Writers Weekend: Steadfast As The Stars

Perth Festival

Fremantle Arts Centre

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

In celestial harmony with the 2023 Perth Festival theme of Djinda, this year’s Writers Weekend bore the Shakespearian-sounding subtitle: ‘Steadfast As The Stars’. Curated by Perth-based South African author Sisonke Msimang (who's also Head of Storytelling at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge), the weekend was hosted by Fremantle Arts Centre, and sessions were dispersed across the front garden, lawns and inner courtyard of that imposing complex of colonial gothic architecture, which was built using convict labour and originally served as the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum – and later as ‘housing’ for homeless and ‘delinquent’ women. It’s now a place of tranquil beauty and a hive of artistic activity, but like so many convict-era sites it’s also steeped in a history of sadness and torment. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, there's no monument to culture which isn't also a monument to barbarity. I felt the same way the first time I visited Melk, a popular tourist destination in my native land of Lower Austria, with its beautiful baroque monastery overlooking the Danube, and noticed a small memorial plaque to the forced labour camp of Mauthausen-Melk with its gas chamber and crematorium, the entrance to which faced directly onto one of the main roads, much like Fremantle Arts Centre. As such the latter was an appropriate setting for the constellation of thoughtful lectures, conversations and readings I attended, with the twin themes of social justice and cultural democracy emerging as a discernible pattern to guide me through the weekend.

 

I started my journey in the Inner Courtyard with Perth poet and performance maker Andrew Sutherland’s Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture. Sutherland’s recently published debut collection Paradise (points of transmission) is a brilliant and mordant series of poetic reflections on his ongoing experience as someone who identifies as a Queer-Poz PLHIV (person living with HIV), and who divides his time between Perth and Singapore. His perspective and writing style provided a fascinating prism through which to review Stow’s work as well as (by implication at least) his life as a gay man from an earlier (and more 'silent') generation who struggled not only sexually but also culturally and geographically with his ongoing search for a place to belong. As the scion of a White settler family who (like Sutherland) grew up in Geraldton and the Mid West, Stow spent time living and working on an Aboriginal mission in the Kimberley and as an anthropologist’s assistant and patrol officer in the Trobriand Islands before relocating to his ancestral homeland in Suffolk and finally settling in Harwich – all of which provided the background material for his novels and poetry. For his part, Sutherland mobilised tropes of virality, invasion, colonisation, appropriation, exile, blood and transmission – as well as identity and desire – in order to read Stow against the grain and talk back to him. His lecture was in effect a kind of ‘infected tissue’ of quotations and original text, in which the borderlines between prose, poetry, Stow and Sutherland became effectively indeterminable. The entire performance inspired me to reread Stow (and Sutherland), in the happy certitude that I’ll never read either of them the same way again. As Stow writes at the end of his poem ‘Portrait of Luke’: ‘and the dolphins of his thought cannot obscure / (look down) the coral bones of all our ancestors.’

 

After this I relocated to the Front Garden for a conversation between Don Watson and Carmen Lawrence about Watson’s most recent book The Passion of Private White, which recounts the travails of his lifelong friend the anthropologist and Vietnam veteran Neville White, who has lived worked for many years alongside other former members of his platoon in a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land. Watson’s characteristically self-mocking sense of humour unflinchingly identified patriarchy as the root cause of many problems shared by Settler and First Nations societies – at one point wryly opining that the only solution might be for men to die out, with the proviso that this mass extinction be deferred for about twenty more years. More seriously, he could scarcely conceal his underlying contempt for the bureaucratic inefficiency (and patronising racism) that continues to afflict Aboriginal people (and well-meaning allies like his friend White). Not for the last time in the sessions I attended, the question of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament was raised and tentatively affirmed (with cautious reservations) as a possible circuit-breaker, if not indeed a ‘solution’ (a word which both Watson and Lawrence were rightly wary of). I also noted with approval Watson’s preference for ‘sympathy’ in place of the much-overused (and perhaps over-rated) term ‘empathy’; to my mind at least, the former implies a form of understanding that also acknowledges difference rather than simply feeling (or claiming to feel) someone else’s pain.

