Dear Editor,

I enjoyed the article in the May issue – the conversation with Ramona Koval, Cassandra Pybus, and Helen Garner. I’m glad that Helen, given what has happened with The First Stone, is not ducking for cover and running. Nor should she.

I would like to respond to Lucy Frost’s ‘Stealing Stories, Thieving Lives’ in the same issue – not so enjoyable. She asks what Garner’s writing of The First Stone would mean to the community of women who are feminists in Australia. Later she states that the ‘book is dividing the community of Australian women who are feminists’. Frost, it would seem, is a spokesperson for, and has the ear of, the entire feminist community in this country. How else could she know that this community is so divided over Helen’s book? Who are her inside informers?

She goes on to say that ‘not since the story told by and about Lindy Chamberlain have I listened to such impassioned arguments’. Does this mean that impassioned arguments divide the feminist community? To the contrary, vigorous, passionate debate can rally and bring our community together. Some of the important moments in my own feminist learning is when the passion and fire were brimming, women heard each other out and agreed to disagree.

It is a sad truth that the generational gap between younger feminists of the nineties and the old vanguard of the seventies does exist. The understanding between the two is a struggle, and perhaps in the centre of that struggle is the relationship between mothers and daughters. The very least we can all do is engage in that struggle. There is no value in silence.

When Frost questions Garner’s capabilities as an investigative writer, a ‘writer of fiction making a guest appearance as a journalist’, reminding ABR readers that this, after all, is only her first book of non-fiction, she is playing a cheap shot.

The spin-offs and the concerns raised from the issues in Helen’s book, the sub-texts, voiced and named, in so many discussions I’ve been a part of since The First Stone hit the bookshops, has contributed to reopening and widening current Australian feminist debate. We don’t have to agree.

Ever since Monkey Grip, I’ve been drawn to Helen’s writing because of her insatiable curiosity about the nature of what makes people tick, how they respond to one another and the consequences of those actions. Because she takes risks and puts herself on the line as a writer. The First Stone is no exception to the Garner legend.

Diane Brown, Mt. Barker, SA

Dear Editor,

In her ‘review’ of Helen Garner’s The First Stone (ABR May issue), Cassandra Pybus correctly grasps the central moral issue at stake. In the welter of self-indulgence, we almost miss it, however. The context of the Ormond College affair – important, intricate, and difficult as it is/was and too much neglected by Garner – is reconstructed messily by Pybus, whose writing is substantially and unnecessarily autobiographical. In fact, we are treated to a performance which has too much of the soap opera with Cassandra Pybus occupying centre stage.

Dr June Phillip, North Fitzroy, Vic.

Dear Editor,

As a journalist learning to become a novelist, I usually find myself criticising my trade, but the debate in your pages about Helen Garner’s The First Stone has left me thinking that journalists might know a thing or two about what is public, what is private, and what is honest.

Lucy Frost argues that by telling the Ormond College story against the wishes of the women involved, Garner has done something analogous to the ‘stealing’ of the Aboriginal women’s stories about Hindmarsh Island. I find this comparison astonishing.

The Aboriginal women’s stories were ‘stolen’ because someone knowingly opened and photocopied mail not intended for them. This was stealing in a literal as well as metaphorical sense.

Garner attended court hearings, looked at public documents, interviewed people who were willing to talk to her, attempted (unsuccessfully) to get all sides of the story, and then thought and wrote about the issue. Whether or not you agree with Garner’s approach and conclusions, there is nothing in these practices which is not entirely consistent with ethical journalism.

If we were to accept Frost’s argument that stories should not be told without the consent of those involved, then most journalism that is worth reading would disappear. The decision by the Ormond College women to go to court must have been a difficult one, but one of its components was a decision to ‘go public’. That is what going to court means. The likelihood of publicity was one of the consequences presumably weighed in the balance.

Of course, as Cassandra Pybus said in her book on the Orr case, telling stories and reporting facts, no matter how responsibly, has a profound and often devastating effect on people’s lives. (That is why there is such a thing as the journalists’ code of ethics.) But as Pybus concludes, after some soul searching, it is important that stories are told about the way our society works. Having just finished reading Pybus’s examination of the Orr case, Gross Moral Turpitude (republished as Seduction and Consent) I am something of a fan. Nevertheless, I wish to raise some issues about her review of The First Stone, and her letter responding to Peter Craven. Like most people I have discussed the matter with, I read Pybus article about Garner as a factual account. I felt cheated, therefore, to read that she had made it up. I am at a loss now, to know how I should read the rest of her article. Where does her reporting end and her opinion about how things might or should have been begin? Were Pybus a journalist, she would have committed an ethical offence by passing off fiction as fact. Her account is powerful, but what sort of power is it that relies on deception?

