A talk about art

This is text of a speech I gave a Wesley College during Arts Week. I have tweaked the text to suit its written form. 

As the luck of my birth would have it, I was born into a family of people with enough money to send me to a very expensive private school. All boys who attended such schools were expected to become rich, successful and famous. Or all three.

Here are some names: The governor of West Australian, Malcolm McCusker, the Premier of West Australia, Colin Barnett, mining magnate, Twiggy Forrest, musical comedian, writer and actor, Tim Minchin, writer, Tim Winton, writer Andy Griffiths and footballer Ben Cousins.

Ok, they are just names and now here is another list, this time of boys who have attended Wesley College and showed a level of success.

Brendon Grylls: you have probably heard of him because he is a minister in the WA State Government. He is a member for a region not the region he used to be the member for and not a region he lives in. He is also the Minister for, well, a bunch of stuff to do with things outside of the metropolitan area.

Ben Hollioke: a very good cricketer who, unfortunately, died in a car accident in 2002.

Earl Spalding: a good Australian Rules footballer who played for the West Coast Eagles, Melbourne and Carlton.

Jeremy Sims: excellent actor and director.

Michael Holmes: excellent television journalist who fronts a show on CNN.

Lance “Buddy” Franklin: plays full-forward for Hawthorn.

Now, here’s the thing, your school, my school, everybody’s school, they all want you to think that if you attend them you will be successful because they are special and if you attend them you will also be special and thus, doubly special.

Fair enough, but life isn’t like that.

When I went to Christ Church Grammar School, I wasn’t special. My mother said I was, but I wasn’t. She lied to me.

My Christ Church life sucked. I failed. Almost everything. The only subjects I passed were bully-bating, surfing, skateboarding and history.

Which reminds me, Geoffrey Bolton, he went to Wesley and he is West Australia’s best known historian.

Why history? Why me and Geoffry? Because history is about us. How we got here. Why we got here like this. Wearing these kinds of clothes. And you, because you are at the end of history up until now.

History is anything that went before now. And now. And now. Notice that it keeps shifting, that the now I mention now, is not the same now I mentioned earlier.

It’s the first fleet

It’s Albany 1826

It’s Mokare, Yagan and 60,000 years of Noongars, Wongis, Yamajis, Bard and Pitjitjinjara.

It’s me, as soon as I’m finished with this, yeah, history.

And that’s what I do, now, after all my early years of failing, I write history.

My history: the fights, arrests, the cold cells, the wonderful girlfriends, the ride on the open crane plummeting down a mountain with no brakes. Luckily I was stoned.

My school years were exciting, insane, boring, depressing and a dismal failure. And so, I wrote a book about it.

When I left school my father forced me to work in a bank. The bank sent me to Papua and New Guinea, where my life was exciting, depressing, insane and the bank fired me. So, I wrote a book about it.

I worked in the family business and on the family farm for four, very successful years. Great time. Big success. There’s no book in that.

I left the family, grew my hair and a beard, became a hippy, then wandered the planet as a long haired looser. Got arrested a few times. Slept in jungles. Got shot at by insane war mongers. Naturally, wrote a book about it.

Went to Curtin University and got a degree in English. Great success. Once again, no book there.

Stood for election to the Federal Parliament. Twice. Lost. Twice. Wrote a book about it.

Can you see the pattern?

I’m here to tell you it is ok to mess up that I am living proof you can recover from a lot of mess ups. That dismal failure can be turned to great success.

And this is the great thing about art. It is in art that you can take misery, that that causes you pain, re-frame it, turn it, into something different, something beautiful, or something new and exciting, something over which you have absolute and total control, the kind of control you will never have in life.

And now, as I near the end of the successful mess called life, would you like to know what I still believe in?

I am no longer religious, but I still like what Jesus said.

I still love a good phantom comic.

I still think Muhammad Ali, at his peak, was the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time.

I still believe in respect, kindness, generosity, forgiveness and taking risks.

And I have believed in a clean and sober life, ever since I cleaned up in 1986.

But I’m still addicted to salt, chocolate, reading, writing, boxing and surfing.

That's me, now let's hear from you.

MP launches attack on CBH board

Brad Thompson, The West Australian May 2, 2013

A junior member of the Barnett Government has launched a scathing attack on the management of CBH and urged the co-operative's grower members to consider voting to change to a corporate entity.

