Podcast Transcript
Ashley Hay Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia!
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Ashley Hay
Nicole Abadee 00:04
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for good weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books, Books podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicoleabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Episode Two of the Books, Books, Books: Griffith Review Series. It's wonderful to welcome back Dr. Ashley Hay, Editor of Griffith Review, to talk about Edition 73 called "Hey Utopia!" Ash, great to have you back on Books, Books, Books: The Griffith Review Series.
Ashley Hay 01:04
Thanks for having me, Nic.
Nicole Abadee 01:05
I'm going to start by asking you what does utopia mean to you?
Ashley Hay 01:09
Look, I think that's a really interesting one, because I think everybody has a slightly different sense of it, you know, there's the sort of bass dictionary definition of the imagined and perfect place. I think we all live in a world now where we've got those fantasies about what a utopia might be, I think we're possibly a little bit clear eyed about whether that perfect place not only is attainable or not, but is it even really desirable. We've probably run through enough failed utopian experiments now to to sort of see a little bit more of the nuance and the complexity and thinking about utopias. But when we began putting this edition of Griffith Review together, we were really looking for a framework that allowed us to explore other ways the world could be, in terms of its past, its present and its future. Now, given that this book was coming into the world in August, I think quite a few of us have a bit of an investment in imagining other ways the world could be. But I, in saying that, this is this is not a COVID edition COVID gets it's toes in here and there but it just felt like a nice time to be saying, how do we think about other states in the world? How do we think about remaking different parts of the world? How do we use our imaginations in this world? What do we actively have to do in the world to realize those imaginings and all these different voices and ideas from lots of different disciplines and perspectives, sort of feed around those central concerns.
Nicole Abadee 02:45
Ash what was the brief that you gave to contributors?
Ashley Hay 02:47
Griffith Review, you know part of our thing is that we have a different theme, a different topic every three months, and, and it's always had this capacity to be able to somehow project itself forward and see what we need to be talking about in you know, six months, nine months, 12 months time, this was famously the talent of its founding editor, Julianne Schultz and it's a very interesting process to go through. This edition, this third edition for 2021, our second year in a pandemic, I as the person now in charge of doing that forecasting and crystal ball gazing, I found this one very hard to think about, because one thing we've learned over the last 18-20 months is how, how little we can predict what is going to come next. So when we sent, when we started talking to writers and we sent the call out out, we talked a little bit about some of the earlier very famous utopian ideas that, that particularly creative writers have put into the world and then we asked our writers to think about what our visions of utopia look like today how we try to disentangle very practical realities from what I guess you could call daydreams or pipe dreams. We wanted to explore the dangers of utopianism, the dangers of that sort of presumption that there is a perfect other state that we can aspire to let alone whether we can ever reach it or not. But we also wanted to look quite particularly at the ways issues like sustainability and gender equity and economic justice, can feed into our visions of an ideal society can feed into the ways we think about different ways of life. We also wanted to make a very big call for the role of imagination, this extraordinary capacity that we have as humans to, to think about things that have happened and play them out through different endings in different scenarios to think about what might happen and play that out through other possibilities and scenarios. It's a really amazing capacity when you think about it, to be able to revisit our past and, you know, in this way foreshadow possible futures. And so imagination ended up being a very central part of the addition as a whole.
Nicole Abadee 05:16
And that comes through in a number of the pieces, some of the ones we're going to be talking about today. There are 34 contributors to this issue, they've written essays, memoir, reportage, fiction, poetry, and there's a couple of photo essays as well. Sadly, we can't talk about all of these, but we're going to discuss a few from each of those different categories starting with essays. First one I want to ask you about is by Professor Julianne Schultz and she was and is, up until now, the founder and publisher of Griffith Review. Her essay, which is entitled "Facing Foundational Wrongs" takes us back to the Federation debates to argue that ever since then, there's been a lingering racism in this country, which she describes as a moral deficit in Australian politics. And she takes us right back to those constitutional debates in 1901 and she talks quite a bit about the White Australia policy, how it evolved and what it was, could you just remind us a little bit about the White Australia policy?
Ashley Hay 06:14
Look one of the things that I think is so powerful about Julianne's essay, is the way she unpacks, you know, this policy, which was pretty much about controlling who was in Australia, who counted in Australia, how they were counted, and right down two really, really severe restrictions on movement restrictions on ways of being one of the things that I found really interesting in this piece was looking at the way this wasn't, this wasn't really accepted in the rest of the world. You know, there was a lot of kind of question about Australia, setting itself up as this very new nation state
Nicole Abadee 06:54
Even in England in the mother country.
Ashley Hay 06:56
Yes,
Nicole Abadee 06:56
You made that point, which was really interesting.
