October 2024 - Reading the City of Literature 2024

Anam

I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection.

I. MICHAELMAS

(If I think of my grandparents now, after all this writing and reading and imagining and remembering, two couples are thrown into relief, their outlines like clay figures in the mud where so many others are failing to resist the ebb and flow of forgetting. Both couples are elderly and Vietnamese and live in an apartment outside Paris with their eldest daughter. Both couples have been together sixty years, through two wars, and many separations. Both speak to me in a mix of Vietnamese, French, and a smattering of English. But one couple speak to me of suffering, loss, exile, forgiveness and redemption, and the other couple do not. Instead they are always laughing, with each other and at me, pinching, touching, feeding me, looking at me, shaking their heads and chastising me, praising my plumpness and my height and my grades. This second couple is harder to write but easier to remember. I think of them as saying to me over and over again, We want you to be. And also, Why don’t you marry that poor girl? And, When are you taking the bar exam? And always, Eat up, Why aren’t you eating, Finished already? I’ve been trying for a long time to bring the two couples together in my mind, or at least to avoid having to choose between them. And just now, thinking of them, I remember the visit that my grandmother and I paid to my grandfather one late afternoon when he was on his deathbed. He was in a clean, beige room in a public hospital a train and a bus away from their daughter’s apartment. He patted the side of the bed for my grandmother to come sit by him, and I asked them once again about the story, expecting them to tell me the usual things. Instead they chose to sing, something they had never done before, and would never do again, an old jazz standard: I remember you… But even as I was fumbling to record them on my phone, they were already finishing, lapsing into wrinkled smiles, so that the recording I have is nothing but silence.)

This will be the last time that I will have begun again – the last, because I will have learnt to see what I failed to see at the beginning. I will have learnt to see that a muddy swamp can be called a fen, that not knowing where you’re going can be a virtue, and that walking is a kind of perfection. I will have learnt to see that the dilapidated rental we left behind in Footscray will always be the house where we first bathed our daughter, washing off the blood and muck with which she arrived, and I will have learnt that after Cambridge we will return to that house in Footscray after all, and that, in time, it will also be where we first bathe our son, washing off the blood and muck with which he arrives. I will have learnt that the robes we matriculated in at Cambridge, hired from the college’s graduate student association, were actually cheap polyester, that most of the books in the many libraries in which I will have sat have never and will never be read, and that the past is no more a home than any of the string of place names with which my family is entangled could be a home: Hung-Xa, Hanoi, Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Laon, Paris, Boissy, Cambridge, Footscray. I will have learnt that we walk, as Paul said, by faith and not by sight. I will have learnt to stop stopping – that is, to stop waiting while stopped. I will have learnt, instead, to wait while walking, to walk without expectation of arriving and yet still be ready to arrive at any moment. In the end I will have learnt – or remembered, if there’s any difference – how to live. Or, at least, I will have learnt what we receive from our ancestors and what we pass on to our children – what we give them, even as we wash away the blood and muck with which they arrived.

We are walking in the meadows halfway between Cambridge and Grantchester. To our left, the river Cam, narrow and deep, winds its way towards town. It’s a fine autumn day, six months after I’d nearly lost them both, and the scene is dreamily bucolic: a canoe or two travelling upriver, a birdwatcher with binoculars trained on some bird of prey – a windhover, probably – beating at the gentle currents with its great wings, a silver-haired walker in Hunters and country coat, all bathed in weak English sunshine. Edith is asleep in the carrier on my back, which is so well designed that I can forget for lengthy stretches that she is even there, as if it is just the two of us again – Lauren and me.

As we walk through the meadows in silence, I remember the crowd of doctors in scrubs that suddenly appeared in the delivery room, the way they stood around Edith’s body – though she wasn’t Edith yet – on the table in the corner as I dumbly held Lauren’s hand; I remember the machine they wheeled in, a big plastic tube on wheels, the way the doctors spoke with quiet authority as they put not-yet-Edith inside and began to wheel her away; I remember the way the last doctor stopped at the door and looked back at me as if to say, Aren’t you coming? I let go of Lauren’s hand and followed, still mute.

I don’t know how much of this she remembers. But maybe it’s not so important to remember everything. Maybe there are reasons to forget.

As we enter the village of Grantchester, past a herd of grazing cows who pay us no mind, Lauren asks me if I’ve settled on a topic for my thesis.

At the beginning of term, Simons, my international law professor, told the class that in lieu of sitting the exam we could choose to submit a thesis. He meant a dissertation, an essay. A medium-length piece of writing duly researched and footnoted. He meant a very minor contribution to scholarship – a reappraisal of the doctrine of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts as it appeared in the American–Mexican Claims Commission, or tracing the evolution of free-flow-of-data clauses in bilateral trade agreements. These are the kind of topics, I say to Lauren, that might tip the balance in my favour for a pupillage at one of the London chambers, or a traineeship at one of the international arbitration firms.

