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Island magazine, Issue 153

Island magazine, Issue 153

Sarah Holland-Batt
4.5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Years ago, during another life as a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, I bought a copy of a Beckett play at auction. It was the ugliest book that has ever passed through my hands: a paperback, seventeenth edition, covers torn, pages crumpled and scribbled over. Its busted spine was brutally reinforced with silver duct tape. And yet this book was special. It was the prompt copy of the San Quentin Players’ performance of Samuel Beckett’s 'Endgame', which took place in the old gallows room of the infamous jail.

Beckett was appalled by incarceration. He expressed a lifelong curiosity and compassion for those trapped inside the penal system. Living across from the La Santé Prison in Paris, Beckett would sometimes communicate with the inmates using a mirror and semaphore. Later on, he would direct performances of his own plays using former convicts as actors, or else assist them to direct in his place. Most famously he befriended and made a colleague of Rick Cluchey, the man whose copy of 'Endgame' I bought that day at Sotheby’s.

Cluchey first heard 'Waiting for Godot' performed at San Quentin in 1957, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery and it is not too dramatic to say that this encounter with Beckett’s play changed his life. Here was a work of art that communicated something of the cruelty and absurdity, the slow violence of imprisonment. After his sentence was commuted in the mid-1960s, Cluchey spent the rest of his life performing Beckett, attempting to transmit something of the power of art to critique the system of surveillance, control and punishment he had known from within.

This winter, Dark Mofo and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are set to explore similar territory in a new exhibition, guest curated by Swiss curator Barbara Polla, with Olivier Varenne and Mary Knights. A Journey to Freedom – which draws together works by contemporary national and international artists working across installation, sculpture, video, photography and virtual reality – ‘explores issues relating to incarceration from a range of different cultural and historical perspectives: from Tasmania’s dark convict past; to ‘doing time’ in the notorious “Pink Palace” Risdon Prison; and the experience of refugees held in camps and detention centres in Australia and beyond.’

This issue of Island has been shaped in part to fit with this ambitious project. It is a rich subject for literary responses – and Tasmania, founded as a prison island after all, is a rich location for thinking through its implications. But as the contributions to this issue reveal, once we begin to explore ideas of imprisonment and freedom, official categories and received wisdom begin to break down.

Van Diemen’s Land began as a penal colony with a reputation for unrelenting misery at the end of the world. Yet economic development gradually altered the calculus: transportation came to be seen as almost an opportunity – for improvement, renewal, a fresh start. To complicate matters further, the indigenous peoples of Tasmania were obliged into subservience or exile in order to make way for this Georgian-era Lebensraum .

Likewise, any prison or penal settlement that takes its reason for existing to the logical extreme – total control over its population, elimination of ordinary norms and decencies, abolishment of even minimal kindnesses – creates the conditions for a paradoxical freedom. In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel of Gulag life, an imprisoned engineer named Bobynin observes that ‘you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.’

And once we start looking more critically at the supposedly free society around us, questions must be asked about the degree to which we actually wish to be liberated. Why are men born free, asked Rousseau, famously, but nevertheless everywhere in chains? Less famous was the Catholic Royalist Joseph de Maistre’s rejoinder. He said this was like asking ‘why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’ He believed that there were as many people who genuinely craved freedom as there were fish that flew.

Finally, the question must be asked: do freedom and autonomy even exist in our rich Western societies for those few who do wish to enjoy them to the full? Anyone watching events in recent months in relation to Facebook and other Silicon Valley behemoths might wonder whether we live inside a surveillance economy – a digital panopticon with a checkout button – rather than a liberal democracy. Indeed, there are those, such as Michel Foucault, who saw little difference between the inside and outside of our institutions of correction:

'Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?'

Creative responses need not strain towards some false clarity or easy resolution in order to express their engagement with and care for the subjects of incarceration. It is enough that they carefully notice and so retrieve the humanity of those which the state or society would demonise, punish or hide away. Waiting for Godot, for example – that play which saved Rick Cluchey all those years ago – offers no solutions, furnishes no hope. And yet it offered solidarity to one inmate, at least: a sense that someone outside was flashing their mirror in semaphore to say, ‘I see you, I hear you. You are not wholly banished from human community’.

Which is probably why Beckett’s play is a banned text at Guantanamo Bay."

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 153

ESSAYS
Running Away - Angela Meyer
Punishment Box - Delia Nicholls
Beyond The Crown - Mark McKenna
Fragments of a Life - John Rickard
Prisoners of a Mindset - Rob White
Turning Inside Out - Aaron
Into the Light - Rosalie Martin
On Caring - Heather Taylor Johnson

ART
A Tasmanian Requiem - Jim Everett, Greg Lehman, Helen Thomson, Julie Gough
All We Can't See
Sisters Akousmatica - Pip Stafford and Julia Drouhin

FICTION
Things to Make and Do - Cate Kennedy
First Fleet: Little Annals - Emma Scully Jones and Fiona McFarlane
Principles of Chemistry - Magdalena McGuire
The Wolves - Josephine Rowe
The Voices of the Magpies - Laura McPhee-Browne and Elizabeth Jolley
Unbury Me - Ben Walter
Her Body's Slight Resistance - Marieke Hardy

POETRY
The House - AG Pettet
My Mother Was A Lonesome Cowboy - Rachael Mead
The Loyalist - Ben Walter
1940 - Geoff Page
Alprazolam - Jim Johnstone
Tin / Lead - Tricia Dearborn
Limit Philosophy - Ella Jeffery
Born for Fun - Liam Ferney
Language
English
Pages
114
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
May 28, 2018
ISBN 13
9780648271918

Island magazine, Issue 153

Sarah Holland-Batt
4.5/5 ( ratings)
Read Download
"Years ago, during another life as a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, I bought a copy of a Beckett play at auction. It was the ugliest book that has ever passed through my hands: a paperback, seventeenth edition, covers torn, pages crumpled and scribbled over. Its busted spine was brutally reinforced with silver duct tape. And yet this book was special. It was the prompt copy of the San Quentin Players’ performance of Samuel Beckett’s 'Endgame', which took place in the old gallows room of the infamous jail.

