Four short prose pieces: Chris Jones

Four short prose pieces It is raining fish The wild melons growing in summer over the black soil plains of north west New South Wales are called paddy melons. I once told some of my Sydney friends how it rains fish out here in the violent late summer, late afternoon thunderstorms. They refused to believe me. No bullshit, fair dinkum, it rains little fish, about a quarter to half an inch long, sucked up from waterholes which have not dried out in the hot sun with strong updrafts to be dropped again into puddles and waterholes, squiggling and drying out in the small and medium sized puddles to become fish emulsion fertilizer and surviving in the larger lagoons to again be sucked up and fall with the rain down onto the plains. Bobby cod, they are called, and that is how fish spread across the plains. A cowboy has left a note for me to meet him in the beat across the road from where I live. We leave our felt tip truths on toilet walls. That is how we meet. There is nothing as sensual, as erotic as making love to a cowboy in the swishing black mud as the late afternoon summer storms belt heavy fish rain onto our wet bodies. welcome to my transcendental operating system you looking at operating system computer screen cathode rays or lcd flat panel (should that be lsd) is it micro $oft windows macintosh redhat linux bluecurve with look and feel desktop graphic user interface on graphic representation transcendental surface words typeface letters graphic semiotic information and this representation caught on surface effect abstract expressionist collage and pseudo airbrush cutups application and repetition repeating repeating repeating repeating yesterday repeating you with sad passion on graphic desktops on this surface on the way to hack to break through to get at code always petulantly fighting your computer transcendental code generations generations generations to break through the operating system doing what has to do to fit into doing what it can do imposing reading procedure on writing notes to get inside the system and hack a smoother way to code to step on a console ascii text will this be source code shell scripts and configuration files not really believing the source is there compiling yet another transcendental surface in ascii typeface console user interface representation computer screen in your face graphics and text console in so far as you can talk about narrative structure it is a process of hacking I must confess I really must confess to having somewhat of a criminal nature. You see, a time ago I needed to read the cards so as to proceed with this undertaking yet had with me no such cards. As chance would have it with my wanders I found myself in a large city, Brisbane, in Queensland, Australia, and knowing that tarot cards could be purchased in almost any bookshop for a few dollars I set about searching the Brisbane bookshops. Bookshop after bookshop I went into asking for cards and none would admit that they stocked such items. Finally, finally, I came to a large chain of bookshops; actually a small bookshop in an out of the way suburban shopping centre. Well, I found a book on tarot cards with images of the cards so I again asked if they stocked tarot cards. The sales assistant, himself an obvious illegal in Queensland (I could tell by the way he looked at me queer like) pulled from the beneath the counter a single pack of cards, which he hid from the other customers with his hands and quickly placed into a brown paper bag. He then rang the price up, twenty dollars for the cards and two dollars for the book. Little did I know that buying or selling cards was quite illegal in Queensland, as was using them. It came under the law against practicing witchcraft. Anyway, I took the cards to where I was staying and began the laying out. I must confess that Osama Bin Laden is not my real name. It is the initials, you see, CJ, and the recorded date of my origin bears the number 666. I am AntiChrist, by police determinations with dialectical antithesis; I am the God of all hackers writing malicious code, a mega worm that will spread virus after virus all over the World Wide Web and bring the Internet crashing down faster then you can say blue screen of death. A perilous journey made to the land of black moonless nights filled with the frightening sounds of marsupial primates and night birds. I watch Gemini, the twin stars, rise in the western sky and higher to the north, Venus shines bright and then the shimmering glow of the Milky Way. In the morning wild horses come down from the mountains to drink quietly at the billabong and produce chemically mutated genes. I am GOD! You begin your journey on the transcendental plane arranging and re-arranging affects. Taking a tool to the job, a Kantian critical scalpel, you slice away in a formalist way at the job in hand, dissecting form, arranging and re-arranging the face's registered semiotic signs of affect's trauma event's alien contact. You don't know but it happens anyway to leave the wounds and still the scalpel slices looking for affective cause, Platonic measures of truth, the alien in your face. Kant does not see, does not know his scalpel is dirty. Swarming with germs, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, you name it, infected faculties infect definite concepts and the economic relation between the definite concept and demonology succumbs to become all is demonology. Through black hole territory you travel across the face coming upon the event horizon of a huge and terrible black hole. A powerful extremely violent black hole, evil in-itself. Calling on all the forces of anti-gravity you can muster, clinging to the event horizon laid out as a plane, step by step you go, battling illusions everywhere. Illusions which if invested in, believed in too heavily, plunge you in an instant into this evil pulverising black hole. Finally, having survived the event horizon, finding a way out of this illusionary maze of affect registered as past emotion, you arrive in the future, on a plane of immanence. The cards turn as black as the ace of spades. There is no form here, only indifferent elements without form or function. A new face to be made where the genetic code which makes up a face is written. Genetic engineering which is no longer human. Nature is future smarter then you are. Writing with the hand of God. God exists but will I believe in him? You see, Mr. Policeman: I am God. Chris Jones

Eva Hesse: Nicki Katz

Eva Hesse: Tate Modern, London, November 13, 2002 - March 9, 2003 Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936. In 1939, the family escaped Nazi persecution and came to New York. In 1970, she died of a brain tumor. By 1965, in the second half of a career that was to span just a decade, Hesse had stopped painting and had begun to make sculptures and installations. Using such experimental materials as latex, fibreglass, polyester resin, rubberised cheesecloth, rope and cord, vinyl tubing and papier-mache. Due to the way in which she worked with these materials, they have become dangerously unstable over time, and so much of Hesse's work is now disintegrating, literally disappearing. The brevity of her life and the condensation of so many ideas into a single decade, give her work an atmosphere of urgency and immediacy. And so within Hesse's life and her work, there inherently lies the very tension at the heart of existence. In Hesse's 1965 line drawings in coloured ink of machine parts / body parts, organs and tubes wind their way across the paper with a delicacy and play that will continue to characterise her work. As will the images of disempowered body parts. But as opposed to being macabre, these pieces seem more concerned with movement; with the freshness of discovery. Her next leap was to harness these shapes and colours and create three dimensional paintings from them. They have the play of Rauschenberg, but the colours of Kandinsky. Metal bolts, plastic balls and styrofoam leap off the pristinely coloured surfaces. And there is the important introduction of wrapped and layered materials that will remain present from here on. Painted cotton cord, cord-wrapped metal, cloth-covered electrical wire. The work beats with the exuberance of discovery, the energy of movement and the freshness of colour (Hesse had studied colour with Josef Albers at Yale). Her mastery of colour is evident in every detail of these beautifully crafted objects, each painted in exquisite gradations; and yet by the following year, Hesse will reject almost all but the most muted of colours. In her final interview in 1970, Hesse had this to say about a work that she felt had become decorative; "That word or the way I use it or feel about it is the only art sin." Her use of rope which will recur throughout her work, is striking. In Ringaround Arosie, 1965, it is built-up and curled into breast-like shapes, complete with aerolas and nipples. Louise Bourgeois comes to mind, most especially in Hesse's post '65 work, in her early sculptures, with their fetishistic, erotic shapes. Both artists seem to have had a fascination with abstracting body parts in order to make sculptural mockeries of our frailties. The two women had exhibited together in 1966 and both of them were to work with latex. Hesse never used latex as a readymade - or indeed anything else - for she was extremely hands-on in her process and was interested in its malleable properties, and the way in which it behaved with other materials. "The materials I use are really casting materials. I don't want to use them as casting materials. I want to use them directly, eliminating making molds…" And this she did to great effect. Her suspended rubberised cheesecloths, (now too fragile to travel or even be exhibited on a permanent basis), are like sheets of skin. Her suspended latex rope pieces are like 3D Jackson Pollocks; atomic, chaotic and impossible to recreate. After 1965, Hesse left behind painting and expanded into these new materials in three dimensions with the same exuberance and energy. The Kandinsky like colours were gone, but the joy of discovery was still very much present. As if to almost formally reject painting, Hang Up, 1966, is of a large rectangular frame, meticulously bound in painted cloth, and from diagonally opposite ends of the empty frame a steel tube lurches out into the room. It is as if the sculpture is jumping away from the remnants of painting, out into the room, leaving the grey and empty frame alone. Long phallic sculptures bound in painted cord (Ingeminate, 1965), clear plastic bags in drooping sacks of net (Untitled Or Not Yet, 1966) and rope "paintings" (Ennead, 1966). These new pieces dangle, hang, flop and swing. And there is a contradiction at the heart of them all that makes them so very modern. The ostensible density of the phallic sculptures is belied by their hollow interiors, for they cover papier-mached balloons. The net bags are weighted down by metal balls hidden in their interiors. And the rope paintings that begin as ordered rows of dyed string threaded through a plywood backing, end in hopeless chaos as they slop messily to the floor. "…I was always aware that I could combine order and chaos, string and mass, huge and small." Contradiction, layering, repetition and the attempt to order of chaos, would become the hallmarks of Hesse's work over the next four years. The layering of the materials would give the work its sculptural formalism. But the materials that Hesse chose, and the way in which she manipulated them, would give her work its ongoing freshness and relevance. In the Metronomic Irregularity series, Hesse threads hundreds of cotton-covered wires across boards of painted sculp-metal. The work is meticulous in its construction. Things beneath the surface come to mind; veins, the inter-connectedness of human beings and experience. The second in this series of three (no longer in existence) is especially moving. There are three panels with wide gaps between them that are breached by these tenuous, chaotic fibres. The wires here are less taut and grid-like than the one on display at the Tate (the last in the series). In this piece the wires look more like waves or tendrils, like a sinuous muscle that is trying to flex. Hesse's deceptively smooth fibreglass pieces are among her last ever made. Using fibreglass and polyester resin she created both hanging and standing sculptures that look like translucent bone. In Connection, these pieces are suspended from the ceiling and repeated over and over again. But Hesse's repetitions were again also contradictions, as each was a uniquely crafted piece, no two alike. Inside the fibreglass, the cloth-covered metal wire is like human tissue; fragile and ephemeral. In Untitled, from 1970 (which is only untitled because of the artist's death, for Hesse was most particular about titling her work), the standing fibreglass sculptures suggest a circle of elders. These were also too fragile for the rigorous three city international exhibition tour, and so remained in the Pompidou. So much was left unfinished at the time of the artist's death that even the installation of this sculpture is uncertain. Haphazardly grouped they seem more environmental, like trees, or some form of atavistic plant life. But as they are now installed in Paris, they appear to represent something as close to figurative as Hesse's later work ever became. A circle of frail, old men; wrinkled, stooped and bent under the weight of time. It seems it was not the artist's intention to deliberately work with material that would eventually disappear. But not only was the material unstable, it was also highly toxic, and so there are even suggestions that Hesse unwittingly poisoned herself. She only had a few years to experiment with all these new ideas, to explore the limits of these materials, and to understand how they would behave in the future. Just before her death she said, "I am not sure what my stand on lasting really is. Part of me feels that it's superfluous and if I need to use rubber that is more important." But Hesse had not set out to make a statement about the transience of human life, for she was interested in finding solutions to the problem of disintegration in her work. The problem has ceased to be hers and continues to be one for conservators and curators. How will Hesse's work be seen in the coming years? Will it eventually be reproduced in spite of its highly idiosyncratic, individual nature? It seems there are no clear ideas about how to stop the onslaught of decay, only that any solution will entail further loss and compromise. This strange conundrum, both human and material, is now inextricable from the experience of Hesse's work. There is a bravery of artistic vision in the face of staggering personal odds that is central to the life and work of Eva Hesse. A desire to create defining art, to fearlessly experiment, and to pursue this with single-minded devotion. "I have learned that anything is possible… vision or concept will come through total risk, freedom, discipline. I will do it." Nicki Katz

