“Time out of Mind”: Thoughts on George Megalogenis’s "The Longest Decade" in lieu of a ‘poem’.

If the universe is, as Borges persistently maintained, a library, my own role in the grander scheme of things would seem to be that of an old woman who comes in every fourth Tuesday in a hat and a cardigan to ask the staff “whether they have any Barbara Cartland” and who can’t remember whether the book she is currently holding is what she calls the ‘new one’, or one of the ones that she’s already read. (Dearie, do you know whether I’ve read this one, or am I getting it mixed up with the one where she thinks she’s the duchess but actually it’s her sister – the titles are so similar! -- ?)

In short, the scope of my literary experience is lacking in the epic sweep and grandeur that I attribute to it in my more openly self-aggrandizing moments.

It’s not just that I have – when it comes down to it – failed to read (let alone to properly assimilate) any number of the World’s Great Books. Nor is it the well-documented, but no less irritating fact that the mountain of important things unread seems to grow exponentionally as I get older while the progress of my reading remains steadily arithmetic. It’s as if the world were the creation of a Malthusian bibliophobe who, convinced that books made people listen to Aristotle instead of the Holy Spirit, wanted to visit upon all readers the punishment of Sisyphus.

If I’m honest with myself, I’d have to confess that not only have I not read any number of important works in what the tenets of soulless academic specialisation would have me refer to as my ‘field’, but that outside of this field there are whole universes, whole genres, whole areas of study, where it would be exaggerating for me to say that I had read so much as a single volume.

Unusually, given some of my other interests, books about Australian politics fall into this category, i.e. the category of things so long neglected by me that I wouldn’t even know what it was that I was neglecting until the damn thing crawled out of its shelf and started suing me for negligence.

My stumbling across Megalogenis’s book stolid, unpretentious, wonderfully thought-provoking book, The Longest Decade, therefore has, as my afore-mentioned Pietist bibliophobe might have said: a rather providential quality about it.

To tell the story of this:

One Summer afternoon, a few months ago, I was heading to a friend’s wedding in my girlfriend’s car. Due to my girlfriend’s formidable (even legendary) organizational abilities, we arrived so ridiculously early at the reception centre that the groom may have still been at his buck’s night. Consequently, we found ourselves in a position where we could either sit in the car or undertake what would have been a rather crass and irreverent quest for pre-nuptial victuals. But with neither of us being hungry, thirsty, or inclined to sit in the matrimonial car park, my girlfriend and I then found ourselves driving (you have to drive in the suburbs; it’s part of the charmlesnsess of it all) around aimlessly trying to make time pass. Eventually, we saw a sign in the distance with the simultaneously ominous and hopeful words: “Book Fair”.

Now, normally, I, like any self-respecting person am suspicious of anything trading under the label of a “book fair.’ This is largely because I find the suggestion that I am about to enter a world in which the wholesome porridge-like stodginess of a good book combines effortlessly with a utopian universe of fairy-floss, fireworks, and Ferris-wheels dubious to the point of recalling such slightly obscene misnomers as “Union of Socialist Soviet Republics” (four words; four lies, as Milan Kundera once said) “clean coal” and “Must-see T.V.”

Indeed, for its mixture of cruelty and confusion “the book fair” is, to my mind, the poorer country cousin of one of my most railed against bugbears: namely, the book launch.

On the subject of book launches, I have often remarked, to my long-suffering friends that a book is not, in fact, a ship.

When said friends fail to applaud the supple dialectical thrust of my rapier like wit (and instead give me looks conveying the kind of patronizing politeness that you give a three year old whose just announced what he’s done in the in the toilet -- yes, Mal, you CAN differentiate between non-analogous objects – that’s lovely!) I usually go on to say something like: you can’t…take…a book…and break a bottle of champagne across its prow. You can’t sit back and hold hands while you watch the thing sail off into the sunset. Most importantly: you can’t do the only thing that you can sensibly hope to do with a book (i.e. read it) while in the presence of a gaggle of simpering narcissists all shouting “associate me with literature!” over the rapidly diminishing supplies of (admittedly free) wine and cheese.

