I file in with at least a hundred others to the session on Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister, our slow shuffling into the crowded theatre bringing to mind the sorts of airline arrangements Carr notoriously complains of in the work.
Chair Marian Wilkinson begins by asking Carr which of the reviews he felt were most accurate – News Limited who called him a “first class tosser”, Julie Bishop who stated in response “while it is tempting to ridicule the arrogant foolishness of this egotistical self-promoter, his book carries a real risk of damaging Australia’s standing among currently serving world leaders,” or Peter Hartcher who compared him to a delusional Don Quixote.
Carr answered with an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln, who would respond in letters to his critics simply with: “You may be right.”
Perhaps because of its proximity to Canberra, the Sydney Writers’ Festival has always done politics well, attracting well known politicians and political journalists, and I saw two events that day on writing and politics that intersected in interesting ways: Carr on his Diary, and How Do Novelists Engage with Politics? with Christos Tsiolkas, Alexis Wright and Kathryn Heyman discussing the political themes in their fictional works.
“There is a romantic image of the author in their garret, shut off from the real world. But you can’t read The Swan Book, you can’t read Floodline without encountering the real world,” Tsiolkas began, referring to the works of the other panelists. “Politics is the heart of why I wanted to be a novelist,” and his concerns have spilled into writing political non-fiction, recently with an essay for the Monthly on asylum seekers. “I felt like my head was going to explode. The issue had become so poisonous.” He said he felt lucky that he had “asserted a space for this sort of non-fiction writing now, but my preferred mode is still to rush into fiction.”
Tsiolkas described his difficulties writing Barracuda, worrying that the current political issues it centres on it would date it. “When you write a political book, you can be accused of polemic, didacticism and earnestness. But sometimes politics matters more than fiction. Sometimes,” he finished, quoting an old friend of his from Melbourne he mentioned at the beginning of his speech, “you need to kick down those Parliament doors and tell those rich bastards they can’t get away with it.”
The format of the session was speeches by each of the three writers, and Alexis Wright took to the lectern next, her speech soft and halting. She spoke of the experience of writing The Swan Book, which she began when Howard was in power “in that time a lot of dreams were squashed for the Aboriginal people.” His treatment of Indigenous Australians was being reported daily, and Wright wondered to herself, “was I going to listen to and read news about Howard every day, or was I going to read about swans? I chose swans.” Choosing their own culture, a “sovereignty of the mind,” Wright said is fundamentally important to her and her people.
Kathryn Heyman explained her difficulties with writing novels as a way to engage with politics: “it’s not kicking down a door and standing with the workers, but it’s all I’ve got.” And yet, she argued, “who you pay attention to is intrinsically political. I don’t see how a novel can be apolitical. There is a base line question: who am I in solidarity with?”
One of the pleasures writers festivals offer is hearing the particular cadence of the voice of those authors you almost only read in prose, the author pic you’re familiar with suddenly animated. The politician, however, we are used to hearing: they accompany us in the mornings on TV and radio, we’re endlessly familiar with their face, caricatured in cartoons and on the front pages of newspapers. The shock of the new for them is reading them in prose, and for all the scorning criticism and hilarity surrounding how concave his abs might be, or with how much disdain he regarded the service on some airlines, Carr can write.
Yet what struck me in Carr’s session was how relaxed and trained he is – as opposed to the agitated and passionate speeches of the authors in the earlier session: Tsiolkas speaking forcefully and almost exasperated at his own lack of answers, Wright gentle and meandering but sharp in her criticism. Carr was effortlessly able to conduct the audience to laughter or concern. As he noted candidly in the session, “entertainment is part of the political function. Let’s be honest – you want to be entertained. If politicians are entertaining they’ve got more leeway to make big policy decisions because everyone’s diverted by the show.”
Carr noted that Graham Richardson had criticised him for contradictions in opinion in the Diary. “The value of a diary is you set it down as you see it. A memoir doesn’t. To record your mistakes has an authenticity that you don’t get in a thick, boring, ironed-out memoir.”
An interesting admission was a conversation Carr records in the Diary, in which Rudd – knowing the election to be lost, the campaign in tatters, the Murdoch press savaging him every day – comments to Carr how few people actually control power in Australia: the Murdoch media, the head of Rio and BHP, a few bank chiefs and maybe a few property developers. Carr comments, “It was entirely unethical of me to reproduce that conversation. But I reproduced it because history should have it recorded, he and I are the only witnesses. I treasure history and it needed to be recorded. The value of this book, if it has any value, is that it captures moments in parliamentary politics like that: the prime minister – he’s got one week left to run, he knows he’s lost the campaign, and he’s reflecting in his office over a cup of tea, how few people run Australia.”
Carr described that period for the ALP as playing out a “Jacobean revenge drama: in one act the knife is flashing, the blood is flowing, the next act that’s got to be avenged, the next act he’s smoldering with hatred, the final act the stage is littered with gasping corpses.”
When session Chair Marian Wilkinson mentioned Peter Hartcher’s report during Rudd’s attempted coup that Carr had switched camps, Carr was strongly negative about the Sydney Morning Herald journalist. “He is way too close to the Rudd Camp. He became so dependent on them for leaks. He’s too much of a transactional journalist. Sorry, but Peter Hartcher does not write my script.”
When Wilkinson interjects that she now feels she must step in to defend Hartcher, Carr comments “I’m under no obligation to be fair to him – he’s not fair to me.”
The conversation ends again on an analysis of food, for which the Diary has become notorious: the terrible catering at government house. He recounts a night at the Senate estimates committee, “I was forced to eat in the Parliament dining room, it’s a form of vengeance by the Australian citizenry on their politicians. Yes, we’ve elected you, but you’ve got the worst caterers in the country, and you’re too scared to up the standard, because you know what we’ll do to you.”
