The Sydney Opera House. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP
Today in Shanghai - a city no less gripped by Olympics mania than Beijing - I was handed instructions on performing "the official Olympic cheer". A cartoon postcard shows a cute girl with round eyes and an enormous head performing a set of orchestrated arm movements to the chant "Aoyun!" (Olympics), "Jiayou!" (Go!), "Zhongguo!" (China!), "Jiayou!" (Go!"). Here patriotism is fashionable, revolutionary gestures are hip, and the temptation to believe identity to be essentially national has never seemed so evilly seductive.
As a guest of the Shanghai Writers' Association, a state-sponsored literary organisation, for the first time in my life I'm an "official" writer. From the 13th floor of a 50-storey apartment block, in a country bent on demonstrative triumphalism, one gets an odd perspective on Australian literary culture. (I'm tempted to use the word "jaundiced", since I'm gazing through yellow sky at a vista purely of rubble and skyscrapers.)
Compared to China, and perhaps elsewhere, Australia is abashed, sceptical and ironic about its writers. Literary prizes tend to raise little public attention: Australia has no equivalent, for example, of the Man Booker carnival, and there's no especial public esteem offered to the lucky recipients of awards. The Miles Franklin Award, arguably the country's most prestigious, raises an eyebrow, but has little hope of competing for cultural attention with the panoptical hyperbole of television or sport.
As an individual, I have learnt to practice a kind of Buddhic detachment from literary shortlists - they're such a contingent, precarious and sometimes perverse system of value; one does well to disinvest, to forget what procedures and judgments they might formally imply, to get on with the more modest, more private work of simply producing a text. I have seen writers tormented by lists, driven to despair by missing listings, and narcissistically inflated to grotesquerie by the mere appearance of their name in a newspaper. The public side of writing includes these ghastly transmogrifications. New writers beware.
The ideological import of prizes is another matter entirely. The election of the Rudd Labour government this year recovered hope in the arts community that the languishing sector would be given attention at last. More particularly, the act of public apology to indigenous Australians on February 13, only eleven weeks after coming to power, demonstrated that the new government had some awareness of the force of both language and the symbolic within a national culture, other, that is, than the pernicious regime of "spin".
The announcement of the new Prime Minister's Award for Fiction was also an early initiative, and in the sense of relief that followed the change of government it was difficult not to believe that a new dawn was coming. It seemed, simply by its announcement, to affirm a new commitment to literary culture, to legitimate its importance, and to suggest, almost heretically, that writing was an activity worthy of serious regard and reward.
Now that the shortlist is out, it is also interesting to see what appears to be a heterodox assortment - not just the usual suspects, but a provocative mix that includes a first novel, a second novel and a novel in verse, alongside well-known luminaries like Malouf and Keneally. This alone is bound to cause controversy and seems to signal a new and audacious spirit of cultural appraisal.
But should the Australian prime minister have a say in "his" award? Emphatically not. Judging panels are contentious enough without prime-ministerial opinion inflecting adjudication. The winning text risks being seen as content-endorsed, or in some way charged by political approval. From my austere room in Shanghai, this sounds like an Olympian mistake.
