Day One
As Sepp Blatter weasels himself a fourth term as the president of the organisation that should be called “Always a Fee for Fifa”, a Rose’s taxi takes me to OR Tambo. The driver tells me that Rose Taxi has been running cabs in Johannesburg for more than 80 years. When I was a student, Rose’s cars took me home from the Union Club in Bree Street where I worked nightly as a barman. The smell of leather car seats invariably reminds me of those drives.
Two hours out of Johannesburg, Qantas Flight 064 takes to 15 minutes of violent shuddering. The tray across the aisle from me hits the roof, scattering debris in all directions, including mine. For the second time in a life of much travel, I think about insurance — is mine sufficient?
The first time this question crossed my mind was in Nigeria during a breakneck journey between Lagos and the university city of Ife. This was the occasion when my travelling companions bribed the taxi driver to drive slowly. Talk about counter-intuitive: usually the bribe is to do the opposite — as in the movie-cliché instruction, “Quick, cabbie, follow that car!”
Crossings to Australia were certainly more restful when my father, on two occasions during his childhood, crossed the Indian Ocean. In those far-off days the dreaded Aussie visa wasn’t necessary and the more benign passport was more a status symbol than the necessity it is today.
What’s So Funny? — Andy Mason’s near-encyclopedia of South African cartooning — is my travelling companion. Unlike the proverbial bore in the next seat, the book is intelligent and insightful, crossing the divide between the written account of political and cultural history, on the one hand, and the infinitely more powerful lampoon on the other.
Day Two
Either one loves Sydney or thinks it a cliché. For me, it’s the former and has been since I first saw her shining face 30 years ago almost to the month.
At Macquarie University, where I taught three years ago, not much has changed — well, not unless you consider spending Aus$92-million (R660-million) on a new library to be change. Standing in the centre of the campus, its beautiful lines and autumnal-coloured blinds sharply contrast with the cement-grey, neo-brutalist blocks of Macquarie’s Âoriginal buildings.
This campus was built in 1964 on an apple orchard. The only reminder of this is said to be an applestill deep in the gum trees. Presumably, too, on moonlit nights one can hear the strains of that famous line in Australian popular culture coming from the vicinity of the still: “You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me” — written in 1895 by the folk-poet Banjo Paterson.
Dinner with a high-flying niece, who read sociology at Wits, and her nice BComm, MBAed husband. Mostly, we talk family matters and the pain of moving but end the meal with a pointed exchange around the lame joke: “What’s the difference between a pizza and a BA?” Answer: “At least with a pizza you can feed a family of four.”
Day Three
An old saw in the local academy runs that if four academics from Sydney get together they hold a party; four academics from Melbourne will start a journal. From my fifth-floor hotel window I can see the elegant outline of Melbourne’s city skyline. Between here and there, the best mode of local transport, a rumbling tram, passes row upon row of Victorian-style buildings while early-morning hot-air balloons float above.
This morning the news reports that another Australian has lost his life in Afghanistan — the 27th fatality this year. The Age, Melbourne’s daily, carries a front-page colour photograph of a pastor walking between two flag-draped coffins: casualties, too, of the 10-year-old war to bring “peace and democracy” to that country. This must be longest war in which Australia has ever been involved.
The first was World War I, 1914-18. The courage and the suffering of Diggers — as Australian soldiers are called — was caught in the iconic 1981 film, Gallipoli. The conflict is burnished in folk memory — not surprising, this: one in three Australian soldiers lost their lives in World War I. Revisionist historians point out that this glorification of World War I, which has been encouraged by successive governments, amounts to the invention of a tradition. Of course, many Australians also fought, under the banners of individual states, in the Anglo-Boer War. The gum trees scattered across South Africa are part of the Australian legacy, as are near-hidden place names, and another iconic movie, Breaker Morant.
In the North Melbourne Town Hall the conference I’m taking part in opens, as is local tradition, with music. After a routine welcome, there are two brief inputs in the form of “provocations” — I deliver one that I call “Thoughts from the Land of Broken Dreams”. Then comes the opening lecture — a superb duet from a husband and wife on the shrinking space for public discourse and the limited geography of opinion in the United States.
We take supper at the city Post-Colonial Institute and, in the mini-van on the way home, my fellow Âpassengers break into Hindi song.
Day Four
Lunch with a young South African friend, Johann Rossouw, who is finishing a doctorate in political philosophy and is a little homesick. In the busy common room our exchanges in Afrikaans are lost in the excited early conference talk.
There certainly is much to be excited about. In a compelling and well-documented argument, we’ve just been told that tea, India’s quintessential drink, was brought to that country by the British — also counter-intuitive. This “Festival of Ideas” has drawn scholars and practitioners from five continents. There’ll be much to learn but the challenge will be an old cross-disciplinary one — finding a common language.
The La Trobe Reading Room in the Victoria State Library is a replica of the Reading Room of the (old) British Library. Tonight it is packed with students studying for the exams that begin next week. The great central dome of the room is overwhelming — no, awe-inspiring. I notice, however, that most who occupy the desks are Asian.
A pretty pink-hatted librarian, who has been chatted up by three fellow conferees from Leeds, says that the Victorian State Library was built as a library, museum and theatre. It is not surprising, then, that its impressive Romanesque façade, fluted pillars with stairs reaching down to Swanston Street, tells of a public-centred world far different from today.
It was built in the aftermath of the discovery of gold in 1851. This was a turning point in Australian history: not only did the local population explode in numbers but the riches also brought official recognition from Sydney and this in turn led to the founding of the state of Victoria. The city fathers used the resulting largesse to advance culture and learning. In addition to the library (with its theatre and museum), they founded The University of Melbourne.
Trevor Hogan, one of our hosts, points out that nowadays this kind of outcome would be impossible: political and social discourse has closed out the possibility that the public good might be strengthened by moments of sudden national or regional prosperity, as Victoria’s undoubtedly was. Today, alas, such riches would be sunk into the construction either of a mall or another garish corporate plaza, or both.
Will this gathering, held in a place that once aspired to be the “Athens of the South”, help the gathered here to escape a prison that is certainly not of their making?
Peter Vale is professor of humanities at the University of Johannesburg. In May he participated in a series of events in Melbourne and Manila, organised by the Thesis Eleven Centre, La Trobe University.