Written in London in 1938, Happy Valley draws from White’s experience as a jackeroo on the Monaro. It was here that White became acquainted with a different landscape from his family home in the Hunter and lived amongst the human detritus that tended to collect around the remnants of goldmines and sheep stations. The vitality of White’s writing stems from the balancing act between hope and despair in each character.

Happy Valley is White’s best plot. The private longings of couples intersect and eventually  combust in a tragedy that highlights the open wound of loneliness that seems to be the lifeblood of the Australian landscape. If these people could escape, then they would be happy, but it is the reasons they stay that draws White’s compassion or judgement.

The wasted potential of Dr. Halliday and the listless virility of wayfarer Clem Hagan stand out amongst the cast of characters, and to my mind, they are the closest to White’s experience in the Monaro. The book provides the first glimpses of other White mainstays – the lonely spinster and the overbearing socialite mother.

Whilst the assured contradictions of his later novels are more deliberate here, the raw ambition is breathtaking. White’s determination pours out of the novel, and this sometimes threatens to overcome our interest in the characters.

Happy Valley serves as an opening act to White’s cannon. It gives light to the origins of the motifs that were to weave their way through his work for the rest of his life. White knows these characters intimately. You can almost see the thin lipped writer acting out Sidney Furlow in his mind, as she lolls around her bedroom, applying lipstick ‘like a whore’.

Met with mixed reviews when first published in Australia, White refused to have Happy Valley reprinted in his lifetime. It is a harsh book, but this frames its moments of compassion, humour and acerbic self knowledge. As White’s first novel it is a marvel for what it signals and the ground it prepares. It represents the young writer’s desire for a maturity in the Australian character, and the start of a journey that would make him one of the country’s finest writers.

This review first appeared on artshub.com.au

The stoics would meet on a covered porch and philosophise. They thought there was nothing good or bad in this world, but rather our judgements colour our beliefs and this determines how we feel about what happens to us. For example, someone you don’t know asks you to do something you don’t want to do. In front of a whole lot of strangers in a dark room. It’s not the request that makes you feel anxious, but rather the process inside you that first decides the request is bad. Your anxiety is caused by your judgement and not the request itself. That’s their first theory.

They had two theories.

The second theory is what they called the premeditation of evil. There’s two aspects to this theory. Holding onto anything in this world is dangerous because everything is finite. If we hold onto anything too dearly we will one day have to deal with its loss. The more accustomed you are to the idea of this loss, the easier it will be when it eventually occurs. So if you were my child or a partner I should imagine you dead or gone every day and eventually, I will be correct.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. I have to do that some times for theatrical effect.

The point of this exercise is to remind yourself of just how precious those things are. It’s an attempt to resist the leveling out of our lives, when everything we love kind of bleeds out into the background, like a watercolour with too much water. If you imagine something dead and gone, then you can imagine what it would be like to loose it and you are reminded of just how important it was to you in the first place.

The second aspect of the premeditation of evil is the one I want to revive tonight. When things go wrong, they usually go less wrong than what you were afraid of. Forcing yourself to experience a taste of something you’re anxious about will help you realise that it is not that bad. For example being naked in public. Your ass doesn’t fall off if people see it by accident. Most of the time the worst case scenario is something we are able to handle.

Which brings us to Bondi.

Ordinance No. 52 established in 1935 set exact dimensions for swimming costumes. It decreed that men’s and women’s costumes must have legs at least 3″ long and completely cover the front of the body.

Beach inspector Aub Laidlaw enforced Ordinance No. 52. He would patrol the beach and measure the length of swimming costumes on both men and women. If Aub decided that the length of the fabric was inappropriate, the offender would be taken to the changing sheds at the Pavilion, just below us, and ordered to put on some more clothes. If the piece of clothing was particularly offensive they may be arrested or escorted to a tram via the back door of the Pavilion. From a lot of the interviews Aub seems a little put out by the ordinance. He was a trained safety professional, and he was forced to become what was effectively the fashion police. There are some suggestions that he liked the attention.

