The Meaning of Recognition (38 page)

It should have been two out of ten. In the year before I sailed for Europe I spent a lot of time with Sydney’s notorious Downtown Push. The Push was a hotbed of libertarian ideology,
centred on the principle that the best way to rebel against bourgeois society was to crash its parties and seduce its young women, the more respectable the better. One of the parties the Push
crashed was in Bellevue Hill, at that time the very pinnacle of genteel luxury. The parents of the house were away in Europe, whence they had come as refugees before the war. The daughter of the
house was still resisting the attentions of the Push leaders but she was naively keen to prove to them that she understood their anger at the spectacle of a house that had been paid for with money
that had actually been earned. The Push operated on the assumption that money was legitimate only if borrowed or won at the racecourse. The Push also believed that the best place to stub out a
cigarette was on the carpet, grinding it well in with the heel. As the daughter of the house frantically circulated amongst the hubbub trying to pick up the butts before they set the stippled
Wilton on fire, I wandered drunkenly into a room identifiable as a library by the number of books present, although only their shape and size told me for certain what they were. They were all in
European languages, none of which I could read. All I got was an impression of beauty and complexity, of a mystery speaking in tongues. I took one of the books down. The author was Thomas
Mann’s brother Heinrich. The date on the title page was 1932, the year before Hell broke loose: that much, at least, I knew. But the date was all I could read, so I put it back. What I was
looking at, as I backed slowly out of the room, was a monument to what I didn’t know. Perhaps one out of ten would have been a more appropriate mark.

And so, almost perfectly clueless about what the world outside Australia had recently been like, I sailed away to see it. In the course of forty years I have learned to read some of those
languages, just for the books. Journalists sometimes kindly call me a linguist but the harsh fact is that I have barely mastered English. Of any other language I can read, I can speak barely enough
to stay out of gaol. But reading I can do. Reading, it turned out, would be my adventure, my only field as a man of action. I would never win at Wimbledon, take out the Gold Medal for the Olympics
100-metres freestyle, cover prodigious distances in training for the mile like John Landy. But I have covered prodigious distances in my own mind, and all the more prodigious because I was starting
from zero, and there was nothing special about my mind. If I had been as clever as Les Murray, I might have done it all without leaving Kogarah, and might have been there to help stop the local
council turning its pretty railway station into a neo-brutalist combination of a flak tower and a U-boat pen. But I was dense, with the impervious density which youth often has when it grows up
surrounded by blessings. Having grown up in Australia, I had failed to understand it. I had thought the whole world was like that: safe, sure, fair. What I read in the other languages showed me
that the world was far otherwise. And finally what I read about Australia, in my own language, showed me that Australia, too, was an historical event far more complicated than I had allowed myself
to believe. The nation that Donald Horne called the lucky country wasn’t just lucky. I have a lasting admiration for Donald Horne’s books – I own them all – but in one way
he was too successful. His central tenet, that his homeland was a lucky strike consistently mismanaged by second-rate politicians, caught on as a dogmatic aid to national self-doubt. As I read on
through our recent and gratifyingly rich heritage of commentary and memoir, it became clearer to me all the time that we hadn’t become a prosperous and reasonably equitable democracy by the
accidental dispensation of benevolent nature and a favourable geographical position. The country had been built, by clever people. Our constitution itself was the work of people who had studied
history. They were readers of newspapers and periodicals, they were eternal students in the best sense, they were bookish people. They had built a bookish nation. But as so often has been the case
with Australia’s consciousness of itself, the problem was to realize it.

When I covered the Sydney Olympics for the London newspaper the
Independent
, I tried to point out that Australia’s alleged lack of national self-confidence had never been anything
more serious than a lack of self-awareness, and that the supposed need to take the final step towards political maturity was an insult to the countless victims in those purportedly mature nations
which had somehow succeeded in going mad. Some of the victims who survived had come to Australia and helped to diversify and expand its culture – and that undoubtedly was a move towards
maturity – but they would not have been able to help with our cultural maturity if the political maturity had not been there to welcome them. The result has been a nation which, even while
some of its commentators were eloquently worried about its identity crisis, already had an identity unmatched in the world’s eyes; a nation which has by now become, in my view, uniquely
placed to exercise an international influence in a world where influence is becoming steadily more important than power. What I would like to suggest now is that we might mark our position in the
world by building a new and potentially resonant symbol: and at this point you might decide that I have gone mad myself.

