The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  I don’t wish to suggest that Kim Scott and Alexis Wright are concerned with the same subject matter, or that their style and approach are closely related. But I do wish to make the point that they are not alone but are eminently successful representatives of a wide and growing movement among Aboriginal writers and intellectuals that is in the process of shaping and inscribing a deep shift in Australia’s culture. An interesting feature of their success, especially overseas, is that their international reception seems to have largely bypassed the context of this nation and its institutions, including the discipline of Australian literature. These writers, like the Indigenous visual artists before them, have gone straight from the regional to the international. Many of these writers and intellectuals have written richly perceptive accounts of this change. (For one such view I would recommend Tony Birch’s keynote address to the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference in 2013.) It is worth noting that Sally Morgan’s My Place, which was published in 1987, is, according to the AustLit database, by far the most translated example of Australian literature, both in terms of range of languages and numbers of translations. Whether in art or literature, the Aboriginal perspective is proving to be the most interesting for the rest of the world. It is new, fresh, exciting and challenging, and in both art and literature, the Aboriginal practice is freer from, and less self-conscious of, the weight of the European tradition.

  In Australia, and no doubt in many other countries as well, we have been through a cultural change in our approach to education and to our sense of belonging in the world in the generation since Kundera’s and the three generations since Lukacs’s and Bakhtin’s works were published. Today education in Australia, and elsewhere in what we fondly call the West, seeks to avoid a Eurocentric point of view and to be inclusive of the sensitivities of a multicultural student body. Our sense of the history and imaginative origins of our literary and artistic forms has extended beyond Europe to include, for example, the earliest extant Chinese and Japanese novels. Though even today what is called World Literature—for example, in the works of academics such as David Damrosch and Pascale Casanova—is usually Euro- or US-centric.

  We have no difficulty reading Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century work The Tale of Genji as a novel. In Murasaki’s rich evocations of the intimate lives of people living a thousand years ago, we are able to enjoy the sense of being in a novel written six hundred years before the birth of Kundera’s European novel. The form of the novel is not so radically changed today from these early appearances that we can’t at once recognise The Tale of Genji or Chin P’ing Mei or A Dream of Red Mansions as novels. We read these books indeed as if they were modern novels, and are enthralled by the same spirit of the human story. To be sure, James Joyce did blow up the firework factory going on for a hundred years ago now, but when the stars had settled it was clear that what he had done was to have written novels, two of them so extraordinary as to leave many of us dizzy and bedazzled for years afterwards, but novels all the same. The form endured and was enriched by Joyce, not destroyed by him. After Joyce writers could do anything they felt like doing and call the result a novel, just as after Duchamp’s urinal, art was whatever you said was art.

  Writing and reading novels and history—and sometimes it’s hard to know which of these I’m doing at any given moment—has provided me with the greatest satisfactions and frustrations of my life. When I was a boy growing up in London it wasn’t a novelist, however, but an astronomer who first inspired me with the idea of the limitlessness of the human imagination. In 1950, at the age of fourteen, I listened with rapt attention to Fred Hoyle’s series of lectures ‘The Nature of the Universe’ on the BBC and was thrilled to learn that the universe wasn’t a static reality but was still in the process of creation and would go on being created forever. (Hoyle wasn’t the originator of the notion of an ever-expanding universe—that honour belongs, I believe, to the little known Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter, who had trouble convincing Einstein to accept the theory—but Hoyle explained it in language that every schoolboy and schoolgirl could understand.) It was the most liberating idea I had ever heard. From then on the notion of the fundamental necessity for change, the limitlessness of the human imagination and of the ongoing process of creation became for me, and for many of my generation, a keystone of my beliefs, and I found it natural to reject ideas of stasis and completion in every dimension of human life and the natural world as being an outmoded, conservative way of thinking.

  In 1953, at the age of sixteen, driven by a youthful desire for adventure, I left England and came to Australia on my own to work as a stockman on cattle stations in the Central Highlands of Queensland and later in Alexis Wright’s Gulf of Carpentaria. In the Gulf I worked with the legendary tribal Aboriginal stockmen on Augustus Downs Station on the Leichhardt River. These black stockmen became my friends and made me welcome in their country. They had no birth certificates, could not travel without a permit to do so from the police, were not able to get a permit from the police. And they were not paid anything for their work. Their pay was supposed to be held in trust for them. They never saw it. They were not citizens of Australia and were not counted in the census and did not have the right to vote. In other words, they lacked the basic human rights and the respect that we expect to be accorded to all human beings in this world. You can imagine, therefore, what a joy it is for me today to see Aboriginal novelists and intellectuals leading the way in a major cultural shift in this country.