Ashley Hay 06:59
Exactly! Setting itself up in such an exclusive way. Now when, you know, Julianne is working on this wonderful book, which is coming out next year, which is sort of looking at Australia's, you know, history since Federation and this essay, in some ways walks towards some of the work she's been doing there. But it is just this thing of saying all the ways we have mistaken ourselves as utopian, you know, that word is used by politicians and public servants and various people all the way through from very, very early on in the piece. The way we make these assumptions about who we are and what we are and the way it absolutely, it allows us to remain absolutely blind to how this new nation state is treating the oldest inhabitants of this landscape. And I think, you know, there's there are, there are some particular points in the piece, Julianne was talking about the restrictions on movement, I think it was in the 1920s, I'm pulling that out of my head at the moment around Indian people with family and background in India coming in and out of Australia in the 1920s. And as she was working on this way, we of course, were in this extraordinary space where the borders have been closed in Australia, to Australian citizens who were in India, and it was a very sobering thing to understand these questions of control of exclusion, you know, in this, in the context of a 120 year conversation, I was going to say that we have been having, but really it's 120 year conversation that we haven't been having around a lot of these issues. One of the points that I loved in this particular essay was a very small, you know, almost offhand comment that at one point, there was a move to name this newly invented capital city that Australia was going to have not Canberra, but Utopia, which I think in the context of all of the news that we've seen coming out of Canberra, particularly in the last year, two years recent times, would have been a headline writers dream if we had all of this emerging from utopia. But I think just the way this phrase drops casually, you know, Julianne opens the piece with remembering when border force was sent up, and the first sort of the first sort of presentation of its commissioner and its uniform and its purpose in the world. And even in that space, there's a reference to protecting our utopia. Now, that language is very interesting and the subtitle of Julianne's essay is "careful what you wish for" which I think is a really, just a really poignant reminder of saying, Here is a particular unpacking of, you know, this part of our history through this, the use and the misuse of this one word, but what is it that we're saying about ourselves, what are we presuming about who we are and how we operate, if we keep dropping this little utopian label into the space that is contemporary Australia.
Nicole Abadee 10:07
And she makes the point that the utopia that we've been talking about for all these years is a white utopia and she talks about how it's a utopia that excludes, obviously First Nations people, and it excludes from those early days because of the White Australian policy, all non European immigrants. And she says that there are echoes of this white utopia that continue to recur in Australian policy and political rhetoric, in law, personal racial abuse and she gives a couple of very pertinent examples. One of them is the, what she calls the brutal rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. And the other example she gives us the treatment of Adam Goodes, she makes the point that a lot of ordinary Australians came out to support him, but no politicians did and the AFL itself didn't apologise or do anything to deal with that situation for some time. So she makes the point that this concept of a white utopia is really part of our foundation story.
Ashley Hay 11:04
And I think what's interesting in exactly those examples, that you just mentioned, there is particularly around Adam Goodes, but also around the presentation, the invitation in the Uluru Statement from the Heart is there was enormous public support for you know, it was public support for Adam Goodes, there is public support for, you know, the adoption of the Uluru Statement. You know, as part of a lot of acknowledgement of action that needs to be taken, you know, concrete action, philosophical action, all these sorts of ways of thinking and, and that, that sort of unpacking of the distinction between how the public perceives and responds to something and what happens at a political level, a political level broadly, is a really, it's an interesting space to consider in the context of any country, but certainly, in the context of an Australia that tells itself very specific stories about, you know, the kinds of people that Australians believe themselves to be, and how they like to think of how they treat each other. This is a very interesting week to be thinking about this. But I think what makes Julianne's essay so powerful is that, you know, in her time and her role, first of all, as Founding Editor and now as publisher of Griffith Review, she's stepping down from that role when she leaves Griffith University this coming September, but she is such an exquisite reader and translator of who Australians are, who they believe themselves to be, and the gaps that sometimes exist in between those two spaces, either at a personal level, or at a political level and that's a phenomenally important space to explore.
Nicole Abadee 12:58
Ash she does make that point, as you say that there seems to be quite a public appetite for reform in a number of areas and she talks about what's been happening globally as a result of COVID and the end of the Trump years and how that seems to herald the end of neoliberalism. Then she asks herself, whether it is possible in Australia, for these things to provoke change, in particular, whether, as a result of COVID, there is a chance for all of us to rethink fundamentals. And she suggests, as we've said that there's a public appetite for it. But she says that the political will is lacking. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Ashley Hay 13:35
Well, I think that's a sense that we've felt, again, recently, you know, you and I are talking just the week after the IPCC report came out, you know, that is a classic space of, you know, a place where you can see such a desire for change, and such an enormous space of political inactivity. One of the other very strong pieces that we have in this edition is by Amanda Tattersall, is one of the co founders of Get Up amongst, you know, a lot of other work that she's done as a Changemaker. And she goes back to her involvement in the massive protests that were mobilised in 2003, around the world against the invasion of Iraq. And she talks about having to struggle as a Changemaker with the disconnect between the millions of people who went out and marched around the world, and the political response. And, you know, I think again, and again, you know, in examples in Amanda's piece and examples in a number of pieces in the book, there is this space, and it's a very challenging one, again, to think about, but as the scale and scope of these problems, get, you know, larger and larger and larger, you sort of think, well, we are all you know, we are engaging with it in our own personal lives, we are engaging, whether it's climate change or whether it's, you know, protesting, something that, you know, some large geopolitical act that we don't agree with. But that sense of disconnection between the different parts of the people who make the decisions and the public is, is getting more and more pronounced, we published a book at the beginning of 2020, called Matters of Trust and a lot of that was, you know, exploring questions of trust in our big institutions in our government, in our public service in, you know, in, in the police and, you know, in the in with nurses, and all those sort of layers of the different sectors that we intersect with. And I think, coming down to this question of trust, if there is a growing disconnect between, you know, what people feel is, is, is their opinion and the sort of things they would like to see action on, and what actually happens in the band of people who have the capacity to make those changes to undertake that action, then that is only going to eat into whatever trust exists, and in the political sphere, that feels pretty urgent at the moment.