I make this point not because I am an Aspergic pedant unable to comprehend the basic function of metaphor is to carry-over (metaphorein in Greek) an idea from one (usually familiar) context to another (usually less familiar one), but because whenever I have been made to endure a book launch, I have noticed that, apart from the friends and family of the author and the odd publishing industry mogul, the people who go to book launches tend to be the kind of appalling hipster zombies (varied in age, but not in income-bracket) who will, at the slightest provocation confess their desperate, ineluctable attraction to the WONderful world of books, publishing, authors and associated camp-followers as well as their congenital inability to “keep away from” anything that looks as exciting as the prospect of a ‘bold new voice’ in the process of “exploding” on to the “burgeoning” Antipodean literary scene.

The question that such criminally repellant behaviour always provokes in me is: who on earth is possessed by such a sufficiently undifferentiated love of books (authors and the like) that they feel the need to see one launched, as if it were so many spaceships?

I cannot help associating such undiscriminating literary enthusiasm not with the bibliophilia of a Borges, but with the drooling illiteracy of a village idiot prior to Gutenberg and Luther.

This is because I take excitement about books in general (which one would surely need to be a regular book-launch attendee) a sign of not being actually able to read. It’s like saying (as people are wont to on “social networking” and dating sites) that you “like music” or “movies”: no-one who likes music likes music GENERALLY, you have to like (no matter how eclectic your tastes might be) something in a way that precludes liking something else, unless, of course, the whole universe of such things is sufficiently mysterious to you, that you can reply, like a ten year old that yeah, y’know, it’s all right.

Thus: I cannot imagine someone who is actually acquainted with printed matter being capable of the sentiment: “Books: how awesome are they?”

The desire to write, in my not so humble opinion, has to be motivated at least in part, by the desire to see a lot of extant books burn horribly in fires sparked by the towering inferno of one’s own genius. Maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think so. The desire to read has to be motivated by something different, obviously, but not, I think, too dissimilar: we read because we are searching for rare fragments of beauty, wisdom or wit: if the long search teaches us anything it is precisely to discriminate. Undifferentiated reverence is suitable only for someone to whom the book is (by virtue of its impenetrability) a grimoire: a magician’s tome such that ideas of ‘spelling’ still retain their link with the idea of ‘spells’.

Anyway. Back to the story.

So, through ungodly punctuality, I find myself at the suburban book fair wandering past table after table of nonsense (“Fat Children: how they will Take Over the World and why you will be responsible”, “Some non-entities tell-all sexual autobiography” et cetera) when I suddenly notice Megalogenis’s book with its cover-photo of (former Australian Prime Ministers) Paul Keating and John Howard.

The cover and the title “The Longest Decade” might have briefly held my attention under any circumstances, but what caused me to beeline towards the thing, grab it and hold it like it was the last hamburger on earth, was that I remembered that I’d read in the newspaper Christos Tsiolkas praising Megalogenis’s book for forcing him to really think about what had happened in Australia over the last 10 years. Tsiolkas is still, as I write this, in the process of being lauded in Australia for his latest novel “The Slap”, which I will read as soon as the Australian middle class have finished it.

But the remark interested me because the descriptions I was hearing in the (admittedly excitable Australian press) made it sound as if Tsiolkas had achieved the rare distinction of having written a novel whose characters (and cultural setting) would be recognizable to me, because and not despite the fact that he was not going to subject his readers to a tortuous meditation on the nature of Australian identity.
Tsiolkas novel seemed to be, in other words, an Australian novel rather than an Australian novel.

Consequently, it looked like it might succeed at ‘holding up a mirror up to the nation’s soul’ precisely because it wasn’t (like so many stupidly earnest Australian novelists) trying so desperately to hold a mirror up to the nation’s soul. And Megalogenis’s book, it seemed, had provided the evocative hard facts that had set Tsiolkas’s fertile brain a-churning.

To explain my thoughts here (especially to my non-Australian readers): like many Australians, I find most attempts to capture the country on a [sic] prose-canvas – yes I have just used the vomit-inducing expression of an arts bureaucrat -- painfully, squirm-inducingly embarrassing. I cannot be alone on this: reflections on national identity, and the state of the Australian soul are a humiliating national vice; basically like masturbating in public but without the irrepressible ex-Colonial charm.

This is not only because of what I like to think of as the “Harold Pinter effect”, i.e. ,the way that truly realistic dialogue (as opposed to dialogue that is supposed to be as ‘realistic-as-it-can-be-while-performing-it’s-requisite-dramatic functions) often comes across as surreal rather than real: an alienating mélange of long pauses and inexplicably unrevealing half sentences; statements piled on statements that seem more phatic than semantic.

