It’s scary out there. Rowdy in the bookshop. Tony Abott is singing Advance Australia Fair very loudly. Helen Garner can’t stop worrying at that ‘thin membrane’ separating Good from Evil. Randa Abdel-Fattah can’t hear her and shouts ‘speak up’. ‘Oh, do be quiet,’ I sigh. Draw the curtains. Let’s have a little séance to lift the Festive mood. Our visionaries from Christmas Past deserve their slice of pud.
We just can’t call them all. Our heritage is a far vaster Jardin Exotique overspilling with second sighted Theodora Goodmans than White imagined in The Aunt’s Story. Feel free to send your picks. St Arnaud Books is especially keen to hear from arty loving Bots who are always sending us enquiries and setting up accounts.
I was saying we need a True Prophet when that old scoundrel Hope appears. He leads me down a well- trodden track reluctantly, overgrown with scotch thistle, wild olives and hemlock. ‘Introduced Species!’ I squeal. We come to a clearing, where AD picks up a book, his sharp eyes averted from the lewd ladies in Siren and Satyr: The Personal Philosophy of Norman Lindsay for just a sec to comment on:
[The] remarkable little Renaissance in the civilisation of Australia that took place in the first quarter of this century which may be briefly described as an attempt to acclimatize Greek Mythology in the Australian scene and to make this a source of a new movement imbued with the Spirit of Classical Paganism . If it was not a particularly successful graft no one now need to be surprised … The movement to settle Pan, the nymphs, the dyads, fauns, and satyrs of Arcadia in the bushland around Sydney was too self-consciously literary.
Really? I think it genius.
Fauns hoofing up the bush wasn’t new when Jack Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor and Frank Johnson burst onto to the scene in 1923 with their Quarterly mag Vision, liberally illustrated by Jack’s dad Norman. Sydney Long‘s purple piping Pan had been decorating arts and crafty homes for decades.
Norman too had been chiseling satyrs and fauns for quite some time in Springwood. Even before the Great War when Norman turned to the Spirits and had a few nasty encounters with ‘emissaries of evil, intent on breaking his will’ (Jack Lindsay, The Roaring Twenties), emerging thankfully with his sanity intact, Daemons were more to Norman than a fancy. With his pointy features and short fringe he could pass for a faun, was already breathing Life into stone and paper. I mean just compare Long’s effete Pan with Norman’s 1909 The Picnic God.
‘Blow, blow your flute stone boy blow!’ Did Slessor Believe when he wrote ‘Now earth is ripe for Pan again’? Jack didn’t know, although he thought Ken ‘maligned by his nickname Gaga.’ Very Sensibly Slessor sat Pan in a wealthy Lane Cove garden, on the nicer side of the Harbour, where like-minded Theosophists, a quirky order mixing Eastern and Western theology with a dash of interpretative Darwinism and a splash of Aleister Crowly, were gathering. The Theos began building their Greco Roman Amphitheatre at Balmoral in 1925. Expensive harbourside seats to witness their Indian Guru Krishnamurti reveal himself as Christ returned were selling fast.
I adore manifestos and Vison’s is superb. Sex with demi-gods would heal the horrors of the First World War. Most Australians were blind, some reviews were polite, others like the Age’s arch: ‘It is doubtful whether there are enough readers in Australia suffering from satyriasis and nymphomania to add to its circulation.’ It delighted Vision. They printed it proudly on the back pages of their second issue.
I know, I know, you think the lads were awful antimodernists but look afresh at how they channelled the Spirit of the Times. We ‘must believe only in Nietzsche’s god who dances’ Vision proclaimed: ‘We must fling overboard all valuations that are complacent and oppressive.’ They loved Plato’s ideal Forms, Blake’s visions and Ruben’s Centaurs. If you want a more intellectual account read Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites with Long’s soppy Pan on the cover. Find a copy. I’m not selling mine.
Vision loathed the Futurists, Shelly, Joyce, Dada, Jazz, Freud and anything French, or so they said. They classified art according to whether it embraced Life or Death, the very Freudian forces of Eros and Thanos they scorned. It’s very strange. Surely Seer Norman saw his rampaging Id and insatiable Ego? Poor Jack, confused by his father’s philosophy, became Freud’s most dedicated couch surfer.
As for the life sucking French ‘Rationalists’ they affected to hate, there was nothing rational about French art and poetry in the 1920s born of war and neurosis. I keep thinking about diabolic poet Andre Breton, inventor of automatic writing to access the unconscious, and his first surrealist manifesto published 1924, the year after Vison began: Breton’s bonds with the boys, not their differences. Opening the Doors of Perception. Daemons. The willing of new movements in art through anti-rational ranting.
It’s those ‘insolent’ Centaurs thundering across Vison’s pages that intrigue and exhaust me. That quaint demarcation between modernist and antimodernist such as you read in curatorial notes at a Heide exhibition rushes to mind. What delusion! Our Centaurs lead me to straight to Salvador Dali Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington. And no Hope, you are WRONG. The Daemons didn’t die out in our ‘inhospitable soil’. Your ecological metaphor is absurd!. They’re idling in our unconscious, just waiting for another remarkable Renaissance.
Joyeux Noël from St Arnaud Books.
