Of research and vaudeville

The item on top of the work pile at the moment is a now very battered advance proof copy of a novel called The Little Shadows by the Canadian writer Marina Endicott, published in Canada last year and due for release in Australia in February. It's about a family in vaudeville, working the circuits along the border of the US and Canada; set from 1912-1917, it shows how their lives are affected by the forces of history.

With my curiosity piqued about vaudeville and its history in Australia -- obviously such an 'American' thing was going to make its way to Canada, but did it have a substantial history here? -- I went looking in the astounding new(ish) resource provided by the National Library, Trove, which -- well, go over there and have a look.

I spent many happy hours on this site last year and the year before when I was researching Adelaide and found, among other things, a great deal of family history buried among Family Notices and roundups from 'The Country', where the ferocious rivalry between my Scottish grandma and her bossy sister-in-law regarding the organisation of fund-raisers for the War Effort in Curramulka can be seen between the lines of often profoundly corrupted text.

Apropos of which, I decided early on that since this magical resource had been provided to me then the very least I could do was take an active part in the way it works: crowdsourcing to correct the scanned text, since obviously the resources don't exist for it to be done professionally. I decided that I would correct every article I used. There's no measuring this, but my guess is that, as with Wikipedia, the longer it goes on the more accurate it will be, as more and more people use it and contribute.

Anyway, vaudeville. Oh yes indeed. There's a thesis in this topic alone: 'Racism in the content and language of journalistic reportage of vaudeville in Adelaide, 1920-1940.' Here, for example, is a paragraph from The Advertiser of September 30, 1926:

CELEBRITY VAUDEVILLE. 

Special interest is attached to the Southern Revue Company, which will be appearing for the first time in Adelaide at the Theatre Royal next Saturday, under the J. C. Williamson management. Many of the members of Joe Sheftell's revue are even blacker than negroes are usually painted, but this is not true about the chorus girls, who are much fairer than their men folk. One of the members of the company remarked while in Sydney "how mighty good every one has been to us." This is the first impression gained of Australia by one of the darkest of the members. He also explained that in the Land of Liberty "culled" folk have to travel in their own special "Jim Crow" railway carriages, and are segregated in special hotels and restaurants. This company includes many talented performers, who have been a great success in both Melbourne and Sydney — Minta Cato, the colored soprano; Joe Sheftell, the producer; Bob Williams, the comedian; McConn, Saunders, and Williams, the nifty steppers, and the chorus girls.

Did you blanch over that word 'culled'? Language is a wonderful thing when it come to the return of the repressed. It took me a few seconds to work out that it was merely an attempt at phonetic approximation of the accent of the unnamed  'dark member' (oh dear, it just gets worse and worse) and his pronunciation of the word 'colored' (interesting that the Advertiser was using American spelling in 1926).  I also enjoyed the snide reference to the Land of Liberty, implying that we in Australia have no such unenlightened attitudes, oh my wordy lordy no.

And as for the forces of history, I couldn't help noticing the tour dates on this one, from The Advertiser of September 21, 1929:

VAUDEVILLE PERFORMANCE 

Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher, announces that the annual concert to be given by her students will be held in the Thebarton Town Hall on October 22. The programme will contain several spectacular ballets, solo dances, and vaudeville acts.

(And for anyone looking for ideas for fiction, there's a whole novel for you right there in the phrase 'Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher.') Unbeknownst to either the journalist or Miss Trixie, the 1929 Wall Street Crash was imminent: Black Thursday was October 24th, two days after the concert.

Vaudeville was a notoriously unstable and insecure profession even at the best of times, as Endicott's book makes clear, with acts being sacked and theatres closing down and impresarios going broke left and right. I wonder what happened to everyone in the wake of Black Thursday: to Miss Trixie, whose pupils' parents must have hurriedly reassessed whether the budget could stand ballet lessons? To those 'culled' troupers from three years before? To all vaudeville everywhere: the performers, the backers, the managers, the theatre owners, and the audiences, many of whom may have abruptly decided that going to the vaudeville was a luxury they could definitely do without? What happened to the nifty steppers, the Men of Mirth, the chorus girls, the acrobatic violinists and the 'Gypsy' dancers, in the wake of October 24th, 1929? Whatever did they do? Wherever did they go?