Nicole Abadee 16:05
Ash let's look now at the essay by Sarah Sentilles, who is a writer, an American writer, and her essays called "Creation Stories: The World Making Power of Art" and there's a beautiful quote, which I had highlighted, and I saw when I read your introduction you had pointed to as well, and she says this, "when we make art, sentence, loaf of bread, garden, painting, we exercise the muscles, we need to remake the world, we remember it is possible to make something new." What does she mean by that?
Ashley Hay 16:40
I find this I mean, that sentence, I think, you know, if I was someone who believed in tattoos, I'd get that, you know, put onto some part of my person. I think the absolute power in this piece is bringing the awareness to everyone that they have the capacity to make new things. And, and if you if you play that out, too, it's sort of, you know, furtherest extension that includes making the world new, and how she talks about doing this is through creativity. Now, her her own background is in large part as a as a theological scholar, which I think is a really interesting space to explore utopias from.
Nicole Abadee 17:26
And she claimed to be an Episcopal priest didn’t she?
Ashley Hay 17:28
Yes, yeah and she and she sort of comes into the conversation in this way of talking about, you know, coming into the question of creativity and utopians through this prism of religion. But particularly, again, in this in this pandemic, time, you know, in this in the in the space where so many people have come back into their houses, have been making all those loaves of sourdough, have been, you know, so many people are writing poetry, again, have been out in their gardens, there is something incredibly empowering in recognising that, like imagination, that is any innate human skill to make new things. And, you know, I'm very fortunate and privileged, the work that I do is in, is in a space where we are making new things all the time. And I think, you know, you know, when you work in that space, you know, the excitement of it, and the power of it, and, and you hope that people see the potential of it, you hope that people see the potential of just this ability, we have to say here is a new way of thinking about this thing, here is a new idea. Here is, here is a new, you know, a new patch with six Tomato plants and some Basil in it, whatever it is, it's it's the the making and the nurturing, and the growing. And I think there is thinking about those things as a muscle thinking about them as giving us all the capacity to make the world new somehow, is an incredibly empowering idea at the moment and speaks to that disconnection that Julianne talks about. You know, while we were waiting for these big things to happen up here well, let's look at the ways even the smallest ways that we can make change where we are.
Nicole Abadee 19:12
And that's something she really points to. She argues that making art is a revolutionary act. She calls it activism. She calls it one of the most vital things we can do right now. She says it's a radical act. Why does she say that? How is creating art, for example, writing a book or an essay activism?
Ashley Hay 19:29
Well, I think it is underscoring the potential for the new and underscoring the potential for change. I think it's, it is, it is working at decoding the world as it is and working at decoding what its future might be. I loved, I am a very big admirer of Sarah Sentille's work. I found her through "Draw Your Weapons," which I thought was an extraordinary book. And she also wrote a very powerful essay about empathy a while ago, which I think feeds into "Stranger Care," her new book. She had this great idea in, in this essay about the limitations of empathy, that empathy requires us to find a sort of common ground with people and then we, then we can sort of feel for them or feel what they're feeling. And she was saying, but the point is, we've got to find the connection where there's nothing in common. That's where radical empathy comes in. So when we started to think about utopias, I thought she might be someone who was quite interested in exploring this space. And we had this lovely moment when I got in touch with her where she, she said that these kinds of ideas, she's very concerned about the idea of utopia, she's sort of concerned about, you know, how utopias get hijacked and how they get set up to, you know, really delineate and define what people are able to do. And she wanted to look at the sort of the, the enormous potential of creativity beyond that, and essentially, our invitation was giving her the opportunity to write this piece she'd been thinking about for years and years and years, and to bring these ideas about the power of art, about the power of creativity, the power of connection, the power of possibility, as well onto the page. So I'm just so grateful for the opportunity, well, to be able to give her the opportunity to make the piece in the first place, and then the opportunity of sharing it with readers on the other side of that.
Nicole Abadee 21:20
She makes another really lovely point and that is how, in practicing art, you as the artist or the Creator, are actually learning to practice a more focused attention. She says this, "when I spend an hour writing, instead of an hour watching the news or on social media, the quality of my ideas changes, what I understand as possible expands, my sense of agency grows." So she argues, contrary to what a lot of people say, or suggest that by focusing on your art, you're being selfish. She says no, focusing on art, focusing on creation is actually an incredibly generous act because it enables you to imagine a better world and to think about how you might help to create that. What do you think about that idea Ash?
