Christopher Pearson, and the pond sends a batch of telegrams to deserving recipients ...

First to matters arising from the minutes, and it's pleasing to report that comrade Jessica Irvine attracted some 513 comments to her rant, her raging against the dying of the light in Sydney is a sadder, meaner, angrier city. The pond committee has arranged for a celebratory telegram to be despatched forthwith ...

Wonderful rant STOP Splendid whinge STOP Don't stop STOP

Now to business at hand, and it's the committee's view that we should send a congratulatory telegram to the editor of The Sydney Morning Herald or perhaps the Pellist heretics for this splendid dose of product placement and irony:

Yes, we checked today, and still the irony continues here at Don't vote Greens, say Catholic bishops. (no warranty is offered that it will still be there if you click through).

Sure it's been mentioned in despatches elsewhere, in Crikey's Media Briefs, but surely such excellent work deserves universal praise and recognition:

Editor SMH STOP Long may juxtaposition of foolish Catholic anti-green conspiracy thinking and pro-green flash ads continue STOP Congratulations for irony feast STOP Many thanks for unveiling The Catholic Agenda STOP Don't stop NO STOP

Now to the main matter for today. Who's drawn the short straw and has the task of scribbling about Christopher Pearson's numinous outburst in Clutching at culture in world without pity ?

At this point several figures were seen shuffling from the room, and the quorum lapsed, which is a pity because someone really should make fun of Pearson making fun of Julia Gillard's accent.

Proving that he knows how to waste a life, Pearson has spent some time trawling a Bob Ellis tome, and uses his findings to mock, yet again, Gillard's accent.

Carr said: "Gillard's accent, and I have some knowledge of voice-training, is acquired. It is learned. It is trained. It is the required house accent of Slater & Gordon, solicitors. They all talk like that."

Uh huh. Is it something of an irony that Pearson might resort to the common gossip of the Labor party, as led by the misogynistic Ellis, with accomplices Carr and Ramsey, to belabor and belittle Gillard's accent thusly

Not really.

"Pearson's scribbles , and I have some knowledge of scribbling, is acquired. It is learned. It is trained. It is the required house accent of the Murdoch commentariat columnist. They all scribble like that."

It led me to do a little historical thinking. Sadly Gerard Henderson's splendid hatchet job on Pearson as Adelaide leftie has disappeared into the digital void - no doubt it could be retrieved but life is short - but still there's fun pickings to be found which explains a little about Pearson's transformation from chrysalis Adelaide social thinker to man of the world butterfly Catholic conservative.

Let's start with Deborah McCulloch on his days at the helm of The Adelaide Review:

The Adelaide Review is unashamedly elitist, and Christopher would certainly not resile from such a charge.... (words have been deleted at this point on legal advice)...women, there are hardly any women, there's certainly not 50% of his staffers are women. And multicultural people, who are also absolutely absent from the pages of The Review. About 70% of Adelaide's population does not appear, is not addressed by and is irrelevant to The Adelaide Review.

So much for Gillard. And now McCulloch on Pearson on aboriginal Australians:

... (words have been deleted at this point on legal advice)...that he says what other people don't have the courage to say. The knowledge and sympathy I have now for indigenous people has been acquired because I've been forced to dismantle what I see as the racism I was taught within the culture. Edward Said's point that the entire European culture needed the savage in order to define itself as civilised, and that is where I see Christopher as. He needs people that he can despise in order to define himself as the product of the best civilisation that's ever been in the history of the world, and therefore he is licensed.

Uh huh. Civilised. That word will come in handy.

Meanwhile, it would be remiss not to remind readers of Pearson's addiction to poncedom, as explained by Pearson himself:

Don's legacy is a complex matter; it would take a long time to cover. But I think that his legacy in the arts was overwhelmingly a positive one; I think that he also made contributions to (horrible word) lifestyle, the way we live: al fresco eating, the quality of the food we eat, the quality of the things we drink, our confidence and enjoyment of our culture, and seas and beaches and the environment. He had a very clear understanding and evangelical zeal in persuading people about their good fortune in being here and living the kind of life we do.

Adelaide hurrah. You can take the foodie out of Adelaide, but you can never take the Adelaide out of the foodie.

Okay, okay. You really have to have lived there to understand any of the above, or this bout of rampant localism from Pearson:

I was going to say the other thing about Sydney and its attitude to Adelaide, and it's even worse in Sydney than in Melbourne, is that Sydney's a terribly provincial, unselfconsciously provincial city, which has to have poor relations to look down on, in order to the more comfortably and confidently engage in its endless self-aggrandisement. Not a sophisticated city, really.

Ah yes, the dreaded, evil eastern states and their superior ways.

Well there's all this and more in the ABC's 1999 Media Report on The Adelaide Review, including Pearson getting editorially snitchy about being dropped from the Writers' Week Committee when Barrie Kosky was the Artistic Director, and bitching away, but it's all such parochial water under the bridge, that the only point is that at last you can see why Pearson would cackle at the fun to be had in Gillard's accent (though managing to be restrained about the bogan hairdresser, or being barren, or being unmarried, because Ellis and Carr probably didn't have the wit or the malignity at the time to provide him with a source for quoting).

Never mind. Today week, as the parochial state heads for a vote, the legacy of Bob 'panem et circenses' Carr will be there to see, and around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands will stretch far away, with Ellis baying in the distance ...

