'Fatal Shore' author Hughes returns to review Australian homeland

"The Fatal Shore," by Australian art critic and author Robert Hughes, is the inspiration for a new Hughes-hosted PBS series which premieres on September 5

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Maybe there is something about facing death head-on. Art critic and author Robert Hughes, who nearly died in a horrifying car crash in Australia 18 months ago, believes it helped him view his homeland in a different light.

"An event like that tends to wipe out inhibitions and you become franker," he said of the crash in Western Australia that left him in a coma for weeks and with a legacy of painful operations to mend shattered bones.

"My feeling was that nearly dying in your native country maybe gives an extra edge to your views about it, maybe that's being sentimental," Hughes, 62, told Reuters in an interview.

He only recently revisited the stretch of desolate highway where his fabled career nearly ended while he was making a six-part television documentary about the land down under.

In one episode of the series, to be aired on American Public Broadcasting System stations starting on Sept. 5, Hughes stares incredulously for some 30 seconds at the concertina-ed wreck of the car he was driving.

"It (the scene) was not staged at all," he said.

"I have no recollection, I am still in complete amnesia. I had some moments of relatively lucid consciousness while I was impaled on the steering wheel, but that was the first time I had seen the car again. It was a terrible shock and I am not an actor, it was not fake."

"Fake" is not a word normally associated with Hughes, who is probably best known as Time magazine's outspoken art critic and who brought the world of modern art to PBS viewers with his stunning 1981 series "The Shock of the New."

The new series, "Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore," strides into territory only touched on in his book "The Fatal Shore," published in 1987 to coincide with the bicentennial of Britain's landing and eventual establishment of a penal colony in Australia. The series airs as the eyes of the world turn to the Sept. 15-Oct. 1 Olympic Games in Sydney.

Hughes' acerbic wit is in evidence in the TV series, whether he is talking about the "Australian Dream" of a house in the suburbs or engaging a Sydney drag queen on Puritanical antipodean mores. There he is singing "Waltzing Matilda" with an octogenarian cattleman or placing a bet at a racetrack and discussing the monarchy with ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

But, with the series coming from a man who has lived in Europe or the United States since 1964, there were divergent reactions from Australians when it aired there recently.

"Some liked it very much and others dislike it intensely. Then there are those who hate me already and have a go at me for being an expatriate," he said. "The unfavorable reviews are all from people who say 'What right does he have?' Some see me as a worthless, expatriate s***head," he added with a wry laugh.

"I have been away 35 years and the premise of the series was coming back and looking at the way it has changed since I lived there. I am perfectly justified in giving my opinion."

In fact, Hughes, the son of an Australian First World War flying ace, says he is proud to be Australian, returns for a few months every year and always fulfills his civic duty to vote.

One episode of "Beyond the Fatal Shore" sees Hughes caught up in last year's referendum on whether to reject the British monarchy in favor of a homegrown head of state for Australia.

To his chagrin, the majority voted for Queen Elizabeth II. "I was not devastated but disappointed. This is not a war, but we will eventually win," he said. "No one dislikes the queen, it's just not right for a country to have a foreign head of state. (But) It tells us something about Australia."

Another major segment of the series is devoted to the ties that bind Britain and Australia and the ruling class that exists in an independent country 12,000 miles (19,300 km) from London.

"We're not much younger than the United States, but we are short of credible heroes and physical icons except for Ayers Rock and the (Sydney) Harbour Bridge. So there is a lingering nostalgia for European forms," said Hughes.

In addition to Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC, the series was produced in association with Thirteen/WNET New York.

Hughes sees startling differences between the way America and Australia developed. "I think the biggest single difference between Australians and Americans is that you were founded as a religious experiment and we were founded as a jail," he said.

"America is such a bizarrely religious country and Australia is hardly religious at all. America could only go down and Australia can only rise," he added with a smile.

The fact that a country roughly the size of the contiguous United States has only 20 million inhabitants is another reason Australians are different from Americans. Australia's center -- its "dead heart" -- is semi-desert, full of deadly insects and reptiles, where only 1 percent of the population lives.

"Americans have this contrary myth of space because for them space is freedom. You go to it and discover paradise," Hughes said. "In colonial Australia, space itself was a prison. You walk across the country, find nothing, then die."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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