The Discipline of the Diary

Joseph Jenkins was born at Llanfihangel Ystrad in Cardiganshire in 1818. He arrived in Australia in March 1869, at the age of 51, and worked in the Ballarat and Castlemaine regions as an itinerant labourer, before securing a steady job in 1885 cleaning drains for Maldon Shire Council. He began his diary in Wales in 1839, continued it in Australia until he returned home in 1894, and carried it on thereafter almost up to his death in 1898, probably making 58 volumes in all over his lifetime. The Australian section comprises 25 annual volumes, maintained regularly and almost without interruption for a quarter of a century, regardless of long working hours, fatigue, ill health and hospitalisation. Jenkins worked 12 or 14 hours per day, six days a week, year after year and not even Sundays and holidays were entirely his own when stables had to be cleaned and horses prepared for his master's use. Nevertheless, the diary imposed a relentless discipline and survived all Jenkins’ vicissitudes. ‘Not a blank day can be found’, he boasted and, remarkably enough, it is almost true.1 There is a three-month lacuna in 1886, when intruders destroyed some of his possessions, and there are some occasional short gaps (in April 1871, November 1886, October 1889 and April 1890) but these never lasted more than a few days.3 The longevity of the diary, and the assiduity with which he completed it every day, make Jenkins an exceptional Australian writer.

On Tim’s eighteenth birthday we are over at York and Auntie Lorraine rings Mum to say Daliak is burning and we go out and there is the thick inky cynical burgeoning mushroom cloud close by, driven away by the easterlies but so close, so very close we can touch if not smell it, though Guru can, he can smell burning as a reversal of flow, and we all know that if the wind shifts direction, and that even if it doesn’t, a slow reaching out against its inclination is its own logic as everything is different for fire and its ratiocination: it will want whatever is dry and unburnt that is flammable to reach back to widen the critical area against the winds inciting enflaming turning to ash—and knowing this, fire’s own advice, the fire plan is enacted and immediate action taken, preparation to evacuate shifting tense, the future only valid as the conditions, the fire’s urges.

—JK

The study of Australian ego-documents has raised the curtain on a cast of very varied and impressive characters in a wide range of settings. We have looked in on secret readings of The Lady of the Camelias in a Queensland women's prison; stockmen discussing Herodotus around the campfire; First Nations people composing a collective petition to Queen Victoria; and some surprisingly assiduous and consistent diarists. Most of the evidence has illuminated the cultural landscape of settler society. As far as possible, however, the study has also embraced the reading and writing of the dispossessed and the unsettled – itinerant workers without a home. Diaries, correspondence and autobiographical documents have not simply emphasised the well-known Britishness of colonial society, but they have also offered insights into the detailed contents of that allegiance in terms of readers’ tastes and responses. They returned repeatedly to Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens; they loved and recited some of the Romantic poets, Shelley rather than Keats, Byron rather than Wordsworth. Australian readers demonstrated their love of the English literary canon, which marked their cultural identity and reflected their loyalty to the British Empire. At the same time, this study has registered in their writing their profound sense of displacement, the pain of separation and their longing for home.

They did not read the canon slavishly or uncritically, however, and this study has noted the Australian inflexions of their choices and responses as readers. I have underlined examples of resistance to the mainstream literary tastes of colonial society, which is most obvious when considering social groups who were subordinate or marginal to settler society, namely convicts and First Nations people.

I realize that what I have been doing is trying to articulate an aetiology of the quiddity and materiality each participant in a collaboration ‘brings to the table’. Collaboration has been the key to generative practice for me since about 1990 when I worked with the artist Mona Ryder on a project of art and text for the PICA Bookworks exhibition. The most difficult thing about collaboration is giving up ourselves to the moment of exchange. Indeed, so deep-seated is the ownership of ‘ideas’ and more especially the personal usage and experentiality of the ideas in action, that I have had some people de-collaborate after a work is finished: that is, take their work, or parts of the mutual work, separate it off and use it in their personalized subjective spaces. This has never bothered me in itself – we are all part of a movement of ideas and one necessarily moves towards others to make works together because some kind of conceptual overlap is identified by each in each. I think ideas can be co-determinous between their intactness (and changeability) as ideas, and their embodiment in an individual. Yes, we’re struggling with post-Enlightenment issues of Western-impacted subjectivity, but that’s reductive: it is ‘procreation’ and survival, it is searching for purpose, it is working to give primacy of ideas that might ‘help’. That’s belief and faith in knowledge in one.

