We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
—Werner Herzog

I read The Neverending Story when I was a teenager. I hardly remember the plot and I have only vague memories of the film (which I saw for the first time in 2009); it was the images in Michael Ende’s book that caught me—plains full of softly waving golden grass, crumbling buildings and a melting rainbow sky. There were pages and pages of this, of pure shifting shape and concept, colour, spectacle, adventure—imagination for the sake of imagination. And then, in juxtaposition, the plague of Nothing—darkness, a hollowness, sucking the colour and the joy out of the world. Sucking the world out of the world.

Artists know that the slip between reality and imagination is, in a sense, not really a slip at all. Writers know that stories exist in a way that makes the dichotomy of fact and fiction artificial. The popular fantasy genre takes as its premise that what occurs in the story exists in a world other than our own. Magical realism, on the other hand, more directly challenges our understanding of this world. ‘Normal notions about time, place, identity, matter and the like are challenged, suspended, lured away from certitude.’(1) Salman Rushdie talks about the writing of Midnight’s Children: ‘I wanted to make it as imaginatively true as I could,’ he says, ‘but imaginative truth is both honourable and suspect.’(2)  The child in Pan’s Labyrinth knows the magic is real, even if the adults have turned a blind eye. Novels like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude merge history and fact with the fantastic to the point where it is almost impossible to tell where the real leaves off and the ‘magic’ begins. And this is precisely the point: by treating the fantastic as an inextricable part of the actual, such stories force us to question ‘the political and metaphysical definitions of the real’ in which we anchor our lives.(3)

It’s the job of the fiction writer to slide between the real and the imaginary and to put these concepts into words. To create something physical (a text) from something that is not (an idea). To create new worlds from those that already exist. To challenge. This is dangerous. Imagination is dangerous. It’s dangerous in the same way that fear is dangerous. It reminds us of our mortality, of our fallibility, of the slipperiness of our experiences, our knowledge, and the simplicity of death. But the imagination is bridled only by itself. We may allow of our imaginations what we would never allow of our realities, and in the private space of our minds, whole other worlds may exist. Every now and then they test us. Stories and ideas push us, push our realities and our understanding of the things we can touch and taste and see. By imagining the impossible we wonder about the realm of the possible. And this is dangerous.

Censorship attempts to limit the imagination. Censorship limits what is shown to be thought in order to limit what it is possible to think. It is at direct odds with the project of the artist, the writer, the creator and the innovator, because it curtails the hypothetical, the imaginary, the possibility. The role of art in a society is not to replicate the actual but to reflect it; to reinterpret it, to represent it: to re-present it. Its purpose is not just aesthetic but social and political. Aesthetics are the medium through which it draws attention to itself. ‘Culture’ is not a fringe concern; it is a representation of how a society understands and defines itself. It is the core of our existence as sentient creatures. Censorship is power recognising danger in imagination and representation, but mainly the danger presented to itself.

I am becoming afraid of being an artist in this country. I am becoming afraid of saying what I think, especially in a time when the world is becoming less and less private, and the relative safety of anonymity is crushed. Even now I struggle with the idea that I am still free to think as I like, that my mind is not shackled by anything except that with which I shackle it myself. And the more afraid I am to speak, the more important it becomes. Soon the only private spaces will be the ones in our heads, if they are not already the only ones left. And perhaps one day even that will be taken from us, because the more restrictions governments and power brokers place on our representations of ourselves and our understanding of the world—of all aspects of it, not merely the loving, the sacred and the benevolent, but also the dark, the disturbing and the profane, which are as much a part of this world as the things we hold dear—the closer we come to a time when even to think in certain ways is to commit a crime.

There are places in the world where these words would be considered dangerous enough to censor. I almost censored them myself, except I think they are too important. The mere fact that I can say them means they should be said, because there are places in the world where speaking your mind or creating art is considered dissident enough for jail, capital punishment, death. That place might be here sooner than we think. The wheels are already turning. The artists are always first.

(1) & (3) From the Introduction to Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, David Young and Keith Hollaman (eds.), Longman Inc. : New York and London, 1984.
(2) Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. Granta and Penguin : London, 1991.

My housemate has spent a few years working in the not-for-profit sector, and recently landed a job as the Australian Coordinator for Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Due to this, and with the promise that I would write a review, I scored a handful of free tickets to the Sea Shepherd sponsored preview session of The Cove at Nova Cinemas last Wednesday.

