Melbourne Writers Festival – A bit political

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL: the BMW Edge  

Mumbo Jumbo: How Ideas Take Hold, Francis Wheen

Gosh.. it was good to be back in the BMW Edge fishbowl, where the fun happens. And as the plumy erudite tones of Francis Wheen drifted up from the floor talking about belief in the market as a religion, and how history had turned out to have other ideas to what Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in ‘The End of History’, I felt a sigh of pleasure, believe it or not, this was entertainment.

Because Wheen is an entertainer, with a very keen sense of the comic and absurd. Not always liked, or agreed with, he’s been a controversial figure over the years. He’s torn into all sorts of social targets who haven’t seen him as a worthy or balanced academic adversary. But he’s also been highly awarded for his writing. As a ‘polemical journalist’ he has written a biography of Karl Marx, and screen-plays but is best known for his columns in the Guardian and the Evening Standard. He is also Deputy Editor of Private Eye.

This was about fads in thinking, times when we are intoxicated with simple answers and leave reason behind. Talk was focused on his 2004 book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. Tomorrow he’s talking about his new book Strange Days Indeed, which focuses on the political and cultural mood of the 1970s.

Chair Glyn Davis pulled things along nicely as discussion rolled over comparisons of the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism with Thatcherism at the end of the 70s; the tech wreak and our current GFC with the South Sea Bubble of the 1720 in which even Issac Newton lost money; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, creator of Sherlock Holmes, sincere belief in fairies.

‘Dillusion comes in waves through history,’ Wheen said describing how people can come to believe that financial gravity has been suspended and markets will do nothing but rise and rise.

‘When people start talking about new paradigms you should run for the hills and put your money under your bed,’ he said. Hmm..been hearing about a lot of paradigm shifting lately, pity the leaders of our newspapers weren’t in the room.

The audience was in tears of laughter as Wheen read a passage about Luce Irigaray denouncing Einstein’s E=mc2 as a ‘sexed equation’ ‘since it privileges the speed of light over other [less masculine] speeds’. He mocked Jacques Lacon algebraic expressions and self help books. Why did President Bill Clinton getting Anthony Robins in for management advice? Or did Bush claim the ‘jury’s still out on creationism? Cause 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old.

Looking around me I saw Steve Grimwade, current Festival Director, and Rosemary Cameron, past Festival Director and Max Gillies chortling away. Is it funny or tragic? I don’t know but it was certainly entertaining.

Politics as Performance in ACMI 2 had a far more hi-brow air. In the blurb it said Judith Brett would discuss the ‘Prime Minister as critic’, Prof. Glyn Davis would talk about ‘Politics as Theatre’ and James Walter on ‘the GFC as Drama’. And this was pretty much as the first part panned out, with each speaker getting a five-minute window before the round-table of chat and the obligatory questions.

I missed the first five minutes or so of this session thanks to yet another venue change as most people were off to Woolf to Wolf or Louise Welsh. So I came in on the back half of Melbourne Uni’s Vice-Chancellor Prof. Glyn Davis’s talk. He was comparing street gangs of the 20s and 40s with political parties linking leadership to the skills of oration not muscle. Gangs show leaders get no loyalty other than what they buy, however, and leaders must work constantly to stay popular with an always restless groups.

Dr Judith Brett, well-known political historian and biographer is writing up Alfred Deakin’s life these days, so she talked about him. He was a fellow who fell into politics having failed at acting and play-writing. Being handsome and a good speaker however, and well liked by David Syme, he found himself in parliament at 22 years old – so Wyatt’s not a new thing. He never really gave up his yearning for the stage Brett argued, and saw all of politics as a melodrama and himself as its theatre critic.

Monash Professor of Political Science Dr James Walter managed to relegate the GFC to a plot device for a Shakespearian tragedy drawing comparisons between the demise of Kevin Rudd the Julius Caesar.

In the discussion, led by ABC Arts’ Michael Cathcart, it was remarked that Julius Caesar is a story where the hero dies half way through. The real crux of it is what happens to the conspirators. This led to linking Australia’s hung parliament with what’s happened in the UK and what is predicted to happen in Americas mid-terms as part of a wider trend.

What followed was a quite interesting discussion on the selection criteria required to be a politician these days. Out pollies have to look good, be fit, have great endurance and be able to sleep anywhere anytime, sounds like we need to get more sports stars into parliament.

**

Come four o’clock, the queue to the BMW Edge was the length of the Atrium and out toward the street. It seemed like a huge audience to see this odd white-haired South African, who looks a bit like an English village vicar just in a black leather jacket and navy pants.

The illusive Miles Franklin Winner, Peter Temple (Truth, The Broken Shore) had been dragged to the Festival to converse with Lindsay Tanner, in what Tanner remarked may have been his last formal function as a politician. It turns out the two go way back to when Temple edited a little know mag called Australian Society out of an office in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, and Tanner was next door taking over the clerks union.