Beach inspector Aub Laidlaw will make stoics of us all.

The story Crawford weaves is of an unconventional Australian. When the rest of the visual art community was firmly locked in the strict if sparse rigors of post modernism, Davis was sticking to his guns. He continually developed his chaotic, visceral style using the old fashioned medium of paint. When others were stripping back in a race to the zero point of meaning, Davis added more to his panels, more cynicism, more whimsey, more darkness and more humour.

In the eighties his chosen subject matter and medium earned him little attention from the art world. After fifteen years in the wilderness of newspaper graphic design, Davis’ phoenix like return to the art world is an impressive and challenging statement of artistic determination and integrity.

His city work often depicts the psychological warfare of the daily grind. His darker canvases skewer the immoral and spiritually weak. The symbolism is familiar, but the sharp contrasts, naive figuration and urban subject matter make Davis a difficult addition in the pantheon of Australian visual artists.

This is an outsider of the most virulent kind. The forceful vision of the world is not easily digestible. Davis’ work is a collection of contradictions. Incisive detail sits next to childlike scrawl. The viewer strays to thoughts about power and the moral landscape of a species surrounded by metal and concrete.

Ashley Crawford’s book does an admirable job of unveiling the intention and background of this independent and forceful artist. Paintings that first appeared difficult and abrasive soon become intriguing. Crawford’s clarity allows the paintings to open up before the reader. Each new page brings another variation, another panel and greater insight into the symbolic work and its relevance to the artist’s unique experience.

In a time of austerity and in the wake of the great vacuum of post modernity, James Davis gives us something to look at. He gives it all to us, unashamedly and with a lust for life and non conformity. He bullishly thrusts his underworld in our faces. The city is full of threats to our sanity and morals, but so too is it a place of humanity and compassion. Davis has been saying this for years and The Art of James Davis is an excellent guide to his vocabulary.

This review first appeared on artshub.com.au

The Art of James Davis by Ashley Crawford

Arcadia

It is 3am and the variety of backpackers have left the deck and are asleep or having anonymous sex in their cabins. A stray cat angles through the night, looking for something to toy with. 

Inside one of the cabins I sit shirtless on the edge of the bed. The lamp is off and I have a towel over my knees. I am so tired I struggle to keep my eyes open. This is not what I had come looking for. I didn’t remember how I got there, I was not sure if I could ever leave. Insanity leaks down my spinal cord to give my limbs an unnatural, stale version of the fight or flight reflex. The night is far from over and before it’s done there will be blood. Regardless of the way this contest goes, I already know that it will be mine.

❦

I like to keep my ears clean. Just for fun, or if I’m in a bad mood, I’ll use two cotton buds instead of one and most of the time both come out just as clean as when the went in. I’m dubious about the phrase ‘like your shit don’t stink’ because I suspect that mine doesn’t.

You could say that I am a fan of control. I don’t go in for security systems or trip wires, but I do enjoy a new sponge on the end of my dishwashing wand and I have a specific way of packing a dishwasher. For the uninitiated, big plates and pans on the bottom level with cutlery evenly spaced in its receptacle. Top level is mugs and glasses and breakfast bowls resting on each other at an angle to allow the optimal ratio of space efficiency to water access. You’re free to experiment with configurations, but I think you’ll find that I’m right.

In fact, there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. A part of me knows that I will somehow live longer, if not happier, knowing the best way to pack an overnight bag or make a bed or style curly hair. It’s not like I’m going to force my rightness onto other people, but I may repack the dishwasher when you’re not looking.

This rightness is about efficiency most of the time. Not always time efficiency because sometimes the right way to do things is the long way. Take the Great Ocean Road for example or sitting through the opening titles for Game of Thrones every episode. Whilst these things are not necessary, they make me feel better about life. For a glimmering hopeful minute, some aspect of this hurtful fucked up planet is bowing to your command. You are in control of the minutia of your existence. You too can stare in the face of chaos and know for one moment of your day that everything is good and proper and easy to find.

