Will Self

An old Australian friend, Kerry Gardiner, whom I met when I was living and working in the Northern Territory in the early 1980s, emails to tell me that the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in Fitzrovia, London, is mounting an exhibition of Aboriginal art that might interest me. He’s right. Ever since that sojourn, I’ve tried to remain connected with the creative world-view of Australia’s indigenous people – and also to stay in touch with the white Australians I met then, idealistic men and women who eschewed the affluent hippie trail to Earl’s Court and instead investigated the red centre and the beige hinterlands of their home country.

These Strine soixante-huitards were radicalised by the predicament of the Aboriginal people, who had been not so much subjected to colonialism as annihilated by it. The British doctrine of terra nullius denied them ownership of their land – and so opened the genocidal gates – while the Australian government refused them citizenship until the late 1960s. On my first journey across Australia, I was shocked to see children with trachoma and rickets at the outstations where the bus stopped. Though white Australia seems to have bucked the global economic downturn, I suspect that you can still look upon such sights today.

Australian Aboriginal painting is familiar to the western eye as a sort of primitivist pointillism: concentric circles of dots, stippled outlines and wavering borders, rendered in bright, primary colours. It is arresting and seems to hum with a visual intensity – as if op art had become a self-consciously mystic methodology. Such apprehensions would be correct: painting and carving are the tangible forms of cultural restoration adopted by a people who came, in recent decades, within spitting distance of total deracination. The superlative mental mapping of the Aboriginal mobs, which, between them, capture the surface of this vast island continent in a reticulation of so-called songlines, is given expression not just in topographic poetry – the “singing-up” of the country – but also by these graphic representations.

It is the abiding fallacy of the west to suppose that cultures that are athwart our notions of “progress” must, ipso facto, be up a cultural creek without a technological or aesthetic paddle. The full sequencing of the human genome now allows us to peek into the deep time of our diaspora and discover that the Aboriginal people of Australia were first out of the African omphalos some 60,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago, they were in Australia and they have been there since, working hard at creating not a stockpile of food but a stockpile of cultural tradition. As a white Australian “political consultant” to the Aboriginal mobs once put it to me: “You have to think of these blokes as like Babylonian or Chaldean magicians who’ve been cultivating their hocus-pocus for longer than all the Near Eastern civilisations put together. If one of ’em tells me to jump, I ask, ‘How high?'”

Australian Aboriginal art is an evolving tradition and, if you go to Rebecca Hossack, instead of dots and swirls, you will be confronted by vivid, fauvist paintings that resist the denotation “naive” – their assimilation of recent, historically codified events to a millennia-old mode of landscape painting is highly sophisticated. Borroloola is known as the “Gateway to the Gulf”, and is situated in the south-western region of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within this remote area, four main tribal groups exist, known as the Yanyuwa, Garrawa, Mara and Gurdanji. The Yanyuwa and Mara consider themselves “saltwater people”, and the Garrawa and Gurdanji “freshwater people”. Kerry thought I would be the ideal person to meet with these Garrawa artists because: “For you to say that you have motorcycled across the Barkly Tableland and know me will help convince them that people can travel across the sea and return and live to tell the tale. Many of their ancestors did not – Indonesian slavers as late as the 1890s took their toll.”

I’ve never visited Borroloola but I’m familiar with its landscape of rocky hills, billabongs and bigger-than-CinemaScope horizons from other travels in the Northern Territory. Given how big this country is, that I’ve been to Nhulunbuy – a mere 400km away as the crow flies – will, I hope, enable me to put Nancy McDinny, Madeline Dirdi and Stewart Hoosan at their ease. These are three of the artists exhibiting and they are the ones who will have travelled all the way from this far outpost to our bustling metropolis for the vernissage. An alternative perspective is that they will have left a place of ancient wisdom, with its deep humus of cultural capital, to visit this ancestor-forsaken antipode, with its hard scrabble of visual arts.

Borroloola: Paintings and Prints from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London W1 runs until 27 August. For more details visit r-h-g.co.uk

People are starving to death in eastern Africa – lots of them, and horribly. I awoke this morning to hear on the radio a report from a BBC man who had interviewed some of those streaming towards a UN-run camp. Thousands were waiting at the gates to get in and each had a tale of almost inconceivable woe – the malnourished child who had died on the march, the ill husband or wife left behind.

What awaits these poor souls once they gain admittance? The UN man told us that there quite simply wasn’t enough food.

So, strike up the band! Wheel out the ever-cranky Bob Geldof! Chuck Bono into the ring for good measure! Dig deep and feel good, because it’s famine time in eastern Africa again – which means it’s also time for those of us in the west to feel mighty proud of ourselves. We may have made poverty history a few years ago, but no one ever said that time stood still and now there’s more history available – and it comes with its own inbuilt poverty. Moreover, a quarter of a century ago, when Bob – with, I think, impeccably good intentions – rousted out the complacent pop stars to do their bit, there was about a third of the people in the perennially drought-prone areas of eastern Africa there are today.

That’s right, you can judge the success of Band Aid and all the other famine-relief charity campaigns by this alone: there are now three times as many people available to starve to death. Result, no? Am I alone in my Swiftian fastness in seeing something just a little bit crazy in this collective impulse to keep people alive at a bare subsistence level so that they can procreate without restraint – as people on the breadline so often do – with the end result that there are many more of them to receive handouts from the World Food Programme a decade or two down the line?

I entirely accept that if you’re of the “every sperm is sacred” school of religious yea-saying to mortification and death, then this is a very good result – but the last time I looked, this was a predominantly secular society; indeed, one in which the utilitarian basis for much policymaking was deeply ingrained.

Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal was that the victims of famine in Ireland be fed with their own babies, and while this remains, in my view, a perfectly reasonable solution, I venture to suggest that it won’t address the real pathology, which is our own. Only a people maddened by their own sense of entitlement to everything – whether material or spiritual – could carry on throwing good money after bad conscience. Despite all our travails, we remain, relatively speaking, high donors to the foreign needy, while Dave “Mrs Jellyby” Cameron is, unsurprisingly, fixated on telescopic philanthropy.

Hanging on to a good conscience while continuing to do bad things, however, is a deranging business, and just as the alcoholic needs ever more booze to achieve the same level of intoxication, so the charitable donor has to sign ever more direct debits in order to assuage that core feeling of emptiness. Deluded though the average Briton may well be, we are not completely psychotic, and we understand that a large chunk of the money we divvy up to charity goes to pay for more fundraisers and more chuggers, so that more money can be raised to keep more famine victims alive, so that the entire sickening go-round may be continued until the last farting trump.

My solution to this particular neurosis is perfectly straightforward: give the dosh to us.

Yes, that’s right, the £9m already divvied up privately to the Disasters Emergency Committee, the £36m given by the government – this money would’ve been better distributed to the British spiritually needy.

A bottle of Château Pétrus, a Longines watch – maybe the down payment on a winter break in the Caribbean: all of these things are guaranteed to make the averagely wealthy person feel rather better about herself than she does already. Hell, it probably works for Rupert Murdoch; why shouldn’t it for ordinary mortals?

I know, I know, you’re worried about the children, aren’t you, you silly sympathetic soul, but I think there’ll be enough for all those middle-class kids who go off to “give something back” during their gap year as well. You know, if I were a starving Somali, I’d see the wisdom in all this. I’d probably applaud it – if I had the strength, that is.

I was meeting up with someone I worked with, ooh, getting on for 20 years ago and whom I hadn’t seen for pushing 15. I was coming from Manchester; she from Soho, London. We compromised on Drummond Street, that row of ethnic eateries parallel to Euston Road. Time was when you could eat a vegetarian thali here, then limp-fart along to the end of the road and buy an ex-Red Army greatcoat at Laurence Corner, a truly legendary army surplus store – so legendary that, when I ran into Paul McCartney at a party once and the subject of Laurence Corner came up, he told me that he’d bought his first double bass there back in the 1960s.

I suggested that we eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House “for sentimental reasons” – but this was pretty much a lie, my associations with this south Indian vegetarian restaurant being largely negative. I once ate there before boarding the Deerstalker Express to Inverness, and during the night developed septicaemia of such virulence that, when I got to the hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney, the following day, my infected hand was the size of a nan bread and chilli-hot streaks of sepsis were shooting up my arm. I’m not saying that this had anything to do with the Diwana, which has always struck me as perfectly hygienic and has decor not dis­similar to that of a sauna in a Swedish health spa, but you know how the mind is, always associating ideas willy-nilly for day after day; frank ly, I sometimes think that it might be a relief if the sun didn’t rise tomorrow.

No, I wanted to eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House because I happened to know that, at lunchtime, it puts on one of the most curious culinary spectacles known to humankind: the all-you-can-eat buffet. Whoever first hit on the idea of offering unlimited food for a fixed price was some kind of crazed genius, because while you might think that this would be an incitement to gluttony, I’m pretty damn certain the opposite is the case.

A fixed amount of food for a predetermined sum introduces a creeping barrage of anxiety – from menu choice through portion size and on inexorably to l’addition – that can only be assuaged by stuffing your face (or, in modern parlance, “comfort eating”). The all-you-can-eat concept, on the other hand, relieves the diner of her cares, allowing her appetite to shrink to its natural size.

Yes, I’d bet the farm – or, at least, a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner – that all-you-can-eat buffets put out markedly less food per diner than the menu-mongers. Granted, my empirical sample is only, um, me – and I’m not so much a lady-who-lunches as a girl who favours a Ryvita smeared with cottage cheese come noon. Indeed, apart from strategic meetings – such as encountering someone I haven’t broken bread with since the Major premiership – I’ve long since dispensed with the meal altogether.

So, there I was, standing in the Diwana Bhel-Poori House, waiting for my quondam colleague and watching while happy office grafters piled their aluminium salvers high with rice, chapattis, assorted vegetable curries, fruit, chutneys and so on, but absolutely appalled. A sign tacked above the buffet read: “Please use one plate per person, eat as much as U like.” When it comes to being non-U, substituting “U” for “you” is enough to put anyone off their shoots and leaves. Not that I needed any putting off: the sight of all that tasty nosh, mine for a mere eight smackers, utterly nauseated me.

What would happen if I were to eat all I could? In Marco Ferreri’s 1973 masterpiece, La Grande Bouffe, four dyspeptic gourmands gather in a country villa with the express intention of doing just that, their ultimate aim being death by buffet. The film won the critics’ award at that year’s Cannes festival – fitting when you consider that, taken as a whole, film critics have to be the professional group whose eyes are manifestly bigger than their intellects.

When my lunch partner finally pitched up, I mentioned none of this to her and went about the business of eating lunch as if it were second nature to me – indeed, so relaxed was I that I ended up consuming a normal-sized meal. After we parted, I limp-farted to the end of the road and stood there staring melancholically at the corner where Laurence’s used to be.

I suppose the moral of this tale is that, in the all-you-can-eat buffet of life, petites madeleines are always for dessert.