Waltzing Matilda is IMHO, Paterson’s one song. He and Christina MacPherson worked as a team at Dagworth Station, Qld around 1891: he wrote the lyrics and she shortly after came up with the tune.

I am not aware of any attempts apart from Wallace and Matilda to put any of Paterson to music.

To my knowledge, Lawson never heard a single one of his poems set to music. (He was a bit deaf anyway.) But in later years Slim Dusty, Chris Kempster, Priscilla Herdman, Gerry Hallom and others, including yours truly, have found plenty of musical inspiration in Lawson’s poetry.

I have a number of Paterson’s poems by heart, but always perform them spoken rather than sung. They work better that way for a number of reasons.

Heathdon: “I was wondering how their type of bush balladeering is considered when discussing high art.”

The question is, considered by whom? Lawson himself was used to academic sneering: vide his ‘To My Cultured Critics.’ But I once met a bushman who recited Lawson’s poem ‘Outback’ with a unique sincerity, for it was the story of his life. On three separate occasions he had been close to dying of thirst in the bush and had been rescued just in time.

He had probably never heard of TS Eliot. But he knew all about waste lands.

Just a thought.

V.

That would be, apart from Waltzing Matilda, of course.

I’ll check out “Down the Lawson Track” if you’ll keep your eye out for a recording of Wallace And Matilda’s classic version of “Clancy of the Overflow”. I’ll wager you’ll not say again that the Banjo doesn’t set well to music.

Holden made some excellent cars, the FJ, EH, HD and VL Commodore being the standouts. Ford engines and transmissions were excellent also, but they never rust-proofed the bodies well enough, and so the cars were here today and gone tomorrow. I never owned one.

But “Lawson, a cute phony country-bumpkin good for beer jingles and not much else, whom Paterson detested” is an opinion you are welcome to.

Towards the end of his life, Paterson lived up at ‘Bendeneen’, near Yass. My father-in-law, a noted local historian, said that the kid who took his mail out to him would be graciously given 5 quid by Paterson, followed by a kick in the backside and a command: “Now git!”

Every time.

Both Lawson and Paterson wrote their share of both classics and stuff eminently forgettable. But while Paterson does not set well to music, Henry Lawson turned out to be about the greatest writer of song lyrics this country has ever produced. Have a listen to the ABC’s ‘Down the Lawson Track’ on RN at 4.00 pm this Friday.

(Paterson v Lawson is kind of a Holden v Ford thing. I’ll take all comers.)

For the demise of home-grown music talent, I don’t know how much HECS did to it. In Sydney, once the home of Australian rock, I believe the state government killed the entire scene by trying to cash in on it with exorbitant Entertainment License fees and standards. There is only a handful of live venues left and most of our musicians now come down from Queensland.

I believe that the introduction of HECS and making further education and training a result of how much money you can access as opposed to talent and/or skill.

There much better.

To illustrate, my hometown of Sunshine produced or had a hand in the production of pre HECS: Keith Miller, Leigh Bowery, Richard Tyler, Jamie Redfern, Captain John Flynn( his father was first principal at Sunshine Primary), AB Faceyand Sahen Warne(Although Warnie changed his birthplace to Fairfiekld for his last biography. Post HECS it’s Lydia Lassila, Andrew Veniamin, Dino Dibra and Rocco Arico. Is it because it is now a suburb full of criminals or have the residents realised that, in the words of Noel Gallagher “is it worth the aggravation to get yourself a job when there’s nothin worth working for?”

I just believe that it is the person and not their wallet that should be measured. Look at the popular music in this country nowadays(sorry love that word). When was the last Australian band that came from the suburbs? How many are made up of country kids who came to town to study. For that matter look at our comedians and journalists and filmakers and see how much of city/suburban life is influenced by people who are new to it.

Or how many are rich kids in torn jeans playing rough trade.(Jet)(Kate Alexa)

I pass a girl everyday in Glenferrie road who gets out of a one hundred thousand dollar 4wd looking like Kurt Cobain at his most junkiest. I smile to myself and say to myself there goes the next Australian Idol. I know I am being unfair to her but I believe she should write what she knows and be honest.

As Ms Greer referred to our racism as strange, so is our culture. Can anybody name Dick Turpin’s favourite book?(Ned Kelly’s was Lorna Doone, where he got the idea for the armor)

How many countries, let alone suburbs, can claim as different creatures as Richard Tyler and Leigh Bowery?

