I have been looking at the world through tartan frames recently, thanks to the current exhibition ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation’ and its accompanying catalogue. Actually, to call it a catalogue doesn’t do it justice; its 330 pages ransack dozens of different angles of the Caledonian experience, with essays by its curators, Alison Inglis and Patricia Tryon Macdonald, the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s director Gordon Morrison, and a dozen others.

Ballarat (which I have always thought of as a predominantly Irish town) has gone all highland-flingy over the show; a new plaid for the city has been specially commissioned to coincide with the event, in grey, blue, and gold, and Prince Charles, in his capacity as Great Steward of Scotland, has written the catalogue’s foreword, in which he laments not being able to come over, and describes the early illustrators of flora and fauna as artists, scientists, and explorers all in one.

 ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make,’ wrote J. M. Barrie, and this is an exhibition about history’s winners. It’s a salutary point to remember, as the Scots in Scotland heatedly debate whether to vote for independence or stay attached to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (and the European Union) when they go to the polls in September. Despite being put-upon and exploited at home by the colonising Sassenachs (if that is your view) in the British colonies, they were part of the Übermensch, cutting a swathe in every British possession starting with the Americas.

‘Ballarat has gone all highland-flingy over the show ... ’

As the exhibition reveals, the Scots who arrived in droves were far better educated than their knock-kneed, maggoty English contemporaries; about seventy-five per cent could read and write, and only three per cent were convicts; Scottish judges regarded transportation as equivalent to a death sentence and wouldn’t mete it out for minor offences.

 The immigrants also had a sharp sense of what they’d come for: a better society with fairer laws, lots of land, and a chance to rule the roost. From the McDonnell Ranges to the Murray, they have claimed and named mountains and rivers and half the highways bear the Caledonian brand from the macadam on the surface to the names – Stuart, Sturt, and Hume – on the signposts. Twenty-five suburbs of Melbourne bear Scottish names (there’s a free can of Irn Bru for those who can list them without recourse to Melways or the Internet) and the Scots lay claim to Freddo Frogs, Tim Tams, the first vineyards, and most of the Constitution.

Jemmy Fisherman, Jack Fisherman, and William Landsborough
(photograph by Batchelder & O'Neill)

Both exhibition and catalogue are full of interesting nuggets; that New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie ruled like a laird and had his own bard (and also has seventy-seven places or geological features named after him); that one of the earliest wombats sent back for taxidermy was mistakenly stuffed in the aggressively upright pose of a grizzly bear; and that it’s possible to carve black shiny portrait busts from kerosene shale.

John Glover painted the newly arrived highlanders in habitat similar to the Aborigines they were about to dispossess; gathered in a Tasmanian dell of glen-like mien, a group of men and women in tartan shawls huddle round a small fire waiting for a charred wallaby supper.

There are dozens of other paintings and objects – as exhibitions go, it’s the full mince, neaps, and tatties – and some are better than others. I was taken by an 1846 portrait of a solid little boy in tartan called Alexander Sinclair, but the label rather snootily dismissed the artist, Joseph Backler, as only moderately talented and catering to an ambitious artisanal class.

Alexander Sinclair, 1846
(oil on canvas by Joseph Backler)

I doubt the curator ever envisaged the scenario I encountered when, turning to the kind-looking, quiet woman standing next to me, I said how much I liked it, despite the label. ‘Yes,’ she said ‘and I’m quite moved because Joseph Backler was my ancestor and this is the first painting of his I’ve ever seen.’

For Auld Lang Syne is at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until 27 July.

It’s odd when you know someone in one context and then discover him in a completely different one. I’m an admirer of the English writer Philip Hoare and his oceanic works Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) and The Sea Inside (2013), explorations and meditations on cultural responses to the marine and his own relationship with the sea and its creatures.

So when, in search of an expert on Noël Coward, a theatre friend recommended Hoare, I didn’t realise that she was referring to the same person. It turned out that before turning to cetaceans he had an earlier career, in the 1990s, as a biographer. In addition to Coward, he also wrote a life of the aristocratic ‘bright young thing’ Stephen Tennant (Serious Pleasures [1990]) and a study of an infamous trial featuring the play Salome, in Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand (1997). 