Beckett was appalled by incarceration. He expressed a lifelong curiosity and compassion for those trapped inside the penal system. Living across from the La Santé Prison in Paris, Beckett would sometimes communicate with the inmates using a mirror and semaphore. Later on, he would direct performances of his own plays using former convicts as actors, or else assist them to direct in his place. Most famously he befriended and made a colleague of Rick Cluchey, the man whose copy of 'Endgame' I bought that day at Sotheby’s.

Cluchey first heard 'Waiting for Godot' performed at San Quentin in 1957, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery and it is not too dramatic to say that this encounter with Beckett’s play changed his life. Here was a work of art that communicated something of the cruelty and absurdity, the slow violence of imprisonment. After his sentence was commuted in the mid-1960s, Cluchey spent the rest of his life performing Beckett, attempting to transmit something of the power of art to critique the system of surveillance, control and punishment he had known from within.

This winter, Dark Mofo and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are set to explore similar territory in a new exhibition, guest curated by Swiss curator Barbara Polla, with Olivier Varenne and Mary Knights. A Journey to Freedom – which draws together works by contemporary national and international artists working across installation, sculpture, video, photography and virtual reality – ‘explores issues relating to incarceration from a range of different cultural and historical perspectives: from Tasmania’s dark convict past; to ‘doing time’ in the notorious “Pink Palace” Risdon Prison; and the experience of refugees held in camps and detention centres in Australia and beyond.’

This issue of Island has been shaped in part to fit with this ambitious project. It is a rich subject for literary responses – and Tasmania, founded as a prison island after all, is a rich location for thinking through its implications. But as the contributions to this issue reveal, once we begin to explore ideas of imprisonment and freedom, official categories and received wisdom begin to break down.

Van Diemen’s Land began as a penal colony with a reputation for unrelenting misery at the end of the world. Yet economic development gradually altered the calculus: transportation came to be seen as almost an opportunity – for improvement, renewal, a fresh start. To complicate matters further, the indigenous peoples of Tasmania were obliged into subservience or exile in order to make way for this Georgian-era Lebensraum .

Likewise, any prison or penal settlement that takes its reason for existing to the logical extreme – total control over its population, elimination of ordinary norms and decencies, abolishment of even minimal kindnesses – creates the conditions for a paradoxical freedom. In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel of Gulag life, an imprisoned engineer named Bobynin observes that ‘you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.’

And once we start looking more critically at the supposedly free society around us, questions must be asked about the degree to which we actually wish to be liberated. Why are men born free, asked Rousseau, famously, but nevertheless everywhere in chains? Less famous was the Catholic Royalist Joseph de Maistre’s rejoinder. He said this was like asking ‘why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’ He believed that there were as many people who genuinely craved freedom as there were fish that flew.

Finally, the question must be asked: do freedom and autonomy even exist in our rich Western societies for those few who do wish to enjoy them to the full? Anyone watching events in recent months in relation to Facebook and other Silicon Valley behemoths might wonder whether we live inside a surveillance economy – a digital panopticon with a checkout button – rather than a liberal democracy. Indeed, there are those, such as Michel Foucault, who saw little difference between the inside and outside of our institutions of correction:

'Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?'

Creative responses need not strain towards some false clarity or easy resolution in order to express their engagement with and care for the subjects of incarceration. It is enough that they carefully notice and so retrieve the humanity of those which the state or society would demonise, punish or hide away. Waiting for Godot, for example – that play which saved Rick Cluchey all those years ago – offers no solutions, furnishes no hope. And yet it offered solidarity to one inmate, at least: a sense that someone outside was flashing their mirror in semaphore to say, ‘I see you, I hear you. You are not wholly banished from human community’.

Which is probably why Beckett’s play is a banned text at Guantanamo Bay."

Editorial, Geordie Williamson, Island 153

ESSAYS
Running Away - Angela Meyer
Punishment Box - Delia Nicholls
Beyond The Crown - Mark McKenna
Fragments of a Life - John Rickard
Prisoners of a Mindset - Rob White
Turning Inside Out - Aaron
Into the Light - Rosalie Martin
On Caring - Heather Taylor Johnson

ART
A Tasmanian Requiem - Jim Everett, Greg Lehman, Helen Thomson, Julie Gough
All We Can't See
Sisters Akousmatica - Pip Stafford and Julia Drouhin

FICTION
Things to Make and Do - Cate Kennedy
First Fleet: Little Annals - Emma Scully Jones and Fiona McFarlane
Principles of Chemistry - Magdalena McGuire
The Wolves - Josephine Rowe
The Voices of the Magpies - Laura McPhee-Browne and Elizabeth Jolley
Unbury Me - Ben Walter
Her Body's Slight Resistance - Marieke Hardy

POETRY
The House - AG Pettet
My Mother Was A Lonesome Cowboy - Rachael Mead
The Loyalist - Ben Walter
1940 - Geoff Page
Alprazolam - Jim Johnstone
Tin / Lead - Tricia Dearborn
Limit Philosophy - Ella Jeffery
Born for Fun - Liam Ferney
Language
English
Pages
114
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Island Magazine Inc
Release
May 28, 2018
ISBN 13
9780648271918

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