editorial | Nathan Hollier

THE CULTURE CONTESTED

IN HIS AUTHORITATIVE ACCOUNT of The Idea of Culture (2000) Terry Eagleton observes that: “Men and women are more likely to take to the streets over cultural and material issues rather than purely political ones – the cultural being what concerns one’s spiritual identity, and the material one’s physical one”.

At the same time, and for the same reason, the ‘nature’ of culture, including Australian culture, is always strongly contested. Though the cultural realm can never be wholly reduced to or explained as a manifestation of politics – neither art nor a person’s whole way of life nor her ideal of a decent civilisation are ever just political – control over understandings of culture can help to yield or reinforce political power.

There is no real agreement on when the present ‘wars’ over the actual and proper nature of Australian and Western culture began. In the Australian context ‘black armbands’ and ‘political correctness’ and the general offensive against forms of affirmative action or positive economic discrimination really got going in the late 1980s. A crucial year was 1988, in which Australia, under an ALP government, celebrated, however imperfectly, its multicultural identity. How long ago that now seems, and in light of recent statements by Prime Minister Howard and his heir apparent, Peter Costello, how far away, culturally.

Thomas Frank argues persuasively that the particular rhetorical shape of our modern culture wars can be traced to 1968: “What beat the Left in America wasn’t inflation and uppity workers, it was the culture war. Starting with the Nixon campaign in 1968 and continuing up through the Gingrich years, the American Right paid the bills by handing out favours to business, but it won elections by provoking, organising, and riding a massive populist backlash against the social and cultural changes of the 1960s” (One Market Under God, 2000). Those who pointed to structural or social causes of inequality and injustice, who thought that greed, racism, sexism and homophobia were not the greatest ideas in the world and that such social problems could be counteracted by a more equitable distribution of society’s wealth, became a ‘new class’ of ‘elites’, who were not merely misguided but actively involved in oppressing ‘the people’, the common folk and their ‘traditional’ cultural values.

The Australian Right, admirably free from any obsession with originality, conducted a wholesale importation of this rhetoric, and like some tiresome uncle you’re confronted with every Christmas, has doggedly, depressingly, boringly, repeated it ever since. The basic narrative was wheeled out yet again late last year, as part of a vicious attack by the right-wing media commentariat on the playwright David Williamson. He had dared to question mindless consumerism and thereby incurred the wrath of Andrew Bolt, et al., for whom this way of life is of course a sacred cow. As Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli wrote a few years ago, in a study of prevailing, free-market notions of economic ‘development’: “There are no societies without religion, even, or especially, those which believe themselves to be entirely secular” (Faith and Credit, 1994).

IN THIS ISSUE Brian Musgrove examines the attack on Williamson, arguing that “the over-reaction to Williamson’s work exposed a deep paranoia about the fragility of both free-market ideology and ‘the people’ myth, reinvented by neo-conservatives”. Musgrove brings to mind here RW Connell’s still resonant 2002 observation that “There is a great secret about neo-liberalism, which can only be whispered, but which at some level everyone knows: neo-liberalism does not have popular support” (Overland 167).

Power relations are by definition relational. No power or control is ever absolute. While acknowledging the social reality of systemic power – variously capitalist, patriarchal, racial and sexual – contributors to this issue are centrally concerned with ways in which culture is currently being contested.

Malcolm Knox looks at the fate of the Australian literary novel, the one-time cultural flagship of the nation, and argues that many people involved in the publishing, selling and promoting of literary works have allowed themselves, because of an overall economic climate in which short-term profit is valued above all else, to become preoccupied with the ‘saleability’ of the author or the text, and so to lose sight of the actual quality of the writing, and so also of the reading experience. This said, the writer’s major enemy, according to Knox, is not the present publishing system but “the person telling the writer, ‘You are a cultural elite, you are a wanker, you are irrelevant, your day is past. Give up. Bend. Write thrillers – sing for your supper’”. Knox suggests, against the trend of academic literary discussion over the past two decades, that what is needed is a way of talking about the emotional impact of the writer’s use of language: “What we lack, it seems to me, is a way of talking about the work itself in a way that expresses what gives us the most pleasure”.

Contemporary Australian literary fiction is surveyed in this issue by Paul Gillen.

Sylvia Lawson writes on the courageous attempt by protesters Will Saunders and Dave Burgess to remind Australians that they have a say in the meaning of their culture and its icons. Saunders and Burgess used the Sydney Opera House as a vehicle for an unofficial, but highly popular message: ‘No War’ in Iraq. In recalling this 2003 “instance of spectacular and passionate protest”, now “all but forgotten”, Lawson suggests that “our amnesia connects with the general sleepy indifference to the tally of civilian deaths in Iraq”.

The Western reception of war in the Gulf is also explored in Anthony Macris’s ‘Highway of Death’ story; while Peter Holding continues his Overland commentary on the subject, putting forward rarely publicised evidence as part of his argument for Australia’s withdrawal from Iraq.

Elsewhere, in his thoughtful account of the 2005 ‘Two Fires’ festival, held at Braidwood in New South Wales to honour and build on the artistic and activist legacies of Judith Wright, Philip Mead searches for a language capable of bringing these different aspects of Wright’s life together. Merle Thornton reveals the deep psychological and political value of the feminist novel, while Ceridwen Spark discusses recent books dealing more directly with issues of feminism and motherhood. Gloria Davies profiles the important Chinese intellectual Wang Hui, outlining his courageous attempt to advance Chinese cultural traditions capable of providing policy alternatives to neo-liberalism and state-socialism. And Thomas Shapcott, Mungo MacCallum and Vane Lindesay recall and praise in turn three great contributors to Australian culture: Brian Johnstone, Donald Horne and Sidney J. Baker.

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