Journalists I Have Known

I originally wrote this as part of the comment conversation on the last post, but I'd quite like to say something positive about journalists in a more accessible spot so here it is again. RIP Hume. (The other one's still alive.)

Such a strange profession.

I owe most of what I know about the art and craft of writing to one journalist, a man called Hume Dow, who was older than my parents, and who had worked on the Age, which I think was back then still the Argus, with George Johnston and Charmian Clift during WW2. Whenever he talked about the gorgeous and brilliant Clift, he was unable to finish any given sentence. He would just waver off in mid-syntactical construction and gaze off into the middle distance. Hume taught me how to proofread properly and what good 18th century prose looked like and why Hemingway in A Movable Feast, but not in his fiction so much, was a miracle of writing.

Another of my major mentors, whom I knew intimately and won't name (grounds, incriminate, etc) was also an exceptional journalist before he moved on to other pursuits. I have great respect for a number of contemporary Australian journalists (Megalogenis, Tingle, Marr, Grattan, Colvin et al), not to mention the legendary international ones, and I have just finished reading a novel about two heroic journalist-photographers, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, who both died in the service of their vocation. And I think all these things may be why I hold the bad ones in such contempt.

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,908

Have you noticed that whenever The Australian wants to publish another piece of vicious, moronic, sexist crapola about Julia Gillard, they nearly always get a woman to write it? Kate Legge on earlobes, Glenda Korporaal on handbags, Planet Janet on pretty much anything you care to name, and now yesterday we have this pile of really stinking ordure by another such female OO journalist [sic] with Form in this respect, namely former adviser to Peter Costello and John Howard (about what, one wonders. Women's affairs? Nah) Niki Savva.

Greg Jericho at Grog's Gamut reckons that of all such poisonous tripe published by the OO thus far in a naked attempt to sway the stupid, this Savva piece takes the biscuit. Which is saying a lot.

Why do they do it? I think it's because they're so ignorant of feminism that when someone says 'Oi, this is vicious, moronic, sexist crapola,' they can reply 'No it isn't, because it was written by a woman.' And I really do think that they really do think that that constitutes some sort of answer.

Yes, we know

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm quite a fan of Crikey reporter Bernard Keane and am enjoying his weekday reports in Crikey's special extra early-morning campaign newsletter. And I am an even bigger fan of George Megalogenis, one of the few grown-up journalists this country seems to have left.

However.

Here's Keane is this morning:

The impact of the Latham “intervention” on the weekend is yet to be played out, but I suspect George Megalogenis was right in suggesting yesterday [Keane doesn't say where] that there appears to be a pattern of men trying to undermine our first female prime minister.

Keane says this as though it were a new thought: as though Megalogenis had made some startling new discovery.

Female journalists and bloggers have been saying it ever since the day Gillard became Prime Minister. We have offered all sorts of evidence in support of the observation. And for the most part we have been ignored, if not squashed, mocked and derided, by blokes in online conversations about it (not all blokes, but enough of them to stifle conversation on the topic), whenever we so much as stuck our heads above the parapet and hinted that there might be a bit of it going about.

But I suppose that for some people, nothing's really real until a bloke says it.

Sorry, Annabel, not good enough

The ABC's Annabel Crabb published a long, informative, entertaining piece at The Drum the other day, characteristically witty and meaty, in defence of journalists and their current behaviour and reportage on the campaign trail.

Much of what she is says is fair enough. But nothing she says can possibly excuse what I've just heard on the radio.

I got into the car and turned on the radio and there was Julia Gillard in Queensland, mid-speech, announcing the Government's seniors policy, after what I imagine was a somewhat stressful morning meeting Kevin Rudd for the first time since she became Prime Minister. The seniors stuff sounded pretty good, mainly the improvements to the pension situation but also several other things. Jenny Macklin followed up. And then it was time for questions.

I listened for a total of just over half an hour, apart from the four and a half minutes it took me to duck into Dan Murphy on the way home, and I heard one, and only one, question, right at the end, about the policy announcement. Every single other question, asked mostly in an aggressive, smartarse, gotcha tone of voice by what sounded like a bunch of extremely young journalists (with the exception of -- wait for it -- Mark Latham, who was "working as a guest reporter for a commercial network"; is there no scrap of venomous fuckwittery of which the man is not capable?) was about her meeting with Kevin Rudd, except for the ones about the presence of Mark Latham.

