Today is an absolutely beautiful, perfect, blue-and-gold Adelaide day, much to the pleasure and relief, I'm sure, of everyone involved in the Royal Adelaide Show, which is currently on, and is the reason why it took me at least fifteen minutes longer than it usually does to get home from morning coffee. Last year's had a huge hole in it: the outbreak of equine flu meant massive quarantining, and that meant no horses at the Show at all.
This year, they're back. And as someone freshly reminded by the Olympic equestrian events of how much I love these beautiful animals and what a solemnly horse-mad little kid I was, I am going to make time to trundle down to Wayville next week and watch some of the gorgeous beasts in action.
What's made me think of this is the Saturday arvo task I've just been doing, a fifteen-minute module (the only way I can bear it) of cleaning up the great mass of paper and other junk in the study, which included coming across one of the more maverick choices of book for review that I've been sent over the last few years: Wild Horse Diaries by Lizzie Spender.
Ripping out all the yellow Post-Its as a prelude to putting it in the Red Cross shop box, I came across a passage I'd marked that made me think again of the recent Olympics events. Both the precision and delicacy of the dressage and the combination of control and recklessness required by the showjumping and (especially) the cross-country showed up how crucial the relationship between horse and rider really is. It's like watching couples ice-dancing: one small wrong move, one tiny moment of miscommunication, and you are stuffed, if not savagely maimed. 'A horse is no household pet,' says Spender,
their size alone can imbue an edge of danger, and so there is the challenge of reaching an understanding with an animal that is powerful enough to trample you to death. Dogs are privy to every facet of home life and give unconditional love, while horses are infinitely less available. They don't sit in your lap, lie on your bed, or jump up and down when you suggest a walk; nor are they as independent or capable of disdain as a cat, and they never sharpen their claws on your furniture.
Horses are wonderfully attentive, even when putting on a show of bad behaviour they always remain somehow connected. [This bit in particular spoke to me; remember the several horses in Beijing that got spooked and carried on like pork chops when planes went over? You could just see them communicating protest and displeasure to their riders and the crowd.] It's as if they enjoy hanging out with people -- sometimes I get the distinct impression that we amuse them. It's a sincere, strong connection of the senses, centred around touch and constant interpretation of each other's body language. ... Horses have a sense of fun which I will not even attempt to describe, but anyone who has spent time with them will know what I mean. There are horses that seem to be always smiling.
Naturally, writing this post has made me wonder what I actually said about the book in the review, and since it's no longer online I went looking for it in my records. For those of you who may be wondering who Lizzie Spender is, here's the first paragraph:
Privilege is a weird commodity, stemming sometimes from things other than wealth. There are one or two moments in this book that make you want to ask Lizzie Spender who she thinks she is, but you already know what the answer would be: she is the daughter of Sir Stephen Spender, god-daughter of Sir Laurens van der Post, childhood friend of Anjelica Huston and wife of Barry Humphries, and furthermore she is a gorgeous half-Russian five-foot-ten blonde, so yah boo sucks to you.
If the name of the chap who was chatting on Friday afternoon to ABC Adelaide's Carole Whitelock about security is anywhere on the ABC website then I can't find it, but he made for riveting listening. He was an Israeli who'd been involved in high-level international security for a very long time, and he was giving a few tips and hints to improve the lives of the mostly safe and innocent citizens of Adelaide, who for the most part are a very long way indeed from the kinds of things he's seen.
But a couple of things he said made a lot of sense to me, as things that an ordinary citizen in a small city in a relatively safe country might well be moved to do. If there is some unforeseen disaster or attack, he said, the first thing that will happen is that communications will go down, which will mean you can't contact your family or any of the people who are important to you; it's therefore a good idea to prearrange a meeting place that everyone will make their way to, especially if your house isn't there any more. This, as Carole Whitelock pointed out, will have struck a chord with Adelaide Hills residents who have been through some of the worst bushfires, and for whom the idea of a prearranged meeting place is a very familiar one.
The other thing he said that was simple common sense, really (though have I ever been sufficiently organised to do it myself? Of course not), was that it's a good idea to make copies of all your important documents and keep them together and waterproofed in one envelope, somewhere they're easily retrievable. Ideally, he said, they should be in the small bag you've packed with emergency supplies of muesli bars, water bottles and anything else that might contribute to your short-term survival when the sky falls in.
It's easy to make fun of this kind of apocalyptic imagination. Peter Cook et al did it in Beyond the Fringe ('Have you got the tinned food?' 'Yes.' 'Have you got the tin opener?' ' ... ') -- but they did it, as they well knew, at a time when what was comedy sketch one day might well have become autobiography the next. And I couldn't help thinking of my friend R, who was living in Manhattan and working at the UN when the planes flew into the towers, and who for months afterwards carried around with her, as instructed by the authorities, a bizarre assortment of survival-oriented stuff. I also couldn't help thinking of the contemporary fiction I read for review as it comes out, and how much of it tells stories of utter ruination, destruction and disaster from the Second World War.