And I have never understood how Patterson and Lawson fit into High Arts, if they do? If they don’t then what good is high art?

As it is, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the thing, like the children in the movie Bliss being taken to the furnace out the back of the mental hospital, and by the time the group of us were finished with the place we all felt so flat that we cancelled our other plans for the day, said goodbye to each other and went home.

In the late 1960s, I spent a week in the old Canberra Hospital recovering from the removal of a gangrenous appendix. It was fantastic to be able to lie back in my second floor bed and enjoy not just the view across the lake to the Brindabellas, but the breezes coming through the openable windows. Many letter writers to the Canberra Times in the controversy over the proposed demolition of the building testified as to how the building itself had aided their recovery. I remembered that when I later visited Epidavros (Epidaurus) in Greece, arguably the site at which clinical and scientific medicine began in Europe, and learned that it was no accident that the Temple of Aesclepius and the clinic were sited near the biggest and finest amphitheatre in Greece, because of the belief that recovering patients should be given the best food and the most stimulating environment possible.

Ah, how times change.

But anyone with half a brain for architecture would be able to tell you that a magnificent lakeside site would be wasted on a museum, for the latter can only succeed to the extent that it turns the attention of its visitors inward, away from the external environment and towards the exhibits. The present Museum thus has no exterior windows to the lake, as it relies completely on electric light to illuminate the displays. There is not even a coffee shop with views over the lake, and the visitor who wants to look at the lake has to go outside the perimeter wall of the monstrosity and scrabble along an unsealed service road.

If Keating had had half the artistic sense he pretends to, he would have noticed the disjunction between the museum’s purpose and its site right at the outset. In my view, no architect could design a museum that would make use of the setting and at the same time enhance its own functional role the way the old hospital did. Any museum there will inevitably be a ‘lemon’.

But as I hope my original comment made clear, that was not my main objection to Keating. Rather, it was the putrid role he played in facilitating the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and his later attempt to justify himself in his eulogy to Suharto.

I do not think that history will be kind to him, Don Watson or no Don Watson.

Mainly I wanted to distinguish between an Arthur Boyd, whose works tap into what I loosely called monumentalism (not the art-school meaning of the word) and others may call romanticism, and the Ken Dones whom Guy reveres in a Peter Pan sort of way for being “sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy”. And before anyone starts calling me snobby for that, recall that we were talking about public patronage; the Ken Done-influenced lollipop view of the world probably blighted the everyday world I grew up in more than any other Australian artist in history. Done and his school were always going to do fine in commercial work and advertising; they never needed any extra help from the taxpayer.

So you’re right. Patronage should be of art rather than artists. Then again, I’ve often felt that the taxpayer could sow a few more seeds on stony soil and see which ones grow. If some school-leaver wants to spend his time in the garage with his guitar doing bad Nirvana knockoffs instead of working in McDonalds, I say more power to him, give him a decent dole and don’t harrass him to find a job. Enough kids do that and sooner or later a few of them will come up with something far more interesting than Nirvana knockoffs. The rest will give it up when they are ready to get a job. It really doesn’t cost us much, and most of us prefer regular jobs so the work gets done and the tax gets paid anyway.

If I have a tendency to go a bit Ayn Randian on you, I also laughed in recognition of this description of our need to be led: “Art - granted, like everything else - is now almost entirely filtered out to its audience through the shotgunning prism of media commentary (of some or other kind): few of us (without even really knowing it) are quite sure what we think about anything much, unless/until we’ve got some steadying professional word-handrails to give us a bit of grip (even if bracing in opposition).”

Am I the only one who moves away from the tour guide so I can see something without listening to them prattle? Years ago I realised I was the only person I knew who puts a CD in the machine and sits down to listen to it through without doing anything else. No talking, no eating, just listening. If I enjoy some things a bit more than is normal, the flipside of this is a constant dull pain as I move through a world of, not an absence of taste, which would be acceptable, but of bad taste constantly trying to figure out what it’s lost and sometimes almost finding it before flinching away.