Wah wah wah shrouded in secrecy (actually, said Gillard, there was a TV camera and sound gear in the room) wah gotcha wah wah why didn't you make eye contact (actually, said Gillard, just because you didn't see something doesn't mean it didn't happen) wah wah gotcha blah are there really two leaders wah wah wah knifed blah blah assassinated wah wah doesn't Mark Latham upset you blah not helping wah wah aren't YOU having a hard time wah wah gotcha blah Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd.

Gillard answered every single one of these aggressive, repetitive inanities with humour, patience and grace.

As someone with an 83-year old father and an older sister recently turned 60, I would have quite liked to hear some questions about the seniors policy. I didn't think it was too much to ask. Perhaps the baby journalists thought Julia had spoken about it so clearly and in such detail that there were no questions left unanswered. But it seems more likely that they didn't hear a word she said and were filling in time tweeting and texting till her mouth stopped moving and they could start yelling But we need to talk about Kevin!

Can anyone tell me what this appalling crap is all about? Has journalism become a matter of goading someone until they lose their temper or burst into tears? Exactly when did loss of control or bodily containment become the stuff that "news" is made of? Did any of them even realise that there were policy announcements being made? Is this the kind of scrum that produces the kind of rubbish we're getting in the papers and on  the news? Do journalists really think that public life is a soap opera in which the only thing that matters is emotion, personalities and gossip? How much of this is being driven by the Rupert Murdochs of the world? Can you really blame the obviously extreme youth and inexperience of some of these journalists when Kerry O'Brien is doing more or less the same thing every night on The 7.30 Report? Now that journalism is something you need a university degree for, what on earth are they spending those four years teaching them? And is the Australian public really only getting the media it deserves?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, I am bloody glad I'm not a journalist. I would be hanging my head in shame, mortification and sorrow at the untrained flea circus this once noble profession has become.

In which recycling occurs

Back in 1994 I was writing a TV column for Eureka Street. Here's what I said about Laurie Oakes, whose weekly political interviews were the cornerstones of Channel Nine's now-defunct Sunday.

The 'political' interview often becomes a news event in itself, a focal and sometimes pivotal point in the affairs of government. While it purports to deal with the events of recent days, bits of it frequently end up in everybody's news bulletins on the following Monday night; constructed thus as 'news', it sometimes produces further consequences.

Keeping track of these unfolding causalities is disquieting. Among other things, they indicate just how much power Oakes has to help make things happen; his recent interviews have had a hand in the ebb of Ros Kelly's fortunes [remember Ros Kelly? -- Ed] and the flow of Bronwyn Bishop's. Remarks edited out of context, and then repeatedly re-broadcast both by Nine and by other stations, can have major consequences; and sometimes those remarks have been lured, coaxed or goaded out of reluctant ministerial mouths in the first place by strategies comparable in subtlety and sympathy to a well-aimed jackboot to the groin.

Cheryl Kernot, interviewed a week or two before Ros Kelly's resignation and taking a tough stand on accountability, is one of the few politicians I have ever seen remain unflustered by Oakes throughout an entire interview. Kernot, like Gareth Evans [ooh, prescience! -- Ed] but unencumbered by what Jane Austen would have called his uncertain temper, is both spectacularly well-informed and possessed of high-level debating skills; at one point she left Oakes speechless, sweetly but mercilessly showing him up through a hole in his own research.

One of the most noticeable features of this interview was the difference in its participants' rhetoric: Kernot's images and metaphors were those of consensus and integration, Oakes's those of strife and fracture. His language, illuminated by the difference, revealed his view of political affairs as essentially antagonistic, competitive and hierarchical; 'win' and 'lose' are two of his favourite words. This world view, like the medium through which it is expressed, is coercive; in shaping his questions according to it, Oakes builds whole suburbs of verbal dark alleys down which it becomes very difficult for his subjects not to go. Most politicians' terror of silence is such that a simple 'I don't accept the terms of your question' would never occur to them, even when that is clearly the case.