Sarah Goffman: Christopher Chapman

Sarah Goffman: XXXXXXXL -Front Room, Sydney, December 2002 In June I met Sarah at Ruth's party. It was an Australiana theme and Sarah was dressed as a swaggy. At that time, Block gallery was across the road from Ruth's place, and Jason and Oscar took me over there to see Sarah's show. I got to see it twice because, later, we went there again to find a stash of beer. This night-time viewing has remained with me because Sarah often uses coloured lights in her installations, and the effect was striking in a modest and poetic way. Here, there were rotating gels, so that things were bathed in shifting hues. This added to the floaty, underwater feel of the work: plastic bags like ghosts, a strange wading pool full of floating cigarette lighters, an inverted clear-plastic umbrella containing a variety of found rings (jewelry), and other collections of things... At Artspace as a part of the Lempriere prize exhibition, Sarah's work was more hermetic but equally atomised, this time using the natural light and structure of a gallery window (at least that's what I remember). What struck me initially about the work at Block was how so many kinds of different vectors were overlaid and how the thing seemed like a diagram or schizoid map. There were connections between objects and materials because of their materiality (plastic, water, light), and networks of formal associations. And what made this stranger was the social connections that many of these things carried: their individual histories, their previous and on-going changing uses. At Block, this happened too. Collections of stuff (found and made, like the clock faces); things whose use values were stretched (big pants / curtains); and the use of lights and transparent materials to set up a supremely evocative atmosphere. Here there was living plant matter too: branches in vessels of water, some long lengths of branch under-lit by a strip of white LED, and outside the door in the hallway, a potted shrub behind a leaning sheet of glass. Within the installation as an overall thing were micro-narratives: a little box with a photo and some wire, and collections of images and objects grouped according to unknown formulas. The thing smelled nice because of honey incense and a smelly advertisement for Majora perfume torn from a magazine and taped to the wall. Spookily, inside water-filled bags and vessels were plastic skeletons, and strange-looking clumps of waxed wool. These elements, and the central placement of a sheet of glass on trestle legs, under-lit, gave this work the sense of some kind of laboratory, or hot-house, moreso than the other two I had seen. As it got darker the subtleties of the lighting began to transform and enhance elements of the work. After the opening was a party, and late at night, the installation, and the experience of being inside it, became stranger and more mesmerising. Chris Chapman

What does art really do? A reflection on art, context and agency.

What does art really do? A reflection on art, context and agency. We all knew that USA won his latest war against Iraq the moment we saw on our televisions the huge head of one of Saddam Hussein's social realists statues being covered with an American flag. This was the image the media liked and broadcasted ad nauseam. Much could be read into it. What happened next was even more interesting: the American flag was replaced with a pre-Saddam Iraqi flag, then the statue was torn down from its pedestal by a tank, and attacked by Iraqis. The statue was literally bashed to death, and with it the rule of Saddam Hussein. These news story, repeated on a loop by television stations all over the world as the 'it' story on Iraq invasion and defeat, made me reflect on what art really does. In the specific case what the statue did. Media images of course are powerful, much more than art, and the American flag on Saddam's head is now an iconic image of our recent history. What I kept going back to was not so much this image, but the following footage showing people attacking the statue, as if the statue itself was invested with the power of Saddam Hussein. In a certain sense, it was, and by killing the statue, political and social change were endorsed. When thinking about art practices in their relation to social change two main points of views stand out. These opinions reflect at large a general understanding of the role of the arts: on one hand it can be argued that art has agency and that artists and art objects have the power to 'do' things, and to promote social change. On the other, it can be maintained that art has a responsive role of reflection, comment, critique and investigation of social reality, but no active role. In this second approach art can be defined as a discursive arena through which is possible to read social change. What I hope to achieve in this conference is to explore how these positions are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, they coexist as a dialogue between art practices and their critiques. In this brief introduction, I will reflect on the role of art and social change in relation to location in the context of production and to the language used. First, I will start with the story of an object that while crossing cultural borders 'does' something, to finally become historicized as the reflection of a particular moment in Australian history. This object is now known as the Bark Petition, and hangs at Parliament House in Canberra. On 13 March 1963 the Australian Government removed 300 square kilometers of land from the Yolngu reserve of Arnhem Land, to enable the Swiss company Nabalco to mine bauxite. The traditional Aboriginal owners in the community of Yirrkala were not consulted about this decision. In July that year two Labor members of parliament, Kim Beazley Snr and Gordon Bryant visited Yirrkala to meet with Reverend Edgard Wells, at the time superintendent of the Methodist Church Mission(1). The church had unveiled only a few months earlier two bark paintings, one for the Dhuwa and one for the Yirritja moiety, illustrating, according to traditional law, the Yolngu authority over the land. The bark paintings hang until the 1970 in the church on the sides of a cross, underlining the possibility of coexistence of Yolngu and Christian beliefs side by side(2). When Beazley Snr and Bryant met with Reverend Wells it was made clear that Yolngu elders were deeply concerned about the lack of Government's consultation over the deal with Nabalco and the impact of mining on their land. They demanded their voices to be heard. According to Wells, Beazley Snr advised on the protocol to follow to send a petition to Parliament(3). The Yolngu people then prepared a petition. It was formulated in a similar way to the Church's panels and it involved both the use of Yolngu designs stating traditional law and title to land, and the text of the petition typed in English and Gumatj. The Yolngu designs depict ancestral figures that created the land around Yirrkala, and consequently the complex relations of Yolngu people to land. The typed text stated these relations in English and requested a Committee to be established to hear the views of people from Yirrkala before proceeding with excision from the land. It also asked to consult with Yolngu people before entering in any kind of agreement with companies whose work might destroy their livelihood and independence(4). As a result, a parliamentary committee of inquiry was set up to listen to Yolngu claims. In October 1963 this committee made a recommendation to Parliament that the mining process was to be monitored by a committee, that sacred sites were respected and that compensation was paid for loss of livelihood(5). These bark paintings are now regarded as the first documents to link Commonwealth and traditional law. They questioned the fiction of Terra Nullius used to legitimize invasion and colonialism: that Australia was an empty continent because Indigenous people did not have the concept of authority over the land. As such they are considered the documents that paved the way for the recognition of Indigenous rights within the Commonwealth law framework(6). When I started to think about the way art can engage with social change, the Bark Petition were an obvious good example: not only it documents the beginning of a change, it actively operates cross-culturally to promote social change. The Bark Petition established a contact zone between the white Australian and the Yolngu cultural and legal systems, but also between cultural practices. The artists who painted the bark petition did so using a language that was part of the rich texture of everyday life in Arnhem Land. This language belonged to the same context of production of meanings and of social relations as the content it illustrated. The Yolngu elders who painted the petition crossed the borders that up to then had contained the production of barks. Barks, in the 1960s, were produced as an integrated part of everyday and ritual life and as a fruitful trade with serious collectors that enabled artists to have an income outside the grip of the Methodist church. Becoming a petition to the Australian parliament, the two barks moved into a different context: they became legal documents, and the channel through which Yolngu people chose to communicate the complex system of relations between land and people to the rest of Australia. The barks were, in brief, instrumental in activating social change. They thus became objects invested with the power to make things happen, objects whose role was not simply commenting, educating or illustrating, but also 'doing'. If art can 'do' things, and what happens when, in the course of 'doing', art crosses borders of cultural systems as well as of cultural practices in terms of engagement with social change, are the questions I am positing here. These questions imply also a definition of 'art' which crosses borders of established genres, disciplines, or art forms to make use of a language that is part of an integrated material, historical, political and cultural context of production. Yet, this is not an attempt to define the role of the artist in contemporary society. Arundhati Roy, writing about the contradictions of being a writer in contemporary India, reminds us how such a role cannot be fixed or externally regulated, but rather it is a role that needs to be constantly negotiated: A good or great writer may refuse to accept any responsibility or morality that society wishes to impose on her. Yet, the best and greatest of them know that if they abuse this hard--won freedom, it can only lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality, rigour and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer. It is singular, individual, but nevertheless it's there. At its best, it's an exquisite bond between the artist and the medium. At its acceptable end, a sort of sensible cooperation. At its worst, it's a relationship of disrespect and exploitation(7). Walter Benjamin explored similar concerns in his 1934 essay 'The Author as Producer'(8). In his text Benjamin theorizes the necessary overlapping of aesthetics and politics in works of art politically viable. Benjamin's text is based on a lecture delivered in Paris at The Institute for the Study of Fascism, an organization close to the Popular Front, whose aesthetic tendency would have been in favor of Social Realism, the accepted 'revolutionary' style(9). Benjamin refuted, in a veiled form, this aesthetic assumption. On the contrary in his text, he implies that an artwork to be politically correct it had to make use of innovative techniques. Benjamin tackled the dichotomy between commitment and quality which informed the contemporary debate around the role and place of artists, stating that rather than presenting an either/or scenario, political commitment or tendency and high quality had to go hand in hand(10). To explain his position Benjamin refuted the question of the relation of the work of art to the social production relations of its time. According to Benjamin inquiring whether a work of art endorses the productive relations of its time and is therefore reactionary, or if it challenges them and is revolutionary is positing the wrong question. The question to ask would be what is the position of the artwork within the production relations of its time(11). This shift in thinking the place of the art work from a relationship of either acceptance or critical response to the location within the context of production is an important one. It gives the artist, and the artwork, an active role, rather than simply the role of critical response, or illustration or comment. Can a similar assumption shed any light on the role of contemporary arts vis a vis social change? Starting from the 1970s, and in the 1980s and 1990s Postmodernism critiqued high modernist formalism and its obsession with essential purity of mediums (flatness and colors for painting, narration for fiction, etc) as advocated by Clement Greenberg in his 1961 'Modernist Painting'(12). Pastiche, trickling down and bubbling up of high/low culture, and a general blurring of borders and cultures were presented as alternatives to medium specificity, as well as to modernist transcendental ideals. Artists and theorists working within and around feminist frameworks in particular paved the way in the exploration of alternatives to the grand narratives of modernism. Despite this critique, Western mainstream art forms have largely remained distinct disciplines inhabiting allocated spaces. A theatrical performance remains a theatrical performance, as much as an exhibition of visual arts is inscribed in the confinement of visual arts. Similarly a visual art exhibition, of old or new media does not make any difference, is likely to happen in a rarified white-cube space of a gallery. Rarely it will engage in a critique of the space as institution, or in a space that is public and lived. This disinclination to move outside canonic boundaries, reflects also a lack engagement with the social, cultural and political context of production. This self-referentiality has its counterpart in art practices - in the West and the East, North and South of the world - that cross over genres, disciplines, that operate collectively, and spill from designated art spaces into the public consciousness if not into public spaces. These practices chose to engage with cultural diversity, with social issues, with politics in a tactical way(13). Tactical refers here to Michel De Certeau distinction between strategy and tactics: A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper… a tactic, on the other hand cannot count on a 'proper'. A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at distance. A tactic is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing'. Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities(14) Likewise, tactical arts move within the everyday: The art of tactics seeks a new relation to everyday life; sometimes that relation takes the form of collaboration with communities beyond the art world, sometimes the form of political intervention of a distinctively post-utopian character. Sometimes these tactics involve provocations that are not overtly political but have political consequences, and sometimes they simply adopt new forms of public address(15). If art is located within its context of production, it can also be considered as the site of entanglement with the everyday. One could say that these art practices and objects embody and make visible, either acting upon it or responding to it, the blueprint of their everyday cultural, social context(16). Fragments of histories and changes become enmeshed in these practices. When cultural borders are crossed and art enters a different context, inevitably new fragments and social issues become entangled with it. I would like to finish suggesting that it is precisely because these art practices function in the everyday, within their context of production and they speak the same fragmented, fluid and hybrid language, that they can make art that 'does' something, rather than as Oldenburg pointed out in the 1960s 'to sit on its ass in a bloody museum'(17). 1-www.foundingdocs.gov.au/places/cth/cth15.htm, p. 2, 19/12/2002 2-Djon Mundine'Saltwater', in Saltwater Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country, Recognizing indigenous Sea Rights, Yirrkala: Buku-larrngay Mulka Centre in association with Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 1999, p.22. 3-ibid. 4-Djon Mundine, 'Saltwater', p. 23. 5-www.foundingdocs.gov.au/places/cth/cth15.htm, p. 2, 19/12/2002 6-ibid. 7-Arundhati Roy, 'Shall we leave it to the Experts?', http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20020114&fname=Arundhati+Roy+%28F%29&sid=1 , p.2, 24/5/2003. 8-Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer(1934)', rpt in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood Eds. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 483-489 9-ibid. p. 483 10-ibid. p. 484: ' I should like to demonstrate to you that the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense. That means that a tendency which is politically correct includes a literary tendency. And let me add at once: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly in every correct political tendency of a work extends also to its literary quality: because a political tendency which is correct comprises a literary tendency which is correct.' 11-Ibid p. 485 12-Greenberg, Clement "Modernist Painting" (1961) rpt. in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood Eds. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 754-760 13-See for instance Glenn Harper collection of interviews with activist artists Interventions and Provocations. Conversations on Art, Culture and Resistance, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988; Jay Koh, 'Art and Activism and Cross-Cultural Projects in Thailand and Myanmar: The Need to Open Up Structures for Engagement', EZINE, www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_16/faf_v16_n03/text/feature.html, 19/12 2002; 14-Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkley: University of California Press, 1984, p. xix. 15-Glenn Harper, 'Introduction, Interventions and Provocations. Conversations on Art, Culture and Resistance, p. x. 16-I am borrowing the concept of substantiation of a cultural blueprint from Grant McCracken Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 74. 17-Oldenburg, Claes. "I Am for an Art..." (1961) in Art in Theory. 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford, Eds. UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1992,727-730 Ilaria Vanni

