Lost for words

posturing over the Ruby Princess, the aged-care system.

Dawe feels the absence, too. “It does feel as if we have stopped laughing because everything is so damned overwhelming. We’re all just bogged down in so much noise. We go back into our hole. We don’t have a lot of time to find the irony.”

Without Clarke and Dawe, it is easy to imagine that these bigger issues are too serious for comedy, that the role of the comedian is to offer escape instead of engagement. Dawe disagrees. “Comedy is easy to do now because it’s light – they let you off the hook. If you’re going to do satire, you’ve got to do your homework. And it’s got to hurt somewhere. It shouldn’t be personal. But it’s got to hurt. Some people do satire, but they’re attacking the victim, not the perpetrator.”

But Dawe doubts whether he and Clarke could even find a place in the current media environment – whether there is a space left for comedians to call politicians to account for their hubris. “The problem you’ve got now is that the ABC is offering up its own self-censorship in a brilliant way. People don’t have to be told they can’t touch that subject. They just know what’s going to happen if they do.”

Back when Clarke and Dawe were on our screens, which is not really so long ago, things were different. With a platform free from interference, the two old friends were, like Monty Python in its heyday, having great fun making serious comedy. And, over time, it became second nature. Which is why, of course, Clarke and Dawe worked.

“We did have a lot of fun. It got to the point where I could just pick up a script and I’d know where the beats were. [Clarke] would observe my tone as I picked it up and observe how I dealt with it. He didn’t direct me as to how he thought this thing should go. He just let me read it, and he’d trust me. There was never a discussion.”

At the heart of it all lay a very special friendship, to the extent that you can imagine Clarke and Dawe continuing even after the cameras were turned off. “If yakking had been an Olympic sport, John would have won gold for two countries,” Dawe says. “We both loved talking. He had the depth of understanding about history. John was interested in people because he wanted their view of the world. That’s why he was so damned good. That’s a rare thing. That’s what I miss. I’d bring stuff to the table he didn’t know about, and he’d do the same.”

For Dawe, Clarke’s death was intensely personal. “Apart from my parents dying, that was the most painful part of my life. I lost more than just John and the work. The work was easy. It was all the other stuff with John that was really, really important. I respected his opinion about the world more than anyone else … When my wife hotel quarantine and at the time and I talked about having a second child, I was so unsure. So I rang John one night – it was very early on, when we just started working together – and I put it to him. I maintain that if I recorded that conversation, his answer, and replayed it on radio, there would have been a baby boom that year. He made it sound like it was the most wonderful thing. Our son turned up out of that conversation. When you lose something like that, you lose —” Unusually, Dawe finds himself lost for words. There was also a professional grief, and Dawe knew immediately that there was no substitute for Clarke. “When you’ve worked with the best…” His voice trails off. “People have approached me. I just didn’t answer. There’s no way. We had nearly 30 years together. It’s there. It’s on the record. It’s a bit like when you do the remake of a movie – it doesn’t work. It never works.”

Many Australians felt the loss almost as personally: as Dawe mourned, so too did the nation. For a time after Clarke died, Dawe carried the burden of his own grief and of becoming the focal point of a profound national grief – one that took many commentators by surprise.

“I couldn’t go out of my house. There was not one day where I didn’t have someone talk about us. I had to stop working. I couldn’t cope.”

Dawe fled to Tangier, in Morocco. It was there, where no one knew Clarke, that Dawe was able to heal. “Tangier is about reinvention,” says Dawe. “I didn’t set out to do that, but it just gave me that breathing space. I hadn’t reflected on John’s death six months after he died, because I didn’t have time, didn’t have the space to do it. In Tangier I was able to switch off while I was there.” Dawe was born in Port Adelaide and is still drawn to the intrigue of port cities. “That’s why I love Tangier. And I love port towns because they’re so used to people coming and going. They’re far less judgemental. They ask no questions.”

While he was in Tangier, Dawe threw himself into local life, befriending barbers and shoe shiners, passing days in the Gran Cafe de Paris, the famed haunt of spies and intellectuals for more than a century. “Casablanca, the film, is really about Tangier,” says Dawe. He also immersed himself in creating the multimedia or digital artworks that are now his passion.