That might be part of the problem. Most Australians think of such events as the stuff of fiction and movies, stuff separated from our sense of ourselves by its packaging as cultural artefacts. Australians who live in the line of natural disasters, say the coastal North Queensland folk or those in the habitual paths of bushfires, have some sense of their indifferent and inexorable destructiveness. But with a handful of exceptions -- people with military training and experience; elderly European-born citizens -- I doubt very much whether any of us has a realistic sense of what a political attack would be like. Even the people fleeing the Gulf Coast in droves as Hurricane Gustav heads north-west have at least had a little bit of warning, but the people at the World Trade Center seven years ago, like the citizens of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945, had none.
This morning after I'd dropped off the car for its regular service, I wandered down to the nearby Hutt Street Precinct for a protracted mooch and dawdle in flâneuse mode till the garage should call and let me know the car was ready to be picked up.
Some time later I found myself passing a narrowish restaurant frontage: old black-painted wooden door, delicate little old-fashioned door-knocker in the shape of a little wreath, ancient art nouveau leadlight panel above the door. All incredibly familiar. I peered inside and recognised it as the restaurant that four of us went to for dinner the night our English Honours results came out in 1976; we'd hung out as a gang all year, and had planned the dinner as an act of solidarity no matter how well or badly each of us turned out to have done in the exams. And we did.
The restaurant was Neddy's, which had been opened by the now-legendary Cheong Liew the previous year, and was already one of the earliest signs that Adelaide was about to transform itself into a city of excellent restaurants, with radically new fusion-style cooking and an equally radically new emphasis on fresh local produce.
I found a near-empty cafe in an old and not-too-tarted-up building, ordered a hot chocolate and had just sat down with my novel when the music started up: Jimmy Barnes, another Adelaide boy, singing 'Flame Trees'.
... and I'm just savouring familiar sights We share some history, this town and I ...
Yesterday on local ABC radio there was a talkback discussion of annual 'days' for this and that -- Red Nose Day, International Women's Day, Fathers' Day -- and I got the feeling that a lot of people think we've now got a 'days' overload. One bloke in particular took against the whole concept of International Talk Like a Pirate Day with some violence; the mention of it by ABC dudes Matt'n'Dave (and they got the date completely wrong) was the first he'd heard of it, of course, but did that stop him having an opinion? Nobody in the part of the discussion I heard was anywhere near grasping the principle of viral internetty anarchy that lies behind it, although one sweet old bloke rang up with a riddle:
Q. Why are pirates pirates?
A. Because they arrrrrr.
(There is a LOLpirate in there somewhere, along the same lines as 'Interested cat is interested.')
Anyway, in this calendar of natural, cultural, UN-sanctioned and Intertubes-generated International Days of This and That that Matt'n'Dave and their own special breed of regular listeners had a fine old time deploring, my own absolute favourite is the Winter Solstice, which will keep happening long after personkind has disappeared from the face of the earth. I love the feel of the year turning and this side of the planet tilting back towards the sun.
This year it's tomorrow morning, Saturday June 21, at (in Adelaide) 9.29 am, as per this site.
If I were a poet, which alas I am not, I would squirrel away that beautiful and evocative phrase 'civil twilight' -- 'The time after sunset and before sunrise when the Sun is below the horizon but not more than 6° below it. During civil twilight, the sky is still quite bright and only the very brightest stars and satellites can be seen' -- for future use. In the meantime here's the recipe for solstice-celebrating mulled wine that I posted last year:
Take one (1) bottle of decent red, something not too bossy that will accommodate additions, and pour it into a saucepan over low heat. Shake the cinnamon jar over it a bit. Tip the honey over the pan and squeeze till you think that's enough. Chuck in six or seven cloves. Cardamom and lemon peel also work.
Heat gently, stirring. Don't let it boil, just get it nice and steamy. If you have an open fire and can therefore rustle up a red-hot poker, by all means use it to heat the wine.
Strain into pretty mugs.
Drink. (Civil twilight would be a good time to do this. The evening one, I mean.)
Repeat.
In the comments thread of the original post, the lovely and talented Zoe from Crazybrave, now also a born-again cookery blogger, suggests that any leftover mulled wine can be kept till the next time you are making a beef pie or stew, which indicates to me that she makes beef pies or stews a great deal more often than I do. Also, "leftover mulled wine" is a concept I can't quite get my head around. The Devil Drink has more power than that.
Last Friday night the Audreys played to a packed-out home-town Adelaide crowd in the late-Victorian wedding cake that is Her Majesty's Theatre. Your 'umble was very glad she was there to see it, in spite of the raised-by-hyenas couple behind us who chatted at normal volume all the way through the support act.
Said support was one J. Walker (jaywalker, geddit?) from Machine Translations who was in fact pretty good, especially since it was just him and his acoustic guitar (apart from the electric one he borrowed for the last few songs that kept going out of tune) and he played one song, the full and much longer original version of the main theme for East of Everything, 'A Most Peculiar Place', the TV version of which the band sings here and which as an acoustic solo was pretty damn close to awesome.
