What the cat dragged in

Helen Darville-Demidenko, and where are all the Australian Xer lit-fic authors?

In today’s Oz*. Imre Salusinszky runs a mostly standard boomer-conservative view on the causes of, and remedies for, the decline in Australian-authored literary fiction since the mid-1980s. Viz, if only universities focused more on literary canons, and less on pomo/cultural studies, more Ye Olde Style reader-consumers would increase the demand for Australian lit-fic, or at least backlist stuff.

Even ignoring the absence of frontlist/fresh lit-fic from this supposed panacea, it’s a superficial argument. Lurking close beneath is a grisly old bone: generationalism, and in particular some unfinished boomer-vs-Xer business from the mid-1990s. Salusinszky indirectly admits as much, in taking a swipe at Mark Davis (author of Gangland (1997)) over the cause of – but not the fact of – Australian lit-fic’s decline:

“The real crime of Davis’s band of oldies was not their years but the fact that each of them, in his her own fashion, had dared question some element of the groupthink that dominates our intellectual culture.”

Yes, Salusinszky really is asserting that boomers are/were the iconoclastic outlaws of Australian letters. Which makes Xers the conformists/PC-disciples, I assume – despite the fact that boomers get – in the mid-90s as now – almost all the lit crit column inches, and that lit-fic’s decline has had disproportionate impact on Xer (would-be) authors. In other words, Xers have – improbably, somehow – loudly doomed themselves to their own eternal silence in a black-hole of groupthink from which nothing – of publishable quality – escapes.

Admittedly, Mark Davis did no favour to Xers in this regard by repeatedly hoisting Xers’ colours to the PC/pomo/DIY mast in Gangland. Student, as opposed to teacher ownership of pomo – very few Xers were academics in the mid-1990s – is an odd claim to make, albeit Davis indiscriminately throws “good” boomer academics like Meaghan Morris and McKenzie Wark into his Xercentric progressivist soup-mix. On balance, Davis unmistakably hands over a poisoned, boomer-crafted chalice to Xers, on an utter “no returns” basis.

The poisoned chalice Xers vicariously got – being held responsible for the worst excesses of the Western boomer cultural revolution, despite never having been in charge of anything germane or strategic – is exemplified in Davis’s peculiar# defence of Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The hand that signed the paper. Just because Helen D-D was an Xer conspicuously bullied by some** boomers, it doesn’t make her a suitable, and still less an exemplary, Xer martyr.

In fact, a decade and a bit after the Demidenko affair, the whole thing smells like a cynical boomer set-up. That is, Darville-Demidenko – consciously or otherwise, I don’t know, or particularly care – so spectacularly shat in the nest of Xer lit-fic that almost nothing and no one has been able to live in there again, to this day. Game set and match to the boomers.

The shame is then that Darville-Demidenko (now Helen Dale) has still not been properly held to account for what she did, despite – or because of – all the boomer-vs-boomer column inches under the bridge. Davis devotes half a page (p 222) to Darville-Demidenko, as lone human agent rather than PC/pomo in general, being the main issue at stake but then necessarily quickly moves on.

For Davis – a boomer writing an anti-boomer screed – a slippery martyr manque is a good Xer martyr, and there are few if any Xers who have so trashed their generation’s authorial reputation for so few shekels## as Helen Dale.


* “Left for dead over lit crit” Australian 13 January 2007

** Boomers were also Darville-Demidenko’s loudest commentariat supporters: Peter Craven (at first), Miles Franklin judges David Marr and Jill Kitson, and Andrew Riemer. Davis’s labelling Darville-Demidenko’s critics as “the bulk of the [boomer hegemon] literary community” (Gangland pp 218) is perverse. Where Xers managed to get a word in – Guy Rundle and Gideon Haigh did, at least – they had only unkind words for their age peer Darville-Demidenko.

# Davis’s defence is certainly not unqualified (Gangland pp 213, 226), but it is oddly passionate and prolix. His strongest point is contrasting the critical reception of THTSTP with Helen Garner’s The first stone – another controversial work of faction published in the mid-90s, but this time boomer-authored, and not at all coincidentally, near-universally praised by the boomer commentariat. Davis then undermines his own argument, however:

“But the questions that were asked of The hand that signed the paper weren’t asked of The first stone, even if, as it turned out, many of the protagonists in both debates were the same”.

Here, Davis is saying that THTSTP’s essential controversy – its naked anti-Semitism – is on a par with Garner’s bitchy dissing of two young/Xer women for being PC wowsers in their response to real-life sexual harassment. Apart from their divergent scale, the two controversies widely differ in that anti-Semitism has no generational angle whatsoever, while The first stone was nothing but ugly boomer bullying of Xers.

## Or more accurately, a deposit on a house in Rockhampton, as Frank Devine gormlessly informed us in yesterday’s Oz.