Phillip George : Nine Mnemonic Notations

Recently, a new printing process in effect rather like the double images of early stereography appeared, through which fixed concentration on a certain point apparently produced a powerful holographic illusion. A display of posters featuring this process attracted fl‰neurs to a well-known Melbourne bookshop window; the crowd was divided into those muttering "I don't see anything", broken every so often by a blissed-out cry of "I get it", and the smug-looking remainder. The image of an instantaneous but unreliable flash of illumination has been alternately unfashionable and retro chic ever since the late 1960s. Remember (if you can) the far-fetched luminism of album covers, such as Santana's Abraxas and Miles Davis's Bitches' Brew, or the cross-cultural sampling in Richard Alpert's The Psychedelic Experience (a William Burroughs-like navigational update of the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Australian versions of cross-cultural psychedelia, such as Brett Whiteley's Alchemy (one of the artist's few genuinely interesting paintings) are precursors of the present national desire for encounters with a whole grab-bag of disparate experiences of Asian cultures, of alternative philosophies and of ecological consciousness. Encounters occur at borders the points where inter-cultural understanding and communication are most easily examined. As Donald Weber, in a study of the shifting Spanish frontier in North America, concludes: "Frontiers seem best examined as zones of interaction between two different cultures." Borders are where the innumerable transactions of hybrid societies in which immigrant, exotic, indigenous and dominant cultures coexist, interact and blend take place as each is forced into making creative adaptations in the process of survival. Often two or more systems are managed simultaneously (as is dramatised in Jane Campion's film, The Piano) not only in demonstrations of cultural resistance but also, as the historian James Axtell points out, because there is much of worth in the traditions of others: