‘Look both ways’ – you might be hit by the traffic: On Peter Beilharz’s Antipodean social theorising

Introduction

It was with a sense of joy and delight that I received and, within the blink of an eye, accepted the invitation to write an essay to help celebrate Peter Beilharz’s 70th birthday. ¹ Peter Beilharz and I have known one another for over 40 years; first as postgraduates – he at Monash University supervised by Alastair Davidson, me at La Trobe University supervised by Johann Arnason and Agnes Heller (Peter Murphy was also Agnes Heller’s PhD student). We became firm friends as we worked together on the journal Thesis Eleven. He, along with our mutual friend Julian Triado, invited me onto the journal’s Advisory Board in 1980, and then onto the Editorial Board in 1981 before I left in 2000 to jointly establish the journal Critical Horizons with Danielle Petherbridge. Our friendship continues to this day over dinners, at conferences, through the chartered waters of ‘old’ beloved associations such as the Budapest School and unchartered ones of new loves and new lives and even greater geographical distances as we get older. Peter, Sian and I catch up when we can, usually at home in Melbourne where we often share our love of non-classical contemporary music – the words rock or ‘pop’ do not do justice to the complexity of this music, as we will see below. ²

We continued to write and publish on social-theoretical topics and personalities that often overlapped – the Budapest School, modernities, politics, aesthetics, friendships and intimacies, the historical and the contemporary. There is one topic that has not overlapped until now, and it is the one to which I dedicate this celebratory essay – Peter’s work on the Antipodes. I am honoured to take this opportunity to make a modest written contribution to a topic that is dear to Peter’s heart and to which he has contributed so much insight and depth. Out of the vast array of essays and books that he has written on this topic, I will concentrate on three: Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith (Beilharz, 1997), Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays (Beilharz, 2015). Toward the Blues (Beilharz, 2023).

Antipodean modernities

In Thinking the Antipodes, Peter articulates six mobilising theses that carry the central themes of his analyses of not simply ‘Australia’, but more forcefully and fundamentally, the Antipodes. These theses are:

‘Thesis 1: When it comes to making sense of Australia today, neither imperial nor nativist mythology will do…

In many ways there are three versions of the Antipodes lurking within Peter’s six theses. These three versions are provincialism or fixation on place, Antipodean relationships and traffic. They do not divide readily into ‘old’ and ‘new’ narratives about ‘Australia’. The more standard version denotes migratory patterns from the First Fleet and white migration to contemporary multicultural migrations after the White Australia Policy was overturned in the 1960s, to create a new and wonderful urban cosmopolitanism in which we all live, identify and drink espresso coffee having put ‘white Australia’ behind us. By contrast, the three versions result in a more complex Antipodes of unresolved tensions and paradoxes.

Provincialism or the fixation on place

The first version, portrayed in somewhat caricatural terms by me rather than Peter or Bernard Smith, is a fixation on place and denial of the relationship. If there is a relationship, it is an asymmetrical one that puts Australia ‘in its place’, and usually as a denigration, a throwaway line, being ‘less than’ the great beacon over the horizon – Mother England. Internal to Peter’s Thesis 1 is an ‘old’ attitude that the dregs, misfits and miscreants of humanity (the convicts and their drunken jailers) were sent to Australia, and out of which was born a second-rate country that bred sheep and a squattocracy instead of culture, that had bushrangers, swagmen always on the move, wild colonial boys and ‘mates’ who drank beer and brawled. Women too were especially stoically self-reliant and resilient. They could not only raise children, but also run a large or small sheep or cattle station while fending off poisonous snakes and living with drought, fire and flood (Lawson, 2014; MacKellar, 1995; Paterson, 2021). ³ All of this took the place of having friends, visiting tea shops and drinking Earl Grey tea. Even if the Australian men and women did drink tea, they did so out of tin mugs rather than fine bone china like they did ‘at home’ (in ‘fair England’). This negative placement bred an attitude, a cultural cringe that was sardonically quipped as belonging to the ‘arse-end of the world’ to quote a former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, to which the affirming reply came from across the ocean – ‘The Lizard of Oz’, ‘Hands orf, Cobber!’ Followed by ‘Aussies don’t give a XXXX about manhandling the Queen’ screamed the English press. ⁴ It was always better over there in ‘Old England’, which not only had tea, but also Culture, Manners and Civilisation (an attitude that continued for generations of artists and intellectuals up until quite recently who ‘had to leave’ and who repeated the love–hate relationship – at times with great wit and dry humour – that was built into the original convict–jailer one). ⁵ Negative attitudes can be self-affirming on both sides of an asymmetrical (non)-relationship. The result was a provincialism. But was it?

Antipodean relationships

Rather than concentrating on place – Australia – Peter concentrates on relationships as more properly dynamic than static. Peter’s second deployment of the term ‘Antipodes’ denotes a series of relationships between South and North, Australia and the Anglo-Celtic archipelago (no longer ‘England’ but the UK/Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), and ‘Europe’ (now the European Union, which includes The Republic of Ireland, but no longer the UK) rather than centre and periphery; between coloniser and colonised; between the country and city; between the dry, desert centre – the Outback – and the habitable mainly eastern coasts, between South and South (there is no such thing as ‘the global South’). ⁶

Additionally, Peter’s second version of the Antipodes is expansive geographically and historically, to include the temporal reach of indigenous civilisation, and thus, conceptually, to theorise what might be termed the contours of Antipodean modernity, or Antipodean modernities, more properly.

But first, and as Peter always reminds us, context is everything. Historically, the Antipodes is a highly urbanised country, and so population density figures are meaningless. Since colonial settlement in 1788, the vast majority of the population have lived in cities along the eastern coast (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane), the Southern coast (Adelaide) and the West coast (Perth). People continue to live in huge, extensive and continually expanding urban conurbations despite attempts at ‘regionalisation’. It is not a frontier society in the American sense. In 2020 and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), nearly 30% of the population are also foreign born with the top five emigrating countries being England (the ABS divides the UK into ‘nations’), India, New Zealand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The beach may be the popular magnet, but it is the cities and the suburbs that are the real drawcards. It also makes Australia a trading and outward looking country – thalassocratic or portal – because of and not despite mass immigration (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020-21; 2021–22).

Peter’s ‘origin’ story of Antipodean relationships is one of settler colonialism, state formation, especially, and mediated or arbitrated forms of conflict, especially the conflicts of labour and capital. Peter outlines four variations of Australian settlement on the themes of Antipodean modernity: (1) 1788, foundation and invasion; (2) 1901 federation; (3) 1983, ALP-ACTU Accord; (4) 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Apology Speech to Indigenous Australians (Beilharz, 1997: 50ff, 2015: 84–93). Reconstructing this slightly, there is sometimes an intersecting or mutually reinforcing tripartite dimension to Peter’s narrative of Antipodean relationships that consists of: (1) exploration, conquest; imperial colonialism, state-formation including Federation and federalism (with indigenous civilisational history standing alongside it); (2) labour and arbitration (rather than production); (3) traffic (rather than immigration to reiterate the third version in my reconstruction of his Antipodean modernity).

In Peter’s Antipodean relationships story and leaving to one side exploration (James Cook, the Pacific and internal exploration), an originating division was instituted that was not so much the penal one, but a racial one directed towards the original indigenous inhabitants. An internal colonialisation occurred in terms of the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’, dispossession and racial exclusivity that included the labour movement and paternalism (Beilharz, 2015: 42). Here there was no benign two-way traffic of indifferent strangers a la multiculturalism; only an unresolved and often violent, sometimes muted traffic, that invisibilised and expelled Indigenous Australians under the rubric of ‘terra Australis’ that created an Antipodean bestiarium without even the Romanticism of ‘the noble savage’, bush tracks, rural landscapes and ‘country’. A precondition of settlement, Peter puts it thus:

A powerful, though undeveloped category here is the idea of internal colonialism. The great experiment of the New Britannia was based on the dream of imperial brotherhood or racial purity, even if it was never achieved. Australian nationalism, was from its inception, racially exclusive, though at this point, we have to wonder who the nationalists were, and how this nationalism worked or was played out locally. (Beilharz, 2015: 42, 87)

Alongside this paradox of bestiarium and thirst for knowledge, another Antipodean relationship continued throughout the 19th century that became the fin de siecle of Australian Federation. ⁸ As Peter points out there was an impulse in the 19th century that could have seen the Australian continent become a conglomeration of competing colonial states tied together by trade, including with New Zealand as much as with ‘England’, that might have continued as the normal state of affairs. Yet, support for an Australian federation of states (which by the end of the 19th century New Zealand had declined to join) had grown through conferences, referenda in all states (some occurring multiple times) and finally the Australia Constitution Act declared in the British Parliament and signed by Queen Victoria in 1900. Australia became a federated nation state on 1 January 1901. Trade and taxation arrangements between the ex-colonial states became the basis of the Constitution. A curious ‘nationalism’ constituted the basis of this new federated nation, already articulated, in part, by the poems, songs and bush myths already mentioned but buttressed by an exclusionary white labour policy (The White Australia Policy), that was more often anti-Asian, than anti-Indigenous, as Peter points out.

