Janine Dixon, Victoria University; Beth Webster, Swinburne University of Technology; Gigi Foster, UNSW Australia; Rodney Maddock, Monash University; Ross Guest, Griffith University, and Tim Harcourt, UNSW Australia
Janine Dixon, Economist at Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University
In his 2016 book Richard Denniss calls out politicians and vested interests for using “econobabble” – which he defines as “incomprehensible economic jargon and apparently simple words that have been stripped of their normal meanings” – to conceal simple truths from the public. Econobabble was published at the beginning of 2016, but it almost feels as though Denniss knew in advance that “post-truth” would be voted the Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year.
The book teems with examples of econobabble that are both entertaining, because of the way Denniss describes them, and infuriating, because the consequences are so devastating. The discussion of the Adani coal mine, which continues to this day, is particularly enlightening.
Economists themselves are not immune from criticism. As an economic modeller, I was particularly interested in the chapter on economic modelling. In this chapter, continuing with the main themes of the book, Denniss promotes simplicity and openness in the way economic issues should be communicated to the wider community – and I can only agree!
Gigi Foster, Associate Professor, School of Economics, UNSW Australia
Back in September I had the unique experience of attending the Sydney launch of William Coleman’s new edited volume, “Only in Australia” (OUP 2016). I like William and I bought his book mainly out of curiosity and a desire to be entertained.
As an Aussie-loving Yankee transplant who for professional reasons is supposed to have at least a passing familiarity with Australian political and economic history, I have found “Only in Australia” to be enlightening, reaffirming, and most definitely amusing. The enlightenment has been in regard to umpteen little facts and interpretations about Australia’s history as a nation.
Did you know, for example, that in the mid-1800’s, “public schooling in NSW was not as exclusive of religion as Victoria but was still, at its core, secular” (from the chapter by Greg Melleuish and Stephen A. Chavura)? Or that “from the 1850s, Australian governments have been responsible for the financing, construction, and operation of railways – urban, suburban, and rural…[while] in other countries, extensive government railways were initiated later than the 1850s, often beginning with the nationalization of substantial private rail lines or networks” (from the chapter by Jonathan Pincus)? These types of titbits have filled in some of my sometimes patchy understanding of the how and why of modern Australia.
The reaffirmation has mainly been of my impressions of Australian culture. The book itself is a testament to that culture: not a single of the 15 chapters is written or co-written by a woman, and the entire enterprise has a clubbish old-boysy feel to it. That said, as a constant whinger about the Australian cultural cringe, I felt my heart buoyed by many observations rejecting European and particularly British derivations of Australian institutions – both formal and informal. Many of my own observations about those institutions were also confirmed as I turned the pages, such as the observation that “no other significant comparator country has tribunal-determined wages to the extent that Australia does ” (from Phil Lewis’s chapter) and the “absence of domestic corporate strength and financing” of Australian agribusiness (from Nick Carter’s chapter).
I didn’t always agree with the ideological packaging sometimes wrapping the text, and of course the book was far too expensive for reasons we all know too well, but I still enjoyed reading “Only in Australia”.
Ross Guest, Professor of Economics and National Senior Teaching Fellow, Griffith University
Tim Harford is one of the best economics writers for a general audience that I have ever read. He shows how economics is everywhere and relevant to our lives in many ways. And he is very entertaining. Besides, this latest book appeals to me because it gives me hope that all of the disorder in my own life might actually be a good thing.
Tim Harcourt, J.W. Nevile Fellow in Economics, UNSW Australia
Last year I read Geoffrey Blainey ‘s history of Indigenous Australia, titled The Story of Australia’s People, subtitled The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia.
It got me thinking that Australia is 50,000 years old not 230. Geoffrey Blainey tells us, as only he can, the amazing stories of Indigenous history and innovation
This year I am reading the Blainey sequel “The Story of Australia’s people” subtitled The Rise and Rise of a New Australia which takes Australia from the Gold Rush to the present day. Blainey has a unique way of looking at Australia and the world and a unique way of re-looking at it. As he says himself, he has revised a lot of his thinking on Indigenous Australia since his early work The Triumph of the Nomads, written in 1975. He is the master of the historical narrative, a natural born story teller whose words “literally fly off the page”. He is always a pleasure to read regardless of whether you share his view of Australian life.
