Making sense of a topsy-turvy world

There is somehow something more to the story, something that grabs sensitive, reflective folk who hear it, than the mere matter of some curatorial stuff-ups. There is something metaphorical and educational about it all. It feels like a canny parable.

Sensitive, reflective ABC Radio Classic FM presenter Ed Le Brocq sensed this and last Sunday morning between snatches of Bach and Beethoven reported the Mondrian story to his listeners. He invited us to think of examples, perhaps even from our own lives, of mistakes made that went undiscovered for yonks.

At once one must make a distinction between enduring mistakes of fact and enduring mistakes of sentiment, belief and faith.

Simple mistakes of fact may be such things as hanging a painting the wrong way up, as having the misinformed idea that Scotland's national anthem is the catchy but undignified Donald, Where's Your Troosers?, as fancying that the sun orbits the earth, that the pope is a Protestant and that the Canberra suburb of Flynn is named after the swashbuckling film actor Errol Flynn*.

Late-realised mistakes of belief, of conviction, are a different and altogether more poignant kettle of fish.

Life is so short (Shakespeare called it a "brief candle") and it is tragedy to waste any of its precious time on delusions, on misunderstanding paintings because they are incorrectly hung, on barking up wrong trees and getting hold of wrong ends of important sticks.

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And so one's heart goes out to, say, the atheist who after 50 years of passionate and perhaps even smug atheism is suddenly shewn (perhaps by a miracle) that there is a God after all.

Similarly, one feels for the hitherto perpetual Christian who after decades of unthinking piety suddenly finds (perhaps upon reading Christopher Hitchens' irrefutably persuasive God Is Not Great) that she has spent the best years of her life singing hymns to and lisping prayers to a figment of superstitious simpletons' feverish imaginations.

Then there is the English migrant who at 18 had the choice of Australia or of New Zealand and who (his teenage thought processes incorrect and hanging upside down as so many teenagers' reasonings are) chose Australia. Belatedly, in his too-late-to-correct-things-now 70s, he sees that of course he should have gone to New Zealand.

What tempests of regret are stirred in his breast, now, whenever (as last Tuesday before the NZ versus England T20 cricket match) he hears New Zealand's touchingly noble national anthem and wishes he had a right to join in and sing it.

Then there are the souls who make long-lasting mistakes in their choices of who and what to adore.

These unfortunates are so beguiled by the charisma of cult leaders and party political figures (yes, I know those brutes are often one and the same satanic thing) that they take for ever to see that the people they worshipped as gods are in truth charlatans, slime balls and mountebanks.

But here, applying our Mondrian-hung-upside-down parable to public life, there has lately been some good, uplifting news.

For it is engaging to think of how the Coalition's Heaven-sent defeat in May's federal election involved now-enlightened electors in 18 previously Liberal-held seats electing non-Liberal and often attractively "teal" candidates.

They, these transformed voters, realised how cock-eyed and inverted their understanding of Australia's political landscape had previously been. I use the word "landscape" advisedly, wittily in this artworks-parable context.

And, eerily, two of the Liberal seats lost to the teals in May, Kooyong and Boothby, had been continuously Liberal-held since the 1940s, for almost exactly as long as the suddenly newsworthy Mondrian had been displayed upside down.

How buoying it is to think that just once in a while, in this world that that is generally a Vale of Tears, wrongs are righted.

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