But it’s not only this: the problem is the nation (or rather the nation’s hacks) seemingly unquenchable desire to find an acceptable identity for itself, a founding myth, et cetera. The result, of this, is usually – to paraphrase the oft-repeated remarks of Clive James (one of the country’s more deservedly renowned expatriates) -- to achieve the opposite effect, namely to make the nation look jejune and unsure of itself, like an adolescent whose constant ostentatious protestations of maturity, preclude anyone treating her as an adult.

(A side-consequence is also that Australia spends more money per capita than anyone else in the world trying to ensure that we “punch above our weight” in sporting matters, if not sporting metaphors.
Translated into English this means that we attempt more desperately to try to win gold medals than countries with much larger populations and less psychotic priorities.)

And, I again, agree with James who has written, that even if you don’t like Patrick White (Australia’s only winner of the Noble Prize for Literature, who I, in fact, like very much), people are getting sufficiently used to Australians, to Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett and other usual suspects as if the country had -- the ham-fisted attempts at belated national mythmaking notwithstanding -- managed to achieve the infinitely banal predicate of self-identity that it was (at least for me) never particularly interesting to seek out in the first place.

For those of you who don’t know about the constant Australian attempts at national myth-making, I offer a brief introduction. To begin with, these attempts divide broadly into two camps:

First, there is the political right’s pathetic (and interminable) attempts to create a national myth ex nihilo as if it were the late 19th century and we were trying to take a bunch of Italian or German provinces and city-states and unify them under a central government that could then fight a war with the French.

The problems with this are of course, numerous: apart from the obvious (but, as such, vehemently denied fact) that there simply isn’t a founding moment in Australian history that has the same imagination-firing qualities of the French or American Revolution, there are all the problems attendant upon the potentially fascist attempt to invent a new national mythologies as opposed to developing something out of already extant traditions.

I say, quasi-fascist, because I am thinking of my agreement with some of (French philosopher) Paul Ricoeur’s eminently sensible comments on the nature of myths, ideology and utopia.

Basically, Ricoeur argues, that any mythology (and any tradition is in a sense ‘mythological) has an ‘ideological’ and ‘utopian’ aspect, the duality between which is due to what an academic would fail to resist calling “the indeterminacy of the mythic object.” In other words, for every collection of stories of origin (say of America and its founding fathers, France and its revolution) there is a way that the story can be read to legitimate the status quo, and another way in which it can be read to challenge the status quo in the name of a higher ideal of justice, freedom et cetera than has been hitherto instantiated. Of course, determining what constitutes the ‘status quo’ is a difficult (and inevitably contested) matter. At the very least, it should be said that the distinction is not simply equivalent to a distinction between ‘right’ and ‘left’ wing interpretations of a national mythos: after all a conservative can be concerned with precisely the utopian aspects of a myth or a tradition (the moral promise inherent in the tradition, the torch carried in the hearts of our forefathers), just as a leftist can be sufficiently (and for my taste problematically) cynical as to deny the existence of a utopian aspect to a tradition or myth, insisting instead that the image of utopia must come from somewhere else: from an ‘outside’, beyond the bounds of sense, or the shadows on the wall of our cave.

Ricoeur takes pains to avoid using either ‘ideology’ or ‘utopia’ in the casually pejorative sense in which both terms are usually employed.

Instead, he sees each aspect of myth/tradition as to some extent socially necessary: there are necessarily ideological and utopian aspects to the stories that we tell about ourselves, our world and those sources of meaning which might, in seeming to at once transcend and pervade the world, provide the world with its ideals, its coherence, and its hope of transforming itself into something better.

However, in Ricoeur’s terms, mythologies (like the Nazi view of history) invented with the express intention of being mythologies tend almost always to be the mere husks of real mythologies because they almost inevitably find themselves to be shorn of at least one-half (usually the utopian aspect) of the ideology-utopia couple which Ricoeur sees as at the roots of what I will call here the richness of a real myth. Real myths are marked by an ambiguity or a polysemy, an ability to provide enough meanings to be contested, even if they possess an obvious centre. But it is this centre, enduring through, and even being constituted through a plurality of interpretations that leads to the perpetual capacity for renewal amidst reformations and revolutions that marks a genuine tradition be it religious, political, national or whatever.

