Last night I attended the unveiling of a facsimile of a portrait of my father painted when he was fresh off the boat in 1941. Thanks go to Bruce Chapman above all, but to many others for organising. To Erwin Fabian, who pained the portrait all those years ago. It’s been over 16 years since Dad departed and I’ve made two other speeches reflecting on things, one at his memorial after he died, another, more general one using Dad as a foil to reflect on ‘the asylum seeker issue’. I needed to make another one!
I.
When Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a gold mask in Mycenae, he was reputed to have said “I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon”. In a more modest way Erwin Fabian’s magnificent portrait allows us to gaze back through time – upon the face of a very different person to the one we all knew.
When Dad arrived in England in 1936, he was 15 and alone. He must have been scared. Met by a teacher from Herne Bay College where he was to board, Dad had no English. “Salve” he said, greeting the teacher in Latin. No dice: He was the gym instructor.
The portrait was painted just four months after the Dunera arrived. To find him in those days you just followed the signs in the main street of Hay to the “Concentration Camp”. Dad must have wondered where his mother Marianne was; how she was. She was taken to Theresienstadt. It was a way-station to Auscwitz.
It also had creepy similarities to Hay. Theresienstadt was Hitler’s home for Europe’s Jewish cultural elite. So, as the inmates quietly starved, it doubled as a set for Nazi propaganda showing how well Jewish ‘resettlement’ was going. As she waited to discover her fate, Marianne would sometimes have attended lectures, recitals, poetry readings, and concerts, just as Dad was doing in Hay.
II.
I’ll return to the person in the portrait shortly, but I thought I’d list some propositions I take from my father’s success.
You make your own life
But look after people
Knuckle down. Work hard. Get on with things
But don’t be a workaholic
Take yourself seriously
But not too seriously
Don’t be shy. Chat with strangers.
If you’re nice to them, they’ll probably like you
Believe in, invest in, your own integrity and that of others.
Don’t get on your high horse or start a fight unless it really matters
You’ll know it really matters if, maybe only if, real injustice is done to someone who can’t easily defend themselves
If you want your intellect to make a positive contribution to people’s lives, the trick is to combine a warm heart with a cool head.
There is no shortage of people with exceptional intelligence and no damn sense
Listen carefully to those who disagree with you.
Listen like they might even be right.
Build, don’t destroy
But turn your back on things if you have to
Appreciate life
It ends
III
To me anyway, it’s important to remember that, however accomplished Dad was, however enjoyable his company, however much Max Corden praised his scrupulousness as a scholar, describing him as a one person Royal Commission, it was all built on the normal human difficulties and frailties.
In the last month or so we had plenty of long talks. In one he said “That’s the last time I really understood you. When you punched a hole in the wall of your room. That was the sort of thing I might have done at that age. Later I decided I needed to knuckle down. Work hard. Get on.”
The thing was . . . I’d not punched a hole in the wall. In a move that can only be fully appreciated with some understanding of adolescent AFL fans, in the dying moments of some unspecified Grand Final, I’d taken a magnificent ‘speckie’, descending from my ecstasy into the softness of my bed, only to learn that I’d not defied gravity by digging my knee into some obliging opponent’s back. I’d simply thrust it through the accommodating canite of my bedroom wall.
IV
At Dad’s memorial I read a Yiddish poem from the child of Holocaust survivors:
Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.
Tomorrow your children will shed your tears
I recall five years later – perhaps ten – sitting in a barber’s chair and some unusual – indeed ridiculous – facts came to mind. I fantasised again, not, this time the unheralded adolescent superhero. I’d become a great poet (again mysteriously undiscovered). I was composing a great poem that would uncover the sublime from the ridiculous.
The pity of it is, as you will appreciate, I’m no poet. I barely understand a lot of poetry. Still, sometimes a poem speaks for itself. As when I first heard this extraordinary fragment – a single sentence in eight lines of free verse – tossed off by John Keats in the margin of a page on which he’d been writing another, longer poem. Keats was 23, desperately in love with Fanny Brawne. And he knew he was dying:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –
I hold it towards you.
What did Keats mean by this last gesture, reaching across the chasm separating the living from the dead?
In any event, as the barber snipped away, tears swept down my cheeks, my mind flooding with grief for my father, rekindled by the beauty of this poem I’d never write. Self-conscious, I added to the surrealism of the occasion by managing to smile: Beatific, if somewhat zoned-out. The bemused barber asked if I was OK. “I’m fine” I said with such nonchalance that I surely convinced him, however momentarily, that his customers usually haemorrhaged tears, smiling blankly into his mirror.
The poem might have been called “Three moustaches: Three ages of man”. I expect moustaches were more important for the generation of my Dad’s father Willi than they were for Dad’s. In any event as a newlywed, Dad briefly experimented with growing a moustache. He and Mum both agreed it looked ridiculous.
Unable to grow their own, Dad’s young sons urged him to grow it once more. It was a long time coming. Then, with David and I in our twenties, on a cruise to Hong Kong and perhaps the last time we spent any sustained time together as a family, Dad’s moustache arrived unannounced; initially unnoticed, but then unmistakable, becoming quite the full huntsman spider in the middle of his handsome face, before yielding, perhaps to my mother’s conviction that it was as ridiculous then as it had ever been.
Then within a week or two of the end … the professor dying … that moustache crept up on us again, initially mistaken for some slip in Dad’s shaving routine. But after the second day and until his death, and in the coffin as he lay there, it stared back at us – as mysterious as it was unmistakable.
We can only speculate about what it meant – on what he meant. I guess like Keats, he was trying to say something across the chasm.
He was saying:
“See here it is. I hold it towards you.”
He was reminding us, that no matter how much we love someone, they always remain, as life remains . . . a mystery.
Waleed Aly: 'I was more likely to win an AFL grand final in my mind than to win a Logie', Gold Logie acceptance - 2016
8 May 2016, Crown Palladium, Melbourne, Australia
Thank you Steve Molk at decidertv.com for sharing his transcription. Great Australian TV site.
That's all we have time for. Thank you very much. Good night.
Do not adjust your sets. There's nothing wrong with the picture. If you're in the room I'm sure there's an Instagram filter you could use to turn things to normal. It'll be fine.
This is happening.
It's true. Finally a male presenter on commericial TV has won the Gold Logie.
I probably should apologise up front to my kids. My daughter and especially my son. I'm pretty sure he was barracking for Grant Denyer tonight, and it was hard work because I had to stop him voting and the only argument I could come up with was that he wasn't yet voting age. You can't vote until you're old enough to have an unrequited crush on a Home and Away star or something like that. It seemed to work, so thank him for abstaining.
Before I get stuck in in earnest I think it is really, really important to acknowledge... actually I want more to celebrate the extraordinary talents and contributions and achievements of my fellow nominees tonight because they genuinely are a remarkable field.
It only struck me today when I set my mind to it. The thing that struck me about it was that each nominee brilliantly distills some separate piece of Australia and I think it's an amazing thing, it's a fantastic thing that that can be a symbol on this night in this way and I'd encourage you to think about that because if you step back and look at all those pieces assembled it is a truly spectacular mosaic and we should really be celebrating that fact.