But it was the Audreys that people had come to see, and the Audreys were fabulous. They won their 2006 ARIA with their first album Between Last Night and Us in the category 'Best Blues & Roots Album' but that's an inadequate way of describing their style, which also has elements of jazz, alt country, pop and even, at a few electrifying (and electrified) moments, rock.
They seemed relaxed and happy to be at home in Adelaide and the band's lead singer and only woman Taasha Coates said hi to her mum in the audience and introduced drummer Toby Lang by way of reminiscence: 'Toby and I went to primary school together. That's how Adelaide we are.'
They played most of the tracks on their debut album (though not, to my disappointment, the seriously country 'Pale Dress') and all of the songs on the new album they are touring to promote, When the Flood Comes. As the title indicates and as almost every reviewer has noted, this second album is noticeably 'darker' in mood and tone: blighted urban landscapes, spoiled love, lots of drinking, lots of sex, and the apocalyptic scenarios both literal and figurative that are suggested by the album's title.
Shellshocked into writer's block by the magnitude of the success they earned with the first album, Coates and Goodall took the clever step of booking into New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel to get some songwriting done, and they clearly took inspiration from its atmosphere, its history and its ghosts.
The gorgeous, gifted Coates sang every song of the evening and didn't put a note, a breath or a black patent-leather high-heeled Mary-Jane-clad foot wrong all night. While her voice is mostly sweet and smoky, she can rustle up some effortless belter's volume and richness when required; when the band is up the country end of its repertoire she can shape a fine country-style timbre without descending to the nasal, but her voice morphs smoothly across to jazz-singer and down to soulful blues. She has a large vocal range and makes a feature of the register change up to head voice, that sort of golden-syrup-sounding blip you hear in early Joni Mitchell; Coates often does that on the one note, which is bloody difficult and sounds lovely.
To say that Coates sings, Goodall plays lead guitar, Lang plays drums, Michael Green plays violin and Lyndon Gray plays bass would be at once true and profoundly misleading. Everyone does a little bit of this and that and a little bit extra; a large part of the band's originality lies in its flexibility, willingness and fearlessness about coaxing a wide variety of sounds and noises out of a range of sometimes unorthodox instruments played in sometimes unorthodox ways, including getting distortion and feedback out of the sound equipment.
Coates, in the course of the evening, not only sang on every song but played keyboard, ukulele, harmonica, tambourine and this thing, which I'd never seen before. Goodall is a fiend on banjo as well as on his several different guitars, clearly a brilliant musician and an anchoring presence onstage, often a kind of conduit from Coates to the rest of the band. Green, every now and then, shifted from fiddle to lap steel, tipped his violin sideways and strummed or plucked it like a ukulele, or strolled over to the mic for some effortless, beautiful harmonies with Coates. At one point, everybody sang.
One of the songs on the first album, 'Banjo and Violin', is a sort of meta-commentary on their own musical style and they played a tighter and more alluring version of it even than this:
And in a number of songs, notably the amazing 'Songbird' which was probably the highlight of the night, they demonstrated further versatility by shifting around and playing several different things in the course of a single song. Coates introduced this song as 'My tribute to Nick Cave', eliciting a few polite interrogative noises from the audience, but the minute she walked across to the keyboard and accompanied herself on the opening bars, everyone began to get what she meant:
songbird with your bones of dust your wiry notes, your cage of rust sing your sweet sad song for us sing for us
This musically complex song shows, again, how willing the band is to take risks: it goes through shifts of tempo, volume and even mode, so what begins as a quietly dramatic ballad morphs at one stage into a pulsing, rock-y instrumental break.
While the rich originality of their sound at maximum-complexity level is one of the reasons why it's hard to take your eyes off them, Coates' voice is in no actual need of any instrumental support or embroidery. One of the highlights of the evening was the first encore, when Coates and Goodall came back onstage alone: to the accompaniment of sharp, spare, percussive electric guitar, Coats sang a tragic version of Sonny Bono's 'Bang Bang' that had the whole theatre holding its breath. The only other cover of the evening was the band's beautiful slowed-down balladed-up version of INXS's 'Don't Change', which features on Between Last Night and Us.
Taasha Coates is a woman of many frocks:
On Friday night she wore a semi-fitted sleeveless sheath dress that came to just above the knee, a soft green about halfway between sage and emerald, the fabric something light and soft over a more opaque foundation. The general effect was part young 1920s vamp, part slinky mature-woman 1950s cheongsam or Mandarin dress, with rays of sparkly embroidery on the bodice that gave an effect of half late-1960s little hippie mirrors and half timeless Nashville rhinestones. Coates brings to her outfits the same wide-net eclecticism, off-centre originality and weird grace that the band brings to its extensive range of instrumentation.
