Light on the Hill: Reflections on a cultural history

While everybody’s proudly displaying the flag and eating damper and lamingtons, racing ferries up and down the harbour, hurling frozen chooks at Watson’s Bay, celebrating en-masse two-hundred and twenty-six years of nationhood (or one-hundred and fourteen and a bit, if you’re being pedantic), I’ve put together a list of a cross-section of books, films and pieces of music which encapsulate what my Australia is, how I see the nation and our chequered history.

The dreaming of William Dawes

Last September, I read Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, a fictionalised account of William Dawes, Sydney’s first astronomer, and his friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang. There was something in it that caught me, made me want to find out more about the man, their friendship, the story. The only trouble is that such knowledge is rather scant.

As with Arthur Stace, the ‘Eternity man,’ (another of Sydney’s key dreamers), it seems no history of Sydney is complete without mentioning Dawes, his little observatory on the headland now buried beneath the southern pylons of the Bridge, his brief relationship with Patyegarang, the Aboriginal girl who taught him fragments of her language.

This land is mine: STC's The Secret River

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River is not an easy book to digest. I wrote about it last year, saying that it was an angry book though Grenville does her best to disguise it at times; angry at the way white Australia has treated the original inhabitants of the continent, their stubborn iron-willed settlers who made little or no attempt to learn how to live in their new home. When The Secret River was published in 2005, historians jumped at Grenville’s ‘claims’ that her book was history (Grenville, however, never actually made such comments). Now, eight years later, the Sydney Theatre Company is staging a theatrical reimagining of Grenville’s The Secret River, under the pen of Andrew Bovell and the direction of Neil Armfield.

Coming at a time when we, as a nation, can no longer ignore the past, where we can no longer pretend these events didn’t happen; when there is an “inheritance of rage” at the treatment of indigenous people by white people, and a saturation point is reached, The Secret River then – as both book and theatrical event – are but two facilitators to help us as a society to look at the issues contained within them, to look to the past to find how we must [not] progress in the future. And it takes its audience to “a pretty confronting place,” to quote Bovell.

On Reading, Part Six

I learnt a new word recently. Bibliobibuli. It means someone who reads too much. H. L. Mencken describes it as being “constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.” For about a week at the end of August, that was me. For just one week, all I wanted to do was read, readreadread, read as much as I could and then keep going, straight on til morning. It was only when Mum told me to stop being so OCD that I stopped and looked past the end of the book and saw that it was perhaps true. This doesn’t happen often, in fact I don’t think it’s really happened before. And it only happened this time because of J. K. Rowling’s new book, The Casual Vacancy, which I talk about later.