That’s it, for now… is likely to be the final issue of HEAT in print form. It opens with Freud and Mahler strolling through the pleasant Dutch town of Leyden in Andrew Riemer’s ‘Four Glimpses of the Zeitgeist’, and closes with the late Peter Porter’s celebration of cats and Brisbane. There are new poems by Robert Gray, Vivian Smith, Lisa Gorton, Peter Boyle, Ali Alizadeh, Kate Fagan, Jennifer Maiden.

Shipping Rate: F

Classic Black 9: horse from behind, 2010, 90 x 69 cm (framed)
acrylic on Italian nursery paper

Image Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Brett and Jodie live up at the house, I live in the shed. When I got here Brett showed me pictures from Agriculture. There are three problem species – corellas, galahs and cockatoos. There was a drawing of each one with a red cross through the middle. The drawings made the birds look big and mean, so I laughed.

Brett says, ‘what the fuck’s so funny?’

And I say, ‘they look like them cartoons – like road runner – you know?’

There’s just the three of us – me and Brett and Jodie. It’s a breakfast cereal place. Genetically modified. Brett shows me the bike and gives me the gun. He says the gun’s the real thing with only minor alterations. The bullet case has been bored out to make a big shallow chamber.

‘Here’s your ammo,’ he says, passing me the cartridges.

And I like that because it could be from television too – like I’m fighting bad guys, or Indians or terrorists. The bird cartridges are shaped like lemons, but black. Brett shows me how to shoot and I’m a bit rattled. The noise is fierce and the gun belts hard into my shoulder. And then he goes, back to the house.

It’s just me in the shed and it’ll be getting dark soon so there’s nothing to do. It’s brown inside and it smells of sump oil and sheep. I drag my swag across the floor to the back wall and lay it flat. It doesn’t feel right to sleep straight away so I sit for a while pulling the little balls of sheep shit from the canvas lining of my swag and making stacks of it and thinking about the birds.

Brett told me the birds have always been around. He said they’re part of the Australian landscape. He said in the old days people even caught them and took them home and lived with them. He said they can talk, but if they start talking to me I shouldn’t listen.

‘I’ve been there mate. I’ve done it. You’ll have them in your sights and they’ll try to fuckin’ reason with you. You think it’s your own voice in your head, but they talk sort of spastic. You gotta watch out for the spastic voice inside of you.’

My job is called protection – seasonal protection worker. I’m protecting the breakfasts from the talking birds. When I head out on patrol that first day I feel like I’m going off to war. I swing my leg over the bike as if it’s a horse and then I look around, I would have liked to say goodbye to someone. I kinda nod at the shed and ride off.

I ride around all of the fence lines watching for the galahs and corellas and sulphur-cresteds. Brett says the galahs are worst. I see myself coming home to Brett and Jodie with a big brace of the feathery bastards hanging from the handlebars of the bike. But those first few days there aren’t any galahs to shoot. I bring down a few magpies for training, to keep my eye in.

The crop is starting to push through. The first birds come. They look like rubbish blowing in the paddock, like pieces of pink and white paper. I shoot them and walk in to collect their bodies. The bird cartridges are like bullets except that they kill things without ripping them up. They kill things nicely, so as to save the breakfast cereal from contamination. The dead birds are warm, but they go stiff quickly. I take them home to the shed in old wheat sacks. Brett says cleaning up is important because dead birds act like decoys, once a flock sees a bird on the ground they’ll come down for a look.

That’s the thing about birds – they stick together. They try to find each other; they keep picking up the stragglers, making a bigger flock. With birds everyone’s the same, everyone’s on the inside…

Before sitting at my desk I walk outside. Almost full moon and the wild winds of the South Australian spring of the last few days have gone. I look up at the clouds this evening and long for my writing about love and desire to be like them; so effortlessly powerful, with perfect swerves and sweeps.

To have lost the ability to orgasm before it is time for such a disappearance seems inconceivable. Although in desperate prayers I have begged for this very outcome, for the price of an orgasm had become seven days of losing the ability to walk, the eerie absence now makes me cry. On the old Richter scale of pleasure would any charge register? Nothing, so far as I can tell. No neurologist has ever fully warned me that this was on the cards. At forty-six years old I’ve now had multiple sclerosis, this slow road to death, one third of my life.

