david williamson..bolt rips him a new one! Bolt got it in one -...

david williamson..bolt rips him a new one! Bolt got it in one - he is one who hates the masses

Vomitous, really

Author overboard
Andrew Bolt
21oct05

DAVID Williamson, our most famous playwright, recently went on a cruise to Noumea, and felt as sick as a dog.

Not from the tumbling waves, mind, but from having to share the ship with happy Australians. It was vomitous.
Like a true artist, he sniffed strife as soon as he boarded. There were children there, for a start, "and the adults didn't seem to be discussing Proust or George Eliot", he writes in the Bulletin.

In fact, "the ship was stacked to the gunwales with John Howard's beloved aspirational Australians . . ." Those suburban masses, so contemptible to the high priests of our dead arts.

How ugly they were on "Cruise Ship Australia", this "metaphor for Australia".

They wouldn't visit the (actually dispiriting) museum in Noumea. They seemed oblivious to global warming or our farmland being so ruined that perhaps "we'd be better to shut down our farming efforts".

Didn't these people care that we were running out of oil? Williamson did, but not enough, it seems, to stop him checking into a luxury cabin of a diesel-chugging liner, dining on the rich produce of these devastated farms.

But how he suffered. "Like Australia at large, no Australian song was ever played, no Australian movie ever shown, the trivia quizzes were all about American movie stars . . ." Could it be true that some even failed to recognise the great Australian playwright himself?

Certainly, it seems none wished to have a bracing conversation with this grim man over our "sobering destiny": "On board the Australian cruise ship . . . there was no inquiry into anything."

Correction: "The one surefire topic of conversation that connected erstwhile strangers was price comparisons. It seems that the worst thing that can happen to an aspirational Australian is to hear that another aspirational Australian got a better price deal on their plasma TV . . . Aspirational Australia really loves a whinge," whinged Williamson.

But what seemed to really grate with him is that these suburbans felt they actually earned this cruise.

"The thought that our ability to spend up big and drift on shouting Ole! Ole! might have little to do with our intelligence and industry as a nation and everything to do with sheer good luck never rose to consciousness," Williamson snapped.

And here it becomes clear how unoriginal he is in his elitist contempt for Australia, its people and its wealth.

COMPARE, for instance, that last paragraph of his with this, from Donald Horne's The Lucky Country, which in 1964 set this sneering script: "According to the rules, Australia has not deserved its good fortune."

Horne berated Australians as dull, stupid, lazy, unimaginative, timid, unquestioning and complacent, and asked: "Can the racket last? NO."

Or compare Williamson's disdain for "aspirational Australians" with this diatribe from author Patrick White, nearly 50 years ago:

"In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blinkered blue eyes, in which human teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means cake and steak, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves."

How poisonous this contempt has been to our culture. So many artists now see the public not as their audience, but their enemy -- and rich government funding encourages their arrogance.

How few are like the great English novelist Arnold Bennett, son of a shopkeeper, who could see the suburbs were in fact home to people of courage, of dignity, of honour, of dreams, of romance, of art.

Which writers now write with similar love of our suburbs? How many of you feel they speak to and for you?

Instead, we see a Williamson strip suburban Australians of humanity, reducing them to a contemptible mass, dead to all but money.

But that's been a fatal temptation of artists since before even Patrick White. Poet Ezra Pound, a lover of fascism, said all but artists were "a mass of dolts".

Writer George Moore hated voters as much as does Williamson: "Art is the direct antithesis to democracy . . . The mass can only appreciate simple and naive emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventionalities."

And some thought that if the mass really was that vile . . . Wrote D.H. Lawrence to a friend: "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace . . . I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed . . ."

H .G. Wells added: "It is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, . . . its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people . . .

"The species must be engaged in eliminating them."

And soon another accomplished artist, Adolf Hitler, also talked of "exterminable subhumans" and "an inhibited bourgeois herd".

Williamson, of course, would be horrified by talk of killing the stupid, but his artist's contempt for the mass has a squalid lineage, with nasty consequences.

Including some lousy, sneering art. No wonder, perhaps, that his fellow passengers felt that with such an Australian artist there was little of worth to discuss.