White South African emigrs carry on as though they’ve been driven into exile, but they’re having a whale of a time, Matthew Krouse discovers in Perth
Perth: the city white South African dreams are made of. Nestling serenely on the banks of the mighty Swan River (more a coastal estuary) it fits contradictory descriptions. If one goes there one hears them all. One Australian calls Perth “a shopping mall with a river running through it”. A South African who’s settled there in enviable comfort calls the place, “Bloemfontein with skyscrapers”.
On the plane, just before landing, one gets a whiff of the mixture of pride and paranoia that characterises the denizens of down under. A list is circulated of illegal substances that may not be brought into Australia a country boasting low levels of disease. A video is shown on the airplane’s movie screen depicting a sniffer dog, its nose buried in suitcases, being led around the busy baggage receiving hall of Perth airport by a sexy Camel Man of a cop. The creature can apparently detect 30 forbidden things, from drugs to exotic wooden crafts.
In the video an elderly Chinese woman confesses that in her luggage she’s stashed some vacuum-packed sausages from home. The Camel Man confiscates these with a stern nod and she’s hit with a steep fine. But, travellers are told, there are bins before customs sporting big signs in which the bad stuff may be dumped. Official-looking pamphlets tell lascivious Australians that, if it’s discovered they’ve had sex with children on their sojourns, they can expect the worst.
These are clues to what one suspects is an inner fear of white Australians who find themselves on the verge of the mighty Asian tiger. A fear of being swamped by eastern cultures far more indigenous and rooted to the region than their own. Everywhere one goes one sees Asian immigrants eking out a meagre living from the great Australian dream. As an outsider it’s difficult to surmise who these people really are, but one can see from the place they occupy in the urban food chain that they are a lesser merchant class battling like hell to stay afloat.
But this isn’t the case with Perth’s expatriate white South Africans. They, in contrast, are leading a full and prosperous life on the opposite end of the Indian ocean, far from the messy democratisation still taking place back home. They’re visible in the distinctly local things they’ve chosen to lug with them. In Perth one finds branches of Nando’s takeaway chicken, 11 Bothas are listed in the telephone book, there’s a South Africa Club and a Jewish school attended by lots of South African kids.
After years of seeping immigration, Australians now know their South African neighbours well. A well-worn phrase gets repeated in a broad Australian accent, attempting to mimic ours: “Thu cors in thu groj.” It translates with comforting sanity. Yes, for South Africans who’ve settled there, the car’s sure to be tucked away safely, in the garage.
It’s in this sunny, litterless scape that the city holds its showcase Perth International Arts Festival, in conjunction with the University of Western Australia. The fact that it runs on government funds seems to keep everyone yakking about how money for culture should be responsibly spent.
Broad-based public concern for the arts is so un-South African. Here we seem to leave decisions about what we’re going to see to corporate sponsors who make a big noise when it comes to self-promotion. In Australia one seldom sees the type of corporate branding of the arts that one sees here.
It’s considered vulgar.
Perth’s headline act, this year, has been a short season of dance by the ever-challenging choreographer Merce Cunningham, who established himself as an uber-guru back in the Fifties in collaboration with composer John Cage.
On February 3 the city’s upper crust arrived in full force at the enormous Burswood auditorium to see Cunningham’s company do a retrospective of works designed by pop art idols Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.
In the thousand-odd seater venue situated alongside a casino, not unlike Caesar’s in Kempton Park, I sat between a former South African dance teacher who took notes throughout the performance, and a well-preserved, elderly South African dentist and his overdressed Australian wife.
The atmosphere was cordial and, to use a modern South African insult, Eurocentric. But still, Perth just doesn’t feel first world. Their opening nights are full of pretentious hugs and kisses their culture club is intimate everybody seems to knowlll everybody else.llll In essence, it felt like a night at Pretoria’s State Theatre back in 1974.
But in reality Western Australia is branching out at a rate that puts us to shame, becoming more inclusive of all the types they encounter in their regular lives. That’s why I was there in the first place. Australians are going all out to hold a dialogue with what they term the Indian and Pacific rims. One wonders why. They really have everything at their disposal. There’s only one problem though: they feel terribly isolated in what one Aussie called, “the arsehole end of the world”.
Feeling far apart has led them to go out and find what it is they think they want to see. The office of the Perth Festival, for example, sent their performing arts manager Sally Sussman shopping for plays to our National Arts Festival in Grahamstown last year.
Before departing Sussman did a little research and came up with a fascinating fact about past Australian-South Africa cultural relations: “In the Fifties there was an Indian Ocean rim festival connecting many countries from the region. It was, I guess, more a community festival and they went to incredible lengths to get people out here. I think it folded in the Seventies.”
