Lopping tall poppies
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ryan Heath
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Ryan Heath's biography and other articles by this writer
I want to play God Only Knows at my wedding. A weird confession perhaps, but when you write books with swear words in the title, are told you hate Baby Boomers and are introduced as though "controversial" is your first name, you take refuge where you can. Even the Beach Boys.
"Generations do exist and they matter," I wrote in the first page of Please just f* off, it's our turn now (Pluto Press, 2006). But does anyone care? For every individual inspired by my book, there are another two shaking their heads or poking a voodoo doll. For every young Australian who bought it, ninety-nine didn't. Most had never heard of it.
Yet few authors have had their books thrown at them at public lunches (thanks, Bob Ellis). Fewer still have had to decide whether it was OK for Kerri-Anne Kennerley to refuse to name their book on air. And I don't know another author who has dragged a foreign minister away from his homework the night before a Royal Commission to a debate in a grotty Adelaide pub. That was my April 2006. If nothing else, it proved generations not only exist, they make some people very angry.
My frenetic writing style, lateral thinking and machine-gun cynicism were fuel to this fire. At twenty-three – as I was when I began writing the book – you change quickly and often. You shift in one direction just as your amorphous generational target shifts in another. And worse still, you are not a neutral observer when you interview people your own age. They shape you until you can't remember what is them and what is you. It means the final product cannot be consistent. Nor should it be. That's the price of presenting a complex generation fairly, of illuminating a group which is not well understood. It also meant the final text was always going to be both a launching pad and a noose for me.
Weeks would pass as the text sat alone and unloved on my C:/ drive. If I dated someone new, my friends would know within hours. When I junked a chapter, no one was any the wiser. When I did talk about it, the conversation came in torrents – a release from my private whirlpool of conflict about the book.
Ninety thousand words were discarded in the two years from contract to launch party – each lost word an attempt to keep pace with a rapidly changing world and my evolving headspace. Blogs were hot in 2004; by 2006 they were as cutting edge as a butter knife. I was tired of Australia in 2004; by 2006 I was homesick.
And the permanent underlying fear was the idea of speaking – or being seen to be speaking – for a generation that doesn't want to be spoken for and doesn't accept labels. Why? Because its members have had to selfishly scrap for everything they've got, and share no inherent solidarity. They would never adopt me or my views simply because I was one of them. In fact, many would and did happily call even youth radio station Triple J to rant about my stupidity and demand I lay off Boomers.
But that passion is matched and beaten in more productive ways by others. Whether it's the new volunteer ethic or the ingrained sense of environmental responsibility they express daily, this generation possesses a lucrative set of values. And they know how to exploit them. With access to the world's best technology, literacy and memories of nothing but capitalist growth, they really believe there is no stopping them. Even when the reality of Australia's conservative institutions – from the mainstream media to political parties – butts up against them, they seem to simply motor around. They make their own media and turn to their dynamic friendship networks rather than the ballot box to achieve social change. But to claim even that is to risk more opprobrium for being "unresearched", as The Bulletin declared.
THE FIRST MONTH OF WRITING WAS EXCITING. Then defensiveness set in. My brow furrowed and I could not explain the book in a sentence ("If I could tell you in a sentence I wouldn't need to write 60,000 words, would I?"). Friends wondered: "It must be hard, writing about something you don't really believe in."
I stand by it – this isn't simply a book about Baby Boomers. It is a book about the complacency that polyfills Australia. It critiques John Howard's Australia without blaming him for everything – or even mentioning him. It "bigs up" the quirks and achievements of my generation and to string it together it points out the absurdities and hypocrisy of our parents – the Baby Boomers.
You would not know that if you hadn't read the book or met me. Proving the very complacency I moan about, many Australians found it easier to judge a book by its cover – or title. Much easier to dismiss the punchy, blog style than actually analyse the ideas from the perspective from which they are written. The auto-script then goes: "He would tell Boomers to f* off, wouldn't he? He was born in 1980." Apparently I am also self-interested, shallow, a careerist and more interested in attention than serious thinking. All because my publishers and I weren't too keen on calling the book Generation now or When generations collide – the working titles.
For my employers, the UK Civil Service, the title wasn't the issue. Calling the Howard government a "bunch of used car salesman" was. You didn't read about it in a nasty tabloid, but according to the Cabinet Office you could have. They feared it could cause a diplomatic incident between Australia and Britain, during Tony Blair's Commonwealth Games visit. So they urged me to cancel my London launch and even sent me home from work in the middle of the day to remove a photo of a Whitehall street sign from my personal website. At the time of these delicately put ultimatums ("We don't want you to feel pushed") I lived in a grey zone midway between The Office and Yes Minister.
To say I was "sacked" would not stand up in court. Yet to deny that my writing was the cause of my sudden ejection from my lovely view of the Downing Street garden would be immoral. The galling truth is that, to the guardians of the Civil Service tradition, I simply wasn't worth the effort. They knew I had done nothing wrong, and they also knew I had the correspondence, written requests and warnings to prove it. But being right doesn't stop you being a PR risk, discarded with possibly a second, but certainly not a third, thought. Hard work and moral authority is no insurance against tabloid headlines – and in twenty-first century government, headlines win.