The Boy Behind the Curtain

  We acknowledged class distinctions as a fact of life. In high school and university, class was a constant topic of conversation and study. Even at the utopian apogee of my youth I could never have imagined a time when class might be rendered obsolete by history. I certainly didn’t foresee an age when the very word might hang in the air like something forbidden.

  In 1995, at a book party in Soho, the literary editor of a newspaper who was decidedly in his cups suggested I was a bit ‘chippy’. I was puzzled. Even after the fellow was poured into a cab and my amused London publisher had time to explain the meaning of the term, I remained bewildered. Apparently at the sort of gentlemen’s club indispensible to British publishing, it was impolite to mention one’s social origins; it made a fellow uncomfortable. Even the most casual, lighthearted reference to class was viewed as ‘making a song and dance about it’. I was amongst people who’d either been to Oxbridge or who were pretending they had. Their accents and manners – even those who’d already begun to speak like Jamie Oliver – were rigidly shaped by conceptions of class. As an exotic I’d had something of a free pass that evening – until I mentioned the C-word. Lesson learnt, I filed that evening’s faux pas under Foreign Customs. I didn’t dream that nearly twenty years later I’d be facing a similar awkwardness at home.

  In the past few years some friends have remarked upon my anachronistic class-consciousness. Invariably they’re the children of professionals, graduates of elite schools – all of them lovely, decent people. One, the son of an architect, gave me a blue collar for my forty-fifth birthday. It was funny, I enjoyed the joke, but I wonder what he’d have had in store if I’d been a feminist and a bit gender-conscious, or Aboriginal and a tad race-aware.

  If I remain preoccupied by class it’s not because I’m chippy or resentful. I don’t feel embittered or damaged. I have no hard-luck story to tell. But social distinctions continue to fascinate me. Perhaps, if I try to take the most disinterested view, their apparent demise has rendered them more compelling; their political invisibility makes them more vivid. But I find it hard to see class dispassionately because it’s still a live issue. I sense it grinding away tectonically in the experiences of relatives and friends, who may not want to talk about class but who are subject to its force every day.

  In 2010, when my face appeared on a postage stamp, I had to submit to the good-humoured sledging of relatives at pains to restrain their pride. In my family teasing is a blood sport and a measure of affection, so I copped it with a smile. I enjoyed their refusal to seem impressed. There were lots of jokes about them having to lick the back of my head. But at certain moments it was painful to be reminded that some of them could moisten the stamp and fix it to the envelope but not write the letter it was supposed to carry on its way. These are the family members who only follow my stories in audio format – not because they’re too busy to be bothered with books, but because they are functionally illiterate. Their curtailed educations, which have sorely constrained their adult lives, are not a manifestation of character, they are outcomes of class. When I’m with those of my friends who are privately educated, I can’t help but be mindful, now and then, of those intimate and often shameful family constraints. Prosperous Australians, even those who’ve snuck under the wire like myself, forget so easily that others are still living over-determined lives in another economy altogether. Many of them are old neighbours, schoolfriends, relatives, and often they live close by, in the same postcode as you.

  When I was young, I didn’t know people like me. By which I mean folks who are comfortable, confident, mobile. I never mixed with people from outside my own class. There was no opportunity, and it seemed there was no need. I didn’t know anyone who went to a private school. The Catholic kids across the street went to the convent, but that was a step down from state school. It wasn’t until I went to university that I came into contact with people my age who’d had private educations. If Whitlam hadn’t abolished tertiary education fees in 1974, I doubt I would have made it to university at all. My parents certainly couldn’t have afforded full tuition and if there were scholarships available to bright young oiks back then we didn’t know about them. Like so many others of my generation who were the first of a family to enter university I was an outrider on a strange and wonderful frontier. All of us were changed as a result. It expanded the curtailed world of my immediate family – exploded it forever.

  ‘The uni’, as my parents called it, was a revelation. The campus of the 1970s was a circus. Everywhere you looked there was a performance, an inversion, a spectacle. It was liberating and surreal. Imperious daughters of the gentry experimented with meekness. Roughknuckled boys slowly came out as gay. Confused by all the costume and panto, some of us began shyly to ask each other about our backgrounds. For many, the schools we’d come from had given us a certain restricted confidence that only pertained within tribal boundaries. Even the posh kids were wrong-footed by the new rules. We were all at sea, only revealing ourselves to one another in cautious increments. We looked wistfully to our new teachers as they strolled the corridors with remarkable aplomb. The tenured Marxists in liberal arts courses were not the first bourgeois citizens I ever encountered but they were the first I spent significant time with. Their self-assurance was epic, marvellous, dizzying. Some of them took modish intellectual positions and had delusional self-hating politics but what was most intriguing about them was not the choices they made, but the fact that they’d had so many choices to make. Range of choice, I discovered, was a key indicator of class. Some choices are conferred by birth while others have to be won by hard work. A few can only be achieved by legislation.

  I didn’t miss the determined certainties of being working class. Nor did I miss its self-limiting tribalism. But I probably wasn’t prepared for the growing self-interest of the class I gradually rose to. For if there’s solidarity at work anywhere in our society these days it’s among the very rich, and the middle class has watched and learnt. Middle Australia is increasingly class-conscious and it looks to bolster its interests at every turn.

