The Guardian book blog today runs a short piece in which I reflect on the New Writing Worlds symposium I attended last week. I was staying at the University of East Anglia, which looks like a Dr Who set dropped into the middle of the Norfolk countryside, with a bunch of most interesting writers and poets, both famous (JM Coetzee and CK Williams) and infamous (me). And, like the walrus and the carpenter, we spoke of many things...

Now I'm in Cambridge, ensconced in yet more spectacular 70s architecture at Churchill College, where tonight or tomorrow night I will be heading back to the 17th century and attending a real masque in a hall that is emphatically not British brutalist or modernist scifi, of which I will report here next week. And thence onto London.

Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot, by David Williamson, directed by Simon Phillips. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, until July 12. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot is, as one of David Williamson’s characters might say, a dog.

It’s a dog with one theatrical idea, which is stretched very thin over two and a half hours. And it’s not quite a nice dog. It has the slightly resentful expression of a labrador that might pee on your shoes if you turn your back.

The play is the story of Scarlett O’Hara (Caroline O’Connor), an incompetent waitress in the sort of restaurant that gives Gordon Ramsay conniptions. In between pratfalls, she deals with her mother, a manipulative bully, and sighs with unrequited passion for her boss.

She fills the emptiness in her life with Hollywood movies. That’s the single theatrical idea: Scarlett drifts into Daydream No. 1 and the backstage screen fills with iconic images of a past era, Bogie and Bergman enacting grand passion for those who can merely watch and dream.

The restaurant is staffed by stereotypes – the dumb blonde (Marney McQueen), the testosterone-fuelled wog (Simon Wood), the frustrated chef-artist (Andrew McFarlane), the aging queer (Bob Hornery). Even Scarlett’s mother Maureen (Monica Maughan) is a cliché, drawn from classic tv shows like Steptoe & Son and Mother and Son.

As I sat stonily under a little private cloud in Row F, the audience around me rocked with laughter. What’s the point of cavilling against that? It inevitably seems mean-minded: as the program suggests, it means that you can’t see Williamson in the “right perspective”, and believe that popularity equals lack of seriousness.

But hey, I’m all for the popular. I adored the ingenious theatricality of the MTC’s production of The 39 Steps, which also riffed off classic Hollywood movies. I’m happy to be counted as a member of the Caroline O’Connor fan club. So why not let the laughter ripple on?

Travelling home with my cloud, I pondered why this work doesn’t merely leave me indifferent, but depressed. It’s to do with Williamson’s startling ability to think solely in media-generated stereotypes, and the complacent laughter this elicits from an audience.

In his essay Politics and Language, George Orwell speaks of a decadent English, in which “phrases [are] tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”. “Language,” Orwell warns, “can corrupt thought….Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.”

Williamson’s entire dramatic craft is prefab: at no point do we see through cliché to real feeling. This makes it insidiously comfortable to laugh at wogs, or footballers raping stupid blondes, or lonely old women.

And that’s depressing.

This review was (I think) in Friday's Australian. I am posting from London, so I can't check, as it's not online. There's no doubt alot more to say about politics and language, and I realise I have scarcely mentioned the production itself - 400 words doesn't leave much room - but Ms TN, ever ready with handy excuses, pleads jetlag. I invite you all to talk among yourselves...

The more perceptive among you (perhaps, given my endless complaints, even the terminally woolly-minded) will have noticed that Ms TN has been a little ragged lately. In an attempt to untangle the mental threads, I'm flying to London tonight; perhaps mainly to remind myself that while, for good or ill, I may be many things, one of them is supposed to be a poet.

The putative occasion for my visit is the release of my new collection of poems, Theatre, which is out this month from Salt Publishing in a handsome hardback edition (full advertisement below). So while I'm in the UK, I'm going to hang out as a writer: I'll be discussing human beings and nature with JM Coetzee and other luminaries at New Writing Worlds at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and mainlining poetry at my favourite festival, Soundeye, in Cork, Ireland. In between, I'll spend a weekend in Cambridge, where - continuing the poetry/theatre nexus - I'll witness John Kinsella's version of Milton's masque Comus, and then a bit of time in London, where I'm planning to see ...Sisters, poet/theatre maker Chris Goode's take on Chekhov, at the Gate Theatre. Fortuitously, a retrospective of Cy Twombly's work opens next week at the Tate Modern, and I will so be there. Ever since I rounded a corner in the Tate and felt my jaw clang on the floor at the impact of Quattro Stagioni, I've been a Twombly fangirl. The poetry theme certainly extends to Twombly: he hung out in his younger days with Charles Olson and the gang at the famous Black Mountain College. And you can see it in his paintings.

