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Don Anderson: 'You're Not All Right, Jack'
I WAS CROSS. REALLY, really cross. I was prepared to cancel my subscription to the English magazine, Granta, of which I possess a complete set, even before I had received issue No. 70 of this 'magazine of new writing' -- Australia: The New New World. This rage to cancel an order attacked me when I saw the full-page advertisement on the back page of the New York Review of Books. Contributors included: Murray Bail, Peter Carey, Peter Conrad, Robyn Davidson, Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, David Moore, Frank Moorhouse, Les Murray, Tim Winton. Distinguished, yes, but 'new': hardly New to the British and American subscribers? Doubtless, but hardly representative of 'Australian' and 'new'.
But that wasn't what made me really, really, really cross. Ropeable, actually. There, in the advertisement, between 'Grenville' and 'Keneally' was the Mancunian Howard Jacobson, who spent a brief period in Sydney University's English Department in the 1960s, returned to Melbourne as a labourer somewhat later, and is an English comic novelist pure and simple. Well, I'm not so sure about the 'pure'; Suzanne Kiernan once memorably described one of his forgettable novels as the sort of thing that gives smut a bad name. But that's all we need -- another 'Weeping Pom', as he styles himself, explaining us to the world. Now I don't want to go on about 'Howard's Way' too much, because I imagine that, after various recent accounts of evenements in the Sydney English Department in the 'sixties by Andrew Riemer, Michael Wilding, John Wiltshire and Terry Collits, any literate Australian under the age of fifty-five has heard quite enough about those Great Days. And I confess to finding Jacobson's piece genuinely funny. I like his suggestion that 'Sydney' is ' a quiet, balding Jewish accountant's name'.
But I am not prepared to forgive Granta's editor, Ian Jack, for including Howard Jacobson, even if to do so be a sales device in the UK, or revenge on Australia for inflicting Germaine Greer on Great Britain. Jack spent a brief time in Australia, and may have followed the tactic of the creators of The Simpsons who, when putting together their Australian episode, made a point of knowing nothing about Australia. We were predictably offended. Yet it's not that we can't take criticism; it's rather that we are justified in feeling victims of some neverending misrepresentation. Jack begins his Introduction by saluting Australia's sporting prowess. So, he's trying in his sales pitch with the Olympics -- maybe there'll be a copy of Granta in every Qantas seat pocket through September -- but those of us who have perused the Australia Council/Saatchi & Saatchi Australians and the Arts Report have really had enough of that tactic. One would not want, however, to deny him his reading of Australia's condition, here and now:
Asia's economic boom turned to slump, and though the Australian economy was immune -- in fact grew -- Asia no longer seemed quite the most promising political destination. The electorate replaced Keating's administration [is that an Americanisation?] with a more conservative government. No national apology was offered to the Aborigines. In 1999, the referendum to secure a republic failed. And so Australia remains in an ambiguous condition and continues to argue with itself; a good place, though not only for those reasons, to be a writer.
Would it be over-sensitive to suggest that that is rather a high price to pay for being a writer, or over-reacting to deduce from that premise that Australia might produce even better writers were it a totalitarian state? One might note Jack's acknowledging that his publication includes 'no writing by Aborigines, or for that matter by any Australians without an Anglo-Celtic-sounding surname', while declining to accept his apology: 'Granta is primarily concerned with writing, on which terrifying and contentious judgments have to be made.' There is something almost vomit-inducing about the use of 'terrifying' in that contentious context. One can only assume that Jack was neither nimble nor attentive enough to see Aboriginal writing. Regarding ethnic diversity, the current Overland makes the convincing suggestion that Pi O speaks for Australia's underclass no less eloquently than Les Murray. And no disrespect to Les Murray, but could Jack really find only one Australian poet to include? (John Tranter features now and then in the London Review of Books.) There is no shortage of exciting younger writers domiciled in Australia, yet Jack wastes fifty pages on a piece of mawkish tosh by Ben Rice, who is described thus: 'born in Devon in 1972, Pabby and Dingan is his first published work and will be published later this year by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Knopf in the US. He lives in London.' The story is set in Lightning Ridge. Does anyone know anything more about Mr Rice? Is the book to be published, as distinguished from distributed, in Australia?
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