Hamish's second gift

A very low-fi song to go with your low-end art; I made it a few years ago when we were looking for a house in Northcote. 

Hamish Morgan

Greedy Motherfukers - Hamish Morgan

We breed the pathologies

Today I stumbled across a small booklet published in 1945 called We breed the Platypus written by local naturalist David Fleay. The introduction was written by Alec H Chisholm, F.R.Z.S., who refers to Fleay as the 'god-father' to the first platypus born in captivity.

The language of Chisholm is what is most interesting about this introduction. Chisholm obsesses with Fleay's noteriety as he does with a shy Australian mammal's global image.

Fame, of course, usually selects her subjects in more or less orthodox fashion, but occassionally she indulges a whimsy and makes her choice on novel lines.

Chisholm introduces to us the platypus in terms of her gradual shift from monist indigenous being, to invader's hoax, to spectacular zoological curiosity and worthy of civilised scholary investigation. 

Aborigines had stated that the animal actually burrowed into the ground for breeding purposes and laid soft-shelled eggs, and a number of white men had made the same claim. But no definitive evidence on the point was forth-coming until as late as 1884.

Chisholm notes that English zoologist, W H Caldwell's "...hard work in the bush" to make the discovery that the platypus actually lays eggs "...caused a major scientific sensation". Then he gets to the crux of what this post is about:

As the years rolled on the platypus continued with persistence worthy of a film star, to keep itself in the news.

In 1927 the first book about the platypus was written by actor turned naturalist Harry Burrell. Earlier Burrell took five 'water-moles' to America, and for the one that survived the voyage, for a mere forty-nine days in the New York Zoo, the authorities declared that the $1400 it cost and the interest it aroused was "fully justified".

Chisholm's invader's voice speaks for itself. A voice we have inherited without acknowledging the subtext. Today academics speak of post-industrialism and post-colonialism but the attitudes that exploit and colonise go on unchecked, as if celebrity culture has delivered us from the cult of the aristocrat.

I can't get out of my mind the poet's words: "Our elders are sick". It seems to say everything about how white Australia has, for the most part, ignored Aboriginal eldership and replaced it with abstraction and mediation.

Immutable fashion – notes on small talk

I have an idea for a t-shirt that says: 'Lousy at small talk', something I can wear to parties. I'll probably make one in the next few weeks, perhaps two, one for you dear reader, if you're inclined. 

Is small talk a thing of common substance or of avoidance?

1. Small talk as common substance: To speak small talk with others is to build relations based on a mutual lightness of spirit. Although I'm empathetic to this notion in terms of 'social warming', small talk functions best as an ancillary to something else, such as dancing or disruption: lobbing a boot at a psychopathic politician and calling him a dog after he has fucked your country.

The Dancers Inherit the party

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –

Not so when I have danced for an hour:

The dancers inherit the party

While the talkers wear themselves out and

            sit in corners alone, and glower.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

2. Small talk as avoidance. The natural territory of small talk resides within the localities inhabited by the bourgeoise and petit bourgeoise. It is here that small talk is rarely allowed to become 'big'. It can be cut off with eye rolling, polite refrain or bodily squeamishness that breaks the social engagement. Small talk as a natural language modality of the middle classes is predicated on older religious boundaries of shame and embarrassment developed since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is when art, incidentally, turned from a practice of everyday social activity, practiced by numerous, to one where the artist became sublime and individualistic – the development of the capitalist construct of the genius; worthy of marketing and cultural exploitation. The cult of the nice is society's modern, secular equivalent – here the genius has a happy disposition (see the likes of John Cage), or for an alternative, winter baby's view:

On middle class poverty 

The poet's teeth are rotten.

The poet doesn't drive.

The poet has an empire in the mind.

The poet writes the god.

The poet is assassinated.

The poet's unAustralian.

Patrick Jones (listen to this poem here)

NB. I'm writing this post after coming home from a party where I engaged in mid-sized talk and ate beautiful food and drank local plonk, all for which I'm passingly grateful.