What a whirlwind the world of the arts can be. Gabrielle Carey who changed forever the image of teenage girlish life and then went in a thousand other directions is dead and the world gasped. All you could say was poor fellow my country. The Sydney Film Festival which is soon to be upon us has a film, The New Boy, by that notable indigenous director Warwick Thornton which has Cate Blanchett as a remarkable nun looking after black kids as well as a new star, Aswan Reid. The festival will also include a retrospective of Jane Campion’s films as well as presenting the great director of everything from The Portrait of a Lady to The Power of the Dog in conversation with that old savant David Stratton. Somewhere in his enthralling memoirs Sam Neill tells us that he sent a note to Benedict Cumberbatch congratulating him (or words to this effect) on joining the ranks of Campion’s truly awful men. It’s arguable that when Campion essayed one of the most awful men in the history of human representation, Gilbert Osmond in her 1996 film of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, she might have been better off with Sam Neill than the great actor who ultimately played that role, John Malkovich. The latter was somehow too New York, too insinuating in a preordained way, whereas Sam Neill – who was not singled out by James Mason for nothing – might have brought to the role the kind of sangfroid that Mason brought to Humbert Humbert in Lolita and in a lesser way to his characterisation of Trigorin, that writerly two-timer in Sidney Lumet’s film of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Campion is, of course, a dazzling directorial talent even if you thought more of the richness of the first season of Top of the Lake with Elisabeth Moss than its successor.

Many years ago in the literary magazine Scripsi we published some of the script of the very early film she made written by Helen Garner, Two Friends, the one that runs backward and there’s a case for saying Campion has never done better even if her An Angel at my Table with Kerrie Fox will ensure the Janet Frame book is read forever.

Magazines make strange bedfellows. And it was through Scripsi that Michael Heyward and I met Tony Staley, that Liberal party warlord who died last week. Staley was the former Liberal party president who was the henchman of Malcolm Fraser and who encouraged his takeover of the leadership which was to make him the most successful opposition leader in Australian history, sparking the Dismissal which ejected Gough Whitlam from office. We came to know Staley because we were setting up a trust fund for the magazine at Ormond College and he was a mainstay of Scripsi of the Air, that live 3RRR program we did which alternated rollicking and circular literary talk with recordings of great moments from poetry and literary drama. I seem to remember getting Tony Staley to read the extraordinary bit of gay daydream from Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, one of those pieces of Elizabethan poetry with such fine-flecked irony it rivals Chaucer. He was certainly part of the ensemble we put together to try out what Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets, that political epic of 1986, would sound like if it was separated from the author’s nasal tones. It was a thing of wonder to hear Tony’s booming voice declaiming about ‘My Lord Consensus giving the bullet’ because The Nightmarkets was the story of a man of great power and wealth starting a new political party. Helen Garner, I recall, was another non-Wearnian voice that was enlisted.

There was a large Fitzroy launching of The Nightmarkets – jointly organised by Meanjin and Scripsi – somewhat to the displeasure of the great man of Australian publishing at the time, the then head of Penguin Brian Johns who went on to head both SBS and the ABC and who brought to publishing the power of mind of a great editorial genius. In his Penguin days he backed the distribution of McPheeGribble books which was a huge boost to the whole of Australian publishing.

Tony Staley, though, went a long way back with Ormond College where he had been a student because of that most legendary Master of Ormond Davis McCaughey who later became governor of Victoria. Davis was the kind of head of a college who would put a log on the fire and in the presence of a few interested students boom out the poetry he loved – Yeats, for instance.

McCaughey always saw it as part of his duty at Ormond to civilise whatever ruling class the country looked like copping and he tried to persuade the young Staley to become a minister of what was then the Presbyterian Church. ‘But Davis,’ Staley protested, ‘I want to be a politician.’ ‘But Tony,’ Davis said, in his rounded and seductive Belfast tones, ‘You can be a politician for the Lord.’

It was something Davis put into practice. We had to help organise for him a reading of a poem the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes had written in honour of the Queen’s sixty-fifth birthday and the person we chose to read it was the man who had so effectively played Staley’s friend, the nemesis of the Dismissal, Malcolm Fraser – John Stanton. Tony himself did ultimately feel the pull of Ormond and had his sights set on becoming Master when he was involved in a car crash that left him crippled for the rest of his life.

But he was a grand figure. I remember him living in a Fitzroy warehouse and I remember him reading on radio with a tremendous sense of drama the opening of Wilkie Collins’ Victorian thriller, The Woman in White. It made you realise how the book had kept that greatest of Liberal politicians William Gladstone up all night. Trevor Nunn did a rather effective version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicalisation of The Woman in White which was notable for Simon Callow in an exuberantly colourful performance as Count Fosco singing, ‘You can get away with anything if only you get away’.

By the way, if you want musical drama Trevor Nunn’s production of Oklahoma! with Hugh Jackman, no less, is being shown as a cinema broadcast on July 16 and July 19.