Problems with the truth.

DO YOU REMEMBER the old promotional slogan: "Bananas Are Cheap and Plentiful"? Just now there is a glut, not of nourishing bananas, but of The Truth; there seems to be a lot of it going around, like flu. This we can safely attribute to the imminence of an election, in the way that a wet season tends to produce an especially lush growth of Paterson's curse.

Parties and candidates are all busy laying out for inspection their own carefully harvested stocks of The Truth, hoping to make a sale. What a shame that our clear view of all this virtue on parade should be obscured by pries of various inferior species of this season's Truth crop, including Half-Truth, Part-Truth, Untruth and Outrageous Deception. But that's democracy, and even if what we get in the end should bear small resemblance to the samples we were shown, at least we will enjoy the excitement of having been offered a choice.

One of W.H. Auden's most engaging poems is "Tell Me the Truth About Love". I wish he had written one called "Tell Me the Truth About Truth". From millennia before the time of Pontius Pilate, and for centuries after Francis Bacon, cultivated persons have made a great hoo-ha of "What Is Truth?" The first of Bacon's essays is titled "Of Truth", and a right old mouthful he makes of it. Not for nothing did William Blake call this terse little book "Good advice for Satan's kingdom". Thoughtful, ordinary folk do not need a philosopher to tell them what The Truth is. Al Smith, mayor of New York, said it: "The people may not be able to think, but they can smell."

Seventy years ago, A.E. Housman was asked how to recognise the presence of true poetry. Such discernment, Housman replied, lay in a region fax deeper than the mind--maybe the pit of the stomach; but did it matter? He confessed that he could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat, but neither he nor the terrier had the slightest difficulty in knowing their quarry when they found it.

At elections, when our minds are fuddled by fudged facts and slanted statistics, we ordinary mugs need merely study the smooth political faces on the television--and sniff.

LET ME RETURN to questions I raised in an article about John Wren (Quadrant, July-August).

Is it a disreputable national trait of us Australians to mangle and distort the characters of the dead? To twist them recklessly in any way which current ideology or particular literary purpose needs? My own answer is "Yes".

Once a historical individual has been "fitted out" with an accepted persona, do we tend to turn our eyes away from new and contrary evidence? Do we insist on sticking to a comfy cardboard out-out which we probably met in the nursery? Again--"Yes". Manning Clark's six-volume History of Australia is a veritable gallery of misleading portraits: explorers Ludwig Leichhardt and Charles Sturt; politicians Edmund Barton, George Reid and Robert Menzies were all artificially blackened to fit Clark's ideology. Yet two of the most appallingly evil people ever in Australian public prominence--Ned Kelly and H.V. Evatt--are coated in thick layers of whitewash.

Sir Owen Dixon, after long dealings with Evatt, called him psychotic, evil and cruel. Despite his professed passion for civil liberties, Evatt left the writer "Inky" Stephensen in jail, just because he didn't like him. During the Second World War, Evatt conspired with the Opposition behind the back of his leader, John Curtin, undoubtedly helping to hasten Curtin's early death. But for Manning Clark, Evatt carried "the image of Christ in his heart".

From the plain facts readily available, Ned Kelly was an ignorant, adolescent, self-righteous, vainglorious braggart; a layabout who, disdaining hard work on the farm, lived by helping himself to other people's horses and cattle; an armed robber and a murderer of policemen.

This is the man whom folklorists and historian--by unimaginable mental and moral gymnastics--have endowed with qualities of quixotic chivalry, and set up as a national hero. It is high time Australia grew up.

One unhappy by-product of Kelly myth-promotion has been the almost obligatory counter-myth of the unjust judge, Redmond Barry, who sentenced Kelly to hang. In all too many minds, Barry still exists in the form of a caricature: a choleric hanging judge, purple-faced beneath the horsehair, frantic to fit a noose around any delinquent neck.

Perhaps we are growing up. Increasing numbers of immigrant citizens who did not absorb the name of Kelly with their mothers' milk must surely weaken the myth. Few of out historians yet seem inclined to tackle it head on. Ned Kelly still has not been toppled from his perch, but (to my immense pleasure) Redmond Barry is emerging from the foolish shadow cast over him by an outlaw. The La Trobe Journal (published by the State Library Foundation of Victoria) has devoted the whole of its Autumn issue to Barry; and a handsome and interesting publication it is. It celebrates in particular the 150th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stones (booth on the one day) of two of Barry's chief creations--the University of Melbourne and the Public Library (now the State Library).

When Barry--a briefless immigrant Irish barrister--stepped ashore in 1839, Melbourne was little more than a huddle of huts, quite lacking any of the softening influences of civilisation or culture. It was typical of Barry's whole life that he began at once to seek practical remedies. His family motto was "Boutez en Avant" (Thrust Forward)--and he did, by leaving his own back door open in the evenings for anyone who wished to slip in and read his books.

It was a humble start, but by the dedication of his vast and generous energies, Barry by 1880 had built the Melbourne Public Library into one of the world's great collections. The La Trobe Journal tells how he did it. His several journeys overseas, for example, were no junkets, but a ceaseless round of visits to scholars, libraries, learned societies, booksellers and even bookbinders. The result, with gratifying frequency, was a free subscription for Melbourne of some prestigious journal or series of volumes.

His (for those days) almost unique care and sympathy for the Aborigines was partly expressed through his publicly accepted role of standing counsel for them, without fee, in the criminal courts, where he saved more than one from the gallows. But the Journal notes that he also tried to have vocabularies preserved of their fast-vanishing languages, and he ensured that their artefacts were to be seen whenever Victoila's other riches were displayed in the great exhibitions of the period.

The celebrated trial of Ned Kelly was in a sense the culmination of Redmond Barry's career, for he died a week or so after pronouncing the death sentence. (Sir Owen Dixon told me that his own lawyer father had been in court, and had watched Barry don the grim black cap.)

It is wrong and sad that the trial should have cast so long a shadow over Barry's memory. That sternest scholar from the Victorian bench, Sir John V. Barry (no kin to Redmond), and Professor Louis Waller from Monash University have concluded that the trial was without serious defect, and that a different verdict could not have been expected.

The lately-retired Chief Justice of Victoria, John H. Phillips, contributes a most interesting essay to the La Trobe Journal, and states his view that Redmond Barry was an ideal judge for his times. The rough and barely settled colony did not need an Owen Dixon or a Denning; it needed, and it got, a competent lawyer who would work very hard. Phillips believes that Barry ought to have allowed the Kelly jury to consider whether the police, in setting out, were endeavouring to arrest Kelly, or had resolved to shoot him out of hand. But--as I read him--he believes the strength of the prosecution case made a different verdict hard to conceive.

Perhaps the deconstruction of the Kelly myth--in the long run inevitable--might begin with the recognition that Ned Kelly was not railroaded by a hanging judge. His conviction was just, and the penalty he paid was what the law then required.