It is possible that of the fifty-or-so people singing Ern Malley karaoke in a dimly lit Cambridge University basement student theatre at 8:30pm on a cold Saturday night last November, only two of us really wanted to be there. That duo would be the entirety of the “Ern Malley Orchestra,” the pair of mic’d up academics leading the sing-along. “I have split the infinite!” they sang in unison, as one strummed his guitar vigorously. The songs were delivered with panache. The harmonica was a dynamic addition. Many attendees gamely clapped along, some singing louder and louder from a sense of duty, or solidarity. A few people unconstrained by British politesse periodically sighed and hung their heads dramatically, as though they could not believe they were being subjected to such torture, then looked around to see if others had registered their disdain.
It wasn't that bad. But the majority of us had spent the better part of the past two days at an academic conference about “Antipodean Modernism.” This was the last night. Nourishment (intellectual aside) had primarily consisted of black tea, biscuits, Yellow Tail shiraz, and crackers. Malley-oke was the final hurdle before we could, at last, hit the pub. As the final strains of the performance echoed through the room, the applause was rapturous.
I was especially keen to get to the Granta, a traditional brick pub on a bend of the River Cam, to hear more gossip about Simon During’s keynote speech. I had come to the conference in the role of curious punter. Arriving late, I had missed the first paper by During, an established literary scholar who—rumour has it—began his academic writing career from prison after being caught dealing. His keynote was titled “Anglo-colonial culture: a new paradigm?” It was pegged to Katharine Mansfield, an expatriate modernist writer from New Zealand (“Katherine’s my rival no longer,” Virginia Woolf wrote after hearing the news of Mansfield’s death, from tuberculosis complications, in 1923). During’s talk seemed to haunt the conference. The professor was repeatedly described as “provocative.” My co-attendees kept guiltily disavowing his ideas every time they came up in discussion: “Referring to Simon’s comments earlier—not the particularly provocative ones…” It was as though During was a Disney child star who had started an OnlyFans account, not a grey-haired academic interpreting century's-old elliptical novellas.
When I asked around, people gave different reasons as to why the talk was so contentious. Apparently, During had said that colonialism was “inevitable”; he had offered a dubiously revisionist European history; he had been in the game so long—“Simon Enduring,” one young man said—that he had “transcended the arena” and didn’t care about paying lip service to current academic trends, which alienated and aggravated younger scholars. The Antipodean Modernism conference was a stage for playing out some of the thorniest intergenerational conflicts dividing the study of the humanities today. Let the dark academia games begin.
*
Some thirty-six hours earlier, on Friday morning, I met my conference companion, Anjelica Angwin, at London Liverpool St Station to catch the 8:58am train north. Anjelica was wearing clogs, a ruffled skirt over track pants, a business shirt, a knitted cardigan cropped to just below the ribcage, and a diagonally striped purple tie. “It’s giving Cambridge,” she explained. Anjelica, who is an actor and screenwriter, not an academic, joined me on my voyage to Cambridge as an excuse to get out of London, where we're both currently living. “What do I need to know going in?” she asked, as we boarded the train.
I told her that the conference was organised by two literature PhD students from Australia, William Holbrook (who is at Cambridge), and Jeremy George (who is at the University of Melbourne). It would mostly entail a series of panels wherein academics would give presentations on their esoteric area of interest, followed by questions from the audience (although these “questions” would often be more of an extended comment). Post-Covid, it’s also common for some presenters and audience members to join via video. The ideal of a conference, I explained, is to index current debates in a field; to force academics to have a deadline to drag their research into some kind of coherent, ultimately publishable form; and to create opportunities for networking. The latter practice, for young academics, largely consists of trying to figure out who is doomed to sessional contracts and obscurity, and who is on the pathway to hallowed full-time positions and stardom. Noone gets paid to speak. Catering nearly always consists of trays of depressing sandwiches. This doesn’t matter, because intra-academic conversations are often ecstatic. Imagine a community of monk-like nerds, who have all been separately toiling away on the same topic, suddenly thrown into one room together. Sparks fly by the tea urn.
