by Luke Carman
One of our leading members, through careful consideration of the Western canon as an undergrad, had discovered that the central distinguishing factor between high literature and mere writing was the philosophical abstraction of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. To come to terms with this complex technical concept, the workshops often required a breaking down of the failings and weaknesses of the writer to their roots – the inadequacies of their work were often connected to their misconceptions of the world around them – and then the rebuilding of this writer from the ground up, into a more morally and ethically vigorous person whose writing would inevitably be improved by the intervention. Our learned comrades assisted many such writers by suggesting to them what verbs, nouns, clauses and subject matters might best fill the gaps in their simplistic sketches of human experience, taking it upon themselves to act as arbiters of what might serve as appropriate subject matter for literary endeavour.
The effect of these workshops, and the wise counsel of our more learned members, was that the group’s writing improved, and our short stories found publication in all the journals and literary rags around town. The arts organisation which housed and auspiced our activities occupied a series of cramped offices across from the railway station to begin with, but they and several other local organisations managed to lobby for the money to create a brand new building, one which had its own theatre space, and soon enough we had found ourselves a comfortable and fitting base of operations. It was whispered by some of our more intuitive members that the real reason government bureaucrats had consented to the construction of the new building was that even amongst the crusty halls of the state government, people were talking about the work we were accomplishing out in the Western Suburbs. We published this ‘work’ in journals of our own making, and we held grand launches and ‘performance readings’ every few months, filling the new theatre of the arts centre with hundreds of people – mostly family and friends – on every occasion. This accumulating success was financed by a steady stream of funding applications that our senior members were perpetually writing. I remember being amazed that the government was willing to give tens of thousands of dollars to us to write stories and publish books, to launch them and promote them, and I was relieved that none of this money was in my own name – the finance side of things was always handled by the more senior members of the organisation, people who could be trusted with the paperwork.
To build a brand is no easy task, and our leading members did their utmost to make our collective presence known. Inflamed by the passion that comes from taking on a noble cause, they became powerhouses of self-promotion – and every individual in the group was a node in this nexus of name recognition. If one of our number found themselves published somewhere, all of us benefitted from the exposure. When enough blogs and journals and anthologies had been conquered, we set our collective sights on singleauthor publications – which is of course the goal of every aspiring writer. A local publishing house with an interest in ‘unique voices’ and young writers came calling, and some of our members were snatched up into that dreamy glory of having a book to call one’s own. Before the first manuscripts were ready for the printers, it was decided by our leading members that the arts centre was insufficient to house our collective aspirations or our expanding numbers. Now that our members were about to have their own collections and novels published and launched and read and reviewed, it was logical that they would be offered spots at festivals and to speak at universities across the country – perhaps overseas, given time. According to our more globally minded members, it was essential for the dignity of the collective that we leave behind our current accommodations at the arts centre and find new digs that might provide a more fitting setting for writers of our burgeoning status. We relocated to the local university campus, where we were surrounded by professors and scholars – a milieu more appropriate for our growing eminence.
Not long after we moved, it was revealed by our senior members that the arts centre which had formerly housed us was not only insufficient to contain our ambitions, but also irredeemably corrupt. Though none of us had noticed at the time, the centre which had so recently been our residence was in fact a place degraded by its conformity to the structural inequalities of white supremacist culture. Were any of us shocked by this revelation, and asked for an example of its iniquity, one of the more cleareyed members of the group would have pointed out that despite being in a culturally diverse suburb, the centre was run by an older white male, who had failed to pass on the cultural capital he had accrued over decades of service in an ethnically diverse region. Pushed on this topic, the clear-eyed members of the group might have professed that they were personally offended that the manager of this organisation had failed to surrender his job to someone more representative of the community – one of our senior members for instance. But for any one of us to have been shocked by the venal corruption of the arts centre would have been uncharacteristic of our group at the time – the workshopping we’d been committed to had not only sharpened our writing, it had honed our minds to the point that we all seemed to be in agreement on almost everything, especially those subjects which our learned members were most vocal about, and so if it was proclaimed that an organisation or a person was unsavoury, we found ourselves agreeing so vehemently, it was difficult to imagine we hadn’t been the ones to think of it first.
