In Richard Flanagan’s first public lecture as inaugural Boisbouvier Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, the author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North had the audience in both fits of laughter and solemn tears last night at The Athenaeum as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
He rejected the idea of a national literary identity, while highlighting the importance and necessity of Australian writing. ‘I don’t believe in national literature, per se. I do believe in Australian writing, conceived mostly in obscurity, frequently in poverty, and forged against adversity,’ he said.
‘Nations and nationalisms may use literature, but writing of itself has nothing to do with national anythings – national traditions, national organisations, national prizes – all these and more are irrelevant.’
‘What Australian writer has written as eloquently as asylum seekers have done, with petrol and flame, with needle and thread?’
While Flanagan was influenced by what he called “classic Tasmania stories” – Camus’ The Outsider and works by Tolstoy, Kafka, Marquez, Chekhov and Faulkner – he declared the most moving Australian writing he had read for a long time was the “extraordinary trove of anonymous short stories” leaked to The Guardian – reports of violence, sexual abuse, and self-harm involving asylum seekers on Nauru.
To a silent audience, he read out several of the incident reports: true stories of guards raping children; of detainees self-harming by drinking insect repellent, overdosing on pills, making nooses out of bedsheets; of a young girl sewing a heart into her hand with a needle and thread.
‘What Australian writer has written as eloquently as asylum seekers have done, with petrol and flame, with needle and thread?’ he asked. ‘What Australian writer has so clearly exposed the truth of who we are, and what Australian writer has expressed so clearly the desire for freedom?
‘All around us we see words debased, misused, and become the vehicles for grand lies,’ Flanagan said. ‘Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us. Sometimes though writing can panic us … This writing has woken me from a slumber too long. It has panicked me.’
He declared that the words and images used by those in power are removed from reality. ‘In this post-fact, post-truth, post-reason world, words seem to ever less correspond with the world as we experience it, as if the world itself is not what we experience, but what power tells us we must accepts as reality.’
Richard Flanagan is the author of six acclaimed novels. Photo by Amanda Wylie.
Flanagan questioned the government’s logic, citing startling facts: Australia spent $1.2 billion each year to ‘keep innocent people in a state of torment and suffering so extreme that it has been compared to torture. This destruction of human beings is deemed a national priority by our country, and is supported by both major parties. In the same year, the same government spent a little less than $2.4 million a year on direct subsidies to Australia writers and a sum of who’s work, may be argued, whatever its defects and shortcomings, adds up to a collective good.
‘What Australia is willing to spend in one year to create a state-sponsored hell on earth for the innocent is what Australia would spend in 500 years supporting its writers.’
He said that he cannot speak for the asylum seekers in Nauru and Manus, but ‘I can only speak for myself. And I will say this: Australia has lost its way. All I can think is: this is not my Australia. But it is.’
In the closing moments of the speech, he answered the question he had set himself in his lecture title: why writing matters. ‘We need to use writing to see the truth in who we are: fellow human beings. No more, no less.
‘But even when we are silenced we must continue to write. To assert freedom. To find meaning … Because writing matters. More than ever, it matters.’