Holbrook and George had solicited presentations “reassessing the character, canons, and coordinates” of modernist literature from the Antipodes. Simon During would give the opening keynote. During is a distinguished professor who has done stints at universities in Melbourne, Cambridge, Baltimore, Berlin, and Brisbane, among others. Some scholars think that in a journal article published in 1985, he was the first person to introduce the word “postcolonial” to the theory world. He’s a big dog. The conference’s “point of departure” was billed as the centenary anniversary of the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo and the eighty year anniversary of the Ern Malley poetry hoax.
“There will be a lot of Ern Malley discourse,” I predicted. “Do you know the story?”
Outside the carriage window, the English countryside rushed by. A couple of teenage girls with thick fake eyelashes watched TikTok videos in the bay beside us.
“No. What is it?” Anjelica asked.
In Adelaide in 1944, I said, Max Harris, the editor of modernist literary magazine Angry Penguins, received a manuscript of sixteen poems titled The Darkening Ecliptic. The package arrived courtesy of the sister of a mysterious man named Ern Malley. Her brother, she wrote in an accompanying letter, was a mechanic and insurance salesman who had died suddenly at the tender age of 25 from something called “Grave’s Disease.” She hoped the editors might find the manuscript, which she discovered after his passing, of interest. Angry Penguins published a special edition devoted to Malley’s poems, with Harris introducing them as the work of “a poet of tremendous power, working through a disciplined and restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human experience.” Unfortunately for Harris, Ern Malley did not exist.
James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two poets embittered by what they saw as the rise of a fraudulent literary trend—modernism—had invented the poet as a hoax. The pair spent an idle afternoon at Victoria Barracks in South Melbourne cooking up pseudo-modernist poems for submission to Angry Penguins. They composed their magnum opus using random books on their desk, such as the collected works of Shakespeare and an American report on the “drainage of breeding-grounds of mosquitoes.” After the laudatory special edition of Angry Penguins was published, the national and international press got hold of the hoax. The story was gold: self-identified aesthetic revolutionaries revealed as provincial charlatans by gallant protectors of True Poetry! An article in the Advocate newspaper called the Angry Penguin affiliates “neuro-decadent” perverts who had spent years loudly stigmatising their “common man” critics as “‘fascist,' ‘reactionary’ or ‘anti-progressive’” and had now got their rightful comeuppance. The Adelaide Police charged Harris with publishing immoral obscenities. In a miserable turn of events, he was forced to argue in court that the poems did have intrinsic artistic merit, regardless of the authors’ intentions. Harris, Angry Penguins, and by extension, the entire enterprise of modernist poetry in Australia, was vigorously humiliated.
In the following decades, McAuley continued down the path of conservative public intellectual, going on to found the right-wing magazine Quadrant (which at one point was partly supported by the CIA). Stewart shrivelled at the attention, moving to Kyoto, converting to Buddhism, and turning to the haiku form. Although both hoaxers spent the rest of their lives writing poems, neither independently had the influence of their chimeric creation. Poets from New York like John Ashbery assigned Ern Malley to their students in seminars. He became po-mo fodder; The Darkening Ecliptic poems “may be seen as early examples of the Post-Modernist technique of bricolage,” argued the editors of a 1991 Penguin collection of Australian poetry. Malley’s surname had been taken from the word for “mallee” eucalypt plants, which in turn is thought to trace back to mali, a word from the language of the Wemba Wemba people. Free-wheeling appropriation of First Nations culture strikes again. Today, the hoax is also often interpreted as the raw nub of settler colonial anxieties about art made by Australians. The Ern Malley affair epitomises that cringe dynamic wherein our artists fixate on artists in (supposedly) more sophisticated global city centres—artists whose glittering successes we (supposedly) copy and inevitably fall short of.
“Basically, Ern Malley is like a proxy figure for every debate in Australian literature,” I posed to Anjelica. “You can kind of twist the scandal to make it fit whatever you want to talk about.”