Ashley Hay 22:07
I it really resonates with me, there's a there's a mindfullness that, sorry that can be quite a loaded term, but there's a mindfulness that comes with creative work, and with the immense privilege of having the time and space to undertake that, which I think changes your perceptions of and relationships with so many other parts of the world. I, I know I mean, what the one of the ways I found Sarah Sentilles' work was through the Australian novelist, Charlotte Wood. And I know that Charlotte, you know, has drawn on Sarah's work in some of her own writing. And a long time ago, I did a writing retreat with Charlotte and she had this wonderful phrase about tilting the mind and it was basically you spent a week before you had this week, where you were only going to be doing your work. You spent a week sort of bringing yourself towards that space, you know, just really paying attention and giving it the, giving it the, giving it the, what's the word I'm looking for, you know, honouring it, in a sense by giving it the space and the attention and giving it the value, I guess I'm saying this matters. And I was fascinated in that process of how it changed your perception of all those other facets of the world. So you know, I'm with Sarah Sentilles, if I could not watch the news, I'm in a much happier state of mind, there's all sorts of reasons for that, but but I think the way you then do look at the world, whether it is your, you know, the curated social media world of your friends, or whoever you're connecting with in that space, or the world that's coming into you through the seven o'clock news. I think that attention and that, that that space that you've brought into your own work also changes how you engage with all those other things. And it's, as someone who is in a position to sort of experience that every so often it sounds like a vaguely alchemical thing, but it's very powerful and the the lovely clarion call in in Sarah, Sarah's pieces you said you know the loaf of bread, the planting the plant, the the making a painting, the making a sentence, it's not as if you have to be Charlotte wood to make the sentence. The point is, we all can do this, whatever it is building a wall or knitting a jumper or you know any of these things. It is a remembering, this is like our imagination. This is a capacity that we have, and a muscle that we can exercise like any other muscle.
Nicole Abadee 24:39
Let's talk now about Professor Danielle Celermajer, she's a professor at Sydney University and the Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. And she's contributed an essay called "Grounded Imaginaries." I just want to set the background a little bit to this one so that it's clear to listeners what she's talking about. So she starts by saying the current system that we are living in are creating disastrous outcomes for all life, human life and also non human life. So the way that we're living is creating catastrophic climate change. We therefore need transformation and she wants to explore how we bring that about. She says that at the moment, we have three responses to the prospect of a climate exchange of a climate change future, she calls them three imaginaries. The first is business as usual, which basically amounts to total denial. The second is rescue and escape, that either technology will save us from the effects of catastrophic climate change, or God will. And the third is apocalypse and doom, that it's all hopeless. We're all doomed. We have no power to do anything or to change this and it's all just doom and gloom. Now, she argues that each of those three approaches is flawed. Why are they flawed? What's wrong with those approaches?
Ashley Hay 26:04
Well, I think they deny the real world in a sense, I think what is wonderful about this idea of grounded imaginaries is that it insists on bringing the problem back into the space where we are, so you know, there's a there's a level of escapism in all three of those in the utter denial, in the something amazing will come in and save us "knight in shining armour" you know and in the, you know, it's all the end of the world, although I have to say, um, you know, that's a hard, a hard thing, not to think at the moment. But I think what's wonderful about this idea of grounded imaginaries, is it wants to talk about practical measures about bringing people into the space where they are with the resources that they have in the particular context that they have and saying, what can you do here? How can you work here to change how you are adapting how you are living with climate change? And there's a, I think that line that I referred to, in our original call out of untangling the sort of practical realities from the pipe dreams is most clearly summed up in this piece from Danielle. I, I found Danielle, I accidentally found her. I met her at the Adelaide Writers Festival, you know, one of those amazing moments this year, where we could actually be in the same place at the same time as each other and Danielle, a lot of people might remember during the horrific summer of 2019 / 2020, she'd written a piece for ABC online, she had a pig called Jimmy and Jimmy had survived the horrific fires in her part of the South Coast of New South Wales, her other pig hadn't. And she wrote this piece about watching Jimmy, come back into the landscape and understand, you know, and respond to what was happening there. And out of that, there was an enormous response all over the world to this piece and out of that, she wrote a beautiful book called "Summertime," which came out in 2020, I think. But I met her in the, in the, at the Adelaide Writers Week, and we started talking about this idea of grounded imaginaries, this idea that we have different imaginaries different sort of default spaces that we go to that guide, how we let ourselves think about things, how we let ourselves think about what might be possible. And I loved the word grounded in what she was doing, of just saying, you know, where are you and what's possible? She's part of a big project that's working on this with some particular places in India and I think that's a really fascinating piece of, you know, academic research in and of itself. And it speaks also, there's an another amazing piece in this edition by Briohny Doyle, who her beautiful novel "Echolalia" came out earlier this year, and she also works, you know, a lot in the sort of climate space. But Briohny makes this great point that we tend to treat, we come to sort of apocalypse stories with the idea that they're that, they're they're sort of the big, full stop the big interruption in something and then there's this extraordinary renewal on the other side of it. And Briohny says, No, you know, you have the big moment and then you just have the next moment and the next moment and the next moment, it's, you know, you're just always in the next now. And I think that idea resonates really with a lot of what Dannie is unpacking in her piece of just saying, look, we've got all these structures by which we, we can think about what we might do, but a lot of them are constraining us, a lot of them are limiting us and really, you know, where we are, if we could look clearly at where we are and the resources we all had to hand, we would be in a different imaginative space in a sort of space of different potential for adaptation and change through that.
Nicole Abadee 29:53
And as you say, that choice of the word grounded, what she's, seems to me she's saying there is it has to be grounded in reality that these days are not fanciful possibilities, people need to know that there are possibilities, there are ways of responding to a future that's dramatically catastrophically changed by climate change. There are realistic, there are realistic possibilities. And the work that you mentioned, the joint project being done by her Institute and and in India, is looking at recent work, looking at how different communities are actually responding in practice, to the practical challenges caused by climate change, she gives a couple of examples of that two examples happening in Australia. One of them is about communities running local energy projects. And the other is about farmers rejecting chemical fertilisers and in using regenerative measures instead. And she argues that because the communities themselves are driving change, this sort of transformation is democratic and desirable. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?
