by Stephen Orr.
1.
The artist is the great itch that has to be scratched or shot. As George Orwell explained in Politics and the English Language: ‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues …’ Listening to some contemporary politicians, it’s hard to disagree, or to see how things have changed in the last seventy years. ‘When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.’
2.
The basic, defining characteristic of Australian political life has been (with a few rare exceptions) a deep distrust of those who challenge the narrative. Of a lucky country with plenty of minerals to flog, endless sun and blue skies, the gods of excess, consumption, and a shared belief that if we all stay on the same page, everything will be fine. Problem being, not everyone agrees. And what value is the life of ideas lived by the diminishing few? And worse, what if this thread of dissent is a tiresome narrative for which many Aussies don’t care? What if our ‘leaders’ have picked up on this, traded on it, allowed it to fester? What if this strain is so deeply embedded in our psyche that whatever culture is, or might be, doesn’t matter anymore? So that anyone writing this essay (over and over) feels like he or she is repeating The Lucky Country. In effect—I can’t be sure, I’m asking as much as suggesting—we’ve traded the poems and songs for a decent rib-eye, and a ten-dollar bottle of Shiraz. I see it every day. Within ten minutes of where I’m writing, three local sports clubs building hotel-sized clubrooms; American film companies gaining tax concessions to animate super-heroes that have become, increasingly, Australian heroes; schools with plenty of grass, but not so many books; taller, glassier casinos rising in our cities. A mantra of build, lay roads, drive, drink beer, stream Netflix, season tickets, and never an idea, an urge to stop and think about our place in the world. Movement. Perpetual motion. Meanwhile, South Australian artist Horace Trennery sits alone in his Willunga shack, painting, before succumbing to Huntington’s Chorea, spending the rest of his days in the Home for Incurables (inasmuch as all Australian artists are). Clarice Beckett rises early and sets off into another foggy Beaumaris morning. Pastel streets, a milkman, a bird on a wire, a way of seeing. Then dying, her paintings stored in a farm shed for decades before someone realises their value.
3.
The Ern Malley hoax has landed Adelaide student, editor and modernist poet Max Harris in court. Harris, John Reed, Paul Pfeiffer and Sam Kerr have recently founded modernist university magazine Angry Penguins which, according to contributing poet Geoffrey Dutton, ‘stayed with Yeats, Eliot and Auden …we left Lawson and Paterson [bush poets] to the Jindys [a nationalist movement in the bush ballad tradition]’. As principal editor, Harris has recently published poems of the late soldier-poet Ern Malley (sent to Max by Ern’s sister, Ethel). Problem being, there was no Ern or Ethel, just two poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, intent upon dethroning and humiliating the king of Australian modernism with a collection of confected works titled The Darkening Ecliptic. The poems appeared in the Autumn 1944 issue of Penguins, the authors came forward to take credit, Max was suitably embarrassed. But that wasn’t the worst of it, Max was about to find out. Soon after, the Adelaide Establishment decided the collected poems were not only illegal in their nonsense but their filth.
Detective Vogelsang has summonsed Max, and on 5 September 1944, the cast gathers in Adelaide’s Supreme Court in front of Magistrate L.C. Clarke. An early autumn day—crows on power lines, sparking trams, men in Moore’s suits with ham, cheese and chutney sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Crown Solicitor D.C. Williams for the prosecution, and lawyer Eric Millhouse defending the poems. The prosecution wastes no time suggesting the poems are lewd, full of unnecessary (and strange, provocative) references to sex. Meanwhile, the war rages. A few days since the liberation of Brussels, the Warsaw uprising, Soviet troops entering Bulgaria on their march west. But in Adelaide, frocks half-price at John Martin’s, and Miss Sunshine running in the fourth at Cheltenham. According to Michael Heyward: ‘When Harris was summonsed this was the first official attempt ever to suppress Australian poetry.’ These were Catholic, conservative days. White Australia at its best, or worst. Hundreds of books (Joyce, Huxley, Hemingway) still banned. The Commonwealth as parent, citizens as children.
4.
The life of ideas. Court begins with Reg Carter, manager of Adelaide’s Argonaut Business Library, the first witness for the prosecution. Carter admits he’s done a brisk trade in the autumn issue and tells the court words like ‘bugger’ and ‘bastard’ are quite common in contemporary writing, and ‘seemed to offend nobody’. Williams’s calculated move to have Carter testify against Harris has backfired.