About Paradise Parrots And Other Australian Legends of Place and Identity: Paul Carter

About Paradise Parrots and Other Australian Legends of Place and Identity, i.m. G.B. (1940-2003) Seven cities once disputed Homer's birthplace. As many regions have claimed parrots as their own. While Romans drew talking parakeets from India's dawnlands, Tang courtesans obtained them from Paradise. The home of Guacamayo, the great American Parrot-Trickster is Guatemala or thereabouts - although the claim of the Brazilian Bororos to be parrots and the name Parrotland (bestowed on Brazil by macaw-struck conquistadors) argue a different origin. Further south a medieval Arabic periplum plumps for Java, on the grounds Javanese parrots spoke every language. Furthest south, Gerard Mercator's world map of 1569 discovers a Psitacorum regio on the coasts of an immense Antarctica-like blankness (collectively denominated Terra Australis Nondum Cognita). The point of these parrot tales is that geographers and historians, who identify Mercator's region of parrots with Australia, fail to see what kind of genealogy they establish. To surmise that Portuguese mariners were the first Europeans to chance upon Australia and discover its parrots is not to backdate Australia's colonial and natural history. It is to suggest an entirely different legend of Australian place and identity. The official legend defines Australian identity environmentally. In The Australian Legend (1958), historian Russel Ward argued that the Australian ethos - egalitarian, collectivist, anti-authoritarian and practical - had its origins in the response of convicts and bush people to 'frontier' conditions. Even as an explanation of mystique, rather than historical facts, this involves a paradox. It would be better to say that Australian white settlerdom discovered its collective identity in clearing the land. Instead of being absorbed into the national psyche, the Australian 'wilderness' induced environmental agoraphobia. Flying over the interior today, one sees the result: in redeeming their Christian pledge to make a garden of it, Australians are well on the way to fulfilling another utopian fantasy. Hadn't French fabulist, Gabriel de Foigny, described (in 1676), a southern land whose natural features had been rationally leveled to a regular plain, producing an interior mirroring the ideology of its people? Less complimentary than Ward, sociologist Ronald Conway (1971) found in this relentless erosion of difference a source of 'the great Australian stupor,' a condition found in vivo in the pantomimic depressiveness of the present Prime Minister's body language and delivery. The legendary elision of 'interior' with 'frontier' may be imaginary. In the recent film Rabbit-Proof Fence Australia's greatest 'frontier,' a 1600 kilometre dingo-fence, was an Ariadne's Thread leading home rather than a barrier. But, imaginary or not, obstacles make for stories. Witness the prevalence of domestic, psychic and environmental interiors in Australian weekend journalism and lifestyle publishing, whose popularity derives from the fascinating 'frontiers' they are found to possess. The primary difficulty the interior renovator confronts is blindness. He cannot see the shape of 'comfort'. He is like an early explorer, assailed by opthalmia. The answer is: let in more light, a process which recalls the white settler's primary experience - clearing trees from his block. In tourism-promoting photo-essays, the principles of the newly-renovated domestic interior are extended to Australian landscape. Weekend cottages in semi-domesticated bushland, redolent of the picturesque suburban prospects favoured by the late nineteenth century Melbourne painters, known collectively as the Heidelberg School, suggest the triumph of Bachelardian intimacy over an Unheimlich wilderness. In times of drought, though, their artificially-bright lawns look merely uncanny. Furnished with native timbers, decorated in bush colours, they are ideal places in which to write about psychic journeys within. Here, the 'frontier' is typically the 'other', embodied in Australia's Indigenous peoples, but the structure of the tale is the same. Personal reconciliation doesn't mean giving up a national legend. It is the desert of the white settler unconscious that is colonized and made to blossom. In the early 1990s reconciliation between Australia's Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples looked imminent. Ontologically, by admitting the existence of Aboriginal people in Australia before and after British colonization (and, consequently, the nonsense of the doctrine of terra nullius), the Mabo decision, handed down by the High Court of Australia in 1992, marked a new beginning. But it was shortlived. Australia has a habit of detaining its historical memories offshore, like refugees. The past, our present political leaders say, is another country (and someone else's responsibility). Amnesia, like Polynesia, is simply un-Australian. It's tempting to explain this terror of colonial ghosts psychologically. Analogies between psychic and national terra incognitae may, though, obscure geography's symbolic role. Historian Keith Windschuttle's recent denunciations of colonial 'massacres' as left-wing myths disclosed widely-shared anxieties about breaches of the national pleasure principle. Yet it cannot be said that Indigenous people and their historical experience are entirely lost objects. In the print and electronic media, which, in Australia as in Europe, are, of course, the national consciousness, both are disproportionately represented. What might be claimed is that this occurs on condition that they can be classified as coming from outside. Ordinary Aboriginal people inside (in a double sense as, in proportion to their numbers in the general population, young Aboriginal males are eleven time as likely to be in prison as their white counterparts) remain largely outside the national imaginary. It is as guestworkers, roughly classifiable with migrants, that they are admitted. In this role, as self-made men and women conforming to the Australian legend, they are adopted, and, within certain popularly-endorsed limits (sports and the arts), pronounced exemplary Australians. Terms like frontier, interior, inside and outside characterise the symbolic spaces of the nation state. Without frontiers it would be hard to start and focus wars. Without outsiders, who can count as insiders? Interiors have a double character. They are zones of exile and confinement. Either way they signify a disappearance from national consciousness. The Australian Government's recent treatment of alleged illegal immigrants was the political expression of this psycho-spatial logic. How else could it make sense to transport 'boat people' detained off the northern coasts of Australia to a 'detention centre,' sited 170 kilometres north west of Port Augusta in the South Australian 'outback.' Woomera is now associated with the British atomic tests carried out there in the early 1950s. It was originally planned, though, in 1947, as a model 'village' for 'a new-ordered way of living.' From utopia to prison camp, via a place-annihilating military experiment: what these chapters in the history of a (non-) place have in common is their association with an interior that is 'out back,' exterior to national memory. The distinctively Australian spatial metaphor 'outback' is not a feature of the nation state's geographical unconscious. This is not surprising. Despite present appearances to the contrary, embodied in a new anxiety about borders, Australia is not a nation state. It is a federation of states and territories. Up until 1901 these components of 'Australia' were self-governing colonies owing allegiance to the British crown. Thus a cartographic time exposure focused on 'the Antipodes,' which commenced with Gerard Mercator's chart and terminated with a Landsat image of a unified land mass, would show a meteorological cycle of gathering and dispersing territorial clouds. The original 'cloud' - Mercator's Terra Australis Nondum Incognita - was a topological conundrum - an unbounded figure with an edge. The great object of white Australia's early coastal surveyors was the detachment and planar bounding of this figure. When Matthew Flinders completed the circumnavigation of the coasts, whose enclosed space he then christened Australia, he turned a 'continent' into an 'island.' But, politically at least, this moment of gathering was soon reversed. With Empedoclean thoroughness, Strife followed Love, and 'Australia' split into a jigsaw of colonies. The detachment of these different political states was reflected in the way their common borders were drawn. Exterior borders followed the coastline; interior borders were drawn with a ruler, north-south and east-west. Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land, being an island, required no interior divisions to define it. The Victoria-New South Wales border was a partial exception, partly following the course of the River Murray. Adoption of these topographical features did not signal a Kantian optimism that societies derived their character from the genius loci. Rather, it showed that, in general, Australia lacked the administratively convenient geographical features (permanent rivers and well-defined, continuous mountain ranges) so useful in cutting up Europe. As for the straight lines drawn on the map of the interior, they represented a collective exhaustion of territorial imagination: their lack of topographical affect indicated the lack of attachment the colonists felt to these zones. The detachment of these interior divisions showed that, in the mental geography of the early white settlers, Australia was an archipelago of states, a political and cultural Gondwanaland slowly splitting apart and spreading. The 'outback' was located in the expanding space between the lines. After the 1901 reorganisation of these local units beneath a regional federal covenant, a new psycho-spatial entity emerged. Much to the annoyance of definitely island-dwelling Tasmanians, physical geographers and political scientists have repeatedly been unable to decide whether Australia is an 'island' or a 'continent.' The hybrid of this uncertainty, 'the 'island continent' is another antipodean contribution to psycho-geography. What, exactly, does it mean to be both continuous and separate, both attached and detached? Australia is a continent that is self-sufficient; or it is an island that is not isolated. These are also classic conundrums in developmental psychology - where, exactly, to draw the line between self and other, in the process defining both and their relation. They suggest that, in the Australian imaginary, the unconscious is not a dubiously-accessible 'underworld' or 'cellar.' It is simply geography, and the emotionally-disturbing instability of its spaces. The early place-names explorers and settlers bestowed on the land attest to this. Names such as 'Plains of Promise' or 'Lake Salvator' celebrated an 'oceanic' sense of immersion or connectedness. The men who made up names like 'Mount Despair' or 'Lake Disappointment' felt, on the contrary, trapped by the immensity, and experienced what Emanuel Miller would have called 'agora-claustrophobia.' It is notable that the Australian collective psyche lacks an underground. Given its mythic location at the antipodes, this is perhaps logical. Unless one accepts the Chinese version of creation, it can't be 'turtles all the way down.' The 'buck,' as they say in Australia, has to stop somewhere. Psychically-speaking, Australia is Freud's unconscious (which Freud himself identified with Kant's 'Thing in itself'). Post- second World War refugees migrating to Australia repeatedly said that they were motivated by a desire to escape 'history.' In this fantasy (which recapitulates white settler amnesia), Australia precedes history. Like the unconscious, it is without chronology. If Europe's mind is a neurotic dunghill of triumphs and disasters, like the hill of Troy, Australia's is infantile, as plain and sprawling as Cambrian bedrock. Coincidentally, this contrast is played out in Australian archaeology. A mode of investigation predicated on the burial of the past out of sight has no purchase on the civilization of Australia's Indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples, whose treasury of knowledge exists on the surface, in the periodic re-enactment of their environment's creative principles. When a non-British spar or anchor is exposed on an Australian beach, the tabloid newspapers and commercial documentary-makers fall upon the discovery with zeal. But their nostalgia for depth illustrates the point that, in Australia, there are no buried civilisations, and confrontation with the thing (the environment) cannot be satisfactorily sublimated. Historically, the antipodes have been the solid foundation of European fantasy. They were, from Ptolemy forward, a necessary hypothesis if the northern hemisphere was to stay where it was. But this brings little comfort to present-day antoikoi. Importing the antipodal dream, they apply its psycho-geographical logic to their own situation. Instead of finding the mythopoetic foundations of their culture in their own spatial historical experience, they tend to think that they must lie elsewhere - further down. Australian imaginings of New Zealand and Antarctica reflect this anxiety. Regular calls to incorporate New Zealand into an expanded, conspicuously un-Asian, Australasian confederacy disguise the suspicion that, lying further south, New Zealand has found a place and identity Australians still long to reach. New Zealand, it appears from across the Tasman, has achieved the beau ideal of the white settler society. It has a treaty with its Indigenous peoples and, unlike Australia, can envisage life beyond America. The case of 'the great white continent' is subtler. Ice where Australia is sand, frozen where Australia burns, its antipodal terra nullius oddly comforts a colonising mentality, used to evaluating the world in terms of 'untapped resources.' When privatised water companies, assisted by a local media that still (after two hundred years) describes Australia's habitually low rainfall as an 'exceptional drought', flush away our last potable water as 'economically unviable,' Antarctica will come to the rescue. The 'ice, mast-high,' which Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, described, 'floating by,/ As green as emerald,' will then become a common feature in our major harbours, as icebergs are hauled upstream preparatory to being processed for human consumption. Stockmarket analysts would be surprised to learn that Australians didn't invest in their underground. Australia may lack a positive Alps - the Australian Alps, like the Great Divide where they are located, being misnamings that attest respectively to a lack of commanding height and a desire to gain it - but its mining industries are energetically engaged in producing negative mountains. Miniaturised in the optic of the air traveler, the opencast mines of Kalgoorlie and the Kimberley (both in Western Australia) resemble the insides of concentrically-ridged oyster shells. As these giant earthforms are deepened, they produce their own negatives. Around their craters immense rectilinear platforms of dirt and rock rise. These low, brooding mesas of landscaped debris recall ancient Meso-American cities. The tenor of the public-relations discourse associated with these sites reveals that this parallel is not lost on those who built them. Unlocking nature's hidden wealth, they testify to a collective practical ingenuity. They