Dawe had always been something of a Renaissance man, a restless creative unbound by genres or artistic norms and a man of voracious appetites. In addition to comedy and politics, he has made important contributions to the world of music, public speaking, photography and, now, the visual arts. In Tangier, through his art, he also found healing and solace.

“The art gave me a release from having to think about losing John. That’s the big one. I’d already had an exhibition in Tangier a year and a half before. I just focused on the art and came back with three exhibitions.”

He knew that he had to return and face an Australia without Clarke, but time had brought if not a measure of healing then of space. “It was only when I got off the plane coming back, and I literally didn’t get out of the

Dawe remains the same man that sat across from John Clarke for three decades, having a ball, trying not to laugh.

airport before I said, ‘Oh my God!’ And then I had to learn how to deal with that.”

Dawe now enjoys being out of the limelight, although he maintains the right to occasionally stick his head above the parapet. “Most of the time, I don’t bother commenting, because you just get the moronic brigade writing crap. I don’t engage. But every now and then something annoys me, and I just throw it out there and go away.”

Most recently he has maintained a busy schedule of digital art exhibitions, with plans for an online exhibition before the end of the year (at bryandawe.com). In the process of creating art, Dawe remains the same man who sat across from John Clarke for three decades, having a ball, trying not to laugh. “I love it. It’s a bit like writing – you hate it and you love it all at the same time. It’s the means of staying alive in the water. I can sit here in the dark, in the middle of winter, and just start playing.”

Raconteur. Provocateur. Commentator on the state of our nation. Bryan Dawe is not done yet.

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Both local parents and the education department considered the Footscray Primary model a success. But times – and neighbourhoods – change. Drawn in part by Footscray’s celebrated multiculturalism, more affluent, whiter families are moving in. And while teaching Vietnamese made sense when Footscray was a resettlement hub for refugees from Vietnam, the new families want their children to learn a more “global” language. That was the opening premise of a report by Associate Professor Russell Cross and Dr Julie Hamston from the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education. The report, delivered in March as part of a wider analysis of Victoria’s designated bilingual programs and shared by the school leadership with school council members and teachers, recommended that Footscray Primary replace its Vietnamese bilingual program with Japanese or Italian. In fact, the report painted a picture of an already marginal language in decline. Fewer students were studying Vietnamese at all levels, from primary to university. From those numbers flowed the damning finding: there were only 16 government primary-school teachers of Vietnamese across the state. In contrast, there were 351 teachers of Japanese and 337 teachers of Italian.

In April, as students, parents and teachers settled into lockdown’s learning-from-home requirements, families at Footscray Primary received a newsletter announcing the “emotionally difficult decision” to drop Vietnamese as the target language. To be successful, the school said it had to adopt a “commonly taught” language. By July, the school council had made its decision. From 2021, Footscray Primary will be a bilingual Italian school, with next year’s foundation students learning 50 per cent of their curriculum in the second language. A 23-year history of bilingual Vietnamese education – the only one of its kind in Australia – has come to an end.

The Cross–hamston report characterises community concerns about history and links to the local community as misunderstanding the purpose of bilingual education, which needs to be focused on “academic outcomes” as well. The suggestion seems to be that defenders of Footscray’s bilingual program are simply Vietnamese chauvinists. Education policy, so the thinking goes, has to rise above such ethnic lobbying to see all languages as interchangeable and abstracted from context and community.

Though the education department’s response is more circumspect, the subtext is the same: be reasonable. A department spokesperson says that the school has made “significant and continued efforts” to employ Vietnamese bilingual teachers but has faced “ongoing recruitment challenges”.

Still, doubts persist. An online petition started by parent Tony Bui, calling for the Vietnamese program to be reinstated, had more than 14,000 signatures at the time of writing. In the comments, and in private conversations, local parents – both Vietnamese and non-vietnamese – are dubious about the justifications given for replacing an Asian language with a European one. As one of those parents myself – it’s our local primary school – I had been looking forward to my children being immersed in the language of their grandparents, their ông bà nội. I’m disappointed, of course, but the feelings of doubt go deeper than that, to questions of class and race that find no acknowledgement, let alone answers, in the official response.