And yes, I plan to blog some of this. In, of course, a leisurely and poetic fashion.

Meanwhile, in between packing and other miscellaneous duties, yesterday I managed to heave myself into Melbourne Festival HQ to hear the media briefing on Kristy Edmunds' final festival, MIAF 2008. I am not, alas, permitted to tell you anything until the program is officially launched next month: but I will say that I am already pondering whether it's possible not to sleep for three weeks. And that I suspect that this festival might be seen in retrospect as one of the high points of Melbourne culture: it is packed with local artists.

At the other end of the scale, last night I saw David Williamson's new play, Scarlett O'Hara at the Crimson Parrot, at the MTC. More on that when I can upload my Australian review.

And lastly, the promised advertisement:

Alison Croggon has from the beginning of her career demanded attention (gaining an entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 1994, on the strength of one book). She is one of the most powerful lyric poets writing today.

Praise for Theatre:

Alison Croggon's poetry is distinguished by passion, intelligence and an intense moral honesty that does not consist of statements about things, or a drawing up of attitudes to this or that, but of a commitment to understanding the ways poetry - the language of poetry - enables us to understand. We have, as she says, "perfected the technologies of harm" and will most likely carry on doing so. But the same prose poem, History, goes on: "In unguarded moments I found myself longing for the dazzling conceits of civilisation to be actual, for the profound and bloody pleasures which underlay them." The marvellous sequence that ends the book, Translations from Nowhere, itself ends with "an eyelid / snapping open, dazzled, full". That fullness and that dazzling characterise all work.

Theatre is the apt title for such poems. Alison Croggon is gifted with a rare capacity, negative capability: not so much, as for Keats, one that allows the poet into the life of the sparrow on the gravel, but a capacity to feel her way into the voices of others, from Iseult or Sor Juana to the uncanny, unhomed voices of Translations from Nowhere. But as with the best theatre, it is Croggon's care for language, its singularities and its musics, that makes these poems inimitable. Through it all, an ummistakeable note is sounded, wrapping through the many voices the tones of joy and desolation, water and wind on stone.

To the mere spectator, it might appear that in this Theatre the poet is delivering her lines. She is not! This is a theatre in which there is no script, no actors, no representation. It is a place of first principles, born from, and belonging to, the poet. From her stage there come no answers, indeed, no questions. The latter are for you to ask yourself when you realize and understand the complete lack of pretence in her words – “if I have been asleep” –

And like Alison Croggon, responsibly, I also want to wake up, remove my masks, my costumes, and step out into the generative presence of real life. Clearly, it is the poet’s language that allows this. She knows that the spotlight is never on the stage but, rather, on the audience: Her art’s only illumination is what it illuminates in you.

Personally, I think this is the best book I've done. And if moved by my colleagues' exhortations, you can order it online from Salt Publishing.

Many of you will know that Dan Spielman is an actor, whose CV spans an impressive range of work. He began his theatrical career with the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project in the late 1990s, and since has gone on to play lead roles on main stages, most recently as a member of the STC Actors Company. But he is a man whom some might say is unfairly gifted. Some of you might also remember that he recently made his debut as a visual artist. And I have known for years that Dan is a writer and, more specifically, a poet: if his translations of Rimbaud don't convince you, then nothing will.

At the beginning of next month, he is making his debut as a theatre writer with Manna, which premieres at the STC as part of the Wharf2LOUD season. Manna, which will be directed by composer Max Lyandvert, is a densely poetic text which explores an intensely physical engagement with language. I thought it would be interesting to ask Dan a few questions about what he thought about the relationship between poetry and theatre, the process of collaboration in Manna, and so on: and he came back to me with this essay. So here it is.



WHEN I read a poem I am reading an object – faceted like a crystal or layered like a flower. Sometimes it takes years for me to be at the angle necessary to see its particular refraction, sometimes many seasons pass before the flower will open. For me, the contemplative engagement with poetry is one of the keys to sharing its incantation.