deserve a prominent iconic status in the Australian legend. But they also serve an archaeological function, compensating Australians for the lack of a monumental antiquity mentioned before. The building statistics tour guides deploy at Teotihuacan are designed to persuade us that another race built what we see. So with the mountains of mining statistics, detailing the daily, monthly and annual volumes of rock dynamited, removed and crushed: in comparison with the giants in charge of this mineralogical Gath, we are puny. Oddly, a sense of being dwarfed is comforting. When the collective will turns the earth inside-out, it holds us in its hand. We briefly feel inside the outside of the 'outback.' Perhaps Australia's best-known mythic interior is its 'inland sea.' Victorian explorers like Edward J. Eyre and Charles Sturt came to feel that they had been victims of a perceptual hoax. The open, gently dipping plains in the region of so-called Lake Eyre (in northern South Australia) looked like ocean shorelines. Horizons regularly sprouted promising mirages of upside-down vegetation and vaguely Moorish-looking buildings. In the end, though, lack of water and debilitating temperatures prevented these geographical seers from substantiating their dreams. Later geographers have appreciated the pathos of their misapprehensions: these colonial visionaries were close to water. It lay beneath their feet, in the vast artesian reserves which, later, enabled the pastoral industry to spread its cattle- and sheep-trail tentacles throughout the Diamantina catchment. They have also pointed out that, so far as surface water was concerned, these forerunners of the future either arrived a few million years too late or were victims of bad timing. The Eyre basin had, once upon a time, been a sea. Nowadays, significant rainfall in inland Queensland occasionally transforms Lake Eyre's shimmering saltpan into a shallow sea, stretching from horizon to horizon. The psychological outcome of these early experiences was not a sense of growing connection with the idiosyncracies of Australian hydrology, but a feeling of rebuff and betrayal. The violence - and, as it has turned out, the longterm environmental destructiveness - of the Snowy Mountains Scheme (1949-1958) embodied the view that, where the genius loci was clearly hostile to civilised settlement, it should be tamed. If a natural flood could not be guaranteed, an artificial one would be created, even if it meant reversing the flow of no less than five rivers. The contemporary counterparts of the nineteenth century explorers are economists. Our modern astrologers, economists regard the 'marketplace' as another outback to be conquered. It's not surprising, then, that the 'boom and bust' character of Lake Eyre's occasional, and subtle, inundations are mainly of interest to speculators in agricultural stocks. Otherwise, apart from assisting the spread of noxious weeds and introduced species of vermin, the occasionally-flowing waters of the interior are a Mediterranean tourist experience for Australians whom fears of fatal respiration have discouraged from travelling over other seas. In the collective psycho-geographic imaginary, Australia resembles a giant atoll, a country in the form of a doughnut. The fact that the atoll encloses a 'red centre', rather than Pacific waters, does not diminish its utility in sustaining that double sense of connectedness and separation, on which, it seems, the legendary collective identity depends. For the Australian 'centre' is not like the American 'West'. It does not imply nearing a goal. Symmetrically-located with regard to Australia's coastlines, it suggests the illusory character of other places. The fantasy of walking across the continent, leaving one suburban backyard eventually to arrive in another, carries with it the suspicion that the exercise would be futile - for how is one to tell one coast from another? When the inland location of Australia's 'bush capital', Canberra, is invoked to prove that Australians have embraced their own environment, it must be with the doughnut fantasy in mind. The transportation systems linking Australia's State and Territory capitals run round the coast. If the ring they form were cut opposite Canberra - somewhere near Broome, say - and laid out in a straight line, then Australia's federal headquarters would indeed occupy a central place. Otherwise, it remains an eccentric geometrical landing pad, a kind of national golf course whose bunkers are tonsured hills and whose clubhouse, on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin, is Aldo Giurgola's War-of-the-Worlds New Parliament House. The eccentricity of a country whose population largely hugs the coast is rarely noted by Australian commentators. This is in contrast with the disproportionate attention given to the beach and its culture. The attempt to derive Australians' easy-going, purportedly hedonistic, lifestyle from an advertising agency collage of surfboards, surf, reclining nudes and multicoloured sunshades is not very successful. In fact, what Australia's beaches chiefly locate is the triumph of the visual image over the tactile real. The apotheosis of this, aptly-named Kodak Beach, a fully-operational artificial seaside across the Brisbane River from Brisbane's central business district, provides, as cultural historian John Macarthur notes, 'a hypervisualised environment.' It also provides a model village version of the inland sea fantasy. My point, though, is that a focus on these micro-cultural adaptations overlooks the historical oddity of a nation of coast-dwellers. One of the great 'what-ifs' of Australian history - guaranteed to revive a flagging dinner-party - is: what would 'Australia' have been, if, instead of rejecting him, La Perouse had taken the 15 year-old Napoleon on his first expedition to the great southlands? Finding his military genius under-utilised, my guess is that Bonaparte would have given full rein to his administrative talent. All roads would have radiated from an Arc de Triomphe located in the French colonial capital, Alice Springs. This is not such a stupid scenario. Most imperial adventures - Cortes most famously in marching far inland to Moctezuma's headquarters - have justified invasion by hypothesising a central 'Baghdad.' In Australia, though, it was otherwise: apart from antlike forays to inland gold fields, and the thinner lacework of sheepwalks slowly converging from all directions somewhere north of the Tropic of Capricorn, most colonists spread out along the coastal hinterlands. The psycho-geographical result is profound. In contrast with most Europeans, who live inland, and for whom (at least in the past) the coast is a kind of ultima thule, marking the furthest reach of the habitus, Australians feel their sense of place originates at the coast. It is going inland that marks an adventure away from where one lives. It also marks an entry into the realm of misleading appearances. If plain empirical matter-of-factness clusters round the edge, surmise characterises the interior. The laconic understatement of Australian humour depends on this contrast. By itself the enormity of the lie - deserts where there should have been fertile lake districts - might have inspired a magic realist literature. But in Australia the enormity of the deception could always be kept in proportion by invoking the coastal scale of common-sense. In the headline-grabbing fancy of itinerant journalists, Australia's inland has been the province of lost children, abducted white women and a variety of beast-man hybrids, including the amphibious Bunyip and a Swiftian Yahoo. But it has also been the terrain of the itinerant worker, the Aussie battler and the jackeroo. These sub-species of the legendary Australian male carried a practical man's scepticism inland. But, in the encounter with a human and natural environment, that repeatedly disappointed expectations, they developed a defensive way of describing things. In a successful bush yarn, litotes is everything. The practical egalitarian celebrated in the Australian legend, is a born ironist. Rhetorically, as well as manually, he likes to 'cut things down to size.' The suburban inheritor of his mantle is the post-war Australian male, trapped in the dreary rituals of married life and office routine. In generations of short stories a certain wistful folk wisdom is attributed to his parodic inarticulateness. Invariably depicted leaning over the back fence, in his mind's eye he is not building castles: on the contrary, he is watching everything solid melt into air. It is the ultimate reductive triumph of commonsense, in a country where the sound and fury of a better future turn out to signify nothing, and where, in consequence, the salesman's fair-sounding eloquence is properly classified as so much 'bullshit.' The frontier, the outback, the inland sea are mythic territories. But so is the coastal consciousness that classifies them in this way. This is the yield of studying the psycho-geography of the Australian collective unconscious, that it reveals the practical reason of the ordinary man and woman as another culturally-convenient myth. When in 1771 Sir Joseph Banks, sailing with Cook in the Endeavour, turned his telescope towards the coast, he caught sight of 'natives.' What surprised him most was that they were not surprised by his sailing ship. Indeed they didn't seem to notice it. Which was more reasonable, the behaviour of the inhabitants of the place, going about their business, or the expectations of the great botanist? Banks by name, Banks by nature, banked on stepping ashore, by this little step onto terra firma inaugurating a giant leap forward for Enlightenment science (and British mercantilism). But the 'coast' in this part of the world is not like the line on the map: it is a fractal zone of estuaries, creeks, backwaters, spits, isthmuses and promontories. Banks' firmly founded coast was the geographical counterpart of his own deductive habits, but it didn't make these reasonable. When Banks reasoned that the interior of Australia must be largely uninhabited because the economy of the Aborigines he had observed was based on fishing, he illustrated the fact that, in the mirror of reason, it wasn't nature's face that appeared, but the scientist's. Turning to the present-day, what passes for the discourse of common-sense - although Edward Said more ominously calls it 'the language of the State Department' - mimics the appearance of rational discourse, but its foundations remain mythical. It is interesting to observe how both the Left and Right in contemporary Australian political debate continue to invoke the imagined community analysed by Ward. They may differ in details of policy and historical interpretation, but they are as one in finding powerful and moving the story of a continent tamed by hard work and ingenuity. They joust, rather than fight, not least because they both respect 'a facility to battle through' and both share 'a loveable tendency to larrikinism.' In defence of the medieval romance of the Australian legend, they energetically and ritually tilt at windmills. The impression of a mimic battle, performed with cardboard weapons, is especially strong if you are one of the one-third of Australians who were born overseas, for whom those touchstones of Australian identity, Gallipoli and Don Bradman mean nothing. These weekly and quarterly campaigns are couched in the language of common sense. The ground they occupy is mythical. But the consequences of their mimic warfare are real and exclusionary. Their appeal to the Australian legend means, in effect, that those who arrived too late to have a role in shaping the legend can have no agency in shaping Australia's future. In the wake of the release of the popularly-known 'Stolen Generations' report in 1997, the present Prime Minister, John Howard, gave this logic an ingenious twist. He explained that it would be inappropriate of his government to apologise to Australian Aborigines for the social and cultural catastrophe, which the biological assimilation policies pursued by earlier Australian governments had caused, because it represented not only Anglo-Celtic Australians but also those citizens of non-English-speaking background, 'who had no personal responsibility for the past policies of Aboriginal child removal.' As a courtesy to recent migrants, we should forget the past. This recognition was, of course, strategic. The condition of incorporation into the Australian legend remained the same: a voluntary amnesia. Not the smallest triumph of the Australian legend is its depoliticisation of arguments like these. In this regard, the present electoral popularity enjoyed by the John Howard, suggests the resurfacing of deep-rooted white settler anxieties. When the ALP (Australian Labour Party) under Paul Keating lost the 1996 election, some saw this merely as a temporary setback to a social and constitutional reform agenda whose momentum was irresistible. In the event they were proved wrong: multiculturalism, Indigenous land rights, reconciliation, Australia 'in Asia,' the republic - one by one these initiatives to redefine Australian place and identity have been rejected. Why should this be? The popular success of Mr Howard is, as I've already suggested, a matter of style rather than substance. Like other populist politicians - notably the former Premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the former leader of the One Nation party, Pauline Hanson - the Prime Minister's utterances appear to be unscripted. He could, but wouldn't, say with Beckett, that the meaning is between the phrases. The presiding rhetorical trope is anacoluthon, a hesitant stringing together of platitudes, whose effect is chiefly to communicate a reluctance to say anything. The pure orality of the discourse, unscripted and resistant to paraphrase, infuriates his critics. Yet, in not putting into words what the average Australian cannot say, he effectively taps into his constituency's mimetic desire. He channels a psychological identification which transcends political differences. This egalitarian discourse of hesitations does not represent a democratic collectivity. Mimicking a legendary image of Australian identity, it's a triumph of ideology. In particular, it illustrates how effectively the Australian legend of plain-speaking represses its true nature. The genius of the collectivist, anti-authoritarian, practical Australian Prime Minister is to parrot a people's fears and insecurities, and, parroting them back, to make them feel comfortable in their awkwardness. In Latin America, a family of cultures altogether more attuned to parrots (human and avian), the political trickster who has presided over the making of Australian place and identity would long ago have been recognised. As the fifteenth century English poet John Skelton wrote, the parrot is the master of plain-speak - 'of that supposicyon that called is arte … Parrot nothing hath surmysed,/ No matter pretendyd, nor nothing enterprysed.' The parrot is the avatar of the 'tall poppy syndrome,' that pleasure in 'cutting down to size' whatever smacks of pretension. Pretending nothing, the parrot detects pretentiousness in others. Lacking artifice, he exposes it everywhere. Surmising nothing, he makes speculation of every kind - including discussion of Australia's past and future place and identity - seem absurd. As I say, it is a tribute to the power which the Australian legend retains over political discourse, that its apologists fail to see its anti-democratic implications. The Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe gets the