Of course, as in all parts of life, you get fucked up. People assert their autonomy and insist on doing things the wrong way, or worse, they don’t even consider that there could be a right way. It’s fine. You know, it’s good. It’s important. I can’t be right for everyone and some people like making mistakes.

Where my quest for rightness really falls down is around the October mark. Something happens to the world at about that time in the year, in Sydney at least, that makes a mockery of any attempt I make to be happy or content in this world. What I’m talking about, the phenomena that can shift me from a zen mountain goat burning incense to a wide eyed half naked revenge apparatus is the natural world’s insistence on insects. Apart from them, I’m usually pretty good with animals. Poodles shit me and some cats are pompous and jellyfish are dickheads, but otherwise everyone’s pretty cool.

Everyone, except of course for mosquitos.

❦

My friend Harry I and I arrived in Cambodia via a border town that reminded me a bit of Deadwood. In those heady days of the first fluctuations of the global financial crisis our comfortable trip across South East Asia quickly became a jaw droppingly expensive and frustrating contest with currency conversion.

Regardless we found a comfortable riverside guesthouse where we could eat dragon fruit and strong coffee with condensed milk before venturing out to do battle with the Chinese embassy to get a visa for the bus ticket we were now going to have to buy thanks to the toxic debt in America.

I liked Cambodia. The street dogs were friendly and the sex tourists were innocuous. Our fellow backpackers were from Brisbane and they were determined to find the complete series of ‘Charmed’ before they went back home. Unfortunately we had little opportunity to speak to Cambodians except those that drove us around or gave us our alcohol.

Somewhere in Vietnam I remembered that European colonials drank gin and tonic because the quinine was a natural insect repellent. This suited Harry and I fine. We did our best impression of bobble hatted British imperialists sitting at the edge of the world with Bombay sapphire as mother’s milk. Despite the permutations of a hundred thousand stock brokers half a world away the post Imperial conquest of one guesthouse and a few pirated DVD’s was going pretty well.

This particular guesthouse started where the shore ended. the whole structure jutted out over the shallow waters of the Bassac. Outside our window grew some tall reeds. It felt a bit like an exotic locale from a Star Wars prequel.

As night fell we retired to our room to sleep off the quinine. From somewhere far away, from under the bed or in the darkest corners of my psychosis the faint, interminable and most of all, mildly irritating noise of mosquitos began vibrating through our air.

I don’t deal well with mosquitos. If my life was a Disney film a trio of mosquitos would be the baddie’s henchmen. Except if this cartoon were animal based, in which case the baddie would be a mosquito. For whatever reason, they like my blood, more so than anyone I’m ever with. In this case, more so than Harry. My mythological quinine was little more than a cultural appropriation, and mosquitos have no regard for post colonial thought. The miasma of my latent alcohol addiction was little more than a brisk barrier to the virile Cambodian mosquito.

For those who know me, I’m sure I appear to be a pretty level headed guy. There is something about the frequency of a mosquito flying in the dark that is a one stop ticket to Spencer smash. They make me irrationally rage fueled. What they do is cruel. In light of my desire for a modicum of control over the environment around me, they fly full in the face of order and gentlemanly decency. They are chaos on wings. I can’t sleep with one in the room, which is enough to say that I didn’t sleep a lot in South East Asia.

What happens next in this story should be prefaced with the knowledge that I was very very tired. I don’t deal will with being tired. I get grumpy and apparently, vengeful. At 3 am on that balmy Cambodian night I was determined to destroy evert cheap little insect in that riverside room. What I once saw as a charming guesthouse I now knew to be an evil breeding ground for the cruelest creatures in the Universe.