The spareness possible in the poetic line liberates my mind from the reductive applications of language – I believe that in poetry it is possible for the simplest things to happen. Where so much in this world bristling with media seeks to name and to reduce, to tarmac, comodify or domesticate the relationship between this and this, poetry is revolutionary. The poet can beckon silence to the edge of insufficient language, can gather runes of rhythm and experience together in an alchemical fashion, and more than nostalgia, more than statement of treachery, poetry can incant the most beautiful ambiguities, the most terrifying lacks within and beyond language. In poetry, because it moves at the face of things language can never enter, touch is possible, the vastness can be said in the vessel. This is the invitation to the reader.

If poetry were only literary, it might be impossible for this power to be translated on the stage. In the theatre, bodies, moments, shapes, gestures move and vanish – the audience vanishes. The incantation is written in the air, is written and absorbed by the event. Literally, there is no time to re-read, no time to go away and return. The imagined silence is completely different. The theatre happens, and then we disappear and the happening takes new form in our memory.

But poetry is an oral form. The Homeric hymns are gems in literature, but reading them I have a sense they live in an intrinsic relationship to the ritual, they exist in time relative to the events and gods they sing to. The theatre is such a ritual time/place, and one of my hopes for Manna is that what is said and sung occurs in a new-forged ritual that the theatre provides. That it might express things that exist between us and between us and that which threatens to overwhelm us.

In saying this, I have no desire to replicate the solitude of reading with a preciousness of language. The hymns, monologues and dialogues in the piece are not recited documents – they are infused with the multiple violences and intimacies of this world as it presents itself to me, and their saying is an act of creation as much as recital.

In the solitude of reading, the severity of a line is something that has to be confronted by the reader – perhaps a little like the considering the void. In the theatre I expect it to be very different. My hope is that the severity of the lineation will be experienced bodily. For the performer, the rest of the line has been erased, or a new phrase violently intervenes. The same can be said for the images of the piece. A score of physical and linguistic interruption questions the images seen and the images created. The voices of the actors are, broadly speaking, seeking to sing or say, but the fragmented language within them describes the contrast or resistance. In this way the performance of the poem will write a new text – a score of images, language and music that doesn’t need the security of the page, that conveys through complexity and fragmentation a ritualised singing. The page is the performers’ bodies and voices – and the equivalent of the aesthetic form of my text will be the craft of the performers in concert with one another.


***


The fact that Max is a composer and sound designer as well as a director is the reason I felt it was possible for me to write this theatre text. Though I have been reading and writing poetry for over fifteen years, I have rarely summoned up the courage to publish it – my process was usually one of filing the poems I wrote away or erasing them altogether. It was in our discussions of music and the ‘ear play’ or radio play form, that I started to see the potential for my writing in performance. On the one hand the imagined silence of reading could be analogous to the exposed ‘production’ of material as seen in a live radio play, and also the setting of poems to music, and the response in the piece of theatre by musicians seemed an exciting way of conveying the ritual I was after.

This ritual is not just an idea about the theatre. By engaging in writing this text, and in asking actors to take it on, I had to look at what my voice was, and what I am trying to do in my work. These questions were new for me. I realised that the place from which I write these poems is a place I need to create in this world. I find a silence, and I try to expand it. In my mind’s ear I summon vast spaces and I seek the expressions there. I am singing when I write these pieces and I am seeking the other who hears the song. This secret dialogue informs my use of language as a performer too. In a sense I try to imagine a fabric of rhythms that has to be found, and the poems that will join this fabric are those that confess all the terror and beauty residual in solitude, but that create new threads, that challenge existing rhythms, in turn creating my path in a communal world. Transforming my voice in this space also engages me in transformation.

At first it was shocking to imagine these private songs being out in the brutal, pragmatic air. I also feared that they would be too slight for the interrogation of an actor – being an actor myself I knew that whatever the material is it has to withstand body blows! – and that there must be certain paths already well trodden. I started to imagine the writing as music.

Max and I were working together in various productions throughout the writing of the text, and in his encouragement, he took a compositional view – some things may be captured in an imperfect musical phrase that would be lost if it were ironed out or described. ‘Keep everything’, he would say; ‘keep going’. Compose later. This conversation resulted in the structure of the piece. Just as every line had to be able to operate both in isolation and in context, so each section of the piece had to build its own relationship between voices, but also to sing to other voices, to answer other parts of the greater song.


***


The voices in the text are all describing absence. Two lovers are singing to each other, in each other’s absence; An old woman tries to teach a song before leaving, a soldier’s profound insecurity narrates her movements in an alien land… There are interruptions: descriptions of physical aberration and fractures in perception, psychotic episodes and delusional beliefs; there are movements of loosely grouped words in lists, in the absence of grammar, or scale… These are elements that are drawn from life in extremity. where language is at its most exposed, because the world has been turned upside down. Looking at language under this pressure is to look at its power to celebrate, to create, to remember and to imagine, but also to see where it falls short, and indeed where it is a weapon, and a carrier of destructive seeds.