point, though. In 'Puck Disembarks,' he imagines the unofficial spirit (a Shakespearean version of Pan) disembarking with the official party at Sydney in 1788. Puck's task is to institute the Australian legend, 'To rewrite Empire as larrikin culture.' But, with the raucous, mocking cries of the cockatoo in mind, he knows already, that 'This is the paradise of Schadenfreude.' The parrot presides over the semblance of reason. Imitating reason, he seems to speak reasonably. In fact, his utterances satirise reason. They expose the mythological prejudices and ideological self-interest underlying the simplest statements. The utopias which classical, medieval, Renaissance and later authors have plausibly located in the realm of terra australis nondum cognita illustrate this. The pseudo-reasonable surmises of Sir Joseph Banks and the parrot-talk of populist politicians employ the same deductive logic found in Sir Thomas More, Jonathan Swift and Gabrielle de Foigny. The result is a kind of science fiction. In the realm of spatial history it produces the psycho-geography I've discussed, with its host of hoax features. An 1830 map of Australia prepared by a certain A.J. Maslen, who signed himself 'The Friend of Australia,' although he had never visited the place, featured an Amazon-like river flowing north-west through the Australian interior. Collecting ample waters from the Great Stony, Tanami and Gibson Deserts to the south (where, in Maslen's imagination, a series of conveniently parallel mountain ranges were to be found), his so-called Great River of the Desired Blessing emptied itself into the Indian Ocean north of present-day Broome. This was pure geographical fantasy, but it was a fiction only one degree removed from the longed-for rivers, lakes and mountains which early explorers deduced from appearances, and tentatively marked on their charts. A striking instance of parrot reason occurs rather literally in the journals of Charles Sturt. Rumours of an inland sea had circulated ever since Flinders' circumnavigation had failed to find any major river mouths. In 1830 Sturt boated down the placidly-flowing Murray, but this river hardly breached the coast, emptying (another austral paradox) into a lake behind the coastline. As Maslen's river was a fiction, the solution to the question of Australia's internal drainage seemed to be an inland sea. The idea that Australia might be like a doughnut, with a sea for a hole, stimulated its own utopian fictions. Flinders himself floated the idea that the centre might be occupied by an unknown, pile-village-dwelling civilization. Others, remembering villages of this kind throughout the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos, suggested that, when this lost people was found, they would speak Malay. When William Light, South Australia's first surveyor-general, responsible for Adelaide's town plan, made contact with the Kaurna people, whose land he was genially subdividing and planting with ideal villages, he was convinced he heard Malay phrases in their dialect. In any case, Sturt was determined to base his argument for the existence of an inland sea on more solidly-empirical grounds. The interior was the region of rumour, hearsay and deception: Sturt, starting from the coast, wanted coastal reason to guide his steps. So he looked to parrots. On an earlier expedition, he had noticed on the Darling in New South Wales cockatoos, parrots and parakeets migrating north-west. He had since noticed on the coast near Adelaide budgerigahs migrating south. He took a ruler and, projecting the lines of flight respectively north-west and north, found they met somewhere north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The 'feathered races' would not flock there, Sturt reasoned, unless there was water - why not look for the inland sea there? In any culture less beguiled by the authority of common sense, Sturt's reasoning would have become the stuff of popular legend. The question would have been, not the relatively dry one of whether or not Sturt's reasoning from the facts held water (in fact, up to thirty per cent of Australian species of bird are 'nomadic,' making guesses about migration routes next to impossible), but when our romantic explorer first read the adventures of Don Quixote. This question isn't rhetorical, motivated by Australian Schadenfreude, a desire to cut 'tall poppies' down to size. Sturt's capacity to invent geographical fictions makes him a true author of Australian place and identity. He deserves this status, not because of his geographical discoveries, but because of his geographical hoaxes. It was his contribution to the mythopoetic invention of Australia that mattered. The makers of spatial history - the unfinished collective experience of self-placing and self-naming - which, I would argue, better accounts for the character of Australian place and identity than the 'Australian legend' - weren't 'magical' geographers. They were mythopoetic engineers, undertaking (with the aid of parrots) the invention of places made after the story. After all, John Skelton's unpretentious parrot doesn't speak the language of univocal reason: he communicates by way of 'metaphora, alegoria withall.' Australian place and identity are constructed mimetically. The attitudes and behaviour of the larrikin-type exemplify this. This legendary figure goes through the motion of reasonable speech and action. But his pretence to be without pretence is Parmenidean. Identifying artifice with change, his rhetorical delaying tactics seek to prove that movement is illusory. Historical amnesia is counterpointed by an indisposition to plan for the future. Either way, a collective will to eliminate all historical forces tending to change produces a parrot-history, in which media and the politicians are condemned to repeat their ideological myths. Recently, Australians debated amendments to the Australian constitution, which would, if adopted, sever ties with the British crown. It was no accident that this debate coincided with another, about reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Nor was it any coincidence that both symbolic initiatives for change failed. Inhabitants of the Australian legend have little choice but to repeat the Oedipal double-bind coeval with the colony's beginnings. As vigorously as they assert their anti-authoritarian rejection of Britain, they must go on seeking its approval. Impatient republicans pointed out that the British (and, for that matter, the Queen) were indifferent to the result. But this misses the point. Britain, like Cathay, was a rhetorical stratagem - Columbus intended extending imperial power by pretending to preserve the status quo. Exclaiming 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' Australian monarchists also displayed their capacity to battle through. But here the analogy breaks down: Columbus found America; some Australians have still to find Amnesia. In 1943 the Sydney poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart forwarded the poems of 'Ern Malley' to the magazine Angry Penguins. The magazine's editors were delighted. Here, it seemed, in the last poetic testimony of a hitherto unknown bush poet, was solid evidence that aesthetic radicalism could emerge organically from Australian soil. If the practical reason of the 'old' Australian legend found its artistic expression in social realism, the 'new' Australian legend, Modernist, internationalist and adventurous would be embodied in the 'impeccably Surrealist techniques' of Ern's poems. A special issue of Angry Penguins was devoted to the discovery, and the Sydney 'classicists', McAuley and Stewart, closed in for the kill, announcing that 'Ern' and his oeuvre were a hoax they had contrived over one idle weekend. The 'affair' was a classic example of Australian Schadenfreude. McAuley and Stewart no doubt considered it a harmless-enough exercise in literary 'larrikinism.' The very angry Angry Penguins called it 'cultural hooliganism. Either way, the effect was to cut down a cultural tall poppy, and to restore the anti-Modernist status quo. But the affair did not end there. It turned out that the parrot was more creative than its masters. The poems McAuley and Stewart wrote in the name of Ern Malley proved to be more interesting than anything written under their own names. In parodying the internationalist pretensions of the Melbourne poets, McAuley and Stewart created the most impressive poems of that generation. Nor did the story end there. In time a casually-improvised hoax was elevated to the status of a myth. In 1952, survivors of the original debacle started publishing Ern Malley Journal. As it was explained, in the ideologically-related manifesto prepared for the Antipodean exhibition of 1959, 'in the growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense of identity.' The Ern Malley episode is an allegory about the cultural mechanisms of identity formation in Australia. Excavating the Australian legend, it turns out to be hoaxes all the way down. After all, the mythic character on whom Ern was supposed to be based was not an 'organic' collective creation. The egalitarian larrikin of the 1890s was an invention of metropolitan journalists. As a genuine bush poet, John Shaw Neilson, remarked, 'this tiresome man/ With his shrewd, sable billy-can/ And his unwashed Democracy' was 'A rare old Humbug all the time.' In the absence of myths hoaxes have acted in Australia like additional electrons, supplying the rogue energy needed to produce a creative change of state. According to Don Watson, historian, political commentator and speechwriter for the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, 'The Australian story does not work any more … a point has been reached where the words "fair go", "Gallipoli" and "show me a better country if you don't like this one" just don't do the job.' But the evidence is that they never did. Australia has always contained 'multitudes that the legend cannot accommodate.' Creativity comes into play in periods of crisis, or cultural transition, when the literal accounts of legends can no longer be accepted. Recognising the legend doesn't work any more doesn't mean submitting to the inevitable Americanisation of Australian culture. It's an opportunity for intelligent mimicry in the style of Ern Malley. Recalling Australia's origins in Mercator's geographical myth, it's a chance for Australians to become what they always were, a region of parrots. As a province of Australian psycho-geography, Regio psittacorum exhibits interesting features. Of more than sixty species of parrot found there only a handful have entered the national imaginary. The budgerigar and the smaller parrots have been successfully tamed, multiplied and exported, warbling legends of a sunburnt country in millions of post-war north European domestic interiors. His talking abilities assure the sulphur-crested cockatoo a successful TV career. Otherwise these raucous, rainbow-coloured indigenes are poorly represented in white dreamings. Poets have generally focused on invisible, imaginary or extinct parrots, associating them with a better country than this one. Even good poet naturalists, like John Shaw Neilson, imagine they migrate from other worlds whether from the underground, like the Regent Parrot ('Gently they say he is not of the Earth,/ He only falls below'), or from Heaven, like the eponymous Paradise Parrot. In everyday rural life, the fate of parrots has been altogether more prosaic. Regarded as a pest, threatening wheatfield and orchard, they have been used for free shooting practice. The Galah has passed into the vernacular as a type of stupidity. In the Australian Regio psittacorum it seems that an egalitarian aesthetic rules: the exotic brilliance of the parrots causes suspicion, and a desire to sap them of their creative energy. Even the exquisitely-plumaged (and probably extinct) Paradise Parrot suffers this fate: it has recently been suggested that he never existed. The exceptional hybrid of two relatively common species, the Paradise Parrot, like the better country he came from, was, from the beginning, another hoax. Like sacred texts, the neglect of parrots can be interpreted at various levels. Literally, it suggests the enduring influence of dialectical mythology in Australian dreams of place and identity. Characterised as the antipodes of reason, Australia is perceived, not merely as nondum cognita, but as unknowable. A Pataphysical empire, it obstructs every attempt to predicts its moods. This is a persistent strand in nationalist thinking. Lamenting the environmental Endgame now being played out in Australia, William Lines recognises that it has its origins in the antipodal trope. Authors, critics and historians such as Patrick White, Alan Moorehead and Manning Clark 'subscribe to a mythic geographical determinism. The spiritual darkness they detect at the heart of Australian civilisation they claim emanates from the land itself - a continent of primeval cruelty sustained by omnipotent sunlight and a dry interior.' Allegorically, the marginal role of parrots play in Australian legends of place and identity points to a creative self-censoring, obvious in Australian publishing and film-making. In these fields hyperbole and tautology fuse, as each new 'great Australian' film or book meets this definition precisely because it remains generically conventional. Novel subject-matter is represented on condition it performs well inside the conventional cages of the mainstream novel, feature or documentary. Here, of course, the parrot can speak on condition he doesn't mention the word 'Freedom.' At a spiritual level, the imaginative confinement of parrots to the edge of the white Australian clearing has a clear significance. It refers to the consistent refusal to open a dialogue with Australia's Indigenous peoples. A consistent symptom of Australians' geographical anxiety has been the neurotic desire to turn inside out. In recent weeks the imminent 'closing' of the 'mouth' of the Murray River has made national headlines. It has been compared to a person gasping for breath, as significant coastal ecosystems will come under threat. Up to ninety per cent of the river's natural flow is used for irrigation, mainly in New South Wales. Another factor contributing to the crisis is the 'drought.' Discovering an ecological conscience, the South Australian Premier has authorised a $A2 million dredging project, designed to keep the mouth 'open.' Now, as the 'crisis' is an old one, repeated every time a drought further depletes an already chronically-depleted flow, it's clear that political and media interest in the story reflect something else, the sense that a key site in the geographical imaginary is under threat. In the absence of the River of the Desired Blessing, the Murray is the single medium through which communication is effected between the inside and the outside. As a matter of fact, this is scarcely true: the Murray's openings (it is polyvocally evasive, rather than single-mindedly progressive) are so ill-defined that Flinders (who was looking for any sign of a way in) missed them. For his part, Sturt, approaching from the other side, failed to find a way out, and had to retreat upriver. Despite these local facts, the closing of the Murray's mouth is felt as a mythic rebuff. If the core of the Australian legend is a 'can do' ability to 'open up' the land, then the discovery of forces hostile to this inside one's own country is calculated to engender collective panic. This explains the interest of journalists and politicians, neither of whom normally has any interest in the environment: parasites on public anxiety, they sense in this event an opportunity to exploit. After all, the vision of an environmental incubus squatting heavily on the breast of Progress is enough to frighten anyone. The desire to turn inside out has defined the white treatment of Australia's Indigenous peoples. As I said earlier, Aboriginal people are granted access to an Australian place and identity on condition they can be imagined as coming from outside. What is unbearable is the prospect of nurturing an alien people within the collective bosom. Although in the early decades of colonization Aboriginal guides were instrumental in showing graziers ways in land, the consistent impulse of white racial policy has been outwards. 