its educative function clear but never constraining.
All of these historians, Clendinnen, Henry Reynolds, Michael Cathcart, Ken Inglis -- to name just a few -- take the public reception of their professional work seriously. And they have, fortunately, found publishers or broadcast media that share their commitment. Although perhaps when Melbourne University Press first undertook to publish Ken Inglis' Sacred Places, his long-time-coming account of Australian war memorials -- grand institutional, like the Australian War Memorial, or small town commemorative -- they might not have realised quite what a phenomenon they had on their hands. The extraordinary popular success of Sacred Places (a clutch of awards, for literature as well as history, as with Inga Clendinnen) is, I take it, just one more barometric reading of the culture. We want to know more about the meaning of what we do. And we want guides who have done the field work. I recall one discussion with two Australian writers, neither of them an historian, and both born closer to the Vietnam War than World War II. Both made a point of extolling the sheer labour and the integrity of Inglis' work. My prejudices would have had them both dismissive of such endeavour, such sifting of evidence. It's good to be surprised.
With historian Henry Reynolds we have to take the notion of public reception a few steps further. Reynolds, for nearly two decades, has been engaged in the rewriting of the history of race relations in Australia. Although even to put it like that is to depopulate the territory -- a terra nullius trick -- when what Reynolds has so characteristically done is put people back into the land, name them, give them back their time and place, in so far as that can be done. His work has had its most profound public extension in the Mabo judgment in the High court and in the ensuing legislation. And despite the recurrent flurries of dissent -- the 'black armband' name calling -- Reynold's history has now issued into law. He wrote in a language, worked in a way that was particularly annexable to legal deliberation. But in later works, most notably his more personal Why Weren't We Told?, Reynolds risks some personal revelations -- as does Inga Clendinnen in Tiger's Eye. These two books are not history as historians characteristically do it, just as Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father is not philosophy as philosophers do it. But all three have this effect -- they make disciplines more hospitable to one another; they open up paths for readers. The testimony they offer here animates their findings elsewhere.
In Why Weren't We Told? Reynolds describes the psychological depth of racial fear by recounting some of his own dreams. This is one:
The second dream was set in the garden. I was standing with a group of Aboriginal men. Somehow my contact lenses had come out and had fallen onto a concrete path. Sometimes one man, sometimes several, stamped on them despite my protests and anguish. The men were often strangers to me. Sometimes I knew who they were. One was my friend Eddie Mabo.
We have come a long way from the 1970s classroom moral fervour that so exercised Don Watson. What Henry Reynolds does in this extract is make complacency impossible and denial unnecessary. If someone with his breadth of historical knowledge and personal experience of Aboriginal culture, of Aboriginal friendship, is still occasionally locked in the labyrinth of his subconscious, then what we can conclude is that mixed states of mind are not shameful -- they are vantage points. And thus the tricky business of collective guilt becomes just that much less fraught.
In Australia there is a disjunction between what historians bring to the public mind and what filters through in the form of public policy. The lag is predictable. And the history is still there for the reading. But its dissemination -- through schooling, through tertiary education, through radio, television and the internet, is another question.
But art sometimes answers questions. Art and history will collude. In time. Or so I concluded after walking, a few weeks ago, around a retrospective exhibition of the photographs of Walker Evans in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Evans, who died in 1975, is everywhere in New York at the moment -- at the Museum of Modern Art, in private galleries -- and his work will turn up everywhere else in due course. You see notices for him in the subway, exhibition advertisements in newsstand brochures, in catalogues, in the press. The banners, simply 'Walker Evans', flap outside the Met, as large as those that herald 'Painters in Paris, 1895-1950' (lashings of Picasso).