Next, Detective Vogelsang cross-examines Max. In reference to the poem ‘Boult to Marina’ he asks, ‘Do you think the poem is suggestive of indecency?’ Harris replies: ‘No more than Chaucer or Shakespeare or others.’ Vogelsang: ‘You admit then that there is the suggestion of indecency about the poem?’ Harris: ‘No, I don’t. If you are looking for that sort of thing I can refer you to plenty of books and cheaper publications … Our publication is intended for cultured minds.’ All for a poem that wasn’t a poem. For two lines (‘Part of me remains, wench, Boult upright/The rest of me drops off into the night’) read by a few people in a small literary magazine in a small city in a small country at the bottom of the world. Harris tells Vogelsang, ‘I can’t help the interpretation that some people might place on it.’ Or, by extension, he suggests, what they place upon a poem, a play, a novel. And what Harris is railing against: culture as a habit that needs to be trimmed, cut, watered-down, thrown out, ignored. And the rush to forget. Elizabeth O’Conner, Peter Mathers, Dal Stivens and other winners of our most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin. Who’s read them? Where’s our collective memory? But back in the hot courtroom, the fan clunking, ties loosened, Harris fights the good fight. This time, defending swung torches scattering their seed, frogs making guttural comment on the ‘naked and trespassing/Nymph of the lake’.
5.
A few weeks later in Sydney, it happens again. In late October, artist Bill Dobell is dragged before the Supreme Court of NSW to defend his Archibald-winning portrait of artist Joshua Smith. Again, the fear of the new. The Picassoesque, the Daliesque, the abstractions and formlessness that threaten the clipped lawns and careful angles of Oz. No Jackson Pollock and his mad splatters here. Just the feeling that the world’s changing (every day, violently) and we need to be protected from the likes of de Sade, Balzac, Lawrence, Huxley, Behan (and eventually, Jackie Collins).
Dobell was the artistic Max Harris, placed in a dock like a criminal, like he needed to be dealt with. After Dobell’s exaggerated ‘modernist’ take on Smith won the 1943 Archibald, two disgruntled artists came forward to protest. Royal Art Society members Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski claimed Dobell’s painting was ‘a distorted and caricatured form’ and therefore didn’t qualify for the award. They brought an action against a horrified (and very private) Dobell and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This case caused a stir in Sydney, and beyond. According to David Bevan’s biography, on the morning of Monday 23 October, ‘Dobell doubtlessly would have preferred to be left outside, far from the crowd and the portrait which had led him there. The portrait, now referred to as Exhibit D, was in the courtroom and covered in a cloth.’ Bringing to mind Ern Malley’s ‘Culture as Exhibit’: ‘I have been noted in the reading rooms/As a borer of calf-bound volumes/Full of scandals at the court … But in all of this I got no culture till/I read a little pamphlet on my thighs/Entitled: “Friction as a social process.”’
6.
Author Mary Eagle noted, ‘The morning after the [Archibald] was announced, Smith’s parents pleaded with Dobell to withdraw the portrait from exhibition; Joshua Smith refused to speak to him.’ Just as the portrait had attracted big crowds, now ‘the public queued outside the court, then crushed into it, just to be part of what Donald Friend called the “Dobell cause celebre”. The crowd ranged from aesthetic-looking young men, some with long hair and beards … to the cream of Sydney society.’ This time the boxing match was refereed by the Honourable Mr. Justice Roper. According to the Truth: ‘It was a fiercely partisan gathering comprising moderns and conservatives, and all those art cults in between.’ The first witness for the prosecution was art critic James Stuart McDonald. He argued that a portrait had to be a ‘balanced likeness of an actual person … you cannot take liberties because your ego is tugging at you.’ Dobell’s portrait, he claimed, was ‘very unbalanced … a caricature.’ And was this so different to Detective Vogelsang’s concerns? That the poems didn’t conform to norms—social, artistic, agreed-upon definitions of what made an acceptable work of art. Of what made an acceptable society, or person, or set of values. Perhaps it had been Hitler’s war, showing Australia what came from deviating from the norm, from being extreme, from thinking you were better than others. Or maybe it was just a coincidental coming-of-age moment?
7.
Dobell and Harris defended their practice. Dobell said, ‘To me, a sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is living in itself, regardless of its subject.’ And Harris: ‘We are fully aware … of our lack of contemporary identity. We are totally unsure of whether we are mini-Americans, emasculated Poms, or our own Zorbas.’
Back in court in Sydney, the ex-director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), John Young, claimed ‘no man could be as sick as that [portrait] and produce the beautiful things that Joshua Smith produces.’ There was a yawning gulf between the painting and the ‘upstanding man’ he knew. Similarly, in Adelaide, under cross-examination by Millhouse, Vogelsang said (of ‘Boult to Marina’), ‘It offends my decency to suggest that a character means that he wants sexual intercourse. I think that is immoral …’
The vivisection continued in Adelaide with Clarke ruling on each poem. ‘Egyptian Register’ was full of indecipherable lines such as ‘make an immense index to my cold remorse’. In ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ the lines: ‘Poor Thaisa had a red wound in the groin …’ meant, ‘Thaisa has her menstrual period so as to make it inadvisable to have sexual intercourse.’ Again in Sydney, counsel Garfield Barwick verbally disassembled Dobell’s portrait to determine whether it was ‘objectively faithful’ (to which Dobell replied: ‘I might just as well criticise the conduct of your case by the angle of your wig’). The normally reserved Dobell wasn’t taking it lying down. According to Bevan: ‘In defending his creation, Dobell repeatedly indicated there was more to the painting than met the eye. He was portraying both the appearance and character of Joshua Smith.’ And Harris was standing his ground, too. As well as defending the non-existent poet, he believed the poems were on trial ‘for the fact that they existed.’