I never went back to the house in Bellevue Hill. I doubt I could have found it, and if I had, the man of the house might have asked me awkward questions about the cigarette burns in his carpet.
I imagine his beautiful library was broken up when he died and the dealers sent the pearls of his collection back to Europe to be sold on. But over the years I have built a personal library
something like his, collecting the books in all the world’s cities where the refugees went, and where I later went to make films. I have one of my pearls here, and I’m sure he had a
copy of it too. It’s the book that the nineteenth-century Prussian scholar Ferdinand Gregorovius wrote about his travels in Italy. I bought the book from a dealer in Staten Island, New York,
in 1983. An inscription on the title page says it once belonged to Anna Liebmann. Either she or one of her children must have got away to safety, and probably the next generation sold her books
because they wanted nothing to do with the old language. You can’t blame them, because the language is German.
Wanderjahre in Italien
. It’s a book of astonishing elegance, and
all the more astonishing because it was produced to be sold at a low price to a large public. There is no publication date, but from my other books in the same series I would guess that it was
printed in about 1922. The publishing house was Wolfgang Jess Verlag, of Dresden. Apart from its books, scattered throughout the world, no trace of that house now exists. It was already gone before
the fire-storm. The Gestapo, remember, were great readers.

I wish my library were all treasures, but it isn’t. After it crashes into the car-park, only a part of it will be worth keeping. But I can think of other Australian collectors whose
personal libraries are so selective, and yet so comprehensive in particular fields of interest, that they are cultural treasure-houses in themselves. Barry Humphries is only one example. He is a
man of great learning, and one day, when he is studied as an Australian genius, the students would benefit by having access to his books. The Americans were first to act on this principle. All
students of Evelyn Waugh must eventually travel to Austin, Texas, because that is where his library is, preserved intact. We could copy the Americans in this even if we don’t want to copy
them in anything else. We don’t want the McDonald’s University of Hamburger Science, although we might conceivably want McDonald’s if we want to feed the kids in a hurry. We might
also want the libraries of some of our most learned cultural and scientific figures all gathered into one place, each individual library in its own house. I see it as a kind of library city,
dedicated to the study of books as artefacts as well as for their contents. What you would be getting would be all the best books not just of Australia, but of the world entire, because our best
creative minds have always ranged widely in their reading: if they ever called Australia insular, it was because they themselves were not. To keep the books beautiful, to preserve them from the
defacement that comes with preservation, some way might be devised of numbering them invisibly, the numbers to be scanned with a pair of special glasses issued by the graduate student at the front
desk, who would be performing his curatorial duties as part of his PhD. To work, study and live for a time in the library city would be a prize for the new intellectual elite, an elite not to be
feared in a country which, after all, consists entirely of elites. The expense would be large, but probably not as large as the total amount expended already on the task of transferring the
contents of books to microfilm in the name of preservation, a preservation that not only seems to entail the destruction of the actual books, but is also based on a misconception. Despite the huge
publicity campaign that warns us of the contrary, the paper of modern books does not deteriorate, a fact explored by Nicholson Baker in his witty treatise
The Double Fold
, although really
we don’t need him to tell us when we have beside us a copy of
Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende
. It was printed on the lowest quality of paper ever made, but its every ludicrous sentence is
still legible even as the margins crumble. And if we look at the thin but creamy paper of
Wanderjahre in Italien
, we can see immediately that it will spontaneously disintegrate at about
the same time as Kogarah railway station in its modern form.

