The pursuit of identity

“The Festival of Ideas is intended as a gift to the people of Melbourne,” says Vice-Chancellor Professor Glyn Davis.

“This is why attendance at every session is free. It is designed this way because this is about building a bridge between the exciting world of ideas that we know exists on a campus and the larger civic democracy of which the University forms a part.

Professor Davis says a highlight of the inaugural 2009 festival was the level of participation by people who may not have spoken before at a public forum and who made important contributions to the conversation between the state and the city.

“And we hope that is the experience of 2011, that the University and the city get to know each other a little better,” he says.

“We often say the people of Melbourne live cheek by jowl with the University but rarely wander on to the campus because they have no immediate reason to do so.

“During this festival we are particularly keen to invite the people of Melbourne to feel welcome, to come and meet the people on campus, to use the facilities, to share in the many discussions we will have during this festival.”

The festival also aims to attract tens of thousands of students.

“About 50,000 students turn up every day on campus, and many of them have only limited opportunities to hear from voices outside their discipline or within the faculty in which they study.

“The festival has been programmed with this in mind to give everyone a chance to hear speakers from a host of different disciplinary perspectives, and we hope that proves to be a great attraction.”

As with the inaugural 2009 festival on climate change, this year’s focuses on one of the biggest issues or problems confronting our society – that of national identity.

“We’ve aimed for an issue that is broad enough to bring in lots of different voices, a problem that is compelling for a large audience, but is also difficult enough to demand the input of brilliant people from many specialisations from within the humanities and the sciences,” Professor Davis says.

“So the festival in 2011 like its predecessor won’t be about a problem that engineers, for example, on their own can solve, or about one that social scientists have a unique position to sort out. Rather, we looked for a theme that demanded conversations across disciplines, without sectional agendas, in the spirit of searching for the best solutions.

“A final important feature I’d like to note is that while it’s centred on Melbourne necessarily, the Festival of Ideas is intended to be far from parochial in its interests. It’s in the nature of universities to be global in their orientation. And we see that in our wonderful student population and their constant engagement with their colleagues from all continents.”

Looking out her sister’s window in Brooklyn, artist Katherine Hattam felt compelled to incorporate a representation of the brightly-coloured stained glass strip running round it into a painting.

“The Brooklyn stained glass window is both me looking at and understanding another world, an American world entirely different to the one I come from, while at the same time looking from my domestic world into my familiar local landscape: Ceres with the chooks, Merri Creek where I walk, powerlines, creek, bike and walking track – an unfamiliar window onto my familiar world,” says Ms Hattam, who completed a Master of Fine Art in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts and later completed a PhD at Deakin University after earlier undertaking a degree in Literature and Sociology / Political Science at the University of Melbourne.

Ms Hattam, who will be a participant in “The Pull of the Landscape: The Artist’s Share” panel, regards her “suburban nature” landscapes of the Merri Creek and its iconic footbridge with its adjacent stand of overhanging trees as being at once reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints while remaining in the Australian landscape tradition of Sydney Nolan, Fred Williams and the Heidelberg School. She sees that tradition as depicting our near outer suburban You Yangs, the Yarra River at Heidelberg or Bulleen, as much as the outback or the bush

‘Each city has its own bit of suburban nature, be it Prospect Park in Brooklyn or Central Park in Manhattan, where people take their exercise looking for something more than just exercise in what is some sort of suburban sublime,” she says.

“Some viewers see my landscapes as ironic. It is perhaps ironic that even after four years studying English Literature I never fully grasped the meaning of irony. Perhaps it’s because in these works the landscape of the Merri Creek is depicted in context through and over the domestic windows and tables. I don’t see this as irony, rather me depicting the way inside and outside worlds interact and inflect each other. Secretly, I see parallels with Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness take on the world: an abandoned shopping trolley, a woven basket, Melba the cat, the footbridge and Brooklyn window coexist.

“People see an ironic element in these landscapes in the sense that while there’s a landscape there’s a lot of the domestic in them also. When I’m walking by the Merri Creek, the inside and the outside merge, much like in the stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s fiction.