The artist’s wife died much more swiftly. She was only twenty-four I think and even over a decade on, though we never met, I find myself thinking of her. The manner of her passing has haunted me ever since I was told the story by someone who also loved her. I imagine that she was as lovely as the Little Prince’s rose and as beloved.

I come from a family addicted to assessing its appearance. If no mirror is readily to hand we are all adept at making do. A pane of glass in a door is good for a full-length impression but smaller windows work well too, to check hair or the appearance of your nose in profile before that meeting with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. We pretend not to prance or preen in the presence of a camera but when it’s time for the shot to be shown, glance anxiously to see if we’ve come out well.

Once in Langley’s Cafe I saw my father find his face in my cup of tea and well pleased, smiling. For me this was as wonderful as a moment in the 1956 Albert Lamorisse classic Le Ballon Rouge. In the film the balloon seeks out its reflection in a large mirror in some pavement markets of Paris. The small boy hero examines a life-size portrait of a girl with a hoop but his red balloon friend is dancing up and down a little in delight at its own reflection.

The invitation from photographer Vincent Long arrived early in 2009. Would I be interested in taking part in his portrait series of Australian writers? Each participant would appear with a helium-filled red balloon, a kind of homage to the Lamorisse film, as well as symbolising in some sense the writer’s muse.

On Vincent’s web site I saw what seemed to be a strange young 21st century Madonna. The way he’d taken this photo was such that the surveillance mirror against shoplifters in a 7/11 served as her halo. If there was sadness in her expression, that she was seemingly without child, at least there were lots of chips and confectionery within easy arm’s reach as compensation.

For the red balloon writer series any location could be chosen. Think about a favourite childhood place Vincent suggested to me, or possibly a spot that had been significant in a previous book.

Although I tinkered with the thought of the Grafton footbridge, or my balloon in the presence of a horse or cat, straight away I knew that I wanted to be unclad in Decateur South, the sea cubby built by sculptor Marr Grounds some twenty years before on the south coast just two hours from the Victorian border. Where else had I ever been more beautiful? Where ever again could I appear so poised for pleasure?

There was no doubt in my mind. For me it had to be nude at Marr’s for my portrait or not at all…

Though there is always the possibility of a return, this will likely be the last issue of HEAT magazine in print form.

After fourteen years of continuous publication the sheer physical intractability of the magazine, and its limited circulation, weigh heavily upon its editor and publisher, especially at a time when the electronic medium beckons, with its heavenly promises of weightlessness and ubiquity.

Not that HEAT isn’t a beautiful object. Its design qualities are among its strongest attributes. I’ve relished the tactility both of the product and the process: the choice of paper, the poring over design alternatives, the marking up of proofs, even the packaging and the way – as the mailout to subscribers begins – the colour and the feel and the scent of the book occupy the senses. I imagine it having a similar effect, in the hands of its readers. Judging by the discrepancy between the number of copies of HEAT sold, and the number of readers who claim familiarity with it, the magazine is often passed on, or left in places where visitors are likely to see it, a testament to its physical qualities and the social possibilities these embody.

But the physicality of the book is also its greatest limitation, from a publisher’s point of view. The packaging again, the warehousing, the handling of returns, and the prohibitive cost of postage or freight which largely restricts the Australian literary magazine to a domestic readership – then, finally, the excessive and potentially overwhelming nature of the object itself, because you have to print more copies than you can sell, and the copies accumulate, on shelves, in boxes, until in an act of resignation – or is it freedom? – you consign them to the bin.

The literary magazine differs from the literary review, in that its primary offering is original new writing, in fiction, poetry or creative non-fiction. Out of respect for the nature of this writing, the literary magazine tends to be bound like a book, to favour the full-page rather than the columnar layout of text, and to limit advertising, if it has any at all. It is, essentially, a magazine in book form, which is why it appears in bookshops rather than newsagents. Over the past two decades, there has been a concerted attempt, by editors, to increase the visibility of literary magazines in bookshops, and the effect has been to make the literary magazine even more book-like. With the computerisation of bookshops, the ISSN for the magazine as a whole had to be supplemented by an ISBN specific to each issue, so that the computers could recognise it as a book. The ISBN requires a title for each issue and an author, or the editor acting as the author. The distribution cycle for bookshops, with its four-month advance notice, its sales packs and media releases, and its emphasis on the celebrity author or topical theme as selling points, made it difficult for literary magazines, but it did offer to open up a new market.

