At Last We Can All Suffer For Our Art
THE SUNDAY AGE
Saturday October 16, 1993
WHINGE, whinge, whinge, moan, moan, moan, gripe, gripe, gripe. Aren't you sick of it. Hardly a day goes by without some spineless, good-for- nothing mother staggering out of a maternity ward, or some legless worker, or public transport user, or homeless child, or bishop, or human rights commissioner whinging or moaning or griping about what is happening to the social fabric of Victoria.
Such behavior is hardly conducive to an image of Victorians as a fun loving, happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, warm, welcoming people. Little wonder that tourists prefer the northern states.
Sure things are tough but this is the repression we had to have and Mr Kennett is only doing what he does because he can, so please leave him alone to get on with the hard decisions and always remember every clod has a silver service.
And also remember the recent poll that clearly showed that with 54 per cent support he is the most popular leader in the country.
(A lot of people questioned the veracity of that poll so I conducted my own among friends and colleagues and came up with the remarkable figure of 0 per cent support. How could this be? How could you not find one person who supported him? Indeed I could find no one who even voted for him. Was the original poll wrong? The short answer is ``No" because I finally met that 54 per cent and a lovely fella he was too.
And very interesting.
He is a professional master of disguise known variously in the business as ``The Chameleon", ``The Man of a Thousand Faces" and ``Jack Flash". What Jack does is find out where the pollsters are pollstering and wanders past, gets stopped and answers their questions. Then he whizzes out of sight, bangs on a wig and moustache, wanders past as a different person, answers the questions again, adopts a new disguise, wanders past again and so on and so on perhaps three or four hundred times. It's his job. The nine-out-of-10 dentists in that ad were Jack.) Now I would be the first to admit, although I'm obviously not the first, a lot of other people have admitted it well in advance of me and I'm more or less just jumping on the bandwagon, but I would be the first to admit that a lot of suffering has accompanied the Kennett era. Of course that's not the only positive but it is one worth focusing on.
THE great works of literature and the arts have all been produced in the face of the most appalling suffering: the works of Dickens, Goya and Van Gogh to name but seven. Happy, fat, content, rich people never produce anything of an artistic, civilised nature.
There have been two Australian Nobel Laureates for Literature, Morris West and Patrick White. Morris won his under the jack-boot of the Menzies era and Patrick under the heel of the Henry Bolte of New South Wales, Sir Robert Askin. But it's been a long time between drinks, Nobel Prize-wise, for Australia. The totalitarian regimes of South America and Africa are scooping the pool these days. But now, thanks to Mr Kennett, the seeds are being sown and watered with the tears of the defenceless and the time is almost ripe for a local Nobel Laureate.
Why even now there may lie in some dump-master somewhere a homeless, abused child who will create from his or her suffering and degradation a novel of eternal passion and beauty. Of course the fact that his or her school has been sold off to profiteers may mean they will have to dictate their novel to someone old enough to have had an education.
So in the face of this imminent suffering-led explosion of creative excellence I would like to propose that the people of Victoria begin to think about some sort of permanent, perpetual monument to Mr Kennett.
There are a few things we could do. We could name the recent floods after him for instance. My personal recommendation would be to write away to the old USSR and ask them what they are doing with all the statues of Stalin they pulled down and offer to buy them up. (John Elliott could do the negotiation.) Then we ship them back here, employ hundreds of people to chip the moustaches off and carve Mr Kennett's name on the bases and then stick 'em up all over the state to remind future generations to be bloody careful who they vote for.
© 1993 THE SUNDAY AGE