“In non-indigenous art there’s been a shift in how our landscape is depicted which reflects a change in our national identity. For example Jan Senbergs’ cartography-like views of Melbourne, Howard Arkley’s and Noel McKenna’s suburban houses, Jon Campbell’s painting of Footscray and his text paintings build a different picture from say Drysdale’s outback - the relationship of landscape to national identity becoming much more exclusively suburban other than in indigenous art where it is exactly the opposite.”

Dr Tony Birch, from the School of Culture and Communication in the Faculty of Arts has explored the streets, lanes and waterways of 1960’s Fitzroy and Collingwood in fiction, photography and historical analysis.

“I come from the postwar generation and more than that I really call myself part of the migrant generation of the 1960’s,” Dr Birch says.

“The kids of that first wave of migrants from Europe were the same age as me and what I identify with is that there was an inner city identity that developed among young people, that is now no longer there, where there was a common thread of identity between kids from very different ethnic backgrounds.

“They were Italians and Greeks in particular, poorer Australians and young aboriginal kids who now we see as having distinct ethnic identities, but I think were united by a common sense of street language, of street corner culture and having what a friend of mine once referred to as ‘a shared emotional vibration’ which I love.

“I come from a generation of kids who overcame difference and are a generation of people who Iived a multicultural existence before the word was ever discovered.

But as Dr Birch observes, it was a liberation of degree only, one viewed with suspicion by the parents of all of the groups.

“Identity was stronger or as strong as ethnicity in the street but relegated within the house,” he says.

“I had a peculiar situation where most of my friends were Italian – we were school friends, we played sport together, and were very good friends – but never once did any of those kids come into my house and never did I ever go into their house.

Dr Birch says that his parents at no time told him not to bring his friends into the house, and talking now to his Italian friends as older adults, finds that they too had experienced a similar unspoken response from their parents.

“We understood without ever speaking about it that the street was ours and the house belonged to our parents. Our parents were not ready to break down the barriers of difference.

“I don’t believe there was hostility. I think our parents’ generation were not quite ready to turn towards each other, and I think one of the great successes of migration is that that generation that grew up in the sixties became the first generation to really turn to each other.”

Dr Birch argues that the specificities of place, which are a hallmark of his fiction, have a profound impact on both individual and collective identity.

“I write about Melbourne in most of my work and to me the relationship between the city and the different pockets of the city were absolutely formative in people’s sense of identity,” he says.

That’s changed and you have more of a suburban identity now, but when I was a kid the inner city was so segregated in some senses that you knew that to cross one or two streets was to go into a different territory. I don’t mean that in a gang-like sense, just that the demographic and culture changed slightly.

“That doesn’t exist anymore and each suburb has its own divisions and subdivisions of culture. It might sound contradictory because that might sound like segregation, but again kids and the street broke that down.

“As kids we traversed across these boundaries and created more fluidity and this generation really changed the identity of Melbourne.”

Those urban journeys were not always easy however, but the effort to make them brought its own rewards.

“People sometimes see my writing as a little bleak, but I don’t. I think it’s about the resilience of the human condition and identity is central to that, especially the old working class tradition of loyalty.

“Your emotional loyalty to people is very strong and it can overcome any sense of difference in identity.”

 Dr Birch will consider the relationship between identity, place and class in readings from his forthcoming novel “Blood” at the “Australian Identity Now: Myth, Tyranny or Illusion?” symposium.

 Author Tom Keneally will pose the question in his keynote address “Australian Identity in the 21st century” whether “given that the most secure in their sense of identity are people of extreme politics and prejudice, identity is worth discussion in the first place?”

And his answer is that “we can’t help ourselves – it is a profound human need” and thus worthy of discussion.

“It’s why we belong to groups, and we try to define what those groups are,” he says.

“We want be identified with a particular football club or church – there are all sorts of identities which are beneath the national level.

“At the national level also, because of our conflicting view of our smallness and irrelevance to the big world one the one hand and our sense that we are a special people on the other hand.”

That specialness for Tom Keneally is encapsulated in the sense that Australia was destined to be a different, nobler and more equitable society (even though evidence as diverse as the slums of Sydney and the white Australia policy suggested otherwise in the formative years of the nation).

“That idea is now under threat and the Australian idea of the ‘fair go’ is diminishing in popular usage, but I believe it is still there and the people want it even if economic theory is against it,” he says.

http://www.ideas.unimelb.edu.au/