Author

 

Summers were spent wandering the bluestone lanes at sunrise, shifting found objects into unusual positions, for effect. A derelict car was covered in a kapok blanket. Hard rubbish went Renaissance. David and I set up table and chairs in a Pigdon Street roundabout for breakfast. We played Perec with commuter traffic, in the days before we’d ever read Georges Perec. Our favourite word was “Author!”, which we would direct at anything that met full critical approval, fairy floss crepe myrtle at a wrought fence, Etruscan-looking graffiti, a cloud in the sky. Days were spent at respective digs making vast collages from 1978 magazines and trashed art books, to a soundtrack regularly interspersed with the first Dire Straits album. I fully imagine many of those cumulative masterworks are still in one of David’s meticulous files. His father, Ian Victor, was a well-known educationalist, also known for his sartorial elegance, both strong influences on David’s life. With friends we would go to jazz shows, peculiar and/or marvellous art shows, excessive student theatre. Talk was always perceptive and silences peaceful. Gradually David left Melbourne, but over time there were visits and dinners in China Town and messaging, back when postcards were a thing, opening ‘Dear Hearty…’ and ‘signed Handsome’. One of his public triumphs was the John Glover show at the National Gallery of Victoria and elsewhere (2004), another his book ‘Dempsey’s People’, which arrived in a big parcel on the doorstep in 2017. This week I read ‘A Tear in the Glass’ by Mary Ryllis Clark, an intuitive memoir of Melbourne curator Nina Stanton, and googling Nina Stanton I discovered that David had been awarded a prize in her name in order to extend his education studying in royal houses of England. All of which made perfect sense, unlike the news received in my ABR (Australian Book Review) mailout two days later reporting “the death of David Hansen, art historian and public gallery director”, with a reprint of his brilliant, timely, and essential 2010 essay ‘Seeing Truganini’. This is the way we receive the news these days, at several removes, electronically. Memories and loss come to the fore, as they will. Seeking further information online I was stopped by sites wanting me to prove I am not a robot, a case of the digital Renaissance turning into soft rubbish. I did at least gather that ‘Handsome’ passed away on the 13^th of January 2024 in Geelong. I keep thinking of how many single- and multi-syllabic pronunciations of Geelong we would have tested, back in the day, the day apparently being that time when we wander Carlton bluestone and wave at the rat race driving their insane Volvos and Datsuns in the direction of, if not fame typically, at the very least a small fortune.  

Doomscroll

 

How do you feel about poets writing about some form of oppression they have had? Do you think it is good for the world? These questions came my way recently from a fellow poet. If anything is a subject for poetry, then the simplest answer is yes, you can write about oppression. Oppression is cause for suffering. Suffering itself is personal experience, experience that is a fact of individual being. Sharing the experience through words is one way towards understanding, towards empathy, towards not living alone with the suffering. At least up to this point, writing about oppression is both a good and even a necessity. You should write about oppression, is a more convinced, imperative way of answering the question. In fact, oppression is a root cause of poetic activity, bound up with our responses to our conditions. More to the point is how we write about it, so that it’s both personal and common. Some of the most humorous, light poetry imaginable can prove to be founded in suffering and oppression, it is a regular feature of comedy. Making fun of the object of your unhappiness is a tactical release, often something that comes naturally. Trickier is naming the oppression and expressing the displeasure, the outrage at length in doomscroll. This is my word for the wrongs that turn into rants, the well-worded exposés that transform into pages of unending rage. The risk here is losing the message and the emotion in stretches of doomscrolling, where only those who enjoy spending hours reading bad news will find something to their liking. The singing contortionist Iggy Pop exclaimed that someone has to suffer for their art and it may as well be the listener. This perverse twist on the Romantic notion of personal suffering needs to be kept in mind when you venture out on the theme of your oppression. Do you wish the listener to understand and empathise with your declarations? Or make them endure the oppression vicariously, thus adding to the sum total of unhappiness? This is the last thought on the minds of doomscrollers, as they plough their furrow from here to the horizon. The risk of sounding self-indulgent escalates. My fellow poet adds that these personal stories are sacred so they wonder how I felt about that. In reply I would say that confessional poetry can focus deliberately on the ‘I’ for good or ill and that you will be drawing attention to yourself and not just the oppression. Is this necessary? Our own experience is, as you say, sacred. For this reason, how directly you tell these stories, or how indirectly or obliquely, is a measure of the value you place on this sacredness. After all, poetry might be about how we think and feel, but in our written and spoken relationship with the other the central concern is how we make them think and feel, through words alone.

Square

 

Image: Collins Street, Melbourne in 1905, lantern slide photograph 

taken by my great-uncle John Henry Harvey. Held at the State Library of Victoria.

When illegal Van Diemen’s Land settlers first sailed up Birrarung, why did they imagine a street grid extending a mile in each direction behind all those mangroves? Their thoughts were on a city, not a village, from the first fatal impact. Until then, not one line in the landscape was straight. The square came from Indian garrison towns, keeping everything wanted inside, everything unwanted outside. Such grid towns were seen in maps of ancient China, square as the imprint of a red ink stamp marking possession. The streets were set out in rapid order, exact measurements, perfect corners. The only anomaly to this army fortress being Parisian boulevards launched into bushland in the general direction of the blue hills, the distant prospects, Sydney somewhere, gold someplace, Antarctica. A city was the idea, but what kind of city? So many squares, no city square. Each generation succeeded in avoiding the overwhelming question, as city blocks were populated with buildings grand as London. It took the demolition of a street of Victorian goodness gracious grandioseness behind the cathedral to come close to a city square. Half a square anyway. Lacklustre, with views onto drab sidewalls and lasting but a season, the square became the scene, most memorably, of a moratorium against an Asian war, a conflict based on the unlikely premise that this city will be invaded anytime soon by an army from Annam. This finest hour of popular resistance to stupidity was the square’s raison d’être, in all cultures the square being the agora where everyone meets to congregate, to celebrate, to market, and to protest. Bereft of mangroves and piebald from the Wrecker, the city made half-hearted efforts at a square. Then a main street was turned into a mall, betraying its true shape in commercial interest: a square is there for the market, once citizens sidestep roving trams. Later came Fed Square, a place for the well-fed rather than the fed-up, an eccentrically irregular dodecagon, not a square. Not one inch of its surface was flat, which is how the planners wanted it. Comically yet, the commercial sector vied, year in year out to be the centre of the city. A complex called Melbourne Central was an outstanding example of this complex, which was only ever central in a businessman’s mind. Half the city blocks laid claim to being the centre at one time or another, but none of them, thus far, have been cleared to make way for a city square. Meanwhile crowds will turn into congregations, celebrations are organised where possible, and protests are so carefully stage-managed that police merge in with the protestors. The citizens take coffee in side alleys then walk the grid maze some more, well knowing their bearings, knowing well they’ll not find the centre, that they could wander rubik-like for days without finding their city square.