As befits the only woman in a band whose name is a tribute to Audrey Hepburn, she is slender and graceful and a little bit fey, profoundly girly (and I mean that in a good way, for once) and a subtle performer of femininity, with short black hair that cuts across any suggestion of confection, stereotype or even mild parody of girliness. She has an extraordinary stage presence that is partly about her stylised poses and half-dance half-swoon gestures; her onstage movement sometimes suggests the reason why people refer to a certain kind of adolescent grace as 'coltish' but she uses her hands as skilfully as a Balinese dancer, to hypnotic effect. She looks young, vulnerable and sweet, so it's quite electrifying when the band takes off into songs like this:
don’t want to borrow your car don’t want to meet your ma don’t want to hold your hand or have you come see my band just lay me down
Can't help wondering what her mum thought.
(NB: The tour isn't over yet; if you live in WA or Tasmania there's still a chance to see them. Their official website is here and they're also on MySpace, where you can see the remaining tour dates and the video of 'Paradise City'.)
The mayor of Unley (an inner (sub)urban Adelaide local council) was on ABC radio this afternoon being interviewed about the protest calls and emails he has had from, among other bodies, the Australia-China Friendship Society about the Council flying the Tibetan flag.
Since this story was published on May 5, the Mayor must have come on board, because he was vigorously defending his Council's actions. Asked what he thought about the Australia-China Friendship Society's protests, he gave the best answer there was: he pointed out how wonderful it was to live in a country where (a) a local council was free to fly a flag, and (b) anyone was free to protest.
Woman On a Mission, it must be said, is not my usual mode; such drivenness as I am capable of usually lies elsewhere. But today I was in quest of the perfect wedding gift.
Because of reasons (as ThirdCat so fetchingly puts it), the prospective bride and groom are particularly difficult to shop for. But they entertain. They entertain a lot, and they do it in style.
After pondering this fact for while and making a few false starts, I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted and was almost sure where I could get it.
So I headed out to Adders' poshest shopping hub, Burnside Village (pronounced "Vee-yarzh", as in "Tar-zhay") and made for a shop I had walked past many times but never actually ventured inside before. I couldn't remember its name, but I'd always seen beautiful high-end table linen and decorative bedding in the window.
As I approached, hoping it hadn't disappeared since I last looked (the Irish Linen shop that used to be across the road certainly had, so this was do or die), I slowly made out the words on the sign outside 'QU*EN B*E LINEN'. This, reader, was more than I had dared to hope for. I felt like a leopard upwind of a lame antelope. I went in and approached the woman behind the counter.
'Can I help you?' she asked.
'I hope so,' I replied. 'I'm looking for a set of twelve good-quality ecru linen table napkins, preferably with a restrained amount of drawn threadwork or damasking or some other kind of traditional self-embroidery.'
The woman looked at me incredulously over her glasses, and didn't reply for a minute. Oh dear I thought, perhaps they don't come in sets of twelve. Perhaps she is insulted that I felt the need to stipulate 'good quality'. Perhaps she doesn't know what ecru means, though surely not. Perhaps I have mispronounced the word 'damasking', or indeed perhaps the word 'damask' doesn't really exist as a verb at all, much less in the gerundive mood. And actually this incredulity I see before me is starting to get a bit oppressive. I wonder what the problem is.
In Adelaide, anyway. 42.4, which is about 109 in old money.
The weather forecast says there'll be a change overnight and it will only be 38 degrees tomorrow. Better find my Fair Isle beanie and leg-warmers.
To cool down and to mark the passing of the year, I'm going to find the relevant books and read two of my favourite poems. Both (though I'm not sure this is why I like them so much) contain unforgettable images of breathlessly watchful love and care -- images created by blokes who both got themselves disgracefully wasted on a regular basis, and therefore, when thus wasted, quite incapable of looking after an unconscious sloth, never mind a child or a woman or the world.
The second one in particular will cool as well as calm you down. Can't do better than linking you to these by way of wishing youse all a happy, and less hot, new year.
When we sing 'The Shepherd's Farewell' from Berlioz' 'The Childhood of Christ', we think privately of our own children leaving us: 'God go with you, God protect you, guide you safely through the wild.' We hope that if we can sing right through to the end without crying, the music will act as a blessing.
-- Helen Garner, 'A Scrapbook, An Album'
I'm early, because I've magically found a parking space in the middle of the CBD on a Friday night in mid-December, but when I walk into the church I see that M's mother, father, grandma, auntie and auntie's partner are all already there. They shove up to make room for me.
In the late 1970s M's mother D and I shared a house when we were studying. On Christmas Eve 1987, when M was three months old, D left her with me while she went and did a bit of emergency family lawyering, of the kind that habtually arises at Christmas. When M got restless, I rocked her and sang carols.
It must have been early in 1999 that we established the habit of meeting regularly for coffee on Saturday mornings. M at eleven would come too, bringing her Harry Potter books and reading while we talked. One morning, when she was about thirteen, she arrived without a book, and never brought one again. Now she's a seasoned 20-year-old Aerospace Engineering student singing with the Adelaide University Choral Society, whose Christmas concert we have come to hear.