I’m not averse to environmental activism; I’m actually slightly ashamed that I don’t get involved in quality campaigns more often, or engage more conscientiously with how my personal choices impact on the environment. But I’m also subject to cynicism about the impact of environmental activism on the public with big business and mainstream media’s tendency to stereotype it as the domain of hippies and celebrities with more money than sense. Perhaps this is less prominent than it used to be, with widespread acceptance of the threat of global warming, deforestation and similar issues. Nevertheless, I think activism often suffers from a perception of condescension and kneejerk politics-for-the-sake-of-it that make it difficult for well-intentioned campaigns to gain traction.

This film is something else. The Cove is a documentation of a group of activists’ efforts to photograph and expose the mass slaughter of dolphins in a wildlife sanctuary in Taiji, Japan. From the very minute they arrive in town, the film crew find themselves under surveillance. They are tailed and interrogated by police, harassed by fishermen and locals who want them out of town, preferably in jail, in order to prevent the exposure of what occurs in the secluded cove of a bay protected by barbed wire fences and fishermen who crawl the hills at night, armed with knives.

“I do want to say that we tried to do the story legally,” says director Louie Psihoyos in the opening sequence, neatly summing up a sense of frustration with bureaucratic and political process that pervades the narrative. The covert, guerilla-style tactics that the filmmakers are required to employ, not only to capture the footage itself but to prevent the project being compromised by government and business interests in the region, result in The Cove feeling more like a thriller than a documentary. But that doesn’t mean information is left by the wayside in favour of an exciting story. On the contrary, in a finely-struck balance between research, narrative and personal testimony coupled with incredible footage, the film manages to document, inform and engage without losing momentum or narrative tension. The action is truly gripping and the revelations serious and disturbing.

This is quite openly an activist film, but it feels neither exaggerated nor uninformed. Rather, the activists involved exude a sense of respectful, intelligent engagement with both the animals whose welfare they defend and the audience itself. A lot of the credit for this must go to the presence of Ric O’Barry, the former trainer of the animal cast of 1960s television show Flipper, whose work sparked worldwide demand for performing sea mammals, and whose personal relationship with these very same animals has resulted in decades of activism against it. The film in general gives ample space to examining the relationship between dolphins and humans, and the emotional journey that many of the crew went through in the attempt to infiltrate the Taiji cove. The audience is invited into this relationship without reservation, the result of which being that when the footage from inside the cove is finally shown, the emotional impact leaves the audience reeling.

A thought-provoking film, both absorbing and distressing.

What troubles me most is an attitude of mind that could come to prevail amongst white Australians: a feeling of irritation apparently based on a conviction that we are saddled with the responsibility for problems not really of our making, and by their nature probably insoluble. (W.E.H. Stanner, 1978)

It’s the evening of Tuesday, February 12, 2008. I’m standing in the hallway of a Kilmore farmhouse while my second-cousin Phil, a giant of a man, digs through his bookshelves. They’re about as high as his knees. He’s piling my arms with books that he thinks might help me—Daly Family Languages, an ANU research paper on the mission and Peppimenarti, the Malak Malak land rights claim book, even a heavy hardcover on Top End Native Plants—but he’s looking for one in particular.

‘I’ve always found it really useful,’ he says. ‘It was written by a man I knew out on the Daly, a friend of mine. I still go back and read it when I’m confused about something—Ah! Here it is!’ He straightens up, grins at me through his beard and presents me with a very plain-looking hardback in a slightly scuffed, brown dust jacket. It’s a collection of essays by an anthropologist named W.E.H. Stanner, called White Man Got No Dreaming. ‘Start with that,’ Phil says. ‘But be gentle with it and don’t lose it—it was a present from the man himself.’

Later the same night, I’m holed up in one of Phil’s kids’ old bedrooms. I can’t sleep, so I decide to start on the Stanner book. There’s a looseleaf piece of notepaper folded inside the cover signed with Stanner’s name, thanking Phil and his wife, Willy, for their hospitality and friendship. I am careful not to crush it, and start reading.

Immediately, the four-page preface (the source of the above quote) has me scribbling notes in my journal. The opening essay, ‘The Aborigines’, completely blows my mind. I note the date it was written in incredulity: people were saying this in 1938?! I power through three and a half essays that night and wake up the next morning with my mind still buzzing. At 9am, the new Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd moves that parliament issue a formal apology to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were removed from their families as children, and all I can think is, ‘We’re only just getting to this now?!’

