WHAT'S LEFT FOR THE CONTRARIAN?

A robust Australian culture has nothing to fear from America (Stephen Barton, 7/03/2003, Online Opinion)

This fear of being "gobbled up", of becoming a 51st state and the cries of "cultural genocide" and "free to be Australian" seem to suggest an inner anxiety. They create an impression of an immature Australian society and a culture not yet developed and seemingly unable to fend for itself.

This is hardly surprising giving the desperate teenage conformity of Australian writers and artists. David Marr in his rather unsurprising Colin
Simpson lecture said "the role of the writer is always to surprise". But the problem with Australian writers is they rarely do.

In the course of writing his latest book, Christopher Hitchens stumbled across some notes George Orwell had made on Brideshead Revisited before he died. He wrote:

Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which writers feel frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole… The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system.

That passage suggests where Orwell was, and Hitchens is, headed. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 9:29 AM