So congratulations to them for everything they've achieved and everything they're gonna go on to achieve and please know that in no way do I feel that I deserve to be here more than any one of you. I thank you for being a part of the class of 2016 with me because it's been fantastic to be associated with you.
I don't... I wanna do my best to keep this as brief as I can because everyone at home wants to go to sleep and everyone in this room has a night that is about to begin and I know you're all keen to get into some stuff and... no, no I mean like your first carbohydrate in six months or something.
So I'm not gonna do a huge roll call of thanks, but I would, because I didn't mention them before I do wanna thank my agents particularly. Michael, and especially Jessinta who has I'm sure so many heated arguments with people and I don't even know they're happening so I can get about my job and that's fantastic to have someone in your corner like that. It makes a huge difference and thank you for being so entertaining when you're doing it.
And I do also want to thank one more time my wife Susan. There's only one more think I wanna say - I could say a lot more about Susan - but the reality is, and this is just a dirty little secret I've carried around for a long time, but if she had my job she'd be better at it than me.
She is sharper, she is wittier, she is funnier, she is infinitely more charming and likable, and I'm really glad she doesn't have my job because otherwise I definitely wouldn't have it. The reason she doesn't is because she has bigger, more important things to do, and everyone who knows her knows that she changes you, and she makes you better. She's done that in her work, she's done that in her community work and they don't give statuettes to people like that, sadly.
But one day if life's fair they might just give her a statue.
I think it's fair to say I never anticipated I'd win a Logie. Not in a sort of I'd fall short kind of way but I couldn't conceive of this - I was more likely to win an AFL grand final in my mind than to win a Logie, and I'm still hoping for that.
That means I'm a little bit gobsmacked but I am hugely appreciative of the audience decided to throw me a bouquet in this way on this night, and I know it's temporary, and I know I will probably never be here again and I know that one day, probably very soon, I'll merely be the answer to some obscure trivia question or if I'm really, really lucky the subject of one of those "Where Are They Now" specials that gets show on Sunday afternoons. That's when they're shown, definitely in non-ratings period.
If I'm really lucky that's what will happen but tonight, tonight to know that when you've just started a new gig and I know I'm the work experience kid - like I've been here five minutes - when you've just started a new gig to know the audience has accepted you into their universe is the most wonderful feeling and I do not take that for granted and I want everybody in this room to know that.
I also know, and this is a really important point, I also know that every individual award, whether it be a Brownlow or a Dally M or an award like this is misleading. Every individual award tells a lie of some sort because it's really about the people that gather around you that delivers these awards to you and I'm incredibly blessed to be surrounded by so many of those people so I'm happy to accept this award but I accept it on behalf of our show - a show that is not afraid to make mistakes by going after something that might be a bit risky, or trying to tell a boring story in a more interesting way and it's the mistakes that I probably cherish more than anything else. Not that I'm going to tell you what they are but I'm definitely cherish them. I think that's what makes our show a show.
And I think it is no coincidence that both Carrie and I were nominated tonight. It is no coincidence that our show has been represented on this spot in this way for two years in a row, and the reason that is the case I think is because this is a show that lands not only on people's television screens but also in people's hearts and I can't claim credit for that but I'm hugely proud of it.
And finally I wanna claim this award on behalf of actually a couple of people. People like this guy called Dimitri, who none of you will know, he's a guy who just came up to me about a week ago and he did something that most people don't do.
He didn't come up to me and wish me good luck for tonight. He came up to me and through gritted teeth commanded me to claim this award tonight. And it was a bit scary and I dare not cross him so I'm glad I can look him in the face again, but he communicated something to me and it was that this really, really mattered to him. This really meant something to him.
He didn't vote, by the way. I didn't really want to point that out to him at the time. There have been a lot of people in the last week or two that have made it really, really clear to me that me being here right now really matters to them. And it matters to them for a particular reason.
That reason was brought home shudderingly not so long ago actually when someone, who is in this room and I'm not going to use their name that they use in the industry, came up to me and introduced themselves to me and said, "I really hope you win. My name's Mustafa, but I can't use that name because I won't get a job."
He's here tonight.
And it matters to people like that that I'm here. And I know - it's not because of me. I know that.
So to Dimitri and Mustafa and everyone else with an unpronounceable name - I dunno, Waleed - I really just wanna say one thing and this is that I am incredibly humbled that you would even think to invest in me in that way, but I'm also incredibly saddened by it because the truth is you deserve more numerous and more worthy avatars than that and I don't know if and when that's gonna happen but if tonight means anything - and I don't know if it does - but if tonight means anything it's that the Australian public - our audience - as far as they're concerned, there's absolutely no reason why that can't change.
Thank you very much. Good night. Have a good one. Thank you.
- See more at: http://decidertv.com/page/2016/5/10/logies-speeches-tim-minchin-noni-hazlehurst-waleed-aly#sthash.yZz5A3Vf.dpuf
Anson Cameron: 'If a woman announced herself as a potter and bought a potter’s-wheel she was a trouble-maker', SheppARTon Festival keynote - 2015
6 March 2015, Shepparton Festival, Shepparton, Victoria
To the average person in Melbourne I am a sage on the subject of Shepparton. I often diagnose and pontificate on her ailments to enthralled audiences… “Shepparton has sold its soul for a few fibre-glass friesians.” “The people who knocked down her old red-brick post-office should still be in jail.” “The dairy farmers have shot themselves in the gumboot.” “The SPC has made a pact with the devil.”
Of course, when I get back to Shepparton I find I’m the most ignorant man in town on the topic of Shepparton – and I should be talking about almost any other town or topic than Shepparton. Still… ignorance on any topic rarely gives a man who’s asked to speak on it pause, or you’d be able to hear a gnat belch in parliament.
I’ve been writing my memoirs lately – I know, I know, I can hear the murmur go through the crowd. “No, Anson. You’re too young, You’re too young.” But Random House is paying me to do it, so I suspect they think I’m on my last legs.
Anyway, I find when I’m writing about Shepparton I’m writing about a place that might have once existed… but then, given that memory is a type of story, a type of fiction, and maybe even an art itself… then perhaps the Shepparton I’ve been writing about and the Shepparton I’ll be talking about only ever existed once, for one person. And if so this talk of mine is just another landscape painted by a hopeful artist
SHOCKIN AWFUL
Speaking of hopeful artists… This festival has come a long way. If I remember correctly, it started with a much narrower base than it has now. These days it’s a broad-based community arts festival spread across forty venues and three weeks. It encompasses sculpture, musical misadventures, musical masterclasses, opera, theatre, film, quilting, woodwork, a boat regatta and, amazingly, a series of geoglyphs that make one wonder if its not routine these days for the Tallises to getripped off their tits on LSD before ploughing their paddocks. The festival even has one event, a piece of performance art, at which the much-loved favorite son of the town comes home to a hero’s welcome, and after he addresses his people the town’s menfolk stuff his pockets with cash and the ladies pelt the stage with their underthings. “Not now, honey. Stay there. Don’t jump the gun.”