*
Cambridge city centre is cobblestones, Gothic arches, heraldic crests, and Ye Olde Lollie shops. Getting off the train, I got the sense that the experience of living here would alternate between cloistered and claustrophobic. Apparently, there is a longstanding divide between “Town” and “Gown.” (“Town” refers to the people who work in the service industry around the university, while “Gown” refers to the academics and students.) This binary is a problem for people trying to reshape Cambridge's elitist image; a QR code on a sticker attached to the back of a seminar room chair led me to an encrypted activist website featuring “Cambridge Land Justice,” a “non-heirarchal (sic) group focusing on building solidarity with the local community and working towards dignity, community and access for all.” Yet to enter the halls of Cambridge as a scholar is to participate in a rarified existence. This is especially true if you live in a residential college, which most Gowns do (some stay for life). Laundry is completed for you, and staff and students eat in communal dining halls, Harry Potter style. Townies live differently. After Anjelica and I dropped our bags at our hostel, we purchased a plastic sleeve of fudge from a woman who told us she’d been bitten by a dog on the nose that morning, missed three buses, then had a substantial last-minute delivery of hard candy that needed unpacking before the end of her shift. She was in surprisingly good spirits for a person with puncture marks on their face.
Chewing on our fudge, we walked towards the English Faculty, which is on the edge of the town. We crossed a stone bridge, spattered with lichen, which overlooked the placid river. Punting boats were tied up at intervals. We entered a grassy field populated with beech trees and coated by a layer of crisp brown leaves. Traversing a stream that ran beside the river, a bevy of swans paddled beside us single-file through the reeds. Each swan seemed to be trying to eat the thin layer of fluorescent green moss that sat atop the surface of the water, and in doing so made a sound that was a peculiar mix of slurping, snapping, and honking. The landscape was completely unlike the baked yellow-greens of Walyalup/Fremantle, where I grew up. Freo is full of waxy-leaved olive trees and grey-green rosemary bushes imported by Italian migrants, as well as tightly knotted native shrubs that hug the ground to avoid being ripped away by the winds that hoon in from the ocean at 3pm nearly every day. In Cambridge, rainfall was clearly the norm, not the exception. Everything was verdant in a repressed, English way. Words like “thicket” and “heath” suddenly made sense.
The Antipodean Modernism conference was taking place in a nondescript modern building with exposed grey concrete ceilings and grey carpets. According to a diamond-shaped plaque, the building had been opened by “HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN” in 2005. One wall poster displayed a motivational quote typeset in Century Gothic from Cambridge alumni Zadie Smith: “Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.” Wise words from a wise woman. We entered the seminar room. About thirty people had come along to this panel, including some key members of the Naarm/Melbourne literati: Art & Language historian and Clyde coquette Camille Orel; poet laureate of Johnson St and author of chapbook Yearn Malley, Ursula Robinson-Shaw; the NTEU's most compelling speech-maker, Abigail Fisher; and Fisher's stepson, an extraordinarily attentive child of about seven who had acquired a handful of glossy chestnuts, which he was counting out like rosary beads.
As the day’s program got underway, the speakers read slowly and methodically from printed notes, lulling the attendees into a rigorously researched stupor. “Do they all present like this?” Anjelica whispered in my ear. The conventions of her experimental queer theatre nights are quite different. I told her to wait for question time—always where the true weirdness of any conference seeps out.
Sure enough, after Robinson-Shaw’s (much livelier) presentation, one attendee raised her hand. Robinson-Shaw had spoken about plagiarism, provincial anxieties, and “aesthetic shame management” in Australian literary culture, a place where there is a “constant hum of literary recrimination.” At this, the audience had guiltily laugh-exhaled. “It seems to me that every six months or so some prize-nominated novelist or respected regional poet is revealed as a pathological liar.”
The questioner piped up. “I was just wondering about those who have been shown to plagiarise, but are sanctioned by Australian literary culture.” Her voice quavered. “I’m thinking of a particular Australian poet, who was revealed to have plagiarised…”
“Name names!” someone heckled.
“...and who has continued to have that high level of cultural capital…”
“Which university do they teach at?” someone else called out.
