Are we witnessing a historic moment in the cultural life of our nation? Are we seeing the first tentative stirrings of a revolt against the suffocating leftist orthodoxies that blight artistic endeavour?

The evidence is slight but it’s there. A standard-bearer of change is a comedian called Lisa Jane Spencer. Not only is she funny, unlike the assembly-line ‘comedians’ of festivals and the ABC, but she has dared to exercise her wit in one of the off-limits ‘sensitive’ areas strictly policed by the cultural enforcers of the left – the ‘First Nations’ zone.

Lisa presented herself in a video as ‘identifying’ as ‘Aunty Lisa’, an Aboriginal woman – a ‘ blakfella’ as activist Aborigines like to call themselves – thus blasphemously assuming the misleading materteral title imported from Canadian race politics and treated in this country with the reverence once accorded to knighthoods. ‘Aunty Lisa’ had her face painted in stripes in the prescribed manner for officiating at ‘welcomes to country’ and was draped in the alleged ‘Indigenous’ uniform of possum-skin cloak. Worse, she was sniffing petrol, apparently a popular pastime in the more deprived Outback townships.

The heavens fell. Various leftists were speechless with ‘offence’, though fortunately, when the spoken word failed they had social media to express their horror on in a customary avalanche of four-letter words. The Melbourne Age dismissed her as a ‘self-described comedian’, something it would never say about genuinely frightful performers like Hannah Gadsby and the rest of the leftist-compliant bores it regularly praises. The ‘I have a sense of humour as much as anyone else, but…’ brigade weighed in. Someone called Brooke Blurton, the (quarter-Aboriginal) ‘first Indigenous Bachelorette in the reality TV series’, herself made a video in which she said she was ‘sick of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being the brunt of the joke’. Really? Where has she heard jokes against Aborigines in our pathologically anti-racist public culture?  Saloon bars in Tennant Creek?

Not employed in one of the left’s cultural domains Lisa could not be formally ‘deplatformed’ but her part-time employer, a ‘geothermal hot springs and day spa’ in the countryside south of Melbourne, which according to itself enjoys ‘meaningful relationships with First Nations people’, whatever that might mean, jettisoned her at once in a cloud of self-righteous verbiage about its ‘values’. She now has no income and has been inundated with offers of help.

Naturally, a chorus of leftist voices is demanding that Lisa ‘apologise’, which resolutely and to her credit, she has refused to do. She’s a comedian, she says. She makes fun impartially of things she finds funny. ‘I apologise to no one.’

May Lisa Jane Spencer prosper. She’s not perfect. She needs to remember she’s a comedian not an interviewer – her ‘false flag’ Instagram question to Senator Malcolm Roberts was inept. But when and if the tide of slavish conformity in the arts recedes, may she turn the blowtorch of her humour on other bastions of wokery and become a household name, just as our greatest comedian, Barry Humphries, was, and the acutely satirical Chris Lilley might have been if he hadn’t fallen foul of the comedic establishment with insufficiently flattering portrayals of some leftist-protected species.

Comedy-controlling pipsqueaks who had the effrontery to ban Humphries from one of their yawn-inducing taxpayer-funded festivals are not likely to spare Lisa. But perhaps the public, that same public which, not content with disobeying the establishment instruction to vote Yes to the Voice, has expressed itself fed up with being welcomed to its own country, and is now shocking the self-appointed guardians of ‘social cohesion’ by propelling One Nation towards the top of the political charts, will want to see more of her, and ensure that she gets due credit for single-handedly defying the virtual censorship stifling originality in the arts.

The other whisper of cultural change came from within the hallowed portals of the ABC itself. One of its in-house ‘comedians’, Charlie Pickering, dared to deviate from the prescribed public worship of that advocate of international terrorism Grace Tame, whose deflating career has been pumped up by the ABC with a sinecure as a ‘presenter’. Pickering so far forgot himself as to describe the appointment, given Grace’s antisemitic hysteria, as ‘problematical’. It sure is. Isn’t the ABC paid for by all Australians, Jews included? But you don’t say disapproving things about management’s decisions at the ABC if you value your career there, and you certainly don’t question them in the hearing of the dwindling few who regard the ABC as a worthwhile institution. Once again social media was incandescent with screeches that Pickering be sacked (sacking, cancelling, whatever you wish to call it, is the Western left’s only answer to dissent from its edicts – the left elsewhere has more direct methods – since it has no arguments or ability to reason). Will it come to that for Pickering? If I were he, I’d be following the advice of my infant-school teacher Miss McDermott and ‘lock up lips and throw away the key’ on any subject other than approved ones such as mocking Pauline Hanson.

Perhaps for those with eyes to see there are further faint indications that cultural orthodoxies are not as secure as they were. One minor one can be glimpsed in the recent Archibald Prize entries. Naturally the utterly predictable winner was a caricature of an elderly Aboriginal woman but there were several representing a return to classic principles of portraiture that should have won, notably a magnificent depiction of Hamlet in a state of depressive introspection by Sean Layh, and other figurative works, all committing the cardinal sin against contemporary artistic rules of being recognisable. Perhaps I am reading too much into this as a harbinger of the prospective demise of artistic infantilism but at least one can hope.