D opens her program and holds it so I can see it, and I see there are two items with soloists. D points to the Coventry Carol -- 'Lully lulla, thou little tiny child' -- under which it says 'Soprano: M.B.' My stomach lurches in sympathetic alarm -- not for M, but for D. Watching one's child perform on stage -- no, no, let me not get into it. D leans over and whispers: 'And she's got the world's worst cold.'
Fortunately it's quite early in the program. Kenneth Leighton's soprano solo for this carol is very high and bloody hard, but, through her cold (and it is indeed a monster, as I observe afterwards), M produces every one of the clear, ringing, bell-like notes. You can see that it's an act of will, but all is exactly as it's supposed to be. At the end, D leans over and whispers 'My little tiny child has lived through it!'
They sing 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter' and I am reminded of the years when I was knee-deep in the huge, wild ocean of nineteenth-century scholarship and reading a lot of Christina Rossetti, a poet at once medieval-sounding and weirdly modern.
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter Long ago.
They sing 'The Shepherd's Farewell' and I think of Helen Garner and her sisters thinking of their children, trying not to cry. I remember a story she told once of trying so hard not to cry while watching a children's concert that her nose began to bleed.
Tonight we get to join in with some of the carols. D and I sang together all the time when we shared a house. She'd sung competitively in her convent choir; she was the person you could hear, in university revues, anchoring all the full-cast production numbers. Singing beside her now I don't think her voice has changed, though she says it has. I know mine has: after four years of singing in a choir here, my voice is much more reliable than it used to be. But I left the choir a couple of years ago, and I'd forgotten how exhilarating it is, having a sing.
On the way home, feeling elevated, I drive past a boy dancing about at the side of the road. He is clearly affected by some mind-altering substance. It's not alcohol; he's far too co-ordinated and graceful. He's about M's age, handsome and dark, wearing jeans and a black singlet and waving his white shirt in operatic flourishes at passing cars, as though playing matador to the oncoming traffic's bull. Cars thunder past, missing him by inches. Behind him the West Parklands loom darkly. Neither God nor anyone else, it seems, is guiding him safely through the wild.
This year's Royal Adelaide Show was hamstrung by the enforced ban on horses in the wake of the equine-influenza outbreak. No blacksmithery and farrier displays; no horses in the Grand Parade; none of the obsessive, cult-like manifestations of the subculture that is show jumping.
Show jumping is something I knew a great deal about when I was a little kid and devoured all available pony-club and show-jumping books (I was never allowed to have a pony on the farm, partly because my father had and still occasionally does have nightmares about being expected to lead his uncle Ross's prizewinning Clydesdales
around backwards when he was a very small child and has stayed well away from horses ever since).
Even my own adoration of these beautiful, powerful, graceful and intelligent animals took a bit of a beating in 1988 when one particularly unprepossessing specimen executed a tricky simultaneous gait-changing and direction-changing manoeuvre at a canter through a steep creek bed somewhere hilly north of Melbourne and dumped me on some rocks, but I'm still very sad there weren't any at the Show. The alpacas nearly made up for them, but not quite.
This little black alpaca was knackered.
Other animals I would have liked photos of: the gigantic bulls, peacefully lying in the straw with their hooves tucked under their chests like cats and the farmer's little kids climbing all over them. (Camera out of batteries by then.) The racing and diving pigs (didn't have enough energy left to wait, much less walk, around for another 20 minutes till the next race). The strange-looking people trotting their dogs around the dog-showing ring, straight out of Best in Show (batteries again).
This was supposed to be a photo of the upside-down roaring tigers, but it seems to have turned into one of those pictures of festively primary colours that look like children's doona designs.
Again with the violent colours. I liked all this raffish sideshow dazzle and noise with the soft colours and contours and the stillness of the Adelaide Hills in the distance.
This hi-tech ferris wheel is definitely not the same one I remember breaking down in 1963 with me and my sisters and my Scottish grandma up at the very top of the ride.
Meanwhile, in the handcraft hall and bakery section, someone named Susan Rabbitt had won first prize for these fabulous-looking passionfruit and lemon butters.
Shrek wedding cake, considerably more tasteful than some of the wedding cakes I've seen.
Fascinators are back, if they ever went away.
Young Elyse (this is the Primary School division) definitely deserved this blue ribbon: these are the best Chocolate Crackles on display by a very long way. No icing, coloured sprinkles or cutesy printed paper patty case thingies, just lots of chocolate and no mucking about.
And the thing I'm saddest I didn't get a photo of? Legendary Adelaide broadcaster and columnist Peter Goers, whose OTT-quirky gift for radio I have never heard equalled, striding along the path to the ABC tent clutching a gigantic Dagwood Dog dripping in sauce.
... you'd better go in disguise, preferably with a bucket on your head. And leave it there for the next month or two.