It didn’t take Sussman much effort to discover a willing audience base the big South African community in Perth. To make tangible links she contacted what she calls “a virtual African studies community, run by someone called Peter Limb”. Here she discovered the Grahamstown festival where she came upon suitable practitioners, like the crazy theatre director Brett Bailey who was planning a new work about Idi Amin. Sadly, the play wasn’t ready for Perth this year. Sussman also saw the internationally famous Handspring Puppet Company’s The Chimp Project that turned out to be too expensive for her festival to import.
“We needed to start out with a few projects that represent different aspects of South African work, rather than blow all our money on one event,” she says.
Combing the discount rack Sussman travelled to Durban where, on an out- of-town excursion, she met up with a pantsula jive group from Umlazi called the Durban Township Boys.
I saw the Umlazi boys do two outdoor performances in the public gathering places of Perth. On February 8 they did a frantic little show in a constricted space between two rows of benches in front of an information kiosk in the city busport. They didn’t exactly crack it. Their backing tape was too loud and the space was too small for them to move in with any ease. It was their first performance and they were probably missing the wild abandon of the African street on a busy day.
They had my sympathies. The Australian commuters, bustling by on the way to their buses, didn’t quite know what to make of these black youths in their tracksuits roaring into their mics. Some stood by watching for a couple of minutes wearing those fixed grins whites tend to break into when the blacks start doing something culturally exclusive in a language they can’t understand. It’s funny how universal these things are.
I caught the Umlazi boys once again, by mistake. I was crossing an outdoor piazza two days later, on February 10, when I heard the familiar strains of kwaito wafting through the air. I hurried over to where the performance was happening and there was the troupe with a grand audience now, much more relaxed. There were also new additions to their crew: four doting white teenage Aussie girls, each one clutching the tracksuit top of her African holiday romance while the boys danced in the sun.
Perth and Durban are basically trying hard to fall in love. Cultural planners of both port cities are using the fact that the two share the same latitude and ocean to indicate something deep and meaningful that will help forge their bonds. One gets the feeling though that what they do have in common, more than geography, is a low sense of self-esteem. Both cities are regarded as being of minor cultural significance to their countries.
The romance was sealed last year when Durban mayor Obed Mlaba flew to Perth to open an exhibition of African wire and metal craft that showed in Fremantle, a trendy coastal spot outside the city. This was preceded by a cross-cultural exchange project between the fine art umbrella body, the Artists Foundation of Western Australia, and Durban’s Bat Centre.
KwaZulu-Natal craft workers beadworker Ntombifuti Magwasa, model car maker Michael Mbatha and telephone wire basket maker Vincent Sithole demonstrated their skills in Perth, and renowned Australian textile artist Nalda Searles came to the Bat Centre.
The South African crafts shown in Perth sold well. Planner Jenny Wright of the Artist’s Foundation found the African craft to have “a broader audience than a lot of cutting edge contemporary art. I’m sometimes a little suspicious of the ‘look at the cute ethnic’ craft aspect to it,” she says. “Perhaps I shouldn’t disparage that because there’s tremendous interest and people wanted to buy. They hadn’t seen work like that before.”
Wright hints at the culture shock experienced by the African artists on their journey into the big wide world language barriers, etcetera. But that was last year’s Perth festival. This year, in addition to the Umlazi boys, the programme showcased two South African plays.
Heinrich Reisenhoffer’s and Oscar Petersen’s Suip, a hit last year at Grahamstown, must have confirmed a planeload of ex-South African fears. Upon arrival at the Octagon Theatre, at the University of Western Australia, one was confronted by prominently displayed warnings that the language would be bad, but it would be in Afrikaans. In case anyone couldn’t understand the bad language there was a glossary on page one of the programme listing foul words like: poes, naai, kont and the well- worn phrase jou ma se …
Suip is 90% in Afrikaans. It’s a frightening work, masterfully acted by what appear to be genuine bergies trying to fathom how, in history, they’ve gotten to be who they are. Of course it’s all put didactically down to drink. The auditorium was brimming with South Africans who must have been thanking the Lord that they and their money were now safely on the other side. Suip does not say to our lost brethren, “please come home”.
There were Australian-South Africans of all hues. Posh Lenasia Indians sat alongside Africans who looked like they belonged to our Diplomatic Corps. Meanwhile, their teenage kids looked and spoke like Aussies. The play was so in-your-face that the mirth eventually turned to stress. So when the really funny moments popped up the laughter seemed a little too forced. There was a South African Indian who was having such a homegrown cultural experience that his eyes were watering and he was virtually rolling in the aisle. After interval I noticed that a smart, severe-looking coloured Cape- tonian woman beside me had not returned.
On February 9, at sunset in the campus gardens, Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane did their kiddies show, A Boy Called Rubbish. It was yet another full house of nostalgic South Africans who, at this stage, I was beginning to suspect may actually consider themselves driven into exile against their will.
