Thanks to a rather brilliant writer (Beejay Silcox, since you ask), I read an ‘Outback Noir’ novel, by Garry Disher. It involves a cop (bent? Seems not, but who can tell and what is bent anyway) exiled from the bright lights of the (checks notes) big “city,” Adelaide to – as the Americans say – Butt-fuck Idaho in South Australia’s north. The novel, Bitter Wash Road, is well worth your time if you like this kind of thing – a whodunnit with lots to say about the nature of corruption, loneliness, race (gasp – Silcox’s essay on the blind spots of much of what passes for Outback Noir is what brought me in).
But, because I am a little weird, one thing leapt out at me, to do with policy theories and – by partial extension – theories of civil society. Yeah, I know.
The back story is that there are thuggish cops who are being allowed to abuse their authority, and the locals are getting pissed off. One of them, Wendy Street, has called a protest meeting. The protagonist cop, Paul, ponders.
As he sipped and chewed, he tried to imagine how Wendy Street’s protest meeting might play out. He saw a big room, perhaps the town hall, with Superintendent Spurling, a public relations inspector, a deputy commissioner and maybe Kropp himself seated at a large table at the head of the room, trying for smiles and patience and genial common sense. But the crowd would not have logic or patience on its side. One by one they would stand, awkward men and women who’d felt the flare of anger moments before but now, in the spotlight, tripped over their words and lost the thread of their argument. A disordered atmosphere, the crowd blurting accusations that trailed into nothing or were overheated or roamed off the point, while Spurling and the others tried to smile and reassure and give everyone a fair go and water it all down with platitudes fed them by the public relations unit.
(Disher, 2013: 207)
What is nicely done (mild spoilers follow) is that Disher comes back to this meeting near the end of the novel. It is indeed unfolding just as Disher has foreshadowed. But the cop has underestimated Wendy Street’s canniness, her ability to foresee the dangers and both create and execute a plan to overcome the business-as-usual trajectory. A purist would call it stage-management, manipulation, failing to let things be ‘spontaneous’. The purist, hooked on Habermasian notions of ideal speech communities, might even warn that stage-management is a slippery slope that leads inevitably to Nuremberg rallies. I was that purist once. What an goddam idiot.
There has to be (imo) some sort of dialectic, some sort of nudging and shaping. Until we have awkward people who can nurse that flare of anger and ‘maintain the rage’, who know the dynamics of these meetings, and the ways that the Spurlings etc of this can rely on people folding in a formal setting. There has to be some Wendy Street putting of the thumbs on the scales… This is the work of ‘policy entrepreneurs’, to use the Multiple Streams Approach terminology, bringing streams together, forcing open a policy window, refusing to be fobbed off, not interested in (just) giving people a chance to kvetch, but can actually try changing it.
But meanwhile, this is a well-written and highly enjoyable novel which has something meaningful to say about Australia’s history, which was Silcox’s point.
marchudson.net 
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