Below is the ficto-critical opening to my PhD.
__________________________

I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood.

(Foucault, 1997: 318)

Two trends coalesced during the 1980s – the internationalisation of the world economy in which success became the survival of the fittest; and the gradual but inexorable weakening of Australia’s ‘imperial’ links with its two patrons, Britain and America. The message was manifest – Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate. (Kelly, 1994: 13)

I am [. . .] interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, his social group. (Foucault, 1997: 291)

 

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote that

[t]he starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory. (1971: 324).

While I appreciate that Gramsci’s choice of verbs here could be construed as recommending an account, it is fitting that this thesis begins with an ambiguity over terms that can turn either toward narrative or economic meanings. While I will proceed by keeping to the spirit of Gramsci’s advice, I want, however, to shift into a narrative mode in order to tell my own story of citizenship and formation, or Bildung. Not because I think it’s of great interest, but because it helps to orient the different directions that this thesis sets out on. I lived through the long Labor Decade in three ways pertinent to this thesis: through my experiences in a small family business; in my participation in Sydney musical culture; and by studying English at Technical College and at University. Having lived through it my first reference points are those historical traces this time deposited in me.

*


There are a number of rites of passage that can mark the transition from adolescence into adulthood; ones that can also signal the crossing from minor to formal citizen. When I turned 18 in 1983, just too late to vote in the Australian Federal election that former President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Bob Hawke won at the helm of the Australian Labor Party, I could’ve confidently flashed my provisional driver’s licence at Bryant’s band room on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. In order to prove I was legally entitled to drown around eight 12 ounce plastic cups of scotch and carbonated coke-syrup mix that night at Manly Vale Hotel while watching, listening and half-dancing to Liverpool band “Echo and the Bunnymen”, I would’ve exchanged that moment of adult recognition but just like the time at Bryant’s the previous year when the high-school based all-male gang had gone to see Manchester band “New Order” play no one asked me for ID.

In 1983 I went to Macquarie University in North Western Sydney, to Study Arts/ Economics, dropped out six months later and went to work in the family business for the next eight or so years. C********’s Hire was a building and party equipment hire business in Brookvale, near Manly. The business was built in the late 1960s, and 1970s on jackhammering out the sand and ironstone footings that many of the houses around Manly are firmly pinned into. In the 1980s the business expanded into hiring pig spits and trestle tables, mirror balls and marquees. We hired out a lot of wallpaper strippers in the 1980s: the 1970s being the epoch of flock and foil wall coverings.

I didn’t really start to get asked for ID at pub-rock venues until I had my Black Driver’s Licence and was paying taxes. By that stage post-punk bands like “New Order” no longer played at suburban pubs like the Manly Vale Hotel, and they no longer played guitar-based post-punk music having moved into electronic synthesised and computer sequencer-based dance music.

When I was finally being asked to show identification, Prime Minister Hawke’s popularity had been tarnished by what some political commentators claimed was an opportunistically early election, held in late 1984, and his deputy and Federal Treasurer Paul Keating’s media presence was on the ascendant.  On 14 May 1986 Treasurer Keating issued a strange and dramatic warning on the nationally syndicated AM radio’s talk-back king, John Laws, radio show:. A sharp descent in the value of the Australian dollar on foreign currency exchanges, and an acceleration in the deficit on the national Current Account, impelled Keating to address the Australian public explaining “that Australia ‘was living beyond our capacities to meet our obligations by $12 billion [and] we just can’t let that continue'” (cited in Edwards: 296). In response to a question from Laws about using interest rate increases to address the current account problems, Keating replied “‘Then you are gone. You are a Banana Republic'” (296).

It was around this time that Dad began to computerise the hire business. Ahead of the game. His partner, my Uncle G, known as the ideas man of the two, resisted this as faddish and wasteful and demonstrated this to me by contrasting the computer with the slide rule: a complex wooden calculation device that I never got the hang of. But being an ideas man Uncle G soon came around to the idea that computerising stock, contracts, and accounts, taxes and wages saved time, and made money.

By the end of the 1980s Uncle G, Aunty C and my four cousins had moved north near Gosford after an acrimonious cleaving of the brothers. Uncle Geoff bought an acreage on which he set up a skirmish, paint-ball business. It’s still going.

