Craig Emerson

I don’t mind a political bio every now and again, and Craig Emerson’s reflections on his journey from obscurity to the national stage make for interesting reading. A very positive review in The Australian (paywalled) was the catalyst for my purchase, but the book probably would have lingered longer on the shelf if not for Emerson’s appearance on the program at the Woodend Winter Arts Festival. I finished reading this engaging memoir just in time for Emerson’s session with Sally Warhaft and Don Watson, but the book was barely mentioned in a wide-ranging discussion on the theme of ‘Australia Adrift’. I took six pages of notes but I’ll confine myself to sharing just one example…
In response to Sally Warhaft’s opening salvo:

"Australia is close to greatness, so close to falling apart. Sketch the state of the nation…"

Craig Emerson talked about how aspects of Australia are great, but the stats show that we’re not the happiest. A social indicator that concerns him greatly is the number of homeless people he sees on the streets and how this seems to be normalised now. Every time we walk past a homeless person, he says, a little part of society dies, and he thinks that we are potentially heading in a sad, callous direction. He described himself as a neo-liberalist, who believes in using national prosperity to reach out to vulnerable people, but he thinks that now people just want money for its own sake and that there are many very rich people who simply do not care. Acceptance of Trump and his values and behaviour is becoming normalised, but he believes that we as a people should push back to values that we had twenty years ago.
The memoir shows that Emerson himself knows what it means to be vulnerable. In the 1960s when he and his brother Lance were boys, his family in the small town of Baradine in north-western NSW was in a state of chaos. It wasn’t just his mother who suffered from deep depression, but also his father, worn out from their constant warfare, and the boys were traumatised by her irrational rages, her violence against them and her attempts at suicide.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/06/14/the-boy-from-baradine-by-craig-emerson-bookr...… (más)