Three years ago, Aboriginal Australia was nowhere on my radar. I had minors in drama and history—none of it specifically Australian—philosophy and English majors, and Honours in creative writing. I had studied Germaine Greer but not Marcia Langton. I knew about the Redfern speech but not the Tent Embassy. I knew more about postcolonial India than I did about colonial Australia. Every piece of information I had about Aboriginal Australia was incidental and through a white populist filter, and it wasn’t until I was considering alternative topics for a PhD that I thought: there is something wrong with this. A year later, having suddenly found myself surrounded by anthropology, politics, Native Title legislation, political correctness, and the history wars, as someone who was looking to write a novel, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d accidentally walked into the topic through a side door. Stanner’s essays jolted me awake: this is relevant to me, I realised, I’ve seen this happen, and no wonder we’ve been getting it wrong for so many years.

A few years ago, Robert Manne tried to find a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming for sale and came up with nothing. The book had been out of print for decades. In April 2008, I was doing the same thing—hunting through secondhand stores and sending emails to every bookshop I could think of, desperately trying to dig up a copy. My university library had one—extremely aged—but it was always checked out or on reserve, and anyway, I wanted my own. I knew Stanner’s work couldn’t tell me everything there was to know about Aboriginal Australia, and that his observations came from a specific cultural milieu and political context. But he wrote ‘without condescension and without sentimentality’ (something so many other white male scholars in the field have been unable to do) and his observations about white Australia’s relationship to Aboriginal Australia still resonated so deeply half a century later—71 years in the case of the first essay—that I couldn’t believe it was so hard to find. Eventually, after a fruitless search, I got BiblioQuest onto it. It took them six weeks to call me and tell me they had found a copy, and it could be mine for $214.50. I paid.

In March 2009, Black Inc. republished most of the essays from White Man Got No Dreaming, including the highly influential Boyer lectures and a posthumously-published article on Aboriginal humour, in one paperback. It’s called The Dreaming and Other Essays and includes an introduction by Robert Manne. I found it last night in Readings and shrieked with excitement. If it was a sign of the times that Stanner’s essays had been so neglected, then perhaps their republication signals something positive—a slight shift in the wind, or a stronger push toward understanding Aboriginal Australia for its own sake. Or perhaps that’s just speculation. But for now, you can buy Stanner’s essays for $32.95—one sixth of the price I paid for them. And dammit, you should read them.

There’s a moment in the film Samson and Delilah where Delilah, destitute and desperate, attempts to sell a painting. She timidly proffers the canvas to people eating outside at a cafe in an Alice Springs mall. Some of them ignore her; others shake their heads dismissively and go back to their conversations. A couple of days later she tries again. This time there is purple-green bruising down one side of her face and her right eye is swollen shut. The customers at the cafe stare as she lashes out, throws the painting at them and is asked to leave.

I saw Samson and Delilah in Carlton last Monday with my mother. The Nova has become a regular haunt for us—tickets are cheaper on a Monday and the daytime crowd generally consists of about three retirees and a backpacker. So imagine our surprise when we arrived for an 11am session to find the line for the box office stretching halfway down Lygon Plaza. ‘Surely they can’t all be here for the same film?’ my mother exclaimed. Low-budget Australian directorial debuts don’t usually generate that much public interest, let alone films about Aboriginal Australia. In this case, however, apparently 5-star reviews on The Movie Show and in The Age had got people talking. So we took our seats early just to be on the safe side, and sure enough, our session was full.

The film begins in a remote community in Central Australia. Until the protagonists reach Alice Springs, the only white characters to appear in the film are a carpet-bagger and the surly owner of the local general store. Such is the power, poignancy and intimacy of the film up to this point that the audience has already well and truly fallen in love with the two teenagers, as they have fallen in love with each other. So when the cafe patrons blithely ignore Delilah, beaten and abused as she is, the audience suddenly sees themselves for the first time. Perhaps watching this movie in Lygon Street surrounded by restaurant culture and overpriced coffee gave the moment unexpected weight, but at this point, the (mostly white) patrons of the Nova shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car during a serious head-on collision with a motorcyclist. As a reaction to that, I became, for a while, involuntarily hyper-aware of everything that happened on the road—every slightly overshot turn or distant flash of brake lights. A similar thing happened once I started engaging with remote Australia. I became hyper-conscious of the words I used, of the assumptions and prejudices that informed every sentence I uttered or judgement I made. I spent months second-guessing myself, constantly asking whether I had the right to write this novel, whether I had the right to think I could come up with answers or even accurately identify the problems. My biggest fear was causing offense. How and when and under what circumstances could my voice possibly be appropriate in Aboriginal affairs when the more that I learnt, the more it became obvious to me how little I actually knew?

Part of the reason people avoid having anything to do with Aboriginal Australia —part of the reason I avoided the topic for so many years—is because it’s hard. For a city-going whitefella on the south coast, remote Aboriginal Australia seems like the antithesis of everything. It’s impossible to grasp the sheer size of the issues or the depth of misunderstanding until you actually start scratching below the surface. And engaging with the issues is not just about practical problems that take commitment and passion to understand and resolve; it’s difficult on a personal level, too. That flash of self-awareness that happens halfway through Samson and Delilah is a constant state for the non-Aboriginal person learning about Aboriginal Australia. And of our English terms—self discovery, epiphany, revelation, enlightenment—not one seems to capture the clumsiness and embarrassment—the profound sense of humbling that these moments force upon us.

After the film, my mother and I wandered down Lygon Street to a restaurant with lunch specials and sat at a little street table in the sun. We talked about the film and my novel and the way that scene made us feel, and we’d just been handed our food when a woman picking dirt out from under her nails with a stick approached the table and asked me for change.

I had no idea what to do. The couple at the table next to us ignored her. My mother, going deaf, hadn’t heard her. She was looking straight at me. As tough as it is being confronted with yourself on screen, there is still a line between epiphany through art and the translation of that into real life. And awareness is nothing if it doesn’t translate into action. I knew this before the woman asked me for change, and I knew it all over again when she did. But it was disconcerting to realise that I wasn’t going to help her out, not like this, and that no matter how much good I like to think I’m doing in the world, no matter how many barriers I’d like to think I’ve torn down, I was still building this wall by choice. It was (and is) a product of class, of prejudice, of cynicism, of a blame-the-victim mentality, and ultimately, of selfishness. I had no idea how I could even begin to try to fix it.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said. I really was sorry. I tried to smile. I tried to smile genuinely.

‘Okay, have a nice day,’ she said.

‘You too,’ I replied.

She paused, briefly. ‘Thankyou,’ she said. ‘And thankyou for your manners.’

Ann Blainey has recently published a new biography about Dame Nellie Melba, and today I spent my morning in the West Tower Suite on the 35th floor of the Sofitel listening to her speak about her research process, with salmon sandwiches and coffee courtesy of the Victorian Opera and my sweetest grin reserved for their generous, silver-haired patrons.

There have been about five other biographies about Melba, as I found out today, and while Blainey was talking I couldn’t help thinking dryly how lucky it was for biographers that someone so famous also had a life that slipped so easily into the conventional narrative form. Convinced she was destined for fame, family who said she could never do it, a vindictive husband, a son hidden from her for years, a public affair with royalty – if it were happening now, it would have been made for trash magazines.

After the talk, I stuck around for a few minutes, waited to get my book signed and watched my aunt do her PR thing – floating delicately around the pockets of people in the room, knowing everyone’s name, greeting every patron like an old friend. Out of the window and way down below, the trains were slugging through Flinders Street Station, as tiny as worms.

I’m always a bit jealous of people like Auntie K – able to just slide right through society, smoothing over the bumps and sidestepping the snares. Most of us don’t live like that. I don’t live like that. The smoothest thing about me is my ability to make excuses, and the bumps bruise my knees more often than not. It’s hard communicating with real people when so much of your life is inside your head – when you’re constantly trying to unravel the world and find a narrative seam, to pin down the thread between the imaginary and reality. It’s far easier just to stick my headphones in my ears, pull out a pen and smooth the edges over on paper.

And so my life is punctuated by awkward moments and uncomfortable silences.