Yet, for Peter, the Federation narrative is a less interesting or important Antipodean relationship than a labour history that was forged not only in the Australian labour movements, but also and crucially the articulation of a variety of labour laws that come out of a system of arbitration for most of the 20th century. It is worth quoting Peter at some length:

The single, central idea is Arbitration. Arbitration and Conciliation are the central symbols not only of Australia but also of Australian foundation and modernity. To suggest this is to draw trans-Tasman experience closer together than it presently is imagined, for after the Second World War…Australian and New Zealand historiographies also became too nationalistic, too much obsessed with their own distinction and strength or status as victims of global change. The earlier story is one of parallel and mutually constitutive paths across the Tasman. From 1894 and before with Kingston in Adelaide, to Wellington and Pember Reeves to Higgins in 1904 with foundation of Conciliation and Arbitration in Australia and 1907 with the Harvester Judgement, Arbitration is constituted by the cultural traffic [a la trade in goods, white work and unionised labour – JR] that makes the Antipodes both integral, and in this particular sense, exceptional. (Beilharz, 2015: 88–9; see also Murphy, 2023 and in this issue; Roberts, this issue)

Traffic or ‘Out of the Blue’ – rhythms of the city ⁹

Peter listens. He also plays – drums. He not only sees but hears the noise, the rhythms of the city, the pulses of the beat, its syncopations, time changes and crossovers. His

is a call for noise, not silence, for more traffic rather than assent, for the revisiting and travel from afar, for the introspection and extrapolation, which makes us what we are: antipodean, here and always elsewhere, more than we can know. (Beilharz, 1997: 193)

As mentioned above, the Antipodes is not merely a place. It is a relationship that now houses multicultural cities and urban conurbations and can carry a multiplicity of migrant groupings each with its own cultural history behind it, as well as the more or less peaceful intersections with indifferent strangers, the new and the different in the context of ordinary everyday lives and institutional arrangements. One could even go so far as to say that this is one of the success stories of the Antipodean New World and sets it apart from other New World countries and most starkly, old European ones. The ‘cultural traffic becomes more dense; and the permanent pluralism of all cultures becomes more entrenched. There will always be competing gods; now more than ever’ (Beilharz, 1997: 167). As Peter makes clear, this is more than a postmodern Australia.

This narrative about traffic constitutes his third and infinitely rich version of Antipodean modernity and is portrayed in his wonderful study on the work of Bernard Smith, Imagining the Antipodes (Beilharz, 1997). Peter means more than either contemporary multicultural Australia, although its importance and relevance should not be underestimated, or the ‘old’ attitude of Australia as ‘down-under’, topsy-turvy and unrepresentational (as early attempts to comprehend and depict the kangaroo as a very large mouse, or the platypus as a stitched together joke, showed) (Beilharz, 1997: 5). His historical gaze is longer and geographical one even wider.

In his hermeneutically sensitive, astute and rewarding study of Bernard Smith’s work, Peter argues that an Antipodean attitude, approach and comprehension is not flat and one-dimensional. While it may have initially leaned on an assimilation of a ‘home’ culture at the beginning of colonisation, the colonial/settler experience nonetheless became a hybridising one. ‘Australia’ was neither a ‘pure’ or ‘other’ reality or concept, but the result of exchanges, even if they might be asymmetrical at times. It is this hybridisation that Peter umbrellas under the more expansive term ‘Antipodean’. In the light of Bernard Smith’s work, Peter puts it thus:

All that was categorically solid melted into air…the subordinate partner or place in the relation of domination would also affect the superior culture. [Even – JR] Europe would never be the same after its contacts with the antipodes, even if the Europeans would be slow to concede this formally. (Beilharz, 1997: 30–1)