Because for about a week now, and again this morning, I have been hearing a lot of the audible golden syrup that is the call of the magpie, both from out in the street and down in the bushland lite that is my back yard. Apparently ThirdCat's mister got swooped some time ago already, though I can't now find the place where she tells that story.
I can remember my cousins in the country riding their bikes down the hill to the township to get to school, and every magpie nesting season they'd have to steer with one hand and hold their school cases over their heads with the other. They got very good at it.
Not even the punters who had thoughtfully pre-ordered their copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Borders could escape the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test of standing in a long queue on a cold morning,
except by saving their $29.95 receipts for later (anyone who paid $50 was seriously ripped off) and rocking on further down the mall to the shop known in some literary circles as Anguish & Robbery: hundreds of copies, no waiting, and witches giving away pumpkin juice and Butterbeer at the door.
Some, having attained their prize, walked only as far as the nearest bench before giving way to the desire to start reading immediately,
and others didn't even get as far as that.
By the time I arrived at one of our regular Saturday morning cafes at 9.30 am, the Aerospace Engineering student and her mother the lawyer had picked up their copies, settled down in a sunny corner with their lattes, and were already up to page 60. They didn't see me come in.
I got all Festivalled out for a while there and also had to meet my Wednesday deadline, but there are two more sessions I want to write about before I move on. This satire discussion and the one the previous day on whistle-blowing were my picks for the two best sessions I went to. In the case of the whistle-blowing session it was partly about the calibre of every speaker and partly about the gripping nature and the grave seriousness of the content, more of which, as they used to say, in my next.
What made the satire session so extraordinary was something quite different: the stellar quality of Phillip Adams' moderation. My admiration for Adams has always been heartfelt but heavily qualified and the one direct encounter I've had with him, a brief spot on LNL chatting about a book I'd edited, did not endear him to me (I don't think it endeared me to him, either), but I'd never seen him onstage moderating a discussion before, and the job he did keeping the quality of discussion high and lively and the three potentially self-indulgent, not to say feral, speakers on some kind of interesting track was really quite remarkable.
The three other people on the stage were two of the Chaser boys, Julian Morrow and Charles Firth, plus Private Eye deputy editor and Karl Marx biographer Francis Wheen, an old-school Brit wit and sort of a sober Christopher Hitchens (for whom my admiration has also always been heartfelt but only became heavily qualified when he Turned) without the gravitas, the spleen or the contrarian-conservative politics, if you can imagine such a thing. Which I doubt. You had to be there.
There were no individual presentations; rather, via gentle steering and occasional quiet interventions, Adams orchestrated and conducted a conversation that stayed, as I think it was meant to, mostly fairly light-hearted and very funny but, thanks to Adams, was repeatedly elevated to another plane about what satire is, where it comes from, what it's for, and where (if anywhere) its lines are, or ought to be, drawn. The next time I find myself in one of those onstage chairing situations at a conference or festival I am going to remember and draw on as much as I can of what I saw Adams do, and copy it as well as I can.
The content itself, however, consisted mostly of funny stories and one-liners, beginning with a hilarious story told by Francis Wheen. Wheen is (or appears to be, when sitting down) a man slightly below middle height, with a cherubic face topped by the kind of baldness that involves bare pink skin on top and a couple of thick white tufts of hair like koala ears sprouting from the sides of his head. He had been walking down to North Terrace earlier in the week, he said, when while crossing at the lights he became aware that a truck driver stopped at the lights was shouting at him in a violent and hostile manner. 'It took me a while to work out what he was saying,' said Wheen, 'but I finally realised that he had mistaken me for your Prime Minister.'
A swell of laughter grew as we looked at him and it dawned on us that this was not only entirely credible but all too likely. Then he very slowly and deliberately took his glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on. The resemblance sharpened. The audience roared. Then he started doing things with his eyebrows and his teeth and the audience howled. It was slapstick, not satire, but it was an excellent start.
Since it was a real conversation and therefore meandered and digressed all over the place like Fair Isle knitting, the best way to report it is probably just to quote the lines I thought were good enough to write down. So here they are.
ON SATIRE:
Julian Morrow: 'Observers of satire tend to project onto it a lot more power than it actually has.'
ON TECHNOLOGY
Phillip Adams: ' I've got a new audience of much younger people because of the [podcasting] technology.'
Charles Firth: 'Capitalism doesn't reform itself just because technology changes the way they all do the same thing.'
ON VARIOUS FAMOUS PEOPLE:
Julian Morrow on Gerard Henderson: 'You can't win, with Gerard. But you can't lose, because it's Gerard.'
Francis Wheen on Margaret Thatcher and Edna Everage: 'I think Edna is now more Thatcher-like than Thatcher herself -- who's now a bit of a busted flush, poor girl.'
Julian Morrow on Paul Keating: 'If you're going to be put down by Paul Keating, you want it to be gloriously eviscerating.'