That market is very small. There might be ten, maybe fifteen booksellers in Australia, who sell literary magazines. The rest probably wouldn’t recognise the genre. If they have copies, they are likely be in the fiction anthology section, spine out – which does nothing for a magazine whose appeal depends on the variety of its contents, only a small proportion of which might be fiction. I used to fret about the propensity of booksellers to put HEAT on the floor, as if it were a newspaper, or worse still, an out of date newspaper. Even now, even in the best booksellers, literary magazines are unlikely to be far from the floor. There’s something provisional and exploratory about a good literary magazine, which must make it look like it is masquerading as a book, at least from a bookseller’s point of view.

Besides, a true literary magazine is by nature uncommercial. It has poetry for a start. Long essays. Short fiction. Literary criticism. And all sorts of confusions – between poetry and prose, between fiction and non-fiction, between fiction and autobiography. Why would you? If booksellers are diffident about selling the literary magazine, it is because only a small number of readers in the country would know what it was or would want to ask for it. A substantial proportion of that small number, the most committed part, would buy on subscription, because it is cheaper and more convenient that way, so the potential market is compromised from the beginning.

But the bookshops also offered something else to literary magazines, access to a community of readers. It is this sense of community that Amazon and other online suppliers seek to emulate by telling you what other readers similar to you have bought recently. When I began HEAT I thought that the community of readers to which it appealed would also ensure its financial success. The community would grow in time, sales of the magazine would increase. HEAT’s reputation has grown, but its sales are the same now as they were for its first issue. It is a mistake to think of a community as a market. People can identify with the objects that define them as a community without having to own them. It is enough to know they exist, and to visit or handle them occasionally, to have a sense of cultural ownership. (Some would argue that it is the state’s and not the individual’s responsibility to ensure the survival of these common cultural possessions, and so it has been with HEAT, whose survival has been underwritten by funding from government and the university, and only to a very small extent by sales.)

I think I made this mistake, of confusing communal with commercial value, because as a literary critic, I was used to dealing with books whose cultural value was established, and easily assumed that their commercial viability must be too. That this was a questionable assumption should have been obvious. At the time I made the shift from teaching Australian literature to publishing it, in the mid 1990s, one of the reasons I did so was because the books I taught had gone out of print, and the authors who had written them couldn’t find publishers.

The confusion between cultural and commercial value led me to entertain extravagant fantasies in which the offices of HEAT were housed in a converted warehouse in Sydney’s inner-west, or a colonial cottage on the Parramatta campus of UWS, or in one of the wharfs overlooking the harbour, with banks of computers attended by interns and writers in residence, contributors scurrying in and out, half a dozen full-time editors deep in reading and consultation, and sun-filled meeting rooms in which international collaborations were in the planning. These were clearly fantasies because they were visions of community, and had no commercial basis to them at all.

My belief that HEAT had a commercial as well as a cultural value was so strong, that I sought to register the name with the Trade Marks Office. I was concerned that the appearance of another publication with the same or a similar name would compromise our reputation, and therefore our appeal. Our first opponent was the World Wrestling Federation, which was planning a wrestling series and accompanying publicity in Australia under the name Heat. We soon reached an understanding. Then a second opponent appeared, a multi-national magazine publisher called EMAP, which had recently begun publishing a celebrity magazine called Heat in the UK. I guess they thought they might want to publish it in Australia one day. They asked for extension after extension, and then suddenly dropped their opposition. Our HEAT mark proceeded to registration. Now we had to deal with their application, and to launch an opposition of our own. This required serious money. Once again extensions were applied for and granted. Three times we provided sworn evidence to demonstrate the significance of HEAT, the regard in which it was held, the damage to its reputation that might be caused by a gossip magazine of the same name. The heads of the Australia Council, the Literature Board and the Copyright Agency Limited filed statements on our behalf. Finally in October 2009, eight years after our trade mark application was lodged, the decisive hearing on the matter was held in Canberra. Barristers on both sides. By this time EMAP had been taken over by the German multinational Bauer, the largest magazine publisher in Europe, with a strong line in ‘yellow press’ titles. The German multinational was represented at the hearing by a senior counsel well known in Sydney literary circles, a one-time president of the Sydney branch of PEN. I couldn’t have predicted it, but here was another reminder: it doesn’t pay to be sentimental about the idea of community.