She continued valiantly. “But, you know, is that better craftsmanship? Or is that actually quite a different approach to yours, which is about cultural capital?”
“Maybe this is a way of avoiding the question,” Robinson-Shaw replied, “but I’m almost disinterested in thinking about plagiarism in a moralising way.”
The questioner kept prodding. “But with the imposter, there is an… identification, I think, at work.” Everyone looked back to Robinson-Shaw.
“I wish I knew who you were talking about,” she said. “But I don’t, so I can’t covertly respond.”
As the papers progressed, the spectre of Simon During’s keynote loomed large. During had presented on Zoom, and was therefore absent from the remainder of the conference. This meant attendees were parsing out the meaning of his keynote at a normal volume, rather than slandering or defending it in hushed tones, which is what happens when a speaker is still present in person. I kept asking around about what was so transgressive about the talk.
“Well, he started with Schmitt,” one woman sitting near me explained.
“Yeah, he started with Schmitt,” her neighbour said. They laughed sheepishly. (On enquiry, it emerged that Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was an influential German political philosopher.)
“I mean… I love Schmitt but…” the woman said.
The man finished her sentence: “...but you normally start by acknowledging he was a Nazi.”
Opposition to During’s keynote was particularly evident in Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk’s comments throughout the conference. Araluen, a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation born and raised on Dharug country, is a poet and academic whose book Dropbear won the prestigious Stella Prize in 2022. She is a rising star, and a confident, fast-paced speaker with a sharp style, peppered with barbs, swear words, and self-effacing jokes. People sit up to attention when she speaks. Dunk is her husband, and a writer and lecturer in his own right. Together, they edit the left-wing journal Overland. Araluen has long, brown hair and, throughout the conference, wore dresses paired with a faded black cap embroidered with the Aboriginal flag. Dunk wore button-up shirts and sturdy black leather boots. In the Dropbear acknowledgements, Araluen dedicates “every word, and every place it comes from” to “J,” who I assume is Dunk. The pair seem to function in deep marital and intellectual symbiosis. At Cambridge, they sat beside one another during panels and referenced each other dotingly in their public comments.
After the Wiradjuri poet and lecturer Jeanine Leane gave a paper over Zoom critiquing books by Xavier Herbert and Patrick White, Dunk asked a question about the role that “primitivist fiction” might have played in the recent failed referendum vote. Someone still had a cheery “Yes” sticker on their laptop.
Araluen responded: “What was most concerning from my position—and I feel permitted to say this given that he is a Bundjalung man from Baryulgil—were figures like Warren Mundine re-narrativising tropes that are very much present in Herbert and White’s work. Tropes regarding Aboriginal savagery and the supposed inevitability of the decline or the elimination of Aboriginal culture… to think of Simon During’s talk this morning,” she added pointedly. What exactly had this guy said?
It was late at night in Naarm; Leane was tired. The room collectively agreed it was unnecessary to punish her with more questions from the crowd.
“Happy colonial dreams,” Leane said sardonically. The video cut off.
*
Later, I watched a recording of Simon During’s keynote. He appeared on Zoom in a chequered shirt with his background blurred and a warm light source illuminating his face from above. He’s in his seventies. Cambridge’s Zoom camera system was so advanced that it attempted to create a kind of AI reality TV show of the conference in real time. As well as showing a view of During, the camera isolated and zoomed in and out on people in the audience, such that attendees appeared nodding, frowning, or snoozing in constantly shifting and glitching close-ups. Another frame showed the entire room in a pixelated panorama. The overall effect was botched yet cinematic.
During spoke in the sonorous, vaguely posh Antipodean accent of Nick Cave, barely inflected by a youth spent in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Contrary to the rumours, he didn’t actually start with Carl Schmitt. He started with Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan (1651). This was followed by an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s diary after the death of her brother in the First World War. “I’ve chosen these passages because they give us a sense of my topic’s sweep: the first, a theoretical text written near the beginning of the modern colonising system; the second by an expat, modernist writer, drawn to her settler colonialist past.”
