{"id":4371,"date":"2021-07-20T15:22:37","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T04:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=4371"},"modified":"2021-07-20T17:33:49","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T07:03:49","slug":"guest-post-homesless-stephen-orr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2021\/07\/guest-post-homesless-stephen-orr\/","title":{"rendered":"GUEST POST: The Homesless, by Stephen Orr"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Stephen Orr has always been a supporter of the arts in Australia. His\u00a0award-winning\u00a0Time’s Long Ruin<\/em> was adapted into Innocence,\u00a0<\/em>an Australian opera, in 2013. In this special guest piece for the blog, Stephen laments the fate of Australian stories, and how we\u2019re losing the battle to keep home-grown culture alive.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read on for his thoughts on the arts in Australia.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There have only been a few places I\u2019ve felt the locals love their books, their poems, their films, their writers, their playwrights, their composers, their actors and singers and painters.<\/h1>\n

\"Time's<\/a>Sitting outside the Vienna State Opera in a misty rain, watching Wagner, the wet hair (and bums), the stereophonic Rhine maidens, the Blitz-like camaraderie between viewers sharing wine and white sausage; or Paris, Rimbaud\u2019s \u2018Le Bateau ivre\u2019 painted on a wall close to Saint Sulpice Church (a stranger telling me French kids are made to learn this and other poems at school); Dublin, anything to do with Dublin and James Joyce; walking the streets of Prague, in the shadow of the castle, or standing, head stooped, in shop 22 of the Golden Lane as Kafka stokes the fire and writes A Country Doctor<\/em>. Real, visceral, warmed-air and finger-tingling (for me, at least) experiences. Back in Vienna\u2019s Literature House, talking to Brecht in Berlin\u2019s Dorotheenstadt cemetery, the whisky-smooth voice of the guide leading me around Stevenson\u2019s Edinburgh.<\/p>\n

As I return, and try to feel the same way here, in Australia, in Adelaide, in 2021. The feeling that a story, a song, can mean so much, can mean something, can mean anything<\/em> to us.<\/h1>\n

I\u2019m writing because I feel we\u2019ve entered the Cultural Cringe Mark II. I\u2019m writing because I feel we\u2019ve descended, again, into a haze of other people\u2019s dreams<\/em>. I\u2019m writing because I\u2019m worried that another generation of Australian kids are growing up along Wilshire Boulevard (now scattered with villages of the homeless; strangely enough, it\u2019s we Australians who have become culturally dislocated). I\u2019m writing because we don\u2019t worry about Australian films, and they go barely watched, or unwatched, and the telly keeps flogging more American dreams because they\u2019re flasher and louder and more colourful and some corporate goon can co-brand burgers and kiddy toys. And these stories would, will, certainly must<\/em> contain people we recognise from the down the street, Uncle Harry from The Sullivans<\/em>, the loner who sits on the edge of a school yard reading a book, refusing to participate in the Great Australian Frenzy (that, mostly, stands in for what other countries call a culture), all the time, an anaemic, second-rate media shifting any hint of spotlight away from outstanding actors, singers, playwrights and authors onto the usual hamstrings and variations on the Spiderman trope.<\/p>\n

\n

Point being, we could<\/em> do something about this. We could<\/em> program the plays, we could<\/em> give more screens to film-makers, we (our political \u2018visionaries\u2019, our arts ministers) could<\/em> read local poetry in zoos (as Donald Dunstan once did), we could<\/em> subsidise small publishers that keep the fritz-smelling stories alive (instead of making them beg, like small, hairless dogs, at the table of Greater Visions).<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We could<\/em> accept that culture needs a hand-up, that (in such a small, culturally-diverse country) the \u2018make-it-pay\u2019 model doesn\u2019t work for plays, ballets, classical concerts; that this area needs proper<\/em> support, needs funding, even if it doesn\u2019t buy votes, even if the weariest journalists resort to the usual \u2018elitist\u2019 tags to summon the blokes to sell a few newspapers (which, in their death throes, discount the very values they once claimed to serve).<\/p>\n

Why, I wonder, does Australia luxuriate in its own indifference?<\/h1>\n

Make a culture of this itself<\/em>, celebrate it, steel itself against the forces of change that night make us braver, wiser, more generous, more understanding of our own history, our strengths and weaknesses, our nastiness, our glories and glimpses of humanity. We could, at last, become something our ancestors imagined \u2013 a civilisation of the first order, so proud of its own achievements it paints them on apartment walls, or broadcasts them the length of shopping malls.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t believe me? Go into a typical Year 8 classroom and ask the kids what they\u2019re reading, ask them to name a few Australian writers, ask them to name a film they\u2019ve seen in the last year that doesn\u2019t involve a Marvel superhero, ask them (by extension) how any of these art forms help them through their day, help them understand how people function, why their uncle and aunt don\u2019t get along. Ask them what it means to be Australian. Or, alternatively, ask them what it\u2019s like to live in a (pre-1960s) culture-of-other-people-and-other-places, where books were published overseas, where we needed festivals to focus attention on proper<\/em> musicians and composers and poets, where there was no idea that we were unique, and could tell our own <\/em>stories just as well as Ealing Studios or MGM.<\/p>\n

Stephen Orr<\/strong><\/a><\/h1>\n

has published eight novels, a volume of short stories (Datsunland<\/em><\/a>) and two books of non-fiction (The Cruel City<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Fierce Country<\/em><\/a>). He has won or been nominated for awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the International Dublin Literary Award. Stephen Orr lives in Adelaide. He was one of two recipients of the 2020 CAL Author Fellowships.<\/p>\n

Support Wakefield Press by buying our beautiful books!\u00a0<\/strong>
\nVisit our\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0or contact us on 08 8352 4455 for more information,
\nor to purchase a book (or three!).\u00a0<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Orr has always been a supporter of the arts in Australia. His\u00a0award-winning\u00a0Time’s Long Ruin was adapted into Innocence,\u00a0an Australian opera, in 2013. In this special guest piece for the blog, Stephen laments the fate of Australian stories, and how … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-fun"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-18v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4371"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4377,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4371\/revisions\/4377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}