'Lost' tribes are brought 'out' of the desert; in 1830 Governor Arthur's notorious 'Line,' a moving frontier of armed white men, was intended to 'clear out' the last surviving Tasmanian Aborigines. The principle of evacuation has applied culturally as well. Nineteenth century missionaries, like their eugenicist successors implementing assimilation, thought admission to Australian society depended on a Pauline conversion, in which every trace of a former identity was erased. Language must be scratched out of memory; customary law must be laughed out of court. It was a sign of white anxiety, that the 'rational dislocation' of so many people was justified on the grounds that Aboriginal people were 'nomadic.' Having no fixed places of their own, it was argued, they had no right to stay where they were. In a further twist of racist logic: a people who shifted from place to place could be assumed to be morally shifty - another reason for disciplining them. In a Benthamite synthesis of these logical twists and turns, the reward of coming out has, as I said, been a disproportionate rate of incarceration. One principle defined all of this activity: Indigenous people should not be allowed to stay where they were. Continuity of association with their country should be broken. It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that, under the present Native Title legislation, continuity of association is the pre-condition of a land claim. Naturally, in a culture that has spent two hundred years clearing away every vestige of former presences, this proves rather difficult. The motive of bringing Aborigines out was not gratuitous cruelty. Indigenous people were not being punished for the collective depaysement experienced by invaders half a world away from home. The production of a terra nullius - the doctrine was only promulgated some fifty years after white settlement, as pressure increased to 'open up the lands' - embodied spatial contradictions within the constitution of the white settler society. By claiming Australia on behalf of the British Crown, the colonists created an either/or state. From a democratic point of view, it was a vast reserve of public land; from a mercantilist perspective it was an equally vast wasteland. The principle invoked to reconcile these visions was that of property. Opening up the land was identified with ownership of the land. But the exclusive possession produced a contradictory result. When a rectilinear grid of fence lines unrolled across the continent, what was opened up was (from the public's point of view) closed down. This was anti-democratic, but so is the Aussie 'battler' of the Australian legend. In white settler societies, public spaces, like remnant stands of rain forest, are an affront to progress, and should be cleared away. The implication of these spatial contradictions for Indigenous peoples is plain: in a country where the creation of voids is a necessary preliminary of exclusive enclosure, people who protest they belong to the land will not have a leg to stand on, let alone a place they can call home. Long before the arrival of the First fleet, according to William Lines, 'the Australian continent supported a life of fecundity, exuberance, drama, continuity and change.' I am not sure that the wish-fulfilling arcadia invoked in this rhetorical diorama helps incorporate Indigenous peoples into contemporary place and identity debates. It is not true that the environmental history of Australia is simply a political history. Knowing more about Indigenous land management practices changes nothing unless it is harnessed to an ideological sea-change. Alongside headlines about the closing of the Murray comes the Federal Government's Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment. It finds that no less than 2891 individual ecosystems are at risk, that native birds are in danger in 240 of the 348 sub-regions looked at, and so on. It explains that Australia's plummeting biodiversity is primarily due to land clearing. Approximately 500,000 hectares of native vegetation is removed each year. But the chief interest of these data is not the change but lack of change they indicate. There is nothing in the 2003 Assessment not already starkly reported in the 1996 State of the Environment Report and the 2001 Environment Report. What the Assessment chiefly enables us to assess is the lack of political action and an ideological inhibition to change. Land-clearance affects greenhouse emissions, land salinity and the health of a fragile water supply, but the farmers remain unmoved. Journalists may think this is due to a failure of common-sense: 'Affected farmers may resent environmentalists attempting to place limits on their freedom, but not the least thing at stake is their own livelihood.' But agriculture is a culture entire, a mode of dreaming places into being. The clearing integral to its practices is also the 'clearing' of Western knowledge in which the light of reason is cultivated. What would it be, this 'sea-change'? It is not a second Flood. It's a mythopoetic humus always returning wherever it's been forked out. It's the dissenting noise of other voices, other versions of place and identity. It's the polyvocal discourse of the Regio psittacorum, occasionally listened to rather than abused and suppressed. It's the atmosphere of meeting places, where mimetic strategies kept open places of peacable encounter and exchange. It's the domain of intelligent mimics, manufacturers of hoaxes, which, in the absence of common ground, create somewhere new that is surprisingly old. It's the province of practical daydreamers who, noticing that the place where they are is not (and is not going to be) a tabula rasa, find the alphabet of the future in the marks that already mottle and fold the land. These parrot-tricksters may mimic the larrikin of the Australian legend, but the resemblance is superficial: emotionally open, where the other is closed, they make improvisation a creative principle, as in a game of Chinese Whispers, encouraging a communication that turns mimicry into news. In this time of dumb auguries, then, the news that the instigator, agent and director of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Geoffrey Bardon, has died is ambiguously eloquent. Bardon was a parrot who collaborated in a cultural, political and spiritual sea-change. Nurse to a different vision of Australian place and identity, his wisdom is sorely needed now. His passing, though, recalls us to the fact that myths have been overthrown, ideologies defeated, and legends transformed. Bardon is remembered for his work at Papunya, an assimilationist settlement 250 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. Between February 1971 and July 1972, while employed there as an art teacher, he initiated a transformation in the way Aboriginal art was seen, and its social and political meaning grasped. Bardon described Papunya at that time, where 1400 Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Pitjantjatjara people lived exiled from their homelands, as resembling a concentration camp. The story of 30 men from different tribal backgrounds overcame their material and spiritual degradation, working together to crystallize in Bardon's words, 'divergent, contradictory, anonymous, and ancient (yet still shared) beliefs concerning the landscape and the world in which the Aboriginal people lived,' cannot be told here. A key moment, though, centred on the painting of the Honey Ant Dreaming mural on the walls of the Papunya schoolroom. In Bardon's account it went through three distinct phases. In the first version certain motifs were used that were deemed to be secret or sacred. In the second version the murals were developed with realistic (European-style) Honey Ants and a flying bird. In the third, at Bardon's request, the Europeanised images were replaced with modified traditional Aboriginal motifs. Bardon discerned in the resulting synthetic design not only an aesthetic revolution but an equally far-reaching political statement. In a graphic representation of their homelands, and their inter-connected stories, in a design acceptable to all the tribal groups, a network of related journeys, stretching ultimately to every part of Australia was envisaged; and, in modifying it for the uninitiated, a new political and cultural confederacy had been devised. 'This was the beginning of the Western Desert painting movement when, led by Kaapa, the Aboriginal men saw themselves in their own image and before their very own eyes, and upon a European building. Truly, something strange and marvellous had begun.' After the murals were completed, Bardon recalled, 'there were enormous roars, wild acclamation and dancing, and singing, in the great camps at night, and a sense of our best affirmations coming to life.' In the following year over one thousand paintings were produced at Papunya. Many of the artists subsequently became world-famous. Their genius is assured. But in what did the genius of the schoolteacher consist? Bardon was an intelligent mimic. From the time he copied the children drawing circles in the sand, and began improvising look-alike hoax patterns on the walls of the schoolroom, he demonstrated his desire, not to found, but to find. He did not want to be an authority figure; he wanted to be part of a future conversation, which, in the absence of a shared legend, would have to be improvised. So he play-acted, representing his creative desire without disguise: 'Often I selected a topic and asked a painter if, as a courtesy, he would tell this story for me. I would mime the bigness of the story and its power, or its quietness and special gentleness.' In these parrot mimes, nothing was 'appropriated', the 'great aphorisms of space, which the paintings so luminously set forth,' were reflected with interest. As a result, instead of being cleared, the emotional and conceptual ground between them was occupied by new forms, Schadenfreude yielding to affirmation. 'Everything in that wondrous time, if I could make it so, was heightened by a feeling of the rightness of the occasion, as in ceremonial dance, and I suppose as the men sang and talked, or I talked, a new kind of dance or song was taking place, although at the time I did not think of it as such.' Works referred to: Geoffrey Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made After the Story, Melbourne, forthcoming; Carmel Bird (ed), The Stolen Children and Their Stories, Sydney, 1998; Ronald Conway, The Great Australian Stupor, Melbourne, 1971; Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters; Tom Griffiths & Libby Robin (eds), Ecology & Empire, Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne, 1997; Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Sydney, 2003; Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors, Ringwood, Victoria, 1981; William J. Lines, Taming the Great South Land, Sydney, 1991; John Macarthur, 'Tactile Simulations: Architecture and the image of the Public at Brisbane's Kodak Beach,' in Ruth Barcan & Ian Buchanan (eds), Imagining Australian Space (Nedlands, Western Australia, 1999); OCAL, Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Melbourne,1986; Hetti Perkins & Hannah Fink (eds), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Sydney, 2000; Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, Melbourne, 2000; Judith Ryan, Geoffrey Bardon, Obituary, 12 May 2003; Chris Wallace-Crabbe, 'Puck Disembarks' in For Crying Out Loud, Melbourne, 1990; Don Watson, 'Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America,' Quarterly Essay, Melbourne, 2001. Glossary: Angry Penguins (1940-1946), a quarterly journal of literary, artistic, musical and general cultural interest; self-consciously modernist. The phrase is also applied to the artists and writers associated with the journal. (OCAL) Antoikoi, 'dwellers opposite', a term invented by Crates of Mallos, c.150 BC. Buck, as in 'the buck has to stop somewhere', i.e. someone has to take responsibility. From 'to pass the buck' i.e. to avoid taking responsibility. Billy can, vessel for boiling water. Block, a subdivision of land. Bullshit, rubbish, nonsense. Bush, natural vegetation; a tract of land covered in such vegetation; country which has not been settled or which resists settlement. Bush capital, a derisive name for Canberra, the capital of the Commonwealth of Australia. Bushland, a small tract of 'block' of bush, often adjoining suburbia. Doughnut. Doughnuts come in various shapes. I have in mind one shaped like a bagel i.e. with a hole in the middle. Ern Malley Hoax. The Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins contained The Darkening Ecliptic, sixteen poems supposedly written by a recently deceased mechanic/insurance salesman named Ern Malley. Identifying themselves as the authors of the poems, James McAuley and Harold Stewart explained that their action stemmed from their anxiety over what they saw as 'the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry.' (OCAL) 'Fair go', an equal chance or reasonable opportunity. Gallipoli, 'a word of legendary significance to Australians,' a town in Turkey, the scene of a First World War campaign in which many Australian troops lost their lives. (OCAL) Gath, 'And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature …' II Samuel 21, 20. Great Divide, abbreviation of Great Dividing Range. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' vernacular expression meaning "if it isn't broken, there is no need to mend or repair it', applied to metaphorically to the Australian constitution. Humbug, a fraud. Inland, similar to Outback. Larrikin, irresponsible, mischievous youth, with a disregard for social or political conventions. Hence larrikinism. Outback, country which is remote from a major centre of population, usually inland. Snowy Mountains Scheme. Located in the alpine border area between New South Wales and Victoria, the scheme involved the construction of more than 150 kilometres of tunnels, eleven large and smaller dams, four hydro-electric power stations, and the diversion of 922 500 megalitres of water a year to inland areas for irrigation. 'Stolen Generations' report. More formally known as Bringing Them Home, a Report prepared by the Human Rights and Equal opportunity Commission from material gathered during the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Children from their Families. Tall Poppy, a person who is conspicuously successful, who attracts envious notice. Biographical note. Paul Carter is an artist and writer attached to The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. His publications include Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia (2002), The Lie of the Land (1996) and The Road to Botany Bay (1987). He is currently writing a book called Parrot. His artworks for public spaces include Relay (Sydney 2000 Olympics) and the recently-opened Nearamnew (Federation Square, Melbourne). Paul Carter