  Frank Budby, the friend in whose honour this lecture is delivered, sadly passed away on the morning of 6 April this year. I had hoped Frank would be here with us today and that this event would give his spirits a lift. I was greatly honoured by his trust and the gift of his friendship and I shall never forget him. When he first stayed with us when we were living in Port Melbourne I was astonished to learn it was the first white man’s house he had ever been a guest in. Frank was one of those legendary stockmen who inspired me in my early youth in Australia. Later in his life he reinvented himself, as many of us did. Frank became a leader of his people, and in establishing Woora Consulting to protect and manage his people’s cultural heritage he formed the business basis for the salvation of his people from prison and violence and drugs and all the other curses that had been laid upon them. His family and the Barada Barna elders asked me to read the eulogy at his funeral in Mackay on Monday, 14 April. Frank was one of the finest and wisest men I have ever met. No one who met Frank was ever unaffected by him but took away with them from the meeting the conviction that they had met a leader of true wisdom and generosity of mind. Memorably, one time when he was our guest at Castlemaine, we had some visitors for dinner to meet him and one of them lamented the dispossession of Aboriginal country. Frank’s quiet response to this was, ‘The story’s not over yet.’ Nothing could be truer than this observation, which immediately put me in mind of Fred Hoyle’s expanding universe. For the story of Aboriginal recovery of country and culture during the past twenty years owes everything to unsung leaders of Frank’s capacity. He is a hero of his people and to everyone who met him and it is my hope to continue to honour him in my own work. The story of Aboriginal recovery of country and culture will continue and will go from strength to strength so long as there are leaders and visionaries of Frank Budby’s kind to show all of us the way. Frank owed his success not to welfare but to his own intelligence, personal courage and initiative.

  It is due to Indigenous leaders of Frank’s rare energies, unselfish commitment and abilities that the Aboriginal story in much of Australia has been one of new confidence and increasing power over the past twenty years, especially in the north. Without Woora Consulting the historic and cultural legacy of the Barada Barna people would have been neglected or even destroyed by the encroachment of mining and other industrial developments. The success of Woora Consulting has meant that many of the children of the current generation have been able to attend private schools and to qualify for university in increasing number
s. The old poverty cycle in which Frank’s people were still caught when he began his work of recovery has been broken.

  I was fortunate to come of age in Australia at a time and in a place where Aborigines were not viewed as a dying race, as they were in the cities of the south in the fifties, but were abundant in number and were at the very centre of the work I was taking part in. By the early sixties I had left the bush and had become a student reading history and English at Melbourne University. It was a time of great social change. What Hoyle’s lectures had done for me, and for many others of my generation, was to liberate our young minds from the static and conservative views of our elders. He liberated us from the idea that the job had been done and that reality was known and measurable and was subject to unchanging laws and that we might become part of that continuing tradition. Well, we didn’t. Ten years after Hoyle’s lectures, by the time we were in our twenties and I was at uni, we had become the generation of the counterculture, and the social revolution of the sixties was well underway. The serious fight to end capital punishment and to bring racism and sexism to an end had begun in earnest and was no longer the province of a few far-seeing dedicated souls. We may not have understood it in quite this way at the time, but to have heard Hoyle in 1950 was to have heard the voice of a prophet of a new freedom. Possibilities, it seemed, were limitless and were naturally so. It was prohibitions and rules that were limiting and were against the natural order, and so they had to go. And of course many of them did go. Conservatives, whose voices we are hearing again today, say far too many of the old rules were discarded and ought to be reinstated. Hearing those conservative voices repeating their old mantras of stasis and withdrawal today I am reminded that what we used to call the good fight, like the universe itself and the recovery of Aborigines from the dispossession, is never a done deal but must go on being fought with vigilance and energy from one generation to the next. The bad old days of a conservative social order can be reimposed, step by stealthy step, and they will be if the present generation is not vigilant.

  My very dear friend the philosopher Raimond Gaita asked me some years ago if I would like to join him in a discussion at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the subject of the relations of philosophy and fiction. I agreed at once, as I have always thought of the novel and philosophy as siblings, just as history and the novel are siblings. As the biographer of Rosa Luxemburg, J.P. Nettl, says in his introduction to that book, ‘Every history is a matter of selection and emphasis.’ No less is true of the novel. Interestingly Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel (1971) is subtitled A Historico-Philosophical Essay, thus bringing together in the one work the three cultural sibling forms of history, philosophy and literature. There is a persistent edge of rivalry between these three forms in their claims to cultural territory and truth, to be sure, but there is also a wide area of shared ground that is not in dispute but is complementary. History is often inspired by literature and without history there would be no novels. Philosophy and the serious novel often work the same moral ground. The serious novel is always, indeed, an ethical text, and is aware of the effects on individual human beings of ideologies. Without history, without a consciousness of the story of the formation and reformation of the social order, the serious novel, among much else that is essential to a civilised perception of the human project, would not exist. As the great European thinker Hannah Arendt said in 1955, ‘No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story.’ The three siblings thrive with and depend upon each other for their vitality and authenticity as cultural documents. Lenin insisted he had learned more about France from reading the novels of Balzac than he ever had from reading the histories, which was really a compliment as much to historians of the day as it was to Balzac. Balzac, after all, had read widely in the history of pre- and post-Napoleonic France. Indeed his first title for his cycle La Comedie humaine was A Study of [Social] Mores. Balzac was actively involved in the politics of his day and possessed a keen understanding of the distinctions between the Crown and the revolutionists and the historical origins of the views of each side. History and the serious novel are close cousins. There is, however, something the serious novel does that history doesn’t do, just as there are things history does that the novel doesn’t do. By serious novel I mean the novel the reader can trust for an accurate portrayal of the intimate lives and social realities of individuals at a given moment in time, be it contemporary or historical. The vast area of our private and interior lives that is subject to the ambiguities of the human heart is the true, indeed the unique, home of the so-called realist novel. In the experimental novel this centrality of human intimacy is given over to a concern with style and form. The serious novel is the novel in which the author does not shape the truth of his or her story to meet the expectations of the market, but holds to the truth of the story despite the fact that it might be unpalatable to the market.