I spent much of the 1980s working in the family business accumulating and playing musical equipment, reading John Irving and Elmore Leonard novels and smoking bongs. To see bands you had to travel to the city or the inner west as band music venues left the suburbs and some pubs were dismantled and redeveloped as townhouse complexes, as Bryant’s would be in the 1990s.,The various subcontractors hired to refashion the old hotel hired diamond-blade bricksaws, concrete vibrators and aluminium scaffolding from my family’s business.

By the end of the 1980s the stable set of staff who had been there since the mid 1970s were gone, and a regime of casualisation in place. My father, an economist by training who had worked for the Public Service Board when Sir Robert Menzies still ran the show in the early 1960s, made the business efficient, productive, lean and flexible enough to weather the high interest rates of the late 1980s and the proceeding recession. At the end of 1990 I broke it to my Dad that I would be going back to University, via a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) course. I had seen the American movie Dead Poets Society and wanted to be an English teacher like the one Robin Williams played.

By the beginning of the 1990s an investment in piano lessons during the 80s opened a few doors into reggae and funk covers bands. I was finally making my way in the world.

I left home for good.

After TAFE at New South Wales University in 1992 studying for a Bachelor of Arts in English and History, combined with a Bachelor of Education, Secondary School, I was soon under the spell of a version of post-colonial literary theory, which made the afterlife of Australia’s colonial past present to me in ways that I found deeply exciting and challenging.

It seemed to be a good time to be doing postcolonial study in the early to mid 1990s as the Keating mythos, in Meaghan Morris’s terms, morphed from its economics phase in the 1980s to the history phase in the 1990s (1998: 13). There was a feeling of certainty around in those days that the slow climb out of the 1990-91 recession was likely to continue and if you felt yourself to be on the Left that a Republic was around the corner, that White Australia was finally getting comfortable with its geographical proximity to Asia, and that the Mabo decision and the legislative framework put in place to administer Native Title claims, were building momentum toward an act of reconciliation.

After living near North Sydney TAFE, my partner and I had moved to Camperdown, near Sydney University, in 1992 and while there I started to see bands again, especially at the urging of my old high school friend and band mate Chris Lobb, who had kept the postpunk flame alive, through the 1980s, while I had drifted into the apostasy of funk and reggae cover bands: playing for money rather than beers. In those days the centre of the inner-west band circuit was Newtown’s Sandringham Hotel, and a group of us spent Federal election night there in 1993, ostensibly to immerse ourselves in a “Peg” gig, expecting Keating to have been another short-lived prime minister, following in Gough Whitlam’s footsteps (1972-75), after his long, public, acrimonious struggle with Bob Hawke. I remember Lobb close to tears that night as the commentators on the old colour TV perched in the corner of the public bar at the Sandringham, began to strike a tone of amazement at the polling numbers and scrutineers’ reports. Even though I was from a small business family, I felt that Keating’s victory was for a Left that I was part of too: perhaps a cultural, even postcolonial, Left. And the vanquished that night, John Hewson’s Liberal-National Party coalition, seemed rightly to have been repudiated. They had campaigned on a near-universal consumption tax and other Neoliberal measures that, while not so distinct from Labor’s policies, appeared a step too far down the Thatcherite-Regan path. We watched in the Sandringham as Keating took to the Bankstown Sports Club stage:

Well, this is the sweetest victory of all – this is the sweetest. This is a victory for the true believers, the people who in difficult times have kept the faith and to the Australian people going through hard times – it makes their act of faith all that much greater.

It will be a long time before an Opposition party tries to divide this country again. It will be a long time before somebody tries to put one group of Australians over here and another over there.

The public of Australia are too decent and they are too conscientious and they are too interested in their country to wear those sorts of things.

This, I think, has been very much a victory of Australian values, because it was Australian values on the line and the Liberal Party wanted to change Australia from the country it’s become – a cooperative, decent, nice place to live where people have regard for each other.

And could I say to you that I wanted to win again, to be there in the 1990s to see Australia prosper, as it will.

The thing is, I said to the Australian people “we’ve turned the corner”. Can I say now, after the election, let me repeat it: we have turned the corner. The growth is coming through. We will see ourselves as a sophisticated trading country in Asia and we’ve got to do it in a way where everybody’s got a part in it, where everyone’s in it.

