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COLUMN REQUIRES PEN
This week’s Continuing Crisis column in The Bulletin is a crossword. Also in The Bulletin:
* Paul Daley examines the failure of Australian spy networks in the wake of the latest Bali bombings;
* David Williamson slams his fellow Australians, reverting at one point to a bizarre cultural-cringe preference for British views;
* Paul Toohey interviews Schapelle Corby;
* Patrick Carlyon reveals the history behind Sydney’s insane decision to narrow one of its key roads;
* And coverage of the Kashmir earthquake that by latest estimates may have claimed 40,000 lives.
David Williamson goes to Disney film, is irritated that it is not a doomsday documentary, nevertheless employs it as a metaphor for all that is wrong, particularly consumption (unless it enables him to go cruising with a bunch of fellow, non-aspirational intellectuals).
The Club was a good play.Posted by Semi-conductor on 2005 10 11 at 04:16 PM • permalinkDavid Williamson made a couple of good plays five million years ago.
Williamson’s characters are generally one-dimensional and there to serve some point he is trying to make about who knows what.
Alas for Davo, his last play - cannot remember the name - was only enjoyable because John Waters put in a nice and multi-dimensional turn as the right-wing shock jock.
I don’t think that was what Davo was trying to achieve. Tough luck, Davo, and who gives a rat’s what you think.
Posted by Major Anya on 2005 10 11 at 05:14 PM • permalink“Aspirational” means “upwardly mobile”, right? Ohhh, the poor dear thing, thrown among the lower orders.
Not that I have any patience at all with people who get pissy with waiters. If he got that detail right about the “aspirationals”, why, that’d make them a lot like… him.
Posted by P. Froward on 2005 10 11 at 06:31 PM • permalinkThe thought of a luvvy leftie trapped on a cruise ship with a load of Kath and Kims is much funnier than any of Williamson’s dismal ‘comedies’. (American readers: imagine Susan Sontag or Gore Vidal trapped on a cruise ship of Nascar fans). Typically, Williamson hates ‘aspirationals’ who’ve actually made some money, and saves his compassion for the hard-pressed ethnics serving the passengers. His compassion is not misplaced there, but when the sons and daughters of those hard workers start getting into the professions, buying condos in Manila, and SUVs and satellite dishes, Williamson will hate them too.
In a similar vein, a lefty I work with, who will soon be taking up a new job in Thailand, was abusing Howard’s new workplace legislation, then in the very next breath was gloating about how she will have servants in Thailand, and will never have to cook or clean again.
The last Williamson play I saw was a shocker, can’t remember its name but it was about shenanigans in the art community; cardboard characters, attempted witty profundities that had obviosly been laboured over (but perhaps not enough) , punchlines you could see coming a mile away….
Williamson belongs to that group of artists - it also includes “Tom” Keneally, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, who were fawned over in the seventies (a time of particular national self consciousness) simply because they were Australian. Now when most of them have turned out in the long run to be duds, the people who puffed them thirty years ago still have to continue to praise them or look like fools. The only real quality Williamson brough to his work in the early days was his grasp of contempory Australian cliches and spech patterns of the time , but even here I believe he owes a big debt to Barry Humphries.
Any way, Williamson certainly enjoys a much softer lifestyle than the aspirationals he criticises, but it’s only owing to his status as another Living National Mediocrity!!
Posted by Consuela Potez on 2005 10 11 at 07:08 PM • permalinkIn a vein matching his style I observe. He was always a pretentious “P_ _ _ , to be found hanging around the male”.
“One Day of the Year” was always insulting propaganda which, as Lefty teachers tried to call it a play, was part of the current cruel damage to education.
He is an aspirant of his class and as such incapable of being internally directed; always nervously following, much as an over excited Pekinese, tongue lolling out, drooling for pats.
Posted by missinglink on 2005 10 11 at 07:12 PM • permalinkDaivd Williamson in full flight:
Right-wing columnists and commentators have a habit of sneering at what they call “elites”. Elites are presumably those who are not aspirational Australians. We are urged by the columnists to accept that all wisdom resides in aspirational Australia and none in the ranks of the effete elites with their wanky interest in art, films and their bleeding-heart concern for the future of Australia.
Notice that DW doesn’t even admit that there might be a true Right elite with true concerns. The Right are actually referring to the New Class Left’s blindness and superiority to its old, lost ALP voters.
Williamson took another ‘well-needed’ charity cruise won cheaply, while admitting they’d recently been on a similar, better British one!
