Graham Little The Public Emotions: From Mourning to Hope
ABC Books $22.95pb, 289pp,
0 7333 0683 7
READING THIS BOOK, for some reason, I recalled an incident from my childhood. I was selling papers on North Sydney station on the day of the Granville rail disaster. There were two afternoon papers in Sydney at that time and both brought out special editions. These were the days before Walkmans, so, unless you were at home or in the car, you read your news. It was impossible on such an occasion to keep up with demand for papers. I had to ask somebody what the word 'carnage', splashed across the front page of one of them, meant. But what I remember most is the way in which people took their papers and went off with them alone. As the peak hour crowd started to thicken on the platform, it became harder and harder for commuters to find any space of their own. Many newspapers were held firmly in front of faces to protect the reader from scrutiny. All of these commuters had come to work by train that day. Numbers of them had come from the Blue Mountains, the origin of the train in which so many were killed that morning. They were running high with emotion. They had shared a significant experience: survival. Yet they sought privacy. Hardly anyone spoke.
Graham Little's new book sheds a lot of light on a situation like this. It makes you wonder to what extent the handling of public emotion has changed in Australia since the late seventies. Public emotion is not new to us. One of our icons is footage of a young man dancing along tram tracks in Martin Place at the end of World War II. In the background are crowds and streamers. The atmosphere of the whole city is celebratory. Yet the icon is of an individual, dancing alone. His emotion is shared. It is also private. The man is dancing along a fine line. This is what makes the footage rich in suggested meaning.
The Granville rail disaster is sometimes said to be the first occasion on which Australians broke the tyranny of 'a couple of Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down', the first time of which counsellors were seen working in public rather than behind closed doors. It was the first time that difficult emotions, as opposed to complex but acceptable ones such as patriotism, were given public legitimacy. Think of images of troops on the Kokoda trail reaching a Salvation Army post and gratefully accepting a cup of hot tea. These are images of warmth and comfort, but also of toughness. It's as if, in the absence of a good lie down, all needs can be met by a cup of tea. Compare these with images of Salvation Army officers kneeling for hours beside the twisted wreckage of rolling stock in 1977. There is a difference. The late seventies also saw the rise of the ersatz nationalism of 'Come on, Aussie, Come on', in which patriotic sporting emotion was stirred for the benefit of one man's economic interests. It seemed that once emotion was legitimated, it was fair game for exploitation. John Singleton started using words like 'vulnerability'.
These are not situations that Graham Little deals with directly and I apologise if I have wandered into the undergrowth of my own agenda. Little probes situations such as the death of Princess Diana, the infidelities of Bill Clinton and the rise of One Nation. This is a searching book which is bound to provoke personal recognitions and fire the reader off on individual tangents. How did I respond to the Thredbo tragedy? Did I feel manipulated by coverage of the waterside conflict of early 1998? What distinguished my reaction to Cheryl Kernot, as a media personality, from my reaction to Pauline Hanson?
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Michael McGirr, a Jesuit priest, is the publisher of Eureka Street and editor of Australian Catholics.