Ros Warby Margle Medin Helen Mountfort: Vineta Lagzdina

SWIFT, Fairytales of the Heart and Mind, (Evolved from EVE) roS Warby MargIe medlin helen mountFort Together SWIFT is a solo performance that is not a solo show. The lighting, film projections and sound are integral to the conception. The moments of live cello performance highlight the collaboration. It is a work that takes you on a wonderful journey conceived by Ros Warby as choreographer and performer, together with Margie Medlin in set design, film and lighting and Helen Mountfort with cello and tape composition. It is intimate and also…….. Spinning Wonder with improvIsatory Fleetfeet transformaTions Performances took place 7 -16 Feb. 2003 at North Melbourne Town Hall Arts House. The Silent image someWhat echoing fInger forms by Flourish transiTory SWIFT traverses two worlds: that of the imagined and that of transformation. Evolving Vernacular mEmory It's movement in time and space, with texture and aural dimension, at times minimalist but also comic and interactive, mysterious, subtle and clean and clear as a mountain lake on a spring morning. SWIFT will be touring Europe and the United States during 2003. Vineta Lagzdina

Antigone Kefala: Angelika Fremd

SUMMER VISIT, THREE NOVELLAS, Antigone Kefala, published by Giramondo, 2003, 120 pp, $20 (pb) Summer Visit is a structurally puzzling book. Taken as a whole, it offers the reader none of the usual comfortable resting places; there are no highs or lows to identify with easily. Death, loss and absence pervade the three novellas. In the first novella, Intimacy, the central character's dreams are more animated than her waking life from which she appears displaced. Grief and loss have numbed her response to reality. At the end of the story a death, dreamt, imagined, or remembered startles the reader. The prose is measured, slow, expertly controlled and delivered. The stream of memory is stopped abruptly, along with the story, by the recalling of a death. The story the book's title is named after, Summer Visit, describes a visit to Greece. "We are in the kitchen making coffee. We speak constantly of the past, the distant past, the family. None of us remembers very much of the old life, we have been on the move for so long, changing places, leaving behind all the objects that would have been tangible proof of their existence. Everything from the past now an unplaced, mysterious story we have been telling each other. But now that the older generation had gone, the past had become more fluid, at ease with itself, nostalgic. It had lost the set positions it seemed to occupy before, when formed by actual experiences, hurts, everyone locked in brutal events that had coloured their reactions." Again, the protagonist moves through this narrative neither fully engaged nor disengaged. The past, the present, the aura of those who have influenced the present but are no longer alive in it, objects, scenery, painful memories, death as a palpable presence, occupy the top layer of story-telling. "Death it seems had been around while we were at the pictures, watching the old American film, that I had seen many years before." Summer Visit, ends with a haunting description of a cemetery, a funeral. "Inside, the place was throbbing with death." The last of the novellas, Conversations with Mother, begins with a death, the death of the story-teller's mother. "And there you were behind the glass, on this trolley, in white, with your white hair, I scaled the steps and went behind the glass to see you, touch you, stroke your forehead, your hair... The absent mother reappears in the story as the 'other', a presence to talk with, a figure that appears in dreams, a companion, a source of memory and identity. "No, no, I shall never accept this disappearance, whatever they say...everyone says...however inevitable...no...no...?" The narrator exclaims. The final paragraph of the book is less stark but still offers resistance to the inevitability of death. "The Moreton Bay figs with those heavy shapes made of granite, and the olive trees, full of little breasts coming out everywhere, as if a series of humans that have disappeared to leave only some vital part of their bodies transfixed into bark, to survive longer." To appreciate Summer Visit, Three Novellas fully, this exquisite book needs to be savoured, its content slowly absorbed, its pages read as they were written, with infinite care and a great deal of intensity. Kefala's portraits of commonly repressed human states and emotions make a significant contribution to our literary heritage. Angelika Fremd