Leviathan, or The Whale
(Fourth Estate, 2008)

The Melbourne Theatre Company had asked me to make a series of podcasts to accompany their current season, which included Coward’s Private Lives, so Hoare and I met, me with a recorder, he clutching a bicycle helmet, in the Brutalist cavern of the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. Despite it being almost twenty years since he’d written his study of the man known as The Master, Hoare was as enthusiastic as if he’d just finished delving in theatrical attics.

Coward spent World War I in London’s underworld of sex and drug clubs. His aristocratic mannerisms were all learnt, said Hoare. Coward’s family, once prosperous and middling-grand, had fallen on hard times, and his mother ran a South London boarding house. In private he far preferred boiled eggs to oysters, held his cigarettes in a clenched fist like a navvy (the holder was pure affectation), and hated champagne.

Noël Coward entertains aboard the HMS Victorious, 1944
(photograph sourced from the Imperial War Museum)

Coward had started work in the theatre aged eleven, in 1910. Although great fun, his adolescence had been rather dissolute, as he became the pet of a much older man, the upper-class artist Philip Streatfeild, a relationship encouraged by Coward’s ambitious mother. He was also a flamboyant shoplifter, Hoare continued, stealing suitcases from Fortnum & Mason’s in order to transport the books he then went on to lift further along Piccadilly. His most important relationship at this stage was with fellow playwright and juvenile actress Esmé Wynne-Tyson, with whom he used to swap clothes for trips around London. As well as enjoying scandalising lumpen society, they were both immensely ambitious and convinced of fame and fortune (Wynne gave up the stage at nineteen and became a writer, a proselytising vegetarian, and a Christian Scientist).

Private Lives, written when Coward was in the Far East, echoed an unhappy love affair he was having at the time, but the cry of ‘Sollocks!’, which its bickering lovers Amanda and Elyot shout to call a halt to their heated arguments, was one apparently coined by Wynne when she and Coward got too vehement.

Before meeting Hoare, I found an interview with him and the very pukka royal biographer Hugo Vickers from the mid-1990s about their unlikely friendship. Vickers is a blazer-and-cavalry-twill sort of chap, whereas at the time Hoare had peroxide-blond hair and several piercings. Hoare was a music journalist and band manager and lived in a council flat (Vickers’ house had a moat). But they got on well and admired each other’s writing, though, according to the article, Vickers drew pictures of someone being sick in the margin of Hoare’s Coward biography whenever there was any mention of homosexuality. Needless to say, Vickers’ works, including lives of the queen mother and the duchess of Marlborough, always leave the closet door closed.

‘ ... Vickers drew pictures of someone being sick in the margin of Hoare’s Coward biography whenever there was any mention of homosexuality.’

At the end of the 1990s, Hoare gave up the brittle world of showbiz and society people to write about places. His first book in the new vein was Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2001). The bleak locus is in Southampton, the subject matter the Victorian care of its sick soldiers in a vast edifice. When it was built, at the end of the Crimean ar, Spike Island was the largest hospital in the world. Hoare’s leap from a bohemian demi-monde to the hubris of Empire was influenced, he says, by W.G. Sebald and his musings about lost places in The Rings of Saturn (1995).

Southampton, a port city on England’s south coast, is Hoare’s childhood home. He now lives alone in the house where he grew up, using his old bedroom as a study. His career all makes sense, he’s said. Alongside the glamorous stars of the 1920s and 1930s, and pop stars from the 1970s, he also used to dream of whales and the mysterious sea. He swims from the grimy city beaches every day of the year, a much more bracing prospect than it would be in Australia.

Philip Hoare (photograph by John Waters)

His latter interests have brought him to the antipodes before, but in the course of our conversation he let slip he was heading south again, this time as a visiting scholar at the University of Tasmania. He was to be shared by the Inglis Clark Centre for Civil Society and the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

As I discovered, as well as whales Hoare is fascinated by thylacines, which he writes about in The Sea Inside. He reckons that a few still probably survive in the island’s wildernesses, but hopes they are never discovered.