The Jews’ punishment was to wander in the desert for a whole generation. Manna congealed on the rocks not to nourish these lost people, but the generation that would follow them. The gift of manna was a blessing and a curse. I am interested in the fact that language, or text, has been handed down in such a way and in its manifestations as text used to justify belief and action, text for the evolution of laws, or the private text with which we measure the world – language also contains the seeds of creation and destruction. I hope that if it is indeed possible in the theatre to recall the public ritual of grieving – of celebration – it will be possible to articulate something which is all too rare in the world as it presents itself to me – that though there is much we cannot know about the future of this world in throes, we can share a vivid and passionate song about the world we have lost.

and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Desire is as much to do with the taking away of the other's pain as with the mutual pursuit of pleasure... it is an alternative, shared use of physical energy and the special lucidity of the body to bestow, if only for a brief moment, an exemption...

– John Berger

Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now. Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the acknowledgement of its supremacy.

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, rocks and sands,
All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them.
How can the real body ever die and be buried?

For every thing that lives is Holy!

It’s tempting, particularly in the light of a certain inner exhaustion, to write this entire review by assembling quotations. I am simply incapable at present of articulating what these writers express with such sure delicacy (and so apologise in advance). These quotes map some of the emotional and intellectual territory that Sally Potter touches in her film Yes, the story of a passionate love affair between a Western woman and an Eastern man that encompasses philosophy, politics and poetry in a work of lucid profundity.

I should confess at the outset that I haven’t seen the film; I’ve only experienced Potter’s text. The script was written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and shot as the US invaded Iraq, and is imbued with a sense of urgent affirmation. As Sally Potter says, “I started writing Yes in the days following the attacks of September 11 in New York City. I felt an urgent need to respond to the rapid demonisation of the Arabic world in the West and to the parallel wave of hatred against the United States. I asked myself the question: so what can a filmmaker do in such an atmosphere of hate and fear? What are the stories that need to be told?”

Last week I saw OpticNerve’s theatrical adaptation. It was an inspiring counterweight to some of the more depressing conversations I’ve had lately, a reminder that eros, with all its complexities and difficulties, is the force that reaches towards and affirms life. The film’s title is taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses; it's the final word of Molly Bloom's monologue, which is surely one of the most passionate avowals of life’s imperfections and joys ever written.

It’s easy to see why Tanya Gerstle wanted to make it into a work of theatre. It bears a closer resemblance to Shakespeare than to any standard film script. Most obviously, it’s written in iambic pentameters (the closest formal poetic rhythm to conversational speech) and rhyming couplets; and it shares something of Shakespeare’s dramaturgical fluidity, shifting specific encounters between times and places to enact a story with a clear emotional imperative. Its concerns are at once political and metaphysical, passionate and intellectual. It even has its own take on Shakespeare’s “mechanicals”. If you knew no better, you’d swear this text was a play.

In the hands of OpticNerve, it’s certainly translated into pure theatre. There is no sense of an uncomfortable collision between the media of film and performance: from the opening moments, when you wander into the space in Fortyfive Downstairs, you are alerted to the dynamics of space and body and personal relationship that theatre demands. Where to sit wasn’t immediately obvious; the seats were at the far end, wrapped in the white fabric that is the chief element of the design, and for a few moments I thought we would be standing among the performers, who were already walking about the space, clad only in black underwear.

But we found our seats and then watched the pre-theatre unfold, wondering if the couples who stood talking in the middle of the space, glancing at the performers as they unobtrusively placed clothing and props about the stage, knew that they too were presently part of the performance. The lights signal the beginning of the theatre proper, and the performers stand before us in their underwear, naked and vulnerable to our gaze, and then slowly dress in the costumes of their roles. But the ambiguity signalled beforehand resonates through the show: as witnesses to this theatre, we are also embedded in its dilemmas and reflections, its desires and sadnesses.