Thus, I would refer to the national myths of France and the U.S.A. as real founding myths of a nation, because both nations can be seen to, throughout their history, constantly contest and reinvent or re-engage with the story of their founding and to constantly come back to the question of the meaning of their founding, in the face, of contemporary struggles. Caveat: I do not ever use the word myth to mean something that is inherently false; an obvious lie told for (apparently) socially efficacious purposes.

Instead, I use the word to mean a body of stories, images, and ideals that, on the one hand, come to play an important role in developing a society’s sense of itself, while yet retaining the potential to point beyond the society as it is, towards something that it might or should be, something to which it must continue to strive if it’s ideals are to be truly meaningful.

These stories and images, these dreams and ideals serve – precisely in their ambiguity -- as a spur for each generation (perhaps even each individual) to examine their own experiences, hopes and ideals, to test contemporary experience against aspects of the tradition that have been realized and aspects whose potential is as yet untapped. The fact that the founding narratives of the American and French revolution have proved so enduring is a testimony to the fact that that there was something in each of these events (and the subsequent history of contesting the meaning of these events) that has proved sufficiently thoughtful, or sufficiently idealistic, sufficiently ambiguous or sufficiently rich to survive constant contestation and interpretation across two centuries and many generations. Such robustness and endurance are the hallmarks of a real, enduring myth or tradition.

In contrast, artificial or gratuitously invented myths tend to be distinguished precisely for lacking the breadth, depth, and (at least potential) universality required for multiple interpretations or constant contestation in a changing world: they tend, because of this, to be all too easily appropriated by those who would try to turn “national identity” into a matter of the merely particularistic affirmation of a particular national “substance”. The problem, to put this in less barbarous language, of a substantial conception of identity (one stripped of its utopian dimension) is that such a conception allows itself to be all too easily exploited by those who wish to identify the nation with a particular usually ethnic “substance” – (America = only those of us who ‘born here’ – as the word nation once implied -- not the immigrants, not “outsiders”, only those people fortunate enough to constitute the ‘original’ racial/cultural/religious group.)

In contrast to this, I have always believed that the greatness of France and the United States lies with the (at least potential) universality of their most significant founding narratives. This is what has allowed these countries to endure: their greatness of their ‘founding’ lies precisely in the ability of the ideals of these nations to be expanded without being betrayed.

In contrast to this, when (former Australian Prime Minister) John Howard speaks of such things as mateship, larrikinism and the sacrifice of ANZAC troops at Gallipoli, he did, of course, touch on some aspects of the national psyche and what could be seen as an important aspect of the nation’s history, and even of some traits (such as martial courage) that are near-universally respected.

However, unlike the French idea of a nation born in a struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity, or the American idea of universal freedom based on inalienable human rights, the mythic qualities of the “Howard et cetera” view of history have a tendency to look narrow, impoverished, parochial and contrived: it is no accident that we hear such values invoked more by beer-soaked jingoists than the even-handed historians.

But pernicious and pathetic national myth-making is not only a pastime of Australia’s political right. Against the “ideological” myth-making of the right, might be contrasted what I would think of (manipulating Ricoeur’s categories) the pseudo- “utopian” myth-making of the left. Examples of this kind of myth-making can usually be witnessed in all their earnest glory in the kind of production that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) comes up with every time it is called upon to spend the portion of its budget allotted to local drama’. In saying this, I admit to never having watched any of these shows but I maintain that it does not take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce the content of these (interminable, interchangeable programs) from their previews.

The plot of any of these eminently interchangeable “let’s invent a slightly less bigoted Australian Story” “local dramas” is as follows:

A feisty, forty-ish white Australian woman moves to rural Australia because the deeply spiritual and emotional qualities with which she (and the show’s target demographic) is allegedly invested prevent her from finding happiness amidst the suburban dreariness/urban tawdriness that she leaves behind for her outback sojourn. Upon arriving in an impossibly quaint outback township she meets a number of loveable eccentrics, none of whom, disappointingly, turn out to be zombies intent on eating her brains.