And that’s what you want, says Lauren, somewhere between a statement and a question.

It’s what everyone here wants, I say. The other students, they’re all Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Indians.

The best the Commonwealth has to offer.

Back to the imperial bosom for validation, says Lauren.

And a golden ticket to stay on in the City, I say. Or clerk for a judge in the Hague.

Just so long as you don’t return to whatever backwater you came from, right?

At a pub in Grantchester, as I eat my first ever Yorkshire pudding,

Lauren asks again about the thesis. I don’t respond right away, lost in a trailing thought about Wittgenstein – he’d completed this same walk many times to take tea with Bertrand Russell at the Orchard, a nearby tearoom. Beside us Edith sits in her high chair, squeezing a slice of
avocado into a pulp in her fist.

A thesis, I say, is also a theory, an idea. And I have one of those, even if it isn’t something that will get me a job:

Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity. Making art is complicity. Living in the world, pursuing material gain, buying a house you can’t afford: complicity. Starting a family, putting down roots is complicity; migration, travel, too. Hope is complicity, but so is despair. Asking, What is to be done? is complicity. Not asking is complicity. Being a human rights lawyer is complicity. Loving my daughter.

I imagine I am already hearing Lauren’s response: Complicity in what? Complicit how? Why don’t you just say what you mean? And why can’t you say it without referencing someone else? But instead she says, Then what are we doing here?

Winner of the 2024 PM’s Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Miles Franklin, Anam can be found here.

Australia in three books: π.O.

It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own.

Though known by his business cards as a famous poet, π.O. is foremost an anarchist landscape artist working against the sanitised tradition of the state-sanctioned pastoral (an institution that makes colonial settlement possible). At least, that is, in his magnum opus, Heide, published by Giramondo in 2019. Elsewhere, in Fitzroy, published by Collective Effort Press in 2015, π.O. is a biographer, autobiographer and fictocritic all at once, giving a gruesome yet delightful account of the inner-north suburb from convict settlement to modern gentrification. But π.O. is impossible to pin down. Just when we were nearly through with the 1300-odd pages of these two master volumes, the famous poet returned for a victory lap with The Tour, published by Giramondo in 2023. Here, π.O. carries the reader with him like a diary as he and a delegation of Australian poets tour 1980s America, the West’s newest imperial motherland.

Fitzroy

As he notes on the back cover of Fitzroy, π.O. writes a poetry of place ‘from the perspective of one who grew up there’. This appeal to authority is necessary when mainstream histories of Melbourne are either laid out neatly in the language of government or guided by the flows of capital (or both). There is an unnervingly insistent historical consciousness in Australian writing that obscures the reality of the colony, maybe because our governments are the largest investors in Australian history, or because 96% of us are essentially migrants (i.e. not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples). In the last census, a third of the population identified as having English ancestry, which may be thanks to British parliamentary control over Australian immigration policy in the 1800s. Being of English heritage myself, I would argue that the British, who have attempted to colonise most of the Antipodes, are the most deranged of all the Western Europeans. In Fitzroy, π.O. does not let us forget this, with the first half of the book dedicated to the pugnacious exploits of several British-Australian murderers, thieves and delinquents.

Highlighting the latent violence of mathematics, the first poem in Fitzroy concerns the London-born surveyor and artist Robert Hoddle (1794–1881): ‘A mathematical bent / draws a square’.[1] Hoddle is the surveyor responsible for the Hoddle Grid, which forms Melbourne’s central business district, as well as the Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond grids. Perhaps π.O., a draughtsman and artist himself, sees his own task as opposed to Hoddle’s: to recount Melbourne’s messy history in spite of the tidy lines of the Englishman’s sterile grid. Language is not innocent in this equation either. Rather, π.O. works against what might be considered ‘proper’ in Western literary or academic terms by producing multiplicitous accounts of history, where several contrary things may (or may not) be true at the same time. In the third poem of Fitzroy, he quotes the diaries of Hoddle, who wrote of the Wurundjeri people: ‘They are friendly / by light / wishing me goodnight, but my faithful / dog tells me otherwise … They would gladly knock my / brains out, and feast on my ribs.’[2] Did Hoddle write this? We can believe it. Here the British imagination turns on itself, taking the form of a paranoid and carnivorous psychosis via gentrification, colonisation and class anxiety over the next 700 bloody pages.