Had any of us spoken up to disavow the cunning prophecies and promises of our growing collective ego on the night of our debut theatre reading, it might have made a difference, but by the time we had taken up our new lodgings, the loudest and proudest amongst our crew could crush any dissent by scowling and pointing to the reviews and articles by local scholars and the self-proclaimed authorities in the literary scene that concurred with our most grandiose self-promotions. There was no denying, the truebelieving Western Sydney writer might have explained, that there was something unique about the literature coming from our members’ books and collections, because just such exclamations were coming from tastemakers on the subject. So enthusiastic were the reviews and citations of the group’s readings and publications that it became commonplace for certain literary types to suggest that Australia’s literary ‘centre’ appeared to be shifting – or leaning, at the least – towards Sydney’s ‘suburban frontier’. When this declaration became a familiar refrain, and caused much discussion in our crew on how best to perpetuate this change of centre, a festival director with an ear for the tremors of his aspirational allies proclaimed that ‘Western Sydney is the capital of Australian literature…if not already, then certainly it’s the future,’ and we took his words as granted by the time he offered them. Were any of us struck by a cynical mood of doubt, unswayed perhaps by the authority of local literary figures, whose manna was exuberant generosity and casual sycophancy, then serious critics, who were suddenly on record as suffering the same illusions, might be cited as evidence against the stubborn irrationality of doubting our mutual destiny. Slam poetry champions, Miles Franklin winners, renowned literary critics and senior academics were all apparently under the impression that our crew of writers constituted an ‘important moment in Australian culture’.
Drunk on our own publicity and self-importance, we made the decision to strengthen our claim to whatever seriousness of status was bound to come our way by rebranding ourselves as literary militants. There were frequent fantasies of explosive behaviour amongst the collective, and many of us now wore a uniform, black with matching berets and bonds tops, and we arrived at festival events in enough numbers to take up entire rows of chairs, sitting up front to keep grim, stony-faced sentry over panels and lectures on topics we deemed worthy of our attention, where we would demand answers to questions about the whiteness of the authors who were presenting, or make sly accusations about cultural appropriation and the implicit immorality of those who didn’t really seem like allies in our crusade to rearrange the landscape of Australian literature. On the subject of the publishing ‘scene’ o
ur members began to speak with the slogans of Malcom X, as if there was some righteous necessity that we were driven by which justified an open hostility towards anyone who distracted attention from our ascendency. When one of our members spoke at an event, we applauded their every emphasis – when they were offstage, we huddled and cross-checked the status of our loyalties and certitudes, who in the room could be trusted and who declared an enemy. It became common to hear our members remark that ‘we were the only ones doing anything interesting with language in the country’. Were anyone to raise an eyebrow at this statement and ask, with all respect, what it was exactly that we were doing with language, a torrent of explication would pour forth, explaining to the unbeliever that having been born into a country that celebrates its reddusted sweeping plains and the curves of our sun-swept coasts, we in the Western Suburbs had suffered the almost gothic indignity of being pinned to the more mythologised provinces of the country, and now that this tectonic cultural movement was ready to erupt into an explosion of artistic force, we – a select few writers who happened to have come along at precisely the right time – were to be this literary reformation’s winged heralds. Through us and our fictions and poems, the ten percent of the nation’s population whose lives had come and gone without the alchemical touch of literary attention – the generations of people who had toiled thanklessly in the recesses of the Western Suburbs – would be given a voice, and it would be the whirling, tempestuous voice of the marginalised and oppressed, not least because our crew rightfully represented the full intersectional spectrum of Australia’s downtrodden and disenfranchised. We were the Suburban Avengers. Where the figure of the ‘westie’ had long been reduced to a vague parade of threadbare stereotypes – bong-smoking bogans drinking longnecks in ‘Penriff’; dragon-tattooed heroin dealers from Cabra; bikie gangsters of middle-eastern appearance doing drive-bys through the streets of Bankstown – the new ‘westie spring’ of Australian literature would sweep through the culture, knocking these caricatures aside and leaving emancipatory nuances in our wake.
Government funding for the arts poured into our collective’s coffers at the sound of these rhetorical pronouncements, and we brought our radical ideas about literature to bemused school kids on the tax-payers’ dime. From the classrooms we plucked out and converted young people with an interest in the arts, and did the same at arts organisations, greedy for new believers to swell our peripheral ranks. Our movement adopted a name, a logo, and a strict top-down hierarchy. It was decided at a meeting of our senior members that there would be one leader, self-appointed, and all other loyal members would be given the subordinate rank of associates. Troublesome and unruly writers who disagreed too often at meetings, or slowed the progress of the movement with their stupidities, or demonstrated a stubborn inability to adopt the correct attitudes towards our goals and targets, were disowned and disgraced. At subsequent meetings their inadequacies were dissected at great length, and the group would spend many hours bemoaning the strain that those wayward members had always caused the group and its effectiveness, though we had often failed to notice how much of a drag they had been until after they became dismembered. One of the first writers who was thrown out of our collective replied via email that he hoped our leader succeeded in finding the ‘compliant group of writers he was obviously looking for’, and we discussed the absurdity of this cruel and fatuous implication at our next meeting, all of us agreeing that the fact that our ex-comrade could describe us as compliant conformists rather than recognise the radical and critical nature of our group was a startling reflection of his inability to comprehend the necessity of the collective’s cohesion in accomplishing the great tasks we envisioned for ourselves.
