Mighty Malouf’s perilous descent Literary icon David Malouf has been hanging out in Sydney and found time to speak to broadcaster Richard Glover on ABC 702. Malouf, whose first novel was published in 1975, firmly believes that authors are limited only by their imagination, telling Glover he didn’t believe in “cultural appropriation”.
Malouf is a huge fan of Shakespeare. “Are we going to say, for example, that Shakespeare should never have written A Midsummer Night’s Dream because he was neither a fairy nor a mechanical? Or that Henry James should not have written The Portrait of a Lady because he wasn’t a woman?
“I believe that all a writer needs is a little glimpse and after that intuition and imagination which allows him to see all the rest. If it’s convincing, it’s true.” Malouf expanded on this topic in his closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Sunday night, from a temporary stage with planks for steps.
As the 87-year-old slowly stepped down the stairs at the conclusion, the entire audience held its collective breath, remembering the last time an Australian icon fell down a set of stairs. Where was the muscular young bloke who could have helped Malouf to the floor? Hard to find at a book-fest.
C-bombs away! Queensland Deputy Premier Steven Miles was in the news again yesterday, and it had nothing to do with borders. Addressing a crowd of union members at a Labour Day rally in Brisbane, the urbane 43-year-old appeared to call Scott Morrison a “cunt”, earning a rousing cheer from the audience.
“Albo’s here with us at Labour Day … while Scott Morrison’s charging 5000 bucks a head to have dinner with him. What a cunt … contrast. Don’t we need … contrast. It’s contrast.”
Like most Queenslanders, Miles, the former health minister, earns a lot of social capital by sticking it to the feds. Later, he insisted it was an honest mistake. “I understand that I might have stuttered while speaking earlier and that some in the crowd might have misheard what I said,” he said. “I want to be very, very clear — whatever I think of the Prime Minister, I would never, ever use language like that.”
Former PM Gough Whitlam loved to employ the c-bomb, to devastating effect. When rural politician Sir Winton Turnbull shouted in Parliament, “I am a Country member”, Whitlam intoned, “I remember”.
Disendorsement dues for booze? Maverick MP George Christensen is trying to wangle an extra $100,000 from the Australian taxpayer on his way out the door.
Christensen announced last month that he would not be standing at the next election. However, under parliamentary rules, if he is officially disendorsed by his party, he could be eligible for a taxpayer-funded payment of $105,600, or six-months’ salary, as a “resettlement allowance”.
Last month he posted a video to his Facebook page, saying he had become disillusioned with politics. “Politics just does not seem to be working when it comes to issues that seem to matter to me and many others,” he said. “Unfortunately, I’m not so sure anymore that these issues can be properly fixed by legislation and via the ballot box.”
Perhaps they could be fixed by moving to the Philippines? Christensen was nicknamed the “Member for Manila” after taking at least 28 trips there between 2014 and 2018. With one-way flights to Manila currently going for as low as $1000, that “resettlement allowance” could buy a lot of mai tais.
The shirt off his back Viewers of Channel 7 were served up a rather strange promo this week, for a documentary-style news special.
In the video, a dishevelled-looking man with an untrimmed grey beard says to the camera, “How you going? Been a while. Been a while since we last videoed anything together. Hope your lives are good. Treasure them, because they can be taken away… like that [snaps fingers].”
The man, filmed without a shirt on, is in fact actor Craig McLachlan, the former star of Neighbours and The Dr Blake Mysteries. The 55-year-old’s career came to a standstill in 2019 when he was accused of indecent assault and harassment on the 2014 production of The Rocky Horror Show.
The actor was charged with seven counts of indecent assault and six of common law assault. After a lengthy trial, all the charges were dismissed in late 2020.
Separate defamation proceedings against the ABC and what was Fairfax, plus a former co-star, were halted after the laying of the criminal charges but will now go ahead.
Channel 7 confirmed McLachlan “will receive a fee” for his participation.
“The McLachlan family will receive a fee for the interview and related production expenses. The broadcast will adhere to the legal requirements in respective markets,” a Channel 7 spokesperson said.
Channel 7 is teasing the documentary as “months in the making”, “new evidence”, “new eyewitnesses”, “never-before-seen footage” and “explosive revelations”.
But could the production budget not have extended to a shirt?
Sir Winton Turnbull
Thank you!
David Malouf is the worst writer and the worst ham I can think of. After being required to read his horrible book about Ovid for school (reading that book got me reading Roman poetry because I needed an antidote, and to find out if Ovid really was a snivelling paedophile) I heard him interviewed on the ABC Classical fm station — and he was hilariously self-important and amazingly pointless and monotone, et cetera, and super long-winded. Now it turns out he doesn’t get cultural appropriation.
This guy’s a national icon! somebody should write an opera about him. I would read more of his stuff so that I can satirize him but the thought of reading anything else he wrote makes me curl up at the edges
But I loved Johnno!
Thanks for that, Margot
On your comment I started reading the Prologue to Johnno, reading all about the dreary business of dealing with his father’s death, his grieving Mum; sorting through his parents’ stuff in their house they wanted to sell; how he would sit on the step to eat a quick lunch while he worked and how the front yard had been taken over by swarming insects (which sounds extreme but I guess is a Brisbane thing) with wavering flowers in the grass (maybe daisies?) — I liked the birds floating along overhead from the mangrove swamps on the river, heading somewhere nice, swarming gnats in the shade, grasshoppers; all of which, the family, his Mum, sorting through the accumulated memorabilia and detritus of a lifetime, the swarming bugs and heavy grasshoppers, was ok if a little weird and depressing. (Some people feel depressed about childhood memories, I suppose.) But I couldn’t get over the introduction of Johnno seen in an old photo from a school yearbook or whatever it was, of David’s surf lifesaving team
‘The Stillwater Lifesaving Team, looking solid and smug in their black Speedos, had been arranged in two rows in front of the Old Physics Lab. Arms folded to show off their biceps, knees regularly apart, the older boys sat stiffly upright on a form. We younger ones sat cross-legged at their feet. …
But what had caught my eye, and made me turn back and look again, was a small boy at the very edge of the picture, who wasn’t staring out like the rest of us into some sort of rectilinear future, but had cocked his head up, away from Mr Peck’s covered tripod, and was staring diagonally out of the frame.
It was Johnno. …
And it occurred to me suddenly that he had never been a lifesaver at all. So how had he got into the picture? What was he doing there? …’
I could go no further