Multi culti stinks and now the autocrats know it
ferdie
Poets are gone and prawns are back in a tourism commercial that shows
Australians doing what they usually do.
DAVID Williamson will yell at me again for saying so, but yesterday brought
proof that people just wouldn't cross the sea for our artists.
Tourism Australia announced it had dumped its $120 million, "See Australia
in a different light", campaign because tourists refused to buy our country
if it was being sold by one of our writers or painters.
In fact, test audiences in Europe were so turned off by the campaign's six
commercials that three of them – starring poet Les Murray, Aboriginal artist
Barbara Weir and departed junkie painter Brett Whiteley – were never
released.
Yet these were the very same commercials that just two years ago were hyped
by our artist-feeding Australia Council as "sophisticated, subtle and sexy".
Hurrahed the council's chief grants-granter, Jennifer Bott: "They reflect
what we in the arts have known for years: that Australia's culture, in all
its striking dimensions, has become – globally – our strongest sales pitch."
Thankfully, the old Paul Hogan style ads, which now made us "cringe", were
gone, and these new ones had "not a prawn in sight".
The hip-hop hipsters of SCAN, a journal of "media arts culture" published by
Macquarie University, were likewise thrilled to the tips of their Converse
runners.
Wrote one, a media studies tutor: "The See Australia campaign . . . saw
hackneyed images of beaches and barbecues replaced by the `more nuanced'
contributions of Les Murray and Barbara Weir."
It's a parable of our arts, isn't it? A work that has arts bureaucrats and
academics squeaking with ecstasy is guaranteed to have every one else
shifting in their sullen seats with bum-numb.
It's like one of the arts events planned for the Commonwealth Games – 400
artists dressed like hedges to form a maze that "questions the notion of
hierarchies and systems of power". Even without looking, I just knew it had
to have Australia Council money behind it.
And, indeed, far from being "our strongest sales pitch", those Tourism
Australia commercials were such a turn-off, the test screenings gave the
audience a sudden itch to fly to Greece, Ethiopia, Iraq – anywhere, as long
as it wasn't Australia with all those damn artists.
Love the higher arts though I do – murmur sweet things to me of Dickens,
Conrad, Parmuk, Borges and van Gogh – I'm amazed that even someone so
baked-beans-and-toast as then Tourism Minister Joe Hockey thought these
commercials would attract anything other than dust.
I watched them again yesterday, and oh, my goodness.
One has Weir, the renowned Aboriginal artist, trudging in faded clothes in
some dusty corner of the outback, quoting D.H. Lawrence in her local
language, before sitting down to paint tribal squiggles in a much patronised
genre of art that even Germaine "honorary Aboriginal" Greer now admits is
"mostly bad".
Such stuff is doubtless the height of chic to a tight social group of highly
urbanised "art lovers", confident they alone have the taste to enjoy, but
even such folk would much prefer to view that kind of Australia only through
a powerful telescope on the balcony of their gleaming waterside home, or
from the cash-bags end of a long-distance grants application.
Another of the commercials features poet Les Murray reciting – truly – lines
from his works.
Now, I don't for an instant say Murray's stuff is bad, but which
spiked-haired sharp-suit thought we'd lure in tourists from the other side
of the world with shots of blokes in shorts while the great baggy poet
himself mutters: "Shorts in that plain like are an angelic nudity.
Spirituality with pockets!"
And why choose Murray above a blockbuster writer such as Bryce Courtenay,
who at least is known to the crowds and is ad man enough to sell them a few
fares?
Were the guys making these commercials really advertising Australia or just
themselves and their elevated taste?
Worse even is the commercial in which a seascape with boats by Brett
Whiteley is animated, with Michael Parkinson intoning, "I think it's
brilliant" and other ritual gasps common to a gallery opening.
If our tourism chiefs really had to have an artist to spruik this country,
surely Ken Done would have been a more obvious choice, but as SCAN decreed:
"I'd rather take methadone than Ken Done."
Done is just too popular, and damned for that reason – as I discovered years
ago when I tried to get my bosses at the State Opera of South Australia to
hire him as a celebrity designer.
No, thank you, dear boy. We'd rather lecture the public than please it. And
there's another way in which Tourism Australia's great disaster actually
tells the story of the woes of contemporary Australian arts, at least of the
kind that lives off your taxes rather than your tickets.
Mind you, two of these commercials did almost work, and were given limited
screenings – one showing scenes of Australia while popster Delta Goodrem
wailed about rainbows, and another of Richie Benaud greeting each new
natural wonder with "Marvellous!" But the less said about Jonathan Coleman
snuffling through all that food and drink the kinder.
At least Tourism Australia's don't-blame-us new management has learned a
hard lesson well. So it's now out with the art and in with the heart. Poets
are gone and prawns are back. Unveiled yesterday was a new commercial that
shows friendly Australians of no obvious literary merit doing what we
usually do when we get ready for visitors – chasing the roos off the golf
course, preparing the plane for the joy-ride over the Great Barrier Reef,
and checking the water in the billabong.
And in the final shot is some smiling miss who – rather than quote D.H.
Lawrence, even in Pitjantjatjara – just asks: "So where the bloody hell are
you?"
Should work a treat. The test audiences have loved it. After all,
Australians, not artists, always were our best advertisement.
By now David Williamson, our most famous playwright, will be ready to belt
me yet again with his thickest volume of Proust.
Only yesterday, in The Australian, he announced I was one of those
artist-hating barbarians who suffer from "conservative paranoia", and
declared: "Artists and public intellectuals have been attacked with a
shrillness that has no precedent in our history."
Actually, David, what really has no precedent in our history is this
preponderance of artists keen to see the worst in their country and their
fellow Australians, and aided in that smug work by the comfort of knowing
that any backlash from the offended citizenry will be cushioned by a thick
insulation of public money.
Also without precedent is to have an artist such as you preach with such
vigor that the world is doomed unless we brain-dead suburban types, with our
indifference to the latest fad in French literature, give up trying to get
ahead.
Of course, it's quite bracing to hear a millionaire writer with a house at
Noosa and another abode in Sydney tell poorer people that "more wealth
doesn't bring happiness" and instruct them to get by with less before the
glaciers melt and we all drown. But, to be frank, it's not the kind of stuff
that's ever won a bloke many fans.
S O, no, far from loathing artists, I wish only we had yet more who spoke to
our optimism, our big hearts and our sense of fun.
What good such artists could do. I suspect they could even sell this country
as well as did that famous actor and screenwriter from decades back.
You know the one I mean. The one we loved. The guy with the prawns, whose
tourism commercials had them coming here in droves.
That's it, the great artist Paul Hogan.
Herald/Sun