Instead -- presumably by way of compensation for the lack of zombies -- she meets an astonishingly handsome young man from one of Australia’s newer immigrant groups (these days that means from the Middle East, or from the Sudan) who performs various acts of delightfully un-city-slickerish acts of kindness for our feisty heroine while remaining enticingly shirtless against the harsh outback sun. After some initially tentative encounters Feisty Older Woman and Handsome Stranger from a Strange Land (who have undertaken parallel journeys in which the skepticism of our lovable eccentrics turns, gradually to acceptance) make the leap from the awkward culture-clash moments of their first encounters to some kind of tastefully-lit bodice-ripping passion.

Along the way, various wise (i.e. older) Australians (white farmers with broad accents, Aboriginal elders and other people who have been given the undignified role of conduits of redemptive wisdom for the lives of middle-class white people) advise Feisty Older Woman to do things like “follow her heart”, and generally to womanfully turn away from whatever shallow prejudices the Bad Guys (bigots, corporations, Americans, Brits, cane toads, people who don’t really like cricket) stand between F.O.W and her lover becoming the protagonist of an ABC drama.

In the end, whether F.O.W. and her impossibly handsome lover die tragically (one hopes they are eaten by some of our more dearly beloved native fauna) or start a small, impossibly cute farm together in the desert [sic!] the various divisions of the nation are all healed in one wonderful Schillerian moment of committee-produced pap. The strains of Beethoven’s ninth can be heard over the sunburnt country and it all goes on happily until you just want to punch Baz Luhrmann in the mouth and then explain (as Bazza doubtless would) to the audience how wonderfully “Shakespearean” the punch was in its demotic directness.

So, given all of this: apart from ignorance, the reason that I don’t read books on Australian politics is that books on Australian politics tend to be, to use an Antipodean expression, “boring as batshit” especially when they venture (pretentiously and predictably) into the territory of the ‘national soul’ and its constituent ingredients.

Given the general awfulness of all such things, Megalogenis’ book is a wonderful surprise, a thought-provoking and important book, that provides a revealing investigation into the national soul precisely because (like, I presume, Tsolkas’s book) it has none of the pretentious earnestness, historical scope, or boringly earnest intent that normally marks such things rendering them unreadable.

In fact, one of the really great things about Megalogenis’ book, is that it has exactly the right level of ambition for its author’s abilities (something that is almost unheard of in anything that even purports to touch on questions relating to the national character.) Megalogenis is and knows himself to be a journalist, a smart one; someone who has done the rounds of the press gallery, who knows a thing or two about economics, who can write a straightforward sentence and who has been reflecting on what has happened in Australia over the last 15 or so years without ever acting as if his undertaking this reflection entitled him to think of himself as the next Durkheim or Freud.

The book concerns “the longest decade” (some 15 years), between Paul Keating becoming Prime Minister and what Megalogenis could not have known (but probably guessed) was John Howard’s last term in office. At times Megalogenis seems to imply that he might mean the ‘even longer decade’ which includes Keating’s stint as Treasurer under Hawke.

To understand the interest of the book, for non-Australians, Keating and Howard, are in the national imagination, the great antagonist’s of Australian politics since the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1973.

The two men, now both ousted from power, but still making the odd barbed comment from their alleged retirements continue to divide the nation, rather like Nixon and Kennedy, Clinton and Bush II, Gladstone and Disraeli. Megalogenis knows this and indeed starts from his premise, he knows that the nation divides into what he calls “Howard-huggers” or “Howard-haters”. Furthermore, he knows that while most “Howard huggers” hate Keating as the person they blame for taking the nation in a frightening, alien direction, most “Howard-haters” see Keating as an idealist, a visionary, a man who – to recall a motif from the unabashed Howard-hating “Keating: the musical” -- never lost sight of (former Labour PM and engine driver Ben Chifley’s vision) of “the light on the hill”. For Howard-haters, if Keating was an idealist and a visionary, Howard is the person who obscures the vision and puts out the fire in the nation’s belly: he is Newton (or Voltaire) to the eyes of Blake.

Like many a Howard-hater, I have even indulged myself (over the years) by thinking of a line from Oliver Stone’s largely ridiculous, but undeniably entertaining Nixon in which Anthony Hopkins’s Nixon says before the portrait of Kennedy: “when they look at you they see what they want to be; when they look at me they see who they are.”

Not even his fiercest detractors would believe that Howard was capable of the kind of pathological self-pity and resentment to which Stone’s Nixon at lest seems so privy.