From what I saw I can safely say I don’t think much of Pearson’s and Mkhwane’s work. The two seem to think they’re the funniest things on earth when, actually, there’s very little humour in what they do. Their act is all over the place and their props, which they boast can all be found on a trash heap, are not that skillfully used. And their supposed tale of endurance, of a boy who saves his village, is virtually impossible to understand.
The audience in the sunken garden of the university, though, had a very good South African time. Across the way from me there was a young Afrikaans couple cosily nestled on a blanket with their baby. They were drinking a litchi Liquifriut and chewing biltong. The hot sun was setting, and my disorientation was beginning to set in.
The next day I found more evidence of South African artistry, this time in the Art Gallery of Western Australia. A glossy catalogue produced by the gallery and sold at their bookshop shows that, for last year’s festival, they brought in the work of three major South African artists in a collaboration called Home. The process of procuring works for the exhibition began in 1997 when the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, Trevor Smith, visited Cape Town and Johannesburg to source material that would appear alongside artists from Canada, Eastern Europe, North Africa and the United States.
The three artists Smith selected were David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Kendell Geers. Mthethwa’s photographs are colourful portraits of township life and Goldblatt went strolling with his camera on a special assignment to some asbestos mines in the Australian outback settlement of Wittenoom. Geers, of course, went out on the attack, taking his installation on to the city streets where he put up his work called 48 hours in bus stops around Perth.
Basically, Geers’s work is a series of backlit inkjet pieces of text that really shine out at night. Where adverts would normally be placed in the bus stops, Geers’s work names shocking crimes that, one assumes, took place in Gauteng in the late Nineties. Here’s a taste: “Six gunmen opened fire on the drinking occupants of a shack …”, “Constable MS Lamola of Ennerdale police station was mugged …” and “a bank robber was shot dead …”
Of course, expatriate South Africans must have shuddered each time they drove past, receiving further confirmation that the country is now beyond repair. Isn’t it amazing how the art of someone like Geers can appear so reactionary once it’s removed from its context? I had seen the work previously on the outside walls of the newly established Camouflage gallery in Johannesburg where it made a very weak statement, reiterating facts South Africans already knew.
But here’s a quote from the Home catalogue, written by Smith, the show’s curator, that can be used in defence of Geers’s idea. “Of course Perth’s crime rate is nowhere near that of Johannesburg,” Smith writes, “indeed it has been something of a safe haven for many wealthy, mostly white, South Africans seeking refuge from the crime and violence of Johannesburg. Yet like most cities Perth has its own particular brand of urban paranoia bred by its nearly empty night-time streets. If fear eats the soul (to borrow from Fassbinder), sitting at a lonely bus stop reading litanies of anonymous death may not be so good for your health. On the surface we may count our blessings, but under the skin we are not so confident.”
So what is the basis of this lack of confidence? Perhaps it can be found in the truth of Australia’s own shady past. They’re hardly free of race politics. They’ve also managed quite successfully to fence off Aboriginal culture, subtly relegating it to a space where, for white audiences, it can be viewed with safety.
Aboriginal artists themselves, it is claimed, support the fact that the Art Gallery of Western Australia has a hall reserved especially for their art. Because specific commercial galleries sell Aboriginal painting only they tend to appear just a rung above the curio chain called Creative Native. It is a form of representation that, in South Africa, we have seen come and go.
The small Aboriginal community of Perth is serviced by a single nine- year-old theatre company called Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, meaning “stand tall”. Run as an incorporated association, members have to have Aboriginal origins in order to have voting rights. They vote in a board that runs the company on behalf of the local community.
Two CEOs run the show: Paul MacPhail, who takes care of the admin, and David Milroy, who looks into the art. The company owns a minibus and they employ eight office staff, who work from an old government function centre in town. A portion of their funding comes from grants received from the state funding body Arts WA, the rest from ticket sales.
Yirri Yaakin Noongar’s freelance Aboriginal performers do about three major productions in Perth’s professional theatres each year. They tour their work nationally and this year they will be developing their own humble venue into a functioning playhouse.
At this year’s festival they put on a one-woman show called Alice, a rambling testimony of a young woman of colour whose life has had far more downs than ups. Spiced up with some gritty live rock, it’s the true story of its author and performer, Alice Haines, who has seen family violence, poverty and a small degree of hometown fame. It was a poignant work, evoking a tired response from its middle-upper class, suburban audience: “We’ve heard it all before.”
Alice’s pathetic life story, like so many, seems dwarfed by major first world cultural interventions that come to Perth in its festival season. Audience members probably regard their tax contribution better spent on cultural highs, like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Carlo Goldini’s A Servant to two Masters, songs by Mahler performed by the West Australian symphony and video art by world class artists Bill Viola and Stan Douglas.
In comparison to these internationally regarded events South Africa’s cultural contribution also seemed meagre. But the dialogue is happening, not necessarily because Australians have now met up with South Africans who’ve packed for Perth. Indeed, there’s a healthier curiosity about South Africans who’ve decided, for whatever reason, to stay home.