to interpret Europe, however floundering an attempt, because I don’t think you can
understand Australia without Europe. So they were the equivalent in writing to the
grand tour but I did see it and always have, and Schindler confirms this, as a grand
tour of horrors.
Europe, if properly projected, not on Mercator’s projection but properly seen
on a fair projection of the masses of the world, Europe is a piddling place and yet it
has the arrogance, it has both an extraordinarily dense cultural history, it has the
gothic cathedrals, yet it has the arrogance of localities too, of exalting a particular
regional identity over any other identity to the point of lunacy and self destruction.
The Balkans is only one example; World War One was another example. I
remember during the filming of ... Naturally, I gather evidence of how dangerous
Europe is. The rules of German citizenship would be intolerable even to Phil
Ruddock. Even in the new one. The great virtue of the new world is that it is
forced, it’s not better or worse, but it’s forced to a kind of flexibility of definition of
what an Australian, or an American or a Canadian is. That’s the greatest virtue of
the new world.
And I remembered during the filming of Schindler there was a long weekend
and the caterers were Croatian and were going back to Zagreb for the long
weekend and I asked them how long it would take them and it turned out to be
from Cracow something like sixteen hours, eighteen hours and I reflected that you
could drive west from Sydney and not even be out of New South Wales in that time
and yet he would cross dense assertions of local identity, cultural identity,
assertions which had a pile of corpses to attest to every one of them. I t struck me
again what a dense dangerous place the old world was and how that at least we’re
delivered from that awful density in the new world ... but still we’re delivered from
those awful assertions that my hundred square miles is the centre of civilization and
anyone who does not attempt to fit my identity, localized in this particular region, is
an enemy and must be expunged. So the idea that there’s some conflict between
being an Australian writer and a writer to the world, whether the world reads you or
not, is another question.
But then I was a mad young writer anyhow I probably ...but you know they
were not properly read. I ’ll give you an example. I ’m sure you’ve seen the murder
mystery in Victim of the Aurora, it is an allegorical murder mystery like Martin Amis’
murder mystery in Night Train. The most important assertion of that book to me,
and it may not have been properly conveyed, was that at the heart of an old classic,
ron
(Ron)
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