The paper was grand in ambition. During set out a complex, multi-pronged theoretical framework about the historical trajectory of a force he labelled “Anglo-colonialism.” He then applied this framework to Mansfield’s At the Bay, a 1922 novella about a family on a beach holiday in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He picked out moments in the book that he felt demonstrated how colonial law and ideology imbued even the most intimate social encounters between white settlers. During spoke passionately about At the Bay. He said Mansfield had captured life’s “mysterious, floating feel,” with all its “intensity, sensations, casual interactions, crises, private fears, and dreams.” Nobody had recounted this rather touching analysis at the pub. Yet it was not hard to see why a number of propositions in the theoretical section of the paper could be described as, well, provocative.
During argued that conflicts about land conquest are a constant feature of human social life, as are the cultural clashes that occur in their aftermath. He marshalled examples from far-flung locations and epochs—Thailand, Japan, Benin, Ancient Rome, Canaan—as evidence. Then, he scrutinised the idea that racism was the dominant, motivating force behind modern European colonialism. Racism was significant and then, later, rightfully condemned. But, in During’s view, it is crucial to understand that the more powerful driver behind the expansionist, violent activities of European Judeo-Christian societies from the fifteenth century onwards were the humanist ideals of “civilisation,” in contrast to “primitivism” and “progressivism.”
He was making a case for an intellectual history of how Europeans had seen their modern culture—“civilisation”—as more advanced and sophisticated than “primitive” cultures. Primitivism is probably one of the single most criticised and debated concepts of the past century. One way Europeans used the word was to refer to cultures they saw as further back in time in a “progressive,” linear trajectory of history. In other words, “progressive” and “primitive” were causally linked ideas: you can’t have progress unless you have a concept of the primitive away from which you are progressing. For Europeans, primitives lived in the past, like their own ancestors, but they also lived in the present—especially in places where European colonialists were justifying their activities as having a net positive impact for indigenous peoples, because they were supposedly bringing them the benefits of civilisation. To call this problematic would be a vast understatement. Now, only geriatrics and the French use the word “primitive” without scare quotes and lengthy disclaimers. During was raising its spectre not uncritically, but as part of a bigger argument. His contention was that some current understandings of colonialism still lean on progressive concepts, and thus also depend on some notion of the primitive. And, in his view, we shouldn’t champion progressivism as an uncomplicated good. Why?
The “chastening fact,” he said, was that “progressivism was and still is bound to imperialism, not just historically but conceptually… Early settlers knew that far away there existed a highly organised temporal, spatial, social, technological, institutional order which would, in the end, dismantle the coherence of indigenous worldviews and lifeways.” He paused for a moment, then continued: “I’d suggest further that they knew that the dismantling of indigenous worlds was inevitable, in the sense that from the knowledgeable European point of view, it was impossible concretely to picture a future in which the European model did not triumph globally.” You could sense the chairs creaking uncomfortably.
The talk moved to questions.
“Deakin University, Overland literary journal,” Jonathan Dunk began. “Firstly, thank you. You recently shared an editorial I wrote about Palestine rather favourably on Twitter. And that's not unrelated to my comment, which concerns the conceptual structure of the first half of your talk. I wonder if, in treating the spatial temporal order of a map, with its unilaterally commensurable time zones, as somehow both the necessary ideological precondition of possibility and, at the same time, the result of the settler colonial process you are talking about… are you not reifying exactly the same sort of teleological appeals to some underpinning logic or nomos that you're describing? And therefore, perhaps treating—allowing—something that is radically contingent, and radically unnecessary, as indeed something inevitable? To use your terms.”
There was a lot to unpack here. During considered the question for a moment before answering.
“I think it was inevitable. If you don’t, we just simply disagree,” he said. He reiterated his argument that violent conflicts over land were unavoidable, something that he said he was not for or against. “There’s no point from a neutral, intellectual point of view deploring this; it's just everywhere.”
The panoramic camera angle of the room showed some attendees scribbling in their notepads. Others had their arms crossed over their chests. Expressions were hard to read.