It’s one of the awful critical errors of the Modernist (+) era that what we have come to admire in the arts is the ‘useless genius’ (ie the talent-as-person) itself and not the work it produces (the talent-as-output). I think it has a lot to do with the advent of an insatiable, 24-7 mass media conversation, with its concomitent casting imperative, the cloning ‘celebritisation’ of all and any human remarkableness. Art - granted, like everything else - is now almost entirely filtered out to its audience through the shotgunning prism of media commentary (of some or other kind): few of us (without even really knowing it) are quite sure what we think about anything much, unless/until we’ve got some steadying professional word-handrails to give us a bit of grip (even if bracing in opposition). That arts and cultural criticism specifically has never been more eloquent and exhaustive, diverse, inclusive, open-minded, undeniable well-meaning in its desire to democratise cultural production and appreciation as much as possible, doesn’t ameliorate the profound shift in aesthetic perspective that is now almost complete: from defining art as ‘a thing a human made (and in the doing, made himself an artist)’; to ‘a thing an artist made’.

I think where you stand on this is the single key question of artistic expression today. Is art a ‘doing’ thing, or a ‘being’ thing? Is an artist defined by and in their output only, or something more reducible? In turn, I think that where you stand on that question will have a defining impact on where you stand on arts funding, and in particular, a form of it like the Keatings. ‘Picking winners’, to use Stephen Fenely’s deft term, tends to presume that what you are funding is the ‘genius’, rather than the genius’ work. This matters, because - to go back to Tozer - whether or not he was a ‘genius’, for whatever reasons throwing money at him did not lead to him realizing it, not even partly. Compare, then, the ‘patronage’-linked demands made of a painter like Velasquez (or, as mentioned before, a Bach) - unquestionable genius, yes, but not the recipient of patronage and public support because that genius ‘was recognised’. These men were blessed with well-supported middle-class lifestyles because of what they did with it, daily, like any other nice middle-class aspirational. Because the Spanish Kings wanted nice middle-class portraits of themselves (not sharks in tanks, and certainly tents full of ex-lovers’s names and used johnnies); because the pious of Leipzig wanted nice middle-class odes to the glory of God and the joy of life (not naked photos of their kids). Now, sure, it’s a job lot, you can’t parse the genius bits that make a ‘nice middle-class portrait’ also great art from the middle-class aspirational bits, and in anothe rage, those genius bits might find that dead sharks and lovers are their only viable path to expression. But that’s not the way the thinking about arts funding should ever go: As patron (including the public), you must fund the work (and hope like hell for a touch of greatness). As artists you should gratefully take the living-dough, respect the middle-class imperatives behind it, shackle it humbly to whatever talent you’ve got, and hope like hell your talent charges it with great artness, too. What you DO NOT DO if you are funded by others, is wave your talent - or, if you are the patron, your largesse - about like some kind of exceptionalist, get-out-of-the-9-to-5-‘burbs Art&Culture Elite card. Not because I care less about arrogant pollies or elite f**k-you arty-farties - would that we had more - but because that stance works fatally against your own creative interests.

James, I am not sure if this will get up, my last response disappeared into the ether, whether for length or offensiveness, I’m not sure. With me, it can always be either. As I said in that coment, I, too, would love to see Guy Rundle turn this bold, gripping piece into an extended series.

Venise: sounds like a good case of “something to struggle against” and for a blade of grass to celebrate surviving.

Ian MacDougall: Keating pushed hard for a National Museum, but he called the final realisation of it a “lemon” and wrote in the Australian on 25 April this year:

“… Another member of my staff and a fellow advocate of Morton’s, Don Watson, was to write in Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002): ‘Over three years the concept of a national museum evolved into a brilliant fusion of technologies, democracy and imagination — a masterpiece.’

“This, of course, was simply hyperbole. No such masterpiece existed, for had it, it would be visible today, notwithstanding the Howard government’s undue haste in designing and erecting the building.

“But a shrewd proselytiser should have known that John Howard, possessing the cultural and artistic sensibilities of a filing cabinet, was more likely to botch the project than preside over its glorious flowering. Which is what happened. Happy to be along for the ride, Morton is now repenting in leisure.”

Ian MacDougall: If Keating were responsible for that crime against nature, the National Museum, I would chain him to it. The truth is although Keating was part of the original brainstorm, the atrocity it turned out to be (well after his time) has shocked him just as much as it does you and me. He put some noses out of joint by calling it a lemon

I was having a crack at the readers of the HS-same rag that pays Andrew bloody Bolt
and when the readers have read the comics and the footy section they may drift off to the Bolter. These people know not of the yartz. And this pains me deeply.

