Vilifying Australia: the perverse ideology of our adversary culture.(AUSTRALIA)(2005 Earle Page Memorial Oration text)(Excerpt)

TWO YEARS AGO, when the journalist and broadcaster David Marr gave the Colin Simpson Lecture, he chose the title "The Role of the Writer in John Howard's Australia". He opened with a quotation from the novelist Patrick White:

 
   In all directions stretched the Great Australian 
   Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of 
   possessions, in which the rich man is the important 
   man, in which the schoolmaster and 
   the journalist rule what intellectual 
   roost there is, in which beautiful 
   youths and girls stare at life through 
   blinkered blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like 
   autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly 
   glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles 
   prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not 
   raise a quiver from the average nerves. 

White wrote those words in 1958. David Marr acknowledged that Australia's subsequent economic prosperity made the country more generous, less parochial, more curious about the outside world. But by the mid-1990s, he said, Australian politics began to shift backwards, to the point where White's Great Australian Emptiness once more became an apt description of our own time. Marr urged Australia's writers, especially novelists, playwrights and poets, to recognise this reversion to the 1950s, to address the big issues of today--reconciliation, republic and refugees--and shake off the "new philistinism" of John Howard's Australia.

There are some writers who have taken up Marr's advice with fervour. Elliot Perlman translated his novel Three Dollars to the movie screen. Released in April 2005, it tells of the fragile existence of a young, tertiary-educated, middle-class couple who both lose their public sector jobs. She is a university tutor in politics whose contract is not renewed. He is a chemical engineer in the Victorian public service. Their existence is fragile indeed. Perlman would have us believe that within one day of being escorted out of his building, this graduate engineer could be reduced to rummaging through city garbage bins for discarded food. He is guided by his new friend, an alcoholic derelict. Another homeless man gives him an old, greasy army greatcoat, which he dons gratefully.

In other words, the plot is ludicrous, the scenario utterly unreal--and yet our film critics have praised it to the skies. "One of the best Australian films yet made," wrote Bob Ellis in Encore magazine. "I loved it!" said David Stratton on ABC tel: evision. "A sorrowful critique of the unfeeling market forces that rule our lives," wrote Evan Williams in the Australian. "A searing portrait of John Howard's Australia," said Peter Thompson, on Channel Nine's Sunday. There is obviously a good market for this kind of thing. Though targeted at art-house audiences, the film took more than a million dollars in box office in its first two months.

Another writer catering to the same cultural constituency is Hannie Rayson, whose play Two Brothers has enjoyed extended seasons in both Sydney and Melbourne. In the program notes, the playwright claims her work is set in the future, but it is actually based squarely on the events preceding the 2001 federal election. The idea for the two main characters might have originated in the contrasting' careers of Peter and Tim Costello, but the evil central character, James Benedict, is closely based on Liberal Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock.

The minister in the play knows that an Indonesian fishing boat full of asylum seekers has sunk and that an Australian Navy vessel has found the survivors in the water. But he orders the navy to turn back and abandon them to their fate. In other words, the play is saying the Coalition government in 2001 not only engineered the Tampa incident and the Pacific Island solution, it deliberately let drown the 353 people on the fishing boat SIEV X. What's more, the Ruddock character finds a Muslim refugee at his holiday house and kills him. His personal assistant, a tough-talking career woman with whom he is having a predictable affair, single-handedly disposes of the body without anyone ever discovering it. His Labor Party brother then discovers his dirty secret but decides not to tell, in return for his teenage son getting off on a minor drugs charge.