Araluen spoke up and said she wanted to challenge During’s distinction between primitivism and racism. She did not seem convinced that they could be separated. Then she asked about the practical outcomes of During’s ideas, saying that they could foreseeably be used to advance political agendas akin to those of people like John Howard and Keith Windschuttle, the conservative historian. I could see where her suspicion was coming from. There was an elegiac note running through the talk. At points, it seemed to bely a deep political resignation.
Still, watching the exchange, I didn’t feel entirely convinced by this critique. It was possible to see how opportunistic bad actors could pick elements of During’s theory up, but it seems a stretch to imagine it having much appeal for our current crop of politicians, many of whom are managerial neoliberals attuned to a populist, anti-intellectual sentiment (now the CIA funds TikTok content creators, not literary journals). Were conservative Australian pollies and their allies really likely to turn to Simon During, author of Exit Capitalism and Modern Enchantments: A History of Secular Magic, for policy inspiration? Theoretically, some pundit could use During’s ideas to write a newspaper column justifying the transhistorical inevitability of the destruction of local cultures by colonial forces—a recurring event that would therefore be futile to try and stop today. Yet During himself was not oriented towards this outcome.
In fact, he said that there was a political point to “deploring” Israel’s activities in Gaza and British settlers’ activities in Australia. Then, in the next breath, he couched this stance in his fatalistic long view of history: “But that's because certain ideological, social, and economic settings are in place now which enable us to resist cruelty. And those settings exist out of the modern international order. They’re not separate from it. They’re progressive.”
During responded to Araluen’s question by suggesting that the purpose of his framework was to understand the conceptual motor of imperialism, or how British colonialists had rationalised their activities to themselves. Research that focussed on racism alone, he said, let so-called progressive intellectuals off the hook: “It allows us to make judgments too easily. None of us are racist, right? But many of us are progressives.”
It was not the consensus opinion at the conference that none of us were racist.
There were a few more questions from the audience. Tom Ford, a congenial lecturer from La Trobe who recently co-wrote a book with Justin Clemens, was sitting at the front of the room. Leaning back into his chair, hands clasped over his right knee, he asked if During could periodise his concept: “Is Anglo culture over?” As During had become more and more engaged in the back-and-forths, he had moved closer and closer to his web camera, such that by the end of the session, his face took up nearly the entire projected screen. “I don't know. Do you think Anglo culture is over?”
*
On Saturday morning, the second day of the conference, Anjelica and I wandered to the town square market for a coffee.
“Why are there so many hetero couples in Antipodean Modernism?” she asked. “It’s freaky.”
“What?” I hadn't noticed. Anjelica had counted at least five.
“Power couples rise up,” I said. “I don't know what else to tell you.”
She decided to take a break from the panels. Instead, she went op-shopping and bought her girlfriend an anthropomorphic pinecone. Priorities. I headed back to the English Faculty.
Araluen delivered her paper in the morning session. It was about the “pastoral mode” and the denial of Aboriginal subjectivities in the settler canon. She focussed on Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), arguing that the text, and settler literature more broadly, sought to “occupy a position of ethical equanimity on Country that is not functionally dissimilar from possession.” The stories—and their film adaptations—might change with the times, but the fundamental, grim political inequalities of the colony remain the same. There is no Voice to Parliament. The Gap has not been closed.
Halfway through the talk, Araluen paused and made an aside.
“I’m not a modernist,” she said. “I’ve found that Australian modernism attracts a particular sort of quite middle-class, polite… it attracts people who don't like talking about Aboriginal stuff. That is because of the effectiveness of the project of erasing Aboriginality from the modernist vision. A lot of people in Australian modernism only do it because they don't like being around Black people. So, yeah, so this is new for me. Feel free to criticise.”
Nobody did. Araluen turned back to her notes. She argued that Joan Lindsay’s book and the canon it belonged to were replete with burial sites, petroglyphs, and hanging rocks—symbols that invoke historic Aboriginal presence while denying cultural continuity and ongoing custodianship of the land. “Read generously, these traces might constitute an attempt to situate ancestral and immemorial presence in the Land, against assumptions of terra nullius,” Araluen concluded. “I am not a generous reader of settler literature.”