Doesn’t he love the poor! Humbug!! Serve him right for not giving it away!David Williamson makes it sound so easy, “manageable population(of convicts)in a land that initially seemed limitless in its natural resources(limitless deserts, the world’s driest continent). A land of abundant pastures for sheep(no-one cleared the land to make the pasture?), wheat(wheat grows in pastures with cattle feed?..be that as it may) and cattle, abundant water(yeah right), and huge reserves of coal(generations hunched over one mile down, black lung, still often buried alive). A land in which the original inhabitants could be reasonably easily pushed aside.(What no frontier wars?(Henry Reynolds boos)
“And if President Bush finally concedes that the ferocity of the natural disasters hitting his southern states might have something to do with all that extra energy in the biosphere due to greenhouse warming” (the big guy starts slapping at this point)
“locked us into a probable long-term disaster scenario for Cruise Ship Australia and for the planet as a whole”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16889149^7583,00.html“A form of this article was delivered last month by David Williamson for the 16th Sir Rupert Hamer Lecture at Swinburne University” (Oh a University..well they would have been a critical audience ..lots of booing at Williamson for sneering at the lower classes? Yeah right!)
#10 Missinglink, One day of the year is by Alan Seymour, not David Williamson, though the mistake is natural enough. (For non-Oz readers, One Day was a play about Anzac day, Australia’s national day of remembrance for war service. It took the line that Anzac Day was an embarrassing anachronism, and would soon die out, and, as Missinglink observes, the play was for many years on the high school literature syllabus. Anzac Day observance has been growing every year, and it is the play that has become the embarrassing anachronism.)
Perhaps the reason that none of them has read Proust and so on is that Associate Professor Catharine Lumby and others of the Critical Illiteracy movement think that David Williamson plays are more edifying.
Perhaps the offensive of the great-unwashed that Williamson had to endure were the natural products of a David Williamson education.
#11 Larrikin, to give the devil his due, one would have to say that Williamson is one of the very few Australian writers, and certainly the only Australian playwright, to get rich on his own efforts. I don’t think he’s ever had much Australia Council assistance, because his plays have always made money. Remember, the Australia Council is there to reward failure. His plays still make money, even though they have been dreadful for years. A friend of mine works for the Melbourne Theatre Company: they have to put Williamson’s plays on, because they have guaranteed audiences, but they hate themselves in the morning.
Well, since Sontag traded in deconstruction for decomposition we don’t have to worry about her ruining the cruise.
And just tell Vidal the dinner theatre production in first class is the stage version of The Naked and the Dead and he’ll throw himself overboard for us…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 10 11 at 08:41 PM • permalinkThe whiny bastard lives up here now, along with a mess of moaning millionaire maxists who infest Noosa and its environs, making it unihabitable for real Queenslanders; my brother had a place on the beach at Sunrise, and the unmistakable shuffling gait of Melbourne’s favourite producer of the same play 237 times would waddle past on his early morning shamble; it was then I really hated JW Howard for the introduction of firearm controls. If you can’t put down a clearly distressed and dying introduced and feral critter, what’s the world coming to?
BTW- just read his article, and it confirms all my previously held prejudices about this hypocritical twat; the cruise he loved sounded like absolute purgotry- similar to the one described by PJ O’Rourke in “Ship of Fools” (Republican Party Reptile), a cruise of the Brezhnev era Volga with a pack of Michael Moore fans. I’d be draining the bar and looking to fit a 20-0 Norwegian shark hook to a few of the windbags and pitching them over the side to troll for makos within hours of boarding. The cruise he loathed was full of bogans- so what? So’s most of Australia. I liked the final tirade about dwindling resources, living beyond means and global warming- all penned by a turd with a million-plus gaff in Noosa and a multi-million dollar one in Melbourne, both fitted with every modern fitting and fixture (and lots of over-priced, tacky art), between which he regularly commutes by kero-burning jet aircraft, when not buggering off by same means to the third world to tut-tut about poverty and deprivation, and buy some more tacky local artisans efforts to further clutter his large residences, and impress his equally daffy comrades with his diversity-awareness and cultural sensitivity.
I’ll be happier than a punter who missed out on the Webdiary scrip issue when the last of these self-important, sanctimonious, selfish baby-boomer shitheads finally croak.I am only half way through the cruise liner article and all I can think is;
1. “Who the hell is David Williamson?”, and
2. “What an ass…”
(Can I say Ass here???)Posted by Arnaudinoz on 2005 10 11 at 09:22 PM • permalinkWith whom exactly did Williamson expect to be discussing Proust and George Elliot on a cruise? Is this really the sort of thing that cruises are famous for? I mean, did the brochures actually suggest that the Algonquin Round Table would be joining them at Noumea?