Sometimes when I know I have to call someone who I don’t know very well, I’ll make a list of things that I can say to them, because I am afraid that if I just go straight to the point, people will think I’m rude, or self-absorbed, or too full-on, or simply not listening to them. My tendency to bluntness is a direct result of my inability to deal with not having something to fill the space with. Sometimes if I don’t have anything specific to say in the first place, I’ll fill the space with verbal jumble, because the last thing I want is an awkward silence. Silence itself is not the problem; I have been wrapped up in silences that are peaceful and warm – drenched in sunlight and completely without negative tension or expectation. But an awkward silence is worse than simply not speaking. An awkward silence, to me, says “We shouldn’t have tried speaking at all.” It sours the space between us and invariably I leave the interaction with a bitter taste in my mouth. I want my conversations to run as smoothly as they do in my mind – like a perfect bel canto aria – or not at all.

When I was a kid I would blush whenever I had to speak to more than one person at a time. I still blush if too many people look at me, or if I’m angry, or if I’m halfway through saying something that I think is really important. That shy, freckled 8-year-old loner bookworm is still in there. Every now and then she comes out of her corner and reminds me that real life does not fit into this perfect narrative box that I want it to, no matter how pretty my clothes or how big my ambitions or how awesome that one-liner was that one time. Real life is awkward. Real life is made of stilted conversations, unsatisfying goodbyes, misunderstood niceties. Beginnings and endings are accidental, love is arbitrary, and nine times out of ten I’m going to trip and scrape my knee.

Sometimes the melancholy swamps me.

I’ve taken to getting up early and studying before midday. (‘Early’ being between 8am and 9:30am, and trust me, this is impressive.) I usually get an chapter or two of some convoluted postcolonial theory read, shoot off a couple of emails, find an article on the university databases and scribble a couple of paragraphs about why I agree with so-and-so about a and b but think they went wrong at z. At about 12:30pm I’ll check the mailbox (the real one) have lunch and watch a couple of episodes of The West Wing.

It’s not the optimum time to watch a television show in the grand scheme of my thesis. After all, the daytime is when I get the house to myself. I can spread my books and paper out all over the kitchen table and under the windows and have direct access to the fridge and be thoroughly – *cough* – studious. But it’s also really the only time apart from midnight when I can sit on the couch or beanbag and watch a DVD of choice without housemate G interrupting / complaining / feeding me / wanting to watch So You Think You Can Dance / wanting to watch Sex and the City, or being relegated to the office to watch it on my iMac instead.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not doing me any harm to break my day up like this. In fact, I think it might actually be helping with my motivation levels. 3pm after all is my traditional nap-time (I am an excellent sleeper. If they had sleeping classes at university I’d blow everyone else out of the water with the enthusiasm of my Zs) and I am not allowed to succumb. To succumb to daytime sleep again so soon after breaking the habit is a slippery slope, so instead of sleeping, I watch The West Wing.

But I can’t watch more than a couple of episodes at once. All those busy people talking at high speed, working 18-hour days, careening through corridors with more things on their plate than they could possibly handle, getting up to come in to work on weekends, public holidays, and still cracking jokes – alright, I know it’s fiction. And sometimes, especially in the first couple of seasons, there would be those sentimental scenes where the music would swell and Martin Sheen may as well have been shrieking “Patriotic moment! Patriotic moment! American pride!” (Although to their credit, that kind of tackiness is very spare, and seems to have been dropped from an episode’s prerequisites pretty quickly. My theory is that they were included in the first season to hook a particular kind of audience, then done away with as too cringeworthy.) But the point is this: after an hour or so of watching the Bartlet Administration at work, I start feeling like one incredibly lazy person. I used to avoid study and favour socialising, because after all, what’s the point of throwing yourself into your work like that? But while watching The West Wing I think, maybe it wouldn’t be so painful to live like that. Maybe it would be mega-difficult and high stress but if you’re doing something you believe is important, you should be relishing the rush, right? The ability to do that work that you love is itself part of the reward.

More than once I’ve stopped an episode halfway through and got up to read another journal article, or the rest of a book, or in this case, to update my quite-often neglected blog. (If I’m stumped on my thesis, I may as well write something.) Quite honestly, I find it reinvigorating. It’s not often that a television show is so engaging and inspiring that it will actually make you feel like you should turn it off and go and do something more worthwhile. I feel like I don’t deserve to indulge in actually watching The West Wing until I’ve put some serious effort into my own responsibilities for the day and worked my brain to breaking point. That’s some kind of accomplished television, right?