Our Unloved, Distrusted Artists

The accusation against George Brandis was damning: “When I met the current federal Minister for the Arts last year, he looked at me quizzically and responded to our introduction with ‘Oh yes, I think I’ve heard of you’.” The speaker was Joanna Murray-Smith—she writes plays. Mid-winter in Adelaide and Murray-Smith was the keynote speaker at the 2015 National Play Festival, the annual assembly of Australia’s leading theatre-makers organised by Playwriting Australia—a body heavily funded by the federal and state governments. No doubt the audience shared her grief.

The over 6000-word keynote address reads like one of her own stylish play scripts; at times the person speaking seems to be both playwright Joanna Murray-Smith and a character from one of her plays. This is a text which, played as a monologue in a theatre, would evoke a standing ovation from her usual audiences. Too often the intoxicating prose makes her slip from a solid reflection on professional theatre practice into a fantasy world of dreaming hopes, idealisation and closed-eyes blindness to the debilitating political monoculture of Australian theatre.

The playwright talked of her private life, and with great affection of her parents. Several years ago the death of her eighty-seven-year-old mother touched her deeply and caused a painful revaluation of her creative life: “In 12 months, I went to Bali, Tokyo, LA, New York, Mexico City, Havana, Paris, Berlin, London and Amsterdam—some of them twice.” No longer feeling the desire to write, she “saw the world’s greatest psychiatrist” and was reminded by him that she is “a very successful writer”.

She also talked about playwriting and, being among people who consider the Australia Council their own personal ATM, the changes the Arts Minister is proposing to arts funding. It’s a relief to learn that six months after Charlie Hebdo the bogeyman attacking artistic freedom is Senator Brandis, and not religious extremists with knives and Kalashnikovs. Though, to an outside observer, it all seems like a brief squall passing over a very small pond. No matter what its designer’s intentions may be, the proposed National Program for Excellence in the Arts will be manipulated by the Left as soon as it is put into practice, and then either be replaced or readjusted to even better suit the Left as soon as a Labor-Greens government is elected.

Much of the tone and content of Murray-Smith’s critical comments on the Brandis changes would be familiar to readers of the Daily Review, an arts website associated with Crikey! and edited, published and owned by her husband, Raymond Gill: “Rumours abound that the silence of the main-stage companies [about the proposed changes to arts funding] has been quietly required by the powers that be, threats implied.” Like the Daily Review, Murray-Smith cited a statement by Opera Australia’s CEO Craig Hassell which had earlier caused outrage among the arts welfare lobby:

Speaking [for] Opera Australia, my first thought is that I am relieved and delighted that major performing arts companies’ funding hasn’t been cut … I don’t really have a view on where the money comes from, as long as the government is spending money on the arts.

Murray-Smith said, “his appalling statement is more than unwise—it’s uncouth”. Raymond Gill had called the remarks “as shortsighted as they are selfish”, and his publication subsequently covered the demonstration by protesters dressed in white sheets outside an Opera Australia performance of Turandot.

The vocal protests that have been made by those affected was written out of the plot with a wonderful fantasy of victimisation:

Do we have a system where a single politician in one of the healthiest democracies on Earth can make the loudest, most audacious and maverick and truth-seeking, most alert and vital, most liberated voices in society tremble?

And not only had Senator Brandis not recognised her name but Australian politicians, it seems, “are rarely heard uttering an artist’s name, unless it is to call them ‘disgusting’”. Murray-Smith is concerned that artists are also unloved and distrusted by the wider community: “this whole wondrous world they [mainstream Australians] feel distant from, suspicious of or excluded by. Why?”

The obvious answer is that the artists are elitist, disdainful and dismissive of the wider society: a distancing which is deliberate and self-conscious. There has been a huge cultural shift since the early 1970s, before the Left’s successful takeover of our culture with government arts funding. In early 1972 David Williamson said, “There is an awful Australian uniqueness, and for the first time the Australian theatre is getting down to the business of finding out what it is.” The curiosity has turned to disdain and distrust. Williamson suggested at the time that the strength of his new theatre was that it did not come from the educated middle class:

Romeril, Hibberd, Oakley and I are all from lower middle-class backgrounds. We are steeped in the real Australia … When playwrights are celebrating the Australian uniqueness, Australia is a very fulfilling place to be working.

Times have changed: “the real Australia” is the enemy and cultural rewards come from pleasing a money-dispensing audience of arts administrators and funding bureaucrats. As award-winning playwright and former member of the Australia Council Literature Board Patricia Cornelius remarked to an audience of intellectuals, “I don’t give a shit if my plays entertain.”

Murray-Smith’s answer to her own question was quite different, and unexpected. It’s the fault of our politicians. Usually, as long as the money keeps flowing in their direction, the theatre community doesn’t give a damn what Coalition politicians and Australians generally think of them. They are too busy filling in grant application forms to write plays telling us what they think of us—which often isn’t very pleasant. The text and subtext of our funded theatre is that politicians are rogues and outlaws, and ordinary Australians in the suburbs or beyond the pale in the Victorian Mallee are redneck racists. Our popular desire to spill blood is only restrained by unpopular but fearless artists on triennial funded grants.

Murray-Smith wants recognition and love from people who hardly seem worthy:

our politicians do not show by example. They do not lead by example. They do not inspire. Paul Keating was the last Prime Minister to show any interest in the arts and none have filled Whitlam’s shoes with regards to elevating the arts to an essential component of national identity.

Perhaps instead we could be asking the artists for some inspiring art, please.