I loved the line, “Warmth and affection within families was genuine, and civility to other passengers was the norm”; fancy that! These people have basic manners and the crudest of feelings! Quick, write to The Age and let them know!
It’s also very telling that Williamson graciously praises the servant class but despises the middle orders. The workers can be admired from afar, but maybe the middle classes are just a little too close for comfort.
Posted by blandwagon on 2005 10 11 at 09:25 PM • permalink#17 Noted Cuckoo. I will give the devil his due. He’s not a parasite. I guess he’s some other form of vermin.
Its interesting to compare Williamson’s view of Australian’s with the one that emerges from Andrew Bolt’s column ‘Tales That Inspire Tears’ in today’s Herald Sun. Williamson spends a lot of column inches looking down his nose (which doubtless he imagines to be quite patrician) at his fellow Australians, whereas Bolt finds their quite courage a source of inspiration.
For what it’s worth, an even more obscure Australian writer, Helen Garner, wrote a similar article about going on a ‘vulgar’ cruise some years ago. Garner is a writer of Williamson’s generation, and for many years was the prose-artist-laureate to Australia’s city-fringe middle-class left. She is always being held up to us as a paragon of liberal wisdom and compassion, but her piece on the cruise was a smug, patronising and hateful anthropological essay on jumped-up bogans.
“In south-western Australia, our most productive wheat belt, the crop is literally grown on pure sand enriched by large amounts of fertiliser.”
As I come from a farm in South-Western Australia, I think David meant to say “rich red clay enriched by modern crop rotation AND large amounts of fertiliser.”
I doubt David Williamson has ever seen wheat that wasn’t already made into bread.
And there is plenty of more fertile land in Australia than in South-West WA. It’s just that it’s used to grow produce that is more valuable than wheat. Wheat is just a grass, it doesn’t need much help, except a bit of rain.
My favourite quote though, is this one:
“Technology has rarely solved anything.”
Is this guy for real?
So Williamson goes on a niche-market cultural cruise of South East Asia, that happens to have been organised by a British company, and has a great time. Good for him.
He later goes on an Australian-organised cruise that was obviously aimed at a more ‘sun and fun’ market. It wasn’t really his thing, and he didn’t have so good a time.
From this, he concludes that British culture is superior. And proves himself a jackass. He would probably have had an equally bad time (maybe worse, who knows?) on an equivalent British cruise.
The thought of a luvvy leftie trapped on a cruise ship with a load of Kath and Kims is much funnier than any of Williamson’s dismal ‘comedies’.
Cuckoo, that summary is genius!
Incidentally, the skull-piles in Cambodia would not have been erected if the luvvy lefties like Williamson hadn’t succeeded in crippling the defence of South Vietnam.
Posted by Susan Norton on 2005 10 11 at 10:14 PM • permalinkLooks like DW didn’t get laid on the cruise.
Posted by Honkie Hammer on 2005 10 11 at 10:29 PM • permalinkLove the comment about “trapped with a load of Kath and Kims”.
Williamson deserves our respect for his work, which has been delivered to a market willing to pay for it. That is totally atypical of the lefty wank arts scene. His opinions grow out of that 1960s time of lefty cultural cringe, and the fact that he holds opinions typical of his associates or peers should shock none of us.
Also cuckoo #24, have you read Helen Garner’s “The First Stone”? For that clear, sympathetically human look at the excesses of politically correct ‘justice’ we should award her our respect.
He’s slightly mitigated from my esquadrion del muerte’ list for penning “The Removalists”, which we studied in Grade 11- it’s possibly enough to save him from being dragged around the block behind a pickup truck full of drunken thugs for giving senior students a line like “if you don’t move that fucking truck now, I’m gonna piss in your radiator and shit in your gearbox”</i>. Imagine the juvenile mirth created by that, especially seeing as we had a female English teacher.
I actually heard one of the smug ‘elite’ (cant recall who it was) commenting on the Bali terrorist attack. Of the dead Aussies, he said that they were probably not the type of people one would want to know anyhow. How I wished he had been in reach of my son’s cricket bat.
But its amusing to note his indignation that Australians dare to want flatscreen tvs etc. Wonder what his tv is? An old black and white 12inch, no doubt.