But, but, but, you say, like a billy goat prone to butting, in your detour through fond memories of Adelaide provincialism, you haven't discussed today's offering, namely Pearson's carefully worded views of Gary Johns' unsentimental view of aboriginal culture, which he sees, at best, as a serviceable culture for the Stone Age.

That's because it's same as it ever was.

The prescient McCulloch has already nailed the way that discussion will evolve. Did we mention civilised?

"There is a gap between modern and pre-modern societies, once called civilised and uncivilised. Denying its existence and the considerable efforts required on the part of individuals to bridge it has been very harmful." He asks: "What are Aborigines fighting for, what is there to preserve? Each step to preserve culture is a step away from the innovation that commenced 200 years ago.

Yep, if you can't actually wipe out the pesky blacks, at least wipe out their culture. And so on and so forth, but of course this raises the alarming prospect that Noel Pearson, the hero of conservatives and The Australian's chattering class, might get a little agitated at the prospect of cultural oblivion:

In a Quarterly Essay entitled Radical Hope, Pearson has outlined a very ambitious program to educate a rising generation able to deal comfortably with modernity and as fully apprised of its own languages and culture as possible.

He predicts it will involve an extended school day, with kids taught the mainstream curriculum and the demanding "high" forms of their tribal languages rather than "kindergarten" versions.

Oh yes, there's much dancing on a pin as Pearson (Noel) seizes on the Jewish capacity to keep a two thousand year old culture burbling along and Pearson (Christopher) burbles as he desperately tries to keep things together:

Judaism has proved to be very versatile in some respects and remarkably unbending in others, but can the same be said for any Aboriginal culture?

I'm reluctantly inclined to the conclusion that the answer is negative. However, that doesn't mean the prescription in Radical Hope doesn't deserve serious funding and moral support.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Serious funding and moral support for a strategy destined to fail - according to the negative Pearson (Christopher).

Plainly, Pearson (Noel) has to work with the cultural materials to hand and it makes sense for him to accentuate the positive. If a significant proportion of Aboriginal youth on Cape York were to become accomplished speakers of local languages and well-schooled in the stories, songs and ceremonies of their ancestors, they'd be much better off than their counterparts anywhere else.

They'd also be in the position to make individual, informed decisions about the extent that they wanted to buy in to their culture and traditional religion; surely something Johns wouldn't begrudge them, provided they also had a solid grounding in the current curriculum as well.

Um, would that be the same Johns that deems aboriginal culture as at best serviceable for the Stone Age? The one that thinks it's totally useless and just gets in the way and prevents integration and an embrace of modernity and all that's grand about the ways of the whitey?

Clearly it gets all too hard for Pearson (Christopher) so he resorts to his usual guff about religion:

In the 1960s, leading American sociologists tended to the pessimistic view that Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy couldn't hope to survive for long their adherents' encounters with modernity.

Nonetheless the evidence suggests that these days substantial numbers of the young are unscathed by the ravages of rampant secularism and seem to draw great strength from an attachment to traditional religion and observing its customs.

Uh huh. So at long last we get around to the way some Catholics are completely besotted by an inability to deal with modernity and seek refuge in such nonsense as the Latin mass, incomprehensible to people in the grip of modernity.

Ought white intellectuals, who as a class have for so long been besotted with their own fantasy versions of traditional Aboriginal religions and customs, deny young Aborigines access to local versions of the numinous experience?

That's it? That's all? The numinous experience? And Pearson has the cheek to talk about white intellectuals besotted with their own fantasy versions of traditional western culture (never mind aboriginal culture), and not realise he's talking about himself?

The numinous experience?

... the numinous experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a Holy other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent.

Aboriginal people are currently deprived of the numinous experience? They have no awareness of the supernatural, the sacred, the holy and the transcendent?

What a prattling prat Pearson is. A worthy acolyte of the Pellist heresy and its blatant political scheming to influence the NSW election. Makes me think voting Green might be the best way to get up the nose of the Pellists ...

Yep, Gillard might have an accent which doesn't suit the tender ears of the citizens of Unley - though I spent a goodly number of years in Unley, unlike Bob Carr, and heard all kinds of rich Australian accents coming from the lumpenproletariat. Come to that, for my sins, I've known a fair number of Slate and Gordon lawyers, and while they speak like donkeys, they do so in a variety of accents ...

But Pearson has an Adelaide ear, and so the matter of accent is terribly important. The trouble is that Pearson is so cloth eared, such a pompous pretentious prat, that when it comes to the matter of indigenous culture, the matter of accent is terribly unimportant, and he should retire to a monastery and contemplate the meaning of the numinous experience and sing the Latin mass to his heart's content for the rest of his days ...

And now, since it's been awhile since we've run a favourite poem, and since a numinous experience is hard to find, and since there's going to be one next Saturday at the NSW election, a big shout out to Bob Carr, the architect of what is about to befall Labor, and Bob Ellis, hereafter known as the Bobsy 'Unley accent' twins.

Let's wax the stax, and spin the 45, and lay that sound on the upcoming sock hop and platter party next Saturday:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is NSW Labor, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Apologies to Percy. A telegram containing a fulsome expression of regret is on its way ...

(Below: an artist's impression of the NSW Labor party).