In the wake of the spectacular collapse of Rothwells and unsavoury revelations about Western Australian entrepreneurial enterprise, it is very apposite for Penguin to have republished Nick Hasluck’s 1980 novel, The Blue Guitar. This novel, as relevant now as nine years ago, deals with the world of entrepreneurship with its illusory money, fast talk, and duplicity. It is a world of the corrupt and the corruptible, where principles and moral certainties give way before glib notions of innovative thinking and flexibility.

Hasluck’s protagonist, Dyson Garrick, self-styled promoter and developer, is a babe in this wood, despite his flair and his capacity ‘to push hard for something worthwhile, to take a shortcut now and then’. Dyson fancies himself as a sharp operator, but he is also something of a sentimental idealist. Having got hold of a promising invention, a transistorized guitar, he is overwhelmed with the vision of a new generation of communal togetherness, of rescuing youth from boredom and self-abuse:

Dyson felt inside him, like a living thing struggling toward the sun, a certainty, a sense of exultation, that this instrument, this almost bizarre curio, was going to work, that he could carry it right through, that there was something about it people would take hold of and insist on having.

Dyson is a likeable character: flamboyant, fun-loving, and funny. He is also fundamentally flawed. As a passionate devotee of the cult of entrepreneurial success, he is willing to sacrifice his peace of mind, his personal relationships and, inevitably, his moral integrity. It’s the hype and adrenaline rush that get him, which he likes to compare to the thrill of the free fall: ‘You’re just about flying. You can do virtually anything.’ Everything, that is ‘except go back up’. Like the smart boys on whom he models himself, Dyson hustles from one project to the next barely ahead of the creditors and the government regulators. It is an activity not dissimilar to the wheel of perpetual motion he is shown by his hapless partner: ‘A wheel that spins without depending on any external source of power ... not necessarily a fraud, my friend, but another riddle. One of the great riddles.’

But as the regulators and the creditors close in, Dyson finds it is not idealism but self-interest and duplicity which keep the wheels of enterprise spinning. At the end of the free fall, he has to acknowledge, is a body in a field of mud; and when it comes to the crunch he will cheat on his partner to save himself. Why should he expect something different? As his father says: ‘That’s what businessmen do ... Isn’t it? Rip it off each other.’

It is also Dyson’s father who points out that: ‘Guitars can be turned into art. Not just projects.’ He refers in this instance to the poem by Wallace Stevens which gives the novel its title:

The man bent over his guitar,
a shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
you do not play things as they are’.

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar’.

And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
of things exactly as they are’.

For all his optimism, his energy and genuine goodwill, Dyson Garrick is not a man to play ‘things exactly as they are’. He has his simple dreams of a more benign, communal life, but his infatuation with fast money and dubious deals leads to the reality of lonely self-loathing, and a world created from junk: ‘all of it pushed up bleakly into crude, serrated skylines, the air within the labyrinthine canyons dank and lifeless; the feeling of it, stifling, suffocating, oppressive’.

The Blue Guitar is in many ways reminiscent of Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel of political corruption All the King’s Men. Like Warren’s flawed hero, Willie Stark, Dyson Garrick believes that he can use corrupt means for idealistic ends, but is inevitably corrupted and destroyed by the forces he sought to use. Hasluck has written a vivid account of the world of shady deals and dirty tricks, but, disappointingly, that is the only world he gives us. In Warren’s novel, the fall of Willie Stark is the vehicle for the moral redemption of the narrator, Jack Burden, and descriptions of the tawdry backroom politics are balanced with philosophical passages of great lyric power. In The Blue Guitar, there is no hint of redemption, no character capable of transcending the venal impulse of the age. I found this a major problem with the novel, since it tended to leave an unpleasant aftertaste. It may be awfully old fashioned of me, but like the unseen audience in Wallace Stevens’s poem, I wish to exhort the novelist: ‘But play, you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.’

In male (I do not, just yet, say ‘patriarchal’) discourse, woman is man’s supplement. The feminist’s perennial dilemma, then, is how to intervene in that discourse which is forever reproducing the very hierarchy that suppresses and excludes her, when – by the power of its appropriation of common sense – that discourse operates not as though it were given her by men, but as though it were simply ‘given’.