Bauer’s argument was that there could be no confusion between our HEAT and their heat because our magazine wasn’t a magazine, it was a book. You had to savour the irony of this – we had spent fourteen years perfecting HEAT as a magazine in book form in order to increase its reach as a magazine, only to be told that it wasn’t a magazine. Fortunately the Trade Marks officer didn’t agree. ‘[Bauer’s] suggestion that a “magazine” is narrowly defined by consumers to be a non-durable publication containing glossy photos and articles on celebrities conveniently ignores a significant portion of the magazine industry’, she wrote in her judgement. She had turned to the Macquarie Dictionary for her definition of a magazine: ‘noun 1. a periodical publication, usually bound and with a paper cover, containing miscellaneous articles or pieces, in prose or verse, often with illustrations.’ This was very close to the definition of HEAT we had offered in our trade mark application: ‘magazines in book form containing essays, fiction, poetry and reviews…’ Not only were we a magazine: we were more of a magazine than their heat was. From a historical point of view this was entirely just. I imagined the person in charge of ‘M’ when the Macquarie Dictionary was in the making, calling up an eighteenth-century specialist in the English department at the university there, to ask for advice on the definition of ‘magazine’. It was okay to be sentimental after all – cultural value manifests itself in unexpected ways. Bauer’s trade mark application was refused.

But in the eight years it took to argue the case for HEAT as a magazine in book form, the whole appeal of the book as a form has changed. Its appeal is now very limited compared to that offered by the electronic medium. So many of the costs disappear – printing, packaging, postage, warehousing. No returns. Cheap and immediate access to an international readership. More to the point: the electronic medium suits the literary magazine more than the printed book because it allows it to reclaim its dynamic qualities as a miscellany. The restrictions on colour disappear. The traffic across genres is enhanced by the capacity to embed sound and video files. The distinction between back issues and the current issue disappears. This was one of the worst aspects of the magazine as book, the fact that the back issues, into which one had put so much work, would lie inactive and unread after only a few months, though they were as much a part of the conception of the magazine as its present number.

The boundaries of the literary magazine, as a printed entity, also dissolve. Since it is a miscellany, there is nothing, in principle, to restrict its combinatorial powers, or to determine where it should end. Henry Fielding’s vision, in Tom Jones, of the author as an inkeeper offering a bill of fare to the feast, is not far off the mark here. Banquet? Degustation? Perhaps Madame would prefer to have only an entrée? The elements could be served from the past as well as the present, from the same author or the same genre or the same theme. They could be drawn from different publishers, and other magazines.

We’re not talking ‘online’. Online offers distribution, advertising, discussion. The literary magazine in electronic form is downloaded to a reader, read in silence, just like a book. I can’t see that much will be lost, not compared to what is to be gained. But you could make a stronger claim for the literary magazine in this form, stronger than its increased reach, and its powers of combination, and this is its ability to lead the way in the new electronic medium. We have followed long enough as second class citizens in the world of books. Because the magazine suits the new medium so well, its formal innovations should provide a guide to what might be possible for the book itself.

We’re taking a year or two off to explore the situation. We thank our sponsors, our designers, our printers and distributors, our contributors, our readers, and all who have worked on the magazine. I think we have made something that is significant in itself – and can serve as a platform for things to come.

Michael Atherton writes on luthier Harry Vatiliotis, Mark Treddinick on poet Judith Beveridge. Felicity Castagna channels a Marilyn Monroe impersonator in Macau. Steven Amsterdam’s heroine develops superpowers in the bosom of a suburban family. The extended family in Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s story does battle on a street in Punchbowl.

