editorial | Nathan Hollier

THE YEARS OF UNLEAVENED BREAD, AGAIN

IN THIS ISSUE we pay tribute to the poet Shelton Lea, who died on 13 May. Shelton had been a close friend and protégé of Barrett Reid, a member of the Heide circle of artists and intellectuals. Reid was associate and poetry editor of Overland from 1967 and its editor between 1988 and 1993.

I didn’t know Shelton well but had seen and spoken to him at various launches and readings over the past decade. He usually sat at the Overland table at the Premier’s Literary Awards and was a lone boisterous figure in a room full of mannered bookish types. I grudgingly admired his bravado while wishing he wouldn’t draw attention to us. He invested so much store in his own identity as a poet – of the romantic mould – that you expected his work to be terrible. But it wasn’t. I was pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed reading and listening to his poetry. In an obituary for the Australian (24 June), Jen Jewel Brown described him as “arguably Australia’s finest romantic poet”, and I do think the critical interest in his poetry will increase.

Shelton tended to remind me of the wizened ‘Doctor’ Robert Levet in the famous poetic description by Samuel Johnson: “Well tried through many a varying year . . . Officious, innocent, sincere, / Of ev’ry friendless name the friend . . . Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind”. But I only knew Shelton as an older man. While staying with Dorothy Hewett in the Blue Mountains, helping her collate and organise her papers for what was intended to be the second volume of her autobiography, I came across a letter from Dorothy, telling of her meeting Shelton and describing him as a striking, wild young man. Jenni Mitchell’s portrait shows that younger person (see Overland 154, 1999), evoked also here by Michael Sharkey.

Shelton certainly had an interesting life, one largely unconstrained by bourgeois conventions. At least one biography of him is underway. He has left a legacy of courage, colour and originality, demonstrating through example how it is possible to remain an optimist and even an aesthete in a world where opportunity and beauty are jealously guarded by wealth and privilege.

The Australia of the past decade has of course been that of Howard, a person who, culturally, brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ or Marianne Moore’s ‘steamroller’. Writing in Meanjin in 1973, Manning Clark suggested that during the Menzies era Australia had become “a member of a club of three or four nations committed to the defence of economic privilege for the few and the supremacy of the white man”. A parallel between the Australias of Menzies and Howard comes to mind, particularly if our membership of what Mary Kalantzis terms the “Axis of Anglos” (Overland 178) is taken into account, though it has to be said that Clark’s ‘club’ nowadays includes more than a few members. “The great Australian dream of social equality and mateship”, Clark writes, “was bleeding to death in the jungles and paddy-fields of Vietnam.” Today we’re in Iraq, and the dream Clark refers to needs more than a blood transfusion: perhaps cryogenic resuscitation.

Clark goes on however to draw a contrast between the politics and the art of the Menzies age: “The men and women with the creative gifts . . . expanded our minds and helped us to see ourselves as we really were”. “Paradoxically,” Clark says, “the more exciting [the artists] made our lives, the greater the mess and the mire and the moral disgrace to which the government of the day exposed us.” Again, a parallel with our own time comes to mind. Louise Swinn suggests in this issue that there is a deal of exciting and stimulating new literary work both emerging now and on the horizon. Perhaps the value and attraction of art becomes more obvious during moments of profound political and social conservatism, as we experience for ourselves what Clark, in reference to the Menzies era, called “the years of unleavened bread”.

As a poet, Shelton Lea dealt with language, imagery and symbols, in a sense the primary materials of culture. Most contributors to this issue are, as ever in Overland, broadly concerned with the historically specific relationship between culture and society; and more particularly with the political dimensions of that relationship.

Sean Scalmer, who has earlier written incisively for Overland on ‘elites’ (Overland 154, 1999), turns his attention to recent uses of the ‘aspirational’ label by journalists, politicians, spin doctors and academics, arguing that while the term registers a desire for class mobility, it is in fact the latest in a long line of terms used to describe groups of people who sit ‘in-between’ the major socio-economic classes, thereby paradoxically revealing the continuing importance of class constraints.
Les Thomas, Overland’s new designer, writes on the case of his brother ‘Jihad Jack’ Thomas (did you get that, ASIO?), currently being charged under the Federal Government’s draconian ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation. Les discusses also the active role of the corporate media in facilitating the Government’s vilification of Jack, part of the Government’s wider agenda of reducing the rights and liberties of the general public and doing away with the legal checks and balances that have historically limited the domestic operations of state power. (Although given that the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions has just commented that further investigation into the affairs of millionaire businessman Steve Vizard may be pointless because of the media’s influence on a potential jury, perhaps Jack Thomas has nothing to worry about.) Relevant also to understanding and surviving the present McCarthysim is Brian Martin’s ‘how to’ article on whistleblowing.

Arnold Zable reviews Gwenda Tavan’s new study of the White Australia policy and Tavan discusses this work and its personal bases with Vin D’Cruz. Jessica Raschke examines the great debates over ‘multicultural’ literature during the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s. She finds that while “arguments over class, gender and sexuality can prompt a bit of literary bruising . . . the tetchy grounds of race, ethnicity, and more specifically multiculturalism, invariably trigger an all-in brawl”. The legacy of the Whitlam Government, which via Al Grassby introduced Australian multiculturalism, is discussed by Peter Holding.

In his important 1998 novel Three Dollars, Elliot Perlman’s character Tanya “predicted that the day would come when people would have difficulty remembering a time that movements in the stock market were not reported more frequently than the road toll or air pollution indices”. Ours, the novel’s Eddie, suggests, is “a world so desperate for high priests that it rewarded the neo-classical librettists of macro self-interest with nouveau mandarin status”. At a time when knowledge of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of economics exists in inverse relationship to the pervasiveness of stock market reports, Tim Battin writes an important article on the social origins and effects of markets. He points out that all market outcomes are socially constructed and so goes on to argue that these outcomes should be chosen, or planned, democratically. His advice is as instructive to many of the Left as it is to those of the Right. Like Battin, however, the self-described ‘child of the Enlightenment’, Noam Chomsky, is eminently aware of the connection between economic, political and cultural power. Continuing our series profiling prominent and influential intellectuals, Clinton Fernandes offers here a new reading of Chomsky’s life, work and reputation.