Jim Chown, the parliamentary secretary to Treasurer and Transport Minister Troy Buswell, said he was speaking as the MLC for the Agricultural Region and stressed the Government had no official policy on CBH and corporatisation.

But his comments are the strongest indication yet of views within Government on CBH, which is facing unprecedented competition in grain accumulation, storage and transport after operating as a virtual monopoly for the past 80 years.

"I think corporatisation or demutualisation of CBH is absolutely essential if CBH as an entity is to go forward and remain strong in a competitive marketplace," he said.

"Every grower needs to remember that at least three generations over the past 80 years have made significant financial contributions to the co-operative and it would be a crying shame if CBH as a critical asset to the grain industry, through a lack of management, was seen to decline and become less viable."

Mr Chown's comments provoked an angry response from CBH chairman Neil Wandel, who said: "Jim Chown as a junior minister should not involve himself in an industry debate and it's inappropriate for him to cast aspersions on the performance of the CBH board."

Mr Chown said a recent Australian Competition Tribunal judgment, which rejected a CBH bid to maintain a monopoly on grain freight through its Grains Express business, was a damning indictment on how the absence of rivals had not been in the best interests of all WA grain growers.

He said it was inevitable that CBH would have to close some of its 196 up-country grain receivable points to become more efficient.

It was also no secret the Government wanted to encourage competition at portside and his comments were about promoting debate among the 4300 CBH grower members.

Mr Wandel said CBH directors and management were united in their support of a co-operative model, which they believed provided the greatest benefit to growers.

 A LETTER

Dear All,

As you may well know, there is a movement back to cooperatives.

And you understand, of course, it is for the board of CBH to make any decision regarding a privatisation and a listing on the stock exchange.

Might I suggest that given the way the world is turning, a cooperative is the safest way to negotiate the shoals and sharks.

Please, allow me to offer a cautionary tale that you might like to distribute by word of mouth.

My wife and I met on a kibbutz in Israel in 1976.

This kibbutz, Nir Yitzhak, had a very successful plastics factory that made shade cloth.

Exported it all over the planet.
Biggest customer - China.

Biggest Australian client - Bunnings.

Then, when things were at their best, a big shot financial advisor came down from Tel Aviv and said: Wow, you lot have a major chance here to make millions - privatise, list, and you can sit back and never work again.
Even though the concept of never working again should have been repugnant to a mob of agrarian socialist kibbutzniks, they agreed.

Tragedy.

Here's what happened.
- privatised.
- listed.

- GFC

- collapse

- receivership

Nasty.

Now, if they had stayed true to their beliefs, their origins, their structure, they would have survived intact, and maybe even prospered, but they would never have gone into receivership.

Beware.

and
for god and country (meaning rural),
maintain your sense of community

May all your crops go in
and be bountiful

Yours in spirit
and practise

Jon Doust

 

Sharks are not the only predators

Recently I spoke at a book launch for Bruce Russsell's latest novel. Here is the spoken in text.

When I was a boy, the surf lifesavers down at Cottesloe and North Cottesloe were big, brutal, and packed with fleshy muscle.

I wasn’t one of them. I belonged to the other mob, the surfers, we were generally smaller, weedier and often chastised, although, to be fair, we did have muscle, but that stringy sort.

Whenever we had a party we would drink too much and do stupid things and hurt ourselves.

Whenever the surf lifesavers had a party they’d drink too much and do stupid things too but if they hurt anyone, it was probably us.

It wasn’t fair. Nothing is, or ever was, or ever will be but none of that has anything to do with Bruce Russell’s book, Reunion.

Or does it?

Yes.

This is not just a reunion story, this twists and turns into a mystery with more than one stream and like all good novels about crime and revenge it doesn’t necessarily end happily.

I loved it that in Reunion all the bad guys are classic Aussie good guys, Aussie heros, lifesavers and surf club members.

Who would have thought? Bruce Russell thought, and got to it, and did it.

When I was a boy the only surf club blokes I ever saw were those who thought they were the hottest shits in town. 

You’d go to the beach and they would strut around in their Speedos, sticking their crutches out, puffing their chests and flexing their biceps.

Many of them, the older ones in particular, were already set in their lives – lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and well on their way to making a million, or two.

Pricks.