For Peter, there was no disappearing picnic at Hanging Rock, but rather an intermingling and exchange beyond the dualism of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. This intermingling and exchange also included the coloniser/settler and the ‘aboriginal’-indigenous populations (which eventually came to delegitimise the legal category of ‘terra nullius’ even if it exits constitutionally), and later a fully immigrant society with its multiculturalisms. The Anglo-Celtic civilisation (English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Cornish) that was introduced into ‘the great southern land’ ¹⁰ was a continual series of dialogues and tensions between space and representation (mainly painting and literature, sometimes music), place, imagination and memory. Memories fade or can become reified. More importantly – crucially – for Peter there was a creativity of distance. Distance – between a putative centre and periphery, the ‘home’ (now perhaps somewhere to visit en route to somewhere else on holiday) and ‘the colony’ (now a fully fledged nation) provided and continues to provide a space of creative possibilities. This is especially the case once these categories no longer become historically, legally, culturally or experientially relevant. In other words, for Peter, there was never a ‘tyranny of distance’. Distance itself provides a space of creative possibilities – and not only of interpretations, and not only because of traffic. Distance is not only a geographic distance from a putative centre, but also a space that opens in which intersections, hybrids, new forms may occur that are not simply synthetic or even recycled – they are creations sui generis. Notwithstanding his emphasis on context and well-honed hermeneutic sensitivity, this is Peter’s implicit insight that pulses throughout Imagining the Antipodes, especially, and Thinking the Antipodes.

For Peter, creativity, distance, culture and traffic go together. As he says, ‘we only ever know cultures in traffic’ (Beilharz, 1997: 187). It could also be added: we can only be creative in traffic. We are also ‘at home’ in it. Peter continues:

We [are] at home or not in Melbourne, or the metropolis; we carry all kinds of cultural baggage, today, English by precedent, American by media, Australia by place, multicultural by circumstance…the absent centre of a universe without centres, everything and nothing all at once, similar, yet different. (Beilharz, 1997: 109)

Peter argues that a cultural renaissance – a ‘shock of the new’ – occurred at the intersection of ‘post-colonial/post-imperial’ and multicultural Australia, rather than White Australia (Beilharz, 1997: 67). This renaissance includes intersections with indigenous civilisation, and for the latter occurs in the wake of momentous historical decisions – the 1967 referendum, the pastoral dispute at Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1966–74), the 1992 recognition of native title by the High Court (the Mabo case) and land rights legislations at both federal and state/territory levels – the result of which is a changed indigenous landscape that is both self-confident and self-assertive (Beilharz, 2015: 91). ¹¹ The renaissance has been articulated culturally in literature, art, theatre, dance (both popular and classical) at the intersection of long civilisational forms of Australian indigenous civilisation and modern aesthetic forms as seen in, for example, The Western Desert Art Movement, especially the works of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his brother Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, that now stand alongside the works of Fred Williams and John Olsen to constitute new landscape painting.

The same goes for music, ranging from classical to blues, folk, rap, pop and jazz. It is not so much that Australian music was on the periphery but the periphery itself, if one wants to use this term, rendered the possibility of different perspectives and the creation of new musically aesthetic forms that include, among others, compositions by Peter Sculthorpe, William Barton, Ross Edwards, Mandawauy Yunupingu, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Geoffrey Gurrumal Yunupingu, Nick Cave, Liza Lim, Paul Kelly, Deborah Cheetham, Archie Roach, Elena Kats-Chernin, Nigel Westlake, Ruby Hunter and John Carmichael. It was always about combinations, synthesising new sounds and creating something new.

This is the secret of Peter’s most recent book Toward the Blues (Beilharz, 2023). At first glance – or listen – Peter’s Toward the Blues is like the Chain music album itself – short and densely packed. It is a book with a specific aim to celebrate, contextualise and analyse one album by one rock–blues band, Chain. Their album is Toward the Blues recorded and released in 1971 into a mostly Melbourne (and Sydney, less Brisbane) world of anti-Vietnam War protest that became an umbrella for other protest movements that were developing their own paths. There was also long hair, student housing, sexual experimentation, drugs for recreation and an ever-present staple apart from Vegemite – alcohol.