In the Q&A, Sam Warren Miell, a polite, middle-class Cambridge alum who had given a paper on a niche ‘90s film featuring the ghost of Ern Malley, asked Araluen why she chose to present her research with “an affect of total exasperation.” He seemed genuinely puzzled. “This is very different from what we usually see in England. Why is this project something that you're investing in doing, instead of just, like, leaving it to people who are interested in it?”
Araluen laughed. “I do often have a very exasperated mannerism.” She explained that she wanted to “embody” a performative challenge to institutional norms. Furthermore, she had read research on how representations of Aboriginal people in literature could have real-world impacts, such as in the creation of legislation, and so believed that shaping literary discourse was a political act.
“It’s also a process of me finding a way of living with the things that I have an aesthetic relationship to that is sometimes very weird and compromising,” she said. “I don't know why I like Picnic at Hanging Rock—you’d think from that paper that I don’t—but I do. A bunch of girlies having a little picnic in the bush? It’s cute as fuck.”
*
On Saturday evening, after Malley-oke wrapped up, everyone wandered down to the pub on the river. “I’m glad I had my Cambridge experience, but if I have to hear about one more person’s PhD, I might cry,” Anjelica said as we bought a couple of pints. We joined a table of fun singles from the conference on the deck. Cigarette smoke drifted over the water. The party was nearly over. I felt reflective.
In many ways, During and Araluen’s contributions to the conference exemplify two fundamentally oppositional tendencies in the study of the humanities today. One approach is liberal, humanist, and rationalist; the other is progressive and values embodied knowledges. One is politically ambivalent; the other is politically active. There are tropey dynamics at play here—old white man vs. young woman of colour, establishment vs. rebel—that make it tempting to say that During is the past, and Araluen is the future. But life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them. Not everything During and Araluen said neatly followed these lines. And not everyone who attended Antipodean Modernism could be divided into one camp or another.
One such person was Aubrey. He is a rat-tail sporting Zoomer playwright and former Young Greens activist now studying Western Civilisation at the Ramsay Centre. His parents, who were born in China, were happy that he was on a scholarship-supported study trip to Europe because he was staying out of trouble and might end up as an Oxford professor. He was happy to be there because he could take nootropic mushrooms amongst Roman relics and make his own assessment of what his intellectual idol, Camille Paglia, had observed: “the defining thing about Europe is its diversity of hair styles.” On Substack, he goes by the name “Rabid Mapplethorpe.” We chatted at the pub and on the phone after the conference.
What did he think of During’s keynote?
“I liked it, which is not to say that I agreed with everything he said. But I think we need to maintain a diversity of views in academia, where at least some people have read the quote unquote great books,” Aubrey said. “I'm glad I've read that dusty Ancient Greek stuff, because I feel able to enter into the conversation that oldheads like Simon are a part of. He’s assuming that you've read Plato's Republic. He’s assuming you've read Hobbes's Leviathan, which is, like, my Bible. You can’t meaningfully communicate with these people unless you've read everyone they’ve read.”
“Yeah, but I think that won’t matter soon,” I said. “It kind of already doesn't. You can get pretty far in some academic spheres without reading Plato.” (I must confess…I myself have not picked up the Old Greek recently.) For centuries, universities were a place for transmitting knowledge of an orthodox canon. This is no longer true. Now, each generation that enters the academy remakes it in their own image. The system survives by incorporating the most promising young rebels, who then, if they’re successful, have to contend with the fact that soon they will be the establishment. During had once been a radical; in the not-too-distant future, he’ll retire, probably into Emeritus status. There is a shift happening, where millennials in their thirties and forties are now moving into more powerful, mid-career academic roles. No single generational approach unites them. But this changing of the guard will inevitably result in the consolidation of new tendencies and new traditions. Just as inevitably, there will be new waves of students, some of whom will push back on what seemed at one point to be doxa.
I asked Aubrey what his favourite part of the conference had been.
