appears to me that Akermann tore him a new one...Elitist sneer...

appears to me that Akermann tore him a new one...

Elitist sneer at the battlers - Piers Akerman

October 16, 2005
IF I'm ever fortunate enough to win a South Sea cruise at a charity auction, remind me to check and ensure the pretentious David Williamson isn't on the passenger list.

The millionaire playwright, who recently won such a cruise, has little good to say about his fellow Aussie passengers because, horror of horrors, "the ship was stacked to the gunwales with John Howard's beloved aspirational Australians".

At the outset of his 2500-word article in this week's Bulletin magazine (trimmed from a speech, of God knows what length, he gave to Melbourne's Swinburne University), Williamson leaves readers in no doubt that he hadn't intended to find himself adrift among people he suspected would be philistines because he had only put in "a low bid . . . thinking it would escalate" the receipts for "a worthy cause".

His misgivings were reinforced when he found himself queued for cabin allocation among adults who "didn't seem to be discussing Proust or George Eliot".

Worse, these aspirational Australians aspired to "all manner of things: to holidays like this, to new cars, to kitchen refits, to renovations, to private education for their children, and to practically anything made of plastic, wood or steel."

It's actually quite difficult to find things that aren't made of plastic, wood or steel anywhere.

But the supercilious Williamson, who aspired to live in Sydney after a Melbourne upbringing, who aspired to live on the Balmain (I kid you not) waterfront when he reached Australia's premier city, and whose aspirations have since permitted him to move upwards to Noosa, would probably have been happier had his fellow passengers aspired to own native handicrafts fashioned from recycled plastic bags by indigent ethnic cripples.

Such is his apparent need to sneer at everyday folk while dropping the broadest hints that he has the sole mortgage on an intellectually and morally superior approach to life.

Not, he stresses condescendingly, that his shipmates didn't have their good points. They were genuinely affectionate within their families and civil to one another.

But, he objects disdainfully, "not for them the grinding poverty of most of the world, or the devastation of tsunamis or hurricanes". It seemed to Williamson that they hadn't actually suffered anything in their lives beyond "the occasional rip-off involved in a shoddy car service".

His point was that columns like this, which occasionally mention self-described "effete elitists" like him "with their wanky (his words) interest in art, films and their bleeding-heart concern for the future of Australia and, indeed, the world" should also knock the battlers for being intellectually inferior or not wearing their care for capital-C culture and the capital-E environment as if it were tattooed to their foreheads.

When Williamson marvelled at a waterfall, or a Renzo Piano-designed building, his fellow passengers went shopping or to a Club Med.

The cruise, he says, was in total contrast to an academic tour he took through Vietnam, Cambodia, and on to Singapore, during which lecturers from Oxford and other universities "gave talks morning and afternoon about the geography, history, culture and art" of the places they visited, including a blood-stained Cambodian torture camp.

Williamson didn't mention that it was Australia's self-described intellectuals – the millionaire ad man and ABC host Philip Adams, and others not dissimilar – who championed the Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot and that earlier incarnation of evil, Mao Tse Tung, reliably credited with murdering 70 million of his own people.

Furthermore, he whines that no one aboard mentioned "the plight of the real aspirationals on board, the Indonesian and Filipino crew members who were away from their families on low-wage contracts for up to 10 months".

People who would not have had jobs, if the aspirationals hadn't made a quid and be able to afford, not win, a cruise.

Williamson wound up his sneering, condescending condemnation of his shipmates with a passionately ill-informed segue in which he displayed his green credentials while complaining that no one else appeared interested in the ecological plight of Australia, Mesopotamia, or the bleak future facing the globe if people continue to win prizes and take South Sea cruises aboard fossil-fuelled ships.

Curious, that. Those pesky paying passengers should have grumbled and worried a lot more instead of trying to enjoy themselves.

Reading of the revelations provoked by Williamson's unhappy shipboard experience makes one wonder how sheltered a life the 63-year-old playwright has led and where he found his characters. Oh, that's right, he drew upon his experiences with members of inner-city ALP branches, realtors flogging Harbour views, silks, and so on.

Maybe his fellow cruise passengers couldn't be bothered talking to him about the authors they were reading, or perhaps he wasn't interested in them because they didn't claim to be victims of capitalists in free-market societies. Or, unlike him, they just may have gone on the cruise to put their feet up and enjoy the sheer pleasure of being served by others – possibly for the first time in their lives – and weren't interested in listening to yet another doomsday merchant.

Williamson should get out more and meet a few more Australians outside the circle he would have been more comfortable with.

He might, for example, sit down with the Russian emigrant I met last week, an electronics whiz who was able to migrate to Australia only after the Soviet empire had collapsed in 1993.

I'm sure Williamson would have been as moved as I was as Iouri talked of arriving at a migrant hostel in Adelaide, and of his sense of amazement on being told by a fellow migrant, a Vietnamese man, that new arrivals could register and receive money from the government, even before they found work.

Or how he, his wife and daughters had been brought to tears by the gift of a basket of fruit, and a fridge full of food, when they moved into their first home unit. Or how he now successfully teaches a prestigious university course in Melbourne, and runs his own electronics consultancy in Singapore. But that might smack too much of the ugly aspirational for the effete author.

Unlike David Williamson, the aspirational Australians I know and work with at this newspaper and in various volunteer organisations, don't buy tickets in charities to bump the bids, they generously donate their time and money to tsunami victims, earthquake victims or flood victims because they're genuinely compassionate.

Some know first-hand what it's like to have benefited from the compassion of others.

They don't pull out their compassion to wear with their Order of Australia and their dinner jackets and their National Trust certificate as Living Treasures.

If they're on a cruise, they're there because they've worked hard and feel they've earned the right to some reward – a reward Williamson and his ilk would deny them because it's aspirational, because it would ruin the planet, because it doesn't fit with the narrow, blinkered and, yes, elitist view of how things should be.

The world has its share of horrors, its concentration camps, its torture cells. But those who have been in them don't really wish to book tours to revisit the past. Some want a South Sea cruise to contemplate what could be, not what they've endured.

Having made it in Australia, it would surprise and, perhaps, hurt them to be sneered at for being aspirational.



also hope his research has improved since "Gallipoli" and he can refrain from re writing history to suit his personal agenda.