  Once the old class-based educational barriers had been down for a decade, Australia seemed to have broadened somewhat. By the 1980s the working class was harder to identify. Manufacturing was on the wane, but tradespeople began to earn incomes that were once the preserve of the middle class. It was confusing, even upsetting, for some Australians to learn that a plumber might earn more than a teacher. This was well before the minerals boom that enabled a bus driver in the Pilbara to pull down the salary of a doctor in Hobart.

  But despite all these changes, class never disappeared from cultural consciousness. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the poor and overlooked resorting to class discourse. The union movement that had once given voice and language to class struggle had either been smashed or imploded. Margaret Thatcher declared there was no such thing as society and Australian governments gradually internalized that view and appropriated policies that sprang from it. Governments of both major parties oversaw a transition from collective citizenship to consumer individualism that remade our conception of education, health and taxation. Federal ministers – Labor and Liberal – who’d been educated in the era of Whitlam promptly pulled the ladder up after them. It was pay-as-you-go for my kids. Or graduate in debt. Workers were encouraged to see themselves as contractors, employers as entrepreneurs. Looking back it seems to have been something of a counter-reformation, an ugly regression. But it wasn’t the vanquished workers pressing the language of class warfare into service, it was the growing middle class.

  The success of Middle Australia didn’t bring the confidence you’d expect. By the turn of the century these prospering folk, now called ‘working families’, seemed defensive, even a little besieged, and the class basis of much of their social discourse was either unacknowledged or completely unconscious. The boho-bourgeois inner city has long been plagued with smugness, something the suburban middle class might aspire to if only it weren’t so anxious. It takes a deep leve
l of entitlement to be smug. Middle Australia settled for just being fractious and snooty. Only after the turn of the millennium did we begin to hear successful tradespeople being called ‘cashed-up bogans’. What else could that signify but class anxiety? Very quickly a large cohort of middle-class people found a means of codifying contempt for those rough-handed interlopers who’d been elevated by the minerals boom into Middle Australia without the benefit of the social conventions and tastes the old middle class was born to. What was the source of all this anxiety? That Jack might leapfrog all his masters and give them the finger in passing? That they, Menzies’ apparently Forgotten People, might be overtaken by the lower orders?

  When I was a kid, most people in the suburbs were likely to describe themselves as battlers – code for unpretentious, working-class toilers. Nowadays, largely as a result of the nation’s remarkable prosperity, the social centre has broadened to the degree that Middle Australia is normative. People are still just as likely to describe themselves as battlers, but their historically large incomes bely the nature of their struggle, which often has more to do with material ambition than any real hardship. In many instances the ‘battles’ of Middle Australia are self-imposed. But in recent years they have been valorized and enlarged. Nowhere was this more obvious than during the Howard years when the term ‘Howard’s battlers’ was deployed as a deliberate attempt to appropriate the power of class language while simultaneously declaring class a dead issue. Once it was rebadged, the middle-class cohort the conservatives had first courted and then ennobled felt increasingly emboldened to expect greater patronage, extra tax cuts, more concessions, a larger slicer of the welfare pie. As a result all subsequent governments were forced to contend with a middle class with an increasing sense of entitlement to welfare. And these funds were duly disbursed – largely at the expense of the poor, the sick and the unemployed.

  This, of course, was the real politics of envy at work. Howard exploited middle-class resentment of the so-called welfare class and pandered to a sense of victimhood in Middle Australia that Rudd and Gillard either couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Battlers morphed into ‘working families’ as prospering Australians were taught to minimize their good fortune and expect more state aid. From the subsidization of private schools to the tax rules favouring the superannuation prospects of the already comfortable, this is the new welfare paradigm. Evidence of it was everywhere before the 2013 federal election as single mothers were stripped of income and middle-class parents who earnt up to $150 000 a year were promised a full wage for six months to stay home and look after their own children.

  As the Sydney Morning Herald  ’s economics editor Ross Gittins wrote in a column in the lead-up to the poll, ‘If you think the class war is over, you’re not paying enough attention.’ He said: ‘The reason the well-off come down so hard on those who use class rhetoric is that they don’t want anyone drawing attention to how the war is going.’ To suggest that ours is a classless society, or that matters of class are resolved because of national prosperity and the ideological victory of the right, is either tin-eared or dishonest. At least the Americans are brutally frank about it. Gittins went on to quote Warren Buffett who declared: ‘There’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’

  Australia may be dazzlingly prosperous, and keen to project a classless image to itself and others, but it is still socially stratified, even if there are fewer obvious indicators of class distinction than there were forty years ago. Accent surely isn’t one of them. Postcodes can be telling but not conclusive. Even a person’s occupation can be unreliable, and the world of surfaces has never been trickier to read. In an era of lax credit regimes, what people wear or drive is misleading, as is the size of the homes they live in. Australians have begun to live ostentatiously, projecting social aspirations that owe more to the entertainment industry than to political ideology. The soundest measure of a person’s social status is mobility, and the chief source of mobility is income. Whether you’re born to it or accumulate it, wealth determines a citizen’s choice of education, housing, healthcare and employment. It’s also an indicator of health and longevity. Money still talks loudest, even if it often speaks from the corner of its mouth. Even if it covers its mouth entirely. And governments no longer have a taste for the redistribution of wealth. Neither are they keen on intervening to open enclaves and break down barriers to social mobility. Apparently these tasks are the responsibility of the individual.