Gotta go to bed now.

Cheers

Venise

I’d take the 18th century patronage any day of the week.

http://noahsarc.wordpress.com/keatings-eulogy-for-suharto/

The journalist Margo Kingston wrote: “Fairfax journos cling tenaciously to the remnants of a true journalistic culture, one backed by a charter of editorial independence and journalist solidarity when journalistic princples are at stake. One where we strive to separate news judgement from the self-interests of owners, boards and advertisers. A culture in which the Board picks the editor and the editor decides what is news and is accountable to the staff for them. A democratic workplace culture of the ‘old-fashioned’ Australian type - which no modern-day power-player either understands or likes. When Keating was Treasurer, he once strode into the SMH Canberra bureau, and brayed at the journalists: ‘Your trouble is that no-one controls you!’ As for Murdoch and Packer, the notion that a media asset as large and complex as Fairfax could get along just fine under the ‘control’ of ‘no-one’ drives them nuts.”

http://www.fabc.org.au/vic/links/documents/details.php?art_id=77

Tom Uren in his autobiography ‘Straight Left’ let slip the one line appraisal: “He is no democrat.”
Understandably. Few control freaks are.

Keating’s current pretension is to architectural authority. To my knowledge, the one building he has contributed something to is the postmodernist abomination known as the Museum of Australia in Canberra, though I understand his contribution was an asset-swap with the ACT Government so that the Museum could get the old Canberra Hospital site. Against the wishes of the ACT medical profession, one of the best hospitals in Australia was destroyed, and its place taken by a building right on the ACT lakefront which takes absolutely no advantage of the site, and would be better placed at the back end of Fyshwick.

As the reader may have guessed by now, I am no admirer of the man. But I will say this for him: he has enormous powers of political persuasion. He persuaded me, a lifelong Labor supporter and a former President of the Canberra Branch of the ALP, to become a swinging voter. I voted for John Howard in1996, and from an East Timorese perspective, I undoubtedly did the right thing.

Maybe the main difference is that art patronage was just as important to a lord’s prestige in the 18th century as charity patronage is now. On second thoughts, it was much more important. So a good artist could always try again somewhere else until his genius was recognised. Whereas, Keating operated practically alone, in (let’s face it) a cultural desert.

JM, I’m don’t think I’m busting Godwin’s law by reckoning that for Keating to cry crocodile tears about the way the Tozers of the brave new neo-lib world get knocked about now, is not so far removed from an Adorno, a cultural elite and born leader who fled the Nazis in ‘34, pompously telling the generations that follow that we’re not allowed to get all dreamy-eyed anymore, like…er, they did (to disastrous effect). While Adorno was getting on with his life as best he could, admittedly no doubt wringing his hands at hip dinner parties and watching his career get screwed, and friends, worse (before f**king off to London, a decade ahead of Wannsee), German Cult&Arts Jews like Martin Gruber, the editor of the Munich Post, were getting filthy in the street clinches with Hitler’s goons, trying to do something concrete while there was still a fair chance. I think that Adorno’s retrospective cod-sombre blah is, actually, not much more than a kind of generational self-exculpation. If you say that line with a shrug, and a plaintive ‘Hey, what could we do, TWNA?’, then add: ‘But to show you young ‘uns how bad we feel now - about stewarding in the greatest catastrophe Man has ever known, in slow motion, over fifteen years - we’re gunna…stop writing lyric poetry! Yeah! (And that means you too, buster).’

To me, that idea is of a piece with Keating’s rather-too-late do-gooding (now, and at the time of the big grants). Why is it that all the post-war generations have been so damned helpless in the face of their own paralysed agency? (Oh, we can’t, we can’t, TINA, TINA, oh dearie, it’s so hard, this human agency thing isn’t it, oo-err, freedom, oo-err, it’s ooo, err, aaa, eee, o won’t somebody, SOMEBODY stop us from choosing not to do the right thing…). Keating’s eulogy was, I think, as much as anything, a generational leader’s bellow of rage at how much he and his lot, for all its fine intentions, sophistication, self-knowingness, and opportunity, have blown it. For a while Keating the Genius - who really doesn’t give a shit about economics - could take a kind of legacy-comfort from the drama and poetry of the End of Certainty…but that’s all gone in the inevitable collapse of that economic ‘revolution’ now. ‘Revolution’ - Christ. It was the Theft of the Century, is what Thatcherism was. All that ‘J-curve’ charisma,all that World’s Best Treasurer guff…God, it must all look so tawdry in his mirror, now that the Masters of the Universe are all inventing log cabin religions, or in jail, Greenspan is the goose du jour, and failed execs are still siphoning public billions direct into their Gdansk chalets. Goodness me, what a f**king hustle it’s all been. What a con, a really shabby, thirty year sucking dry of generations’ worth of public commonwealth.