There’s always cause for concern but never pessimism and Australia, wherein for the first time in our history, located in a region of the fastest growth in the world, and we’ve been set up now, we are set up now as we’ve never been set up before to be in it, to exploit it, to be part of it.

It offers tremendous opportunities for Australians and now we have to do it, and we have to do it compassionately. (Keating, 1993: pars. 1-8)

In 1995 I wrote an honours thesis on three of David Malouf’s novels, arguing that Malouf’s postcolonialism worked alongside both a romantic, transcendental conception of the power of the creative imagination, and a Heideggerean philosophy of being in which existential authenticity was enabled by the anticipation of death, or encounters with primary ambivalence. I received my combined degree after practical teacher training in 1996, and in need of a steady income soon returned to the family business after it became apparent that there were few English teaching jobs available.  So I went back to the family business, some English tutoring and music.

When Keating had won the leadership of the federal ALP, amidst a recession that cut deeply, in 1991, a Seattle band called “Nirvana” was gathering a mass culture storm around their songs and performances. Just as the band that “New Order” formed out of – “Joy Division” – had been a cult touchstone for my generation, Nirvana combined similar cult cachet with mainstream success. Grunge arrived not only in the musical world but, strangely, became the name foisted on a style of dirty-realist urban fiction in Australia. Andrew McGahan’s Praise published in 1992 and set mainly around Kangaroo Point and the old New Farm in Brisbane, is generally considered the germinal grunge novel, followed by a number of similarly styled novels in the period up to 1995. 1995 was a year of literary scandals. The year when the appellation grunge was retrospectively bestowed and the generationalism that Mark Davis describes and attacks in his book Gangland (1999) become a key weapon in the culture wars that Keating was so engaged in. Critics and reviewers with parental personas wondered if Grunge lit was as lazy as Praise’s Gordon? Good writing took hard work, and didn’t rely on the easy shock value of graphic sex, graphic drug use and graphic language. Good writing required a level of maturity that had to be earned and experienced. Grunge was typing not writing. At least Christos Tsiolkas’ Ari in Loaded could be slotted into the fictional politics of identity, but all that reckless drug taking, clubbing and beat sex. And no job.

By the mid 1990s, in my year of practical teaching and in the Labor Party’s last year in Federal Government for more than a decade, I was playing in a more alternative revue-style band with Chris Lobb and Peter Fenton, who was attempting to reinvent himself, and earn a bit of extra cash on the side, outside of the postpunk persona he performed in his main band “Crow”. [i] I was never that close to Peter, but was very impressed by him: a dynamic performer, with the onstage charisma of the “Go-Betweens'” Robert Forster and the song-writing talents of Don Walker of “Cold Chisel”. Peter had been chosen to play the asthmatic, premature ejaculating, unemployed Gordon, opposite Sacha Horler as Cynthia Lamonde in the film adaptation of Praise. When I read the novel I was caught by its realism and Gordon’s voice. It was depressing and somehow uplifting and it flowed – like “Nirvana’s” song Lithium – in turns angry and melancholic. Gordon’s failure to mature, his failed formation or Bildung, resonated with me like the best of Peter Fenton’s songs, like “New Order’s” debut song Ceremony which was their transition song performed first as “Joy Division” with Ian Curtis before his suicide. Reading Praise was like letting my feelings surface onto the page. I felt dirty reading it, but elated at the same time. As though something, perhaps a ghost, was released.

I was beaten, I was tired of questions. I did know what I was doing. The problem was that the knowledge was deeply unconscious, it was a premonition, it was a gut-level instinct. I knew I had to stick it out with this life for some reason, some important reason [. . .] It wasn’t anything external at all. It was something profoundly internal. Something to do with simple survival. With existence. I wasn’t even close to knowing. But in some ways, what I was doing – wandering around this way, month after month, wasting my time, my health, my money, going nowhere, seeing nothing – somehow it had a purpose. My life as a whole felt right, as much as all the individual pieces of it looked wrong. (McGahan, 1995a: 258)