Nonetheless, to be a Howard-hater, in Australia is to believe that the man brought out everything prurient and small-minded, everything grasping, covetous and small-minded in the national soul. To love Keating is to believe that he did just the opposite: that he enlarged the national vision, that he took us forward, gave us hope, looked-forward and other Obamaisms. But precisely as with Kennedy-Nixon, the point is not, in the first instance, the truth or justice of the associations, only the fact that the associations exist and form a very powerful hold in certain sectors of the public imagination. Keating, whatever his true legacy became, especially during the seemingly interminable Howard years, a symbol for a compassionate, cosmopolitan and progressive nation that his supporters considered had been slowly strangled to death under Howard’s divisive, mean-spirited and ultimately parochial policies.

The great merit of Megalogenis book is the clarity and lack of partisanship with which he brings out the way these two very different men together presided over one of the greatest (and most rapid) changes in Australian society. Megalogenis is keen to note (contrary to the political ideas of almost every partisan in the country) what is shared between the two great rivals, while never being blind the differences between them. Almost from the outset he denies the vision of Keating and Howard as antithetical powers: however the nation divides on which one represents light and which one darkness. At the same time, however, he does a remarkable job of drawing out the fact that the differences between the two men are made all the more significant (more remarked upon) precisely because so many of their economic attitudes and economic policies tended (in the long run) in the same direction.

Although the book offers all kinds of insights into both men (the final section in which Megalogenis allows the two men to give their assessments of each other is particularly revealing) the substance of the book lies in its description of social change in Australia during the period in which these two were in office.

The exceptionally evocative quality of Megalogenis’s description of these changes is due mainly to an ability to let the facts speak for themselves. Behind this seems to be Megalogenis genuinely admirable, sense of his own limitations. Despite his many assured comments, and carefully chosen snapshots from the “decade”, the book wisely avoids trying to write a poem about the period in favour of simply pointing out to the reader a great number of cold, hard (usually economic) facts.

The effect is (like Stanislaw Lem’s statistics-based story One Human Minute) surprisingly evocative – as if one can see both an epic and a lyric -- in the mirror of drab economic statistics much more vividly than if one had been presented with a second-rate poem about the epoch. (This is a trick, incidentally, that the Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawm has mastered.)

Without wanting to repeat Megalogenis’s narrative in too much detail, the story basically concerns the shift in the Australian economy from an economy of local industries protected “behind the tariff wall” into the de-regulated participant in the global market. Along the way, Megalogenis tracks, in a wonderfully matter-of-fact, non-partisan way the socio-cultural shifts that accompany the economic changes. (It is perhaps particularly important to note, at this point, that Megalogenis is anything but a Marxist, despite the fact that I think Marxists could benefit much from reading him. This curious fact, relates to something that I have noticed on other occasions, namely that there is a way in which the Financial Review or the Wall Street Journal can sometimes sound more “Marxist” – in that they tend to talk about the economic bases of social reality than any number of trendy leftist journals discussing Giorgio Agamben’s “Messianic” reading of St. Paul. It’s a funny old world.

In any case, the shift that Megalogenis outlines could be described as a move from a society marked by a considerable degree of social and cultural homogeneity to what could almost be termed an obsession with distinction. In the kind of jargon, that Megalogenis eschews, it is the story of Australia’s move from a “Fordist” mode of production to fully-fledged consumer (“post-Fordist” or “late capitalist”) economy, i.e. one built not around the idea that the nation needs to be organized such that it may produce in the manner of other “developed” countries, but around the idea that each individual consumes differently and thus differentiates herself from others.

Megalogenis’s matter-of-fact tone throughout helps to convey what is already the undeniable message that his chosen period sees social changes in Australia that no-one could seriously regard without ambivalence.

On the one hand, the transition leads to a much vaunted break-down in community, in what could even be called, social solidarity, and with this new forms of social isolation, social insecurity and seething resentment of the sort that fueled, in the last years of the last millennium movements like Pauline Hanson’s extreme right-wing “One Nation” party. On the other hand, the same kind of social changes just talked about could be said to have given all kinds of opportunities to all kinds of people (Megalogenis notes in particular that he is talking about the period in which the number of women in the workforce exceeds that of men) that they would not have had in other decades. It is impossible not to be (as Megalogenis is in his mild way) ambivalent about this. After all, without the changes that Megalogenis is describing, society would be unrecognizable, such that people like myself would have found themselves on paths that simply would not have been available to them in previous decades. The lesson is that “social mobility”, to use the rather repulsive jargon of the age is a strange beast: a source of what on the other hand appear to be new freedoms, that is also a source of new deprivations, new inequalities.