You make music, and your hands, wrists, and fngers are exceedingly important to you. This is natural and inevitable, but also paradoxical: you must think about your hands, wrists, and fngers; and you also must stop thinking about your hands, wrists, and fngers. Fretting, worrying, and obsessing about your hands isn't good. But sensing, celebrating, and enjoying your hands is good! Concentrating on your hands at the risk of not being attentive to the music itself isn't good. But allowing the hands to respond to a musical stimulus is very, very good!

Let's see what we can do about it.

Newborn, baby, toddler, kindergartner: the child is forever making discoveries. Everything is new, everything is worthy of the child's attention, everything is fascinating and wonderful—unless it's incomprehensible and terrifying. A toddler notices her shadow for the frst time, and she panics: What is this horrible thing that's following me around? Is it trying to kill me? Discovery is an exciting energy like no other. Our job is to live in wonderment, with the excitement of discovery not hampered by habit, routine, inat-tention, cynicism, or any of those troublesome adult emotions that are foreign to the baby.

Here’s the exercise: watch the hands of babies and young children at play.

Tender little fngers, agile, intelligent, sometimes already structured: a baby with “pianist’s hands,” space between the fngers, curved fngers ready to approach the keyboard.

‘sombre woods’

The Argonautica

With settler familiarity the forest is brow-beaten by four-wheel drives and pig hunters. Pigs are the lament-excuse-justification for blood-letting, a way around circumventions. And then there’s the farm turned into a minefield—a mine in a field, or rather the exploratory drills for a mine in a field that will dilate into the forest if the company has its way with relevant government agencies— the lamenting and unravelling of ‘green tape’. In case you shoulder wonder about deployments of language for investors, try ‘Gonneville Intrusion’ as the name for these activities. Or, ‘strategic deposit’ of ‘critical minerals.’ Intrusion strategic critical deposit. And ‘expand footprint’. Definition. Seven rigs—diamond and reverse circulation. Farmland entrée. And then… and then the full run of revelation with missionary zeal.

And this poem-addendum to petition that lives in the mind of the forest and its readers—the wandoo and jarrah and marri trees in full awareness of what lies beneath in the ‘complex’, speaking with words that will be extinguished before they can find a way past investor vocabularies, before they can upset degrees of separation, the consequences of portfolios. Oh, blue leschenaultia

Trying to formulate a response to John Kinsella’s ‘Sacred Kingfisher and Oblong Turtles’ poem has triggered a small existential crisis for me: small but perhaps not entirely insignificant, because it pertains to signification and significance. The crisis has two central components.

In part, and this is the first component, it’s a question of how to respond appropriately to such a work, and about the meaning or point of such a response.

It would be entirely feasible to write an academic essay on the piece, analysing it and laying bare its workings. The poem operates with a number of overlaid templates of linked metaphors. One is that of photography, and the idea of ‘exposure’, partly derived from the photos taken by the poet-speaker’s son of some oblong turtles seen at the coal dam; this resonates with the work of the sun rays, which is part of an natural economy, albeit an impended one, of light, as the sun interacts with the lake biotope that is the turtles and kingfishers’ natural breeding environment; but it also resonates, less optimistically, to the deadly exposure of the turtles to the world of mechanized humanity. Then there is a layer of meditations on ‘montage’, that is to say, not just the spatial economy of juxtaposition, but also the temporal economy of rupture and apposition of fragmented shards of time that have been jolted out of their supposedly sequential flow and jammed up against each other in something resembling a Benjaminian dialectic of contradiction.

Let's imagine a school devoted exclusively to the exploration of textures. Tradition says that the school is in the foothills of the Himalayas. Students learn how to recognize specifc materials, how to tell fne sandpaper from rough sandpaper, how to gauge resistance in spring mechanisms, how to read Braille, and how to tell a 3B pencil from a 4B pencil simply by touching the pencil to paper. Over the years, students become alert and sensitive, and their textural skills end up infuencing their entire lives.