The genre of post-punk music was formative for me: it felt right. By the end of the long Labor decade I was performing and recording music with a number of bands, including “Crow” who also contributed to the soundtrack of the movie adaptation of Praise. How I came first to read and engage with McGahan’s debut novel is not through Australian literary but Australian musical culture. This might seem an irrelevant, even vain, point to make, especially in the introduction of a thesis, but this personal optic is also an aural amplifier. There is a considerable literature on the culture and sociology of musical aesthetics and the dominance of optical and visual metaphors to describe the operations of the psyche – think of how the concepts of the imaginary and the gaze dominate cultural analyses – and thought shouldn’t prevent us from valorising sound thinking; thinking through and on sound and music as cultural forms of historical experience.[ii] The musical culture of the period is for me and the Sydney Inner West milieu I mixed in not one where punk is followed by “Nirvana’s” Grunge rock. This narrative is common in the musical culture context accompanying literary reviews of Grunge fiction, eliding the period of postpunk and the historical sociology of musical form. Thinking together my own experiences in small family business and musical culture over the period enables an approach to Australian Grunge, political and Bildung(sroman) novels from a number of boundaries in the field of knowledge that while demarcated by Australian literary studies and Australian political texts are also subject to the sounds of jackhammer moils beating out sandstone and overdriven bass guitars grinding.

*

In social theorist Peter Beilharz’s book Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia (1994), the period of the book’s title is itself transformed in the preface, written after the 1993 election victory for the ALP and Keating, where Beilharz writes:

 

The election of a fifth consecutive federal Labor government on 13 March 1993 astonished many people, the present writer included. Until that point, the working title for this study was The Labor Decade – Innovation and Exhaustion in Australian Politics 1983-93. My considered sense for the moment is that this title could still apply – apart from chronology. The extension of the long Labor decade to 1996 represents a reprieve rather than a great historic shift [. . .] Viewed in terms of its past or its ethos Labor is indeed in many senses dead, or at the very least exhausted. (1994: ix, emphasis added)

By the end of the long Labor decade, in March 1996, like Gordon Buchanan in Praise and Peter Beilharz above, I also felt melancholic, ready for the true believers, the real Australian political and cultural Left to take back government. Not yet ready to mourn the end of a Labor government and all the hopes and desires invested in it after one defeat, it could be said that from this distance the end of the long Labor decade signalled more than the last rattles of a dead, exhausted Australian political-cultural formation: it was a loss that could not be named or worked through, but was instead denied and acted out. Music was for me a way of getting through that period: learning about and playing in traditions that were recent and old; participating in creating music and being present while other bands and artists emerged. I also think that Praise‘s Gordon Buchanan’s voice and reflections begin to name that structure of feeling that can get through a loss like the one Peter Beilharz attempts to name, describe and analyse in 1994, and which Meaghan Morris also writes of in its wake:

Given that the contradictions between [the tourist industry-based] culturalist program [involving ‘state support for an export image of Australian as an urbane, socially liberal, multiculturalist heaven’] and the economic realities of life for most rural and working-class people had been obvious for a decade before the “Keating era” [1991-96] had began, it is not surprising that the era ended with a devastating defeat for Labor at the federal election of March 1996. For historians, it will be a long time before this period can be seriously evaluated. (1998: 13)

This thesis is a contribution toward that serious evaluation through a combined political and literary history of the long Labor decade.

 

[i] It might appear odd but in this thesis I will use a capitalised ‘G’ Government to refer to the Government as opposed to the heuristic that Foucault deploys – government – meaning the practices of conducting the conduct of oneself, others or any social formation. The purpose of signalling the distinction between Government and government in this way, following the Foucauldian “research program devoted to the study of rationalities of government in the modern West”, is to indicate that “government is heterogeneous and pervasive [and] it intrudes into all aspects of life [and] should not be seen as emanating from a single controlling centre – [. . .] the state” (Dean and Hindess: 2).

[ii] Theodore Adorno’s work in this stream of the sociology of musical form and his affirmation, albeit guarded, of Schönberg’s 12-tone system as the only path through tonality is severely limited by its Eurocentric and high-modernist prejudices. But what Adorno established was that the sociology of twentieth century musical form must begin with the exhaustion of tonality and its symbolic forms of harmony and reconciliation, which for Adorno are homologous to the forms of reification that capitalist commodity exchange and Enlightenment Reason produce (Martin, 2002: 9-10).