Francis Wheen on Rupert Murdoch: 'Murdoch never rises to it. One of the thousands of things that are irritating about Rupert Murdoch is that he doesn't give a toss.'
Julian Morrow on Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating: 'There'd be a role in Rudd: The Musical for a former PM, where he comes in just before the election and f*cks everything up.'
The Saturday afternoon session featuring nutritionist Professor Marion Nestle -- one of her more singular titles is '2004 Time Obesity Warrior', and indeed she is a mere slip of a thing herself, a practised public speaker with those lovely soft American good manners -- began very well when I recognised the man stepping up to the mic to introduce her: SA Minister for Health, John Hill. This is a bit of a feature of living in Adelaide; the SA pollies get out and about in non-ministerial mode quite a lot, so you'll often see Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith at the opera, Treasurer Kevin Foley at the theatre, or Premier and Arts Minister Mike Rann chairing sessions at Writers' Week.
Hill is one of the most liked, admired and trusted of the SA ministers; he's the friend of friends who have nothing but good to say about his integrity and intelligence, so I think there's a good chance he researched and wrote his detailed, charming introduction himself, putting the contemporary First World 'lifestyle disease' epidemic in its long historical context. By the end of his intro, Nestle was looking quite startled. 'It's a pleasure to be introduced by a Minister for Health who's actually interested in public health,' she said to the audience as she arrived at the lectern. 'He's really rare, so treasure him.'
Nestle was using a PowerPoint presentation, which could easily have been excruciating but wasn't; it was a tad too distracting, but she had put the images together cleverly (and it was, thank God, mostly graphics) and spoke to them with practised ease. Some of them were very funny, like the 'Shape of Things to Come' cartoon, a mocked-up parody of that 'evolution of primates' diagram that begins with a chimp on the left-hand end and moves through several 'Ascent of Man' type images to modern Homo Erectus -- except that there was a new figure on the right-hand end: a spherical, waddling slob clutching a burger in one hand and a shake in the other.
Nestle's topic was the contemporary obesity 'epidemic' and its origins, which she traced back to the 1980s. First, she said, a change in US farm policy in the 1970s saw production restrictions lifted and by the early 80s 'food became too cheap and too plentiful' (this had an absurd ring to me; I get the economic logic and the health consequences, but it still sounds a bit too much like the scene in The Grapes of Wrath where they're dumping and poisoning oranges while people with starving children watch them do it). In the early 1980s came the 'shareholder value movement' that saw pressure applied to food companies to show a profit, in this new buyers' market, every 90 days.
Other causes apart from the lower prices and the advertising push, she said, included the rise in consumption of food outside the home (at retail outlets there are almost always more calories and bigger portions); a rise in serving sizes (at this point we saw an alarming graphic of a gigantic paper cup called the Double Gulp, which apparently holds 800 calories' worth of non-diet soda; I don't know what this is in kilojoules but in my youth it was the daily calorie allowance that doctors put women on for a medical weight-loss diet, though not any more); and the new ubiquity of food, now commonly consumed at any time and in any place: 'When did it become okay to eat in bookstores?'
Her particular objection as far as the food companies are concerned is the way they market to children: 'You can argue "personal responsibilty" to adults about their food choices, but not to children.' On this topic she talked us briskly through 'brand loyalty' and the 'pester factor' before arriving at a phenomenon nobody can have failed to notice lately: selling food via cartoon or other cult figures, most recently the saturation exposure of the Shrek the Third 'brand' tie-in on practically half the food products currently available on supermarket shelves. 'Tell your kids that if they eat all the things that Shrek promotes they're going to end up looking exactly like him.'
Nestle listed a number of proposed antidotes, counter-movements and possible solutions to all this: the Slow Food movement; the organic revolution; the mainstreaming of animal welfare, leading to reform in farming practices (and if you think this one hasn't started working yet, go to a supermarket at the end of the day and look at the stacks of cage eggs left and the huge gaps where the free-range variety are all long gone from the shelves); the rise of local agriculture movements, manifest in things like the increasingly popular farmers' markets; a push for change in public health policy. 'I'm a firm believer in regulation,' she said. 'Government's role is to balance the needs of corporations against the needs of the population.'
Several commentators, including fellow-blogger Stu at Le Rayon Vert (who was there; see his recommended list of podcasts), have observed that the audience demographic at the Festival skewed 'old', but -- quite apart from being bloody annoying when it's meant as a putdown, though on the whole people over 50 think it's hilarious when people under 50 think "old" is an insult (and it's to Stu's credit that he doesn't) -- this isn't quite accurate in any case. Naturally the audiences at the Friday sessions tended to be older, because a lot of working-age people were at, um, work. The audience for the session the Chaser boys had all to themselves was, on the other hand, predictably very young. But on the whole there was a pleasing heterogeneity among the festival audiences in all kinds of ways, and one noticeable thing about Nestle's audience was the very large number of people in their teens and twenties -- many of whom, as became clear at question time, were apparently vegetarians or vegans.