To show how things should be done, Murray-Smith retold the story of Gough Whitlam telegraphing David Williamson following the Sydney opening of Don’s Party, the play about the ALP’s 1969 election loss, saying that after the next election Williamson would have to rewrite the play’s ending. He didn’t pay for the telegram, and he was massaging the ego of an influential follower. When ALP and Greens politicians do the culture thing they are among friends. If John Howard had seen a play and sent a message to the playwright he would have been derided for attempting to suck up, and the playwright would have led the attack lest he be put down as a conservative. Paul Keating attended Keating! The Musical, and saw a flattering portrait of himself. When Opposition leader Tony Abbott attended the Australian Book Awards Dinner in 2012 he was booed and Kerry Greenwood (author of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) walked out of the room to protest against his presence. There was a time much earlier when Gough Whitlam attended a writers’ function to distribute awards and confused the names of novelists and playwrights—it made his audience love him even more.

President Kennedy was also brought into the discussion: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.” When Overland magazine blacklisted poets who had followed their vision into Quadrant’s poetry pages, a single artist, Joe Dolce, protested. When Australia Council funding to Quadrant to pay for literary contributions to the magazine was slashed for political reasons there was much sniggering, but not a voice raised in protest. Murray-Smith passionately calls on artists to be brave, to stand up, to have courage. At a time when she could have spoken out against censorship and for the right of artists to publish where they please, Joanna Murray-Smith chose silence. It’s not the platitudes of a keynote address which are important, it’s what you do in real life.

Lurching towards the contemporary, Murray-Smith quoted from a 2007 speech about culture by right-wing French president Jacques Chirac:

To hold up the infinite diversity of peoples and arts against the bland, looming grip of uniformity. To offer imagination, inspiration and dreaming against the temptation of disenchantment.

Her comment was naive: “Can we imagine an Australian politician making such a declaration?” They certainly would. President Chirac was performing the official opening of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Built on a site near the Eiffel Tower it is a striking architectural and cultural monument to his period as mayor of Paris and French president. It is the home for international indigenous art, including Australian. Chirac wasn’t talking about art in general, he was talking about “the idea behind this museum”. Some of his words drew on the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss. This is acknowledged in his speech but omitted by Murray-Smith. It is suggested that one day the museum will be renamed in Chirac’s honour.

The paragraphs she has quoted could also be read as a fashionable acknowledgment of French post-colonial guilt and conciliation:

To gather all people who, throughout the world, strive to promote dialogue between cultures and civilisations. France has made that ambition its own. France expresses it tirelessly in international forums and takes it to the heart of the world’s major debates. France bears it with passion and conviction, because it accords with our calling as a nation that has long prized the universal but that, over the course of a tumultuous history, has learned the value of otherness.

What she praises in Chirac, which encompasses flag-waving national pride and patriotism, would be derided if spoken by Tony Abbott. Though perhaps France does have something to teach us. The 1905 law on the separation of church and state could be a possible model for an Australian law on the separation of culture, public broadcasting and the state.

Murray-Smith delivered a memorable line which must have driven some of the angry playwrights in her audience quite crazy: “Artists are not the enemy and must not be made the enemy.” It’s an empty piece of wordsmithing which ignores the Left’s desire to politicise absolutely everything. It seems illogical to abuse politicians onstage and then abuse them offstage for not supporting their tormentors who have only received a platform because of public subsidies. In 2004 Hannie Rayson’s Inheritance won the Helpmann Award for Best Play. Though it now reads more like soap than politics, at the time, with John Howard as Prime Minister and Pauline Hanson in the recent past, it was mistaken for a forceful political tract excoriating racist white Australian society. The play was commissioned by a subsidised theatre, the Melbourne Theatre Company. It was played by them and at the Sydney Opera House. It was adopted for study by senior students and the text, subsidised with a grant from the Australia Council, was published by Currency Press. That publication, now used as a school textbook, comes with a note by an actor who had grown up in the country area where the play is set. He talked affectionately of his family and friends when he was growing up: “It’s to my grave disillusionment that some of them now mouth the poison of Hanson, Howard and Ruddock.” Some may think the poison lies elsewhere, and that government funding is being used to propagandise schoolchildren.

At one point self-interest and an embarrassing grab for unearned prizes recalls similar ideas expressed by attendees at Kevin Rudd’s infamous 2020 Summit. Yet this may be the key to this very strange discussion; what is being sought is not success or respect but celebrity:

Put our artists on the front pages, celebrate their triumphs, put their works on our streets, let’s see them on Q and A … let’s see Australian artists sprinkled heavily through the annual [sic] Honours List, let’s hear our leaders quote our artists past and present, let’s see artists bringing imaginative thinking to our corporate and government boards.

Arise, Dame Joanna, first lady of the Australian stage! But it’s not a seat on Q&A that’s lacking, it’s a place on Dancing with the Stars. Thirty years a playwright and the Arts Minister doesn’t recognise her name. That’s the symptom of the real hurt—the lack of celebrity.

Having already disposed of cultural critics, “major critics—an oxymoron if ever there was one”, she leads us towards a very strange future where politicians are turned into publicists for Left artists:

It is not a politician’s job to judge us, influence us, punish us—it is their job to convey to their constituency, the nation, that in the imaginations of Australia’s artists is an essential beauty that improves, entertains, stimulates, comforts and elevates us and our experience.

On the other hand Murray-Smith’s peers are turned into hanging judges over us all—the words evoke a vision of “artists” in KKK outfits:

And what sort of life would we have if those in power in any of our worlds: Church, State, Family, Education, Employment—what sort of life would we have if the law-makers in our lives never face judgement or analysis or criticism?

And what sort of life would we have if we couldn’t criticise the National Play Festival for encouraging race division in our society by including a writing workshop “exclusively reserved for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers”? Probably, the brave new world of Joanna Murray-Smith—the black-and-white world of our new Constitution.