Ashley Hay 31:01
I think this also comes back to that disconnect that we were talking about in the context of Julianne Schultz's piece between, you know, the sort of desire for action at the ground level, and the, you know, the political, the slowness of the political process, shall we say, at the other level. And I think there is, you know, there is incredible sense of agency and power in saying, you know, this community is doing this thing, you know, this is, you know, here is the micro grid here is the, the, you know, collective of farmers that are changing, you know, what they plant, how they plant, when they plant, what goes where, all of these things. And there's been a massive movement, we published a piece a couple of years ago by Charlie Massey about this, here has been a huge response to his sort of focus on regenerative farming and the agricultural space is really interesting in Australia in terms of what it's, what it's doing, and how it's responding. I think if there's any sort of limitation, it is that, you know, yes, there is all this amazing activity, and it is incredibly important to understand how you can engage with it, or how you can be part of it, or how you can, you know, in your own way, make a difference, change something, you know, get something off the ground, it doesn't preclude the need for the big, you know, policy wide, overarching, you know, governments of the world coming together, it doesn't take away their need for those decisions, as well. I think it's super, it's so important to have that sense of personal agency, but it's not to let the people with political agency off the hook for not sort of getting a move on in some spaces.
Nicole Abadee 32:43
Let's move now to look at memoir. One that I thought we'd talk about is by Lea McInerney, who is a writer and she's written a very pertinent piece which is entitled life on job keeper. So we find out she's a freelance trainer and a workshop facilitator. She's also in the process of writing a book but she earns her living from those those first two types of work, training people and facilitating workshops. So, as with so many people in the arts and the creative sector, all of her paid work dried up during the COVID lockdown, and she was in Melbourne last year. And she received job keeper the government allowance, what she calls Australia's mini experiment in having a universal basic income or a UBI. What impact did it have on her? What impact on her life on her work, and on her mental health, did it have for her to receive that regular allowance?
Ashley Hay 33:43
I love the opening of Lea's piece, because she describes this very small moment when she's taking her designated amount of exercise time in that brutal lockdown that Melbourne went through last year. And she's in a park. And she realises that she feels happy. And it's because she is giving she's able to give herself to these creative work that she wants to do. This speaks back to Sarah Sentille's piece that we were just talking to. It is you know, Leah has been working on on a guest sort of memoir project with a First Nations Elder who's over in South Australia. And when all of her paid work falls away and this money starts turning up, she has space to focus on this project. She has the space to do the work that matters. And it is this lovely little embodied, you know, Lea McInerney is in a sense, you know the smallest part of the small experiment that is what would a universal basic income mean to the creative workers of Australia now? Given the response through COVID, in terms of getting funding to the creative sector, there have been some lovely initiatives that have been lovely initiatives for you know, some individuals and for the, you know, some organisations and you know, there are some really great projects that are underway. But the complications for people working in the cultural sector, which is a precarious sector at the best of times, in terms of accessing job keep, the number of people who couldn't access job keeper who couldn't access, any kind of support. I think, you know, there's there's not a lot of lovely epiphanies that have come out of the COVID time. But Lea's own lived experience with her work with this, this little period of support that she could have, and, and how that transformed the project itself but her relationship with her work, her sort of her mental health, everything. I, I was just delighted to, I was delighted that she brought this onto the page, because we talk a lot about the precarity of this profession, this industry, this sector.
Nicole Abadee 36:15
Ash there are a couple of other pieces in this edition, where people talk about the impact of COVID on people in the arts and creative industries. What are those pieces? Well, it's, there's a really fabulous pair of pieces in this book, one by Justin O'Connor, who works out of University of South Australia. One by Julian Meyrick who is at Griffith University, Justin looks at the overall cultural landscape of Australia how, how it has come to be in the state it's in and more urgently, what it needs, you know, what it needs to be aware of, as it desperately tries to navigate into, you know, some future state. So Lea is the sort of lived experience of job keeper coming in and and the way that that injection that fortnightly injection of a payment changes her own sort of cultural space Justin looks at the the sort of huge topography of the cultural sector, in terms of how funding has changed over the decades in terms of, you know, presumptions that the sector has made presumptions that you know, governments of different stripes have made how all of this has led us to the particular place that we found ourselves in in the particular precarity that the pandemic increased and introduced. And Julian's piece then talks about Julian works also as a Theatre Director, and he talks from a very personal space of having the first show to go on tour after the lockdown in Melbourne, having watched, you know, that shows sort of be mothballed and postponed and upheaved in all sorts of ways across that year, getting it back into the theatre, watching the audience come in, just feeling the weight of what he knew the sector had been experiencing and understanding how that felt and what it meant through the context of the particular play that he was bringing to an audience then. It's, it's been an interesting time in the cultural sector, you'd have to say that, but I think there's a lovely conversation between these three pieces. Julian's is very philosophical, Lea's is very personal, and, you know, on the ground lived experience and Justin's insists that we look at how we got to this point, and really what we need to think about as we try very urgently to get ourselves out of it. And I just like to come back to one of the points that Lea makes, which I think is a very important one, that by her receiving these regular payments, she was basically released from doing any other sort of work, other than the work that she, as it happens was absolutely passionate about which was recording the story of this First Nations man. And she thinks about that a bit and she realises that that is that, that particular project, it's quite possible that she is the best placed person to do that, but nobody else could do that quite as well as she can. She looks at the other jobs that she does as a Workshop Facilitator, as a Trainer and she she realises that there's a lot of other people that could do that work not just her. So I thought that was a really nice take out as well that by giving her that equivalent the universal basic income to an artist in that way you were really enabling them to be their best person and to do their best work.
