AustLit

‘Often when we think we are writing one thing we are in fact writing something else,’ Joe intoned, more than once. ‘What you consciously devise is not where your unconscious is taking you,’ he elaborated. For all his cultivation of the Lawson laconic mode of Australian demotic, he was often drawn to elaborate. Perhaps it was the potentiality for the exploitation of this that he envied in my academic employment, perhaps in his secret dreams he would have liked to have stood there, capped and gowned, elaborating in panelled halls. Well, now he has his opportunity in that college of buggers and spies. His words, I hasten to add. Though the teaching component of the fellowship, he told me, was something he had managed to have waived for his tenure. It was the teaching component that had made the fellowship so unattractive, certainly to me. That would have discouraged me from applying for it, had it ever been advertised. But apparently there was no advertisement. It was cosied up by invitation. Joe was never one to advocate public examinations and careers transparently open to talent. Competition, market forces, all that ideology that he proclaimed, was for the others. Indeed it was properly, precisely, an ideology: something that masked the true workings of society. Even its originators and progenitors could be heard to complain that it had never in fact been introduced into practice. It had remained a slogan to mystify the middle class masses, and Joe had been one of the happy advocates, though surely he must have known in the depths and shallows of his cynicism that things were never done like that, that society functioned on a system of deals and favours and controls and patronage, and the wise positioned themselves in order to benefit from the system.' (Introduction)