At the centre of this piece is the body, its senses of transitoriness and permanence. It begins with a monologue from the Cleaner (Ella Watson-Russell), a chorus/witness figure who also embodies the unseen and ignored third world labour force that keeps the west going. Reflecting on the nature of dirt, she says, “everything you do or say is there, forever. It leaves evidence.” Later, she tells us: “we never disappear, / Despite it being what we all most fear…Every single creature feeds another…When we expire perhaps we change, at most, / But never vanish…”

This idea of permanence is poised finely against the mortality of love, the emotional emptiness that haunts She (Meredith Penman) and her Husband (Gary Abrahams) as their marriage disintegrates. When She meets He (Grant Cartwright), a Lebanese refugee working as a kitchen hand, erotic love becomes the means to a larger, spiritual vision that at once divides and unites the lovers.

Their relationship becomes the nexus for a series of meditations on science, religion, class, consumerism, racism, colonialism, and the vexed question of self and other. But these ideas are revealed through poetic action rather than explained for us. The actors’ bodies, articulating the exquisitely choreographed movement, become the means of precise emotional expression: they are erotic, bereaved, violent, forlorn, ecstatic.

From the beginning, you feel confident that you are in the hands of theatre makers who know what they’re doing, who can step unerringly between the specific realities of feelings and the abstraction of ideas. The design subtly emphasises the poetic restraint of the text, with a rigorous palette of black and white that highlights the passions of the body, and is beautifully lit. And the performances are all first class, physically disciplined and marked by an intense emotional honesty. It’s the kind of theatre that devours your whole attention without your quite noticing. And at the end you are released, at once exhausted and nourished, into the complexities of your own life.

Yes, by Sally Potter, directed by Tanya Gerstle. Lighting design by Richard Whitehouse, stage management by Canada White. Ensemble/co-creators: Grant Cartwright, Ella Watson-Russell, Emmaline Carroll, Anne-Louise Sarks. With Gary Abrahams, Grant Cartwright, Kane Felsinger, Carl Nilsson-Polias, Meredith Penman, Tim Potter, Ella Watson-Russell and Anne-Louise Sarks. OpticNerve Performance Group @ Fortyfive Downstairs. Closed June 7.

I know you must all be sick to death of the Henson debacle (I certainly am, and am looking forward to a break from Australia next week) but I feel obliged to update, I hope for the last time, since this case has signalled some warnings for all of us. I am a bit tired of those who keep casting this as a question of The Arts vs Everyone Else: no, it's a question of whether we want to live in a society where moral questions are rigidly applied in state law. As in, for example, theocracies ruled by Sharia law, or the extremities of the Taliban.

Western democracy balances individual and societal freedoms and, for the moment, there are places where the state, quite rightly, stops. As far as I'm concerned, its authority in questions of private morality should focus on the question of harm to others, and that harm should be actual and not perceived. It has yet to be proved to me that Henson's art has harmed anybody, although the kinds of distress these campaigners have caused Henson, his models and their families with their ugly accusations about child porn have, I have no doubt, caused a lot of damage. For all her supposed concerns about the rights of young people, Bravehearts campaigner Hetty Johnston hasn't shown a great deal of respect for the young models in Henson's photographs, and has certainly paid no attention to anything they have said in defence of Henson.

There are various responses to yesterday's dropping of charges against Henson. Hetty Johnston, whose complaints to police sparked the Roslyn Oxley9 raids, has announced her intentions to pursue her campaign against Henson. And, as comments posted here demonstrate, campaigners have decided that he's a menace to society and must be stopped, even over the dead body of democracy. As UK anti-porn activist Gregory Carlin said to the pro-life (homophobic, anti-Harry Potter) LifeSiteNews, "Material which is child pornography in Britain, is now considered child friendly viewing in Australia". Watch out.

Michael Leunig today claims that those who defend Henson do so "in chorus" (unlike, presumably, the brave individuals going with the flow of public outrage): "Some say his work is creepy pornography that culturally legitimises and fosters pedophilia, others hold the considered view that it's abusive and exploitative, while others defend it unreservedly in chorus, seeing any forceful questions or challenge about its essence as a sure sign of ignorance, repression and mindless resistance to change." He reflects many accusations recently made of the arts world, which reflect attitudinal prejudices rather more than what was actually argued; and of course there are many "considered" and thoughtful defences of Henson's work. And it's hard to think of a world more riven by disagreement than the arts.

But there we go: take heed, my friends, and think on. It is not the fault of artists that they are thought of in these ways so widely, since the arts are in general so badly discussed in the mainstream media, but it is up to artists to address the problem.

