The Echo of Coriolanus

I shared rooms as an undergraduate with a girl from Beecroft in New South Wales. Quite often late at night in her homesickness she would listen to an online broadcast from Sydney, a sort of comedy talk show, earthy harmless stuff hosted by a man and a woman.

Unfortunately I can’t remember their names or the name of the show, but I’m now beginning to wonder if it was Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, the two radio hosts responsible for the prank call to Edward VII Hospital last week, asking about the health of the Duchess of Cambridge. If it was them I can only say that they are about as far removed from ‘shock jocks’ as is possible to imagine. The latter – I’m thinking of some American presenters - are really nasty, usually indulging in vicious political invective verging on total character assassination.

The nurse business is truly tragic. Who could not feel sorry for Jacinth Saldanha and her family? But the reaction to her ‘apparent’ suicide – this word keeps being stressed – I find shockingly out of proportion. It was a childish prank but childish pranks have been the small change of radio and television for years. What is Candid Camera, or more recently Fonejacker, but a series of childish pranks?

This one, which was directed at the Royal Family, not the nurse, went horribly wrong but the vicious mob calling for the immolation of the two presenters quite frankly disgusts me. I imagine it includes lots who took delight in previous pranks, laughing at one moment, snarling at the next.  These are the canaille, the people that Mark Antony manipulated from one state of mind to another with consummate ease.  In their stupidity they shock me far more than any shock jock. 

It wasn’t the paparazzi who drove Princess Diana to her death but those who lapped up publicity, no matter how the story and the pictures were obtained.  I was only eleven years old when Diana died but even then I felt disquiet that evening her body returned to London, a grim procession through the dark, punctuated by the flash of countless cameras.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing more ghastly than the passions of the mob.  

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
as the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt the air - I banish you...

Man Bites Shark

Last Saturday morning, at 9am local time, Ben Linden, a 24-year-old surfer, was killed in a particularly horrific attack by a Great White shark to the north of the city of Perth in Western Australia.  It's a news story I reported on BrooWaha simply as a story (Shark Bites Surfer in Half, 15 July).  

There are aspects to this tragedy that made me uneasy, specifically over the slightly hysterical reaction in the Australian media.  However, with the death so fresh and the shock so apparent, I felt it best just to report the bare facts.  I did, right until the end.  It was only after I found out that surfers were still using the beach in question, despite a local ban, that I felt a brief observation was necessary;

Comment is superfluous in the face of such tragedy, though I think it only right to say that there are some risks simply not worth taking, or if people are prepared to take them the sharks themselves should not suffer the consequences of their foolhardiness. Jaws-style hysteria seems wholly out of place.

Sadly Jaws-style hysteria is what we are getting. Great Whites have been a protected species in Australian waters for more than a decade, after the International Union for Conservation of Nature identified them as vulnerable. Now, in the aftermath of Ben's death, there have been repeated calls for a cull.  Norman Moore, the Western Australian Fisheries Minister, said that is now time to reassess the species population numbers and its protected status.  "Regrettably", he said, "people are being taken by sharks in numbers which we have never seen before.”  

Greater numbers, yes, they are, but what exactly are we talking about here?  Precisely this: five people have been killed in Australian waters in the past ten months.  I agree; it's not a statistic - its five individual tragedies.  Still, the matter should not be taken out of proportion.  We have to understand why sharks are taking a greater interest in human swimmers, clearly not part of their routine food population.  

The answer is we have attracted them, with new and thoughtless forms of high adrenaline tourism.  Cage diving with sharks is a popular pastime in both South Africa and Southern Australia.  When you look into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss looks back into you.  

For sharks this baiting with bait has made them more familiar with a human presence, with humanity as a source of easy food.  Great Whites feed mainly on seals.  Even the rare human attacks have not often resulted in the total consumption of the victims, little comfort, in that a single bit from these powerful jaws is likely to be fatal.  The bites, though, are clearly tests.  In future they may become something more.