Everyone is an intruder when you have all the land. Like other interventionist enterprises, feminism is always already guilty of trespassing on sanctified ground: the sun revolves around the earth, which is flat, and discourses are not gender­inflected. This is particularly problematic for the feminist whose point of interventionist departure is the writing of a woman whose personal dissociation from the women’s movement is a matter of public record.

Stephanie Johnson writes short stories and writes mainly about women. It’s as though there’s a specific genre in current writing that ties together these two kinds of writing, for women writing about other women in short prose pieces make up a distinct category that includes almost all of the familiar names of women writing in Australia now. These women writers include migrants who have made their homes in Australia and write from that position. Johnson, for instance, is a New Zealander.

A convention of this genre is romantic love, and while the cliché used to mean that writing by women about women was no good, it is now this relationship between women and writing and romantic love that has become a powerful means of cultural critique. Another convention in this generic type of writing is ideology. And Stephanie Johnson’s collection of stories might have been called Tales of Love with more than a sideways glance at the work of feminist, especially French, writers. Yet another convention is formal experimentation – this kind of writing is self-conscious about the practice of writing – and Johnson can do that too.

I have often found myself feeling a little frustrated after reading a David Foster novel. While never doubting his ability as a writer, the convolutions of his narrative have, more than once, overshadowed his undeniably fine prose. His latest book, Hitting the Wall, a collection of two novellas, allows us the opportunity to examine how Foster handles the more urgent needs of this much shorter form.

Hitting the Wall also allow us to see two different stages of Foster’s development as a writer. The first novella, ‘Eye of the Bull’, was written in 1986, while the second, ‘The Job’, is a much earlier work having been written in 1973 and having first appeared in Escape to Reality in I977. Both these novellas share similar concerns. Wilson, the central character of ‘Eye of the Bull’, is obsessed with running. In fact he spends most of the novella running, both physically and emotionally. Like a true addict, he believes that he can keep his addiction under control, whereas his addiction gradually overtakes him, and this will cost him his job, his health and eventually his family.

What Revolution? The title’s a teaser! Echoes of Lefty/Godot?

You’ll understand if I’m infected by Noel McLachlan’s prose. On page after page, sentences and semi-sentences addressing the reader informally/colloquially (even verblessly!), rich in apostrophes, italics, parentheses, sloping lines between pairs/triads, even quartets/quintets, of words, ending often with exclamation marks and (nine times on one page I’ve counted!) question marks.

In a suburban theatre somewhere in the most isolated capital city in the world, on an early Sunday morning, the Ambassador for Ireland, James Sharkey, was pouring three glasses of muscatel. This action, rather like the lighting of the Olympic flame, opened the 1989 Writers’ Week of the Festival of Perth.

The presence of the Irish ambassador and the muscatel was accounted for by the first theme of the week, which was that of W.B. Yeats and his influence. It is not surprising that a great many Celtic accents could be heard off stage as well as on. Indeed, the previous night saw a private dinner held by the W.B. Yeats Society of W.A. (one of only four Yeats societies in the world) whose only club rule seemed to be that some of Yeats’s poems should be read and suitably appreciated.

The Keynote address of Writers’ Week was given by Yeats’s American editor, Richard Finneran, who talked, delightfully and entertainingly, on the problematic nature of editing.

Australian academic Peter Kuch gave a paper on Yeats and Ireland, entitled ‘For Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’, borrowing Auden’s famous line. Kuch, making little concession for the non-academics in the audience, came to the conclusion that poetry did make something happen because of the political and personal implications of the constructed nature of language, although he seemed to completely ignore what was the most obvious effect poetry was having that morning. Poetry was making things happen: it was making governments and councils spend money for a lot of people to stand behind a lectern and discourse on the nature of poetry and an Irish poet. It was making a lot of other people spend money to hear these people, as well as to sit through innumerable tea breaks. (The scene was so Celtic it cried out for defamiliarisation in the antipodean framework.) Poetry made writers’ week happen.