In truth, this is how every life unfolds: as an endless series of encounters with textures and gradations. Your kitchen is a textural school. Peeling a carrot is diferent from peeling a potato; their textures aren't exactly alike. Placing a knife against a tomato, you sense the tomato's texture and its degree of resistance, and you make quick psychomotor decisions as to the angle of the blade on the tomato and the force you’ll apply to slice it. Dinner is a series of textural assessments (Figure 8.1).

Walk barefoot through your house, and your feet will marvel at how many diferent textures the foors ofer you: rugs thick and thin, stones rough and smooth, planks and slats, tiles, each texture with its own personality and its own physicality. There's no confusing stone and rug; there's no confusing wool and wood. Your feet are lovers of texture, and so are your hands.

Our imaginary school of textures takes on students of all ages and all levels of talent and experience, ranging from a complete beginner to a complete master.

We are told that poetry makes nothing happen (Auden 1975, 142). We are told that ‘the approved practice of high culture is marginal to the serious of political concerns of society’ (Said 1984, 2). We are told that a university degree in literary studies has no value, that it amounts to pure indulgence, to be equated somehow with a hobby or leisure pursuit.

Following through on such talk, the Australian government has recently hiked the fees for humanities degrees: for such a decadent luxury with no tangible social utility, you now pay a hefty price, in contrast to core societal commodities such as a Bachelor in Nursing, which has now become eminently affordable. Paradoxically, it transpires that because a lunatic fringe of afficionados of the book will probably overcome any obstacle to get a literary education, universities may cash in quite nicely on boutique BAs in humanities (Eltham 2020; Karp 2020; Zhou 2021).

In all of this, we are being told that the power of the imagination has no purchase on the power of the buck. Symbolism is out, simony is in.

Yet there are modes of symbolism that, unlike poetry, do make things happen. Clicking on certain icons on the computer screen transfers money from my account to your account. In the meantime, the bank is doing some very real stuff with the figures on your balance – some of which you’d rather not know about, so real is its reality.

Methodology and Approach

As previously stated, and according to the LCN network website, around 2,000 churches were established by Liberty University graduates throughout the United States and approximately 4,800 churches. Falwell's vision/ estimate was planting 5,000 new churches. This original qualitative study is a mere example or model that does not presume to indicate the full extent of the phenomenon but shines a spotlight to illustrate Falwell's strategic action and ofers a case study to understand better the ripple efect and infuence caused by the conservative political force in particular and the American political system in general. The study only examined churches established by Liberty graduates throughout the United States. In cases where an alum planted more than one church, the sampled church was the frst one he planted during his studies or postgraduation.

Liberty University alumni were tracked via two primary sources: The frst was student newspapers, alum publications, and ofcial university publications found in the Falwell archive at Liberty University. These covered mainly graduates who completed their studies in the 1970s and 1980s. The second was a LinkedIn search, which is not limited by time, hence including even recent graduates. After identifying the graduate's name and the church they planted, additional background information was reviewed, like the exact church's address, city and state, year of establishment, the number of worshippers in the frst prayer service, and as many historical details as exist on the pastor who founded the church.

Were one to be invited to participate in the design of a twenty-frst-century version of ecolonial board games, tiles would be needed in order to capture new geopolitical confgurations and incorporate visual display techniques equipped to accurately personify and convey power dynamics and transactional asymmetries. These should not be understood as innocuous changes, but rather as signifcant modifcations with analogous adverse efects. Contemporary practices share with their historical predecessors a range of raptorial actions, profteering motives, and extortionist orchestrations, as well as reckless and transgressive behaviors. As Giuliano da Empoli has convincingly shown, the “tech conquistadors” have transported us into an “era of digital colonization” and “the age of predators.”

Arguably, no world leader has, at the time of writing, more than Donald Trump, exploited and instrumentalized the nefarious and algorithmic potential of new technologies, and “the new American president has led a motley procession of unashamed autocrats, tech conquistadors, reactionaries and conspiracy theorists eager to do battle.” There has been no hesitation in rewriting history and privileging alternative narratives. Furthermore, the question of narrative is especially relevant to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and other far-right, populist or extremist politicians and thinkers, since recourse to narrative authority inserts itself into governance strategy.