As readers of Mark Steyn will know, the Canadian Western Standard organises special cruises for conservatives. Maybe we can get Williamson a ticket on one of those. And since no-one else has done it yet, let me be the first:
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip…
and insert “Williamson” for “Gilligan”: it scans!Davo, Davo, Davo, I’ve never been on a cruise; wouldn’t EVER think of going on a cruise (even if won in a raffle or auction!) and agree that many Ozzies are a bunch of beer swilling, Eliot/Proust (who?) shunning yobboes. Funny thing is I still reckon you’re a wanker.
Oh, and I don’t own a plasma TV either and not interested in getting one but did do over my kitchen recently, I’ve got kids but don’t have a problem with sending them to a Public School; love planting eucalypts on my property but own a nice SUV. Does that make your head spin, dickhead?Posted by pick-your-pun on 2005 10 11 at 11:35 PM • permalinkAnother fine issue of the Bulletin. I was particularly impressed with the Corby interview which was compassionate and revealing. As to the David Williamson piece; I hope that if he were to read it again he would be as embarrassed by it as I am. It is boring superficial and condescending, a complete contrast to the Paul Toohey piece with Schappelle.
Keep up the good work, its great to have a quality Australian magazine.
Regarding Ms. Corby, I noticed some months ago that “schappellecorby.com” had not been registered. Just checking reveals:
Domain Name…....... schappellecorby.com
Creation Date…..... 2005-05-17
Registration Date…. 2005-05-17
Expiry Date…....... 2006-05-17
Organisation Name…. Loss Prevention
Organisation Address. Box 895
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Bondi Junction
Organisation Address. 1355
Organisation Address. NSW
Organisation Address. AUSTRALIAAdmin Name…........ Ian Brooke
Admin Address…..... Box 895
Admin Address….....
Admin Address…..... Bondi Junction
Admin Address…..... 1355
Admin Address…..... NSW
Admin Address…..... AUSTRALIA
Admin Email…....... .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Admin Phone…....... +61.293861690
Admin Fax…......... +61.293693770Tech Name…......... Ian Brooke
Tech Address…...... Box 895
Tech Address…......
Tech Address…...... Bondi Junction
Tech Address…...... 1355
Tech Address…...... NSW
Tech Address…...... AUSTRALIA
Tech Email…........ .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Tech Phone…........ +61.293861690
Tech Fax….......... +61.293693770
Name Server…....... rns1.melbourneit.com.au
Name Server…....... rns2.melbourneit.com.auI wonder what this Ian Brooke has to do with her apart from being an opportunist hoping to make a buck from her name.
Williamson said “Our golden soil is the oldest and most nutrient-leached in the world. What nutrients there were were quickly used up by our early farming efforts, and from there on we’ve relied on ever more expensive and increasingly uneconomic doses of fertiliser to keep our wheat crop growing.”
So the lush grass I see outside the window of this farm house is a figment of my imagination?
The invincibly-ignorant wanker also said “In fact we have used our soils as a non-renewable resource, living high on the hog for a while but allowing wind erosion and water erosion to get rid of half our topsoil in less than 200 years.”
No, you stuck-up city slicker, topsoil, is (and always has been, and always will be) not just renewable but self-renewing.
Australian inner-city elitists have long been strangely hostile to farmers (except when they can patronize them), but this pseudo-scientific gibberish takes the cake.
Posted by Chris Chittleborough on 2005 10 12 at 01:44 AM • permalinkI liked Andrew’s column in the Herald Sun this morning.
Thought it showed what real people are doing, while others are merely going on and on about how compassionate they are.
The shy bit was very cute.
Posted by Major Anya on 2005 10 12 at 04:15 AM • permalinkIf you believe in a wider set of values than accumulating material affluence, wear it as a badge of honour next time some self-righteous journalist uses the word “elites” pejoratively against you. An obsessive focus on material acquisition, encouraged by governments who worship economic growth and little else, have locked us into a probable long-term disaster scenario for Cruise Ship Australia and for the planet as a whole.
As someone who lives in a 35 year old unrenovated house in a rather tired but very much middle-Australia suburb, with no plasma, no new car, no savings to speak of, but quite a few records and books, I say to Mr Williamson - humbug!
His self exposing, depressive (both cruises sounded awful!) tirade against those straw-men and women who he knows voted Howard in (yet again) is nothing but sour grapes from an elitist.
He has found a group to blame for the impending disaster, when the ship hits the jagged, avenging rocks of overindulgence. He has salved his soul with a quick confession that he really belongs somewhere else, with people of a higher plane.