Another book I’ll be reading, as a self-confessed Australian history junkie, is Stuart McIntyre’s Australia’s Boldest Experiment about the national building efforts of post-war reconstruction in the 1940s. Think of the Snowy Mountains scheme, the Holden car, CSIRO, the ANU, the expansion of the post-migration scheme, all coming out of that innovative policy work undertaken by the war time Curtin-Chifley Labor government and into the long economic boom that Australia enjoyed from the 1950s to the 1970s. The role of the influential economic advisers of the era such as HC Nugget Coombs, JG Crawford and others (known as “The Seven Dwarfs” although no one knows who Snow White was!) is examined in detail by McIntyre. As my own grandfather was an adviser to Prime Minister and Treasurer Ben Chifley in the war years, I am fascinated to see what one of Australia’s most distinguished social historians has to say.
Rodney Maddock, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Victoria University and Adjunct Professor of Economics, Monash University
My book of the year is The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch. This is quite philosophical work, reflecting on the ways in which we will change and are changing in response to the internet. It explores all the ideas and concerns you would expect and is somewhat pessimistic as is clear from the title. What Lynch underplays is the way in which consideration and debate can and do take place on the web, so that it can assist in active development of knowledge rather than just consumption of facts. A thoughtful read.
My novel of the year is Commonwealth by Ann Patchett which I think is her best book since Bel Canto. It is a multigenerational family novel, but written with a light touch and lots of insights into how families function. It is another thoughtful book and one which deserves to be read with time for reflection on its shape and character.
Beth Webster, Director, Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology
Joel Mokyr is a smooth read – packed with anecdotes, facts and stories about our economic origins that will surprise even the most crusty scholar. In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Mokyr highlights the persistent fundamentals that are still very much in operation today in the economy. He makes us wonder why no-one studies economic history any more. Are we raising new generations of number crunchers who only have a superficial understanding of data?
Janine Dixon, Economist at Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University; Beth Webster, Director, Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology; Gigi Foster, Associate Professor, School of Economics, UNSW Australia; Rodney Maddock, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at Victoria University and Adjunct Professor of Economics, Monash University; Ross Guest, Professor of Economics and National Senior Teaching Fellow, Griffith University, and Tim Harcourt, J.W. Nevile Fellow in Economics, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Amy Brown, University of Geneva
The early trailers for Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) were released last (northern) summer, which means my favourite season in life as a medievalist academic is coming: the season of The Truth About King Arthur. It doesn’t matter if the movie itself is good or bad: the question I will be getting is “but how accurate is it?” Does it represent the “real” legend of King Arthur?
Knowing Guy Ritchie’s films, the answer is going to be a glorious “no, and it’s not even trying”, but modern audiences often seem to be attracted to the idea of an adaptation that is more true than others.
The 2004 film King Arthur, a glorious romp featuring Kiera Knightley in an impractical outfit fighting hand-to-hand with an even more impractical short bow, billed itself as telling the “real” story of King Arthur as we’d never seen it before. Set, ostensibly, in the 5th century, it promised the story of a beleaguered Briton warlord rallying his people against the Saxons – but it also gave us a love triangle featuring Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and the knight Lancelot; a tale which first appeared in the 12th century, in France.
Can you tell a King Arthur story to a modern audience without including the royal love triangle? The Australian animated series Arthur! And His Square Knights of the Round Table (1966), aimed at young audiences who presumably weren’t supposed to comprehend a complicated narrative of love, betrayal and sin, is nevertheless peppered with in-jokes about the Queen’s devotion to the comically inept Lancelot.
The BBC’s Merlin (2008), a delightful festival of historical inaccuracies, made the triangle a key part of Guinevere’s character arc for several seasons, ending with poor Lancelot as the tool of necromancy and plots against the throne.
