A loose Australian Canon.

"BY THE WATERS of Babylon we sat down and wept." Yes, and I've got a pretty good idea of how they felt. Any civilised person today seated beside the Derrida-desert of what used to be our system of secondary education can only suffer the same sense of desolation.

In a few weeks, Australia's schools will disgorge their annual draft of young people who are supposed to have been educated. A high proportion will be semi-literate: crippled by a vocabulary that is barely rudimentary; unable to spell; unable to construct even a paragraph of clear English. Not all of them, but all too many will merit Winston Churchill's famous words of faint praise: that the Honourable Member could certainly create useful literary works, such as: "Gentlemen--adjust your dress before leaving".

This opinion does not rest merely upon report, but also on a body of first-hand experience. For the fifteen years up to 2004, part of my day job was to interview and to assist each year about 1000 young people. Most were in their early twenties, and approaching the point of entry to their chosen profession. My position was a humble one, but I was happily committed to it; I enjoyed especially the opportunity it gave an elderly man to maintain daily touch with each successive annual accretion to the "rising generation".

It was, mostly, a rewarding experience. True, there were a few total no-hopers, a few unmistakable bad eggs waiting to hatch out into early professional life. But my impression of young Australians, including (perhaps even especially) the children of migrants, gave comfort and assurance for the future. I found (again for the most part) candour, enthusiasm, decency and innate intelligence. There seemed every hope that by their own efforts they would be able to throw off the millstones which had been hung round their necks at the brink of adult life, and be able to swim after all. That millstone was their education: mean, cramped, wrong, slanted, narrow, visionless. Those young people, like Jesus in the garden, had been betrayed thrice.

First, by their own parents. These, by the exercise of a little guts and gumption at state election times, could have shown that any candidate, of whatever party, was a dead parliamentary duck if they connived in the degradation of our schools.

The state governments were the second betrayers, as all of them, by degrees, handed over control of the education system to those who were employed by it--the teachers.

The trinity of traitors was led by the teachers. Themselves narrowly educated and amazingly ignorant, they and their unions pursued naked self-interest with all the delicacy and restraint we had associated with wharf labourers and builders. Strikes and threats of strikes, tricks such as refusals to mark exam papers--any tactics would do, and to hell with the harm it may do their students. This poisonous dispensation is now of long standing. For example, in Victoria, Labor premier John Cain and Liberal premier Henry Bolte were of one mind in their contempt for school teachers. "They won't go on strike just now--the holidays are coming up," said Cain. "They can march up and down till they're footsore. I haven't got a doorstep low enough for them to sit on," said Bolte.

Do recent stirrings by the Commonwealth government (as, for example, in curriculum reform) offer hope of a spring cleaning of the pedagogical slums which masquerade as our schools? Hard to say, for the line wavers, and is under persistent counter-attack from teachers deeply entrenched (and contented) in their regime of dumbed-down darkness.

But one thing is certain: more hope lies in the return of the Howard government than in a government led by Kevin Rudd: not only are teachers numerous and influential in the Labor Party branches; their unions stand high on the list of contributors to Labor campaign funds.

I have seen suggestions, in respect of the teaching of both English and History, that we need a good series of truly fundamental Australian books, readily available, well edited and printed, and cheaply priced. This in itself is admirable but, though it may be a necessary condition for the recovery of general literacy, it is by no means a sufficient one. Something like that was tried with Discovery Press's splendid list of canonical novels, stories and biographies--all handsome books, and cheap. (On the wry side, they were printed in Japan.)

Who will select the titles for any new list of distinguished texts? Could the result be a mere sacred cow, a stuffy "canon" of "classics"? The very idea of an official "must" list of Great Books is somehow naive and illiberal. Yet our present state of decadence may well demand something of the sort.

If it appears, I shall peruse it with anxious eyes--hopeful that novelist Martin Boyd is well represented, stoically enduring the pain at the inevitable names of Patrick White and Thomas Keneally.

A "canon", if such we are to get, is almost bound to lean towards gravitas and pomp. Yet there is a multitude of Australian works never likely to reach any "finest fruits" list, but which are yet vital fragments of the Australian experience. To broaden the range, and also to prove that we don't take ourselves too solemnly, we might create a supplementary list--a sort of literary "'second eleven", or salon des refuses.

My own such catalogue would include the following, and I make no apology whatever for its wild heterogeneity; that's how it is, and all part of the fun:

P.R. Stephensen's The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). Its title perfectly describes its contents. The Road to Gundagai (1965) by Graham McInnes distils the essence of a schoolboy's life in Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s. Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1918), with the author's own delightful animal drawings. Although The Pudding pretends to be a fairytale fantasy for children, no Australians are grown up until they have read it. Likewise with C.J. Dennis's A Book for Kids (1921), prescribed by the author himself for reading by "all good children over four, and under four-and-eighty". One ought include at least a couple of Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong books, of which she wrote many in the first half of the last century.

Two novels about men at war are (in my opinion) among the finest in the English language, though one rarely hears them mentioned today. One is Her Privates We (1930), by aesthete Frederic Manning. It is based on his own service on the French battlefields in 1916. The other is Kenneth ("Seaforth") Mackenzie's Dead Men Rising (1951), an account of an escape of Japanese prisoners of war from a camp in Cowra in New South Wales.

H.M. ("Paddy") Moran was a First World War soldier, an international footballer and an eminent Sydney specialist in cancer therapy. Few autobiographies are more haunting than his Viewless Winds (1939). Bark House Days (1921) is Mary Fullerton's own story of growing up in the tall timbers of Gippsland at the turn of the nineteenth century. (My own treasured copy of the original edition was a present from Frank Dalby Davison.) If you haven't read John O'Grady's They're a Weird Mob (1957), about the bewildered Italian migrant Nino Culotta, you've left the garlic out of your literary lasagna.

I could add many more, though I can already hear murmurs of "my dear--how terribly yesterday he is". And indeed, even the editor's patience may be running out, and his page-space be dwindling. So let me finish the round dozen with two funny men, both of whom worked for Frank Packer's original Women's Weekly: Ross Campbell's She Can't Play My Bagpipes (1970) and Lennie Lower's Here's Luck (1930).

I suspect that not one of these books will ever make the "A" list, but give yourself a treat and read them all. (That's if you can find a copy.)