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Where have all the good minds gone? [8/3/2009]
I have spent the last three weeks in Australia and being here reminds me that this country badly lacks public intellectuals.
I grew up seeing brainy egomaniacs like BA Santamaria and Gough Whitlam on television (and here I mean free-to-air-TV of course.)
But apart from someone like the journalist, author and broadcaster
Phillip Adams there are now precious few in mainstream life and popular media.
The same claim could reasonably be made about the United States today where figures like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and perennial US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader have been replaced by a small number of quality satirists such as Jon Stewart.
Even someone like the writer/activist Naomi Klein has been sidelined from a being heard on a scale that her ideas deserve because cable TV stations pull in large numbers of viewers who are instead fed a constant diet of polished lies.
Australia is a part of the world where clever creative people in the arts must leave if they genuinely desire to have a wide audience. Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Barry Humphries simply could not have achieved what they have by remaining in Australia where sport is number one and everything else cultural is a a very distant second.
Comments
Posted by: Nick on 9/6/2009 4:09:21 PM
Where have all the good minds gone?
I'm not sure voices like Vidal, Chomsky and Nader ever were given much mainstream air time and although Jon Stewart is hardly a replacement for them, I think he's a step forward for the American mainstream media landscape.
Interesting to hear that things haven't changed much in Australia. I was there almost 15 years ago and got that impression although I thought things might have changed now. I guess there must be some "intellectual" voices out there but as you say, they´re not given much mainstream coverage.
Posted by: Brett on 9/8/2009 10:25:07 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Thanks for that comment, Nick. I agree that Jon Stewart is good for the mainstream media landscape in the US. He promotes thoughtful books and writers has been consistently sharp-eyed and equally sharp-tongued at times with many of the hypocrites and self-serving public figures over there. He was much too soft and deferential towards Tony Blair when he interviewed him though.
I'm interested that you too found Australia to be lacking in intellectuals in the popular media. (Which I think also extends into the arts, but that's another issue I suppose.) Sadly, I think it is probably the case that this situation is actually far worse than it was 15 years ago.
Posted by: ausbryant on 10/4/2009 7:32:03 PM
Where have all the good minds gone?
A quote I saw soon after arriving in Australia 12 years ago:
"Australia is a cultural desert; this is not seen as a disadvantage".
Posted by: Brett on 10/6/2009 3:36:22 PM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Thanks very much for that quote, ausbryant.I'd really like to know who said that. I'll try searching for it because I think it's a very accurate statement unfortunately.
Posted by: Cadwallon on 10/9/2009 12:14:52 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
It is ex-patriates like yourself who come in, 'skim' the commercial media for a brief time and then leave who give your fellow exes (Clive James, Germaine Greer etc) a bad name. How can you genuinely expect to guage the relative 'cultural' merit of a country after such a brief time? Germaine et al did grow up in a country very parochial and closed - it is not the same now.
Did you see the apology to the Stolen Generations by Kevin Rudd? Do you read New Matilda or Crikey? What sort of ideas would an outside get if the only information you get was from UK commercial media - or the Fleet Street tabloids?
You see what you want to see - something that reinforces your own prejudices and stereotypes.
Posted by: on 10/9/2009 12:49:28 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Thanks for the comments and questions, Cadwallon. You raise some very relevant points. Yes, I did see Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation. I thought it was well done and long overdue (though Paul Keating did make some similar, but not as comprehensive statements when he was PM in the early 90's, I remember.)Occasionally I have a look at New Matilda and Crikey, both of whom I respect as places of decent alternative media. (I particularly follow Antony Loewenstein's usually controversial columns for them.) My own history is that I spent the first 30 years "growing up" in Australia but only about a year and a half in the last 10 years there. (I visited Canberra for a month for the first time in 5 years in July. My previous view on Australia hardly changed while reading and watching mainstream media during that time.) I don't read any mainstream media from Australia consistently because I think the quality is poor. I just don't trust or believe in most of it, except maybe Phillip Adams for example. There's some good bloggers though. Fleet Street tabloids? Nobody with any brains actually "reads" them I would tend to think. You're right about Australia being an 'open country.' I believe that it is often too open to blindly accepting new trends and fashionable behaviours, especially from the USA. It is still quite parochial in many ways though. The Hey Hey episode is a good case in point. I look at Reportage Magazine also, but would you suggest I read any other particular sites apart from the two you mentioned?