Pybus suggests Garner has committed the same offence of ‘fictionalising’ fact. An equivalent action by Garner would have been to make up an interview with ‘Elizabeth Rosen’ and not confess that it was made up. Garner reports, imagines, speculates and opines, but it seems to me she always declares what she is doing. She has been accused of too much declaring of her ‘finer feelings’.

Jenna Mead claims Garner has not given a factual account, and only Garner and her subjects can know whether she did make things up without declaring it. However, since we have yet to hear the other side of the story, Mead’s assertion remains just that. A made-up story can be more potent than a true one but, if writers want to deal with real people’s lives, then it is important that they and their readers remain aware of what is claimed as fact and what is fiction.

The line between the two can blur. There are many different ways of telling a true story. But, particularly when we are talking about sex and power, we are in dangerous waters if we use fantasy to justify our public attitudes and behaviour.

It is also dangerous to suppress discourse about publicly available facts because of spurious worries about who ‘owns’ the story.

Margaret Simons, Newnes Junction, NSW

Cassandra Pybus replies:

Isn’t it interesting how people want to read prose that does not declare itself to be fiction as truth, as if language can contain such a slippery construct? This is exactly a concern I have about The First Stone, a book properly called fiction.

But to specifically deal with Margaret Simons’s letter: I did not invent my meeting(s) with Helen Gamer. Nor did she invent her conversations with me, called ‘a prominent feminist writer’ in The First Stone. It is just that she heard, and quoted, only what she wanted to hear and this has made me feel angry and misused. My words have been turned against my purpose in discussing the issue with her and I have even been denied my position from which to speak. There are other people who spoke to Helen who feel equally betrayed and manipulated by their fictionalised characterisation in her book of non-fiction.

In my ‘review’, I wanted to say what I understood our conversation to have been about. I am not about to try to pass off my memory as truth, any more than Helen’s memory is the truth. I remember that she drank a short black coffee. She remembers that I betrayed my own beliefs. Where does the truth lie here?

Cassandra Pybus, Lower Snug, Tasmania

Dear Editor,

The juxtaposition in your June issue of the symposium on postmodernism and Jeffrey Grey’s thoughtful ‘Rolling Column’ on the present condition of academic history incites comment.

Objectivity is an aspiration, not a condition, and we are kept up to the discomforts attending the aspiration by constant assaults on our complacencies. Foucault et al. have made such an assault (as have Molière and Mozart, Chaucer and Cervantes). When postmodernism struck, many of my colleagues did what professional historians usually do when a blast of ‘theory’ sweeps in from adjacent disciplines: they hunkered down. Now they come blinking out of the bunkers, peer around, and congratulate themselves: ‘See? I told you it would blow over.’ Look again, friend. The world is different now. The epistemological and moral vertigo induced by the linguistic and other ‘turns’ has had its effect, not the least the generation of a pervasive scepticism towards all truth and value claims, not only those where epistemological naïveté masquerades as bluff common sense. When pinball is as good as poetry – better, in that it is certainly more popular – ‘history’ comes to be fiction, and very dull fiction at that. This constitutes a danger to all of us, not only career historians.

Now that we have arrived at Post­postmodernism I rather hope that some concern for the social condition of fellow humans might once again become fashionable. But that concern can be rendered productive only when we have some sense of what can be changed in human affairs. In these days of defensive specialisation, only history undertakes the quixotic task of exploiting the past as the storehouse of human experiences it is, and seeks to render some of those complex and various experiences intelligible, and therefore useful, to the present. As the pace of change quickens and its consequences, intended and unintended, multiply, the indulgence of ignorant experimentation becomes increasingly irresponsible. Myths about the past can be quite as dangerous as ignorance. (If you doubt that, consider the sorry remains of Yugoslavia.) The American historian C. Vann Woodward puts the case for history well:

There is no other branch of learning better qualified to mediate between man’s daydream of the future and his nightmare of the past, or, for that matter, between his nightmare of the future and his daydream of the past.