But many years ago this Festival was nothing but an exhibition of paintings. It was situated at what was then called The Civic Centre. Now known as SAM, I believe. We called it the Civic Centre because it was a… Civic Centre. We despised acronyms in those days.
There was a long verandah outside hung with the canvases of all the aspiring artists within cooee. Hundreds of the things. Paintings of smithys and Smiths and stamen and laymen and ponies and phoneys, and Furphys and Murphys, and Lady Godivas and shady connivers and Monaros and Camaros and shady Mayors and Lady Mayors and other local dignitaries… with which nothing rhymes.
I think Mooroopna artists may have been ineligible to enter, because Mooroopna, with her usual little-sister’s hubris, had set up a paltry exhibition of her own in competition to the Shepparton one. Still, excepting Mooroopna, all the cracks had gathered to the fray, as it were. And as a boy I used to parade up and down the verandah along the front of the Civic Centre, not looking at the paintings, but eavesdropping on what people were saying about the paintings.
I was gobsmacked, and delighted, by the shit people felt free to pile on other people’s artworks. Shepparton, when the art show rolled around, seemed to be a bubbling cauldron of critical thinking, free expression and undiluted bile.
On the verandah of the Civic Centre I once watched an old lady proudly standing alongside a still-life she’d painted. A man, who I suspect was an orchardist, stepped up to it and said, ‘Huckin pears. What type of idiot paints huckin pears?’ The old lady’s face sagged and a tear came to her eye. Now it’s not uncommon for an artist to go through years of struggle before they meet with success. Everyone can expect a few rugged reviews. But this old woman took up the brush when she was about eighty-five. And by the look on her face I suspect her artistic aspirations died right there, crushed at the hands of that pear-despising orchardist. Exhibitions and Festivals are full of little tragedies.
Another year I remember eavesdropping on two large women as they stood in front of a painting and talked it down. I can’t remember the subject of the actual painting in question, but if I say it was of a rusty watertank I’ll have a fifty percent chance of being right. A lot of budding artists painted rusty tanks back then. There was an hysteria about the things. It wasn’t uncommon to see a rusty tank out in a paddock surrounded by five or six easels and a Mister Whippy van, with the owner of the paddock trying to shoo everyone away.
Anyway, these two hefty women were getting stuck into this painting of the rusty tank, “Oh, it lacks all perspective.” “What even is it?” “My Blue Heeler has more brush-skill than this bloke.”
I was only about six, but even then, I had an unappeasable appetite to embarrass adults. So I stepped between them and the canvas they were belittling, as if I was protecting it and said, “Excuse me… my Dad painted this.” Now, my Dad never painted anything but his sheds… always Mission Brown, for those of you who like detail. But the truth wasn’t then and isn’t now my métier.
One of the women, a particularly big woman, puffed herself up in her sunfrock, which had gravy stains and sauce daubings down the front of it, and I was only little, so to me she looked like a Winnebago that had been decorated by Jackson Pollock, and she eyeballed me and said, “Sonny, I don’t care who painted it… I think it’s shockin awful.”
“Shockin Awful” That phrase has resonated with me down the years. It’s the sort of no-favors, no-nonsense critical honesty an arts festival needs. I have, in later life, come to revere that fearless critic. And I hanker to hear her views on fibreglass Friesians.
So, I come here tonight to honor that lady’s memory and unleash some fearless critical theorem of my own on this town and its Festival. Just think of me as a chubby Sheila in a stained sunfrock, not necessarily blessed with any knowledge or aesthetic sense, but bristling with opinions.
THE COLOURED BOY.
But it wasn’t the Shepparton Art Exhibition that gave me my first experience of real, profound art in this town. My first meeting with art was at Gowrie Street state school when I was disgracing that educational facility with my sporadic attendance.
I was very fond of my Grade One teacher Miss Scott. She drew the most magical scenes on the blackboard in rainbow colored chalks before class. I suppose it’s a comment on the easy wonder the world holds for a child that no visual art I’ve seen since has ever filled me with such mind-boggling awe as Miss Scott’s pictures.
Every morning we’d race each other to be first to class to see what new vista, what fresh masterpiece, this chalk-wielding Da Vinci had conjured. It might be an erupting volcano with lashings of red and orange lava, and white-eyed Indonesians fleeing down its slopes in fear. It might be a blue and yellow seaside scene with dolphins cavorting the way dolphins presumably did. They were, to us, the most astonishing pictures. We did our lessons in our own little Louvre.
Sadly, by the end of each day I would have committed some crime and my punishment would be to clean the blackboard. I felt like a Nazi looting one of the great galleries of Europe. After erasing the picture I’d have to take the wadded felt blackboard duster outside and beat it with a ruler until all the chalk was out of it. As I beat the blackboard duster a cloud of colored chalkdust would rise around me and slowly engulf me.
If Miss Scott had drawn a red hippo eating yellow grass on the blackboard alongside a song about hippos, I would put my hand up and ask her loudly if it was a picture of Deidre Lowe. Deidre Lowe would burst out crying to be compared to a crimson hippo and I would be punished by having to erase the blackboard and then take the duster outside and clean it by beating it with a ruler, thereby raising an orange fog made of red hippo and yellow grass. As my skin became wet and sweaty I would march back and forth through the orange fog and it would settle brightly on me and I would cycle home the color of an Oompa Loompa.
If Miss Scott thought I found this embarrassing - if she thought it might shut me up - she was wrong. I enjoyed leaving school as vividly painted as a rodeo clown. I was a particular wonder to one old couple that used to lean on their wire fence in Cottrell Street as I rode past on my way home. Her eyesight was going, so her husband would narrate my passing for her. ‘Look, Doris. It’s the colored boy. He’s orange today. Orange as orange can be.’ I imagined they thought me some sort of hallucination who’d leapt from the flagon of sweet sherry that was always pugged into the horse manure between them. Most pensioners were drunk in those days.
‘Why is a boy riding around orange?’ he’d ask her. She just shook her head. She didn’t know.
One day Miss Scott was teaching us a song from The Sound of Music. She had drawn an alpine scene on the blackboard, luring us to sing of a lonely goatherd. But I had substituted “old turd” for “goatherd” and sung too loudly, “High on a hill lived a lonely old turd.”
My punishment was to erase those mountains and then go outside and beat the duster clean. Once outside I wanged at the duster and writhed in the green fog made of that obliterated mountainscape upon which the Von Trapp’s lonely goatherd had fed his mangy flock.
As I rode home I saw the old couple in Cottrell Street standing drunkenly holding onto their fence watching their piece of streetscape. I rode along on the footpath slowly, right up close to them to hear what they said. ‘Well… jingoes, Doris… He’s green today. Green as clover.’
‘Who? The Boy?’
‘Yeees. The colored boy.’
‘Sing out to him and ask him why he’s green,’ she said.
So the old fellow yelled out at me, ‘Why are you green?’
‘Cos Goatherd rhymes with Old Turd,’ I shouted back.
I think that probably cleared the matter up for them.
Of all the many wonders and delights you people will be treated with at this Festival over the coming weeks… Dethridge wheels made into flowers, the otherworldly warblings of David Hobson, the many contemporary art installations… I truly doubt you will see anything as avant garde as that old couple were treated to… a rainbow colored boy with an underlying patina of ringworm, wobbling grandly along on a cherry red Malvern Star.