There was also the bloke who asked the final question of the session, a fit and ferocious thirtysomething Nordic chap who addressed his question to the Health Minister. He worked in a hospice, he said, and he wanted to know if and when the Minister was going to do anything about some of the appallingly unhealthy food that gets sold in hospital cafeterias and canteens. Hill's reply kind of summed up the contemporary dilemma and the intractability of the problem. 'We're trying,' he said ruefully. 'We asked the people at the children's hospital in Melbourne why they don't get rid of their McDonald's, and they said it was because the parents had begged them not to. They say a trip to Macca's is one of the few things that will cheer their sick kids up.'
So it was left to Paul Chadwick, just as I had given up hope of hearing anyone say anything that was both knowledgeable and interesting about traditional journalism and possible online futures, to restore my faith. Walkley winner, former Victorian Privacy Commissioner and recently-appointed inaugural Director of Editorial Policies at the ABC, Chadwick is obviously an extraordinary person as well as an extraordinary speaker.
His background is in law and it is very easy to imagine him in court: he is one of those lucky few with a gift of speaking on his feet in complex whole sentences full of good grammar, audible punctuation, skilful rhetoric and lyrical speech rhythms, and he appears to be composing these remarkable sentences as he delivers them, in one smooth integrated action. He also appears to be not so much a 'Glass Half Full' type as a 'Glass Overflowing With Veuve Clicquot and Here, Have Another One, Why Do You Think God Gave You Two Hands?' sort of bloke.
Like Marion Nestle the following day, except without the PowerPoint, Chadwick had thought in detail about the structure of what he wanted to say, knowing (as do all lecturers and ex-lecturers) that information can be more easily delivered, and more of it retained, if it's presented in dot points, with headings, in a logical order. This he did. It isn't possible if all you have to say is waffle, so when someone does do it you can be sure that they are actually telling you something.
His three headings, or 'angles', were (1) History, (2) A Romance, (3) Opportunity, but before he embarked on any of them he gave his answer to the question implied in the title of the session: 'Has journalism a future? Yes. It is an essential service.'
'History' turned out to be exactly that: a quick, focused, potted history of journalism that laid the foundation for what was to come. He took us through a few precursors of modern journalism as we know it -- the names he mentioned were Defoe, Paine and Hazlitt, who were, he suggested, early prototypes of bloggers -- and through the relationship between technological innovation and changes in the nature of journalism, pointing out that the practice of 'journalism' changed dramatically in the 19thC with the invention of newspapers -- 'great lumps of paper with ink on them' -- as we know them.
He then drew a direct parallel between the historical moment around the turn of the 18th/19th centuries when the combination of a rise in mass literacy with progress in mass print technology enabled the evolution of modern journalism, and the historical moment we're currently in, 200 years later. Both, he argued, were a matter of 'technology enabling growth'; contemporary computer-literacy he called 'a different, parallel literacy ... a literacy assisting journalism in its new incarnation.' The internet, he said, was 'a tool for mass disclosure' that was available to everyone.
The 'Romance' turned out to be a rather dodgy love story about a recent bit of nepotism between lovers in high places that was immediately pounced on, exposed and torn to bits by bloggers in the US. This Chadwick used as an example of the 'new transparency' provided by the blogosphere.
A disconnect has developed, he argued, between the previously reliable Fourth Estate and its previously trusting audience; while people these days expect to be lied to by the newspapers, the emergence of blogging has enabled if not ensured the rapid investigation, exposure and exhaustive analysis of most such lies. Bloggers, he said, can and do quickly raise questions about conflicts of interest (both personal and business) in the MSM, 'and if you think Media Watch is tough ...!' There is, he said, 'a new transparency now abroad in old media, imposed upon it by new media.'
He enlarged on this point later in general discussion when he was talking about contemporary journalists' loss of confidence, not only because 'the economic model has been shaken by the new technology' but also because of this new online scrutiny: what bloggers are doing, he reiterated, is analysing and exposing journalism itself -- 'doing to journalists themselves what journalists, as a privileged caste, have been doing for 200 years.' This kind of change, he said, is quite frightening to those who have been used to controlling information: 'It's really hard, to lose that power.'
Under the heading 'Opportunities', Chadwick described what he saw as another vital role for the blogosphere: the support and augmentation of news-gathering and primary content delivery, a point on which Colleen Ryan, in the general discussion, later agreed: 'Bloggers provide such a fabulous resource,' she said. 'Some bloggers have amazing expertise.'
Chadwick's example of the kind of journalistic support he could see the blogosphere providing was the sifting and analysis, done very quickly because done by so many, of news as it broke -- the release, say, of a substantial government report that the MSM was expected to respond to overnight if not sooner. A 'critical mass of bloggers', he argued, can quickly process this kind of information, 'sifting and ordering the haystack' in such a way as to make it a great deal easier for frontline journalists to find the needle. 'What we're seeing in the digital world is an augmentation of journalism, potentially to its and our benefit.'