For me, and I think for many others, the highlight of the week was the reading of the Irish poet, playwright, novelist, anthologist, and academic Brendan Kennelly. Kennelly had organisers worried when his plane was delayed in Bangkok. After having spent the night under gate forty-two, Brendan looked remarkably fresh, his well-rounded figure, his receding hairline, his good natured but slightly naughty smile giving one the impression of a benevolent uncle. Brendan Kennelly has the knack of making potentially platitudinous things sound like words of wisdom, cliches like well-turned phrases. He made the Anglo-Saxons among us feel guilt without resenting him for it. As Kennelly said himself, poetry should be a ‘bringing together’. Brendan Kennelly’s reading showed a gift that few poets can give to their work, which is to bring life to their poetry. Kennelly must have affected others too: chairman for that session, Dennis Haskell, in thanking Kennelly could come up with little more than ‘bloody marvellous.’ Kennelly also gave a paper on Yeats and his influence on later poets, showing a similarly entertaining and highly personal, though not self-indulgent, ability to bridge the gap between the academy and the world.

Other academics to give papers were John Harwood, world expert on Olivia Shakespear, Patrick Furey, and Peter Alexander. Ron Blair read a wonderfully witty short story which fictionalised the meeting of Yeats and Australian playwright Louis Esson. One of the sad absences was Vincent Buckley, in whose place was friend and New Zealander Vincent O’Sullivan, who gave a memorial paper on Buckley. O’Sullivan also gave, along with Western Australian poet, critic, and recently retired academic Fay Zwicky, a reading of original poems.

On Monday, the participants in a Poets’ lunch sheltered from the heat under the gum trees outside the Subiaco theatre centre, at which a reading of Louis Esson’s Vagabond Camp was given, led by John McCallum.

Having been immersed in Yeats and all things Irish, we were suddenly plunged into the second theme of the week, ‘Fact, Fiction and Fantasy’, subtitled ‘We Are All Writers’, and devoted to the relationship of ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ writing and the reputation of writers of non-fiction.

We were thrown in at the deep end with Dennis Altman’s ‘The Politics of Poetry’, in which, as seems common today with the most theoretically advanced, poetry was redefined so radically that it may mean anything, and this becomes its political force. Altman’s paper was a good example of the rhetorical power and limitations of political assertions.

Brian Matthew, author of prize winning biography of Louisa Lawson, Louisa, de-authorised his own text by admitting to its constructed nature. Nell Dunn, well-known author of Poor Cow, Up the Junction, and Steaming gave a disappointing paper on writing as the purging of the forbidden, while reading huge tracts of Chekov for almost no apparent reason. Margaret Barbalet gave what must have been a rather hurriedly prepared paper in the absence of Drusilla Modjeska.

Perhaps more generally appealing were the many and excellent readings given over the second half of the week. Of great interest was the appearance of Brian Patten, who for twenty-five years has been labelled a ‘Liverpool poet’. Patten’s keynote was accessibility, and his paper ‘Comedy in Poetry’ was simply a reading of his own humorous verse for children and adults. Patten had great stage presence; he would move the lectern away from himself, and begin as confidently as a stand-up comedian. ‘I’m not a very good speaker in terms of talks’, he said and proceeded to give a lively reading.

There were also some forward-looking moments. Australian author, Rod Jones read a story from a forthcoming collection of short stories all written in response to the Jeffrey Smart painting The Expressway.

Margaret Barbalet read from her forthcoming novel and Marion Campbell, author of Not Being Miriam, performed her paper with the help of Jacki Reed. What could have easily been metafictional rubbish turned out to be a hilarious romp through the ‘Strange Suburbia’ that surrounded us, and which we had been inhabiting metaphorically in the discussion of the fictional and non-fictional.

The week ended with a discussion promisingly entitled ‘Don’t Label Me, I’m a Writer’ with Nell Dunn, Margaret Barbalet, Brian Matthews, Brian Patten, Rod Jones, and Dennis Altman. Unfortunately the chairperson had disappeared and the discussion lacked focus and became (fittingly perhaps) disparate voices extolling disparate views.

Other events were held during Writers’ Week in Perth. These were a Bush Ceilidh or ‘informal Gaelic gathering’; a Yeats exhibition at the local library; an exhibition on censorship by International PEN; a performance of Irish theatre (including Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon); the launching of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press’s Wordhord, a critical anthology of contemporary Western Australian poets, followed by a writers’ cabaret, which included poetry readings and music. Writers’ Week was funded by the Government of Western Australia through the Department of the Arts, the Australia Council, and the British Council.