I’m not sure Lindsay’s got a great future career as an interviewer but there were interesting moments as the two of them reminisced and went over Temple’s earlier career. Temple enjoyed laughing, his shoulders bouncing up and down as though he could fold in on himself any moment. Often he perched a foot on his opposing knee, rocking it contemplatively, relaxed and unhurried.

After nine crime novels Temple commented he’s not what you’d call an overnight success. It’s an unusual occupation, he said, boring, lonely, sedentary, and those are the good parts.

In talking about how he forms character Temple described it as a process rather than something he can do quickly. Things stay in his head, he starts to wonder about a characters childhood, their parents and it slowly grows. Until one day he’s walking next to you, he said.

Temple’s style is sparse and dialogue heavy, filled with idiomatic flourishes. Having come to writing through editing, he says, ‘I try to take everything out’. Sometimes admitting he compresses the prose to the point of incomprehension. He’s fascinated by the speech of people who know each other intimately; in the way people really talk. That’s balanced with more lyrical passages he says, to control pace. It’s faintly musical. You hope the whole thing will hold the reader as if they’re listening to the book.

Having lived through the Ash Wednesday fires and the remarkable dust storm that hit Melbourne the week before, Temple said he’d always wanted to set a story at the height of summer. There’d always been bushfires burning in his plotting of Truth, however, the Black Saturday fires happened when he was three quarters of the way through writing it. It stopped me in my tracks he admitted, and caused him to change the time line of the book to set it further into the future.

He has no plans to write a sequel to Truth and The Broken Shore which are only loosely connected anyway. It’s been good to take this dog out on a long walk, he remarked, but if you take it out again, it’s the same dog. It goes to the same trees and digs up the same bones.

**

What a jolly ol’ fellow Professor Ross Garnaut is. How unassailable and pre-eminent. Policy advisor to Hawke, former ambassador to China, and guru to the Rudd government, though they ignored him when he told them the likely economic impact and actions needed to address climate change. He’s just the sort of guy you’d expect to find having a beer with Annabel Crabb. But that was after the session, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The topic was The Great Crash of 2008, Garnaut’s new book, and the crowd that gathered in Feddish was cheerful, having a few drinks and tucking in to a Friday night with a bit of global economics. Writers Festivals really are a bit strange.

Crabb was effusive about how Gaurant articulates the reasons for the Global Economic Crisis in 2008, while simultaneously managing to make it a gripping and entertaining read.

For the next forty minutes we got a round up of what went wrong, quite unlike other versions I’ve head before. Garnaut explains the crash in terms of global saving and borrowing imbalances, almost blaming China for our woos. If they had spent the money they earned selling their ware to the Anglo-sphere and not saved it, thereby giving us a source of credit, this may not have happened, like lending a gambler money.

There was a good measure of self-interested greed, recklessness and immorality too, of course. As they’re all free market ideals however, I’m not sure he should be complaining about that. But the gold rush mentality and the perversity of executive salaries meant executive came to not act in the long term interests of their companies. But the companies then got bailed out by the tax payers around the world, so it hardly mattered to them.

We now face a weakened US and a damaged Europe says Gaurant while the impact of the crisis on the developing world has been minimal. The shift that’s been happening toward China and India has suddenly been accelerated. ‘That’s the bad news,’ he said though I’m not sure why as he later spoke of how quickly China responded to the crisis and how that had also greatly helped countries like Australia. He also talked about the massive investments China is making into green technology and experimenting with carbon tax systems.

So a mixed bag of thoughts to chew over on a Friday night, but never mind that I had one more thing I had to do – find out who the winners were at the Ned Kelly Awards.

Over on the other side of Fed Square at the Festival Club the thriller-arti were gathered for the traditional debate and appearance of Jane Clifton in a talking point outfit. This year a leather fringed skirt, very nice. The topic was ‘That one can do right in a world gone wrong’. Melanie Ostell and Mark Dapin argued for the affirmative and Lenny Bartulin and Virginia Trioli for the opposing. There were interesting stats, some confessions of dubious deposits, and unsuccessful criminal careers revealed. As usually it made very little sense but was pretty funny.

Virginia Trioli started off pretty funny then plunged the room to an uncomfortable place of reality. She told the story of a family who’d lost both their daughters as a consequence of the abuse they had suffered from members of the Catholic church. The parent’s pain to be compounded by the injustice the Church dealt them when they wouldn’t promise silence. Somehow Trioli was able to transition from describing ‘the fading light of their daughters in their eyes’ to the lyrics of Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ and end on a laugh. Still, not sure how she pulled that off.

The prize went to Gary Disher for Wyatt, a revenge-served—cold’ story with no murder solved but plenty of crime. Kathy Marks got the gong for True Crime with her deeply disturbing Pitcairn Paradise Lost, an account of rampant sex abuse in the tiny community of Pitcairn. Best debut went to Mark Dapin for King of the Cross, described in the judges’ notes as ‘ utterly politically incorrect’ and ‘funny as buggery’. Zane Lovitt won the SD Harvey Short Story Award for ‘Leaving the Fountainhead’ and Peter Doyle received the Lifetime Achievement Award.

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL
27 August to 5 September
For further information and ticketing go to www.mwf.com.au
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