‘Clutter brings social responsibility and tolerance to the anarchy of the jungle’

One of the most electrifying experiences I ever recall was first seeing that emblematic Peter Weir film of the 1990s, Dead Poets Society. Or, more particularly, the famous Carpe Diem scene when English master John Keating (Robin Williams) gathers his class of senior students around a glass case of historic photos and the boys’ reflected faces are superimposed on those of former students now “fertilising daffodils”.

This scene, I am sure, was trying to convey the idea that unless the boys recognised that theirs was a once-only chance to make their lives matter, they, too, would subside into a conformist swamp that leads only to the grave of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

I think the film was trying to say something more, at a much deeper and richer level; that by superimposing the faces of one generation on another, they might see that we are part of a great human journey that began in the mists of time and ends … who knows where? Indeed, in an earlier scene, Mr Keating seems to pull these two threads together to plait a common skein on life itself: “The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse,” he says.

I was thinking of the challenges posed by Dead Poets Society when we were visited by Jenny, a dear friend of many years. Jenny is an archivist which, to the unaware, is the profession of those whose hapless duty it is to preserve the records of our expedient society. She was telling us how difficult her profession had become when caught between the powerful penny-pinching bean-counters on one hand, and the horrible legal consequences of important records having ‘gone missing’ on the other.

One need only hearken back to the recent royal commission on the institutional response to the sexual abuse of minors to see what she was driving at.

As it happens, this conflict is not new. She reminded us of one project she had been engaged in many years previously when 400 historically precious files of an important institution were ‘torched’ to make room in a compactus unit for the next generation of records.

“Why did you do it?” she had asked in disbelief. “Because all that information is now in books,” was the reply she received, with the culprit apparently unaware that what had been so summarily vandalised was no different from how we journos used to describe our daily articles — the first, rough draft of history, which, as we know, is always subject to revision when new questions are asked as circumstances inevitably change.

(If I might intrude at this moment and make this observation: If one of those files had been, say, clippings of all the daily newspaper articles written when the Bretton Woods conference was taking place in 1944 to establish a new, post-World War II international economic order, we would have a record of the to-ing and fro-ing of the negotiations before any agreement was reached. And so, if the world economic order went into a tailspin, as it did when we shot ourselves in the foot in 2007, we would have a resource — the first, rough draft of history — to access so as to find a way out of this new dilemma.)

In a nutshell, what Jenny, the long-suffering archivist, was saying is that by clearing the shelves of clutter, to make a clean, minimalist setting that Marie Kondo would be proud to call her own, something vital in that powerful play Mr John Keating referred to, may be irretrievably lost. And so we might as well screw our own small verse into a ball and toss it into the wastepaper basket. Unread.

Jenny believes that since that unfortunate incident of the 400 files, the fate of our culture, in the form of the protection of its past, has become so much worse. While we don’t need to revisit 30 years of cost-cutting expediency, what she sees is a dangerous disrespect for our inherited culture that would be like your local council ripping out all those fading ‘one-way’ signs to save a few ratepayer dollars.

She tells us that even at the smallest level, one’s local school for example, archives and records are now treated like costly rubbish, left to moulder with the silver fish — unless they’ve already been dumped into the skip for landfill.

I suppose, as an old journo who was always conscious of writing that first, rough draft of history, I am making a plea for us to protect our past, to respect our past, and to ignore those snake-oil salesmen who regard any comparison with past experience as an impediment to them making hay while the sun shines.

I don’t mean by this that the past should control us like a dead hand, only that it should always inform our decisions from the highest level to the lowest. In this regard, I regard one of the great triumphs of Australian governance in the 20th century to have been Ben Chifley’s 1945 White Paper Full Employment in Australia. But not a syllable of its stored knowledge and experience and humanity was referred to when our Federal Government committed us to a free global market — as though there were no other alternatives.

Clutter is important. It makes a house into a home; it brings social responsibility and tolerance to the anarchy of the jungle; and it accepts that one size never fits all.

No one exemplified the creativity of clutter more than the esteemed artist Margaret Olley. She lived less than 100 metres from my daughter’s home in inner-Sydney’s Paddington and when I stayed there overnight and walked to the city bus stop at Five Ways, I always passed Ms Olley’s little one-storey terrace, with its battered old rowing boat incongruously upright on the front veranda.

Margaret Olley’s creativity grew from her sentimental engagement with her own cluttered surroundings, not from sitting in a stark, minimalist photo-shoot for some glossy magazine. Similarly, the only test for any of us as to whether the path we are beckoned to follow — by any of those slick persuaders out there — can only be the proven test of the past, not the rosy blandishments of the future.

Be sure of that past, I reckon, and you are so much better placed to take a punt on the future.

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