Progressive culture since 1954
When I was a young lawyer researching a case in the law library, I overheard two lawyers discussing strategies for a rape trial. The lawyer defending the accused said that his client wanted to use alibi evidence as his defence, and argue that he had been in a different town at the time. The lawyer told his colleague that he had advised his client to use a defence of consent. The shocking thing about this conversation is that those defences are utterly incompatible.
Not a month goes by in academia or in literary culture without a debate about Australia’s literary canon and calls for a more inclusive list. Undoubtedly our canon should include more voices from women, the LGBTI community and Indigenous Australians. But I’d like to throw forward another undervalued and underrepresented genre: women’s political agency and activism – and this year might be a good time to acknowledge it.
The Australian far right has seen a slight but unmistakeable revival in recent months. Groups like Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front, for the farce that is their moderate posturing, have managed to win appeal beyond the swastika-adorned neo-Nazis at their rallies. Reclaim Australia boasts tens of thousands of supporters in online forums. Still more sinister indicators, such as popular support for Australia’s brutally racist immigration system, or statistics revealing that between a quarter and a half of all Australians have negative attitudes towards Muslims, suggest further that the ideas of Reclaim Australia are not entirely at the fringes. At the least, the far right should be watched closely.
For a man who has lived through almost one third of New Zealand’s modern history, Prime Minister John Key seems to know very little about it. ‘New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully,’ he said a few months ago. ‘Maori probably acknowledge that settlers had a place to play and brought with them a lot of skills and a lot of capital.’ Many New Zealanders will nod gently while whispering to each other in conceited agreement: ‘Yes, we were not nearly as savage as those Australian settlers.’
Australia appears to have become a nation governed by people who proudly engage in legalised child abuse, torture and neglect. Both the ALP and the Coalition conspired to make that happen, and we now have the brain-bending spectacle of a Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse ruthlessly laying bare the predatory practices of nearly every significant institution in the country that has ever had care of a child, while the institution of government continues to blatantly torture the children it has care of on Nauru and elsewhere.
But if you’re looking for permission to write something, nobody is going to give it to you, ever. Certainly not the deceased. So take the silence of these dead white men you venerate as consent to dig them up and go through their pockets.
The corruption in Macedonia, however, is almost dystopian. This is not just a government where ministers seem to be appointed entirely due to their personal/political connections rather than expertise. Take the Prime Minister who, when confronted with evidence he has tapped 20,000 phones of ‘opponents’ says he will ‘face down the attack’ because to do otherwise would be weak.
‘I think it would also be fair to say that we should have made more of a fuss at the time.’ It was April 2015. In a brightly lit Australian National University lecture theatre, Seven West Media’s Bridget Fair was lamenting the passage of a terrorism law. Depending on how you count such things, it was either the sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth anti-terror law passed by Australia’s parliament since 2001. This one had far-reaching implications. Among other things, it criminalised the conduct of journalism.
The problem is not that publications are failing to pass on their enormous profits – it’s that they don’t exist. Very few organisations are making big dollars out of content marketing in its current form. A sponsored post on its own rarely has the pull to pay for itself through traffic alone. That’s not an excuse. Writers should be paid their worth. I think I’m worth at least as much as your next mid-range word herder. But what constitutes a ‘decent rate’ is unsustainable, because the working parts are still out of sync at a market level.
It is deeply disturbing for any Minister to attempt to directly control the kinds of culture produced in a democracy that values freedom of expression. We want to continue the Australian tradition of arts funding being independent of any political influence. The Minister himself has previously argued that art will always provoke debate, ‘that’s why we have an arms-length and peer-reviewed structure for the allocation for the funding’. What he now proposes is precisely the opposite.
While women strive to improve the gender imbalance in the literary world, men can and should strive to be good allies. As readers, writers, programmers, editors, and publishers, men in the field are in prime positions to make a tangible difference for their female colleagues. Here are some challenges for the men of literature.