The end of Catalyst: four ironies

An oft-occurring phrase in Peter Temple’s award-willing crime novel, Truth, is “moving on”. Characters say it when they want to change the subject, or there doesn’t seem much more to say about a subject, or when they can’t bear to talk about a subject any longer. In the book, the truth is a thing to be avoided at all costs. Moving on is a synonym for looking away.

Now that Catalyst is, as I predicted last October, officially cactus, there is pressure on the one hand to bury the whole George Brandis-instigated mess, and on the other to see heads roll.

The Australia Council, understandably, wants to get on with the job: to absorb back the Catalyst budget and shore up its own programs and priorities; to go about the business of funding art and artists in Australia...