Ashley Hay 39:32
That comes back to to what we were talking about with Sarah Sentille's piece earlier of honouring the work you know, of, of being able to actually hold the space for it and to say, you know, this matters, this matters, for this man personally to have his story told but it matters because this story you know impacts, will impact, will reach these readers. It's it's actually, It's being, it's being enabled to take the value of it seriously, rather than tucking it in around the edges of the money making work, which is the thing that has always had to have more value placed on it simply because you have to pay your rent and buy your food and support whoever you're supporting.
Nicole Abadee 40:24
As you say, that comes back to exactly what Sarah said about the space to focus your attention on your art. Before before COVID, she had this one central project that she was passionate about but she had to fit that in around her working day, maybe a couple of hours at night, maybe a couple of hours in the morning. But being released from the need to make an income by doing this less rewarding work, she was then able to focus all of her intentions on the work she was really passionate about and make it the really best that it could be.
Ashley Hay 40:52
And if you think about how this project will feed into, you know, Australia's national narrative, I'd argue I'm sure Lea's a fantastic Trainer and I'm sure all those workshops are wonderful but I would argue this is incredibly important work in the context of that broader national narrative. And it's Yeah, as I say, we can't publish too many happy stories about COVID and I'm really delighted that we were able to bring this finding to this edition of Griffith Review.
Nicole Abadee 41:20
And she draws it all together at the end by talking about the benefits that she sees in a universal basic income. So she gives us something to think about prevents poverty, it nurtures creativity, and it values people for what they contribute. So that's a really important take out I think, in terms of people in the creative industries in the arts.
Ashley Hay 41:40
And in terms of any industry, I think, you know, if you, if you say something, you know, prevents poverty nurtures creativity, you know, increases people's sense of value, whoever they are, whatever they can contribute, all of those have to feed to mental health, which, you know, takes us a whole Edition back to States of Mind. But yeah, I there was something in the New Yorker just this week in its daily newsletter about a lot of people specifically in the knowledge creation industries, in the knowledge industries, there's been a lot of resignations, and a lot of, you know, changing life plans and changing work plans. And it is because, you know, notions of value are changing. And that's interesting if you start haemorrhaging your knowledge workers out of Science or out of the Arts or out of wherever. But it's also interesting if it is part of a bigger rethinking or remaking of how we work, why we work, the work we want to do, the work we understand is important. And what that work can then do when it starts to combine you know, out in the world and finds its own audiences. I see a future edition of Griffith Review on just that topic. I think that would be fascinating. Okay, let's have a look at reportage and I loved this bit. We won't talk about it for too long. But I love this piece by Irene Caselli. So she's a researcher who researches the early stages of life from conception, I love that, to two. And she's written a piece called worlds of play, which is all about the child friendly city movement involving children in urban design, and she says it really the movement took off in the 1990s, since then, there's been a unit, a UN document or report attached to it. She talks about a specific project in Colorado called The Growing Up Boulder Project. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, it's this glorious idea that if you actually consult children about the spaces that they would like to be in and play in and live in, not only will you make something that the children enjoy more, but you will actually make landscapes that benefit everyone. And I love this idea. I just think it is so obvious once you start thinking about it and so powerful. The there's quite a bit in this piece about The Growing Up Boulder Project and and how it sort of moved out from its beginnings to you know, actually not just thinking about parks or playgrounds, but actually thinking about lots of different parts of the city landscape, you know, where you put a seat for someone to sit on and what those things, you know, how those things, what they look like how they operate. But there's a there's a city that she mentions is a European city, which I'm not now going to pull from my head, but I know you will.
Nicole Abadee 44:37
Albania
Ashley Hay 44:38
Yeah, where this you know, this, this sort of child friendly, city focus has actually helped to undo some of the political divisions and tensions in a city, which I just think is magic. And the idea of you know, of, of consulting the people who are actually involved, this speaks, this is a very tangential link, but You know, come with me here. I think this to me talks to there's a there's a powerful, powerful piece in this book by Jane Gleason white called arranger, which is all about reframing economics by actually counting what women do the same way that you cannot what men do. It's, you know, there's people have been talking about this for some time now. And I think Jane is up to her back teeth with it. And there's a lot of ferocity in this piece. But this idea of of, we change, we change what's possible to do in a landscape when we change who we're talking to about what's happening, happening there, and how we're talking, what we're asking them this also, it intersects with a fantastic piece by Helen such that reframes poverty through the, through ideas of, you know, the individual deprivation measure, and actually looking not at the dollar a day metric or the, you know, per capita thing, but actually unpacking the experience of poverty. Is it different for women than men? Well, strangely enough, it is
Nicole Abadee 45:55
And she gives examples such as access to sanitation, access to cleaning water
Ashley Hay 45:58
Exactly
Nicole Abadee 45:59
Access to clothing, access to the internet, that, that was also a fascinating piece looking, if you measure extreme poverty in a different way, not just in monetary terms, then perhaps that will give you a better way to think about how you might be able to eradicate it.
