Hi Nina,
A very interesting perspective. It is also one in which while I have some sympathy it is also one where I think you miss a significant contribution. Churches are full of Australians communicating and interacting in our egalitarian way.

Writers festivals are meetings where elites and academics, dominate. Where the old Australian cultural cringe is alive and well. Except the cringe is now no longer before all that is from the home countries, it is now a cringe before all that is foreign.

Its no wonder people leave them confused about community.Its forums are where Australian egalitarianism is scorned and foreign forms of community interaction are promoted as preferable to our own. Where foreignn understanding of Australian community is encouraged and the Australian voice is stifled.

Cheers well done.

Glorious, glorious,
one can of beer between the four of us.
Hail the purple flower there are no more of us,
cause one of us could drink it all alone.

Seriously, if you can't believe in a creative being, or simply can't find it in some hall or church, or work of patently pluralistic plagiarized fiction, then believe in the mighty irrefutable truth.
Hard to go wrong there?
Rhrosty.

That's an interesting perspective, imajulianutter.

>>[Writers festival] forums are where Australian egalitarianism is scorned and foreign forms of community interaction are promoted as preferable to our own. Where foreignn understanding of Australian community is encouraged and the Australian voice is stifled.<<

Here in multicultural Sydney, my (admittedly personal) observation is that our city churches are actually filled with Asians - Chinese and Koreans in particular. One neighbourhood church only recently (proudly) advertised the fact that one of their Sunday services would be held... in English!

Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that. We all choose the groupuscules with which we identify. And quite frankly, it doesn't surprise me in the least that churches and literary festivals appeal to totally different mindsets. I'd probably be quite upset if they did coincide, given their fundamentally differing views on the value of broad enquiry over dogma, and of imagination over conformity.

Rhosty

Your simple non rythymical ryhming verse would be scorned by our literary elites and academics.
They would prefer you used the American idiom of free verse but that would make you too sound utterly conflicted.

American free verse was born out of the American ideology of freedom of and premience of the individual. It maintains the classic structure do not suit that voice or idealogy.

Our lefty elites tied to the idealogy of the collective constantly use this form as to them it is a tearing down of all the old literary structures. Sadly they fail to understand the conflict and their free verse is as a result sadly conflicted, has mangled and obscure metaphors and all theother critisims the socialist Poe yelled at the American free verse inventors and individualists Dickenson and Whitman.

There I do know enough about poetry to critique, scathingly.

Well Pericles

Whoever said our communities of Asian new Australians haven't adopted or won't adopt our Australian egalitarian way?

My money is on a tendency to think our land will shape those communities in much the same way it has always shaped all the communities of all the inhabitants in the 40,000 years of existence as custodians of this land.

Would you disagree with that?

And that Pericles is the voice not heard in the australian writing festivals of elites and academics, which puts them outside our society of communities.

That's very confusing, imajulianutter.

>>My money is on a tendency to think our land will shape those communities in much the same way it has always shaped all the communities of all the inhabitants in the 40,000 years of existence as custodians of this land. <<

I absolutely agree with you. It has always been this way, despite the protestations of the Little Australians that immigrants are a blight on our communities.

But surely, your depiction of the writers festivals support your assimilationist views? You describe them as places...

>>where foreignn understanding of Australian community is encouraged<<

Sounds to me as though you are on the same side.