The Korean-american poet Cathy Park Hong has described such emotions as “minor feelings” – “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic” that arise in the face of persistent and official undermining of one’s perception of reality. These minor feelings are “built from the sediments of everyday racial experience”, residue that in my case includes the story my parents tell about being chided over the phone by a preschool teacher for speaking too much Vietnamese at home, and the time in high school when my reward for getting the top mark in literature was to be congratulated in front of the class by a muchloved elderly teacher for my surprisingly good English.

Beneath the smooth façade of the school’s decision (which the department spokesperson described as “the result of an extensive community consultation process”) there is plenty of sediment. The official responses don’t mention that this was actually the second attempt at axing Vietnamese from Footscray Primary. Back in 2016, the principal declared that, from the following year, the school would no longer be bilingual at all. The intention was to focus more heavily on English literacy, and bilingual hours were seen as wasted time.

Following a parent-led campaign, the department intervened, reinstating the program and assigning an additional $150,000 to the school above its ordinary bilingual funding allocation in 2017 and 2018. Still, without the enthusiastic support of school leadership, the program struggled. The reinstated program was never delivered consistently. High staff turnover didn’t help. Cong is adamant that recruitment is difficult for all bilingual schools, no matter the language. But the specific problem at Footscray was with staff retention. Why did six Vietnamese teachers leave the school between 2018 and 2019? That they immediately found new jobs, often at other bilingual schools, suggests that teaching ability wasn’t the issue. Cong, for instance, left at the end of 2018 to take up a position as an English teacher at Camberwell Primary School, where she puts the French she learnt growing up in Vietnam to use in its bilingual program.

According to the Cross–hamston report, families often expressed a preference for “world languages”, including Japanese and Italian. (The Footscray Primary website also cites the perception that Italian is easy to learn as a reason for the switch.) By implication, Vietnamese is parochial, what language education experts call a “community language”. But what makes Italian

My reward for getting the top mark in literature was to be congratulated in front of the class for my surprisingly good English.

more global than Vietnamese? Both languages are spoken beyond their home countries in diasporas around the world, without being dominant anywhere away from home. In fact, there are more Vietnamese speakers than Italian speakers around the world.

Instead, the difference seems to lie in the more nebulous concept of prestige. In an interview for an ABC Radio series on multilingualism in Australia, Tongue Tied and Fluent, the University of Sydney’s Professor Ken Cruickshank explains that fluency in French or German is seen as a marker of prestige, whereas fluency in Chinese languages or Japanese is seen in terms of academic competition. The logic of this distinction is that the study of community languages is dominated by members of the relevant ethnic community, whose mother-tongue proficiency affords them an advantage. That there is also a racial dynamic is revealed when Cruickshank is pressed on the status of Japanese: it’s true, he says, that the language is considered prestigious, but the speakers are not. To put it plainly: a community language is one predominantly spoken by black and brown bodies.

The distinction between “world” and “community” languages is at play when the Cross–hamston report leads with statistics on the changing ethnic composition of Footscray, and again when it is suggested by the school that a compromise Vietnamese LOTE (Languages Other Than English) program of two hours a week be taught to current students and thereafter offered only if there is interest from new families. The perception seems to be that teaching Vietnamese to Vietnamese refugees and their children is one thing, but as the suburb and the school grow more affluent – and more white – a more prestigious, global language is needed. What this story elides is that Vietnamese is still, by far, Footscray’s most commonly spoken language at home other than English, and that Vietnamese is more popular than Italian at senior secondary level in Victoria.

To defend the Vietnamese bilingual program is to be speaking in a register that is foreign to the education department and its experts, and to many of the new families moving into Footscray. It is to see language as deeply connected to people and places, and the learning of language as something more than a certificate to be put on a wall – more even than as a passport for the individual student. The conversation around Footscray’s bilingual program reflects a consumerist approach to multiculturalism in which languages are ranked according to purchasing power. In that calculation, imperial languages will always come out on top. Do Australians need further education in seeing and speaking the world in a dominant language? Speakers of “minor languages”, on the other hand, know things the majority do not. They know, for instance, that culture and community are precious – and need taking care of.

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