And finally, a word from Patrick McCaughey, whom many of you will remember as the flamboyant director of the NGV until he moved to the US, where he was a major defender of Robert Mapplethorpe. He has an interesting reflection in the Australian today, in which he talks with great good sense about the ethics and limits of art:

I'm putting this up to buy time. Despite everything (and there's been a lot of that, even without the pitchfork brigade) Ms TN has been getting along to theatre, but sometimes late in the season. And last night I saw Yes, a theatrical adaptation of Sally Potter's film directed by Tanya Gerstle, which is on at Fortyfive Downstairs until this Sunday. It's a knock-out: elegant, beautiful, intelligent, passionate theatre. A more considered response will be forthcoming, once the synapses engage.

This morning comes the news that the DPP has told NSW police that they don't have a case to prosecute Bill Henson for obscenity or possession of child pornography, and Federal Police have said that they will not press ahead with charges over the Henson photographs in the NGA. Moreover, the Classification Board has given the image on the exhibition invitation - the one that sparked this whole farce - a rating of PG. Apparently, it's "not sexualised to any degree". You could knock me down with a feather.

Moreover, Kevin Rudd is - at last - saying publicly that his personal opinion has nothing to do with the decisions of legal authorities.

So that's that, then. I guess we can claim victory for common sense, although there's little to be triumphant about in the spectacle of the past weeks. But at least the police can now get on with chasing actual paedophiles.

Some pointers to interesting stuff I've missed here recently. Firstly, and most importantly, La Mama put out a call for help last week. Having heroically raised $100,000 over a single weekend in order to place a deposit on the purchase of the theatre, Artistic Director Liz Jones and her team now faces the Herculean task of finding the rest of the $1.7 million required to buy this piece of prime Carlton real estate. Every bit helps, so get out there to help save this unique Melbourne institution.

Which leads me to point belatedly to Louis Nowra's very interesting review of a new history of the Australian Performing Group, Currency Press's Make It Australian by Gabrielle Wolf, in which he remembers his encounters with the APG as a young playwright:

My trouble was that I was estranged from the world the APG presented to me. Sometimes I didn't know if the APG was satirising the ocker or celebrating him. The contemporary male characters seemed from another era.... My reservations put me in the small minority, as did my queasy doubts about APG's macho heterosexuality, which seemed as gross as a pub bar five minutes before six o'clock closing. I also found its questioning of the cultural cringe, its gaudy Australian nationalism and anti-British, anti-American attitudes very old-fashioned, its lack of interest in sex and love mystifying. Yet, at the same time, the physical energy, the Aussie humour and the vigorous criticism of conservative suburban values were wonderfully refreshing.

Meanwhile, in a reminder that art is ever an axis of argument, UK playwright Mark Ravenhill robustly defends Bertolt Brecht against his detractors, most recently Nick Cohen, and asks why Richard Strauss, who supported the Nazi regime, is so much easier to forgive than BB.

And now I must, must, must turn to my poor neglected novel, which patiently awaits my authorial copy-edits, before my US publishers begin to scream.

Ms TN and others have had many requests from people who would also like to put their names to the The Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson. Those who would like to do so may go here. Please pass around the word to anyone who might be interested.

Given that (rather laughably, given the fuss) the Classification Board has rated the internet images of Henson's art as "G" or "very mild", prosecution seems very unlikely: but the wider concerns about freedom of expression remain. These are not concerns confined to the arts, as should be demonstrated by the closure of an exhibition about conditions in Hebron after a visit by anti-terror police.

The concerns expressed are about the rights of all of us to represent or debate realities that may offend sections of our community: a point that Guy Rundle seems to have missed in his off-the-mark commentary in the Age today. It's hard to see how the soberly argued Open Letter, which clearly condemns child abuse by anyone, places artists above the law; perhaps Rundle forgot to read it. Certainly, on the strength of some of the responses I've read, I suspect that some of our prominent commentators would fail English comprehension exercises at school.

Yesterday, in a move that reflects the present climate, the ABC reported that the AMA is campaigning for funding cuts to companies making plays and films that depict smoking. I've avoided the phrase "nanny state" (prominent on banners on Friday night, during protests against the 2am lock-out the State Government is introducing, supposedly to prevent street violence) but it's a bit irresistible. Presumably all of us are impressionable infants who can't make up our own minds about anything, and are also incapable of noticing what goes on in the world around us.

Further, many people seem to think that art is a branch of advertising that exists to "promote" certain types of behaviour or "messages". No, it's not: but that's a long argument I won't address here. I'm beginning to wonder if reality is the one thing that artists are not permitted to represent. Welcome to the Brave New World. And pass the soma.