Give an Australian writer a taxpayer grant.

ANDREW BOLT




Write goes wrong
Andrew Bolt
04mar05

What's a sure way to produce arcane, stodgy or just plain bad literature? Give an Australian writer a taxpayer grant.

ASK an Australian to act, dance, sing, paint or play, and you've got a show, a smash, an Oscar - and an audience.
But give them a grant to write and - good God - you've got drivel.
It's almost guaranteed, no matter what you ask them to tap out, from a play to a humanities thesis.
On film sets and studios, libraries and arts festivals, readers now stare at the crud cascading from the printers of these poets and asking, "What the . . . ?"
There's George Miller, director of The Man From Snowy River, hissing that scripts are so rank today that filmmakers "have literally lost the plot" and audiences "would prefer root-canal treatment to an Aussie movie".
"We've got plenty to say, but none of it entertaining," he wrote in the Financial Review, after Australian movies in 2004 took their lowest share ever of the annual box office - a mortifying 1.3 per cent. A leper could find more people to stare at his sores.
Same story in the bookshops, reeking of stale or undercooked local fiction.
"The trouble is there's not enough good fiction being published . . . Too many people are writing stuff which can't be published, shouldn't be published, and they shouldn't be encouraged to think that it would be," groaned publisher Henry Rosenbloom last year to ABC books presenter Ramona Koval. As Koval herself has sighed: "Much of the new fiction is a combination of good ideas badly executed, a literature awash with first drafts."
Our Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences can't believe how academics write, either.
Snapped one board member in a newsletter to humanities researchers enraged by my hints that some lacked a strong tale to tell and the words to tell it: "Seriously, rather than just rail against Bolt etc, we could reflect on the arcane, pretentious, indeed pajero-like language we fail to communicate within the sector, which lays us open to not entirely unmerited ridicule." (Translator's note: "Pajero" is Spanish slang for "wanker". "Bolt" is an academic term for "common sense".)
There are always exceptions, of course, and many writers will assume they are them. But when so many scripts, books and humanities theses all tend to the pajero-like, it's clear we have a problem not just with films, or fiction or universities - a glitch that can be fixed with another grant.
No, this is a crisis in our national culture - a crippling inability to think fresh and write smart. To write entertaining stuff that people like to read, or see acted.
Compare: 150 years ago, Britain had the population we have now, and writing then were Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Tennyson, George Elliot, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins and Matthew Arnold - none funded by governments. Who, pattering at their grant-maintained keyboards, have we to match just one of those names?
I said more grants could not fix this, but fewer may help - because let me show you how a government handout can curdle the most creative mind.
Last year the Bracks Government spent $1.5 million to turn Ballarat's Eureka commemoration into a festival of the Left, with predictably deadly results. Here, for example, are lyrics of a Eureka song Deborah Conway was paid $15,000 to write and sing:
I want to go on a journey
Will you come with me, we can sing to keep warm
I want to know who we are and why we're here
I'm looking for questions that make the answers clear
I went to school in the sixties
Free milk at recess and free love on the streets
They didn't teach much blood in our history
Not compared to what got shed on the football field
And every story's precious
They all need to be told. . .
Everybody's spaced out here
But there are times when we want to hold hands.
Conway is a good singer, with fine songs to her credit. But see what happens to her writing when a government slips a grant into her ink.
So many artists have been crippled by such direct-to-artist government cash, so much of it spent on cutting the oxygen line between an artist and their audience. How foolish, to subsidise the writer, not the reader.
Now many writers know their most important readers are the politicians and bureaucrats who feed them, or the fellow artists who sit on judging panels. They know, too, it will not pay to howl Right when these folk baa Left.
So they turn inward - so inward that on Channel 9 on Sunday, the taxpayer-funded Film Finance Corporation's Tait Brady gave this marvellous who-us? excuse for the failure of so many badly-written local films: "The marketplace was letting us down."
Well, someone sure was letting people down, given the FFC last year blew $22.4 million to make Australian movies but filmgoers risked just $11.8 million of their cash to watch them.
You'd understand why the FFC and its dependants might conclude it's easier to get dough from the government instead, as three of the eight FFC board members might gladly confirm.
These three are all producers who got FFC grants of their own since they joined the board, with one, Jonathan Shiff, scoring $24 million to make television shows for children.
It's all ethical and by-the-rules, of course - in such cases, no one votes on their own application. But no one gets forced to contemplate chasing only audiences, and not grants, either.
This same cancer has metastasised into so many other fields of writing.
Last year alone, five of the 12 members of the Humanities and Creative Arts panel of the grants-for-all Australian Research Council were given grants by their fellow board members. Again: all quite properly and honestly.
But what kind of writing do you get from such a process? Well, two years ago board member Professor Vera Mackie got $880,000 to write about "the cultural history of the body in modern Japan", focusing on "the classed, radicalised and ethnicised dimensions of the bodily experience".
Hmm. Was that another Pajero I saw go by?
Not much different with the artist-feeding Australia Council, which gave author Rodney Hall - read much of his lately? - several grants, both before and after he was the council's boss.
Nor are these councils and commissions the only machines used by our Leftist political bureaucracy to pasteurise and sterilise our writers. There are also all those other bribes and lures - from premiers' literary awards, state-sponsored writers festivals, state-funded arts companies and state-owned media outlets.
And how well, how tragically well, they work. You'd see this for yourself, if only you could bring yourself to study the script.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au


ANDREW BOLT

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12432191%255E25717,00.html

SBS charter in Ashes
Andrew Bolt
04mar05

BY buying the rights to the Ashes, SBS has shown even its board has lost faith in the multicultural broadcaster.

Under the SBS Act, passed by Parliament, SBS has one "principal function" - to pump out "multilingual and multicultural radio and television services". Australia playing England at cricket doesn't qualify, unless the commentators speak Swahili.
The charter tells SBS to instead harp on about "the contribution of a diversity of cultures to the continuing development of Australian society" and to "contribute to the retention and continuing development of language and other cultural skills". Verstehen?
The dumb idea - which the public never accepted - was to stop migrants from assimilating. Mind you, the SBS found few migrants liked such toadying, and were keener on assimilation than our experts.
So SBS has had to muck around, helping some other tribe that has trouble with plain English by screening hate-America documentaries for our incoherent Left. So why now pay $1.2 million to cover the Ashes, when no other free-to-air station could be bothered?
Simple. SBS knows the cricket will please its political masters, and bring in badly needed viewers. It could even sell enough ads to make a solid profit.
As for the Government, it loves to see the SBS screen free cricket rather than Leftist tirades. And how sweet it is for us conservatives to see SBS itself - the multicultural icon - quietly assimilate, without even a struggle or cry of basta!
bolta@heraldsun.com.au