Interestingly, Guy Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword seems to have cast no Lancelot; it remains to be seen if modern audiences will accept a Lancelot-less Camelot as “real” Arthuriana. But whether they do or do not, Ritchie’s work will be compared to an imagined true story of King Arthur, which never existed, even in the Middle Ages. The medieval sources dealing with King Arthur are numerous, inconsistent, and wildly ahistorical in and of themselves.
The name Arthur first appears in the work of the 9th century Welsh historian Nennius, who lists twelve battles this Arthur fought against invading Saxons. Similarly, the Welsh Chronicles (written down in the 10th century) make some references to battles fought by Arthur. On this shaky foundation, along with a scattering of place-names and oblique references, is an entire legend based.
Ask any scholar of Arthurian literature if King Arthur really existed, and we’ll tell you: we don’t know, and we don’t really care. The good stuff, the King Arthur we all know and love, is entirely fictional.
The “Arthurian Legend” really kicked off in the early 12th century, with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (1138), which purported to describe the entire history of Britain from the day dot until about the 7th century.
He describes the founding of Britain by the (mythical) Trojan warrior Brutus; he covers a lot of the historical events described in Nennius’ earlier work; and his account is the first to really describe King Arthur’s reign, his wars against the Saxons, and the doings of the wizard Merlin. Some elements, like the part where Merlin helps Arthur’s father Uther deceive and sleep with another man’s wife, thus conceiving Arthur, remain key parts of the Arthurian legend today. Other elements modern audiences expect, like the Round Table, are still absent.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in Latin, and his book was read and treated as a history book in the Middle Ages. But very quickly, the material was re-worked into French and English poetry. The Norman poet Wace, whose audience included people living in both France and England, based his Roman de Brut (1155) on Geoffrey’s History. He added many things to the story, including the Round Table itself.
Around the turn of the thirteenth century, an English poet named Layamon took both Geoffrey and Wace’s works, combined them, and added more in his long English poem Brut. Arthur is not the only subject covered in the Brut, but it’s the first treatment of King Arthur in English.
These versions, and some of the later English romances like Of Arthur and of Merlin, focus on battles and political tensions. Aside from Merlin they feature few supernatural elements, and do not usually devote much attention to love. In these versions, the traitor Mordred who defeats Arthur at the battle of Camlann is usually his nephew, not his illegitimate son; and Guinevere may willingly marry him after Arthur’s death.
Arthurian romance is where things really start getting fun, from the 12th century onwards. The earliest romances did not focus on Arthur himself, but on various heroes and knights associated with his court.
The very first might be the Welsh Culhwch and Olwen, the events of which rarely make an appearance in later Arthurian works, but which share with them a common basic plot structure: a young man needs to prove himself to win the hand of a fair lady, goes to Arthur’s court, undergoes a series of supernatural adventures, and is eventually able to marry his lady and settle down.
The earliest surviving French Arthurian romances are by an author named Chrétien de Troyes. He wrote five romances, of which the most fun, in my humble opinion, is The Knight of the Lion (1176). The most famous is The Knight of the Cart (1180), which introduces Lancelot and his love affair with Queen Guinevere.
Hot on its heels came The Story of the Grail (1181), which introduces Perceval and the Grail quest – although Chrétien himself never finished that work. At around about the same time, a separate tradition of romances about the knight Tristan and his affair with Queen Isolde of Cornwall was also circulating.
Over the 13th to 15th centuries countless romances were written in French and in various other European languages, telling tales of the adventures of individual knights associated with King Arthur.
For instance, in the 14th century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1390), a young Gawain is challenged to cut off the head of the Green Knight, in return for which the Green Knight will cut off Gawain’s head a year later. Unfortunately for Gawain, the green knight has supernatural headless-survival powers which Gawain lacks, and so the adventure unfolds as Gawain seeks to keep his bargain and his head.
