It’s a strange period of relaxation, isn’t it? The post-Christmas and New Year period in the lead up to Australia Day or Invasion Day or whatever you want to call it – January 26 in any case – when the wheels of the nation start to whirl again. In the meantime there’s the Australian Open and nothing more defines Melbourne in the summer holiday season than the tennis at the Rod Laver Arena. Isn’t it weird that a year ago Scott Morrison’s government went to elaborate legal lengths to have Novak Djokovic banned because he hadn’t been vaxxed and imposed a three-year ban on him to boot. And now he’s back, injured but playing like a hero and the Morrison government and the anxieties of Covid are a more distant memory than they should be, though there’s no denying the vehemence with which Morrison was ejected or the panic about the virus from which we sought shelter curtailing funerals and visits to the dying and the Lord knows what.

The Australian Open in Melbourne is one of the things that puts this country on the map and you find its echo in a literary masterpiece like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as well as in the memoirs of the Palestinian-born Edward Said, a tennis tragic who mentions the legends of a baby boomer childhood (Lew Hoad, Neil Fraser, Frank Sedgman). Edward Said once said a bit unfairly that the poetry of Wallace Stevens always reminded him of an orchestra warming up before it got going.

It was cheering to see the memorial for that muse of the Hawkesbury, the poet Robert Adamson, done with such power and such grace and with such a line-up of speakers. It began with Linda Burney, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, who talked of Bob’s sense of country and told the story of how he was amazed when Tony Burke, the Minister for the Arts among other things, had rung him when the world was alerted to the fact that he was on the way out. It was appropriate of course because Adamson’s poetry is a national treasure and it was a fine thing to see such a wide range of people attesting to his glory including, early on, that legendary journalist and feminist Anne Summers. One of the most powerful speakers, again in the opening stretch, was a man in a black beret, white-haired, who paid homage to the poetry by reading Bob’s ‘Green Prawn Map’ and some work of Barry Hill. He did so with a force that was not merely elocutionary though it was technically dazzling. This was Craig San Roque, playwright and late of NIDA and Alice Springs, head of the Jungian Society as well as a playwright who has recreated the Greek myths.

Robert Adamson had been a troubled child from a working class family finding himself in the desolation of junior prisons for extraordinary ‘crimes’ such as stealing a rare and beautiful bird from Taronga Park Zoo – all of which is delineated in his marvellous and scarifying memoir Inside Out but it is extraordinary how much he became central to the consciousness of the nation – more indeed than any poet other than Les Murray and certainly more than his peers who also took their bearings from America in the long-ago poetry wars.

In all of this it would be impossible to underestimate his wife, the photographer Juno Gemes, who opened up a world of travel to a man who as a boy had taken his bearings from his beloved grandfather, Fa Fa, the man who had given the river to him like an imaginative estate.

Perhaps there’s a sense in which Bob Adamson was an epitome of the country he graced. The reform schools and the ghastliness of what he suffered are like a reminder of our convict inheritance but there’s the paradoxical sense with him of fabled wonder: the quality that made Mark Twain say that Australian history was like a series of beautiful lies.

Mark Twain was the writer who Hemingway thought had invented modern prose. The author of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea thought it all came out of Huckleberry Finn. Twain was an uneven writer: Tom Sawyer is a beautiful kids’ book but Huckleberry Finn is something else, a great work of literature and a book of wisdom. Think of the moment when Huck declares he’ll help the runaway slave, Jim, and says, ‘Alright, I’ll go to hell!’ If you want to read something else by Twain at the height of his powers read Pudd’nhead Wilson, the one that was admired by the toughest of all Cambridge critics, the redoubtable Doctor Leavis.

It is among other things a courtroom drama, a thriller, a series of dark, comic gags and an extraordinary meditation on the conundrums of race. There are moments in Pudd’nhead Wilson – which as Leslie Fiedler, the author of Love and Death in the American Novel said back in the Sixties – which are extraordinarily like William Faulkner, the author of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury who used a James Joyce-influenced technique to write novels which were at once modernist and dramatic but who had an extraordinary feeling for the African-American voice. And Twain, of course, had a ventriloquial power to create dialogue and differentiate dialects. It would be a sad thing if a literary classic like Pudd’nhead Wilson were to fall out of human ken and that’s obviously true of so much classical music as well.

It’s good to see that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under its brilliant spirited conductor Jaime Martín is doing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in February. The great work with its masterly dynamic counterpoint and its harmonic brilliance is characterised by its driving sense of rhythm and is immemorially associated with the performance of the work in 1913, just before the outbreak of the first world war by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes with that most legendary of all dancers, Nijnksky. But The Rite of Spring also exists as a stand-alone piece of music and it will be marvellous to see what Jaime Martin with his spectacular musical extroversion makes of Stravinsky’s work which is like a recreation of the world.