In my multi-colored phase I was, in some ways, the prototype of the plastic cows that graze your streets, I think. A sort of pointless alien who left people blinking, shaking their heads and asking, “What the hell was that…?”
THE URGE TO MAKE ART.
Art appears to be non-negotiable, doesn’t it. No sooner do man and woman fill their bellies and warm themselves by the fire than they begin to look about the cave walls and wonder if a bison or kangaroo might look good daubed here or there in ochre or charcoal. Or perhaps if a man has recently been granted the favors of woman he’ll paint her naked on a cave wall as a way of boasting to his mates, in this pre-literate world, that he has met with some success.
Whatever the impulse - the urge to make art seems innate, fierce, universal. There has never been a society or culture that didn’t, as soon as it had a moment of leisure, or a shekel of disposable income, begin to throw light on the world through the many media we know as art.
Except… around here, we didn’t… as far as I remember.
SOUP CAN.
There was, I recall, to the East of town, a massive Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can atop a tower. And for the five or six people in the district who knew of and rated Andy Warhol’s art, this monument was a thing of pride. For the rest of us it was a tricky way of getting the kids to hassle their mothers for tomato soup for dinner.
But other than that I don’t recall the landscape dotted with public art.
FIELDS OF INDUSTRIALS.
So we took art where we could find it. And for me the most wondrous art in the district were those fields of junk that a certain type of man collected. Here and there the valley was dotted with great collections of what appeared from distance… and quite often from close-up, as yesterday’s crap. But there is no truer museum than a field of accumulated junk. These days I suspect by-laws and officious officials have cleansed the landscape of them and psychologists have diagnosed their curators as suffering some syndrome… Rusty Metal Psychosis, or some such thing.
But there were dozens of these junkfields in the district when I was a kid. And as a child I used to creep among rusty tin, walk swivel-necked through these rearing fields of obsolete critters; car bodies and stock troughs and coils of wire and engine blocks and truck chassis and ploughs and grader blades and sheets of corrugated iron and Ferguson tractors and horse-drawn buggies and Sunshine harvesters and Furphy carts and swingle trees and drums marked with skull-and-bones, and dog kennels and mangles and the silver innards of dead dairies or the contents of some burnt-out hardware store… this was a walk through a gallery… a museum… an adventure park. There were dead contraptions in these fields of junk that were as mysterious to me as a UFO, a dinosaur or a Gregorian Chant.
They echoed of rural history, of industrial progress, of good times and bad, of bankruptcies and booms, of folly and war, of brilliant ideas and crackpot inventions. This is what I had for public art when I was a boy here.
And best of all you could go to these places alone and puzzle over what this or that geriatric contraption might have done. There’s a lot to be said for letting children discover things by themselves… give em a bike and let em piss off… within twenty pushes of the pedals they are in Kansas… a world of their own. And if these fields of junk weren’t art… then it was at least curatorship, it was memory rendered in rust. They were the maverick museums of our valley.
Even today a bullock dray slumped over on shattered grey wooden wheels still speaks to me as coherently and profoundly as any sculpture. There is, I know, a statue of Joe Furphy in Welsford Street. Strangely, for a statue of a storyteller, it doesn’t tell a story as well as one of his brother’s carts.
This is why I love Tank’s sculptures out on the old tip road. Go out and see them. Those mighty flowers made of Dethridge Wheel’s. There would be men in this room who devised any number of ways to cheat those wheels and fool the water bailiff and pinch a few litres for their pears. And now after years of ushering water to other plants they’ve finally bloomed themselves. Quite poetic, in its way.
NOT MUCH PUBLIC ART
I suppose there wasn’t much public art in Shepparton when I was a kid because we Anglo/Celts were such an ascetic, unadorned people, suspicious of decoration and distrustful of people bunging on side. We were wary of showiness or affectation. If a man wore a cravat he was “Bunging on side”. If a woman announced herself as a potter and bought a potter’s-wheel she was a trouble-maker, probably with a vast palette of mental problems associated with lesbianism.
I remember many conversations between the men of my father’s generation that went like this:
“I hear Evonne Smith’s bought a potter’s wheel.”
‘Jesus. Ceramics.”
“Yeah, pots. Probly vases too.”
“Shit. That’s it then.”
“Yeah. I hope the kids ‘ll be okay.”
You could take the potter’s wheel out of that convo and insert the word “easel” and it would go the same. An easel was thought a dangerous weapon to a marriage.
If artists grew up here, by and large, they went elsewhere to make their art. Flashiness or affectation of any kind was frowned on. We had a lot in common with the Taliban except we drank a heap more grog.
CEMETERY.
You’d see our austere ethos at its most chronic when you’d go out to the cemetery and look at the graves of the immigrants from the British Isles. Unadorned basalt, with names and dates and family connections and every now and then someone rose into the melodramatic heights to mention the deceased had been DEARLY BELOVED. They are the monumental incarnations of a puritan aesthetic. These days you’ll see grander graves in a pet cemetery.
GREEKS ITALIANS CEMETERY
But wander into the newer areas of the cemetery and you’d find the Italians and Greeks were shouting at God through megaphones - their family crypts made of shiny black marble and decorated with cherubim and seraphim and Saints and alabaster Jesuses and busty Virgins Mary in legion, and they were decorated in gold, and some had photos of the deceased on them, fading beneath beautiful bubbles of glass. They were awe-inspiring to an Anglo/Celt kid. Each grave, each mausoleum, was a work of art and a thundering demand on God’s time and attention.
Sometimes Dad would take us out there, to those lovely sandhills with their peppercorn trees where, a boy who knew his stuff could collect the valuable eggs of the Rainbow Bea-eater, and I’d look at the graves of Furphys who’d been gathered in by their creator, and I’d wonder “How on Earth are my people going to get heard by God while surrounded by this Mediterranean crescendo of architectural splendor? The buggers must all be still queuing in purgatory like Mexicans trying to get into America.
JEALOUS. SUNDAY DRIVES.
I think as kids we were jealous of the ostentation, the freedom of expression of these people, their crypts were the granite equivalent of crying in public… of showing emotion… which we were forbidden to do.
And the easiest way to make sense of art you don’t understand is to despise it. So when I was a kid that’s what we did. Actively and with passion. On Sundays we’d load into our Galaxy 500 and drive out beyond the edge of town, to the orchards where the eagles and lions waited. Out there, in acres of fruit trees Mediterranean immigrants had surrounded their houses with cement critters; vultures, stallions, lions atop gateposts, eagles perched on pillars…
Inside every Italian, there was, it seemed, a Medici who, freed by pear money, became a patron to a Michelangelo working in cement and cliché. Thus each Italian was soon keeper of his own stone menagerie, a job-lot of noble beasts frozen in the act of defending a small orchard.
For us the payoff of an otherwise boring Sunday Drive was ogling and guffawing at this cut-rate renaissance. We’d motor from one palace to the next as Dad pointed out fresh affronts. As with Picasso, this art brought as much pleasure to its delighted detractors than its defenders.
