Article
11-17 September, 2003
Poets’ diaries: David Malouf
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January 18, 2006
I take the hour long flight from Sydney to Brisbane with Virgin Blue. At each check-in counter, a sign: “We do not appreciate jokes about safety. Police will be called.” Something very Australian about this. The mixture of death's head humour and an immediate recourse to order and the law. Still, it's the wrong day for safety jokes. Maybe the wrong day for flying.
I'm met in Brisbane by Kate, newly back after six years overseas, a lot of it spent in Sweden. A big talker, she launches into an excited description of the winter markets in Lapland: temperatures 40 degrees below, herds of reindeer in the streets, the brilliant colours of the old Lapp costumes. Meanwhile, outside, the greenlands between the airport and the city are softly steaming. We miss our turn-off and find ourselves on the freeway to the Gateway Bridge. We cross it and Kate asks the toll-gate keeper how to get back. He, obligingly, handwrites a note that will allow us to return without paying. Very smalltown and folksy, this, I think, as we zoom past a view of the new skyscraper Brisbane, all flashy steel and glass, that always hits me with a shock of disbelief since the big country town I still carry in my head is one-storeyed and wooden. This new Brisbane is the one I spent all my childhood waiting for – the 20th-century city I knew was on the way from the movies. When it finally arrived, in the mid-60s, I had already left. Each time I come back I keep looking out the car window for landmarks that have long since been replaced by something taller, glossier.
The Arts Precinct, when we arrive, is a case in point. One of the city's three universities, QUT (Queensland University of Technology), is a crowded place, set in one of the oldest and best preserved parts of the city, between the Old Botanical Gardens and the river. I remember it as a red-brick high school. Now, having got rid of the car in a labyrinthine underground carpark, we pass the long glass wall of a library where rows of readers sit at lighted screens, cafés where all the students are in T-shirts, trainers and shorts, the glass cube of a theatre foyer. Tonight I am to launch an exhibition here of works on paper by William Robinson, one of the most admired of contemporary Australian artists. He too grew up here, we are almost contemporaries, but in a way that seems typical of Brisbane – the old Brisbane anyway – we have never met. I go immediately to the Precinct Gallery to take a quick walk through the exhibition: drawings, etching, watercolours, pastels, and some splendid lithographs, made in Paris of course. I love these glimpses of the sort of work an artist does “in between;” this indication of energies that do not slacken off because there is, for the moment, no large work in sight.
I've always been intrigued by the topography of Brisbane and the influence it may have had on those of us who grew up here, our way of reading and mapping the world. Its river meanders in such sharp turns that you never know which bank you are on, left or right, between so many steep little hills that the climb up any one of them delivers a view quite different from the last. New and unexpected views is what you come to look for; it becomes a habit of mind. You see it in the writers who grew up here, Peter Porter, John Blight, Gwen Harwood among the poets; even more clearly in Bill Robinson, whose landscapes have no single perspective; the horizon runs for three hundred and sixty degrees so that the sky is in the centre of the picture, in a world of sub-tropical vegetation whose rate of growth is so rapid that one form becomes another while you are actually watching, as if the movement that swirls around these works was not through space but through time.
18:30 and I speak of this to maybe 200 people on a warm evening in a courtyard garden under the stars. Later, dinner for 40 in the glassed-in foyer of the theatre, while images from the exhibition play on the ceiling overhead.
Friday, September 12
Work on this diary. Early dinner at home with my sister, my niece and her three kids, two boys, 11 and nine, and a little girl of four. Katie and the older boy, Ben, stay on to watch the football (Brisbane Lions vs. Adelaide Crows) on my sister's giant TV. David is off to a school disco. My niece will drop me, on the way, at the Judith Wright Centre for the opening of the Brisbane Poetry Festival. In the car, over the four-minute journey, my niece tells me that David, who plays the clarinet, is trying out for a wind group at the Conservatorium. “I’m not,” he shouts from the back seat. “I am not. I’m not!” Protest about anything he really cares about seems to be his style.
The Centre, like all the new art institutions here, is quite grand. The major Australian poet of her generation, Judith Wright, lived here and at nearby Mount Tamborine for nearly forty years. Two prizes are being presented. The Val Vallis Award for an emerging poet goes to Jaya Savige, whom I first got to know about two years ago. He lives on Bribie Island in the Bay and, since his mother died, has been looking after four younger siblings. I know the winning poem, “Skirmish Point”, but it sounds even better when he reads it. The Thomas Shapcott Award for an unpublished collection goes to Lidija Cvetkovic for a book of poems about Serbia, War is not the Season for Figs.
