Barry Levy's Blog - Posts Tagged "book-as-if-6363547"
Militarising a State's Culture
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
A million dollars may not be a lot of money over three years to send 50 students to ANZAC Cove in Gallipoli and the Western Front, as announced by Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, but it is a fortune, not only in physical wealth but in cultural capital and vitality, when weighed against the same Premier's virtual assassination of the annual state literary awards valued at $230,000 a year.
Where the one will foster a nation's history and tradition of military sacrifice, the other will eat blood out of a creative culture that stands at the heart of any state, nation, society and its ultimate remembrances and progress.
It tells us a lot about where Premier Newman is going - and where he is taking the state.
I happen to be one of those, a writer, who supports maintaining the tradition of military remembrance. But I do so in the hope that by remembering, by telling from year to year the tales of sacrifice and bloodshed and cruelty and power-hunger and forceful empire and ideology spreading, we can also learn there are better ways of going about our lives and spreading our ideas.
One of those ways, possibly one of the biggest and most essential ways, is through the arts and literature, the colourful matter people see hanging on walls, in churches and institutions, and the pages they read in books in the hopes of gaining an insight into our common humanity, its failings and possibilities.
Therefore when a man as powerful as the Premier makes his first act of governance the deselecting of a literary award, no matter how elitist the award, I take exception. We should all take exception.
Not only that, but when the million dollars for remembrance is announced in a state where the commitment is to smashing all debt - and comes at a time when the federal government has announced it is putting upwards of $80 million over the next three years for exactly the same reasons - it means only one thing that probably everyone (except the dead) already knows - we're winding back down the trail (impossible as it may seem) of the Bjelke years.
The obscenity, the starkness of such a manoeuvre is made all the more brutal when one considers that in putting to death the Queensland literary awards, the Premier in all his strategic intelligence, and with all his tunnelling and engineering skills, did not even offer to think about other ways of doing it: Eg, reducing the awards money, or even better still, putting a mere $50,000 or so of it away as grants money to both writers and publishers.
No, instead, like the military man he is, he just stood up, marched onto the podium and trampled on the awards, giving no thought to how money can be saved without trashing the works.
If you are living in Queensland and are worried, you should be. It should also be of concern if you are living in other states. Not only is Mr Newman a cultural insult to us all but he wields great influence over other states.
Unfortunately, the new law of our jungle, means that the Premier is going to have to be stood up to (it seems by a small minority left over from those who thought it more important to teach Anna Bligh a lesson) and that everything decent and uplifting in our 'great state' is once again going to have to be fought for.
For a man who claims to stand in the 'liberal' tradition and foster a sense of passing on the important lessons and battles of our history from one generation to another, it seems there is only one strand in that thinking: the military and the engineering of militaristic precision. The jackboot as language and literature.
As a born and thoroughbred Queenslander said to me: How are these kids (out to garner Mr Newman's ANZAC remembrance awards) going to write their submissions? By the time they do so, there will be no language or literature left in the state. Except maybe for the curt vocabulary of military command.
Put a little more prettily, Mr Newman, if you are listening, in the words of mathematician, educationist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Unfortunately, we here in Queensland, are going to be left with nothing more than the concrete.
As If!
A million dollars may not be a lot of money over three years to send 50 students to ANZAC Cove in Gallipoli and the Western Front, as announced by Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, but it is a fortune, not only in physical wealth but in cultural capital and vitality, when weighed against the same Premier's virtual assassination of the annual state literary awards valued at $230,000 a year.
Where the one will foster a nation's history and tradition of military sacrifice, the other will eat blood out of a creative culture that stands at the heart of any state, nation, society and its ultimate remembrances and progress.
It tells us a lot about where Premier Newman is going - and where he is taking the state.
I happen to be one of those, a writer, who supports maintaining the tradition of military remembrance. But I do so in the hope that by remembering, by telling from year to year the tales of sacrifice and bloodshed and cruelty and power-hunger and forceful empire and ideology spreading, we can also learn there are better ways of going about our lives and spreading our ideas.
One of those ways, possibly one of the biggest and most essential ways, is through the arts and literature, the colourful matter people see hanging on walls, in churches and institutions, and the pages they read in books in the hopes of gaining an insight into our common humanity, its failings and possibilities.
Therefore when a man as powerful as the Premier makes his first act of governance the deselecting of a literary award, no matter how elitist the award, I take exception. We should all take exception.
Not only that, but when the million dollars for remembrance is announced in a state where the commitment is to smashing all debt - and comes at a time when the federal government has announced it is putting upwards of $80 million over the next three years for exactly the same reasons - it means only one thing that probably everyone (except the dead) already knows - we're winding back down the trail (impossible as it may seem) of the Bjelke years.
The obscenity, the starkness of such a manoeuvre is made all the more brutal when one considers that in putting to death the Queensland literary awards, the Premier in all his strategic intelligence, and with all his tunnelling and engineering skills, did not even offer to think about other ways of doing it: Eg, reducing the awards money, or even better still, putting a mere $50,000 or so of it away as grants money to both writers and publishers.
No, instead, like the military man he is, he just stood up, marched onto the podium and trampled on the awards, giving no thought to how money can be saved without trashing the works.
If you are living in Queensland and are worried, you should be. It should also be of concern if you are living in other states. Not only is Mr Newman a cultural insult to us all but he wields great influence over other states.
Unfortunately, the new law of our jungle, means that the Premier is going to have to be stood up to (it seems by a small minority left over from those who thought it more important to teach Anna Bligh a lesson) and that everything decent and uplifting in our 'great state' is once again going to have to be fought for.
For a man who claims to stand in the 'liberal' tradition and foster a sense of passing on the important lessons and battles of our history from one generation to another, it seems there is only one strand in that thinking: the military and the engineering of militaristic precision. The jackboot as language and literature.
As a born and thoroughbred Queenslander said to me: How are these kids (out to garner Mr Newman's ANZAC remembrance awards) going to write their submissions? By the time they do so, there will be no language or literature left in the state. Except maybe for the curt vocabulary of military command.
Put a little more prettily, Mr Newman, if you are listening, in the words of mathematician, educationist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Unfortunately, we here in Queensland, are going to be left with nothing more than the concrete.
As If!