My plan was simple. I would kill them. I would just kill them. I was a man and they were a chemical reaction. If nothing else and pending mosquito’s ability to remember and communicate, my last stand would go down in their tiny annals as a bloody night where an entire colony would pay for the irritation of a lot of sleepless nights near the equator. I lay my exposed limbs in the darkness as a kind of bait, willing the poxy little shit heads to come and feast on these prime cuts of grain fed Australian flesh.

‘Hahaha’, I laughed inside my head, in case they heard me, forgetting that my foe was barely sentient.

It was a slow start to the offensive. The hunters became the hunted, but of their noses or proboscis were immune to quinine they were all the more sensitive to treachery. After full minutes of waiting, a tell tale vibration rang out near the far wall. I turned the light on – ha! ‘Surprise! You thought I was asleep! No, my friend I was lying in wait, I was waiting for you!’ In the harsh light I slapped at the wall and through light pained eyes I saw my adversary fall, stunned, to the ground.

With careful precision I picked the agent of chaos up with the fingernails of my thumb and forefinger. It didn’t seem so big now. Its delicate wings motioned in the air. I could see it’s hateful beak swiveling, looking for purchase. ‘No. Not this time. I have you now and you will pay. If your kind feels pain, you had better prepare yourself.’

In the dark dark night on the banks of the river next to Phnom Penh, in a sleepy guesthouse, I got my satisfaction. The tiny cries of a single mosquito could be heard through the city.

❦

As I look back now, with my blood down, and out of the heat of warfare, do I regret my actions? No. I blame the natural world for making me what I am today. As I stood over the lamp slowly bringing my newly wingless prey closer to the heat of the 75 watt light bulb and taking pleasure in its adorable convulsions I knew that I was going home a changed man.

Do you ever recover from war? No. It stays with you always. In my heart I know that my cause was just. Even if that was the only mosquito I killed that night, I know that a balance was restored, that wrongs had been righted. When blood is spilled there must be retribution. Blood can only clean blood. That is the order of things, the right configuration, the small bowl underneath the big one, alphabetized, orderly, and efficient.

This story was originally performed at Story Club, Hermann’s Bar on the 27th of June, 2012.

Tin Shed’s Camping Tours was originally produced at Fraser Studios as part of the 30 Days and 30 Nights Festival.

IVAN: They sent the boy up in a plane. I was there when he took off. They were applauding as he walked the length of the hangar. He carried his helmet under his arm and what looked like a white orchid on his lapel. I assumed it was from his girlfriend, but I couldn’t see any women around. No doubt she was hooked up somewhere. He could have been talking to her through a microphone in his suit at that very time. Groups of men in grey flight suits had gathered to see him off. I took it that he was quite famous. I saw his face only briefly. He was young. Not handsome, or dashing. He had dark eyes and a thick neck. Nothing out of the ordinary about him as such, If I hadn’t such a difficult relationship with my own son I probably wouldn’t have thought any more on it.

But I do, and I have.

The plane was white with silver wingtips. It was an older model with those criss crosses that hold the two wings together and safely on top of the fuselage. The pilot half sat in the cockpit and made a farewell gesture to the crowd. I have thought about it since, and I have come to the conclusion that I was trying to emulate it. It’s a very simple movement, but I appreciated its naivety. I knew from this motion that the boy and I could have been friends.

The take off was a success. His mission was all over the newspapers. He was to bring back the last surviving members of a species stranded in a war torn land. A single pilot with no back up in strange skies with no protection but a white orchid.

I thought back to his gesture, his last movement on earth. He held his index and middle finger together and raised them to his temple. He swiped them back down. This was not a regulation salute, perhaps he had seen someone do it in a movie. I held my own fingers together, with my thumb sticking out at right angles. I saw the airplane begin to cut through the cloud cover. I raised my hand, but raised it further than my forehead. My hand climbed and climbed until my arm was fully extended, my fingers aiming at the airborne boy. The sun was setting and had painted the clouds pink.

I stood on the tarmac and fired at him.