It’s not blaming PJK alone - it was coming, anyway - to point out that he more than any single Australian politician was responsible for the ideological commodification of life (not the same as mere daily fiscal imperative, as in my earlier post), so antithetical to a Tozeresque worldview. And of all them all, he’s also the one who its increasingly rotten fruits will sicken the most.

Sorry, I’m growing more incoherent than usual, I’ll try to shut up and read, now. but it’s a ripper piece, a defining humanities subject, and - like others on this thread - I would love to see GR open up the carbs again, see just how far and fast he can get this baby to go in Part II.

Here’s a profound and simple lesson: Getting p*ssed only takes you to a lower steady state from where you started. Millions of advertising dollars and legal drug pushing is organised around masking that basic reality. Tozer’s reported addiction is the same result as thousands of others only from a greater and remarkable height.

That, my friends, is the story of art.

The Holocaust did not bring about the drearification of Western culture. High Culture was already crumbling under the force of Bolshevism in the 20th century. The age of empire was over and with it was buried an attitude of immortality, of leaving something for the ages. Monarchs tended to take a world view that stretched long before and after their lifetimes, so they venerated aesthetic heritage even when they didn’t understand it, and they typically loved to immortalize their names by laying more stones upon that heritage. The effect on more humble architects, engineers and designers of everyday objects was similar to that of Melbourne’s Victorian masterpieces upon “the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs that surround them, and stretch out beyond the city” as you say.

The fall of empires brought on a veneration of noble mediocrity, and a cleansing tabula rasa where fresh was good and anything old was just second-hand. Monumentalism fell out of currency and now sounds like absurd arrogance. It took durability with it, and eventually consigned beauty to “decoration”, the cheery colours pasted onto an object when its makers are finished with it. There were flourishes of post-empire excellence such as the skyscrapers of New York City and the height of the Art Deco movement. But the rising quest for efficiency and short-term outlook meant those flourishes were little more than death-throes. An engineer today would be sacked for trying to make public transport as graceful as a steam train, when you can stamp out buses that double up as advertising billboards.

This is what Keating has tried to combat. The relegation of beaty to a splashing of Ken Done squiggles, “sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy”, over a Westfield mall to cheer up shoppers.

And while it’s true that giving cash to those with the spark of something greater still burning in them may not, in hindsight, be as useful as giving them a stage to perform on, you can hardly blame him for seeing what’s happened to the world and trying to fix it.

And I doubt if drinking money hastened the demise of Geoffrey Tozer. The bland ugliness of the world he was born into would have assailed his senses every day and driven him to the hardware store for metho if he couldn’t buy something decent.

I’m confused, good buddy. How can you praise “a distinctively Australian genius” that’s
 ”sun-bleached, hedonistic, innocent and simply happy” after saying that it’s “indisputable” that “Romanticism died in the death camps” and there should be “no celebration of humanity, or nature that does not see also the shadow that it throws”?
Didn’t you contradict yourself here?

And while Tozer may have been a wimp, I for one don’t think that all “people who are inward, unassertive, frail, and vulnerable” are wimps. I reckon it’s often true that people develop a deeper and more authentic inner strength the more they suffer.

Over.

But whoring is whoring no matter how classy the boudoir, enjoyable the trick or handsome the pay-off (and payer). If you allow someone to fund you with grandiloquent visionary rhetoric attached to the dough, then no matter how genuine their best hopes, the price is too high. Bach wasn’t paid to be a ‘genius artist’, he was paid to be chapel master (or whatever it was). That kind of workaday banality - the same for us all - is the only basis on which serious artists should take money from anyone - and, critically, the only basis on which anyone serious about nurturing them/the ‘possibility of production’ of their serious art, should ever offer it (especially public money): pure unsentimental daily-production stake, preferably with a some broader societal anchor (such as teaching dullards, or putting on regular free gigs in public spaces) as an inherent part of the bargain.