182: CULTURE CONTESTED
ISBN 0 9750837 9 1
AUTUMN 2006
published 31 March 2006

With the major political parties agreeing on the broad directions of economic policy, conflict over ‘values’ and over the nature of Australian culture has become a central element of contemporary politics.

In this issue of Overland contributors examine how Australian culture is being contested now.

In his lead-article on the writing and publishing of Australian literary fiction Malcolm Knox, award-winning journalist and novelist and literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, finds: “It would seem that the political Left has allowed the Right to steal the high ground of standards and connectedness to real life”. He asks “How on earth can this happen? How can a government that helps to set off the homicidal inferno of Iraq claim to be connected in any way with reality? How can a government that seeks to commodify workers claim any kind of moral or family values?”

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 canvas 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”.

Brian Musgrove looks at the attack on David Williamson launched late last year by a cohort of right-leaning public commentators after Williamson had asked if Australia’s increasingly consumerist culture is truly satisfying: intellectually, emotionally and morally. “The over-reaction to Williamson’s work”, Musgrove suggests, “exposed a deep paranoia about the fragility of both free-market ideology and ‘the people’ myth, reinvented by neo-conservatives”.

Ceridwen Spark contends that recent books on motherhood “suggest the dire need for new thinking about the policy on parenting and the related fertility decline in Australia”.

And Mungo MacCallum recalls Donald Horne’s long march towards a better Australian society: “At a time when most of the Left were in the throes of rage and despair, I was struck by his good-humoured optimism; he knew the world was often illogical and contrary, capable of vast stupidity and cruelty, but he also had an unquenchable belief in the underlying decency of humanity. You had to, he said towards the end of our session; otherwise what was the point?”