The Vapour Trail

Every academic experiences it at one time or another, and yet I have not read an honest discussion of what it feels like to have one’s work raked over by an anonymous peer review. The whole endeavour of scholarly enterprise depends on the rigorous assessment of work provided by review processes, and at least in theory these are freed from toadyism or fear of reprisal by the mechanism of anonymity. And I do agree that anonymity is significant. If someone asks you for your opinion of their work, it is often hard to really give it honestly. You worry about their feelings if you say something critical, perhaps, toning it down because you don’t want to jeopardise your friendship. And a more junior person may well feel prevented from honesty in some measure if asked to assess a more senior colleague’s work.

Nonetheless, there is also something about the nature of anonymous comment which invites a highhandedness or snarkiness of manner that I think is one of the curses of academe. The fact that you do not have to worry about the author’s feelings in an anonymous review seems to be taken by some as an invitation to unfeeling waspishness, or a chance to blow one’s own trumpet in an underhanded way.

I have received some of the best and most valuable constructive criticism of my own work via anonymous review. I can absolutely say that it has challenged me in ways that I am hugely glad for now, and know that this will continue to be the case. Criticism is difficult to receive even at the best of times, but there is no growth without it – and it is in many ways a boon to be able to receive it privately, having time to absorb it without anyone witnessing your initial (often crestfallen) reaction. But I have also received nasty reviews, and even if sweetened by recommendations of publication, or at least some faint praise, it makes for an excoriating experience. Early academic life is an uncertain and difficult business enough as it is without having work you have laboured over for months imperiously dismissed. And at such times, there is a sense of injustice that  it has been provided without accountability because it is anonymous. 

This post in part a reminder to myself: may I avoid the little thrill of superiority that comes from demonstrating my command of an intellectual field (or what I imagine to be my command of the field) at another person’s expense. I think we need to work hard at fostering a culture of truly constructive criticism: warm, rigorous, involved, aiming at really getting to the nub of an argument or expanding ways of thinking about an issue rather than choosing to snipe at someone else’s contribution, or to seek self-aggrandisement that way.

Once again I’ve been reading Don Watson’s exquisite diatribe, Death Sentence (2003). It’s an important book. It rails against the mangling of language by big companies - and even worse, the adoption of their managerial verbiage by politicians and public servants. It’s also a rollicking book. “This is a clag sandwich with the lot”, he writes after citing a particularly mealy example of corporate-speak. I laughed out loud at that one. 

Now that I’ve been reading back over reportage of the Maritime Strike of 1890 for my chapter in Crucial Moments, however, I’ve found myself questioning some of the historical arguments Watson makes. Australians were never bred to be eloquent, he says. Across our history since 1788, we’ve been taught not to enjoy the sounds of our own voices, to avoid flights of sentimentality, to shy away from verbal extravagance. At the turn of the twentieth century in particular, no animating ideals appeared on which to base a sense of Australian nationhood: ‘none at least that were articulated’.

Even a quick glance at the speeches of trade unionists during the Maritime Strike, or the histories of it written by Labor leaders over the following years, suggests that this was not always the case. Here is the New South Wales Labor leader George Black, for example, writing in 1915:

‘The magnificent loyalty of the strikers… and the splendid self-denial of their martyred wives, were equal in heroism to the undying deeds which are blazoned in the glowing pages of history’. 

And what about William Guthrie Spence, a union leader and Labor MP?:

‘The trades unionist workers – men and women – are the true heroes and heroines of the world. Their names are unrecorded in history, but their work lives after them and has given colour and force to a Movement which cannot die, but is becoming more powerful and better understood as time goes on. After all, names matter not; it is deeds that count’.

What, too, about the manifesto issued by Queensland’s Maritime Council in August 1890, calling on unionists to support a group of marine officers on strike: ‘The same spirit of union courses through their veins which thrills in ours’? 

Historian John Hirst writes about the sentimental language accompanying the ideal of federation in late 1890s Australia. We hear a lot about the pared-back prose of bush poets in this era, he says. But most Australians did not take the work of Henry Lawson or Banjo Paterson all that seriously at the time. They saw it as light and ephemeral verse, lacking ‘the nobility, the profundity, and moral elevation thought proper to poetry’. Real poetry was of the kind William Gay wrote, so high-faluted it is liable to induce altitude sickness in those unaccustomed to the style:

‘From all division let our land be free / For God has made her one: complete she lies / Within the unbroken circle of the skies…

O let us rise, united, penitent / And be one people – mighty, serving God!’

So it seems that the absence of a rhetorical tradition in Australia is actually a matter of historical forgetting: more of a lack of eloquence in subsequent historians and publicists, perhaps, than at that formative time.

This year I have stepped in as book reviews editor for the Journal of Australian Studies, while Cath Kevin from Flinders University (Adelaide) is on maternity leave. JAS publishes articles and book reviews on aspects of Australian life – historical, cultural, political, sociological &c. As of 2008 it will appear four times a year, in hard copy and online, published by Taylor & Francis, and edited by the good Martin Crotty and Melissa Harper at the University of Queensland.

The reviews are to be scholarly – you don’t have to be at a university to write one, but they need to be written in articulate, well-tempered prose, for an audience mainly consisting of scholarly people. Length: 600-800 words, to be written within a month of receiving the book.

I have attached a list of books available for review now (books-awaiting-reviewers.doc), and plan to update it here online as more come in. There are books of political commentary here, of poetry, history, and an intriguing look at Australia’s dismantling of public education. I’ve also put an example of a fine new work, Howard Morphy’s Becoming Art, along with the publisher’s media release, below. If you are interested in reviewing one of these books, email me at m.bellanta@uq.edu.au with a brief bio and an outline of your interests.

Howard Morphy, Becoming Art (UNSW Press, 2008)

Thirty years ago Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today it is considered to be an important cultural movement, but the dialogue between Indigenous and Western fine art worlds has usually been written from the Western perspective. In Becoming Art Howard Morphy seeks to reverse the trend. Drawing on his close association with the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem land, he recounts the history of Indigenous art with the artists themselves centre-stage.

Becoming Art provides a new analysis of the shifting cultural and social contexts that surround the production of Aboriginal art. Transcending the boundaries between anthropology and art history, the book draws on arguments from both disciplines to provide a unique interdisciplinary perspective that challenges Western presuppositions of fine art. Examining how contemporary Yolngu artists negotiate their cultural practices in the face of the narrow definition of fine art in Western terms, in Becoming Art, Howard Morphy argues for a more cross-cultural perspective on world art history.