My lot, the surfers, doomed, club-less, bedraggled, deviant. We kept our boards behind the local petrol station. We rode primitive skateboards when the ocean was flat and sometimes we drank warm beer in the beachside change-rooms. But we were harmless. We didn‘t hurt anyone. We were good for the environment. 

This book turns the tables and reveals surf club blokes for who they really are – mean spirited, controlling, sexist, racist, money grabbing, vindictive, revengeful, greedy bastards. 

Some samples, if I may:

Jimmy thought about surf club days: weekend carnivals, the nights of training in Gunnamatta Bay, the pub crawls, the drunken midnight escapes down the track to Tagary. It had been a great way to grow up. His father disapproved and his mother went crazy trying to keep him at home. Like most young men, he thrived on the disapproval.

At high school someone started singing ‘Ahab, the Arab’ in the change room after gym. There followed a short and bloody scuffle, with Jimmy the victor. In the surf club, all the prejudice seemed to flow towards Nigger, an Aboriginal boy who was as black as Namatjira.

Nobody seemed to notice Jimmy’s glossy hair and brown skin, or the angle of his nose. They called him Turk for a while, but the origin of the name was lost in time. Mostly, he was Jimmy Leathem whose parents had provided him with everything he needed to make it in white Australia.

All right, I take your point, it’s not a good example of the point I was trying to make. I read the passage because I liked reading it.The thing is, the best passages to make the point I want to make give away too much of the point of the book, all tied up in it’s complex plot.

Readers of all genders, Reunion is a rollicking read that took me no time at all to get through because I love powerful women and a gritty crime tale in which all the good guys can be bad and some of the bad guys can be good and where no-one is that good.

And most of the grit in this book involves a strong woman, Bette. 

Here she is in action:

At the table, Nathan had upended her handbag and was holding her digital recorder aloft.

“Told you,” he said to his father. “Never trust a woman.”

With that he dropped the machine on the floor and stomped on it. Bette stalked over, grabbed her handbag and replaced the contents.

Jeff Lundquist was holding both hands up to his chest, palms facing like an innocent bystander. She rounded on both of them, her eyes blazing.

“Why don’t you fuck off back to the wadi, Nathan! And you, you pathetic old prick, no wonder you’ve ended up here in this sad little box. Jimmy Leathem was a better man than you’ll ever be!”

Oh yeah, reminds me of my first wife the day she walked out.

There are other reasons why I enjoyed this book. First, it mentions my current home, Albany. Then there is Saleem, an Afghan boy, another of the central characters. Not only is Saleem a decent human being he is one of the few to survive this complex tale of crime and retribution with his morality in tack. In this time of refugee demonising, it is refreshing to read a tale in which the demons reside within us and not out there among them, the others, the unknowns, the foreigners.

Now, I’m not sure you know, but I have written a tale or two myself and one of my earlier works has often been claimed as the kind of book that it isn’t and, in order to prove the point that it wasn’t, I ran a word count.

I have done the same with Reunion.

But first, here’s an example of what I mean:

Boy on a Wire:

Wank – 8

Wanker – 4

Wanking – 15

Christ – 13

Jesus – 44

Church – 37

Salt – 36

Love – 36

Laugh – 60

So, rather, as some have claimed, that it is a book about a boy obsessed with masturbation, it would seem, on the evidence, that it is more a story about Jesus, church and a laugh filled love of salt.

My old mate, Roy Piggott, who runs the visitors’ centre in Manjimup sent me this email:

In my word count I found Jack mentioned 372 times, so I actually thought it was a story about car maintenance.

Oh, by the way, I ran a count of THEs in both books: Reunion - 4248; Boy on a Wire – 2694. There you have it, no doubt about it, Reunion is THE book.

Reunion.

Lifesavers – 7

Sex – 5

Hate – 5

Potatoes – 1

Refugees – 3

Albany – 3

Drowned – 6

Afghanistan – 4

Crime - 6

Fish – 9

Love – 20

Help – 34

Bed – 46

Reunion – 52

There you go, rather, as at least one reader has suggested, than a book about mean spirited surf lifesavers, it is more a tale about love and help to bed for a reunion.

Bruce, thank you for asking me to talk tonight. It has been a pleasure and an honour.

Now, the rest of you, readers, buy it up, get Bruce to sign it and tomorrow morning let’s all meet for breakfast down at Cottesloe SLC and heckle the older surf lifesavers as they creak and grown their way down to the water’s edge.