I lured people onstage with a packet of Iced Vovo’s. This image came from research into Africa witch doctors who kidnap small children using lollies and biscuits to attract them. I wanted to experiment with the experience of being a part of the audience and then being singled out. I am very interested in the phenomena of diffused responsibility that occurs when people are in a group. Among other things, audiences gather together to be anonymous and private in a public space. I was quick to destroy this expectation and wield my automatic authority as a person speaking on stage.

The theatre seems to rob people of their own sense of agency. I think this directly relates to the hyper reality of the space (in a non-digital sense). Anything can happen there and it isn’t illegal. We accept that different rules apply. Its why business people seem so uncomfortable watching shows, they know that they are on foreign turf, where authority is automatically taken away from them.

The show is about fear. I set up the show by admitting there will be audience interaction, and if the audience member is anything like me, this immediately puts them on edge. I want to create an atmosphere where the general ‘administration of fear’ that can be located in our contemporary and social life is emulated in the theatre. I want to see how people react to unjust authority and how they negotiate personal responsibility in a group.

I realise now that there is an important distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear is the anticipation of pain, but anxiety seems to be anticipation of something much less specific.

Ultimately I think the show could have a very strong and irresistible thematic interest in mass individualisation and the uneasiness we have sharing space. Paul Virilio notes that the ‘here and now’ of previous human experience is quickly being eroded by the mythic quality of instantaneous communication. Historically, qualities of omnipotence were limited to deities. Now we seem to transcend human capacity on a daily basis and the world is shrinking. Progress is is becoming a religion and we are outgrowing our world.

Countering this perspective, people still choose to come to the theatre. Not all of the population, but a sizeable number. We still group together, and this is no small thing. It shows that unity is possible. It is fleeting and chaotic, but unity is possible should we need to call upon it.

The next step in developing this show would is to see how far I can push my authority onto the audience. I noted just how fearful I was of the performance and this too, should be looked at. The fear I had was of a loss of control, of being on stage with no guarantee of a satisfying dramatic arc. In an age where so much personal expression is vetted and curated in status updates and, well, blog entries, this is no small victory. I smell a new project, one where the audience is the main source of interest, where the show is about whatever the audience bring into the theatre. That and Iced Vovos, obviously.

The quarterly poses itself no small task when it asks ‘What is Australia For?’ Its broad scope struggles to produce a collection of analysis greater than the sum of its parts, but it is an audacious task and the answers have never been so varied, pressing and complex. Bravery in intellectual analysis is always appreciated and so the collection is a thrilling and unpredictable guide to the myriad of Australian experiences today.

Australian history is littered with blind spots and this book stands as a testament to our new desire to look everywhere, to be mature enough to deal with any injustice and by doing so, help ease the knots in our history. Cameron Muir and Charlie Ward shine a light on some of Australia’s more obscure movers and shakers. It’s a timely reminder that the right role models to make the most of the ‘Australian Moment’ can be found in our own country’s history.

The great challenge is to pay homage to the diversity of voices but maintain specificity. This is achieved in large part through the highly personal nature of much of the content, from Frank Moorhouse’s near death experience in the outback to Maria Papa’s musings on cultural appropriation.

The personal is political, but these politics are dealing with the world as it is, and how they would like it to be within the limitations of our current epoch. The writers are passionate about that they are telling us, but prescriptions for the future are comfortably general. The collection does a good job of representing the issues, but it shies away from offering specific answers to hard questions. The onus is on the reader to assess what is worth cherishing and what needs to be changed.

A literal answer to the question ‘What is Australia for?’ would be ‘Chinese buildings and bridges.’ As our landmass is repatriated we can use this mental image as a kind of talisman to remember we have two options which both have a strong precedent in our history.

We can choose to contribute to a narrative told overseas or engender our own unique story. Meaning is no longer elsewhere. It is springing up from the land, as it has done for thousands of years before white colonisation. Meaning is about sitting comfortably with lived experience, taking inspiration from our own landscape and relaxing in our expertise. This too could be positively Australian.

