The Best Australian Essays 2015 (25 page)

It made me think about my own accumulating collection of prime ministers, premiers and ministers. Since 1993, when as a 28-year-old I was part of a delegation led by Mick Dodson and Lowitja O'Donoghue in negotiations with Paul Keating, my time in public life has seen another four prime ministers and a score of ministers of Indigenous affairs. The present prime minister is the third with whom I have had close dealings. How did this aid me and my cause? What is the chance that I will come to look back on this history with Yunupingu's chagrin?

In theory, Tony Abbott represents the best opportunity to bring together the great dialectic of the Indigenous rights secured by Paul Keating and the responsibility agenda that John Howard understood. This dialectic could synthesise in a full agenda of empowerment and recognition. Will this theory turn out in practice? This will be answered over the coming weeks, months and possibly years, but I am all too conscious that if the destiny of Aboriginal leadership is for people like Yunupingu, Pat Dodson, Charlie Perkins, Marcia Langton and Lowitja O'Donoghue to look back on a collection of prime ministers, then this one must be the last in my collection.

VIII

In 2005, the Cape York Institute, of which I was the director, gathered together a group of economists to consider the viability of remote communities. Economists from the Commonwealth and Queensland treasury departments and consultants from leading corporate partners joined our policy staff to devise a method by which the social and economic viability of remote communities might be assessed. We were joined by the development economist Professor Helen Hughes, then a fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. The project examined four communities in Cape York Peninsula: Aurukun, Coen, Hope Vale and Mossman Gorge. These communities were diverse in terms of size, their proximity to urban centres, and the relative challenges they faced in accessing government services and developing local economies. The project produced a framework for thinking about whether or not a community or town is viable. Viability was not just confined to economic indicators; importantly, it encompassed indicators of social wellbeing.

The assessment framework was then applied to these four communities and some conclusions reached about their relative viability. According to our framework, none of these four communities was socially and economically viable, and the team then assessed what would need to happen if these communities were to become viable.

Scenarios of viability required greater success in education. Education clearly was the most important factor.

A second conclusion was that a significant number of the members of these communities needed to become mobile in search of work. While the take-up of local jobs was imperative, under no scenario were any of these communities viable without a significant proportion hitting the road in search of jobs within the district, or the region, or beyond the Cape York region. So mobility became, in our policy thinking, critical. Encouraging an expatriate community to engage in what we call orbits into the wider world in search of careers and employment was not just good for those individuals. It was also the means by which the viability of that community could be guaranteed.

The third conclusion was that utmost effort was needed to see if there was an anchor industry that could be established within these communities or nearby. In the case of Aurukun, the development of a new bauxite mine on their land could provide an industry buttress to the community, if the local people participated fully in the opportunity. In the case of Mossman Gorge, they did develop a significant tourism facility, taking advantage of the opportunity they had to corral visitors to the nearby Daintree National Park. The Mossman Gorge Centre has generated the kinds of employment opportunities that this small community needs. Hope Vale pursued horticultural industries and established a banana farm that has begun to generate employment for local people.

The outcomes of the 2005 viability study then became the basis of the Cape York Welfare Reform pilots. These four communities that were part of the viability study became members of the Welfare Reform pilot. We pursued Welfare Reform because we wanted to guarantee the viability of these communities. I pursued Welfare Reform because I wanted my own hometown to be viable. I wanted my people to live in a community that was socially and economically viable. That is why we have been so zealous in our reform agenda in Cape York.

Ten years later, following the largest mining boom in the history of the world, Western Australia, the province that was the largest driver and beneficiary of that boom, has announced the potential closure of up to 150 remote Indigenous communities. Many of these communities live in the shadows of the very mines that were part of that boom. Was there any province anywhere on the planet that generated as much revenue as this one? How could it be that at the conclusion of this boom, the government of this province could say that it could not afford to continue to support these unviable remote communities?