We Cameron children were an amalgam of unpretentious peoples. Scot, Paddy and Pom, a cocktail of dour bloods ran in our veins and nothing in our world and nothing in our knowledge of the wider world and nothing in our imaginations was as racially hubristic, civically antagonistic, tastelessly ostentatious, or just plain un-Australian as a cement eagle with its wings unfurled and given a lick of gold paint. These Italians, these Greeks, these Albanians… what type of crazy people were they? We would roll about on the Galaxy’s back seat in stitches, laughter flipping us like carp on a pier.
WRONG
Of course, as with so many other things, you grow up and realize you’re wrong. I visited Europe and saw the gods and gargoyles ushered from marble by crazily gifted sculptors and realized that centuries and a hemisphere later people around Shepparton were honoring the most vibrant explosion of art humanity has ever known.
And I realized that even if the lions and eagles and cherubim of Shepparton weren’t Michelangelos, the attempt made was exactly the same as the attempt made by Michelangelo… each artist began with a vision as limitless as Michelangelo’s vision. Each local artist and each local patron began with exactly the same impulse in his or her heart as a Michelangelo and his Medici… and that’s enough really, to give them dignity, and worth. And so right here in Shepparton I’d been looking at a faint and worthy echo of The Renaissance, all along. An honoring of ancestors and a promise to continue trying to enrich our brief existence.
END.
For every piece of art knocked up by some dreamer in a shed borrowing her old man’s welding kit, there will be a critic who stands before it and denounces it as “shockin awful”.
BUT I TRIED THOUGH.
For me, the perfect answer to that is a quote from RP McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. He’d just tried to lift a massive block of marble to throw it through the bars and let all the inmates escape the asylum. All the guys had bet him he couldn’t lift it. And he huffed and puffed and finally when he collapsed exhausted and they realized he was beaten they began to whoop and holler and celebrate their winnings. And he looked at them and said: “But I tried though. Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?”
The silence, shame and awe, when they realized he was the only one who’d ever tried to get out was, of course, the embryonic sound of freedom.
Similarly, every attempt at art, carries an embryonic value.
BELIEF
And what no critic of any sense can denounce is the thing that really matters… the innate, unkillable belief in the artist that they have something to say that matters, something worth hearing, seeing, feeling… that the thing they’re currently hammering, grinding and chipping away at is of value… it’s Michaelangelo’s David, it’s a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. And it’s that belief that’s critical - because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a community believes it can make good art… one way or another, eventually, it will. You only need to allow that belief. Give it space and license and sustenance. And today one of the ways you do that is through a festival like this.
Of course belief flows both ways. An artist’s belief that they can make something to delight or enlighten a community is a show of love and faith in a community. It’s a way of saying, ‘You guys are worthy… so I’m going to lay my best thing on you.’ No poet reads his newest best poem to a cat. He reads it to someone he loves.
And if the feast laid out at this festival proves anything it proves that the faith of artists in the people of this district has grown strong. They don’t move away anymore. Shepparton, like Oz, is no longer known for its expats. The urge for Art is now fully rampant in a place that, I can attest, it once wasn’t.
So, whoever’s responsible for that… and I think it might be all of you… congratulations on propagating that urge to make art… that confidence to trust one another with the best thing you’re capable of.
Have a good Festival. Thank You.
Anson Cameron is a funny and experienced speaker. You can book him for your event here.
His memoir about growing up, terrorising the people of Shepparton, is Boyhoodlum (Penguin Random House, 2015)
Tony Wilson: 'On the wild desert plains west of Old Humpty Doo', Emo the Emu, Airey's Inlet Festival of Words - 2011
20 August, 2011, Airey's Inlet, Victoria, Australia
Tony Wilson's read this poem out after main at the opening night dinner. It has been cut down and edited and published as picture book by Scholastic Australia. The illustrator is Lucia Masciullo.
On the wild grassy plains west of Old Humpty Doo
Lived the moodiest, mopeyest, saddest Emu
Just why he was sad, well he didn’t quite know.
But he was, so the other birds called him, ‘Emo’.
‘I hate running fast,’ he would say to his brother
‘I hate coming last’ he would say to his mother
‘I hate living here at the top of Australia’
‘I’m Emo the Emu, the world’s biggest failure.’
Now most emus grow up to more than two metres
And most emus are not the fussiest eaters,
But Emo the Emu he slouched with a hunch
And only ate Cedar Bay Cherries for lunch.
‘I hate eating weeds,’ he would say to his father
I hate eating seeds, grasses mango and guava’
‘I hate living here at the top of Australia
I’m Emo the Emu, the world’s biggest failure. ‘
On all types of days and in all types of weathers
Emo the Emu wore dark winter feathers
He wore his crown plumage long over his eyes
And rattled off lists of new things to despise
‘I hate kangaroos,’ he would say to his teachers
‘I hate all of youse with your strange emu features
I hate the goanna, the dunnart, the snake
And what’s with koalas - the noise that they make!
‘I hate the green tree frogs, the frilly necked lizards
I hate a wild dog from its nose to its gizzards
I hate how the crocs here are all a bit snappy
I’m Emo the Emu, and I’m none too happy
On the red desert plains south of Angurugu
Emo bumped into a kangaroo who ...
was sheltering out of the heat of the day
And made the mistake of just saying ‘g’day’.
‘G’day?’ muttered Emo, ‘A good day it’s not!’
I’ve walked forty miles and the sand is too hot
I hate this warm weather,’ said Emo morosely
I should watch the evening forecast more closely
‘I hate the outback and its endless blue skies
I hate all the dust and I hate all the flies.
I don’t like this hear and I don’t like Australia
I’m Emo the Emu, the world’s biggest failure!’
The kangaroo snorted, ‘Hey buck up there, matey,
A pleasure to meet you, my friends call me Katie.
I doubt you’re a failure, I doubt you’re so bad
I just think that Emo the Emu is sad
I’ve noticed you use the word ‘hate’ quite a lot
Well how ‘bout we ditch it and give ‘like’ a shot?
And as for Australia, you surely can’t mean it?
You must not have travelled and properly seen it.’
Katie the Kanga, she jumped with elation
‘What’s say we travel around the whole nation!
By foot or by car or by truck or by bike
Until you admit that there’s something you like.’
Emo the Emu - he tried to say ‘no’
But Katie the Kanga convinced him to go
The first place they stopped was the rock Uluru
That grumbling bird and that red kangaroo
‘Isn’t it truly, divinely superb?’
Said Katie the Kanga to Emo the bird
Emo just shrugged and stared down at his toes
‘I guess it’s alright, yeah, it’s okay I s’pose.’
They headed off east through the rich Darling Downs
And sat on verandahs in quaint country towns
When they reached Townsville they donned swimmers masks
And swam with the coral the fish and the sharks.
‘You must surely love it, or my name’s not Kate’
Admit that the Barrier Reef is just great.’
Emo just shrugged as he picked at his nose
‘I guess it’s alright, yeah, it’s okay I s’pose.’
