Longneck
November 2013
A statue to Edith Campbell Berry.
It’s true: Canberra needs an Edith Campbell Berry statue. So what if she’s not real: she’s still somebody to admire, marvel at, gaze upon – worthy of the attention of people and pigeons alike. She’s an innocent young woman who leaves Australia to take on the world. She’s a 1920s idealist who believes that the League of Nations can deliver world peace. She’s a trailblazer, daring and independent. She’s an old woman dimly aware that she’s moving slower and slower through an unfamiliar, aloof world. What a thing it is, the great arc of a life. Even an imaginary life.
If Edith awes me, I’m besotted by her creator, the writer Frank Moorhouse. Three cheers, then, that Moorhouse has just been awarded the 2013 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, which ‘acknowledges the achievements of eminent literary writers over the age of 60 who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature’.
That mouthful of an explanation has a sharp edge to it. It implies, after all, that Moorhouse is getting on a bit (although at least the Australia Council have stopped calling it the Writers’ Emeritus Award). But although he has, in fact, outlasted Edith Campbell Berry, 74 doesn’t strike me as anywhere close to old for a writer. Or for anybody except a professional sportsperson, defective by 30.
Other than kudos and glory, what is Moorhouse’s reward? The Australia Council will lob him a cheque on behalf of a grateful nation. And they’ll host a celebratory function, hopefully a long lunch at which guests will linger over the finest known food and drink (this for a bloke who called his memoir Martini). But although that all sounds lovely, it’s not enough. Not even close.
The best way I can think of to honour Frank Moorhouse is to read him. And to hassle other people to read him too. So: imagine that I’m a spruiker prowling a shopping strip – dressed in a shiny suit and in shoes with toes that point the way towards universal truth and knowledgs – haranguing you as if Moorhouse’s books are a dodgy mobile phone plan. Or a dose of Scientology: ‘Read Dark Palace. It’ll change your life. Read Loose Living. It’ll change the colour of the sky.’ I mean it.
Australia has a mountain of writing awards but the Lifetime Achievement in Literature is a standout – or should be. But did you know that the Aboriginal writer Herb Wharton won last year? Or that Amy Witting won in 2001 or Patricia Wrightson in 2006? I didn’t. I hadn’t even heard of Wrightson, even though she was an acclaimed children’s writer with an OBE.
Don’t take this as another ‘why aren’t the arts as celebrated as sports in Australia’ whinge. There’s no particular reason why I should be familiar with Patricia Wrightson (or you with Frank Moorhouse). And there’s not much in this world that can compete with the spectacle of Cathy Freeman winning gold at the Sydney Olympics (that old chestnut?) or Shane Watson pulling a hamstring. But maybe Australian writing needs the equivalent of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Or at least a Hard Rock Café, where every over-priced burger comes with an under-hyped story or poem.
I revere Frank Moorhouse because he writes about politics and culture and manners and sex and food and drink – about life seen and unseen – with a glorious abandon built upon a foundation of hefty research and heavy thinking. He writes about difference – different ideas, different people. Whether he’s offering a portrait of a cross-dressing English diplomat (Edith’s hubby) or probing ASIO or pondering the etiquette of eating alone or defending the importance of committee meetings, his fingernails leave beautiful scratches all over heavily varnished Australia.
His non-conformity is not theatrical or anti-social or prurient. His dissent is every bit as celebratory as a giant snake made of beer cups weaving its way around the MCG. His disruptions to convention do not swallow us like a tsunami – he’s more like the tides, day after day pushing sand up and down the coast until eventually the beach ends up somewhere else entirely.
The English writer Angela Carter once said that Moorhouse ‘makes you laugh, and think.’ That’s it. That’s it exactly.
@PatrAllington
Other Articles You May Like
Longneck
Election gastro
…
Longneck
Post-physical: AFL’s whole new world
…
Longneck
The Fat Man in History
…Galleries
Weather
20°Latest Edition