IX

I look at Brian Samson and his anxieties for his Martu people, and I see my own anxieties for the Guugu Yimithirr people of my hometown. We share an existential fear for the future of our mob. Samson has gathered together a large group of educators, Martu elders and young people at a conference room at Newcrest's Telfer mine on a Saturday morning. My message to Samson and his Martu leaders is that education is its own economic development strategy. Empowered by education, our children can pursue their own opportunities in the world. By being educated, they will themselves find answers to economic development. Even if we cannot conceive of all potentialities in these communities today, the children will find their own answers as individuals and as communities. Samson is right in making education his number one goal. This is the kind of serious leadership that is needed for those seeking a future for remote communities.

At the end of ten years of struggle and success, progress and failure, it is plain that the empowerment and development agenda for Indigenous Australia must be our future course. I fear that the binaries of Indigenous affairs, if left unresolved, will leave us caught between the laissez-faire of the left and the increasingly hardening hearts of the right. People like Samson and I are not content to be caught ‘formulated, sprawling … pinned and wriggling' on the horns of that dilemma.

The Monthly

Seven Poor Men of Sydney

Delia Falconer

Christina Stead's first novel, published in 1934, is a dark love letter to Sydney, a portrait of madness and the study of a lost generation. It is brimful of overlapping visions: realist, modernist, collective and Nietzschean. Its characters, their lives cramped by the depression, are all too aware of being thwarted. The novel takes its form from the way their paths cross in the lending libraries, public lecture halls and workers' newspapers of a city in the grip of change – a 1920s Sydney in which the Harbour Bridge is half built and covered in cranes, and small businesses are pushing out the colonial houses in the city centre. Full of talk, and ideas, the novel makes Sydney appear as busy and full of secret niches as Conrad or Woolf's London. It should be called
Seven Poor Men of Bloomsbury
, quipped fellow novelist Miles Franklin meanly, among the many from the moment the book was published to accuse the author of overreaching. But the novel's reach is the point.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
is a major work; its best description remains that of Stead's life partner, William Blake, when he read it in manuscript. It ‘contains mountain peaks'.

Stead's novel is mighty; it does inspire awe. Its sense of being large, peculiarly energised, almost a force of nature, is all there in the strangely commanding, dynamic first sentences, invoking the novel's key landscape, that of Watsons Bay (which Stead reimagines as Fisherman's Bay).

Those first two lines, adamantly unpunctuated and adamantine, seem to embody the rocky steadfastness of the Sydney Heads themselves. I can't tell you how much Stead's sentences in this book excite me. They're utterly unafraid and defiantly particular; but also, so often, perfectly fitted in form to what they describe. We're in the presence of genius here, albeit an overwhelming one; as Angela Carter would write of Stead much later in her career, ‘To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness.' I don't think it's a coincidence that William Blake chose the geological metaphor of a mountain range in describing Stead's novel. In fact his description reminds me of another literary comparison – Eudora Welty's response when asked about writing in a South dominated by the work of William Faulkner. It was ‘like living near a big mountain, something majestic – it made me happy to know it was there, all that work of his life.'

Yet I have to make a confession. I did not have, as a young writer, the uncontentious, calm relationship with Stead's writing that Welty's response suggests, or the wisdom to grow up with a comfortable sense of it shaping my own city. For me – as, I suspect, for many readers – the magnificence of Stead's prose fuelled a reluctance, perhaps even an antagonism, toward her first novel. If Stead's book is a mountain, it's not a picturesque or tranquil one. My love affair with this novel is very recent; I had not read it until I was asked to write the introduction to the new Melbourne University Press reissue. I did not – another confession – even consult it (although I re-read
For Love Alone
) to write my own non-fiction book about Sydney.

Yes, I had owned a copy of
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
for more than two decades, and opened it over the years with good intentions, only to feel myself beaten back by those packed first pages. With its great summoning of life, the book seemed to make some too-personal demand upon me; I had the sense that the effort required to read it would be almost physical (in a way, I was right). As a young literature undergraduate, I had somehow also absorbed the message – mostly from my friends studying
The Man Who Loved Children
– that Stead's writing was ‘difficult'; unkind, odd, overambitious and perhaps not entirely controlled. That these criticisms have a gendered aspect I am now painfully aware. The title,
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
, certainly does Stead few favours, yet had I persisted, I would have realised that its main character is, in fact, a woman.

