This was published 13 years ago
Somewhere in Gillard's eulogy to tortured English lies the truth
When prime ministers open their mouths, people listen. Sometimes, however, they wonder why they did.
By Michael Shmith
ONE can't help feeling a trifle sorry for Julia Gillard. Her curiously circumlocutious sentence on what could be called the East Timor dissolution, made me wonder anew at the power of the English language and its ability simultaneously to clarify and confuse.
Her predecessor was a master at it. But just as one thought the new Prime Minister was going to be a figurehead for plain speaking, she comes out with this:
''I am not going to leave undisturbed the impression that I made an announcement about a specific location.''
Between reading this and allowing this phraseology to settle into my brain for just a moment - enough time to leave the sort of impression made by a bucket of water thrown into a sand dune - I somehow managed to work out what Ms Gillard was trying to say. I know she was born in Wales, but I didn't suspect she still spoke the argot. She can probably reel off the name of that famous station whose signage matches exactly the length of the platform. In fact, I thought, the translation of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is an old Welsh saying beloved of station masters: ''I am not going to leave undisturbed the impression that I made an announcement about a specific location.''
The late Bernard Levin, English journalist and writer of elegance, used to walk along the Thames, crossing each bridge from Tower Bridge to Hammersmith, amusing himself by seeing how many separate sentences he could devise from the immortal line, ''The ploughman homeward plods his weary way''. Gray's Elegy is one thing; Gillard's Eulogy to tortured English is quite another. ''An announcement that a specific impression about an undisturbed location that I made I am not going to leave,'' is about as far as I got, barely quarter of the way across Princes Bridge.
The trouble is that politicians, compared with other human beings, feel they must wrap their public utterances in the most impenetrable paper, sealed with syntactical sticky tape and bound with bombastic barbed wire. Somewhere in there lurks the truth, but it takes time and bleeding fingers to divulge. Which is why my hero of the week is the great American playwright Edward Albee. Presented with one of those spurious forms of instant journalism - the fill-it-in Q&A interview - Albee obliged, but just. I loved the following: Which artists do you most admire?
Good ones.
Would you like to give any examples?
Nope. They know who they are.
Imagine, if you will, if Edward Albee was Australia's prime minister. He would make short work of the asylum-seeker debate:
Why did you want to establish a processing centre in East Timor?
Because it's convenient.
But why didn't it work?
Dunno. You'll have to ask them.
Albee would make brilliant short work of the federal budget:
What's the thrust of your budget?
Read it and see.
Ah! Brevity! The master of that was Victor Hugo. While Les Miserables is, indeed, several hundred pages of misery, it was Hugo who sent his publisher a telegram, inquiring how his latest book was selling. This is what he said: ? Not to be outdone, the publisher replied: !
The riposte is not what it used to be, alas. Perhaps we're not all as quick-witted as Stephen Fry, but it seems that the combination of political correctness and management-speak has blunted the sabre of witticism. This is not mixing metaphors: a riposte is, of course, a technical term used in fencing. Indeed, the witty remark, the rejoinder, the bon mot, have been consigned to books of quotation or misappropriated: the riposte becomes a rip-off.
The trouble is that you tend to think of a riposte far too late. Like standing ovations, they have to be instantaneous, leaving the lips at the same time as the brain. One of the greatest, and quickest, exponents of the riposte was the late Australian-born actress Coral Browne, who did for bitchiness what Yehudi Menuhin did for violin playing. She once told a Hollywood scriptwriter: ''You couldn't write f--- on the dust on a venetian blind'', and notoriously remarked: ''Edward Woodward? - that's not a name, it's a fart in the bath.'' There are worse examples.
While I don't expect Gillard to be as foul-mouthed, I am not going to leave undisturbed the impression that sometimes saying less, in a clear-headed way, is better than saying more and saying nothing.