Saturday, September 13
The Chinese Moon Festival. The Valley Mall is crowded with people drinking coffee at outdoor cafes, street performers, street stalls. I follow the sound of drums, and in the main square in Chinatown find a Chinese band and a dragon dancing about at the top of a 30-foot bamboo pole. Listen, at the Centre, to several readings. Return in the evening to read myself, with a half-Chinese Kiwi poet, Lynda Chanwai-Earle, who is wonderfully flamboyant and presents us all with mooncakes, and Judith Beveridge, one of our best middle-generation poets, whose poems get better and better, I think, as they get darker. Dinner afterwards with half a dozen others at one of the noisy half-open-air restaurants that crowd this part of town. Long, rather inconclusive argument round the table about whether words or music are more 'precise'. I have just been reading Parallels and Paradoxes, Daniel Barenboim's wonderful conversations with a rather lacklustre Edward Said. Barenboim brilliant on the approximateness of what is notated in music, including the role of touch in the poignant suggestion that a note, even when it is cut off, is not extinguished.
Sunday, September 14
Have coffee at the Centre with a small group that includes Matt Foley, the Minister for the Arts up here, a great supporter of poetry and himself an excellent reader. The talk gets round to funding. I'm on the Board of Opera Australia and say something about how hard it is for the big arts organisations to get by when we are being shifted from one funding culture, the British and European, to the American, where the major part of funding is to come from sponsorship. Matt very unsympathetic to opera and especially to the “Sydney” Opera as he calls it.
Monday, September 15
19:30 plane to Sydney. Call from A., a young Afghan refugee I see once or twice a week for coffee. He's on a three-year protection visa and is trying to get to university. His Hazara group wants to organise a demonstration. He has been here long enough to wonder if a demonstration, especially if it gets passionate and violent (and how else get attention from the media) is the best way to appeal to an Australian public. I suggest some form of street-theatre with music and folksongs to tell these people's “story;” something short and portable that could be performed in shopping-malls and other public spaces. Australians like to see people with get-up-and-go and a bit of imagination. I agree to find professionals to help.
Tuesday, September 16
Quiet dinner with J.K., whose house at Woollwich has probably the best collection of contemporary art in the country. J. shows me the new hanging: lovely room upstairs with Stellas, a whole wall of Bechers, a Carl Andre on the floor, his bedroom with its all-black Sol Lewitt murals, now enlivened with a forest of polychrome Lewitt sculptures, the Richard Long stone circles that used to be here now downstairs with the Rauchenbergs and Gurskys. A new Bill Viola, etc.
Wednesday, September 17
Opera Board. In the evening a fantastic Lulu. Ensemble very strong. This is what the AO does best. Emma Matthews an affecting Lulu, amoral in an animal-innocent way, vocally splendid, and the whole production full of humour. Audience very buzzy both before and after. Great night.
Read more about David Malouf and his poetry on his Poetry International profile page.
Distinguished Australian writer David Malouf, back in his native Brisbane for the Queensland Poetry festival, observes through the city of his childhood, Australian art, opera and poetry: “New and unexpected views is what you come to look for; it becomes a habit of mind.”
Thursday, September 11I take the hour long flight from Sydney to Brisbane with Virgin Blue. At each check-in counter, a sign: “We do not appreciate jokes about safety. Police will be called.” Something very Australian about this. The mixture of death's head humour and an immediate recourse to order and the law. Still, it's the wrong day for safety jokes. Maybe the wrong day for flying.
I'm met in Brisbane by Kate, newly back after six years overseas, a lot of it spent in Sweden. A big talker, she launches into an excited description of the winter markets in Lapland: temperatures 40 degrees below, herds of reindeer in the streets, the brilliant colours of the old Lapp costumes. Meanwhile, outside, the greenlands between the airport and the city are softly steaming. We miss our turn-off and find ourselves on the freeway to the Gateway Bridge. We cross it and Kate asks the toll-gate keeper how to get back. He, obligingly, handwrites a note that will allow us to return without paying. Very smalltown and folksy, this, I think, as we zoom past a view of the new skyscraper Brisbane, all flashy steel and glass, that always hits me with a shock of disbelief since the big country town I still carry in my head is one-storeyed and wooden. This new Brisbane is the one I spent all my childhood waiting for – the 20th-century city I knew was on the way from the movies. When it finally arrived, in the mid-60s, I had already left. Each time I come back I keep looking out the car window for landmarks that have long since been replaced by something taller, glossier.
The Arts Precinct, when we arrive, is a case in point. One of the city's three universities, QUT (Queensland University of Technology), is a crowded place, set in one of the oldest and best preserved parts of the city, between the Old Botanical Gardens and the river. I remember it as a red-brick high school. Now, having got rid of the car in a labyrinthine underground carpark, we pass the long glass wall of a library where rows of readers sit at lighted screens, cafés where all the students are in T-shirts, trainers and shorts, the glass cube of a theatre foyer. Tonight I am to launch an exhibition here of works on paper by William Robinson, one of the most admired of contemporary Australian artists. He too grew up here, we are almost contemporaries, but in a way that seems typical of Brisbane – the old Brisbane anyway – we have never met. I go immediately to the Precinct Gallery to take a quick walk through the exhibition: drawings, etching, watercolours, pastels, and some splendid lithographs, made in Paris of course. I love these glimpses of the sort of work an artist does “in between;” this indication of energies that do not slacken off because there is, for the moment, no large work in sight.