Ashley Hay 46:14
Absolutely. And I think, you know, with Irene's piece is this thing, of saying, "Hey, what about talking to the children, what about actually asking them what they'd like and why they'd like it and how they'd like it to work." It connects to Jane's piece, it connects to Helen Suich's piec it connects to Hugh Possingham's piece about citizen science. But Irene's is just this wonderful demonstration of what a different perspective can open up and again, I think the really important point that I took away from it was not just to make an afternoon in a playground, more fun for a kid, but to change the experience of being in the city, for elderly people, for adults, you know, as they say, that sort of at a political level, you know, this, this sense of, of understanding it as a human right, you know, part of the work this UN document does is saying, you know, these people have a right to be heard now. You know, to come back to that sort of climate space again, we have seen the increasing power of children claiming their voices in that space to again think well, what if you just bring it down to your neighbourhood, you know, your, your walk to school, your city, wherever you are, and, and, you know, get the perspective from three foot high, instead of, you know, five foot six, or whatever it is. I think there's something really, really lovely and empowering in this idea, again, you know, across all kinds of landscapes.
Nicole Abadee 47:48
And as you say, I love that central point as well, that by making a city better for children, you're actually making it better for everyone. And she gives examples, there's less, less traffic, better access to nature, separate paths for walkers, and cyclists. I mean, who would have thought, green spaces? All of these are fantastic ideas. I really loved that piece as well. Let's move now there are two picture essays in this edition. We'll only talk about one of them, but one that, they're both fascinating, but this one by Dr. Fiona Foley, I found particularly interesting. So she's an Indigenous Artist and a Lecturer and she has created something called the Magna Carta Tree, which she calls it's a photographic project. She calls it a utopian thought experiment. Could you tell us a little bit about that photographic project?
Ashley Hay 48:42
I love the I love Fiona Foley's work. She's an award winning Badtjala artist and she's at Griffith University. Badtjala is the First Nations, the First Nation around the Fraser Coast around Fraser Island.
Nicole Abadee 48:58
So that's specifically what she's talking about.
Ashley Hay 49:00
Yeah. So Badtjala is Fraser Island, and that sort of and that Fraser Coast area, and this piece was inspired, there are extraordinary mangroves all around Queensland, well, there should be all around or different ones all around Australia. But there is one mangrove in particular on a piece of property on Badtjala country, which is currently a cattle farm and it's a particularly striking tree. And the the family that that owns this land, manages this land at the moment, had it dated, and it was found to be 700 years old, so that the man who actually owns the farm called it the Magna Carta Tree because it comes you know, it would have been a seedling in that time. And Fiona does this wonderful thing of sort of picking up this image and, and taking the the invitation of that name that idea to imagine a different path, to put like these very sumptuously imagined historical alternatives into a Badtjala landscape into, you know, a historical context. And in that way to kind of play around with the idea of reframing history reframing the past and what that allows you to do in terms of reframing the future and the present. And she's very, she's she picks up on work by Rosie Bray Dotty, who I think we might have talked about last time, I can't actually remember now, but just this this lovely image of using creative work to time travel and in time traveling to see other possibilities. As she says, it's it's, you know, to, to imagine, to imagine country as a Badtjala person now it has to be, you know, has to be a thought experiment, because there's not a lot of evidence and Badtjala culture on the country. There's not a lot of evidence of, you know, their story, their recent past let alone, you know, deep time connection, the mangroves are part of that connection. And I loved this idea of, of, of the thought experiment, of being invited to time travel and of the absolutely rich narrative that she brings into being through this series of very staged, very lush photographs.
Nicole Abadee 49:02
And she travels across different times as well as different locations. So she goes back, as she says, to the 1300s to the mangrove swamps. She also goes to more recent history, the late 1800s, where she writes about one of these particular towns in this area just opposite, where Fraser Island is Maryborough, was an opium den. And she writes about how the whites paid the First Nations people for their labor in opium, she talks about that and she also talks about the fact that the white people started to object to their being First Nations people, they started suggesting that the white men were getting diseases from the Indigenous girls and as a result, in 1897, a group of Badtjala people were actually banished from the mainland to Fraser Island to something called the Boggy Creek mission, which he says was a complete hellhole. So these photographs look to me as if they're drawing on that as well.
Ashley Hay 52:25
Absolutely. And Fiona has done a lot of work in this space so her book "Biting the Clouds" which grew out of her PhD work was published last year, and it's actually listed, it's on the shortlist for this year's Work of State Significance in the Queensland Literary Awards and so the, some of the, some of the timelines that she is exploring are in these opium dens and are sort of flicking the, flicking the questions of responsibility, you know, who's, who's doing what, to whom here? Who is responsible, who is in power, who is in control? And then as I say, these are Absolutely oh just visually stunning pieces of artwork that allow you to sink into this, this little sort of snapshot of possibility, you know, is this what this place looked like? Is this the person who's in control of this situation? Is, you know, what is the relationship that I'm looking at here? What is going on underneath this narrative? What are the opportunities for different tellings of this story? You know, how can I reframe it just in that kind of creative space? And I think, you know, not only is there this, this powerful series of, I think we have seven of the photos from the series, they're on show at the moment in Brisbane, and we've got seven of them in this edition, but she's also written this essay, explaining how she came into the work, what she wanted the work to do, what the sort of, what the thinking into the work was, which I think is really fascinating, and also how the work, you know, speaks to this ongoing relationship she has with mangroves, this ongoing, ongoing, relationship, ongoing relationship she has with this particular country in this particular space.