Ed Kuepper: Erik Roberts

UNIVERSAL GROOVES: ED KUEPPER SHAKES UP CLASSIC AVANT GARDE FILMS When I was a kid, a lot of disturbing things happened round me. But… happiness became my whole theory of life. Not hedonism but happiness of a lasting kind, like art. Art replaced God for me very early on. I ducked anxiety, but it was still there, it had to be there somewhere. The 'Tusalava' octopus-spider was a kind of death figure. Len Lye (1901 - 1980) Len Lye's dazzling handmade films have stood the test of time and continue, over 20 years after his death, to provide uninhibited joy and inspiration to audiences and artists worldwide. Now with the support and blessing of the Len Lye Foundation, Ed Kuepper has awoken latent artistic potentials within Lye's high-speed abstract paintings and drawings on film. The visual-music fusion that results achieves moments of genuine awe and unfamiliar beauty. Kuepper recently previewed his new set of instrumental pieces in the lounge of David Pestorius' suburban Brisbane home, prior to a giving a giant-screen performance in Melbourne as part of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's Live@ACMI series. Hamilton, Brisbane On a magical, mild, mid-Summer's night on Australia Day weekend, about 100 assorted Kuepper connoisseurs gathered in the small garden courtyard of a late-1960s house on a hill above the glittering city. Originator, organiser and host of the event, art impresario David Pestorius, appeared and disappeared, Puck-like, among the well-behaved crowd of latter-day Saints-lovers, never at a loss for words. For there was a lot to be excited about. This was, after all, "the world premier" of Ed Kuepper's latest set of six instrumental soundtracks composed for avant-garde art films by the great Len Lye. Pestorius explains: It is somehow fitting that Ed Kuepper's initial foray into the world of film should take place in the lounge room of a Brisbane house. Those familiar with rock 'n' roll history will recall that many of the early performances by Kuepper's first group, The Saints, took place not in the customary pub or suburban dance hall, but in an old house up on Petrie Terrace… I knew that Ed had done instrumental albums in the past, and even some of his more popular songs have extended instrumental grooves with strong rhythmic contrasts. These were important considerations as I felt they bore a certain affinity with the jazz-inflected music that Len Lye was interested in. Then there was the subject matter of 'Tusalava' - being a creation ritual about the beginning of organic life, it made sense on a conceptual level to go with Ed Kuepper as he more than anyone else in this country, is identified with that most liberating of moments in popular music, the so-called "punk" era, when everything unnecessary was stripped back and it was like starting afresh. By and by, after party talk and tequila had run dry, Monsieur Kuepper quietly entered the lounge room, accompanied by his percussionist, sound designer and a video projectionist cleverly disguised as David Pestorius. Live-performances don't get much more intimate than this, with the small audience literally sitting at the musician's feet. In a brief, off-the-cuff statement, Kuepper outlined the experimental nature of the night's audiovisual entertainment. Playing 'live' to motion-pictures is a new adventure for the seasoned guitarist with over 30 years of musical exploration behind him. The idea, it seems, was not to deliberately synchronise with Lye's freehand motion-paintings, but transfuse them with fresh musical energy. To give the audience a quick taste of Len Lye at his unadulterated best, Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940) was screened complete with its original soundtrack. Then it was Ed's turn. The bracket of film scores commenced with Kuepper's interpretation of one of the strangest animated films ever created. Made on a minute budget in the late-1920's, Tusalava, (Samoan for it's all the same, i.e. why worry?) was originally intended to be accompanied by an eccentric score for two pianos by expatriate Australian composer, Jack Ellitt, Lye's best friend and close collaborator in London. By 1929 films were using the new talkie apparatus to synchronise their music, but Lye could not raise the money needed to obtain a print with a soundtrack. Then budget forced them to reduce the two pianos in the cinema to one. Ellitt, a passionate perfectionist, was deeply troubled by these compromises. He withdrew from playing at the premier himself and one of the (London Film) Society's other pianists was left to make what he could of this avant-garde score. ( Roger Horrocks, Len Lye, a biography, Auckland University Press, 2001) So, for almost three-quarters of a century, wherever it has been screened, Tusalava has remained mute, stripped of its original music. The effect of silence on Lye's mysterious imagery has been to distance the viewer from the film's sustained rhythmic development that builds relentlessly towards an orgasmic crescendo. Soundlessness produces a more analytical, detached form of attention like looking through a microscope. Kuepper's Tusalava disregards the original rhythms and expressive nuances of the film's hand-drawn imagery. Lye's painstaking work could be seen to operate here merely as a spectacular visual accompaniment to one of the great grooves of all time. If this is all there was to the experiment, the film-performance in question could be simply dismissed as an extreme case of artistic licence - but there's something much deeper going on here. Kuepper's solo guitar above the relentless, driving rhythm immediately makes the epic scale of Lye's shamanic vision apparent. In terms of visual style, 'Tusalava' was influenced by both Maori and Aboriginal art, and as he went along (it took 2 years and over 4,000 drawings to make) Lye often considered 'how it would look if an Australian Aboriginal was doing it'. (Horrocks) From the first frame, an archetypal rhythm is established that doesn't let up for the film's 9-minute duration. Digitally multiplied and orchestrated, the raw and incisive solo guitar burned deep into the motion-pictures and came roaring back out into our gaping senses. Rarely does a moviexperience awaken our naked inner selves to the universal Flow. Existing Ed Kuepper admirers will be elated by the ferocity and assurance of the new film music. Just as he can rip and tear, Kuepper strokes and caresses the strings like a talented lover. Len Lye's art is equally erotically charged. Maybe that's where they click. Art house film buffs might be initially shocked by the composer riding roughshod over the intricacies of Lye's semi-abstract imagery, but once Kuepper's pulse-like beat and Miles-like groove get into your body, you become mesmerised by Lye's vision of life as an eternal cycle of creation and destruction. >From this point of view, Tusalava, stood out from Ed Kuepper's different interpretations of five other 'kinesthetic' films by Len Lye. Screened in the following order were: Colour Flight (1938), Particles in Space (1980), Colour Cry (1953), Tal Farlow (1980), Free Radicles (1979). Judging by the sustained applause, the audience's favourite was Colour Cry, the loudest and fastest in a set of refined grooves that test the metal of these archival masterpieces, as much as they re-present them for 21st centruy consumption. Kuepper's concert closed with a reprisal of Tusalava - much to the audience's pleasure - followed by one blast of Swinging the Lambeth Walk so we could all go home with a smile and a reinvigorated sense of wonder. "Thanks Ed", we said as we went to bed, "for bringing back to life a film that breaks every rule of cinema to free us from the mundane for a while" Erik Roberts

Gianna Murazzo: Lucas Ihlein

Event for Touristic Sites: an interview with Lucas Ihlein by Gianna Murazzo Gianna Murazzo: I really like the idea of those t-shirts of yours! I think I remember seeing a few of them at some other art site - are they the same ones? Lucas Ihlein: Yep, you can see 'em at www.pica.org.au and on adelaide indymedia too... adelaide.indymedia.org GM: If you'll allow me, I'll write a few thoughts i got from that project of yours ... the choice of a message which seems so simple, written in red ink on white t-shirts (direct, simple colours) - combined with these very public "touristic" spaces - and photographed so "frontally" in this way - is a great idea ... there's no obfuscating of the subject matter, no hiding behind metaphor or allusion, no real need to evoke art-historical references (apart from fluxus and happenings ... which were/are similar in sensibility - interaction, and directness)... LI: Sure ... it's a deliberate desire to bring together those local sites where international tourists go (or are told to go by their guidebooks), and offensive messages about the countries where they come from ... because usually in these "touristic sites" they are only greeted with the most polite and obsequious forms of false hospitality, presumably to squeeze an extra buck outta them... I want to bring what's underlying to the surface, the resentments and hostilities which nations feel for each other, and which have often been created (and also suppressed) out of that equation of tourism=money ... all of which you can easily do if you've got nothing to lose, if you aren't trying to make cash from those visitors ... GM: ...this taking of a country's identity to "ironise" it, annul it, because those red texts bring to the surface the banality and ignorance which hides beneath every generalisation we breathe... LI: Right! GM: There's also, in the event for touristic sites,, a sense of "universality" (as much as there can ever be): a desire to include as many people as possible ... remember the old one-liner "I'm not prejudiced, I hate everybody!" ... the way that folks of all nations can rummage through and find a joke about their home nation ... i imagine people would actually be disappointed if you didn't have a shirt for their country! ... but then more deeply, and going beyond the satirical aspects of the project, you do have a desire, don't you, to meet people from as many different places as possible, to go a bit further than our normal comfortable positions when meeting foreign tourists... i can also see in those public spaces a comic desire to tell stories, to get closer to people, not only because we all already know that the phrases "all the Spanish are lazy" and "all Libyans are terrorists" etc etc are blatant untruths ... in all of this there is some kind of imprint of personality, an imprint of something of a national people - that if a person is born in one place rather than another, there are consequences to be had (that's obvious) ... LI: Absolutely. I've always thought that jokes are serious things... the seriousness of the tourist's laughter or anger in this case is that there are disturbing truths that lie beneath the jokes... everyone loves relating the national stereotypes to their own travel experiences, adding their bit of evidence to the stereotype, while at the same time declaring that of course the stereotype is false, it has to be... and it's those travel stories that I love, standing there in those public spaces hearing someone's banal post-card story of how the French treated them rudely when they were in Paris in '84 or whatever... it's as "genuine" an experience of the place for them, as visiting the Eiffel tower, and tourists love it... GM: That's what I like about the event for touristic sites - although it has a darker underbelly, on the surface it's so light-hearted - these days contemporary art, to squeeze some kind of emotional response from by-now jaded art-gallery-visitors (blasted each day with ever more falsely-emotional visual crap) needs to SHOCK! and often what it proposes is so heavy, heavy in the sense of ... full of suffering, suffering and awkwardness, which sometimes is great, I'm not saying it isn't ... but so many times its just puffs of smoke to let you know you're getting near a fire - nothing but signs pointing to emotional triggers - rather than a situation which makes for a real interactive experience for people, you know what i mean? LI: Exactly. But that's a problem for contemporary art, not my problem... curators and galleries want product, rather than experience or phenomenon... they need to have their stimulus served up in recognisable forms, filtered through "artworks" or texts ... and in general they're too busy to get out on the street and actually experience the city in a less mediated way... GM: In fact, curators are often too busy to even go and look at art in galleries - they read catalogues from the safety of their own offices, and arrange to look at artist's slides - their research thus even further removed from "real" experience ... LI: Right... when I do the event for touristic sites, (and it's happened now in 6 cities - Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Berlin), often the interaction is completely outside the sphere of "art" ... and that's great, its an end in itself ... people who wear the shirts and take photos are nearly always confused by the event, too - it seems to have no commercial underpinning ("what, you're not charging me to participate??"), and it doesn't look like "art", so what is it? which leaves it open for the interactions to be real and immediate and to some extent, the event ends up being much less self-important than gallery art often is - it has to be, as it's completely reliant on those unpredictable, conversational elements...

Donovan Ward: Kevin Murray

Donovan Ward: Ash, Dust & Trade Marks at Bell-Roberts, Cape Town Long Street runs down the middle of Cape Town. It's a sparkling parade of exotic nightclubs, township hustlers, randy backpackers and streetwise undergraduates. Looming behind Long Street are the granite cliffs of Table Mountain. Sometimes, when clouds gather menacingly on its peaks, it seems like a tidal wave about to crash down on this glowing neon strip-as though the whole continent of Africa is about to descend on this merry scene with its gross humanity, its post-colonial pre-renaissance, its angry future. Near the end of Long Street, Bell-Roberts Gallery hosts exhibitions by the new generation of mostly white Cape Town artists. The gallery has also just published the first issue of Art Africa, the continent's only art magazine. Their current show, Ash, Dust & Trade Marks by Donovan Ward, eerily reflects the world around it. A set of wall pieces are painted with the face of Colonel Sanders, which has been rubbed back on one half to reveal an African mask underneath. The second series contains neon centrepieces with glowing faces like Mickey Mouse that are set on top of canvases that have been pasted with dirt, into which has been ground fragmented images of the previous era, including magazine photos and Afrikaans place names. While extraordinarily made, the works are quite sad. The future seems just as alien as the past. As an overseas visitor, I was emboldened to speak with the artist. His response was stubbornly Germanic, and resistant to any praise on my part. Donovan Ward was most talkative when it came to the technical dimension of the works, and his love of making. The fact that art of such intensity could still be made was the only possibility of redemption in otherwise fraught works. Ward seems very much one of his generation. Other Cape Town artists like Brett Murray, Doreen Southward, Jane Alexander and Lien Botha are, to varying deg