Cirrus@Austlit

'In this episode, a conversation recorded at the launch of Raimond Gaita’s Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings.

'For more than three decades the incomparable voice of Raimond Gaita has been summoning us to new conversations that deepen our understanding of what matters most to human life and awaken the sense of our common humanity. For Gaita, we are never more fully alive than when we are fully present to one another in conversation.

'In a time when modes of communication tend to superficiality and self-promotion, when political debates are increasingly inured to lies and even violence, and the moral demands of dialogue give way to a torrent of competing monologues, Gaita's invitation to rediscover what genuine conversation requires of us could not be more timely.

'Gaita was joined in conversation by Maria Tumarkin.' (Production summary)

'I am a migrant on stolen land—this I cannot escape, this I don’t want resolved. To understand my family’s move to safety as the displacement of others is a lifelong project. I am not in the market for fantasies of innocence, I studied history. Giving up the idea that I am on the margins though—that’s hard. If I am on the margins in any sense it’s because being a writer in Australia is seen as an esoteric pursuit, certainly not a profession, a hobby maybe, an extracurricular thing. Australia doesn’t care about most kinds of artists but doesn’t care about its writers in particular. While this contempt must be fought in submissions and agitation and at universities and schools and kept visible like the sauce stain on a thousand-dollar suit, continually spreading, responding to it cannot be the defining fight of writers’ lives or our main conversation. It shouldn’t be how literature gets talked about to young people. Orienting ourselves to this contempt and to the struggle it invites us to join in is a deadend.' (Introduction)

'When did the experience of fear become synonymous with the passage into womanhood?'

Source: Radio National Fictions.

'What I want is for three people to speak to you. Merlinda Bobis, Julie Koh and Mammad Aidani. You may know one of them, three of them, none of them. Whatever. I will speak to you too, I guess. So it’s one of you and four of us.' (Introduction)

'The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes?  Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present?

'Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough.

'Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms:

• ‘Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I’ll Give You the Woman’
• ‘History Repeats Itself…’
• ‘Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It’
• ‘You Can’t Enter The Same River Twice’
• ‘Time Heals All Wounds’

'These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live. 

'Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book of non-fiction, and her most pioneering. Her three previous books, Otherland  (2010), Courage  (2007), and Traumascapes  (2005), have each and all been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for major prizes.

'More than seven full and long years in the making, and utilising her time as a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, Axiomatic actively seeks to reset the non-fiction form in Australia.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Australians haven’t had the present-day European experience of refugees on our streets. If families were napping outside our houses and walking single file along the highways, holding plastic bags containing all they own, thousands stuck in limbo at train stations, in squares - Melbourne’s Federation Square, a few centimetres between bodies and not one untaken bit of sandstone panel, summer, winter, they’re still there - if the living and the dead washed up at Trigg, on Clovelly, places our children go in bathers and arm floaties, how would it have been different? Would it have been different?' (Introduction)

'Dear Rude Awakening, hello. 
'I realise now you came to me three times. Pint, you were a Musician. People would get under each other's skin to your music. Love songs. Set in half-forgotten cities that lay, like camels, in sand and dust. With retired coronets left behind by history. A god-shaped hole or a hole-shaped god. Love songs, but not how-deep-is-your-love love songs. One day, not in Australia mercifully, you became a star. Now hundreds of thousands of people were falling for each other, fucking, feeling their hearts beat and bind to your songs. And somehow in this ascent of yours, which felt, yes, almost inevitable, your very modest capacity for love and friendship, the unfeelingness of your heart, the scale of your self-involvement, never entered the frame. ' (Introduction)

'In Law and Literature, a subject offered to the University of Melbourne’s final-year law students, they study Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In both books the law fails. Or as Gary Cazalet, who got the subject up and running, says of Hooper’s book: ‘It is an indictment of our legal system and it isn’t.’ I’d put it another way. In both books the victims’ families find, in law, neither solace nor justice. Justice, that is, the way we laypeople like to imagine it: morally purifying, thunderously absolute, a revelation, a release—justice of the kind that law can rarely give us.' (Author's introduction)