The first half of Fitzroy covers roughly the Victorian period in Melbourne, when people of all classes were behaving very badly indeed. One of these was the well-known chocolate magnate Macpherson Robertson KBE, the founder of MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works, where Freddo Frogs were invented. The tone of mainstream history appears to reflect his philanthropy (Robertson funded a 1929 Antarctic expedition as well as numerous public works projects). π.O. writes, ‘Charity is / a coin in the / slot, and a paper-flower in the lapel.’[3] But charity can also be an easy way to launder both money and reputation in one clean sweep: ‘everything about him, had to be absolutely “spot- / less” i.e. spotlessly White or cream—including / Him, his buildings, his factories, his horses, / the colour of the walls, his worker’s uniforms, his suits…’.[4] On Friday, 25 August 1905, at the intersection of Nicholson and Gertrude (though π.O. records Nicholson and Kerr), opposite the Exhibition Building, Macpherson Robertson was one of first drivers in Victoria involved in a fatality.[5] The decorated chocolate mogul ‘was travelling / towards, a cable tram, when he hit and ran over / something, solid’.[6] The ‘something’ was Tom Hall, an iron foundry worker and ‘recent widower (with / 4 kids)’, who died from his injuries at the scene.[7]

But Fitzroy is much more than a mere sullying of the whitewashed names of Victoria’s enshrined bourgeoisie. π.O. also takes an interest in reporting on the wider cultural landscape, which ‘belongs / to the people, not just to the traffic’.[8] In ‘Greek History’, we learn that in 1939, ‘Australians still didn’t know “which Dago / was which”… they all went on / a rampage, smashing Dagoes windows, thinking them / all Mussolini’s’.[9] After World War II broke out, anyone born in Italy, Germany or Japan was considered an ‘enemy alien’ under the National Security (Aliens Control) Regulations of 1939. Italian studies and linguistics scholar Gaetano Rando documents that those considered ‘highest risk’ were conscripted to the Civil Aliens Corps, which was ‘a national labour force, or, following a precedent established during the First World War for German Australians, imprisonment in one of the purpose-built internment camps’.[10]

As π.O. records, the racist policies of the white Menzies government also contributed towards attacks on Greek families: ‘A number, of fruit and a fish’n’chip shops, had / their windows broken. In Johnston St, one of the shops / owned by a Greek (& his family) had a brick thrown / thru the window… Greek shops, taped up signs / on their windows: “We are not Italians”, but Australians / were no good at writing or spelling, either.’[11] This is classic π.O., recapitulating violence and stupidity with a twinkle in the eye, in stark juxtaposition with anything recorded in the passive tongue of government records. The second half of Fitzroy brings the reader up to speed on the scandalous history of the suburb from the 1950s onward with an autobiographical focus. If you want to know what happened in the 1960s at Collingwood Yards (then Collingwood Tech), or in 1972 when Allen Ginsberg came to read at the Melbourne Town Hall, you’ll have to buy your own copy of Fitzroy from Collective Effort Press for $55, which you can do by writing a letter to the anarchists at PO Box 2430 GPO, Melbourne VIC 3001.

Heide

π.O.’s more recent epic, Heide, is published by Giramondo. The form of the ‘everything poem’ is developed cohesively in this volume, where he ventriloquises further histories from a present perspective as the modern dissipates into yet another dusk. Heide was my first encounter with π.O.’s work. Having recently moved to Melbourne, Iwas recommended the book by scholar, writer and trans pioneer Vivian Blaxell. Blaxell was nominated for the 2021 Writer’s Prize while π.O. was up for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Reading π.O. and Blaxell introduced me to art, literature and culture in this colony, and both incorporate shifting viewpoints in style. Blaxell advances a unique sort of ‘everything’ essay in a similarly irreverent tone (see: ‘Nuclear Cats’). In π.O.’s work, the ‘everything poem’ collates facts from old encyclopedias and Guinness World Records alongside local narratives to form a murky stage-set of implications rather than a cold hard representation of Truth. It’s impossible to hold on to anything concrete in the everything poem because the background scenery is always changing. The effect is that each poem has a life of its own. Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno writes that ‘the decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers … But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game.’[12] R.I.P. Adorno, you would have loved π.O.

The poems in Heide present surplus galore, each an overflowing Zarathustran cup challenging the authority of ‘fact’ by pointing towards the simultaneous truth and untruth of all language. Heide may well be one of the germinal texts of an emergent Australian fictocriticism that leverages the questionable modal realism of imperial archives (modal realism being the view that all possible worlds are actual worlds). Anything we might say or write could refer to a real possibility. Take, for example, the recent Overland article ‘Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason’ by writers and scholars Max Brierty and Stephen Muecke. They take a collaborative fictocritical approach to represent a museum tour on Kullilli country (‘where Max’s people come from’) in the year 2060. Like π.O., Brierty and Muecke consider artworks and historical artefacts to fabulate a possible future constructed from a very real past.[13] Fictocriticism reclaims possibility, drawing attention through negation to the untruth of a single narrative and the impossibility of truth, particularly in the digital age. In recollecting multiple histories via the ‘everything poem’, π.O. summons alternative futures through his historical observations of shifting Australian landscapes.