They journeyed to Sydney, that city of lights
That city that hums through the days and the nights
They sailed Sydney Harbour and boarded the ferry
And Katie said, ‘Matey how extraordinary!’
‘The beach out at Bondi, the Sails and the Bridge
Don’t you think Sydney is just ridgey didge?’
Emo the Emu was hard to impress
‘I s’pose it’s alright, yeah, it’s okay I guess.’
They trekked the high country, with brumbies and snow
Then shot down to Melbourne to take in a show
The famed Twelve Apostles,’ said Kangaroo Kate,
‘But don’t count too closely - you’ll only find eight.’
Emo the Emu looked down at his socks
‘I guess they’re alright, yeah, they’re okay for rocks.’
They paddled the river in Tassie’s South West
A wilderness up there amongst the world’s best.
From towering headlands they saw a Great White
Cruising the coast of the Great Aussie Bight
‘Look at this coastline, the view from these cliffs.
Admit that you like it, no buts and no ifs!’
Emo the Emu breathed in the salt air
‘I guess it’s all right, um, are we nearly there?’
They did the last bit in an old camper trailer
The long rugged coastline of Western Australia
From Perth and the karri trees down in the south,
To open cut mines with their open cut mouths
‘Isn’t this lovely, oh dark prince of gloom?’
The kangaroo said as they pulled up in Broome.
Emo the Emu, just furrowed his brow
‘I think that I’m ready to head for home now.’
On the wild grassy plains west of old Humpty Doo
Emo caught up with his mob of emu
Including his mother and father and brothers
And sisters and cousins and aunties and others
‘Come here!’ shouted Emo, ‘Come here and meet Katie!’
We saw the whole country, did me and my matey
‘I liked it down south and I liked it out west
Sit down and I’ll tell you the bits I liked best
I liked it up north and I liked it out east
I can’t even think of the bits I liked least’
‘He said the word “like,” whispered Emo’s stunned mother
‘He said the world ‘like’’ said the birds to each other.
He said the word ‘like’ said the Kangaroo Kate
‘He said the word ‘like’ where he once would say ‘hate’.
With stars spreading wide over Humpty Doo skies
Katie and Emo they said their goodbyes
‘I had a good trip,’ said the smiling emu
I had a good trip and I hope you did too.’
‘Kinda I guess,’ Katie joked to her friend
‘Sorta quite good, in a way, by the end.’
This poem was edited and published as a picture book. You can purchase Emo the Emu here
Barry Humphries: 'Through the thin end of an asparagus roll', National Press Club - 1978
27 April, 1978, National Press Club, Canberra, Australia
I think it surprises members of the public to learn that stage performers, stage artistes and vaudeville personages like myself do suffer from stage-fright. But I always do. Quite often in fact I'm physically ill before any public appearance. There's usually a plastic bucket in the wings when I do my stage shows. But I thought a few years ago that my trade is not really that of a one-man performer, because the expectant countenances of my audience are very often illuminated into the dress circle. And so really I perform with a very large cast. And it crossed my mind some time ago to invite members of the audience to participate in the show. This sometimes leads to problems as it did in New York not long ago, when a woman sitting in the second row said that she was unable to hear Dame Edna because of the laughter of two 'pansies', as she described them, sitting next to her. So I rashly asked her if she thought she could hear better if she came up on stage. To my alarm she did. (Laughter.) This is five minutes into the show and she was there till the end. She also brought her knitting. I need hardly tell you that this altered the entire course of the occasion. I asked her her name and she said it was Lucy so we called it the Lucy Show after that.
At the moment I'm engaged in writing a new starring vehicle for myself and friends and I open in Sydney next month. And it's usually my practice, being a professional procrastinator amongst other things, to commence writing the show as soon as the first ticket has been bought. It entertains me to think that there's some poor character actually paying for something that doesn't exist. In Melbourne I used to like sitting in a little Greek restaurant called the Cafe Florentino. At about ten past eight in the evening. And seeing old Melbourne Grammar boys, contemporaries perhaps of our Prime Minister, hurrying with their wives down the stairs in order to attend one of my performances which I had absolutely no intention of starting for another three-quarters of an hour.
The advantage of course of being a solo entertainer is that they can never start without you. And I think that that is probably one of the few advantages. Except of course that it keeps me off the streets and fills my evenings entertainingly. As I hope it will yours. Difficult, looking at those scrawled envelopes, those comparatively blank sheets of foolscap paper and wondering if the thought that crossed one's mind on a tram is likely to divert an assembly of people. But I've always found that people generally come to the theatre as they do to an occasion like this with an immense store of goodwill, which it's very hard to exhaust. And after all it cost them a lot more to come to the show than just the ticket. They have to get babysitters. They have to take out extra fire insurance on their houses.
I always find too that an audience laughs much louder if they're extremely anxious. And therefore I think at the beginning of my new show I'll remind them of all the terrible things that could be happening at home. Was the kitchen window really firmly locked? What kind of cigarettes was the babysitter smoking? How many friends is she at present entertaining? All of these things, I think, should put them in a very good mood. . . a very receptive mood. I'm going to have a lot of bleepers concealed under the seats so that doctors will be leaving regularly throughout the evening. Hurrying off to save imaginary lives.
I have had people die during my shows, unfortunately. I was informed that a man had fallen gravely ill during my last performance some four years ago in Sydney. And as I left the theatre I noticed some screens had been erected in the foyer. Until the ambulance arrived. But the usherettes were shaking their heads and alas—the customer had caught the ferry as they say. But it pleased me to see a seraphic smile upon his ashen lips, and in his pale grasp was still clenched a wilting gladioli.
A lot of Australians attempt, when abroad, to evoke agreeable memories of their homeland. Some burn gumleaves. I thought I'd perhaps call the first volume of my autobiography, Some Burn Gumleaves. My first thoughts were to call it . . . well I like titles like Silverfish in the Bath or Snails in the Letterbox. If you come from Melbourne you know about snails in the letterbox. And I'm essentially, you see, a Melbourne artiste. It was kind of you to say, not in so many words of course, Mr President, that I belong to the universe, was it, or the galaxy? I can't remember your exact words. But I would insist that I'm basically a regional monologist. Just as I suppose Dorset belongs to Thomas Hardy, Dublin to James Joyce, Hull to Philip Larkin, Canberra to Manning Clark.. . I suppose the Mornington Peninsula belongs to me. Moonee Ponds wherever she may wander still belongs, I think, to Dame Edna Everidge. And so I still look at the world rather through those dusty venetians, through those crossover terylene drapes. Still peer at those things which peculiarly amuse me through the thin end of an asparagus roll. A uniquely Australian invention I would point out. The asparagus roll is not to be found anywhere else in the world. It's not a problem to open a tin of asparagus, it's not a problem to cut brown bread thin enough or butter one side of it thinly. The problem is to stick it up. The punk asparagus roll will soon be with us, no doubt, secured with a suitably sterilised safety pin.
The other great Australian inventions of course are the terylene golfing hat, the lamington and the Hill's hoist. I can't think of any more. Perhaps the vanilla slice. I remember once asking the
Australian painter, Sir Sidney Nolan, what he missed most about Australia when he was away—and he said it was the way the icing on a vanilla slice stuck to his thumb. I suppose the second volume then of my autobiography will be called The Way It Sticks to Your Thumb though that may well evoke memories of Ms Shere Hite. Or I might call it something rather
grandiose, like The Restless Years.