Philip Hoare gave a talk on his latest book The Sea Inside at the University of Tasmania on 18 March 2014. His website is www.philiphoare.co.uk/

I was asked to interview the Chinese theatre director Meng Jinghui recently. He’s a cult figure in China, an associate director of the Beijing-based National Theatre and has over two million followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

Meng Jingui holding a copy of Niubi!:The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School by Eveline Chao (photograph by Nick Frisch, 2013) http://evelinechao.com/Meng is known for taking things to the edge; for having, according to American academic Claire Conceison, a ‘badass’ attitude. In a recent article in the spring edition of The Drama Review, Conceison reveals that Meng’s favourite phrase is niubi, which in Mandarin means cow’s vagina. Cow’s Vagina could also describe his aesthetic, she says, slightly enigmatically, and Meng will bring it to Melbourne in June when he directs a version of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan (1943).

My Mandarin is non-existent, Meng’s English is rudimentary (rehearsals will be interesting), and we had half an hour. My questions were possibly convoluted, though Meng would often laugh, which I found encouraging (the humour of creative recognition perhaps?) until I received the dry little cough of an answer. It was as if the traffic of words had been conveyed in a leaky sieve or while a very noisy truck was thundering past.

The only English word he used was bullshit (should I adopt niubi as a cultural compliment? It has a certain ring). But he is a charismatic presence, with long scruffy hair, black scruffy clothes, and a disconcerting way of staring intently at you even when you are looking elsewhere; this was often the case as I willed the interpreter to match her terse scats of English to the expressive torrents of Mandarin.

Bertolt Brecht in 1954No, Brecht’s not done much in China these days, he said, he’s rather old hat. No, continued Meng, he is not really interested in Brecht’s theories of traditional Chinese theatre and Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect). No, it wasn’t going to be set in an imaginary China, as was Brecht’s play. Yes, materialism is rampant and young people in China today are far more individualistic. And finally, the message of the play is that money is not important but that the future is.

Brecht’s play, about the difficulties of being good in a corrupt and unequal society has a greater pertinence in today’s trade- and progress-obsessed China than in the world of Mao’s idealised worker, and it will be interesting to see what the local critics write when it tours there later this year. The play’s alienation effect on Australia’s wealthy and possibly complacent audiences may well have more to do with niubi aesthetics than penetrating questions about the history and economic reality of capitalist greed.

The Malthouse Theatre’s idea of inviting a renowned director from the world’s last great communist power to interpret a work set in China by one of the great Western playwrights and ideologues of the twentieth century is a form of cultural Chinese whispers. Brecht’s theatre combines Marxist ideas of alienation (of labour, through class stratification) with the aforementioned Verfremdungseffekt in Chinese acting; there is no fourth wall with the actors acknowledging the audience and commenting on the action; there are encoded gestures and acrobatics, all adding to Brecht’s aim of ‘making strange’.

Meng Jinghui (photograph by Pia Johnson) http://www.piajohnson.com/Brecht didn’t want the audience to identify with the characters on stage, but rather to ponder the historical and social realities of the times. Thickening this sense of unreality was also behind the exotic locations of his plays. The Good Person of Szechuan was written in 1943 in Finland, while Brecht awaited safe passage to America. His Szechuan was as imaginary as his Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) in its wasteland wilderness, or the Soho of his Threepenny Opera (1928).

As a young theatre student in 1989, Meng witnessed the clashes between army and students in and around Tiananmen Square, which led to the June 4 massacre. He has spent the past twenty-five years negotiating a changing reality of increased personal freedom and huge economic growth, travelling the world as an independent theatre maker. He was last here in 2011 with Rhinoceros in Love, written by his wife Liao Yimei. His knowledge and aesthetic is a mash of the Western canon (he did his university dissertation on the great Soviet era theatre-maker Vsevolod Meyerhold) with traditional Chinese stage traditions, mainly opera and all the cultural bricolage in between.

For Meng, Brecht’s Szechuan is an absurd cartoon; his idea of making strange may well incorporate ideas of the West as filtered through Asian eyes. I tried to winkle this out of him, but he wasn’t saying, or maybe it got lost in translation. Or maybe, like a good theatre maker, he’ll show rather than tell. We’ll have to wait and see.

The Good Person of Szechuan, Meng Jinghui’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s realist parable, will be presented by the Malthouse Theatre at the Merlyn Theatre from 27 June to 20 July.