It's only in coming to Stead's work as a more mature reader that I discovered that it's precisely the book's mountainous force that I like; and more, that what appear to be its excesses are in fact part of a brilliant and extraordinary vision that sets out to make us see the Sydney lives of its time as faceted and complex – in ways that I think we're yet to fully understand. So this essay proceeds as a kind of atonement. I want to rescue the novel from my own youthful ignorance, but I also want to defend it against the many misreadings it has suffered subsequently, in which it is seen as the awkward precursor to Stead's major work, and even as a failed realist novel (an unfortunately abiding criticism). I appreciate it now as deliberately dynamic and iconoclastic. Its ambition is to be mighty; but its greater ambition and achievement is to be mutable, to change in different lights.

*

Seven Poor Men of Sydney
is a novel crowded with characters, but its main focus is on the half-siblings Michael and Catherine Baguenault, two intense souls who have grown up in Fisherman's Bay. (Stead herself spent most of her childhood in its real counterpart, Watsons Bay.) Catherine and Michael struggle against a smallness of spirit enforced by a lack of money and a society geared to stifle human potential. Both have a singular, even visionary, take upon the world, especially Michael, who has been assailed by states of ‘ecstasy' since his childhood, at first in Fisherman's Bay and then later in the ‘mild wilderness' (a terrific term) of Sydney suburbia where the family later moves.

Michael and Catherine share an unrequited incestuous attraction. At first, in the childhood sections, it looks as if the novel will be one of developing sensibility, a portrait of Michael's creative oddness, like James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916). Certainly there's a sense from the earliest pages that Michael's will be a tragic trajectory, that he won't survive this journey, which begins with a suicide at the Gap (in a fabulously unsentimental scene very early in the novel, children, nuns and other locals who have been entertained by a dead shark on the beach race up to see the body that is just being hauled in); the novel will be, in one sense, a twenty-year prelude to self-destruction. Yet while Joyce depicted a single consciousness in that book,
Seven Poor Men
is closer to
Ulysses
, in that Stead sets out to depict the inner lives, ‘unexpressed, incoherent, unplanned', of a whole cohort. ‘Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out,' the novel asks in its first pages, ‘when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed?'

Catherine and Michael's lives intertwine with various sets of other characters, all of whom are part of 1920s Sydney's socialist intellectual milieu. After moving through Michael's childhood and restless young adulthood, when he can't settle to anything, the novel skips forward past the First World War, in which Michael has served to impress a young wife he was courting, to Catherine and Michael's thirties. Their younger, far less ambitious cousin Joseph is a kind of counterweight to Michael and Catherine in the novel; he's just as poor but more ‘ordinary'; he's also self-critical, and bent on self-improvement, but less driven and more content (or at least able to deal with his lot). Joseph works in a small printery near Circular Quay – and he's the main link to the most of the novel's poor men. In the printery we meet Withers, a bitter schemer; the philosophical Baruch Mendelssohn; a pathetic, broken old man, Williams; and Montagu, who covets the business.

Michael is also bosom buddies with the thwarted cripple Kol Blount, who lives with his mother in the working-class inner west. At the other end of the social scale, we have the printery's dissolute, self-righteous owner Chamberlain. And then there are the Folliots, wealthy benefactors of socialist causes who live on the North Shore, whom Michael met in England during his service in the First World War. (Michael had an affair with Marion Folliot, while Catherine holds a torch for her husband.) Most of the characters in this book are aged in their early thirties, though they seem younger; in fact, it is hard to think of a book that gives such a sense of burning youth and its hypersensitivity to ideas and conversation. This cast may sound difficult to follow, but it's quite easy once you accept that the connections in this novel are social, that its movement is the movement of conversation and meetings.

