Cirrus@Austlit

'John Forbes was an Australian poet who lived from 1950 to 1998 and was one of the so-called ‘generation of 68’ who were deeply influenced by contemporary American poetics and culture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s Radio National paid tribute to Forbes’s life and work in 1999, in the posthumous radio adaptation A Layered Event. This article analyses representations of national identity in A Layered Event, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the ‘arboreal’ or unified versus the ‘rhizomic’ or networked. I argue that, through edited biographical interviews on the one hand, and adaptations of Forbes’s poems on the other, A Layered Event cultivates two distinct images of national identity—arboreal and rhizomic—and that it plays these off against each other. The article asks why Forbes and Forbes’s work is represented in these ways in the program. I use this reading of A Layered Event to reflect on the ABC’s role as a national public service broadcaster at the turn of the millennium. I argue that A Layered Event’s handling of national representations may be read as an allegory for the ABC’s negotiation of its Charter aim to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’, in an age of increasingly trans-national and fragmented identities and audiences.' (Publication abstract)