However, it is much more than this. Peter’s Toward the Blues represents a shift in aesthetic analysis from the grand narratives of alienation to the little narratives of the everyday including little loves, little sufferings and heartbreaks, the vicissitudes of everyday life. In Durkheimian terms, while Imagining the Antipodes works in the world of the sacred, Toward the Blues works in the world of the profane. It gives the profane an aesthetic musical form that is as real and legitimate as anything that occurs in the world of ‘high culture’. Toward the Blues is an anti-Adorno text. It does not join the fray of those who conflate the everyday with mass, popular, manufactured culture, and rock music with formulas and fame (for Adorno (1991) it was jazz). By comparison, Toward the Blues (the album) was self-constituted, self-disciplined and imbedded in the blues, jazz and rock traditions. Peter’s book indicates something about the nature of contemporary rock or popular music that is more than its transformation into a professionalised ‘music industry’ made up of managers, session musicians, sound engineers and producers, advertisers, executives and entrepreneurs (even impresarios). Like classical music before it, ‘rock’ music in all its forms, has become a genre with its own criteria, its own ‘sensus communis’ (Kant, 1987). The criterion of taste is neither fashion nor fame (and even this affects classical music taste, sales and programming), but the quality of the composition and its performances. Composers, players and audiences know when a good piece or band is playing and when a bad one is (they leave or stop listening) (Markus, 2011). ¹² Like classical music and jazz, there are standards in the double sense – qualities of composition and performance, and compositions that enter the repertoire and the canon, which become reference points to be learnt, re-arranged, played and improvised.

This is certainly the case with the music album Toward the Blues and Peter’s book Toward the Blues. The latter really is a companion text to Imagining the Antipodes. For Peter, as we have seen, traffic and noise matter. It is certainly not din; nor is it simply a product of intersection even if it is significant. It is a product of cultural traffic: ‘Australian culture was often thought to be too far away from where the action was. An alternative view is that distance, or being on the periphery can also be an advantage when it comes to innovation’ (Beilharz, 2023: 11). In Peter’s view Chain, the band, is representative of a cultural renaissance, this time at the level of everyday life that has its own pulses of creativity: ‘Novelty in conception and execution; imagination, technique and technology combined. New approaches, older music styles folded in together’ (Beilharz, 2023: 2). It was also the outcome of cultural traffic between American blues culture, Motown and a ‘rock’ culture, both American and British that was experimenting with jazz instrumentation and forms to create ‘fusions’ of sounds and rhythms: ‘Chain resulted from cultural traffic, the movement between places and cities interspersed by other influences’ (Beilharz, 2023: 6; also 63–85). Their second music album, Toward the Blues highlights that rock music (for him, Chain, but it could also be the long-lasting Rolling Stones, for example) has its own musicality and musicianship that can bring something new to an already established musical genre. Peter, musically, conveys that it was indicative of a magic moment in the studio and in Melbourne’s wider music scene, where the crossovers in personnel and style led to a thick culture of jazz, blues and elements of progressive rock and fusion, improvisation, all held together by riffs. There was also the close proximity of audience and musicians that produced an intensity often mediated and enhanced by alcohol and illicit substances. It all amounted to a frenetic cultural traffic in musical ideas, sounds and influences (Beilharz, 2023).

As Peter discusses the musicians and the songs, it becomes clear that both are as sophisticated and self-knowledgeable as any other musical form. This tribute to Peter’s work can conclude with his analyses of the six tracks on Chain’s album, which have affinities with his six theses on the Antipodes that opened the discussion in this essay. Instead of six theses, let’s call it, in the spirit of the creativity of distance, six ‘Chain tracks’ that connect North with South, East with West. Let’s take a listen.

Chain tracks

Track 1 is ‘live’ and sets the tone for what follows, sonically – rough and a bit raw, not manufactured or bound by studio rules. ‘32/20’ is a ‘canon’ blues song by Robert Johnson, who recorded it along with 29 other tracks in 1936–37. He ‘mythically’ originated the blues, and his work is widely known and played by blues connoisseurs and mainstream (white) players alike from Chicago to London and now Melbourne. This is Chain’s version of a canon blues song with pulse, rhythm, soaring harp and guitar solo, although the song is carried by the bass and drums (Beilharz, 2023: 7; 17).

Track 2, ‘Snatch it Back and Hold it’ is not part of the canon, although it became widely known, before in cult circles, and after because of Chain’s version. It is a traffic song but sexy, sassy, suggestive both lyrically and musically, not like a bossa nova and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. It is raunchier. You cannot resist. You get up and dance! Inspired by the 1965 Junior Wells song ‘Snatch it Back and Hold it’, Chain plays it experimentally, creatively in a way that leans on the great guitarists of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton but bring their own drive (Beilharz, 2023: 18–19).

