No one knows where culture begins, but if we put our mind to it, we all have an idea of where it ends. My guess would be a Bunning’s warehouse without the hardware, or an airport terminal without the planes, or even worse a hotel lobby that doubles as a conference centre. Over to your right you can see the buffet restaurant at the end of the universe. It’s called The Orangerie. In front of you there are pla威而鋼
stic trees standing three meters high in over sized pot plants, and the Muzac is playing Pretty Woman. You know this place. Mazda holds its AGMs here. Be careful not to fall in the water feature. It’s designed to make you feel as if the inside of this hotel is all that exists. Outside is a waste land and the windows are fixed shut. The only air is air conditioning. You want some connection to the real world. You grab a newspaper and eeek … this hotel even has its own newspaper. It’s a journal that features photos of business leaders singing karaoke. The bubble is complete. Nowhere Land has closed around you. You begin to miss home and begin to wonder if you will ever be back, and you think to yourself ‘Now I know why all those crack-pots keep going on about art and culture. If the whole world was like this, I’d forget why I was alive.’

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Sometimes find myself thinking not just about the books but the connections between the books. Take Australian fiction for instance, what actually is the link between a handful of novels and the national subconscious?

ABC Radio National’s The Book Show is about to broadcast a series of programs called ‘Five Classic Australian Novels’. The novels are Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala, Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow and Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia. The selection of these five novels was a little bit random. It was based on the idea of what would make good radio, rather than what was or wasn’t a classic.

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Ten years ago, quite by accident, I began floundering about in the idea that language is the mechanism whereby you understand what I’m thinking better than I do. It’s an aphorism from one of Australia’s most unusual and least understood writers and performers, Chris Mann. Chris actually calls himself a compositional linguist, because what he’s doing may not really be writing at all. For him, language is an impediment – or it ought to be, and communication, when it occurs, is more or less by chance; ‘coz you know, mea犀利士
ning is such a pissy little concept.

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