From Matthew Richardson

Dear Editor,
  For anyone interested in publishing the insights of academics as widely as possible, the attitudes in Paul Dawson's letter (ABR September, 1998) are exasperating. His array of obstacles to academic participation in community discourse argues in favour of ivory tower seclusion.
  The call for academics to 'write more accessible prose' he regards as a proposal that they abandon academic pursuits such as 'ideas about relativism, intertexuality and the death of the author'. Academic silence in the public sphere he blames on gatekeepers from the literary establishment.
  But the lucid prose of the letter itself helps demonstrate that writing comprehensibly does not prevent a meaning being conveyed. Are there gatekeepers denying access to ideas and content? Are academics being asked to surrender a useful tool when invited temporarily to keep to their mother tongue?
  More often the obstacle is their incapacity to express themselves properly. Asked to write a book or article they degenerate into abuse of language. Their subordinate clauses devour one another. Words that normal people understand are everywhere replaced by unpublishable ones like 'referentialities', the verb 'critique' and the noun 'problematic'. Non-academic readers are thereby alienated under the false pretence that common language lacks the vocabulary required by advanced studies. If only academics were required to express their findings in good English they could, and it would sharpen their understanding.
  A further illusory impediment to participation in the community is the presumption that it happens only through newspapers and magazines. Academics are not disqualified from broadcasting. And it is just self-fulfilling expectation that makes most of the books they write unfit for the general market. The objection that there are no promotion points in popular publication -- even if it mattered -- is untrue of books.
  More mysterious is Paul Dawson's notion that dealing with issues of publicly recognised importance means abandoning academic pursuits. Why would you bother with intertexuality and relativity if you're not keeping in view their relationship to other important issues? Even a study of semi-colons in a nineteenth century poem can be worthwhile -- but only for its potential to shed light on other matters which are important to many.
   Without that potential, intertexuality and every other academic pursuit have no more worth than making pot pourri or collecting stubby holders. If academics aren't committed to general enlightenment, we ought to dismiss them and let them carry on their arcane hobbies in Parthia.

Matthew Richardson
Publisher
Rushcutters Bay, NSW

From Graham Williams

Dear Editor,
  While it is an undoubtedly good thing that ABR reviews children's books. the contribution by Barry Carozzi (ABR August 1998) on Geoffrey McSkimming's Ascent into Asgard was at best a mixed blessing.
  His opening gambit was a revelation. 'Capt.W.E. Johns...created Gimlet as the female counterpart of Biggles' was a real epiphany. There was I thinking Gimlet was a kind of SAS precursor who did the dirty work Biggles was too gentlemanly to do. I don't have the book any longer, but wasn't one of the titles Gimlet Bores In ? Suddenly my confused Adolescence took a different shape, and some of the more curious sexual practices of British MPs made sense. I assume that Worrals of the WAF was an early try out for The Crying Game.
  Carozzi's assertion that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza belong in a 'boys own/girls own adventure genre' did make me wonder whether he had read Quixote in any form, but things got worse.
  Despite being excessively long winded, his review gave us little more than a plot summary and 'enjoyable enough if you like this sort of thing'. Given that 'this sort of thing' is apparently 'not politically correct' (a lazy piece of quasi-journalism anyway) one might have expected more. Is it sexist? Racist? Fascist? A little bit of all the above? And if so, is that OK if it's wrapped in fairy floss?

Graham Williams
UTS, Sydney, NSW

From Barry Hill

Dear Editor,
  We all have our blind spots, I suspect, even Barthes. But who are the blind ones here, when the offending remark that Gelder and Jacobs (ABR September 1998) (mis)quote was 'factually inadequate' -- not 'factually inaccurate' (on Wik). Their glaring inadequacy was in a vague summary of the Wik decision as 'advocating the "co-existence" of Aboriginal and pastoralists' rights to leaseholds in northern Queensland'. What about that proviso that wherever the rights of native title holders were in conflict, the pastoralists' rights would always prevail? Would Gelder and Jacobs kindly point out to me where exactly they dealt with the fact of that proviso?
  Perceptions, if they are to be politically useful in the post-colonial struggle we are in, like it or not, have to be factually correct, when facts are relevant. The other fact that is easily lost sight of in their book, and even more so in their hysterical column, is that for all their problematising of the sacred on the basis of a handful of cases, there are hundreds of sacred sites around Australia that remain recognised. So we can't generally suggest that sympathy for a sacred site that is 'secure and exclusive' is the product of 'nostalgia'. Discoursing about discourse does tend to overlook the simple truth that the sacred is lived; it is real. Essaying that tends to put this fact on the same conceptual scale as the mining lobby's propaganda has something wrong with it. Gelder and Jacobs write from on high, and at an emotional remove from the guts of the debate.
  So I wasn't objecting to 'post-colonial' -- far from it -- I was worrying about their species of it, its political purport and its personal inadequacy. They say the post-colonial is a 'troubling condition'. Exactly. All the more reason to try to find a way of writing into the condition that bears upon the complexities of experience, and not merely 'ideas'. Uncanny Australia is uncannily like Songlines: it is founded on bookish conceits without getting out of the car.
  Gelder and Jacobs chose to be blind to my first three paragraphs because they raised the most difficult question of all: how does one's own sense of the sacred bear upon the cultural predicament of indigenous people? As if our secularising culture has done the thinking and feeling for them, they have danced about the sacred without their feet touching the fround -- least of all the ground of their own religious beliefs or lack of them. It's a class act, writing so much about a troubled condition in such an untroubled way.
  But we do seem to agree on one fact about post-colonial performances: there are no final certainties, especially with regard to the content of one's analysis. Gelder and jacobs quite liked my book The Rock, becuase it was out and about with regard to the uncertainties of storytelling. If we could find a time to go camping together, maybe I could tell them about my biography of T.G.H. Strehlow, a post-colonial subject if ever there was one.

Barry Hill
Queenscliffe, Vic