Re: message from the Mother Country
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 15:33:20 +1000
The amazing thing I always find from people of the so-called `Mother
Country' is that the difference between `colonial' literature and that of
the larger more established nations has anything to do with them. Australia
abandoned the sort of cultural cringe that had intellectuals like Robert
Hughes and Germaine Greer scurrying for smarter climes way back in the
1960s. Which makes me resent even more ex pats such as Barry Humphries (aka
Dame Edna) sticking their nose into our affairs and commenting in a very
arbitrary and haphazard way on our politics and way of life. It's simply
not like it was for them anymore.
For my money, the reason Australian and Canadian literature is fresh and
innocent is because we are newer countries, we are to an extent more
isolated countries (us more than Canada) and simply because we are still
participating in the creation of our own cultural paradigms. The reason
Australian literature could occasionally be described as `paranoid'? We
live in a large sparsely populated country a long way from everyone else,
no more, no less. Surely we could not attribute the success of say,
Arundhati Roi (sp?) as compared to Cate Blanchett as springing from the
same wellspring of cultural inferiority? It's a quaint way Britain has of
looking at its underlings but to the underlings themselves, it's simply no
longer relevant. Australia will be a republic by 2001, 100 years after
Federation, and to me it will be a welcome cut of old and irrelevant apron
strings. It will allow our country to become finally liberated; and more
importantly to let its art stand or fall on its own merits.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
> GRASS is always GREENER Department:
>
>
> The ever-erudite Scottie suggests that:
>
> >
> > the essential quality of Colonial Writing
> > is a kind of innocent freshness which we in the old world
> > have now almost completely lost.
> >
> >
>
> I'll accept this generalisation (on behalf of 'real' colonial
writers--who,
> like many Oscar nominees, are off doing exactly what they should be
doing,
> WRITING.... I doubt, for example, that Margaret Atwood will ever grace
us
> with her presence in the bananafishbowl.... ) as the compliment that it
was
> obviously intended be. But I'd LOVE to hear some examples! (Atwood, for
my
> money--who frankly probably doesn't make my "Top 25 Canadian Writers"
list,
> anyway--is the absolute antithesis of "innocence" and/or "freshness"....
But
> she's probably the best known Canadian author outside this former
colony....)
>
> In fact, I somewhat sheepishly suggest that two of my favorite "fresh"
> novelists (Graham Swift and William Boyd) have both emerged from the
cynical
> slough of the Mother Country's mainstream fiction lists in recent
years....
> They may not be the best examples of the muscular Christianity that
Scottie
> seems to be suggesting.....
>
>
> it radiates an honesty & vigour
> > which - though mistakenly identified sometimes as paranoid
> > - truly reflects that healthy, assertive life lived nowadays only
> > in God's open air on the wide plains & lofty mountains of
> > the Dominions.