But some Australians burn gumleaves. Others like to remember the old advertisements on
commercial radio. The old wireless programmes like The Koolmint Theatre of the Air. The old days when one perhaps listened to the ABC for entertainment. (Laughter.) We evoke nostalgia in many different ways. Inducing such maladies as Persephone's Neck. I introduced that for the scholars in our midst, and I'm relieved to find there are none. Or the Lot's Wife syndrome. When glancing back at Australia you turn into a pillar of bauxite.
I always like of course to write the reviews first. In New York I provided typewriters in the foyer for this purpose. To save them rushing to their newspaper offices they could always type the notices then and there, and come back and enjoy the show in a relaxed frame of mind. I also had a very large map which a lot of people took quite seriously. Like most of us I was a little indignant when some apparently sophisticated person thought that Fiji was the capital of Australia. And I had a very large map in the foyer of Australia showing the entire Americas fitting into Gippsland. And there was a big caption which said something like, 'For Your Information, Actual Scale Map, America in Relation to the Australias'. Quite a few people were very impressed by that. Rightly so. It took a lot of painting.
But the object is rather a callow one I suppose, to preempt adverse criticism since who isn't a little susceptible to it. I've always liked to give my shows rather self-deprecating titles so that perhaps a journalist who would have been thinking of starting his review with 'It's rather pathetic at his age' would have to think again and say, 'Well if I said that I'd be agreeing with him really wouldn't I if my previous show was called At Least You Can Say You've Seen It. And most of these show titles were all invented by my aunt. Who is still with us I'm happy to say. Whenever she went to a Williamson show—and it wasn't David in those days, it was JC—she used to come home and say. . .You know, we only went to the theatre in those days on wedding anniversaries. Now we go on Mother's Day as well as wedding anniversaries. But she used to always say something like... 'What did you think of it?' I'd say and she'd say, 'Well, Barry, at least I can say I've seen it.' She'd say, 'Oh it was just a show.' But more often than not she used to say, 'Isn't it pathetic at his age?', 'You know, he used to be wonderful in The Desert Song' 'Why do they still do it?' I mean, that my aunt can say to me, 'Why do they still do it?' as I'm simultaneously borrowing five dollars from her, I don't know.
But when I came back to Australia, as I always do, again I saw those banners outside newsagents which I like to collect. I'm the person who goes around late at night stealing banners from outside newsagents. If you don't know what a banner is it's one of those things printed in very bold type which are put in little cages which look at us through little wire grilles outside milk bars and newsagents all over Australia. The first one I saw I was tempted to steal in broad daylight. It's the first time I've ever done it. I'm going to hold it up just to show you. It says, 'Killer Spiders, What To Do'. Well we all know what to do. Scream and die painfully.
Without any further ado therefore I feel I should throw the meeting open to questions. I, as I say, will not flinch from the most intimate. I am in the land of total disclosure. Nothing is a secret. It's a country where the venetian blinds lock in the open position. Did not a former Prime Minister, a former speaker at this very table, speak of his wife, his lofty spouse as being good for bed and board? To the astonishment of the more prudish and more decorous amongst us. More recently, I understand, when the Honourable Mr Whitlam was asked to what he and his wife attributed their sexual compatibility he replied, 'Not Masters and Johnson, sheer Hite.' I was saving that one for the show but this is a preview. It must go no further.
Tony Thomas, The Age: Now that you're back here, Barry, I can see why the Government has just reintroduced export incentives. I've long been an admirer of your work and the question I've got to ask is slightly personal. Are you heterosexual like us, homosexual, transsexual, bisexual, trisexual or multisexual, pro-sexual, anti-sexual or married?
Mr Humphries: I think I'm infra-sexual.
Bruce Juddery: Is it true, sir, that you were approached while you were in Melbourne by Mr
Bjelke-Petersen to work for him and several other Tory politicians, counterparts to Mr Whitlam?
And if you weren't, were you disappointed?
Mr Humphries: No, I'm glad that you said that because I think people were enjoying themselves a little too much. (Laughter.) It was either you or a fault in the sprinkler system. If I may obliquely reply to your question, there have alas been all too few official approaches made to me. I had hoped that I might get the Paris job. Dame Edna wanted to seize it but she couldn't get past the antique furniture in the doorway. I don't see any reason why artistes or sort of oddities shouldn't have diplomatic posts at any rate. There are many precedents. Lord Byron, Shirley Temple. . . I once said to Gough Whitlam that I'd rather like the Lisbon job since there wouldn't be a great deal to do except to see that the sardines got all put in the right way around. When I was last in. the Portuguese capital I'd forgotten my driver's licence . . . an interesting, heavily endorsed document that it is. (Laughter.) And the Portuguese Avis girl . . . sounds rather Portuguese, 'Avis', doesn't it? The Portuguese Avis girl refused to give me a car. I felt a tap on the shoulder and I turned round and there was 'our man' in Lisbon. He said, 'Anything we can do for you, Brian?' I was pleased to hear that he wasn't going to address me in Portuguese. I said I was having a bit of trouble and I was secretly very flattered indeed that news of my arrival had been telexed straight through to the embassy and there was indeed a man with a finely crafted white vinyl belt, ensign tie and platform shoes waiting for me. I said, 'Well. I have this slight problem. But first I must say that it's very, very nice of you,' and he said, 'Oh just a minute, Barry, just a minute. Oh morning, Mr Halfpenny, we thought you might have been on the next plane.' So it seemed it wasn't I that they were coming to meet after all, but some leather-jacketed troubleshooter from the trade union movement. I'd very much like to be our man in Lisbon. Whether I could handle Brisbane or not I'm not quite sure. Though I am a great admirer of the Brisbane leader. In a political scene so devoid of personalities it's rather nice to find one.
One of the things that interests me by the way is that you are soon to have a revolving restaurant. As you know I have an eye for these things. People say, 'Oh, you know, you're quick, you've only been here half an hour and you know we're going to have a revolving restaurant.' Well it has to be. It isn't a great town unless you have somewhere where you have to go up a long way to get a red Kleenex to wipe the garlic prawns off your tie. Meat served on a piece of wood with a flag in it saying, 'Medium rare'. And waiters staggering dizzily out of the central service core. . . laden with food to tables which didn't order it. . . where something goes wrong with the speed, where sometimes the motor goes berserk and hurls the diners miles into the surrounding landscape.