Track 3 is simply called ‘Boogie’. Boogie, as a sub-genre, became a standard item in the repertoire of white blues bands into the early 1970s, mediated by John Lee Hooker and then most popularly by LA band Canned Heat (Beilharz, 2023: 7; 19). But as Peter also points out Chain made it their own – ‘a riff that leads to a jam, with words added over the top, the standard images of sexual excess, vagrancy, police cars, drug abuse and desolation’ (Beilharz, 2023: 20). Antipodean in spirit, it yells across the distance and isolation in stoic resistance to fate.

Track 4 ‘Booze is Bad News Blues’ is almost an Antipodean working-class urban manifesto before pubs went ‘gastro’: all day Saturdays in the pub, buying rounds of beers for mates, telling jokes and maybe waiting for a fight. This is lazy, loping, slow, laid-back blues, for a lazy, loping, slow, laid-back day. With a twist. Alcohol is mean, partners are mean, life is mean and cruel. Drown your sorrows: ‘This is a moment of rare and chilling beauty in period Oceanic rock’ (Beilharz, 2023: 22). It is not a plaintiff, subdued call by Billie Holiday. It is confessionally sociable. You don’t wallow in the blues. Rather, the music follows a slow companionate blues pattern with a fine guitar solo as you are picked up off the floor because you have some mates.

Track 5, ‘Albert Goose is Gonna let the Blueses Looses Now’ is the most original and indeed ‘traffic’ and creative track on the album. As Peter notes, it is a combination of blues, jazz and rock combined in an artistry through a solo on drums: ‘a beautiful, tasteful drum solo with music dropped in around it and over it’. Peter continues:

The mood is jazzy – playing time on ride cymbal, punctuation improvised on snare, always played by Little Goose in jazz grip, picking out the accents, bass drum played alternating against the snare, shaft of the right stick across the ride cymbal on the third stroke, some rimshot. Then guitar and bass re-enter, and finally harp. Bass and drums perform some wonderful intuitive layering and tricks together. (Beilharz, 2023: 23–4)

Constant traffic

What do we make of these six ‘Chain tracks’ in the light of Peter’s six theses and our reconstruction of his work? The title of Peter’s book can also be interpreted as pointing beyond and not only towards. Notwithstanding its local context, the album is a statement of traffic, of musical influences and confluences that have both travelled and come to reside and then travel again. It is beyond the blues – literally – with jazz and rock influences. It is beyond provincial ‘folk’ culture, setting its sights beyond the horizon to America and the United Kingdom, this time as equals and co-inhabitants. It is beyond the amateur and the professional to take its place among the auteurs (Beilharz, 2023: 51). With this ‘beyond’ in mind, Peter’s recent work is symptomatic of the cultural renaissance that emerged in and out of the traffic in contemporary Antipodean modernity. It didn’t dodge the traffic; it embraced and learned to live with it. The great Australian motifs are present – punishment, distance, loss and hardship. But there is also humour and tenderness – all composed and played as a creative constellation out of an admixture of cultural forms. There is no redemption in Chain’s musical work – just the blood and grind and sardonic humour of the everyday. This occurs though with a stunning musicianship that nonetheless simultaneously dissolves the boundary between the ‘high’ and ‘the low’ that, musically, becomes transcendent for a moment, and yet in the next restates it with a gut-filled lyric and a thumping bassline.

Peter’s work, like the Antipodes more generally, opens a creative space for thinking, feeling, imagining in all its colours and hues, from the cruellest, to the most beautiful. There is not only a traffic in cultures, but also a traffic in aesthetics and emotions. It is not that ‘life imitates art’ or ‘art imitates life’. There is no mimetic relation between the two. Rather, the best observers, composers, performers, theoreticians – even the rest of us – can be sensitive to and deeply understand the tensions, dissonances and paradoxes of lives that do not ‘fit together’ or do so only unevenly. Peter’s sense is that there is neither tragedy nor drama in this, but at times the wry sense that this constitutes the normality of everyday life and its complexities – even in the Antipodes. As Peter makes clear, the distance, beauty and even the cruelty of the Antipodes is that it can create – in and through traffic – and this creativity of distance can enable a distance from ourselves, a distance from others and a distance from all the modernities while never leaving them. We live them in all of their – and our – ambivalence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Peter in his La Trobe office, Melbourne, 1993

OPEN IN VIEWER

Peter in his La Trobe office, Melbourne, 2013