JENGA: Oh, God this is exciting. It’s so wonderful to be here with you all. I can’t thank God, but I do want to thank something, because this is a privilege. This is so heartening. I’m just going to take a deep breath and make a mental picture. The next time I’m down or low, I’ll remember your presence here and the gift of communication.

This is the true work of humanity, right here. And when i say humanity, I mean with a capital ‘H’. Give yourselves a round of applause. No, I mean it. It’s beautiful what I’m seeing here today. I wish you could all be up here and we could be as one. Not this leader and follower mentality. Can we do that? No, they’re shaking their heads. No, that’s not possible. You know, we have the power to change the face of the planet, but we cant get some audience members onstage.

I’m just kidding, I’m kidding. You know, lets just be thankful. Lets be thankful that we’re here today. That you were selected to be in this room. You got your lanyard and you shake that lanyard around like its the most important object in your life. And it is. That lanyard means you get to meet people. You get to talk and communicate your life experience. And that is such a precious gift. A precious gift friends. There are people in this world who can’t read. There are people in this world who cannot speak. They are voiceless. They are speechless. They cannot speak. They are dumb. We, we here, we’re gonna change all that. Tonight. Okay. We’re gonna change that. You and I, and the stage manager over there who’s still shaking his head.

I want you to cast your mind back. We’re gonna do a little thought experiment. I want you to cast your mind back to the eighties. I want you to remember a little film called ‘Three Men and a Little Lady’. Don’t laugh, this is important. Okay three men and a little lady. If it wasn’t for that vaguely homosexual family environment, that little girl could have been in an orphanage. And orphanages, we all know are bad. Yes. They’re bad places. Almost without exception. What we can learn form that film is that if you don’t have some kind of support system for children, they can end up in Africa and they can be dirty and have al kinds of diseases and they can sometimes die. People die in Africa. Children die in Africa. But we can change all that tonight. Yes we can. And I’m gonna show you how.

Imagine a world with no crying. Imagine a world with no pain, no tears. Can you do that for me? I want you to put your hand on the person next to you. Touch the person next to you and tell them that they are a good and kind and decent person. They deserve love. Tell them now, ‘You deserve Love’. I can’t hear you guys. That’s what I’m about. I’m about more communication. Because its though communication that we can comprehend the bigger picture. What is the bigger picture? I gotta tell you, I’m pretty myopic. I wake up, I get my coffee. I can’t see over my dashboard, I’m so myopic. Does this sound like you? You like existing in the little bubble of your car? You own a car? You do? Well, you’re a bad person.

I’m just kidding. I don’t think you’re a bad person for owning a car. I think you’re a lazy person, I think you’re a self satisfied person who can’t see themselves in the bigger picture . I think you’re self satisfied. And I am trying so hard up here. I am trying. I think you deserve what you have. I think you deserve your car. But what you have is stolen. It’s stolen property and you’re all thieves.

Who’s seen the Smurfs? You’ve all seen the Smurfs, they’re one of those things. My lord those little guys have cut through. You know, you’re like Gargamel. You’re stealing from little blue guys who just want to sing and dance. And you’re chasing them and chasing them and you have a cat. And you’re just really pissed off and you’re bald and you have this snaggle tooth that everyone knows is fucking rank. You should get that seen to. You don’t even need braces these days. You can get these invisiline things that gradually realign your teeth over thirteen months. You should look into it. You’re disgusting.

But there’s a catch. Well, many catches as it turns out. One of which is that you probably didn’t want to sleep with a lot of people, but only one person in particular. And as it turns out, because of the rules that you currently live by is doing their level best to sleep with a lot of people to prove her artistic credentials and say they lived the dream in Paris.

Meet Joe. He’s the guy with the camera and the daschund like solemnity. I had the great pleasure of working on this excerpt of a feature called ‘Art and Fucking’ with Harvey House productions a few weeks ago.

Oh, and you may want to sit down around the 2:40 mark.