In the intervening months, Matt has had time to heal and reflect. In the annual Leslie Rees lecture last night at the Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, Matt examined the relationship between critics and art – a long history in which he is in good company.

Matt acknowledges that although his lecture was titled The Art of Corrupting Youth, he doesn’t really know how to do it. It’s just that people – many people – have told him he has. Corrupted youth that is.

From James Lorimer (1849) on Emily Bronte : “Here all the faults of ‘Jane Eyre’ are magnified a thousand fold and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.” to the brouhaha about Pollock’s Blue Poles, with Beethoven (‘musical anarchy’) and countless others who have challenged artistic boundaries in between, Matt is in excellent company. The true test will be time. Will we look back at Requiem in years to come and wonder what the fuss was all about?

It is to be hoped that Matt will find the time to publish his lecture so that many more people than were present last night can enjoy the philosophical underpinning of his theories. Impossible to do justice here, but in a nutshell, the Western tradition is to think cyclically, so that at the beginning of a new cycle of artistic thought we haven’t yet learned the language and all but a few are fearful or dismissive. With time, if the art is good, it is referenced by others, we become familiar with the language and look back to the original and appreciate it for the groundbreaking idea it was.

Artist, musician, or writer? Matt Ottley is all three in equal parts. Musician Matt composed a short sonata to reinforce the notion of cyclical thinking. The form is a perfect cycle – new musical idea, variations on the theme creating aural familiarity, returning to the now familiar and no-longer-new starting point, which also becomes the conclusion.

Frane Lessac and Liliana Stafford both gave moving readings of the work of the late Leslie Rees, whom the lecture honours.

Matt’s latest book, a collaboration with John Marsden, has just been released. Home and Away will not sit quietly on the shelves either.

Previous CMIS Fiction Focus blog posts about Requiem for a Beast

With the intriguing title The Art of Corrupting Youth – Beethoven, Zusak and Ottley, the lecture from the CBCA Picture Book of the Year winner promises to be provocative and, as always with Matt, highly entertaining. The controversy of his win is still raw, so Matt will have plenty to say about ‘corruption’.

Beethoven? Well, Matt’s musical credentials are well established and will be part of the evening’s presentation, as will his artwork. Apparently Eroica was decribed as ‘musical anarchy’ when first performed. Zusak? That other CBCA winner (2003 Book of the Year), The Messenger, has been called ‘immoral’. So Requiem for a Beast is in good company. The evening is dedicated to the significance of quality and challenging youth literature.

The Leslie Rees Lecture series honours a Western Australian author who won the first CBCA Award in 1946 for The Story of Karrawingi the Emu.

2008 Fremantle Leslie Rees Lecture

Where: Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre, Old Prison Hospital, corner Knutsford Street and Hampton Road, Fremantle

When: Wednesday December 3. Drinks at 7pm; lecture 7.30pm

Cost: Free

RSVP (essential) by November 28. Telephone 08 9430 6869 or email: freoclc@iinet.net.au

Speaking at a school in Sydney’s Burwood as part of Children’s Book Week, Ottley said he was “nonplussed” by the criticism of his book, which is “largely autobiographical”.

“We have a romanticised view of what a stockman’s life is like, a Man From Snowy River-view, and I wanted to present life in a stock camp as it really is, in all its grittiness,” he said.

He spent seven years working on Requiem for a Beast, consulting the Bundjalung people from NSW.

Ottley said the book’s style and the cover blurb made it clear it was not for young children. “If you don’t want young children to be exposed, don’t give them this book,” he said. “Part of the problem is a lot of schools buy books sight unseen, and that’s idiotic.”

He said it was important to challenge the “default associations” for picture books as being only for young children.