Cassandra Atherton

‘Fuck all editors’: The Ern Malley affair and Gwen Harwood's bulletin scandal

Until the 1990s and Helen Demidenko, there have been only been two Australian literary hoaxes. The first was the Ern Malley Hoax; the second Gwen Harwood’s Bulletin scandal. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were the two poets behind the creation of the ‘great aussie battler’ Ern Malley and Gwen Harwood was the quaintly titled ‘lady poet’ behind the suave European Walter Lehmann. McAuley, Stewart and Harwood are important figures in Australian literature, not just for their individual contributions to Australian poetry but for their construction of enduring literary figures. Ern Malley and Walter Lehmann were believed by many to have made a mockery of editors willing to publish their work, but the hoaxes reveal more than the Australian public’s delight in the humiliation of editors Max Harris and the Bulletin’s Donald Horne. Despite the fact that Harwood and Lehmann’s poems were no longer welcome at the Bulletin, she managed to perpetrate a further hoax (although less dramatic), where poems under other pseudonyms were published unknowingly by Horne.1 The creation of Ern Malley and Walter Lehmann illustrates John Rowan’s theory of subpersonalities, where pseudonyms can be read as the manifestation of a sub-self. If a subpersonality is defined as ‘a semi-permanent and semiautonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person’,2 then Ern Malley and Walter Lehmann betray the subconscious desires of their creators. In the Malley poems we can see ‘a young man who believes in his vocation as a poet, recoiling from a broken love affair’,3 as well as the nightmares and self-doubt of McAuley. Those who have read Cassandra Pybus’ The Devil and James McAuley will recognise his subconscious desires in this subpersonality. This is a particularly interesting theory when it is applied to someone like Henri Beyle, Stendal, Henri Brulard or Mr Crocodile, or any of the one hundred and seventy one pseudonyms or aliases he adopted.4 Similarly, McAuley has been described by Harwood as ‘four or five men rolled into one’,5 and by Horne as ‘a multi-faceted presentation of himself as a series of performances’.6 The creation of Ern Malley, his sister Ethel, and Ern’s poetical oeuvre is an entertaining account. They were all created ‘one Saturday afternoon’7 in 1943 in Melbourne by two young Sydney poets: James McAuley and Harold Stewart. Their dossier on Ern Malley is impressive. Ern had two very important things going for him: he was working class and he was dead. In a letter to Max Harris, co-editor of the Angry Penguins, Ern’s sister wrote that:

‘Unconscionable Mystification’?: Rooms, Spaces and the Prose Poem

Since the 19th century, when a number of French writers – most conspicuously Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud – introduced what we may think of as the modern prose poem into European literature, prose poetry has been part of a debate about the contemporary usefulness of existing literary modes and genres. While early French practitioners partly used the form to problematise traditional poetic prosody, once this aim was achieved prose poetry remained a significant contemporary literary form. In the context of contemporary developments in prose poetry, this article discusses John Frows observations that texts are able to perform or modify a genre, or only partly fulfil generic expectations, or be comprised of more than one genre. It also discusses the authors Rooms and Spaces project, which explores ways in which prose poetry may be considered ‘poetic’; how it may be room-like and condensed; or open and highly suggestive (sometimes both at once); and how prose poetry is intertextual and polysemous. Prose poetry may be generically problematic but the authors suggest that this may make it an exemplary post-postmodern form; and that reading prose poetry may provide significant insights into how unstable genre boundaries really are.

Situating Public Intellectuals

The concept of the public intellectual has always been a somewhat contested term. This article serves as both an introduction to the debates around what it constitutes and an entry point into how the new media environment is producing a different configuration of the public intellectual. Through key thinkers who have addressed the idea of the public intellectual internationally and those who have focused on the Australian context, this essay positions the arguments made by the authors in this special issue. Via a short case-study of TED, the conference and online idea-spreading phenomenon, it argues that the contemporary moment is producing and privileging a different constellation of experts as celebrities that match the exigencies of online attention economy. A shifted conception of the public intellectual is beginning to take shape that is differently constituted, used and situated, and this article helps to define the parameters for further discussion of these transformations.

Fragments of the place itself: Boston neighbourhoods in prose poetry

ABSTRACT As complex and geographically discrete life environments, city neighbourhoods are invested with a great deal of personal meaning as well as with general cultural significance. Pierre Moyal argues that ‘the city is poeticized by the subject’ and explores the refabrication and consumption of space by the city dweller, along with the outsiders creative and fractious presence. Boston, MA, has been touted as ‘the city of neighborhoods’ by Anthony Bak Buccitelli and our practice-led research project, Fragments of the Place Itself, investigates insider and outsider creativity, rupture and poetic form in Bostons North End, Beacon Hill and Cambridge neighbourhoods through prose poetry. Our project considers the notions of perambulation and drifting, and the idea of genius loci. Further, we argue that prose poetry is well suited to writing about neighbourhoods because prose poetrys fully justified text is able to set up a demarcation or ‘plot’ that readily accommodates both insider and outsider viewpoints.

Broken forms: Prose poetry as hybridised genre in Australia

It would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. The consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. At this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. Hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. This paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. The Northern Rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. A variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. In this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. The movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere.More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable.The history of Perth, Western Australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. While disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. The extensive wetlands of central Perth, food gathering and meeting places for Noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. Urban dwellers of Perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both Noongar and Settler. The loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence Perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. Reimagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. Reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. The fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in southern suburban Perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place.This paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the Indigenous nations of the continent of Australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of Australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. From a philosophical perspective, the Settler-citizens of the occupied territories of Australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. As the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary Settler Australians find a way to live together ethically with the Indigenous population? This paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. I apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of Settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial Australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. The paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. Through recognising and relinquishing Occupier subjectivity, Settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than Occupier.This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poeticsLiving with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility , the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.

Poetic boundary conditions: Australian poets in the ivory tower

This article explores the experience of women poets in academe and posits that by institutionalising themselves in universities, women poets gain financial stability by working in the wider field of poetry. However, they also face discrimination and a lack of opportunity in these workplaces. The article uses two case studies of poets Maria Takolander and Jill Jones, who work at Deakin University and the University of Adelaide, Australia, respectively. These case studies show the way in which these poets explore the experience of academe in their poetry.

'Very inflated rhetoric, polysyllables and so on': The public intellectual and jargon in the academy

The public intellectual, by their very definition, aims to reach a large sector of the public or publics. This requires proficiency, or at least the capacity to communicate in a variety of forms. As a large proportion of the public, to which the public intellectual appeals, is an online or cyber public, the importance of blogs in a computer-literate public cannot be under-estimated. The immediacy of the blog and the way in which an online presence facilitates immediate communication between the public and the public intellectual through the posting of comments online allow for a broad recognition of the intellectual in the public arena. My arguments will hinge on my interviews with contemporary American public intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Todd Gitlin, Camille Paglia and Stephen Greenblatt) and their views on communication in a society experiencing a decline in the publication of print media.

‘Hottie Doctors’: academics as celetoids, a case study of Dr Bonnie Blossman and Big, Rich Texas

Cassandra Atherton is a senior lecturer at Deakin University. She has written several articles on academic public intellectuals for international journals and is currently writing a book, Wise Guys, on the changing role of the public intellectual in academe, based on her interviews with Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Stephen Greenblatt and others. A book of interviews with these American public intellectuals, entitled In So Many Words, was published by Australian Scholarly Press in 2013. She has also written a critical monograph, a novel and a book of poetry.