8.
In the end, Honourable Justice Roper dismissed Dobell’s case. ‘I find as a fact that it is a portrait … and consequently the trustees did not err in admitting it to the competition.’ He ordered Edwards and Wolinski to pay Dobell’s costs. Outside the court, Edwards explained: ‘We were here in the defence of a high principle of art and for the benefit of art, not ourselves.’ Harris wasn’t so lucky, fined £5 in lieu of six weeks’ imprisonment, after which, according to Heyward, ‘he strode from the court and told reporters [that] Penguins would appeal all the way to the High Court if necessary’. The journal was banned from publication in South Australia so, in early 1945, Harris moved to Melbourne. The new firm of Reed & Harris continued to publish books, but the last issue of Angry Penguins was published in July 1946. The court case, the Malley years, would hang over Harris’s head for the rest of his life. Soon after the verdict, he delayed and then abandoned a new book of poetry, Amo, Amas, Amat. As the war ended, as Australia returned to a pastoral default, the memory of Ern’s poems faded. Max soon returned to Adelaide, and whatever was achieved in those few days in Spring 1944 was forgotten. The case changed the course of Dobell’s life, too. The media articles, the abusive letters, the vitriol. Dobell suffered an attack of dermatitis, and eventually a nervous breakdown. He stayed in his house, stopped painting, stopped socialising. And over what? The very thing that, today, we demand from our artists – a distinct, individual, unrepeatable, breathtaking, dangerous, unexpected view of the world. As Harris was settling into Melbourne, Dobell moved into his sister’s house at Lake Macquarie. When he did produce another portrait (‘Lord Wakehurst’) it was, according to Mary Eagle, ‘markedly conventional’.
9.
So who are Australia’s free speech warriors? Where is our tradition of standing up to orthodoxy, who, our Milton and Orwell, where, our John Stuart Mill, or Chomsky? This frail continent with an even more fragile tradition of dissent. Maybe that’s our problem? We’ve had it too good for too long, and now there seems little desire, little of the necessary energy and angst, available to oppose a seemingly endless succession of second-rate governments. Surveillance, free speech, climate change, refugees, anything that requires some spine, forget it. And in this context, the Arts—with its fixation on the truth, unpalatable realities, its habit of seeing the world through a historical lens, creating some unpriced product that is neither real, recognisable, fun, funny, tasty, its shit-stirring practitioners—seem a bother, easily replaced with more palatable narratives.
Four years after the ‘Australian Spring’, novelist Patrick White wrote The Ham Funeral, a lusty drama, part-vaudeville, a whiff of Beckett, a modernist yarn inspired, ironically, by Dobell’s painting ‘The Landlord’. It remained unproduced until 1961 when – after the Adelaide Festival Board of Governors rejected it for the 1962 Festival – the Adelaide University Theatre Guild took it on. According to David Marr: ‘The Ham Funeral had become a rallying point for those who were unhappy with the boring, official culture of Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and hated the philistine power of the Establishment.’ Still at work, years after the lessons of the Penguins. ‘… the power, especially, to determine what was written and read in a country where books, films and plays continued to be censored and banned.’ In 1964, the Funeral’s director John Tasker observed: ‘Theatre history has proved that innovation is invariably greeted as a “mistake”, if not a calamity’. And in such a deeply conservative country as war-time Australia, the shock of the new, the myopic habit of resisting all change, was almost total. But with every year, every play, every novel, we inched closer to the blank canvas we have today. A canvas upon which anyone can draw, paint, write or say whatever they like. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the big and little dictatorships, better times emerge. But in the era of cancel culture, of narrow and narrowing opinions, of the apparent dangers of freely speaking our minds rather than the possible liberations, of by-lines and tweets and accusations that seem more Cultural Revolution than cultural revolution, we should remember that each inch of ground has to be fought for, over and over. Nothing was, or is, a given. Everything revolves around the incurable urge to write the unthinkable, to say the unpalatable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Orr is an Adelaide-based novelist and essayist. His latest novel, Sincerely, Ethel Malley (Wakefield Press), is a riff on the 1944 Ern Malley hoax. Recent essays have appeared in minor literature[s], The Guardian and the Australian Book Review.
