The Arts and the Pre-emptive Buckle

Mine was not a distinguished degree. Philip had that for both of us. But equally for both of us this University laid down the direction of our lives. The principles we learnt here were those I still believe to be the basic principles of education: not to learn and remember everything but to have your mind opened to the world of learning: to recognise what you don't know and to learn how to find out. As we have all come to realise, it is not the end product which is important but the process, the continual process of learning, in which we engage for the whole of our lives.

Some at this university did not always think like that. Walter Murdoch, the founding professor of English, used to tell a story about his meeting with the appointments board when he took up the Chair of English around 1913. His primary task, he was told, would be to lecture five days a week from 9 to 5. When he asked how they expected him to prepare his lectures, they answered: 'We thought you would have done all that before you came.'

By 1949 when as a naïve fresher, barely 17, I enrolled here, things were much more comfortable. The University of WA was proudly a free university. Dr George Currie was Vice-Chancellor and his door was always open to students. He even gave parties for senior students in his house in Crawley Avenue which is now the Festival of Perth headquarters. The Arts Faculty was a vintage array of individualists from the acerbic Leavisite English professor Alan Edwards, who taught me how to be a critic; the lovable Alec King, who taught me to love language; Jeana Bradley who taught me to love and engage with classic drama; and host of others, like Josh Reynolds, head of History, Jean Randall and Biddy Morrow in the French department, and, of course, the irrepressible Frank Callaway. Bob Hawke was president of the Guild, Billy Sneddon was president of the Young Liberals; the angst-ridden teenage novelist Randolph Stow; Bill Heseltine, later the Queen's private secretary, and his brother Harry, later professor, and many more who later made their name inside and outside Australia, were undergraduates in my time. More important still we had a heady injection of returned servicemen and women completing degrees under the Commonwealth Returned Services Training Scheme. There were also Columbo Plan students; and the first of the exotic displaced persons from Europe who have changed Australia forever. These people contributed a worldliness to the level of tutorial debate which was intoxicating to a school-leaver like myself.

It was a very, very secure world, here on this campus in the early post-war period; a solidly Anglo-Saxon world in which we could look forward with confidence to the career of our choice. The war to end all wars had been successfully accomplished; Australian wool was reclothing the world; and in the new mood the arts would lead the way to international peace and understanding; and science the way to material progress by the application of amazing new technologies.

Remembering the past can, however, be put to better use than just nostalgia. Corporate memory is essential to progress, particularly in today's society in which policy is determined in three-year spans. Today's society is so mobile that almost all of us are deprived of our roots. Careers have become global; families are widely-separated; ours is no longer a monoculture. Those immigrants I went to university with are now grandparents; their grandchildren are asking the question, 'Where did I come from? Where do I belong?'

All these changes have been reflected by the arts in Australia and in turn have been affected by them. What being an Australian at the turn of the millennium means is mainly defined by what we are not: we are no longer an Anglo-Celtic population; we are no longer wholly dependent for prosperity on agriculture and raw materials; we are no longer culturally dependent upon Britain or the United States. The nouns which spring to mind are 'diversity' and 'pluralism'; more accurate is probably the word 'individualism'; for public attitudes and current language are dominated by material advancement and self-empowerment. And yet at bottom there remain received values of egalitarianism, loyalty to community and suspicion of personal ambition which contribute to a common culture that our immigrants absorb; and which provides them with a welcome sense of security.

But while public life is awash with high emotion, where are the arts in all this turmoil? Where is the subversion that characterised the 60s and 70s? The assaults on gravity, the poetry, the vulgarity? Hidden from plain sight, I am ashamed to say. Instead we have again the 'deadly theatre' against which Peter Brook once railed. The big companies, once small and ambitious, have become the captives of their sponsors and subscribers and are even more mono-cultural than they were at the start. Engagement with the turmoil is now left to the indigent fringe. Artists themselves are beginning to call their world moribund. The Australia Council recently employed Saatchi and Saatchi to investigate this. They found that while the majority of Australians are touched by the creative imagination, 'the arts' as they have come to be known, are not seen as part of their lives. It needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this. Nor an expensive market report, either.

'The condition of the Deadly theatre is fairly obvious', wrote Brook.

All through the world theatre audiences are dwindling. There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole, the theatre not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains... The Broadway crisis, the Paris crisis, the West End crisis are the same: we do not need the ticket agents to tell us that the theatre has become a deadly business and the public is smelling it out.¹

It could be a comment from 'Securing the Future', the recent Nugent Report on the crisis of the major arts institutions. In fact he was writing in the 1960s.

At this point I want to except from what I have to say one section of the arts community - and that is our Aboriginal artists. Unlike their white colleagues they have persisted in their purpose from the '70s to the present. Their joint purpose has been self-expression, communication and empowerment. It has been political from start to finish; it has exploited and subverted; and more than any other aspect of endeavour it has assisted in joining the hands of the disparate tribes across the country to create the beginnings of an Aboriginal nation. In drama, small beginnings in Redfern, Broome and Brisbane have by degrees allowed the white spectator into the private world of Aboriginal life and history; more dynamic beginnings in the outback have achieved a global place for Aboriginal musicians; Australia's name in the art world has been transformed by the unique perspective of Aboriginal artists. And writing has become a further means of empowerment, of seeking in the hidden past some understanding of the present. 'To write', Jack Davis has written, 'is a political act.'

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