The discipline of history subjects the stories people choose to tell about their pasts to critical appraisal. Only when such appraisals are effected can we hope to map the space for negotiation between groups and interests; to discover how enduring changes in human relations and attitudes might be effected; to widen the role of reason in human conduct At the least it might teach us, we individuals who con­stitute ‘society’. how to resist the stam­pede for the guns. We need history, not in the form of master narratives or resuscitated grand theories or the perverse myths of atavistic nationalisms we see proliferating now, but in the form of the critical discipline, as the best, indeed the only, weapon against them.

Inga Clendinnen, Department of History La Trobe University, Vic

Dear Editor,

Windschuttle, a theoretician not an empirical historian, has written a book intended as a succés de scandale about ‘the killing of history’ by the ascendancy of theory over empirical engagement with evidence. ABR (April issue) has another theoretician, Damien Broderick, review Windschuttle’s book. Can this even begin to do justice to debates over theory and empiricism?

I take one example. It is asserted that Greg Dening – said to be a ‘post­structuralist’ (and by implication somewhat heedless of empirical evidence) is ‘dispatched’ by the publication of a book about European mythmaking by Obeyesekere, a ‘Sri Lankan-born’ professor at Princeton. Broderick, here, is simply unqualified to assess who has empirical evidence on his side – Dening (and his colleague Sahlins) who have devoted their professional lives to the close study of the documents of Pacific and Polynesian history? or Obeyesekere, a late comer to this field? So Broderick decides it must be Obeyesekere, with his Sri Lankan origins and his Princeton chair. A cultural cringe combined with an implicit ‘post­colonialism’ has been invoked to demolish an unexamined attribution of ‘post­structuralism’ !

If ABR wants a useful review of a book engaged in a debate of this kind, it must find a reviewer who knows empirical history at least as well as he knows the infighting of theoreticians.

Professor Rhys Isaac Department of History, La Trobe University, Vic

Dear Editor,

I read Peter Timms’ essay in the April issue with particular interest. It is a pessimistic piece – and not just because it takes its starting point in the exhibition Art in the Age of AIDS. Timms laments what has happened to art in modem times: it is circumscribed by demands of social relevance; allegory substitutes for metaphor; and images are infected with the viruses of advertising technique. An authoritarian art, he labels it, regretting the days of lions and horses.

We live in the age of science, and any perceived or imagined reality, which – by remaining indescribable and unmeasurable – evades the scientific paradigm, is ruled non-existent or at best non-important. Art, says Peter Timms, can no longer hope to contribute in any meaningful way to the world of ideas. It seems so sad.

But is not Timms too pessimistic? Art may no longer be capable of contributing to the pursuit of knowledge, since knowledge now is the crop of science, bred from observation, repeatable experiment and logic. But happily the world of ideas reaches beyond this well-mannered garden, into the wilderness of surmise and fancy, where notions may be juggled with abandon. ‘That whereof one cannot speak, of that one must stay silent’, says Wittgenstein, a man who valued precision: But there are some who will waffle where they cannot talk – they may even sing. What is wonderful about art is not just that it permits itself to sing or waffle or shout, as the case may be, but that it dares to approach the unapproachable, flirt with the great paradoxes in the realm where science cannot enter. Does that not count as a contribution?

Scholars and practitioners in the field of the arts have- and not as the only ones – been lured by the beacon of science. For most of this century it has been by the methods of science that academic respectability and status have been won. The effect of this trend on art has, with all due respect for science, been deadly as art’s unique power is blunted when objectified, and its radiance dulled by the prescripts of theory.

Art is a rebel – it must be. Its goal is to awe and uplift, to thrill and horrify. It must transcend the here and now to touch our human psyche. In doing so, it will confound the scientific need to under­stand the process. Art must never be slave to political correctness or pander to the dictates of academic critics and theorists. Art must be free.

Robert Dessaix’s interview with Harold Bloom in the same issue of ABR complements Timms’ essay. Bloom seems to diagnose the same malaise as Timms, calling it theory and damning it. One is tempted to plead that since that which makes art art – the sublime – is unamenable to rational analysis, it should be spared the scientific approach and its sad, misguided caricature, theory. That should not mean one could not talk of it. In a singing voice, perhaps.

Most of us will never reach the sublime, but there is many an artist and writer who will keep trying.

Dr Lisbet de Castro Lopo, Newcastle, NSW