There are new poems from Robert Adamson, Anthony Lawrence, Joanna Featherstone, Berndt Sellheim, Sarah Holland-Batt, George Toseski, Esther Ottoway, Tim Wright, Craig Billingham, Eileen Chong, Adrian Wiggins. Featured artist Mary Leunig draws the decline and death of parents…

HEAT 23 - Two to Go!

NON-FICTION

• Justin Clemens – You Have the Right to Remain Silent
• Peter Doyle – Bashful City: Sydney’s Covert Criminality
• Vanessa Berry – Dark Tourism
• Dmetri Kakmi – Salam Cafe and the Great Burqa Debate
• Cassi Plate – Correspondences
• Michael Atherton – Harry Vatiliotis: Luthier
• Prue Gibson – Under the Skin
• Mark Treddinick – Judith Beveridge’s Cool Web of Poetry

FICTION

• Steven Amsterdam – I See You
• Michael Mohammed Ahmad – The Hat Dance
• Felicity Castagna – Falling in Macau

ART

• Mary Leunig – Dead Parents

POETRY

Robert Adamson, Craig Billingham, Sarah Holland-Batt, Stephen Edgar, Adrian Wiggins, Fiona Wright, George Toseski, Anthony Lawrence, Tim Wright, Berndt Sellheim, Eileen Chong, Esther Ottaway, Johanna Featherstone

Two to Go!

HEAT 23, New series, 2010

ISBN 978 1 920882 64 8, ISSN 1326-1460

Shipping Rate: F

Alek was out on the front steps all by himself, waiting for them. ‘Greetings, cousins!’ he shouted to the rusted red Corolla as it pulled up. He held a glass of milk over his head, toasting their arrival. What a cutie.
Giordana unpacked herself from the piles of clothing and sheets and pillows and pots and pans that crowded the back seat, and climbed out into the still, suburban night.

Alek turned and yelled into the hallway, ‘They’re here!’ summoning the negligent adults who hadn’t been waiting on the doorstep all evening. Giordana forgave him for being mega cheerful because Superman underpants were peeking from his baggy blue jean. It looked like Alek and his underpants were about to soar up to the black velvety sky.

She waited next to the car with her brother Ben, while her mother dragged the first of many bags up the porch steps. Giordana took a stiff whiff of the situation. They had left Dad, a cramped apartment, a street full of rats and early morning truck routes, and landed out here in nice-nice town. Look at it. Aunt Natalie’s house was the kind you would draw with a crayon if you had just learned squares and triangles. Better than its neighbour, at least – a fake Tara with columns in front of a bland brick box. She had been here as a visi- tor before, but for the next few weeks it would have to be home.
She moved closer to Ben, who was yawning, as if nothing mattered. Since he’d turned seventeen, she felt that if she didn’t watch him every minute he might walk off and start living his life without them. Younger by him, but only by a year and a half, she didn’t want to be left behind with their mother. Especially now that they had taken off with just a note – anyone could really leave anyone. There were no rules that said that this was where they had to stay. If their mother could change her mind, Ben could change his mind.

Giordana couldn’t think about it anymore.

She gave Ben’s arm hair a tug and led him toward the front door, as if walking into their aunt’s house were merely a matter of politeness and not a trampling of the better memories of her father (which seemed to be occupying space in exactly nobody else’s mind). Her mother, Ruth, had a successful double in life. It was Aunt Natalie. She looked even more quietly glamorous tonight than ever before. She appeared from the living room looking all mellow, like she was just practicing piano with a cup of chamomile tea at her side. She spread her arms wide for a hug that pulled the three of them into her arms and into the house at the same time.

‘Oh Ruth,’ Natalie said, embracing her sister tightest of all. ‘I am so sorry. It’s rotten.’

‘It is,’ Ruth said, stroking Ben and Giordana.

Uncle Peter, a few steps behind, said, ‘You know you can stay as long as you need, if not longer.’

In the three-hour runaway drive to get there, Giordana had cried for everything they had left, had begged that they not live like refu- gees. For this moment, though, she was glad to be squished together with her family, her eyes dry and her soul almost relieved by the orange light of the hallway.
Alek broke in and asked his mother, ‘Can I take them on a tour?’