Were anyone in our midst to stop and question the rightness of our consensus on this subject, they would inevitably have to join the ranks of the excommunicated and be reduced to the pitiful position of watching from the outside how eager journalists, literary figures, arts organisations and community leaders were to confirm our self-belief and sing the collective’s praises as a group of important radicals. Swathes of radio interviews, newspaper articles and television sound bites favourable to our stated mission demonstrated how profoundly ready the culture was for the great task of bringing the Western Suburbs to voice through our growing programs of workshops, publications and events. It became clear to us that the degree to which arts brokers feted our movement was an unfailing indication as to where they sat on the spectrum of moral righteousness – those who disagreed with us, who stormed out of our members’ panel talks or refused to invite us to their events – were invariably on the wrong side of history. On the other hand it seemed unerringly to be the case that those who affirmed our every move and supported our every action without question were useful, but naïve, and so we were forced to deduce that the only people who had any purchase on the virtuous side of the culture was the collective itself, and even there it appeared that, amongst our own ranks, it was our leader who most exemplified the ideals we championed of our own free will.
When the Writers’ Festival line-up was released each year, we were not only a permanent part of the program, but our attendance was requested at the rich end of town, given full-colour exposure in the promotional brochures and featured prominently in the press for the event itself – though not as prominently as we felt was fitting for our status in the literary scene. At the program launches we scoffed at their canapes and champagne, though we were given permission to eat and drink them. Speeches were made by the festival types, and videos were played on a huge projector so that the selected invitees could get a sense of the current curator’s personal vision for the event. At one program launch, international guests and local stalwarts of the scene, from bestsellers to poets, as well as a diversity of races and creeds, were proudly displayed through the projectors’ beaming lights, and the presentation of the program ended in a generous applause, during which we stormed out in protest. We regrouped on the walkway outside and condemned the organisers as conservative cowards for refusing to include in their highlight reel the short commercial we had shot for the festival. Though they later assured us via email that the video was to be made available on their website, this only further demonstrated how duplicitous the organisation was, by showing that they were willing to exploit the radical excitement of our subversive work, but only by doing so in a way that sheltered their privileged constituents from coming into contact with the sharp, discomfiting edges of our subversive art.
On the afternoon of our event at that year’s festival, I came in early to survey the parade of wealthy, white, middle-class types traipsing across the walkways between the venues – the silver-haired women in their ostentatious necklaces and pastel-coloured dresses with their bejowled husbands whose soft, floppy faces seemed oblivious to the great machinery of exploitation and oppression that underpinned the culture industry they were supporting with their bourgeois whims and sensibilities. At the mouth of the old shipyard doors along the wharf, chairs were placed around speakers which broadcast the inane blather of some hack novelist or moralising journo. The emerald waters churned in the grey day’s breezy heat, and the Harbour Bridge squatted over the event like a monolithic signifier of the nation’s complicity. A volunteer in a yellow jacket and lanyard stepped in front of me when I came towards the Green Room, and I felt the coiling spring of a righteous anger ready to release itself at the thought that this drone was about to prevent me from entering the sanctuary on the assumption, no doubt, that I didn’t look the part of an author.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he began with a strange smile on his face. ‘How long ago did you buy those jeans?’ Taken aback, I was forced to concede that the jeans were new. He reached down, pinched something stuck to my right leg and peeled off the size-index sticker I’d neglected to remove before leaving the house that morning. I thanked him, and turned around to see if anyone else had witnessed this interaction, but the crowds on the wharf were busy holding hands and strolling obliviously from
one festival distraction to the next, and so I went into the Green Room with a pale expression on my face, sat on a couch next to the author of a bestselling novel with a cat on the cover, who was chatting with a young poet from Melbourne whose head was shaved, and I watched from there the tiny forms of climbers in red shirts moving over the Bridge’s spine, inch by inch. I started thinking about my dad, and all the time I’d spent thinking about Centrepoint Tower. I wondered if anyone ever looked at the Bridge and thought about their family; their fathers, mothers, sons or daughters. I hadn’t spoken to my father in almost a year – we’d had a falling out over my evolving politics. I listened to the conversations all around, and each and every one of them seemed so friendly. There was love in the room, and I realised I hadn’t been in a room like that for a long time. Outside, I saw the light dipping behind the curvature of steel above the Bridge, the sky was awash with violet cloud and the walkers in red were raising their arms up to the heavens.