Nicole Abadee 53:40
And she says that one of the things that she wants to do is what she clearly wants to do is to remind people of the history of this area. She She makes the point that this city Maryborough she says his white washed it's racist past it's famous now as the birthplace of the author of Mary Poppins, and she says everywhere around the town there's artefacts and statues and things about Mary Poppins, but there's no Badtjala cultural presence there at all. And she's, she's trying to address that as well isn’t she to remind people of the racist past of that particular area, and also to remind them of very important Badtjala culture that's a part of the land?
Ashley Hay 54:49
Absolutely. Yes, I think this is, you know, this is part of, this is part of the reckoning that is well, that is hopefully going on more and more, I think, you know, people will know Henry Reynolds book "Truth Telling" that came out late last year and he talks in that, I'm very excited that we're going to be working with him on a piece around this next year, just the different work that Queensland in particular has to do in this space of acknowledging the recent past, of acknowledging the way violence and disruption swept across this landscape, the timeframe in which it did that, which is different to a lot of other parts of Australia, what that means in terms of the proximity of some of the events and then the work that needs to be done in in sort of telling, telling that history. And I think Fiona's Fiona's sort of comments about Maryborough, in particular, and this focus that has on one figure and one, you know, one very celebrated person, but but without this other very long connection, you know, the fact that the mangrove tree that is 700 years old, still stands. 700 years is, of course, nothing in the context of First Nations inhabitation of the continent itself but it is another one of those sort of temporal reminders of, you know, there's a story here that goes longer. And the trees one part of that, and the land is one part of that this people are one part of that. And, you know, it's the thing of, I think, saying, well, all of this has to be acknowledged and celebrated and recognised, not just the sort of the one bit or piece of, of a very recent and very particular narrative.
Nicole Abadee 56:46
Ash to finish I'd like to ask you, what do you see as some of the common themes that emerged from this collection as a whole?
Ashley Hay 56:53
I think the power of imagination is, is incredibly strong. I think there is a lot of, a lot of interesting work done by a lot of the pieces in looking at practical responses and sort of insisting on, on change, insisting on changing all sorts of different spaces. I mentioned, Jane Gleeson-White's piece earlier and her sort of insistence on reframing economics as another fantastic conversation in the book, which explores a great area around radical governance and utopian legalities. And you just think, Wow, getting governance and law and kind of looking at that through these different prism that is, that is fantastic. I think again, and this is something that we find in a lot of the different editions that we work on, there is exactly the point that we started talking about with with Julianne Schultz's piece in terms of the urgent work that needs to be done around Australia's reckoning with its you knows indigenous settler relations with its history, with with, with whatever post colonial Australia is going to look like. I think that you can see that coming through in a number of pieces in Pat Hoffie piece, in Annie Yaetman's pice piece and as a political scientist too, you know, writes quite personally about transcending her discipline and understanding the big question at play here comes back to this, this, this, this reckoning this accommodation that needs to be made. Julian Meyrick's piece aswell, that we mentioned earlier, you know, walks into that space, too. And I think one of the things that was really interesting is understanding the the commons through line is the recognition that no matter what discipline you're writing from, this is the space that you that you reach in Australia, this is the thing that has to be dealt with, again, you know, politically, philosophically, in terms of actual practical change, and structural change, and action. So many people from so many different areas through so many genres right into this space and that sort of says a lot, I think about, you know, knowing the work that we need to do
Nicole Abadee 59:23
Ash trying to choose the pieces to talk about in this one hour that we have is the most difficult part of this gig. It's something I've heard people say sometimes having to choose something like that's like having to choose their favourite child and I've only got one child so that would be easy for me, but I still get the point. I want to mention just a couple of the other wonderful pieces here. Academic Natasha Cica writes about contemporary Tasmania, and whether in fact her native statement is the utopia that it's often thought to be. Helen Suich as you pointed out, we did refer to her she writes beautifully on different ways to measure extreme poverty. As a way of trying to work out how we can eradicated writer, Australian writer Ellen Van Neerven writes on what a trans sports utopia might look like, they write about their own experience as a trans person playing different sports and then they imagine speaking to other trans people, what a trans sports utopia might look like. Queensland Chief Scientist, Professor Hugh Possingham looks at citizen science as a way to remove what he calls informational inequity. In other words, the more of us to get involved in science, then the more knowledge will all have. There's beautiful poetry as well. There's more fiction that we haven't talked about. It's just a cornucopia. So, I just have enjoyed speaking with you about this edition so much, and I really encourage listeners to go and grab a copy and start reading.
Ashley Hay 1:00:50
Thank you, Nic.
Nicole Abadee 1:00:54
Thank you for listening to Books, Books, Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website, nicoleabadee.com.au. To listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast you can also find me Nicole Abadee on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and give a rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking books with you again soon.