I've always been intrigued by the topography of Brisbane and the influence it may have had on those of us who grew up here, our way of reading and mapping the world. Its river meanders in such sharp turns that you never know which bank you are on, left or right, between so many steep little hills that the climb up any one of them delivers a view quite different from the last. New and unexpected views is what you come to look for; it becomes a habit of mind. You see it in the writers who grew up here, Peter Porter, John Blight, Gwen Harwood among the poets; even more clearly in Bill Robinson, whose landscapes have no single perspective; the horizon runs for three hundred and sixty degrees so that the sky is in the centre of the picture, in a world of sub-tropical vegetation whose rate of growth is so rapid that one form becomes another while you are actually watching, as if the movement that swirls around these works was not through space but through time.
18:30 and I speak of this to maybe 200 people on a warm evening in a courtyard garden under the stars. Later, dinner for 40 in the glassed-in foyer of the theatre, while images from the exhibition play on the ceiling overhead.
Friday, September 12
Work on this diary. Early dinner at home with my sister, my niece and her three kids, two boys, 11 and nine, and a little girl of four. Katie and the older boy, Ben, stay on to watch the football (Brisbane Lions vs. Adelaide Crows) on my sister's giant TV. David is off to a school disco. My niece will drop me, on the way, at the Judith Wright Centre for the opening of the Brisbane Poetry Festival. In the car, over the four-minute journey, my niece tells me that David, who plays the clarinet, is trying out for a wind group at the Conservatorium. “I’m not,” he shouts from the back seat. “I am not. I’m not!” Protest about anything he really cares about seems to be his style.
The Centre, like all the new art institutions here, is quite grand. The major Australian poet of her generation, Judith Wright, lived here and at nearby Mount Tamborine for nearly forty years. Two prizes are being presented. The Val Vallis Award for an emerging poet goes to Jaya Savige, whom I first got to know about two years ago. He lives on Bribie Island in the Bay and, since his mother died, has been looking after four younger siblings. I know the winning poem, “Skirmish Point”, but it sounds even better when he reads it. The Thomas Shapcott Award for an unpublished collection goes to Lidija Cvetkovic for a book of poems about Serbia, War is not the Season for Figs.
Saturday, September 13
The Chinese Moon Festival. The Valley Mall is crowded with people drinking coffee at outdoor cafes, street performers, street stalls. I follow the sound of drums, and in the main square in Chinatown find a Chinese band and a dragon dancing about at the top of a 30-foot bamboo pole. Listen, at the Centre, to several readings. Return in the evening to read myself, with a half-Chinese Kiwi poet, Lynda Chanwai-Earle, who is wonderfully flamboyant and presents us all with mooncakes, and Judith Beveridge, one of our best middle-generation poets, whose poems get better and better, I think, as they get darker. Dinner afterwards with half a dozen others at one of the noisy half-open-air restaurants that crowd this part of town. Long, rather inconclusive argument round the table about whether words or music are more 'precise'. I have just been reading Parallels and Paradoxes, Daniel Barenboim's wonderful conversations with a rather lacklustre Edward Said. Barenboim brilliant on the approximateness of what is notated in music, including the role of touch in the poignant suggestion that a note, even when it is cut off, is not extinguished.
Sunday, September 14
Have coffee at the Centre with a small group that includes Matt Foley, the Minister for the Arts up here, a great supporter of poetry and himself an excellent reader. The talk gets round to funding. I'm on the Board of Opera Australia and say something about how hard it is for the big arts organisations to get by when we are being shifted from one funding culture, the British and European, to the American, where the major part of funding is to come from sponsorship. Matt very unsympathetic to opera and especially to the “Sydney” Opera as he calls it.
Monday, September 15
19:30 plane to Sydney. Call from A., a young Afghan refugee I see once or twice a week for coffee. He's on a three-year protection visa and is trying to get to university. His Hazara group wants to organise a demonstration. He has been here long enough to wonder if a demonstration, especially if it gets passionate and violent (and how else get attention from the media) is the best way to appeal to an Australian public. I suggest some form of street-theatre with music and folksongs to tell these people's “story;” something short and portable that could be performed in shopping-malls and other public spaces. Australians like to see people with get-up-and-go and a bit of imagination. I agree to find professionals to help.
Tuesday, September 16
Quiet dinner with J.K., whose house at Woollwich has probably the best collection of contemporary art in the country. J. shows me the new hanging: lovely room upstairs with Stellas, a whole wall of Bechers, a Carl Andre on the floor, his bedroom with its all-black Sol Lewitt murals, now enlivened with a forest of polychrome Lewitt sculptures, the Richard Long stone circles that used to be here now downstairs with the Rauchenbergs and Gurskys. A new Bill Viola, etc.
Wednesday, September 17
Opera Board. In the evening a fantastic Lulu. Ensemble very strong. This is what the AO does best. Emma Matthews an affecting Lulu, amoral in an animal-innocent way, vocally splendid, and the whole production full of humour. Audience very buzzy both before and after. Great night.
Read more about David Malouf and his poetry on his Poetry International profile page.
© David Malouf
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