Books that Made Us by Carl Reinecke

Author:Carl Reinecke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2021-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

7

Something sinister

‘Operation O’, the ceremonial opening of the Sydney Opera House in the October of 1973, was a staid, if sometimes raucous affair.1 With Queen Elizabeth launching the official opening ceremony, the organisers were desperate to avoid accusations that the event was too formal or elitist. Promising instead ‘a harbour carnival’, they assured the public that the event was ‘for the people, not the starched shirts’.2 Two thousand yachts, warships and tugs sounded their sirens and horns in an exuberant ‘two-minute cockadoodle-doo’, and the organisers released 1000 pigeons and 60,000 balloons, soon snatched away by 45-knot winds.3 The Queen, struggling against the breeze, delivered her speech in the building’s forecourt; she described the opening as proof of the ‘progression’ of Australian culture ‘from the mud hut to soaring opera house’.4

The opening, in the words of the expatriate art critic Robert Hughes, was a cultural watershed for Australia.5 But there were two conspicuous absences from this long-delayed ceremony. The first was the building’s original architect, the much-maligned Dane Jorn Utzon. The other, having died in 1959, was Joseph Cahill, the New South Wales Labor premier who had commissioned and approved the building seventeen years earlier. Cahill was one of the first to argue that the Opera House would ‘display the flowering of Australian culture’ and prove ‘a monument to democratic nationhood’.6 Cahill’s cultural ambitions lived on and were shared in part by the new, transformative Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam.

When he was elected in November 1972 after twenty-three years of conservative rule, Whitlam was keen to bring about a vast political and policy change as quickly as possible. It was to be the ‘end of the ice age’, according to many commentators. Eager to meet the needs of ‘modern society’, Whitlam and his government wasted little time; the rapid changes of Whitlam’s first days in office continued unabated for the next three years. He set himself the task of removing ‘anachronistic’ holdovers and embarked on a program of reform to remake Australian laws, society, politics and culture.7

In line with its modernising ambitions, the Whitlam government positioned itself as an enthusiastic advocate of modernist art. One of its most famous decisions was the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting Number 11, 1952, known as Blue Poles, with Whitlam insisting its $1.3 million price be made public.8 It was immediately controversial. Some were outraged by the cost, along with the ‘doubtful value’ of abstract expressionism, while others defended the decision, saying it was ‘the greatest thing that has happened to art in Australia’. Criticised as an example of the way Whitlam’s government ‘foisted its actions on an unprepared public’, a section of local artists were particularly hostile, arguing the government could have instead spent the money on paintings by Australian artists.9 To Donald Horne the controversy around Blue Poles suggested that Whitlam’s ambitions weren’t so much nationalist as ‘catching up with overseas’, satisfying ‘an anxious itch that somehow Australia has fallen shamefully behind other places’.10

Australian literature was no exception to these rapid modernising reforms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.