By comparison, reading Andrew Bolt’s articles is a joy. Andrew has an abiding love for Australia and the amazing variety of its people. He condemns with insight and incisive, reasoned judgment instead of the class warfare blunderbus.Sounds like David Williamson is really disappointed there were no Islamic suicide bombers on board his cruise ship.
Posted by Young and Free on 2005 10 12 at 08:39 AM • permalinkHeaven forbid anyone should actually ENJOY a holiday.Where’s their social conscience?
The Bogans actually PAID for their vacation so why not enjoy it.Unlike them who may be on the trip of a lifetime-his majesty has several hols a year.
I’d like to see him on a Poseidon Adventure,preferably swimming through the pipes with his head underwater.
This would take him to a higher state of consciousness.What Williamson really needs is an excursion to the Costa del Sol. Plenty of cultured British holidaymakers ready and waiting to discuss Proust and shed copious crocodile tears for asylum swindlers not.
Posted by Jim Geones on 2005 10 12 at 09:49 AM • permalinkI know a lady from India (settled in Australia) who tells me that she was shocked when she came here in the 50s and had to reside in a house with an outside dunny.
She and all her sisters married anglos and a sister lives in U.S. and one in U.K.
The Brit resident has a villa in Cyprus complete with “guest worker” servants from Sri Lanka.The family does not appear to have a problem with using 3rd world labour.The creative heights and the brutal depths of human potential resonated powerfully in our imaginations.
DW’s Holocaust Cruise to Cambodia drew this piece of incoherent pretension from him and his fellow travellers.
If only aspirationals read more Proust, they too might enjoy that special brew of cultural masochism, class snobbery and philistine intellectual vanity that mark Dave’s Kind of People.
Didn’t Chomsky and other lefties think Pol Pot’s regime ‘a bold experiment’ until the inevitable piles of bodies turned up?
the brutal depths of human potential - and fans of bold experiments. The people on the Noumea Cruise wouldn’t be so easily gulled.
And Williamson thinks he knows Proust.
It just bothers me that this dipstick has to be named “David.” Can’t something be done about that?
Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2005 10 12 at 04:23 PM • permalinkWilliamson is just the same as Philip Adams - one of the lowest forms of life on the planet: a rich, pretentious, prosing socialist. I’ve been on that cruise - recognised it from several clues. How come he didn’t mention - probably because he didn’t ask - how grateful the stewards and waiters are for their jobs. Work on board for seven years and they can but a house - something two of them made a point of telling me would never be possible if they’d stayed in the Philippines or Indonesia.
Posted by chessfiend on 2005 10 12 at 04:40 PM • permalinkMr Williamson is obviously a man who is scared of being found out as a westy.
And why is Mr Williamson a bigger westy than the “aspirationals” he despises? Because he went into print despising them. A true gentleman does not disparage the hoi poloi, he just ignores them.
The true hypocrisy is that of the the person who acts as though everyone should read Proust, whilst revelling in the fact that only his kind do so. (Personally I think Proust is overrated, Anthony Powell is far better).
When the British cruise, whose ageing but fit passengers took lots and lots of notes on lectures delivered by terribly smart Oxford professors, visited Cambodia, the ageing eager-beavers saw that…
“Blood still stained the walls and floors and in the final room we saw a massive pile of skulls. [...] Discussion at dinner was a lively examination of what we’d seen and its implications.”
Lively discussion at dinner? They had an appetite after seeing that?
And a little afterword from VDH:
“It used to be that liberalism was also populist. Yet lately the Left has often adopted a condescending attitude toward the so-called people, trivializing the folks in the trenches in assorted uniforms and camouflage who supposedly need guidance and moral enlightenment by their elite betters.”
Victor HansonTim Blair:
But this year has seen a sequence of natural disasters that have targeted with terrible precision some of the world’s most vulnerable regions, and its poorest citizens.
It reads as if you were implying that the disasters had intent.
David Williamson:
And if President Bush finally concedes that the ferocity of the natural disasters hitting his southern states might have something to do with all that extra energy in the biosphere due to greenhouse warming
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Anybody want to chip in and get the poor fossilised phalus a Contiki tour of Europe.
if a cruise nearly topped him then this should well and truely finish him off.
And I dont know about other people but I much prefer my “world problem solving” moments when im talking with trusted friends face to face, or a forum like this. Seems preferable to being a misery guts on a ocean tour.Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2005 10 15 at 05:25 AM • permalink
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I’m still glad I saw Williamson’s “After the Ball” on my visit to Melbourne, but he seems to be coming down the backstretch astride PInter and Hare in the blowhard derby.