There were proposals to introduce cage diving into Western Australia.  I understand that operators have now been told that they will not be allowed to go ahead for fear of attracting more sharks and more attacks.  The link here has been a matter of controversy.  Research by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation produced findings which are ambiguous at best.  They concluded that baiting kept sharks in an area for longer, but did not prove a link between baiting and attacks on humans.  Well, I can only go on a level of simple intuition here but I think it reasonable to assume that more sharks means more attacks.  If human are there and sharks are there the rest will surely follow.

Sharks are ancient creatures.  They were swimming the waters of this planet before humans appeared.  How much longer, though, is now open to question.  In all of last year twelve people across the entire planet died as a result of encounters with sharks.  In the same year, as reported recently in Prospect magazine, a million sharks died in encounters with humans.  The story surely has to be man bites shark, not shark bites man.  

Eminent Australian

How many of you have a county, I wonder, bearing your family name? Well, I do – Fitzgerald County in the north-west corner of New South Wales. Honestly, it’s true! Actually, the county was specifically named in honour of Robert D. Fitzgerald, one of Australia’s most eminent Victorians, a surveyor by profession who established a dynasty of surveyors, as well as being a poet, a botanist and an ornithologist of some note, one who corresponded with Charles Darwin and published Australian Orchids, a classic in the field.

I mention this because in a recent email I alluded to his grandson, Robert D. Fitzgerald III OBE AM, a distant cousin of mother’s, one who made a significant contribution to the development of Australian poetry. She only ever met him once, when she and my grandparents went out to Australia in the 1960s to attend the wedding of his daughter Phyllida, though his expansive personality made a big impact on her, something she remembered years after. Sadly, I was never able to meet him as he died the year after I was born. Now, I think, is the time for me to say a little more about the Australian Fitzgeralds.

Robert D Fitzgerald, the patriarch, was born in Tralee, County Kerry in Ireland in 1830, emigrating to Australia in the mid-1850s after completing his education in what was later to become University College, Cork. As a surveyor he rose rapidly in the profession, though much of his energy, and a good bit of his free time, was devoted to watching birds and cultivating orchids at his home in Hunters Hill, a suburb of Sydney. His published work on orchids was widely acclaimed in the scientific community.

His son and grandson carried forward his name and his profession, though Robert D Fitzgerald III was to establish a reputation principally as a poet and man of letters. In A History of Australian Literature H. M. Green says of him;

The work of Robert David FitzGerald blows like a fresh wind across today, exhaling a courage and confident aspiration, a sense of wonder and mystery that are strange in a world which is bored and afraid and sorry for itself, and a poetry in which this attitude was intensified under the shadow of the early work of T S Eliot. Fitzgerald represents in fact a life and an interest in life that wars and depression have dammed back after the upwelling of the nineties; that upwelling had found its most characteristic expression in the ballad revival in Britain and the dominions, but FitzGerald's poems have none of the qualities of the ballad, Australian or other, except vigour and an adventurous spirit

He began publishing his poetry when he was still at Sydney Grammar school, writing under the nom de plume of Cruma-boo for the Sydnesian, the college magazine. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s dedication. For his poetic achievements he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1951, later becoming a member of the Order of Australia (AM), the most distinguished of a number of other awards and honours. Though by now he was a grand old man of Australian letters he started out as a rebel, whose early associations had all been with the literary avant-garde, his poems published in a literary magazine called Vision. There is a wonderful pen portrait of him from the 1920s;

Impatience is his keynote, an impatience with flesh and bone, boisterously thumping his fist on the marble-topped tables of Mockbells [coffee shop], or the linoleum covering of a bar, while he insisted that Vision found a new school, the pre-Kiplingites, escape from the modern mathematics of verse, from the intellectual cottonwooling of emotion. Huge, lean, gaunt Fitz, with his bright dark eyes and tousled hair, striding down Pitt Street. I can see him now a theodolite tossed carelessly over one shoulder, roaring suddenly at sight of a friend, and swinging around, theodolite and all, so that had he been of ordinary height, he'd have brained at least a dozen passers-by; Fitz bellowing in the Angel or some other pub, or trying to fold his long legs under a restaurant table.