Posted by: Andy on 10/9/2009 12:46:56 PM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Sorry but a really uniformed blog. A whole three weeks? Wow im sure you can make a good opinon based on that. Not sure how having a strong sporting culture is a negative, I guess you hate sport.
All the wide audience rubbish? Thats called population if you did not notice there is only 20million people in Australia. Go figure
I don't mind opinions but ignorant opinions like this are just embarassing
Posted by: Brett on 10/10/2009 5:38:33 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Thanks for the comment, Andy. No need to apologise for it. Maybe you didn't realise (and not that it should matter) but as I said to 'Cadwallon' in the reply above, my own history is that I spent the first 30 years "growing up" in Australia but only about a year and a half in the last 10 years there. (I visited Canberra for a month for the first time in 5 years in July.) And no, "I don't hate sport" I still play touch rugby when I can and have played a variety of sports a lot ever since I was a kid. I actually really love rugby league, union, cricket (especially Test matches involving Australia) and other sports like Sumo. What I hate is that sport is easily the most prominent cultural activity in Australia...and by a very long way. Where I live now (Catalonia) has less than half the population of Australia but at latest double the interest in literature and the arts (while still somehow having an obsession with Barcelona Football Club!)
Posted by: ausbryant on 10/22/2009 3:01:13 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
The quote came from a little book that I was given on arrival here, and it was a collation of assorted famous Australian quotes. It could therefore have been attributed to almost any of the Australian intellectuals who have left the country.
I can see both sides of this debate.
I don't personally believe that the quote is universally true, because Australia has a rich and diverse cultural background if people only take the trouble to look for it. Australian culture has both post-European and Indigenous elements, but Murdoch-originated media has steam-rollered the daylights out of any thing that can't be made to turn him a dollar or several billion.
Cultural diversity and richness can only come from being allowed to develop and grow over extremely long time periods, so the counterpoint to the argument is that such a young country as Australia probably has a long way to go to be able to claim it has its own non-Indigenous culture, but by that time it will of course have become THE Indigenous culture of that time period.
In the end, culture of any kind is only what the people of the time make of it, and with media having the level of influence over society that it has assumed in 2009, I fear that less and less people will be inclined to search for and preserve what aspects of Australian culture remain unspoilt by the influences of modern media.
But of course in the fullness of time, media itself will become the culture of the day until another influence displace sit from its pedestal and starts the whole cycle again.
Posted by: ausbryant on 10/22/2009 3:04:51 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
PS: The wholesituation is summed up quite nicely in the brilliant words of a song by the late Harry Chapin: "The Cat's in the Cradle".
His "Thirty Thousand pounds of Bananas" is worth a listen to as well.
Posted by: Brett on 10/24/2009 2:57:00 AM
Where have all the good minds gone?
Thanks for continuing the debate, Ausbryant. You say above: "Australia has a rich and diverse cultural background if people only take the trouble to look for it...but Murdoch-originated media has steam-rollered the daylights out of any thing that can't be made to turn him a dollar or several billion." I certainly agree with the last part of the sentence about the media and the commercial power it has (though I think Murdoch is only one of the main figures involved.) The question then has to be why has this been allowed to happen? I think there's at least two major reasons: Firstly, the political deals that the media barons made with previous "Labor" governments and secondly, the lack of interest in real politics in Australia (as opposed to the personality/leader-rivals "slug it out in a contest" type-journalism that Australians prefer.) The internet should be a factor in reducing discussion on politics being so mediocre but it does not appear to be in Australia (unlike the USA.) It sounds like something out of a tourism commercial when you say "Australia has a rich and diverse cultural background." I think there are just too few examples of this to make that statement true.
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