The most significant extension of Adorno’s analysis of post-tonality in music is Jacques Attali’s Noise: the Political Economy of Music (1985) which seeks to provide a historical-structuralist approach to the political economy of music. Attali argues that human systems of exchange and production are first worked out in the field of music: he famously writes that “[m]usic is prophecy” (11). For Attali changes in the production, distribution and consumption of music prefigure transformations in western political economy. The starting assumption for Attali is Rene Girard’s notion of the link between violence and the sacred: the production of music is essentially an imitation of the sacrificing of the scapegoat which any ‘society’ must perform periodically as a means of ending cycles of revenge killing: ending the general violence. Music is mimetic of sacrifice: a gift that exceeds repayment. Thus music is active in the general economy and by tracking changes in the economies of music Attali persuasively argues that phases of modernity correlate to orders of music. The order of Sacrifice is superseded by that of Representation which in turn is overwhelmed by the order of Repetition. Attali posits a fourth order, that of Composition, which he argues is prophesised by improvisational play and ‘playing’ primarily for self-pleasure, as can be heard in Jimi Hendrix’s solos and jazz improvisation. Nevertheless, Attali’s theory of historical musical orders is both most interesting and most contentious as he outlines and explains the factors that presage and mark the paradigm shift from the order of Representation to that of Repetition.

Central to this explanation is the notion that commodity exchange in capitalism is actually an exchange of dead labour: that the commodity form is one of sacrificed labour-time. During the rise of Western European Liberal capitalism music was always embodied. Whether decoded from a score or played from folk-memory music was performed by musicians for an audience. But with the rise of mechanical reproduction music was recorded and could thereby be re-played in situations no longer structured by national and bourgeois institutions. This dis-embodying also amounts to the victory of the simulacra, or the mediatised parade of empty signifiers, that Jean Baudrillard alongside Guy Debord has argued marks the shift from industrial capitalism, where products are produced and consumed, to the society of the spectacle where signs are produced and consumed. The visual bias in this account is immediate once Attali’s aural history is heard, but what is clear is that Attali’s account of Repetition leans heavily on Baudrillard’s concept of the commodity form as dead-labour.

Attali writes:

Repetition is established through the supplanting, by mass production, of every present-day mode of commodity production. Mass production, a final form, signifies the repetition of all consumption, individual or collective, that replacement of the restaurant by pre-cooked meals, of custom-made clothes by ready-to-wear, of the individual house based on stereotypical designs, of the politician by the anonymous bureaucrat, of skilled labor [sic] by standardized tasks, of the spectacle by recordings of it. (1985: 128)

Robert Fink in his study of the sociology of American pulse-pattern minimalist music argues that

Attali’s broad grasp of socioeconomic realities is unmatched, as is his materialist understanding of how technological advances in production and reproduction engender passive repetition in consumer society – but he is too in love with Thanatos to see how complex and multivariate our experience of repetition might be. (2005: 8)

For Fink, part of this multivariance is the erotic dimension to the production of demand that Attali either ignores or eschews in favour of the centrality of death to the order of repetition: ‘For death [. . .] is present in the very structure of the repetitive economy: the stockpiling of use-time in the commodity object is fundamentally a herald of death‘ (Attali, 1986: 126). To some extent Fink’s approach to repetitive music, his foregrounding of Eros over Thanatos is complementary to Foucault’s focus on the productivity of desire as opposed to the repression of desire, and thus valence of Thanatos, as the mark of civilisation (Fink 2005: 4-12, Hamilton, 137-38).

So, if repetition is one way out of tonality, and there are diverse social-psychological interpretations of this broad musical form that range from a focus on the Death-drive to those focussing on the creation of desire, then such a brief foray as this into the historical sociology of musical form reveals that ‘sound thinking’ offers a rich counter-point to the visually dominated terminology and explanations thereby enabled by much historical and cultural study. While this thesis is in no way a musical history it will at times draw on aspects and methods of this sub-field of historical sociology in order to strengthen and extend some of the arguments concerning literary form and especially concerning Grunge culture in Chapter 2. In particular it is the equation of grunge and thereby punk-rock music with an untheorised notion of noise or dissonance as authentic rebellious youth-culture expression that I want to dispel.