When Julia Gillard patiently said 'I don't accept your premise, Kerry' to Red Kezza on the evening of the day she became Prime Minister, in response to just such a begged question about the 'stabbing in the back' of Kevin Rudd, I whooped and hollered and applauded and frightened the cats. I'd been waiting (at least) sixteen years to hear a politician say that to a journalist.

Much of the rest of it also reads as though those sixteen years had never existed. Perhaps these are the glory days for which Oakes yearns, and that's why he's behaving the way he is now.

What's prompted me to dig this out of the filing cabinet is the news that Cheryl Kernot may be standing as an Independent for a Senate seat. Go Cheryl.

Equivalences

Let me get this straight: Christine Nixon is to be crucified for taking an hour off, when she wasn't even rostered on, in order to have dinner -- but it's cause for gasps of meeja admiration when the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition goes AWOL on a nine-day bike ride, taking yet another opportunity to wobble his budgie at slavering photographers and horrified truckies for the entire length of the Hume Highway.

Because, like, he's fit, and she's, you know, not, and everyone knows the skinned rabbit look equals virtue whereas a traditionally built lady must by definition be, you know, evil.

Have I got that right?

Have a read of that linked article, and then ask yourself how much more vile, ignorant, sniggering, misogynist fat-hate Nixon would be copping even than she already is if she were to emulate the Leader of the Opposition and say, in defence of the shocking crime of having an evening meal, 'I'm just being myself.'

Only 8 days to the SA election, but who will save us from Lara Bingle?

If I see the mindless expression 'spin over substance' trotted out one more time with reference to SA Premier Mike Rann and his government, I'm going to have what my grandmother used to call A Turn.

But alas, there's only one thing journos (and apparently their readers) love more than alliteration, and that's a nice simple false dichotomy. Those who keep saying 'spin over substance' believe, or would have us believe, or both, that the relation of spin to substance is the same as the relation of black to white, good to evil, night to day, you get the picture. I don't know which is the more annoying, the woolly-mindedness or the sibilance and sussuration.

Because as any South Australian with eyes in his or her head is perfectly well aware, Rann has both spin and substance in abundance. You may not like his substance, but you cannot deny that he has it. He may have less of it in some areas (like water), but he certainly has more of it in others, like the healthy state economy, the low unemployment rate and the massive improvements in Adelaide's roads and traffic flow in half a dozen different places over the last eight years. Everything except the really intractable problems (like water) appears to have gone pretty smoothly throughout his two terms thus far, in spite of his, erm, strange team and his apparent ongoing, erm, disagreements with the legal profession.

But the brutal populist Laura Norder policies, even in their weird ideological disconnect from the Social Inclusion Unit headed by a priest appointed by fiat, are a different thing from a lack of substance. So, even, is this silly business with the former waitress, she of the 'funny, flirty friendship' (and if you believe that, then I've got a nice bridge you might like to buy -- though 'funny' is appropriate, if not in the way Rann meant it). Take down their pants and their brains fall out, as my baby sister is wont, tersely, to observe, but that doesn't indicate 'lack of substance' either, whatever else it might be a symptom of.

Unfortunately, shapely blondes are right up there with alliteration and false dichotomy when it comes to what the meeja likes most, so the non-story about the alleged long-gone affair with the waitress is the one we keep hearing over and over again, not least because said waitress keeps popping up behind microphones and in front of cameras -- not unlike that other shapely blonde whose non-story is taking up so much space not only in the sports pages but also in the news pages at the moment. The SA election is only eight sleeps away, but who knows how much longer we're all going to be subjected daily to more breathless, sleazy fluff about the hapless Lara Bingle?

Um, no

Reading my emailed online Age this morning I was a bit shocked to see at the top of the Top Stories the headline 'Praying for twins Trishna, Krishna'. The article itself was a perfectly workpersonlike report on the progress of the surgical team in Melbourne working on the separation of the conjoined Bangladeshi twins. No mention was made of prayer, nor was any subject attached to that verb 'praying'.

But be damned if the Adelaide Advertiser, as I found out later in the day, wasn't doing almost the same thing: on the front page, with a large photograph, there appears the headline: 'Nation prays for Trishna and Krishna'.