It wouldn’t matter where this library city was actually situated. I suppose there would be the usual fight between Sydney and Melbourne so that it would end up in Canberra. In my own
daydreams it is somewhere near the ocean, so that the lucky student who had qualified to read there could take a break to go swimming in the way I once took a break to go smoking. Perhaps part of
the library city could be an Islamic library, so that Muslim scholars from all over the world who are brave enough to go on building a secular body of commentary and criticism to set beside the
sacred texts could congregate there in relative safety from the pressure that will inevitably be brought to bear against them by zealots who share their faith but think it can be protected only by
remaining unquestioned. There would be dangers, but there is always danger in learning. Pursued far enough, it shakes every faith except its faith in itself. I think personal libraries can
contribute to a greater library, just as the State Library of New South Wales has always been nourished by the nearby example of Mitchell’s library; but I think so only because the greater
library is a collectivity that supersedes the individual; almost the only kind of collectivity that does. Somewhere in the book that we shut out of our own collection might be the fact that would
alter our own orthodoxy, and it is part of a nation’s true maturity to make sure that the awkward book is available somewhere. Which brings me back, at long last, to our first book.

One of the orthodoxies many of us share is that the Europeans came to this country in order to commit robbery with violence against the native population. Well, let’s look at page four of
the Governor’s standing orders. ‘It is His Excellency’s positive injunction to the settlers and others who have fire-arms, that they do not wantonly fire at, or take the lives of
any of the Natives; as such an act would be considered a deliberate Murder, and subject the offender to such punishment, as, if proved, the Law might direct to be inflicted.’ The robbery
happened, alas, and so did the violence; but it wasn’t the first intention. We blundered into it, and on that issue it might be said that we have been blundering ever since. But something got
built, and it was something wonderful; and we would be playing false to our young people who died in Bali if we were to go on saying that Australia is a selfish provocation to the less fortunate
world. Australia is the hope of the less fortunate world, and principally because of the example we provide that thoughtfulness and justice and tolerance don’t just fall out of the air like
the sunlight, but are the fruit of a continuous critical interchange, which could never have been had without the books. It was always true, and now it’s time to say so.

Australian Book Review
, December 2002 to January 2003

One day it will be part of British art history that Sarah Raphael died young. Today, on the day of her funeral, everyone who knew her must cope with the first loss – the
loss of her physical presence. Perhaps the cruel law of chance that took her so soon was trying to make up for its early prodigality in giving her everything. She was brilliant, she was beautiful,
and she had the generous, unstudied charm that does not always go with those gifts: being down-to-earth when you are so favoured can’t be easy, but she could always manage it. Once, when I
first knew her, I was looking through a stack of dauntingly authoritative paintings leaning against the wall of her studio and I ventured to suggest that ‘Sarah Raphael’ wouldn’t
quite do as a name: ‘Sarah Michelangelo’ might be more appropriate, or even ‘Sarah L. da Vinci’. The gag got a laugh – she looked more than usually lovely when she was
laughing, which she usually was, even while she worked – but there was a thoughtful addendum. ‘You really think I’m quite
good
, don’t you?’ I really did, and
nobody who had seen any of her work thought anything else.

Which brings us to the second loss, the one that will affect many people who never met her, and eventually whole generations to come, because rarely since Rex Whistler was killed in Normandy in
1944 has there been a deprivation so calculated by fate to impoverish the future. Right from her first phase, she looked destined to put into reverse the dire expectations for the next round of
young British art: she could draw, her canvasses had more in them the longer you looked, and there wasn’t a dead shark in sight. At Camberwell School of Art (where she went after Bedales) she
was a star student, but there was no surprise in that. She had been born into a cultivated household – her father is the writer Frederic Raphael, two of whose books she illustrated –
which is always a help towards an apparent precocity, although later on things tend to even out. The real surprise was in her thematic range. Precocious wasn’t the word for it. An historical
synthesis is usually something that artists attempt only later on, as the final prelude to their achieved individuality. In the initial stages they work through one influence at a time. Young Sarah
seemed to have been influenced by the whole European tradition all at once, and to have absorbed the lot.