Australian cities are always doing ludicrous things to themselves in order to make themselves
internationally interesting. Melbourne as you know wrecked itself in the 1950s preparing itself for Olympic visitors. All the cast-iron verandahs were torn down because it was felt that Latvian shotputters might think it was a country town. How they kept copies of The Sun News-Pictorial from them goodness only knows. Of course when Nicholas Pevsner, the eminent architect, visited Melbourne and the architects were racing him off in their cars to see their little boxes that they had constructed in the suburbs, all Pevsner was interested in were the few remaining cast iron verandahs in Carlton and Fitzroy. It was thought vaguely that some of these places which had been given too cheaply to the Greeks might still have some architectural value. As we know now they're inhabited almost solely by architects, advertising people and raving poofters ... of impeccable taste. But still the despoliation continues. The entire Yarra Valley has been ruined. There's a sort of committee now for historical buildings. Once they've decided to pull something down, they've always rebuilt it and they're already collecting the rent on the new building but they have a little tribunal just to show
that they're quite prepared to listen to arguments for something or other. Melbourne Comedy
Theatre which I'm going to be performing in in a couple of months is up for auction. I hope that it's still there when I'm there and I won't have to do my performance from the top of a car. But, you know, it is to me a decadent community in which a theatre needs to be defended. That one should actually have to stand up and say, 'Well, you know, I would submit that a theatre is quite important.' There seems to be something a bit wrong there. In Sydney however a revolving restaurant is being built and people can revolve up there.
Melbourne alas hasn't any such thing. But we have a city square and I'm afraid I have led you into a small trap. I hope that you'll forgive me. On the pretext of course of addressing you in a learned fashion I really wish to make a press statement. Many of you know that I'm soon to retire from the theatre. Driven by public opinion. Most of you know of course that my ambition in life is to become a society photographer. In Australia I should have no work whatsoever. When my children asked me recently what was the definition of a contradiction in terms I said, 'A Sydney socialite.' But town planning is my major interest. I've been secretly going to Monash University doing a little course in town planning with all the housewives. And I've always felt, you know, that I'd rather be in a good building or.. . really I would rather be in a building designed by a bad architect and a good accountant. Too many buildings seem to be
designed by accountants.
I've been working on a scheme for the Melbourne city square. I've gone to a bit of trouble over this. Now you'll all appreciate it, it's nice to know that your speaker has gone to a bit of trouble. There was a block in Melbourne on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets which had some quite nice old buildings on it. So nice indeed they had to come down because someone thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we had a civic square.' I think probably they were thinking, 'Wouldn't it be nice if I had a knighthood and you had a civic square.' (Laughter and applause.) Mind you, do you notice that I've got this Silver Jubilee tie for my services to the Queen? This is the Silver Jubilee polyester, woven at the Palace. No gong yet though I know there are plenty of people working hard for them. I'm not going to name names. I could be referring to any Tom or Dick or even Harry. The thing is. . . ladies and gentlemen, I have a scheme for this plot of ground, which is much ploughed up. No one knows quite what to do with it. They're thinking of putting a vast television screen there so the latest footie results can be shown there. Of great interest I'm sure to the people of Melbourne in the middle of summer. But it seems to me that the thing that is going to put Melbourne on the map is not a tower, not a revolving restaurant, no pinnacle—but a pit.
Think of it for a moment. A gigantic excavation is what I recommend for my home town. In short, an abyss. Then Melbourne can be truthfully called the abysmal city. Think for a moment of the famous holes which attract tourists. The Black Hole of Calcutta attracted a few. The Grand Canyon is nothing else but a hole. It brings in enormous revenue to those who, I presume, have the box office. However, my plans for the abyss are well and truly under way and I can now unveil them for the first time in Australia at this meeting. I have copies which will be handed around . . . the original artwork, for the paper courageous enough to run it on the front page tomorrow. I've got a few of them here. This is an architect's drawing made by my friend, Mr Charles Billitch, my partner in Humphries, Billitch and. . . Associates. The spire is St Paul's Cathedral. The distant Byzantine building is the surviving Flinders Street Railway Station. The small area on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets marked Number Ten is the protestors' precinct. The wall of the salvaged Regent Theatre has been rusticated. That is, it has been covered with a fibre-glass surface so it resembles a cliff face over which coloured water pours. Fifteen . . . yes, that is the Regent Falls. Six, rock climbing is possible up that wall. Number One is the abyss. Now this is a hole of incalculable depth. It ought to be about three centimetres deeper than the World Trade Centre is tall—making it the deepest abyss in any city centre, undoubtedly. Now the road can be diverted into the abyss to accommodate the next Moomba procession. There is a cave at the foot of the falls in which, appropriately enough, is a caveteria. Rock groups can perform on the top of the rockery. And there is a lift taking people down to the revolving restaurant in the bottom of the abyss. Now from the windows of the revolving restaurant of course, cheerful diners will be able to discern little else but glow worms and slime. We have as yet to devise a method of bringing them up again. The garlic prawns should see to that. On the side of the Abyss is the Abyss Mall. Perhaps there is a radio station called the Abyssee. Now it's the Town Hole as seen from the Town Hall.
I only have a few copies—it's an exclusive, it's classified and if it isn't run in any of the papers I've wasted my time haven't I? But one of the most important aspects of this abyss is that it offers an opportunity for people to destroy themselves. As you know Melbourne has many incentives for suicide but few opportunities. It's difficult to get to the tops of a lot of the tall buildings. I know I'm speaking in a city where the suicide rate is the highest in Australia. How do you do it? Go out and stab yourself with a gum tree? Ecological suicide. However there is a special jump for suicides here which would be floodlit at night and televised by the ABC who have, as you know, very little else to do. So I leave this with you, ladies and gentlemen. It actually is rather funny, don't you think?
Claire Zorn: 'I am a glitch in the system', CBCA Accceptance - 2015
Speech from 2.50 on video
21 August, 2015, Melbourne Town Hall, Australia
Claire Zorn was accepting the Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year award for Older Readers.
I often say that I write for my seventeen-year-old-self. Right now my seventeen-year-old-self is standing here saying, ‘What the frig? How did this happen?’
I’m the kid who had a panic attack in the middle of her first HSC English exam and left. I’m not here because of the wonders of our education system, I am a glitch in the system. I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of high schools recently and I’m not sure all that much has changed. When it comes to education we are very concerned with rankings and bell curves. It’s worth noting that I was discouraged from taking on what was then called three unit related English because my ranking wasn’t high enough. We want our kids to perform. We teach them to play Tchaikovsky by rote, but disable their ability to write their own music. I had teachers who fought against the obsession with marks and rankings and focused on nurturing my creativity, but I think that is like trying to light a candle in a cyclone, if you will allow me to get a bit Elton John.
I must thank my darling dad who told me over and over again that creativity was immeasurably valuable and must be held on to. I must thank my mum who gave the me stubbornness and determination required to pursue an artistic path.
Creative minds are vulnerable and mine has caused it’s fair share of problems, I would not have survived, much less written any books without the love and support of my husband, Nathan. Of course my thanks also go to my Publisher Kristina Schultz at UQP and my editor and co-conspirator, Kristy Bushnell.
I will finish by saying that this wonderful award does not qualify me to go into schools and give students the formula for a good piece of writing. I have no interest in improving their rankings. It does qualify me to visit high schools, look those kids in the eye — the off-beat ones, the weird ones, the ones who haven’t done that Biology assignment but have written 67,000 words, sometimes on their phones — and tell them that they will be okay.
To the Children’s Book Council: thank you for this award, I can not tell you how much this means to me, especially seventeen-year-old me.