Natalie shushed him, ‘This is a difficult time. They might not feel like playing.’

Alek was unstoppable. ‘But we’re all together and that’s what’s important, right?’

‘Just wait,’ said Natalie, clearly proud of his ability to parrot adult touchy-feely talk, but not loosening her hold on the three of them. A corridor of framed family photos behind her seemed to hold out a promise. Off in the front room, Giordana saw that they owned a VCR. A family sitting around, watching movies together. One simple, quiet night with no fighting. See what a little money and a good marriage can produce?

Peter looked at the bags of clothes still in Ruth’s hands and said, ‘We’ve got a study next to the boys’ room with an old daybed, or we’ve got the big pullout sofa downstairs. Who wants privacy more than comfort?’

‘Me,’ said Ben, with first-born authority. Ruth ratified it without debate. So Giordana would cuddle up with her mother. To be expected. Alek wrapped his fingers around Giordana’s and Ben’s wrists to pry them away from the huddle, ‘Let me take you on the tour now?’ Ben, forever a downer, told him, ‘You gave us the tour last year.’

‘Then I’ll make it different!’ ‘Sweetheart,’ Natalie said, in a tone that meant stop. Because Giordana was convinced that she was nicer than Ben (or
at minimum wanted to be seen that way), she waved her hand at her face like it was a royal fan and told Alek, ‘A tour would be divine!’ Alek could now focus his energies on her. ‘Ok, which do you want: to be able to fly or be invisible?’

‘Is this part of the tour?’ ‘Which do you want?’ ‘Invisibility sounds sweet. Can I walk through things or do I have to slip in and out of rooms when the door is open?

Alek thought it over. ‘No. Ok, yes, you can walk through walls, but you can’t steal stuff, like at the bank.’ ‘That’s fine.’

She gave Ben a glare to make him accompany them. He flapped his arms sarcastically. ‘And I’ll fly.’

Alek was satisfied. ‘Good. Follow me.’ Given the choice, Giordana would have preferred to stay with her mother and hear how she would tell the story of leaving, how Natalie and Peter would react, and what the next few days would hold, but she knew that it would all be said differently if she were in the room. She and Ben had to play with their cousins. Unsurprisingly, Alek’s tour led directly to the boys’ bedroom. Sasha was on the upper bunk, on his back with a teal blanket pulled over his head.

‘That’s my little brother. He’s shy,’ Alek announced. Sasha threw the covers back to shout, ‘Am not!’ He hid himself again.
Alek ignored him, handing Giordana a model of Godzilla and getting down to the business of pulling games off of a shelf. She followed Ben’s bored gaze out the window – a girl around Giordana’s age was biking down the street. A nine-year-old could hang out on the porch and a girl could bike down the street. It was that safe here.

Alek spilled three games across the carpet and carefully set the boards so their corners touched in a triangle. He was inventing rules so they could play all three at once, as one big game. If anyone was going to rein him in (if only to keep the playing pieces separate) it would have been Giordana, but she was distracted by the sound of someone sliding a window open across the street. It was that quiet too. People liked the leafy streets for a reason, she was sure, but this simply wasn’t her. Until she got back to her friends, she felt like she would be marked absent from life. This was not the summer she had planned.
School had just ended. She should have been scooping ice cream at Sprinkles, which was totally mung, but it came with perks, like free cones when the manager looked away. Furthermore, Thea’s parents had just left her alone for a week and her house was going to be a base of operations for sleepovers where no one would sleep, where the blender would be full of rum and fruit juice and always full, where the mornings would be occupied by fashion extravaganzas (unknowingly sponsored by Thea’s mother). But now, at the exact moment that all of her friends were together, Giordana was standing there in Alek and Sasha’s room. L is for most lame.

At least until this was over, invisibility would be a relief. Imagine it. Not having to be seen by anyone as she limped through a dull week or two in all this quietude until her parents patched things up again. Being able to spy. She could watch couples together, alone, and hear what they talked about. This was a mystery to her. Her parents’ secrets she knew, because their conversations happened at top volume. But what did a girl say to a boy?

