© 1993 David Myers
© 1993 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Edited By David Myers, Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Some years ago, Bernard Shaw observed that England and America were two countries separated by the same language. The same socio-linguistic observation might well be made of America and Australia today.
It is clear that in Australia, as in the western world generally, there is an inevitable division between high and low culture. The functional literacy required for survival in the world of low culture is pretty basic. Being able to barrack for your favourite football team with meat pie and sauce in one corner of your mouth and beer in the other is, of course, a gift not to be sneezed at. Each culture requires different skills.
Literacy for high culture is inextricably bound up with serious literature. It is sad that serious literature has an unenviable reputation among the general public and certainly among the commercial media for being simply too intellectual, too abstruse, too inaccessible for ordinary people to enjoy. This was not always so in Australia. In the literary golden age of the 1890s the literature of Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson and Steele Rudd was eminently accessible to ordinary people and formed a great part of our national consciousness and identity. It is a mark of the lack of spiritual depth in western society today that commercial publishers promote, and people buy in huge editions, works like Colleen McCullough’s ‘The Thorn Birds’ and Stephen King’s ghoulish horror entertainments and, further, that works such as these find their way almost automatically onto the mass electronic media as serials or feature films, for this is the nature of low-culture literacy.
Contemporary works of Australian literature which offer a serious spiritual challenge to our mindless lifestyle such as Patrick White’s ‘A Fringe of Leaves’ or David Malouf’s ‘The Great World’ or Thea Astley’s ‘Beachmasters’ or Tom Winton’s ‘Cloudstreet’ or works from the third world like Pramoedyra Ananta Toer’s ‘Awakenings’ are virtually ignored by the commercial electronic media. They are thought to be too difficult for a public which is seeking a ‘quick fix’ in diversion, sensual entertainment and fast-food equivalent gratification. As US novelist, playwright and poet Dan Marquis said, “publishing a book of poems (or fiction or essays) in today’s electronic world is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo”.
Literacy and high culture are elitist insofar as they aim to challenge readers with the most profound, the most spiritual and the most tragic treatments of their themes. Everyone who is willing to work at the understanding of great literature is affirming the value and the distinctiveness of high-culture literacy. We shall never produce a wise and spiritually literate Australia until we accept the division of our society into low culture and high culture and happily spend some more of our tax money on maintaining national institutions like the ABC and SBS in such a way that these institutions can broadcast more reviews, discussions, readings and dramatisations of good Australian and foreign literature. To hell with producing a Clever Australia! What about producing an Artistically Literate, Spiritual and Ecological Australia!
Now, I have admittedly phrased these arguments in a rhetorically loaded way. Pardon me, my prejudices are showing. And I have only personal experience and anecdotal evidence to give some flimsy support to my prejudices.
Let us start again in a more dignified, tolerant fashion. Perhaps the complaints of university lecturers and senior high school teachers about the sinking literacy standards of their students today ignore the basic demographic point that we are now trying to give an advanced level education to up to 50 per cent of our youth, instead of the 5 per cent whom we used to regard as an intellectual elite suited for our universities.
The search for a convenient scapegoat on whom to blame this alleged drop in grammatical standards inflames the passions as the buck is passed from schoolteachers to parents and finally to the indifference of a whole society which has allegedly been seduced into electronic communications at the cost of sophistication in written communication.
There is a much wider problem today with the achieving of literacy in Australia and the western world generally. This problem is one of values and priorities. Love of language for its own sake and respect for literacy are low down on people’s priority lists. The majority of our population seems not particularly concerned that after the lapse of a thousand years the greatness of a civilization is not commonly measured by its industrial production or its balance of payments. It is measured by its contribution to philosophy, art, architecture, education and literature.