Now look. I wish those children nothing but well. They're out of surgery and into intensive care, now, after a 27-hour operation. According to the most recent news updates I can find, they are still okay and that is fabulous. Every time I heard an update about the surgery on the news last night and again today, I wished the surgeons and the littlies well, and marvelled, recalling some of the unforgettable 19th century things -- including a number of skeletons of conjoined twins -- that I saw in specimen jars in Vienna's Museum of Pathological Anatomy, at what is now surgically possible.

But I wasn't "praying" for either the surgeons or the children and I'm damn sure most of the rest of the country wasn't either. This kind of thing provokes the same shudder of irritation that passes through me whenever the Prime Minister uses the word "evil" in a public speech. The discourse of Christianity belongs in the churches and the homes of Christians. When you use it in public life you are effectively saying that its concepts are real for everyone, and you are forcing non-Christians into active resistance, which may not be the effect you were trying to achieve.

Australia is, or is supposed to be, a secular country. As one of its citizens, I believe in mindfulness, in suffering, and in the alleviation of suffering. But I don't believe in prayer and I don't believe in evil, and being spoken for by politicians and newspapers as if I did believe in them makes me want to spit in somebody's eye.

Irritants: a series less occasional than I would like

*Clears throat, rings town crier bell, unrolls parchment*


'Disinterested' does not mean 'uninterested'.

'On Ermintrude's behalf' does not mean 'on Ermintrude's part'.

'Cohort' does not mean 'mate'.

Irritating as these and their constant and egregious misuse may be, they pale into insignificance beside the moment when a young person employed by the Channel 7 News referred to 'Michael Jackson and his panache for plastic surgery.' It took me several minutes to work out that the word this 'journalist' should have been groping for was penchant and that's not really right either.


*Rolls up parchment, retires to Ladies' Lounge for a medicinal brandy*

Penis envy alive and well: who knew?

In today's Age there is an account by sports writer Greg Baum of the terrific tennis match last night between teenage rocket Caroline Wozniacki, the eleventh seed in the Australian Open at only 18, and Jelena Dokic, of the tragic and dramatic history thus far. The article will be read on and offline by tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people.

I watched the whole match and it was full-on, played with great pace and power but also featuring a lot of the delicate touch and mixed-up play that players such as Hingis and Henin won all their Grand Slam trophies with.

Greg Baum's take?

The match was a beauty, a slugfest, played at take-no-prisoners tempo, worthy of the men's draw.

Now if slugging and imprisoning are your favourite things then yes of course the men's draw will be your cup of tea, along with rugby, ice hockey, heavyweight boxing, the AFL in melee mode, and gladiators v. lions and bears. If not, if you prefer different aspects of the game of tennis -- precision, skill, quick thinking -- then perhaps you won't think to make evaluative gender comparisons but will rather take each kind of spectacle, and each kind of player, of whatever gender, on her or his own particular merits.

The match was indeed worthy of international competition at the highest level. It was worthy, at its very best moments, of past greats like Navratilova and Court. But is 'worthy of the men's draw' really the highest compliment you can think of? Give me a break, Greg Baum. Shift your great fat lazy paradigm.

Don't like what they're saying? Hack them to death with sharp objects!

I love blogging. I do. But as someone who's been reading blogs of various stripes for over four years now and therefore knows more than she used to about the depths of misogyny and hatred that can be plumbed when women speak fearlessly of what they know, I have to say that this surprises me less than it would have in 2005.

How To Erase Women and Perpetuate the Dominant Culture

There's a good article about the death of Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne in today's online Age by Rod Curtis in Dubrovnik. Curtis went and talked to a goodly assortment of the citizens of that city and asked them what they thought and how they felt about Lapthorne's death.

The central point around which the piece revolves, the plank on which the whole article is (very well and thoughtfully) built, is that local opinion is very clearly divided along gender lines.

Men -- mostly young men -- think Lapthorne got drunk, went for a swim and drowned.

Women -- all kinds of women -- think she was raped and murdered.

And what headline has the online minion at the Age seen fit to give this clear, thoughtful, well-argued piece of writing?

Locals blame it on the booze.