Critic H.M. Green suggested that this is the first novel in which Sydney appears as a modern world city; and certainly Stead's portrait bears more resemblance to the busy, abstract visions of 1930s artists like Grace Cossington-Smith than to any of its literary predecessors. Throughout its pages, ferries whistle, ocean liners bellow, cars rattle, typewriters tap and hydraulic lifts hum in cart-docks. The novel also embodies the intense intellectual energy of 1920s Sydney, much of it more exalted (in spite of Miles Franklin's sneering) than anything in Stead's book. In this decade, the Lindsay brothers published the wildly Lawrentian journal
Vision
; Reverend Frank Cash was penning his mix of swooning futurism and Biblical exegesis,
Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
, to argue that the structure embodied a holy geometry; anti-moralist freethinking thrived at the University; and numerous workers' organisations, as we see in the novel, housed those on strike and out of work.

On a first reading, the novel seems to follow the ‘natural' shape of the life of these groups of people, linked by their active political interests; and yet it dawned on me, re-reading it, that it is structured around five splendid set pieces that run like great tracking shots through the city's different districts. And Joseph Baguenault is often the ‘camera'; it's through his eyes, as he walks, that we see the city unspooling.

In one of my favourite scenes in the novel, Joseph goes window-shopping in the city with Baruch; their back pay has been finally, grudgingly granted and it's jingling in their pockets. The two men go for a long wander, which takes them past bedding and chemist shops, past the flyblown cafes in the less salubrious area behind the markets, and Central Station. During the first part of the walk, as they pass the more bourgeois boutiques, Stead's long, vigorous sentences spill forth as if imitating the city's greedy momentum. ‘Splendid were the silver shops,' Stead writes,

Again, this sentence is as much a pleasure to the eye as to the ear. Observe the way its punctuation mirrors the reflections and embellishments of these objects on display: that delicious use of hyphenated words; that lovely run of rings, signet-, mourning-, wedding-, in which your eye is drawn along the line that threads them together. Stead is immensely generous in filling out her clauses, enumerating the scrolls, flourishes, chrysanthemums, cherubs, ‘all punched out and pressed in' (note the almost Ruskinian balance of those two compound verbs across the ‘and'); and then, where most writers might stop, she adds the perfect little trinity ‘chased, embossed and pierced'. Even here her sentence doesn't stop; after the briefest pause provided by a semi-colon, it continues to pour its treasures out.

In another of these magnificent set pieces of walking observation, Joseph travels from the back of St Mary's Cathedral down to Woolloomooloo Bay, where Baruch has his flat. Here the summer evening causes doors to open onto parlours with their Chinese screens and smells of dust and bugs.

The most striking thing about Stead's city is its poverty. Its dull weight is everywhere. It's hard to think of anyone who writes as well about the soul-sapping work that is involved in simply existing without money, or the relentless physical intrusions of old, stale, cumbersome and dirty things: the scrap-iron typewriter Catherine struggles with in the offices of a socialist newspaper; the cockroaches that pour after sunset through the cracks in the Fisherman's Bay buildings; fruit buns and cups of tea barely placating stomachs weak with hunger. The owner of the press hasn't paid his workers for two months. The huge distances the characters cover on foot to save a tram or ferry fare are almost unimaginable to us now. Yet none of this can be described as the ‘background' to Stead's novel. Instead, it's this continual struggle that defines its characters, an educated working class, struggling to help the great international ideals of human betterment take root in the local soil. ‘If bread grew on trees,' Catherine says, ‘no one would recognise his brother or lover; we'd be a race of angels.'

If
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
were only a set of case studies of its characters as embodiments of their material circumstances, it would not have such power. But one of the many pleasures of the novel is its characterisation; and, even more so, the sharp way these smart people have of analysing and describing one another. Catherine is ‘the firebell clanging', says an acquaintance, while Michael is its ‘echo in an empty house'. (What an excellent description of co-dependence!) Michael is a ‘soft forest ivy', in the words of another character, a ‘clinging vine that someone has always supported' (another wonderful description), while he himself recognises that he will ‘never be captain' of his own soul.