It was just then, as she was thinking about walking in a park and eavesdropping on some dreamy-dippy lovebirds, that Ben called her name. He looked around the room – at her – then stuck his head into the hallway and called out, ‘Giordana, where the hell are you?’ He looked back into the room, at Alek.

‘Where’d she go?’

Alek glanced up for a moment and then went right on jumping playing pieces around the boards. He didn’t see her either.

She didn’t say, ‘I’m right here.’ Instead, she withdrew from the middle of the room without breathing, staying quiet and close to the wall. Ben called her name again. Across the room, there was a mirror above a dresser. She looked in it and realised, with a sudden heat surge in her body, that she was gone…

Like most Sydneysiders, I was brought up to take a quiet pride in the city’s legendary raffishness, a defining theme, running from the days of the Rum Corps to the razor gangs and sly-grog houses of the 1920s, to the rogue cops and corrupt politicians of the 60s, to the gaudy extro- version of public life since then. Sydney has always been imagined as the place where easy-going acceptance blurs into ethical expediency and shoddy governance. Sin City. That’s ‘sin’ in the dark, criminal sense, sin as sin. And ‘sin’ in a milder sense, connoting something anti-puri- tan, anti-hypocritical, anti-authoritarian. Sin as virtue. Cool sin.

Forty years ago one the most energetic spruikers of the sin city discourse was Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror newspaper. The Mirror more or less grew out of the old weekly newspaper, Truth, the broad- sheet with the tabloid heart, in whose tradition the young Murdoch was schooled. Through the 1960s the Mirror got good mileage from Kings Cross, Abe Saffron and the brothel trade, just as the Truth in the 1920s had got similar mileage from Darlinghurst, the razor gangs and the brothel trade. They loved the Sin-City thing.

And it loved them back. Some of the key figures of the 1920s milieu happened also to be enthusiastic self-promoters, and they gave Truth consistently good copy. Well-maintained files afforded many reprise press stories through the 30s and 40s. Those files eventually passed to the Mirror and the same characters, stories and photographs later resurfaced in the ‘Historical Feature’ section of that newspaper, and in true crime potboilers by Mirror writers such as Bill Jenkings. In the 1970s Alfred McCoy’s Drug Traffic in Australia drew heavily and effectively on those same Truth and Daily Mirror stories, as more recently did Larry Writer’s book Razor. The upshot is that criminal figures such as Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine and Phil Jeffs have been in the public eye more or less continually since the 1920s.

In the early 2000s I was invited to go into the vault at Sydney’s fabulous Justice & Police Museum and dig up material for an exhibition about the vibrant and rambunctious between-the- wars street life of inner Sydney. There are many tens of thousands of photographs in the archive there, including street photos dating back to the 1920s. And they’re the real deal – unselfconscious, unprettified and wholly unexpurgated. So naturally, when I started delving, I expected to find traces of the old inner Sydney I had grown up believing in: the rough and raw city of spectacle. Maybe something reminiscent of William Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’ or ‘Beer Street’. Or the early archive footage of New York’s Lower East Side, with its team- ing masses of people, and lawless display. Noise. Superfluity. Rowdy disinhibition. The antipodean version of New Orleans’s Storeyville, or San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. The old inner city slum archetype, with an Australian accent.

It wasn’t so. The photographs I found showed a strangely bashful city. Few people were to be seen in most of the outdoor scenes, even those taken in the densely populated inner city areas. There may be good reason for that of course (the locals faded when the cops arrived) but nowhere did I find anything remotely like Weegee’s New York photos of the same period, say, where eager crowds press around a corpse after a gangland shooting, where there’s always an unruly crowd ready to form. It was more ghost town than sin city.

One of the earliest exterior photos in the police collection is inscribed ‘Sofia Street Kennedy Murder’. The case concerns the murder of a railway worker, bashed to death in a Surry Hills laneway in 1922. The Truth report described the precinct as:

one of the most to-be-avoided sections of Sydney’s underworld…An ill-kept, ill-lighted thoroughfare…a favoured haunt of some of the worst characters in Sydney, and many and brutal are the crimes which have been committed within a small radius of where Kennedy’s body was found. The thug, the harpy, the plug-ugly and the garrotter are all to be met with here.

