POLITICAL BIAS IN THE ARTS.(Australia)

AUSTRALIA'S OTHER RED CENTRE

CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA presents itself to the world as a paradise for surfers, swimmers and sportspeople and as an eventual economic Eden to those who flee harsh political climates to try to come here from elsewhere. But what sort of intellectual climate is on offer here, not just to visitors and immigrants but also to born and bred Australians?

The first point that needs to be made on this subject is rather an odd one. A significant proportion of recent and longer-term immigrants to Australia have come from countries where left-wing, totalitarian regimes are or were in the ascendant: the old Soviet Union, communist Eastern Europe, Vietnam and China. What would have been unknown to all these folk, as their leaking freighters or other, more legal means of transport brought them closer to Australia's shores, is that at the heart of their chosen destination's culture, academics were hard at work trying to recreate Australia to resemble those very regimes the immigrants were so desperate to flee.

Perhaps the first thing we should recognise about intellectual life in Australia is that a millstone of hypocrisy and seemingly invincible blindness lies like a dead weight at its centre. Picture, if you will, a Marxist professor of cultural studies from Melbourne, Monash or elsewhere as he drives his massive off-roader to his weekender on the Mornington Peninsula (the new vines were planted last year). What does he know or care about the lives of hundreds of millions of present and past inhabitants of Romania, East Germany, Ukraine, North Korea, Cambodia or all those other past or present communist paradises?

Of course, our professor would have all his qualifications and excuses at the ready: Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and so on were not real Marxism but aberrant variations. He, personally; is a neo-Marxist, of course (otherwise known as "postmodernist") and thus an infallible interpreter--to suit contemporary Australian conditions--of the ideas of a German who died in exile roughly 120 years ago.

All postmodernist initiatives are Marxist in origin and can be recognised by their need to find a supposedly oppressed minority as their mainspring--even when the "oppressed" "minority" turns out to be a statistical majority. Ironically, when postmodernist courses in women's studies and gay, lesbian and queer studies were set up in Australian universities, the only group to remain unrepresented--as an object for cultural scrutiny, that is--became heterosexual men. As a percentage of the total population, heterosexual men can now certainly claim minority status; although whether we are yet oppressed enough to become fit objects for study may be debatable.

Will we live to see a chair in heterosexual men's studies created at an Australian university? A rather more urgent creation might be a course in which future Aboriginal leaders and activists and would-be sociological writers for Australian broadsheet newspapers study the history of the world outside Australia. The recent histories of the unfortunate countries I mentioned above would form the core of the curriculum. Students of the course might be encouraged in the refreshing view that Australia is not a uniquely terrible country, after all.