It's not about the children

As we all knew it would, the new Bill Henson 'outrage' is being used as a stick to beat the Luvvies and a flag to wave in the culture wars. And voices of reason like those of Dr Leslie Cannold (hat tip to Mark Lawrence for this link) seem to have been largely lost amid the shouting.

When there is danger to children in the form of sexual damage, almost all of it comes -- as indeed with adult rape -- from people those children already know. Their uncles, their big brothers, their soccer coaches, their daddy's friends. But there are all sorts of reasons, most of them I'm sure subliminal, why everybody wants to leave those stinking waters unstirred. Much easier, as it has always been much easier, to blame the outsider, the stranger: to use him or her as a focus and target onto which to project your own half-conscious, half-understood fear and rage.

The fact that all sorts of commercial enterprises have been routinely using schools for years as a source for models and 'stars' is one that the outraged choose to ignore, as they ignored it when it was first pointed out in Australia a year or two ago that corporate paedophilia had been going on or years. No no, they cried, when photos of pouting, posing prepubescent girls half-dressed in brand-name clothing were pointed out to them, that's not suggestive, you've just got a dirty mind.

*Waits for other shoe to drop*

*Crickets*

This mushroom cloud of self-righteous indignation speaks to parents everywhere in their concern for their children's welfare and safety, but the commentary itself isn't really about threats to children at all.

It's about getting stuck into the cultural left, and particularly about getting stuck into one of the cultural left's best spokespersons and scribes, David Marr (which for them is the equivalent of blowing up the post office or bombing the munitions factory), by banging on about how he's only trying to sell books. Presumably they think that if one has written a book then one should try to keep this fact as quiet as possible. Or perhaps they don't know that it is standard newspaper practice to publish extracts of forthcoming books of interest.

'I reject outright,' Text publisher Michael Heyward is quoted today as having said,

any suggestion that the controversy over Bill Henson's fully supervised and entirely proper school visit was cooked up to boost sales of David Marr's book ...

I approached David Marr to write this book so that readers could have a clear understanding of the issues around the closure of Bill Henson's show in May.

The renewed ill-informed and inflammatory commentary shows how important it is that people have access to clear debate about the real issues so they can work out what they think.

For what it's worth, my guess is that, knowing the right-wing commentators would immediately glomp onto the story of Henson in schools the minute the book did come out and blow it up into a storm of sensationalist, oversimplified misrepresentation and outrage, Marr may be trying to exercise a bit of pre-emptive damage control by getting in as quickly as possible and providing some non-sensationalist analysis and response to predictable fuss, like this article on Monday.

(I know David a bit, not well, but well enough to have an idea of what kind of bloke he is, and I'd just like to point out that one of the most highly respected senior journalists in the country, the man who co-authored Dark Victory and who wrote the best literary biography this country has ever produced, doesn't actually need to tout for book sales, and wouldn't even if he did. Besides, the people who are going to buy the book would have bought it anyway, and the people who weren't still won't.)

There's nothing new about philistines gleefully getting stuck into artists on the grounds that they are really just pornographers and degenerates, as any student of the history of any art in any country knows. But then, it's not the people who understand this conflict who are making the fuss.

Bill Henson makes art about the emotional and sexual turbulence of adolescence. So did Shakespeare, he whom the self-proclaimed enemies of the cultural left insist should be taught more in schools. Do they know what Romeo and Juliet is actually about? (You've got to wonder whether Kevin Rudd's ever read or seen a performance of this play, or, if he has, whether his response was 'This is revolting, you should just let kids be kids.')

Henson's highly regulated and monitored search in a school for suitable models, a practice we now know to be common, bears no resemblance to the big companies' use in advertising for profit of inappropriately sexualised prepubescent children. It bears no resemblance to the behaviour of, say, former SA magistrate Peter Liddy, who used his work as a surf lifesaving coach (oh the irony) to groom, molest, torment and rape little boys and wreck their lives. It bears no resemblance to what nice Uncles Darren and Hugo do to little Tay-lah and Charlotte whenever they get the chance.

But hey, that's business, sport and the family, innit. Sacred, every one. Not like those arty-farty wankers, who are, as everybody knows, fair game. And besides, look how they vote.