Certainly, Dutton and White were friends for a long period, and it was to Dutton that White sent his play The Ham Funeral, knowing that Dutton was on the Adelaide Festival of Arts drama committee. Dutton showed it to Harris, who was enthusiastic about the play and recognised that it should be performed. With Medlin’s assistance, they arranged for the play to be performed at the Adelaide University Union Theatre in 1961. It enjoyed a great success. In 1962 they followed this with The Season at Sarsaparilla, and in 1964 with Night on Bald Mountain. Harris wrote an insightful program note to Season at Sarsaparilla:

One thing is certain. White’s powerful and febrile imagination, his poetic sensibility, and above all the magnificent originality of his language, have produced an effect on dramatists and Australian theatregoers [...] we can say with some certainty that the whole course of Australian drama will be modified in some significant way by the very play we are seeing tonight.

Marr paints Adelaide as generally backward-looking. The festival drama committee had welcomed The Ham Funeral at its presentation by Dutton and Harris. It was one member of the Board of Governors who was prejudicial. Unfortunately, he wielded certain influence in the town and his views prevailed. Slating the Adelaide Festival governors does not prove a great deal. Other states were slow to acknowledge White’s literary stature.

On at least one occasion while the plays were being performed, White and Manoly Lascaris stayed with the Harris family at Kensington Park. Despite his earlier angry feelings towards the conservative Board of Governors, White enjoyed the city: ‘More than ever I felt that I want to live in Adelaide. One feels happy just walking about the streets, as we discovered when we were there five or six years ago, and now of course I have many friends. Max is really a marvel at organising any kind of campaign.’

Marr makes an unexplained and unjustified reference to ‘Harris’s better days’. He also makes a flippant reference to the literary journal Australian Letters as ‘Dutton’s Australian Letters’. The editors – Max Harris, Geoffrey Dutton, and Bryn Davies – jointly requested that White write an essay on his views of the expatriate state. White’s first and only published essay, it was commissioned as a response to Paris-resident poet Alister Kershaw’s essay on why one would not return to Australia. Whether it was White being his characteristic pig-headed and contrary self, or whether he truly felt that he belonged in Australia while despising the place, cannot be known.

Dubbing the journal ‘Dutton’s’ shows ignorance of the true nature of that important literary paper. The journal was essentially Harris’s. Dutton, along with Davies, was invited to co-edit the journal. Dutton did so with his characteristic enthusiasm and gusto, working hard to realise Harris’s vision. Dutton was certainly an important figure in the journal’s making, but to refer to it as ‘Dutton’s’ is wrong.

Betty Snowden, Coburg North, Vic.

Straw men

Dear Editor,

I thank ABR for generous attention to Demanding the Impossible: Seven Essays on Resistance (May 2012), but the misreadings in Judith Armstrong’s review must be addressed. Ms Armstrong finds the opening essay diffuse, ‘wandering from one sad subject to another’. The stages of this essay are in fact explicitly dated and located, and include reference to the Aboriginal poet Dennis McDermott’s writings. There’s nothing ‘sad’ about McDermott’s work, to which Ms Armstrong doesn’t refer; there is much that is challenging and complex, heartening and exciting. Ms Armstrong suggests that the following essay is on David Hicks and asks, ‘is the cause not passé?’ The essay is not simply about Hicks (even if it were, Guantánamo Bay is still in operation). It is about a protest rally held in December 2006; it is about the way such events work as social interaction, and about citizens’ need for symbolic resistance.

Ms Armstrong sets up straw men; she finds that some instances of resistance are merely ‘admirable’ – read predictable, dismissable – and ‘admirable’ is not enough. True, but nor is it enough to dismiss Aboriginal political and cultural resistance, in the essay called ‘Out There’, as merely ‘admirable’. She writes ‘On then to West Papua …’ as though I were merely ticking off the boxes, and as though everyone knows about that area of Australian political disgrace. They don’t – check the media. The essay on East Timor, of which Ms Armstrong does approve, is centrally about the neglected writings of Jill Jolliffe and of James Dunn, who gave up a diplomatic career to keep the East Timor story visible. Ms Armstrong imports Shirley Shackleton here, as though the essay referred to her in any way; it does not. Mrs Shackleton’s interventions in that history are very widely publicised, and need no help from me.

Ms Armstrong laments that ‘the battle cries of warriors do not necessarily incite the next generation to bear arms’. Hasn’t she noticed the (mostly youthful) Occupy movements, which inherit May ’68 as vividly and validly as that insurrection inherited the wartime resistance? Bearing arms is not the point; this kind of resistance craves neither guns nor political power, but justice.

Sylvia Lawson, Newtown, NSW