  Where once Australia looked like a pyramid in terms of its social strata, with the working class as its broad base and ballast and the rich at the top, it’s come to resemble something of a misshapen diamond – wide in the middle – and that’s no bad thing in and of itself. I say that, of course, as a member of the emblematically widening middle. The problem is those Australians the middle has left behind without a glance.

  In recent years the incomes of the top fifth have outgrown those at the bottom by more than four times. At the other end there are the poor, who make up almost 13 percent of the population. The most visible of them will always be the welfare class: the sick, the addicted, the impaired and the unemployed, who only exist in the public mind as fodder for tabloid TV and the flagellants of brute radio. But if ever there was a truly Forgotten People in our time it must be the working poor. These folk, the cleaners and carers and hospitality workers, excite no media outrage. They labour in the shadows in increasingly contingent working situations. Categorized as ‘casuals’, the only casual element of their existence is the attitude of the entities that employ them. Often on perpetual call or split shifts, their working lives are unstable. Many of them women, a significant proportion of them migrants, they have little bargaining power and low rates of union representation. As Helen Masterman-Smith and Barbara Pocock vividly documented in their 2008 study Living Low Paid, these are the figures ghosting down the corridors of hospitals and five-star hotels. They stock the shelves of supermarkets in the wee hours. They mind the children of prosperous professional couples and wash their incontinent parents in care for an hourly rate most middle-class teenaged babysitters can afford to turn their noses up at. It is upon these citizens that the prosperity of safer families is often built.

  For these vulnerable Australians there is little mobility. And precious little of what mobility affords – namely, confidence. The cockiness that irritates the old middle class when they encounter FIFO workers with their Holden SS utes and tatts and jet skis is rare amongst the labouring poor. For years I worked in a residential highrise where the looks on people’s faces in the lifts and on the walkways ranged from wry resignation to unspeakable entrapment. Single mothers on shrinking benefits, injured workers on disability allowances, middle-aged people staggering back from a night at Woolworths. Even the most functional and optimistic of them seemed tired. They were not exhausted from partying, from keeping up with all their dizzying choices; they were worn out from simply hanging on and making do. As an accidental tourist in their lives, I was struck by this weariness. And I felt awkward in their presence. Their faces and voices were completely familiar. They smelt like the people of my boyhood – fags, sugar and the beefy whiff of free-range armpit – but despite the cheerful, noncommittal conversations we had on our slow ascents in the lift, I felt a distance that took many months to come to terms with. Like the expatriate whose view of home is largely antique, I was a class traveller who’d become a stranger to his own. For all my connection to family, for all the decades I’d spent in fishing towns amongst tradespeople and labourers, the working class I knew was no more. My new neighbours were living another life altogether.

  The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes about the contrast between the ‘light, sprightly and volatile’ working lives of mobile citizens at the top of society who are underpinned by those largely without choice and prospects. Comfortable, confident people, heirs of the new individualism, often view strangers in cohorts below them in astoundingly superf
icial terms, as if they have adopted a look, chosen an identity – as they frequently do themselves – as if life were a largely sartorial affair. Faced with your own surfeit of choices, it’s easy to assume everyone has so many. The ‘liquid’ elite understands exotic poverty – it rallies to it tearfully – but it often fails to recognize domestic hardship: poverty of choice, poverty born of constraint, the poverty that is working servitude or the bonded shame of unemployment. Despite the angelic appeal of market thinking, there is no gainsaying the correlation between success and certain family backgrounds, geographical locations, ethnicities and schools. Pretending otherwise isn’t simply dishonest, it’s morally corrosive.

  The culture that formed me was poorer, flatter and probably fairer than the one I live in today. Class was more visible, less confusing, more honestly defined and clearly understood. And it was something you could discuss without feeling like a heretic. The decency of our society used to be the measure of its success. Such decency rescued many of us from over-determined lives. It was the moral force that eroded barriers between people, opened up pathways previously unimagined. Not only did it enlarge our personal imaginations, it enhanced our collective experience. The new cultural confidence this reform produced prefigured the material prosperity we currently enjoy. It is government intervention as much as the so-called genius of the market that has underpinned our national wealth and it amazes me how quickly we’ve let ourselves be persuaded otherwise.

  I have no illusions about overcoming class distinctions completely. Nor am I discounting the role that character plays in an individual’s fortunes. But it disturbs me to see governments abandoning those at the bottom while pandering to the appetites of the comfortable. Under such conditions what chance is there for the working poor to fight their way free to share in the spoils of our common wealth? No one’s talking ideology. There is no insurrection brewing. For many Australian families a gap in the fence is all the revolution they require. But while business prospers from the increased casualization of its workforce, and government continues to reward the insatiable middle, the prospects of help for the weakest and decency for all seem dim indeed.