The Enigma Of Arrival
              __________________ MINI KAPOOR

Granta 70 Australia:
The New New World
Price: Rs 450

Australia’s starkest symptoms of schizophrenia show up in the most unexpected of locales. This week that country’s Olympic authorities cautioned the Aboriginal people to stage their protests at a respectable distance from the Aboriginal arts centre in Sydney’s Olympic park. The centre, it has been clarified, is aimed at showcasing Aboriginal arts, not their complaints. This year is of great significance for Australia. It does not merely present an opportunity to demonstrate its sporting might. (At the Atlanta Games, Australia won 2.28 medals for every every million Australians; the Americans could claim just 0.37 by this measure.) It also marks one whole century of Australia’s existence as a unified nation. Hence, the frenzied attempts at introspection, at outlining the contours of an Australian identity.

At one level, the nation in general and Sydney in particular are revelling in the global focus this Olympics year; but at another, they are struggling to sort out a host of contradictory notions. Is Australia part of Asia? Or a new new world exploring the limits of national association? Or a tired attempt to create another Europe? More specifically, are Australians to chart their destiny as a republic, or with the British monarch as their head of state? Should they issue an overwhelming apology to the 350,000 Aborigines? But how should they accommodate this endangered culture in a very modern Australia? These issues are explored in great depth in the new issue of Granta, with its impressive smorgasbord — whether via memoirs, fiction or reportage by a range of Australian writers.

And while, as editor Ian Jack notes in his introduction, there is no contribution by Aborigines, the Aborigine question haunts a large chunk of the volume. If a certain, though somewhat confused, fascination and reverence for the continent’s indigenous folks is evident (as in Robyn Davidson’s curious marriage to an older, already married Aborigine man), it is imbued with a heavy dose of guilt. Indeed, guilt is the overwhelming leitmotif in this collection. In the most poignant piece, “New New World”, Peter Conrad returns to his Hobart home 30 years after voyaging to Oxford with the intention of never returning but for a holiday. With him he carried a tea chest with his skimpy, but entire, library of English literature, a body of work that had estranged him from his native land and ensconced him in an imaginary England. It was a courageous choice, for to make his place there he had to ditch his ageing parents, and retreat from their ambitions and his duties as an only child.

Now as he returns to dispose of their possessions after their death, it is a different Australia he encounters. An Australia effervescent with cultural and literary activity, with optimism, with a sense of ambition. He must confront a painful question: Did he, three decades ago, effect an act of betrayal, as much to his parents as his country? Other writers may not be as conscious of this guilt (indeed, they have less reason be so), but a question that eddies under most of the writing in Granta 70 is: when and how did this national transformation occur? It is a question that will be much asked as Sydney basks in the spotlight later this year.

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