If the period in question can be seen finally as responsible for what bureaucrats call a ‘widening of cultural horizons’, i.e. a breaking of some of the dreary, inveterate patterns of Australian life that were the objects of satire for the generation of Barry Humphries, it is also a period that unleashed what could be looked at as a prurient appetite for individual gratification and “improvement” over any kind of ties to (or concern for) the community at large. In this sense, the book describes an historical watershed that cannot help but evoke a similar ambivalence to the one we find in (particularly American) books about the ‘60s.

The 60s: contested moment of modern politics. No-one denies that some kind of revolution took place there (even if we confine the decade to what happened in, say, the U.S. and Europe), the 60s cannot help but stand in our minds for the breaking of old ties, and the creation of new ways of living, thinking, loving.

s such, we can see the decade as a “high watermark” (to use Hunter S. Thompson’s phrase), a decade marked by hope, creativity and moral passion that is later betrayed by grey decades and hollow men. On the other hand (especially from the vantage of the 70s and the 80s, but even remembering, say, who is President in 1968) we can see in the golden decade the seeds of its uglier descendants: looking back at the 60s can look like the opening of the door to much that is infantile and narcissistic in today’s culture, as well as much that is competitive, self-obsessed or self-important.

Where do we locate, after all, the moment when the adolescent as young idealistic social dissident (beat poet, folk musician – those bright eyed kids we see in footage of early Bob Dylan concerts) morphs into the now ubiquitous adolescent as ideal consumer-subject: the eternal narcissist to whom some diffuse sense of personal glory (arising from personal accomplishment/development) are the alpha and omega of existence? The way each of us answers this question will say a lot about our political views (I’m ducking this one for the moment) insofar as it will reveal how each of us locates the causes of contemporary social malaise.

What is really extraordinary about Megalogenis’s book for me, and doubtless what would be equally extraordinary for other people my age is that much of what the political-economic “action” of the book takes place against the background of my own “formative” years.

As such, reading the book excavated (again: despite Megalogenis admirable lack of poetic flourishes) all kinds of half-buried memories from the depths of my memory. As I’ve suggested these were more often evoked by Megalogenis’ dry summaries of statistics than by the little vignettes that he uses (after each chapter) to provide a snapshot of his period.

But the ultimate result of the book was to make me remember and then rethink a large number of unrelated events from my childhood/adolescence and young adulthood whose place in a broader socio-historical context entirely escaped me at the time because my ignorance, self-pre-occupation and generally dragon-centric world-view denied me any awareness that such a context existed.

In fact, one of the less salutary effects of my reading Megalogenis’s book was me composing a whiny 19-page vers libre monstrosity about remembering my adolescence, a monstrosity which most of my friends have (generous souls that they are) deemed it kinder to pretend I did not actually write. But if the book provoked bad, pseudo-poetry from me, it may nonetheless produce something good (or at least better) in someone else. One of these things seems to be the highly regarded new novel by Mr. Tsiolkas: who knows what else it might accidentally inspire in ‘young’ (and not-so-young) Australians’.

In summary: while this is a good, rather than a great book, Megalogenis’ has done the nation a favour by writing something that, for all it’s journalistic common-sense and straight-forwardness, seems unprecedented in its insights about the recent past. It’s as if, Megalogenis, by his very lack of pretentiousness has cut a Gordian knot (“it’s the economy stupid!”) which otherwise would have preoccupied the intelligentsia for decades. In doing so, he has freed up the space for some more sustained reflection and debate. And his will be a hard act for the more pretentious types to follow.

Love &c.

-Mal.

P.S. I know I’ve been away for a while: in fact, I’ve had the longest sabbatical since starting the blog. It’s my damn teaching schedule, not to mention the recent deluge of marking. There’s the little matter of the thesis too. And all that jazz. But I’ll be back: soon, I promise. And next time there’ll be some kind of Eminem like introduction attesting to my return.

Love,

-Mal.