Maybe they are, but they’re certainly not in any of these photos…

‘To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche

‘Every woman adores a Fascist,’ wrote Sylvia Plath in ‘Daddy,’ her most notorious poem. We should add: ‘Every person adores a torturer.’ As Sigmund Freud put it in Civilisation and its Discontents:

men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.

For Freud, the real question is not: ‘why do humans torture?’ but ‘how did some humans ever come to think torture was a bad thing?’ The paradoxical answer, of course, is that humans did this by turning torture against themselves, by turning themselves into auto-torturing devices. ‘I abominate torture, so I must continue to practice it covertly’ is perhaps the kettle-logic of the neurotic rejecter of torture, ‘I must refuse to recognise its claims and usefulness, I must reject the complicity of my own highly moral way of life with such obscene practices.’ The disturbing Freudian proposition would then be that torture continues to be enjoyed in the mode of its repression and displacement: other people may have dirty hands, but mine are very very clean.

Freud’s answer itself echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s remarks in the second book of his Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche analyses the tight practical bonds between law, torture, and the development of a sense of conscience, guilt, and justice. If, in order for a promise to be meaningful, one has somehow to be obliged to fulfill it, man must have been turned into ‘the promising animal’ (in all senses of this suggestive phrase!) by the communal invention of horrible punishments. Drawing out the principle that ‘only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory,’ Nietzsche writes: ‘the severity of all primitive penal codes gives us some idea how difficult it must have been for man to overcome his forgetfulness and to drum into these slaves of momentary whims and desires a few basic requirements of communal living.’Communal living, of whatever kind, has its foundations in violence and torture, and we would do well not to, ahem, forget this. But forgetting the origins and sustenance of their communities in torture is what self-torturing animals precisely tend to do – except when they are unpleasantly reminded of this, as happened globally with the photographic evidence that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004.

The question of torture immediately became highly visible and voluble again in public discussions, implicating the highest officials in the US government to anonymous citizens worldwide. Some allegedly democratic legal philosophers and lawyers even began to proselytise for the decriminalisation of torture under limited circumstances, both in the US and in Australia. Two of my legal colleagues at Deakin University, where I was working at the time, briefly became the focus of Australian mass-media attention with a utilitarian variation on this theme, complete with thought-experiments and pseudo-mathematical formulae enabling us to calculate when torture could legitimately be applied. I was appalled by such claims, as well as severely shaken. With Russell Grigg, a colleague from the Psychoanalytic Studies Program, I organised a day-long seminar on ‘The Crime of Torture,’ and we co-authored an article titled ‘A Note on Psychoanalysis and the Crime of Torture.’

Our basic argument was as follows. In general, Freud (and psychoanalysis more generally) provides several rather simple-minded guidelines for ethical discussions of this kind – and which one would perhaps like various ‘experts’ to consider before they pontificated in public about the immutable value of this or that position. First, psychoanalysis doesn’t really prescribe or proscribe any actions in principle, but has to begin with a kind of suspension of judgment on everybody’s part. The doctor doesn’t know better than the patient; nobody is sure what’s going to emerge. Second, however, you therefore can’t be sure a priori that you’re not implicated in what wish to condemn. Third, you can’t just wrench this knowledge out of yourself or others, it’s going to require a long period of just talking it through. Fourth, this talking-through engages a historical anamnesis, which may stretch back through generations. Above all, there is only one ‘fundamental rule,’ that of ‘free association.’ You can say anything you like – or not say it. It is not this or that content of speech that is really key to the process, but the non-intrusive, non-coercive encouragement of the patient to seize power over his or her own utterances. Such free association is, as Brian Stagoll once put it, the very antithesis of torture: the latter extorts speech through the violent infliction of pain and suffering, to the detriment if not destruction of its victims.

In line with these broad psychoanalytic principles, the ethical imperative in this context seems to be something like this: given that I felt so sickened at the thought of secret official torture undertaken by the greatest democratic states, what, exactly, about torture was so repellent to me? What secret enjoyment was I deriving from my repulsion? What, in other words, did I personally owe to torturers? What were the alternative histories of torture and its relation to human polities? When was torture abolished and why? What were the justifications for the abolition of torture in the first place?

Mary Leunig, from Dead Parents (2007)