  The novel endures in all literate cultures because its subject is our story, the intimate lives of us. In a serious novel the intimate lives of the characters are set within an authentic cultural and historical moment. Tolstoy’s and Balzac’s characters carry their social realities and their sense of history and culture with them, but remain identifiable for us today as individuals nevertheless; people just like us, caring, hating, loving, suffering and dying, traitorous or heroic, they are as human as we are and elicit our empathy. And it doesn’t matter if we are of one gender and they are of another, or we are of their time and place or of another time and place. We care for the characters in the novel and often identify their fate with our own.

  During our discussion about philosophy and fiction at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Rai came up with the phrase the limitations of fiction. We didn’t explore what these limitations might be and I don’t recall Rai elaborating on what he might have meant by the phrase, nor did I ask him what he meant by it. We left it hanging suggestively between us, as one often does in a real conversation. The phrase has stayed with me and has continued to hang about in my thoughts ever since. The limitations of fiction are, of course, the same as the limitations of philosophy. Or, for that matter, the limitations of scientific thought—remember Einstein’s initial reluctance to accept de Sitter’s theory of an expanding universe—or the limitations of historiography. The limitations of all human intellectual endeavour are determined by the limitations of the human imagination. In order for us to be able to measure the limitations of the human imagination so that we can come to know its limits, however—as Einstein wished to measure the limitations of the static universe before he was interrupted by de Sitter—we would need to propose a static model for the human imagination. We would need to adopt a position outside the imagination from which to gain a detached view of it as a whole measurable and complete entity. In order to do this we would need to employ our imagination. It doesn’t immediately follow from what I’ve just said that the human imagination itself, like the universe, is still expanding, but I believe this to be the case. And my belief is not unrelated to the early influence of Hoyle; a conviction formed in youth, in other words, that we can’t measure the extent of our possibilities before they are fully realised.

  The epic, the novel, the poem, the scientific treatise, the work of history, the work of biography and so on, just like the universe, are no longer viewed by us as finished static forms but are—or in the case of the epic and the sagas have been—transitory conceptions along the way of an ever-changing universe of human culture and ideas. This is not to suggest a qualitative progress of human culture and ideas. Change, not progress, is what I’m asserting. The universe and the whole of nature and humankind, as Einstein was required to accept, is an unfinished work. This surely includes the human imagination. As Frank said, ‘The story’s not over yet.’ I believe he was right. Cultural formations change from day to day like cloud formations. The limitations of these changes are not known to us. We are ourselves perfor
mers within the dynamic of the process, and are performed upon by these forces as much as we ourselves are the creators of the forces. This is the territory of Alexis Wright. We are culture’s offspring as much as we are her maker. We are embedded in culture and often find it difficult to see or to accept the way our culture changes around us, often creating in us a sense that we are strangers to ourselves. Rai and I were for a moment silenced, I think, by the phrase he had come up with, the limitations of fiction. It was as if he had struck a bell that sounded into the deeps of our ignorance.

  Soon after I began to read history and English at Melbourne University in 1962, having conceived what then seemed to me to be the nearly impossible ambition of becoming a serious novelist, it was my great good fortune to meet and win the friendship of Max Blatt. I soon began to bring to our regular conversations in his home my first impressions of modern European history and the work of the poets and novelists as they were taught at Melbourne. I thought I was studying two separate disciplines, but Max soon showed me that literature and ideology are not separable. I’ve seen it recorded somewhere that Max was born in 1907, the same year as my father. He was a Central European intellectual who, like the hero of his youth, Rosa Luxemburg, grew up in Poland as a Jew speaking German at home. He was gentlemanly and formal in his manner, slight in his appearance, and often seemed frail. In fact he was not frail but was physically robust. He once helped me rebuild a fence that a flood had carried away and he wielded a heavy fencing bar for hours in the muggy heat apparently without becoming fatigued. Max had been a member of ORG Neu Beginnen (New Beginning) in the 1930s, a German Socialist intellectual group committed to resisting the Nazis. The fight, as he saw it, was of course primarily to save his people, but it was also a fight to save the human project of civilisation itself. As for Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone and other novelists and intellectuals of his time, the reality of Communism had shown itself to be as brutal and authoritarian as Fascism. During one of our long talks about European history and politics and novel-writing in the sitting room of his house in Caulfield, which Max and his wife, Ruth, shared with the Viennese pianist Robert Kohner and his wife, Peta, Max stood up and went to the bookshelf at the side of the fireplace, took down a book with a red cover and handed it to me. ‘This will make my intellectual journey clearer to you,’ he said.