He was particularly moved by the closing keynote speaker, Elleke Boehmer, describing how expansive, Antipodean light filtered through Katherine Mansfield’s writing. Over the course of Boehmer’s lecture, which started at 3:00pm, the sun had slowly sunk. By 4:30pm, it was completely dark outside.
“This is, like, super poetic and gay, but she talked about how low the sky is in Australia, and I just got hit with a wave of homesickness when I remembered the quality of the sky in Sydney. In the Inner West, where I go for walks a lot at night, you can see the stars, and the Milky Way. At that point, I started tearing up a little.”
“Me too!”
I said that my favourite part had been hearing the Ern Malley story reinterpreted over and over again. On the one hand, it is the core of a retrograde white Australian literary tradition that has been masticated to the point of meaninglessness. On the other hand, as a product of secular Anglo-colonial culture, with no religion but art, the Malley affair has taken on an allegorical quality for me. It’s myth. It’s lore. It’s an OzLit soap opera whose long-serving characters remind me to be wary of intellectual arrogance and moral certitude: Angry Penguins editor Harris is Icarus; hoaxer McAuley is the poisoned chalice of neo-conservatism; and co-hoaxer Stewart represents the antisocial desire to throw it all away and move to Kyoto. A whole footy team’s worth of idiotic pseudo-bohemian Australian males got taken down by this thing. It’s a cautionary tale about jealousy and interpersonal viciousness between writers spiralling out of control. Nobody comes out a winner. Well, except The Good Story, but that always triumphs in the end.
By now, the myth of Ern Malley has become so central to the way we understand Australian modernism that he feels, in some way, inevitable. If Stewart and McAuley hadn’t invented him, someone else would have. The Darkening Ecliptic is an occult text, after all. It practically wrote itself. Maybe Ern Malley is Satanic. No, Ern Malley is God. Jokes: he's actually the therapist I go to for my aesthetic shame management. We've made so much progress together. Ern Malley is a silly billy (Abigail Fisher, 2023). Honestly, Ern Malley is just everyone you hate at the poetry reading. He’s also everyone you love at the poetry reading. Ern Malley is the guy you didn't even notice lurking in the corner of the poetry reading. Well, he noticed you. As Anjelica pointed out, Ern Malley is a Pisces. "Classic water sign." Creative. Dreamy. Prone to melancholy and Grave's Disease. Call me by your name, Ern Malley, and I’ll call you by mine! The ghost of Ern lives on. He never truly left us. He is the spirit of art made in the colony: weird, twisted with insecurity, politically fraught, occasionally transcendently good. Ern Malley appears in disguise when you least expect him. And, for those with hearts open to receive him, he always comes bearing a message about the state of Australian literature.
*
Anjelica went to buy another round. I started chatting with a Classics scholar from Sydney about the pleasures of translating ancient languages. A man dressed in smart business casuals and a puffer vest came over to our table, picked up a stray jar of peanut butter and a packet of digestive biscuits he seemed to have left there, then walked off. A short while later, he returned and abruptly sat down. He seemed like a loner looking for company.
“Hello. Where are you from?” he asked. He sounded English.
“I’m Australian,” I said.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Australia does not exist.”
I looked at him properly, wondering if he was a radical decolonial theorist who believed in questioning the fundamental legitimacy of the settler nation state. He looked more like a web developer. I noticed that he had a large scar running down one cheek and a slightly feverish look in his eyes. This was Cambridge—even lunatics wear expensive puffer vests.
“Many years ago, people travelled far away on a ship…but that’s not real,” he said in a sing-song voice. He looked around at my companions.
"You,” he said, gesturing towards the Classicist beside me. “What do you think?”
“About what? Australia?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Um… I don't know.”
The vest man glowered at us. “Australia,” he said, “does not exist.” The legitimacy we had built up around our rich literary culture over the past 48 hours seemed to disintegrate. It was like Antipodean Modernism, both conference and epoch, had never taken place. All that discourse for nothing. We smiled awkwardly, made our excuses, and shuffled back inside to the safety of the pub. There, we began to giggle uneasily. The man remained sitting at the table outside, alone, prophet-like, staring into the shadowy depths of the River Cam. Ern?