R. D., along with Kenneth Slessor, introduced some important modernist themes into Australian poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, helping to give it a new vibrancy. I particularly like the dualism he perceives in humanity, torn between everyday reality, the mundane facts of existence, and transcendent truths, something he referred to as the Greater Apollo.

His early poetry, including the Greater Apollo series, was published in literary magazines and anthologies, though it wasn’t until the 1950s that it was gathered in a more complete book form, a collection called This Nights Orbit. Amongst other things the latter includes Fifth Day, a partial reflection on the trail of Warren Hastings.

It’s a pleasure to be linked to such a man, however distant the link, such a comfort to know that if my family vanish from the face of the earth we will leave a trace of our name in a county in New South Wales, no better place, I feel sure. :-)

Serendipity: Discovering Clive James

Life is not for television; life is for living! Yes, my declaration: I do not watch that much television; I’m altogether for too busy with deeper-and shallower-modes of experience. OK, OK, I confess that I simply refuse to miss Friends and Charmed when they are on and I like documentaries and good movies. Oh, gosh; maybe I do spend too much time watching telly after all!

What I have been watching recently, when I’ve been able, is the BBC’s poetry season, which has allowed me to immerse myself in the beauty of words and rhythms; allowed me some insight into how other people perceive poetry. I particularly enjoyed the programmes on John Donne, my favourite poet in the English language, full of deep sensuality, and John Milton, who, in Paradise Lost, might be have said to have recreated Lucifer as a modern hero, the greatest of all of the great rebels. There were also some wonderful new discoveries-new for me-and here I want to make particular mention of the show presented by the comedian Robert Webb, an hour long personal exploration in My Life in Verse.

I watched this for two reasons: first because I think Webb is a super comic, and second, because he was touching on the work of poets, modern poets, whose work I would like to understand better; poets like T. S. Elliot, E. E. Cummings and Philip Larkin. I learned Larkin’s This be the Verse years ago just to be able to recite it to the other girls in my school, more for the shock value, you understand, than because I thought it an outstanding poem. Well, yes, they do fuck you up, your mum and dad!

It was all good, the extracts from The Wasteland, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and the readings from Cummings. But the poem that impacted on me most was High Windows, also by Larkin, which I simply could not get out of my head. It’s still there, now committed permanently to memory.

There was something else about this particular show: Webb introduced me to Clive James, whom he described as his favourite writer. Now, I absolutely adore serendipity, discovering something, something that takes me by surprise, while looking for something else. James is a writer, broadcaster and himself a poet. He was talking specifically about Cummings. He also read some of his own verses, good stuff, but it was not that specifically that impressed me; it was his general manner, the things he talked about and the way he used words. So, having time on my hands at the moment, I decided to find out more.

I suppose I should say that my mind works in a slightly eccentric way: it moves, capillary-like, down particular avenues in search of something, often branching off on discovering something else; lairs within lairs, meanings within meanings. You can see it at work here, for I started to talk about poetry and I’m about to finish at a different teminus altogether!

I have before me Cultural Amnesia: Notes on the Margin of My Time, a collection of essays by James, essays on a large variety of people, artists, politicians, musicians, writers; essays that cover people as diverse as Anna Akhmatova and Josef Goebbels. Who would have thought to find those two between the same covers!

The book’s quite delicious. It fills me with tingly delight, because, like me, the author goes off at tangents when he detects a scent he wants to pursue. The essay on Peter Altenberg, an Austrian writer and poet, was fascinating and frustrating; fascinating because I had never heard of him, frustrating because James says so little before setting off on a different path. Why did I find Altenberg of such interest? Simply because of a single quotation, from a work called Fechsung. It goes like this;

There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.

Anyone who writes like that is worth getting to know better. Clive James is worth getting to know better.