 

I concluded my afternoon on Saturday back in the Inner Courtyard with Msimang and Egyptian-Danish-Australian journalist, photographer and fiction author Massoud Morsi in conversation with Tongan-Australian writer Winnie Dunn, who has edited a new anthology including stories by both of them and collectively titled Another Australia. Msimang and Morsi read extracts from their stories and were refreshingly candid about the challenges of being in interracial partnerships with multiracial children, and the complications of family life that ensue when issues of race (and racism) inevitably enter the picture. Love – it became apparent from their stories and anecdotes – is an ever-fixed star that looks on tempests and is never shaken (as some dead White male poet once wrote), but it’s no more of a ‘solution’ than sympathy or a Voice to Parliament. Msimang also voiced her own qualified support for a Voice, alongside a treaty and a process of truth-telling – with the proviso that based on her own experience in relation to post-apartheid South Africa as well as with friends and acquaintances in Australia, White people also need to give an account of their historical and personal complicity with racism, rather than Black people doing most of the work of remembering and reckoning with the past.

 

I began Sunday morning on the South Lawn listening to Msimang in conversation with political reporter Amy Remeikis discussing the latter’s book On Reckoning about sexual assault and harassment in the corridors of power and elsewhere. Remeikis movingly shared her own story of assault and was passionately articulate about male dismissiveness of women’s anger – a discussion to which Msimang added complexity by raising the spectre of the ‘angry Black woman’ and the ways in which racism further divides and polices ‘acceptable’ behaviour. In her capacity as a storytelling mentor who frequently works with migrant women, Msimang also reflected on the need to speak or write about one’s scars, but not necessarily about one’s wounds, at least while they’re still raw. I couldn’t help thinking about the applicability of this remark to the way the criminal justice system currently handles allegations of rape and sexual abuse, and the harm it typically does to the victim regardless of the legal outcome.

 

Back in the Inner Courtyard, Future Tense was a panel discussion about how Australia might be changing (or failing to change) as a nation with specific reference to racial justice but also the environment and climate change. The panel included Noongar elder and organisational leader Carol Innes; two White female elders (and Professors Emeritus in their respective fields of Psychology, and Media and Culture) Carmen Lawrence and Julianne Schultz; and journalist and broadcaster Tabarak Al Jrood. The discussion was facilitated by fellow journalist Antoinette Lattouf, and all the panellists were clear-eyed and incisive about the work that still needs to be done. I was left with an overriding sense of urgency about restorative justice for First Nations people – with a yes-vote for the Voice again being affirmed by all on the panel – as well as the principle of Indigenous sovereignty and care for country as a precondition for any possible reversal of environmental and climate catastrophe. 

 

The last session I attended (also in the Inner Courtyard) was a heartening return to the reading and discussion of poetry – albeit with an edge of social and cultural critique. Dead Poets Society was an exploration of poetic influences, once again featuring Sutherland alongside fellow WA-resident poets Tineke Van der Eecken and Nadia Rhook, and Noongar writer, editor and educator Casey Mulder, facilitated by another Perth-based writer and poet Elizabeth Lewis. Belgian-born Van der Eecken nominated Jacques Brel, and read samples of her own multilingual poetry, including the self-reflexive ‘On Language’ – inspired by Brel’s song ‘Le plat pays’ and containing untranslated lines in Flemish and French that were a delight to surrender oneself to – followed by a playful ‘Ode to Jacques Brel’, containing a host of references to other Brel songs for anyone with ears to hear them. Sutherland spoke next, invoking the shades of precursors who had died of AIDS-related complications, including Malaysian-Singaporean-American poet and performance artist Justin Chin (who once famously proclaimed that ‘every work of art that works as art is a critique’); he then read his own hilarious and heart-rending poem ‘afterwards, bring me back as Tom Cruise’s wig in Interview with the Vampire’. Rhook ironically cited Dorothy Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ in order to reiterate the notion of ‘speaking back’ to the Anglo-Celtic colonial canon (much as Sutherland had done with Stow), before reading two poems from her own recent collection Second Fleet Baby that juxtaposed her own convict ancestry with her experience of becoming a ‘pandemic parent’, during which (as she writes in the closing lines of her poem ‘I offered advice’) she ‘read enough / experts / on / freedom / to understand that / it is the opposite to breath it / starts in / the mind then / travels / along / melodies / ancestors / out through the / mouth’. Finally Mulder spoke of overcoming her sense of imposter syndrome at being appointed First Nations Editor for Westerly Magazine, and encouraged other Indigenous writers to seize the power of the spoken and written word – as well as exhorting us Wadjellas to do our own research and stop asking her who were the latest Blak authors we should be reading in order to count ourselves as allies.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair remotely in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.