After Chrétien de Troyes’ day, the Grail quest story became extremely popular: there are several continuations of his unfinished poem, a complete reworking in German by a Wolfram von Eschenbach, and many translations. In these, Perceval is the hero who becomes keeper of the Grail. In the complex French prose version known as The Quest of the Holy Grail (1230), Lancelot’s illegitimate but extraordinarily holy son Galahad takes that honour.
If you read no other piece of medieval Arthuriana, read the 13th century French prose romance The Death of King Arthur (1237). The Penguin translation by James Cable is eminently readable, and cheap too. This romance circulated in the middle ages as the last of a “series” of Arthurian works beginning with the Grail’s arrival in Britain and ending with the break-up of the Arthurian court and Arthur’s own death. We call this whole series the Vulgate Cycle, or the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.
This series, rather like many modern fantasy series, was written out of order: the long romance known as the Lancelot Proper and the Quest of the Holy Grail (the one with Galahad, mentioned above) were composed first, by different authors; very quickly afterwards the Death of King Arthur was added, and then the prequel material dealing with the origin of the Grail and the birth of Merlin was added.
In the Death of King Arthur, the Arthurian court is aging. Lancelot has lost his chance at the Grail, the court’s harmony is shattered as Guinevere’s adultery comes to light, Mordred betrays Arthur, and everything falls to pieces.
Fast forward to the 15th century, and an English knight named Thomas Malory, serving time in prison in Calais for attempting to abduct a young heiress, gets hold of the Vulgate Cycle, the Tristan romances, and a range of other material, and produces the most famous piece of English-language (despite its French title) Arthuriana: Le Morte d’Arthur. Malory, whatever else he might have been, was a completist, and he tried very hard to make a single coherent story out of the many contradictory he sources he had.
Chances are, if someone in an English-speaking country says to you they’ve read the “original” story of King Arthur, it’s Malory they mean. Its great popularity is explained by the fact that William Caxton put out a printed edition in the late fifteenth century. You can find that for free online, but the best reading version is the Oxford World’s Classics translation by Helen Cooper.
Very few people get their first idea of King Arthur from a medieval text, today. When I taught Arthurian classes at Sydney Uni I used to ask the group to describe their first encounter with the Arthurian legend – it got oddly confessional at times, liking asking people to describe their religious conversions or coming-out experiences.
A lot of people my age and younger met Arthur through the movie The Sword in the Stone (1963), although in my case it was the infinitely funnier and more terrible Quest for Camelot (1998).
I was reading Arthurian stories long before I learned that the way we’re supposed to judge an adaptation in the modern world is its “fidelity” to its source. I loved Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur (1903) and the 1998 miniseries Merlin and the ridiculous BBC children’s show Sir Gadabout (2002), and the last thing I worried about was whether or not they incorporated exactly the same plot elements.
There’s a distinct pleasure, though, in reading your favourite story told again in new ways: Sir Gadabout was so funny to me precisely because it plays fast and loose with elements that are treated as sacred in the solemn Victorian style of Howard Pyle, or the serious moralising of T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958).
Ask a group of medievalists what the best Arthurian movie is, and 95% of us will answer Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (1975). The reason for that is not, as anyone who has seen it can guess, because it is exceedingly faithful to Thomas Malory’s monumental work, or to any other particular text.
What Monty Python did so brilliantly was take the cultural “idea” of Arthur (perhaps at that time best encapsulated in the musical Camelot (1967)), along with a broad knowledge of Arthurian traditions both medieval and modern, and have fun with it on various levels. You don’t need to have read the weird romances dealing with the Questing Beast to laugh at the Black Beast of Argh, for instance, but if you have, knowledge of the “original” can only improve your appreciation of the adaptation.
And so I contend that whether or not Guy Ritchie includes Lancelot is immaterial. As far as I’m concerned it’s not a real Arthurian movie unless it contains the Beast of Argh, and that’s the stance I’m sticking to.
Readers interested in the history and development of Arthuriana could consult the second edition of The Arthurian Handbook (Routledge, 1997), or explore the texts, images and mini-histories at The Camelot Project.
Amy Brown, Doctoral Assistant in Medieval English, University of Geneva
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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