π.O. has achieved something momentous with Heide—not only by presenting a less sympathetic account but also by collating such a readable history with his ecstatic tone and impressive eye for salacious detail. If π.O. presents this history incredulously, it’s because the antics of the bourgeoisie and their artists are utterly ridiculous. In ‘The Artist & the Patron’, he writes:

A lot of money, can produce
a lot of money, or a lot of //// paintings.
But either the Artist snubs the Snob, or the Snob
snubs the Artist—Thank God, for hypocrisy!—
The Patron, is the one, who supports and approves
and the Wretch, is the one who responds
with insolence. ‘Business, my dear boy, Business!’[14]

The poem examines the motives of John Reed and Sunday Reed (née Baillieu), an old-money settler couple who in 1934 purchased a former dairy farm in Bulleen. The old farmhouse became known as Heide, comparable to Garsington Manor in Oxford, England, which hosted members of the Bloomsbury group. Heide is now, of course, a museum of modern art, but from the 1930s to the 1950s, the Reeds patronised artists there, including Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. π.O. writes ‘Sunday knew that the business of landscape (in / Australian Art) was not finished’, and this unfinished business is the central concern of Heide.[15] Here, π.O. offers a critique, demonstrating how Australian landscape art and bourgeois ideals have made the ongoing colonial project possible. The success of colonial settlement in Australia is fuelled by collective delusions of white supremacy, nativity and belonging. The mythology of Australia has relied upon naturalised representations of the settler as transplanted into the landscape from imperial Europe. Sunday Reed encouraged Sidney Nolan to paint the landscape, and during World War II, she secured Nolan a Parkville hideout from which to work: ‘Landscape art was like treason; a return to / an authentic view of Nationhood; the gumleaf & / koala school of Impressionism. The fastest amputation (in / history) was done by one of Napoleon’s surgeons.’[16] Nolan received the Order of Merit for his service to art in 1983.

Read the full piece here.

Footnotes:

[1] π.O. (2015). Fitzroy (p.11). Collective Effort Press. Melbourne.
[2] Fitzroy (p.17).
[3] Fitzroy (p.82).
[4] Fitzroy (p.82).
[5] https://prov.vic.gov.au/archive/78638184-F1C1-11E9-AE98-2342D5DCF76F
[6] Fitzroy (p.83).
[7] Fitzroy (p.83).
[8] Fitzroy (p.403).
[9] Fitzroy (p.419).
[10] Rando, G (2005). Italo-Australians during the Second World War: Some perceptions of internment 2005. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/120. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[11] Fitzroy (p.420).
[12] Adorno, TW (1990). Negative Dialectics (p.32), trans. Ashton, EB. Routledge. England.
[13] Brierty, M and Muecke, S (7 July 2023). Whitefella Mischief: a tour of the museum of the magicians of reason. Overland. https://overland.org.au/2023/07/whitefella-mischief-a-tour-of-the-museum-of-the-magicians-of-reason/. [Accessed 23/10/2023].
[14] π.O. (2019). Heide (p.342). Giramondo. Penrith.
[15] Heide (p.344).
[16] Heide (p.368)

Ethics 1

Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations for which this desire is primary.

My father was a bridle maker, ensuring the production of horses, of colts and fillies, alive-alive oh.
  For some this was a supreme good, ensuring the survival of the genes of Longue Durée,
or as some have translated it, Regret. Within each desire is a secondary desire, and relations
for which this desire is primary. As Earth sped up, methods failed quicker. He got up at 5am,
or 6am, while the machines were half present, and more willing – malleable. In the half-light
there seemed to be more mystical possibility. Metaphorical dark continued, however.
  If you looked in a pocket long enough the key would turn up. Delphi was as Delphi told.
  Byes at work were a chance to catch up. [Avoid the interstate, the dentist, do general research
but only at breakfast. Chartres Cathedral turned its face to the photographer, like a mega demon.]
  No one made their own traps in the twentieth century. Vraiment: they were the best traps.
  A vegetable garden could be called a secondary desire. A carrot might consider itself
a supreme good. Biographies can begin at any moment. Or be divided – arbitrarily – by the times
we read such and such. I began reading Proust in Collingwood; I approached completion
(of the great novel, not the greater oeuvre), blocks away in Fitzroy. But I lived in Rome
in between (where I went to read Burckhardt). My ethics were severely challenged there:
more than in Canberra. There was love; there was malleability. There were horses in the streets;
the Pope rode a horse, behind a plaster Madonna.

*Note: While the above may give an impression of being prose poems, it is a verse poem of long lines.

This poem is published in Australian Poetry Journal 13.2: ‘desire’, edited by Ellen van Neervan.