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PIETIES COLLIDE! PITIFUL PRIVILEGE PANIC ERUPTS!

You think they did it tough at the Somme back in 1916? You reckon troops in ’Nam feared deadly Mekong Delta man traps? People, those battles were as nothing compared to the Great Australian Woke War currently playing out online.

Tim Blair
4 min read
June 5, 2018 - 2:49AM
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You think they did it tough at the Somme back in 1916? You reckon troops in ’Nam feared deadly Mekong Delta man traps? People, those battles were as nothing compared to the Great Australian Woke War currently playing out online.

Matters commenced peacefully enough, with ABC radio presenter and Meanjin editor Jonathan Green yesterday cheerfully promoting his magazine’s latest cover:

It’s not an altogether weak design. Should’ve played well to Meanjin’s audience, such as it is. And it’s always a good idea to replace a title nobody knows how to pronounce. But Green’s #MeToo cover gambit soon drew fire:

“I should have seen that,” Green replied. “There’s a carelessness there that I didn’t intend.” Well, he’s frequently careless. Then came further objections:

Next, Meanjin authors promoted on that front page announced their disapproval:

“This is precisely part of the ongoing trauma caused by whiteness in this country,” Clementine Ford and Anna Spargo-Ryan, who are white, said in a joint statement. The ashamed duo vowed to donate their payments to “a service that benefits Aboriginal women”. But others were not so keen:

Writer Harry Saddler, whose work also appears in the June issue, likewise apologised, saying: “I need to hold my hand up & say that in promoting my piece in this issue I also failed to notice the obvious problem with the cover until indigenous people pointed it out. I should have seen it.”

He added: “I’ve seen that a couple of contributors to this issue have said they’ll donate the payments for their pieces to indigenous (organisations) and I really wish I could do the same … but I’m having wisdom teeth surgery this month & it’ll cost me $1000, so to be honest I really need the money.”

Go woke, go broke. Confronted by an army of snowflake warriors, Green quickly surrendered. But his kind never signals defeat. Instead, they signal virtue:

This blindness to the subtext of obliterating the word Meanjin with the hashtag #MeToo was mine. I wanted to give the most arresting treatment I could to what I consider to be a significant and thoughtful essay on one of the most important social movements of our time, one element in a body of work that I’m proud to present to readers.

I was wrong to do it.

Green, incidentally, believes electric light is an indicator of planetary doom. Just thought I’d mention that by way of contextual helpfulness. Jonathan continued:

Meanjin is the Turrbal word for the land consumed by what became Brisbane. It has been the title of this magazine since its foundation in 1940.

Great year to launch a literary magazine. It's not as if Australians in 1940 had anything better to do.

To put it simply, the word is more than just the name of a magazine, and it shouldn’t have been mine to obliterate in a design flourish.

Has it ever occurred to Green, or to his accusers, that the written form of “Meanjin” never existed prior to European settlement? It’s an Anglicised version of a word previously only spoken. In a way, it was already “obliterated” by being rendered in printed English.

Compounding that error was the complex story of the #MeToo movement, a movement created a decade ago by American woman of colour Tarana Burke.

As she explained to Ebony magazine it was a grassroots movement designed to provide ‘empowerment through empathy’ to survivors of sexual abuse, assault, exploitation, and harassment in underprivileged communities who typically don’t have access to rape crisis centers or counselors.

Or even to centres and counsellors. Green wasn’t having a great multicultural language day.

That said, in an Australian context, where violence against Indigenous women should be a source of national soul searching, anger and concern, the casual obliteration of a proud Indigenous word with the hashtag of a movement dominated latterly by white women was a gesture of unthinking clumsiness.

It’s not just an indigenous word. It’s a proud indigenous word – you know, about where Brisbane is. How dare Green demean this proud geographical location term by association with dominant “white women”.

I regret it. It’s a reminder of my privilege to not see what now seems so obvious. It’s a reminder that the human stocks of this magazine could be enhanced by a broader range of backgrounds and mindsets in the editorial process.

So he’ll be resigning, then.

Meanjin is a constant publisher of Indigenous voices and concerns. This is work of the greatest importance to us as a publication, a publication that does what it can to place Indigenous thoughts and history at the heart of the national cultural conversation.

“At the heart of the national cultural conversation”? Please. You’ve got a circulation of twelve.

I should, therefore, have known better. We work with words: the power of this erasure should not have been lost on us.

After all of that, Jonathan finally retired to his wicked white-guy sleeping chambers. But yet more trauma and regret awaits – because in his apology, eyeball-privileged Green insulted the blind.

UPDATE. Chris Kenny:

How could you possibly satirise what has transpired at Meanjin magazine this week? When the uber-woke, green Left attack themselves isn’t it entertaining and revealing enough just to look on?

Journalist Catherine Marshall was initially impressed by Meanjin’s cover:

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But then she deleted that tweet. And Melbourne University has cancelled a scheduled Meanjin event.

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Original URL: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/tim-blair/pieties-collide-pitiful-privilege-panic-erupts/news-story/2fa0dc775d59a754a0a074e4888a5f17