A First Place

  There was also the censorship. On books, on films, on any idea that might corrupt us morally or shake the society up by questioning values so firmly entrenched, so universally accepted, that to go against even the least of them might begin a fragmentation that could never be repaired.

  To read Ulysses you had to get permission from the State Librarian, who kept it under lock and key in his office. It was not for sale. And it was still forbidden to advertise condoms (men and boys got them ‘under the counter’ at the barbers) or to publish information of any kind about birth control.

  In Queensland, where I lived, in an odd reversal of what everywhere else in the world is regarded as civilised behaviour, the law forbade us to eat and drink on the same premises.

  It is easy to laugh at these foolish restrictions. But they were only the visible sign of something larger and more insidious – more disabling, too. A sense of embattlement against life itself, a fear not just of the threat from without but of the even darker forces that lurked within. We were terrified, I think, of discovering that the body, for all our shame and fear of it, was harmless and that pleasure too might be harmless; that ideas, even dangerous ideas, ones that put us at risk, might be as essential to our wholeness and good health as cod-liver oil or Vegemite.

  Meanwhile, it seemed, only the acceptance of a strict conformity would save us from ourselves and society from a collapse into total degeneracy: National Service, a vote for Mr Menzies, moral and legal restrictions backed up by a system of official and unofficial pimping and prying that used nice-looking young policemen to entrap homosexuals in public lavatories, and divorce agents, hired by the ‘aggrieved party’, to burst into hotel bedrooms and expose adulterers in the act of being what the newspapers on Sunday called ‘intimate’.

  Comfortable, secure, cosy?

  What is most striking about earlier periods in Australian history – say the 1830s to the 1880s – is the sense of openness and optimism the place generated, in spite of droughts, economic slumps like the one that shook the country in the early 1840s, or the disappointing discovery that the continent had no great inland river system like that of the United States.

  As early as 1810, Lachlan Macquarie, newly arrived as Governor of NSW, speaks in a letter to his brother of the ‘flourishing condition’ in which he found the colony. ‘Indeed the whole country,’ he writes, ‘is much more advanced in every kind of improvement than I could have supposed possible in the time it has been settled.’ He did not add that this was the more remarkable because for all but three or four of those years Britain had been engaged in a major Continental war.

  Peter Cunningham, in 1828, writes of ‘gentlemen foreigners, tempted by the fineness of our country and climate to take up permanent abode among us. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans … all add to the variety of language current among us … In the streets of Sydney, too, may often be seen groups of natives of the numerous South Sea Islands with which we trade … a considerable proportion of the Othesians [Tahitians] and New Zealanders are employed as sailors in the vessels that frequent our ports.’ This reminds us that Sydney at this time was still mainly a seaport, and that Australia was still a place open to nationalities other than the British.

  Cunningham also remarks on how a passion for the outdoors in all classes of Australians already marks them as quite different from Englishmen. ‘Young men,’ he writes, ‘think no more of swimming out a mile or more, and back, than a stranger would of taking a walk the same distance’ – although the great Victorian respectability, which was introduced here two decades before its time by the Macquaries, and in some ways never receded, soon decreed that mixed bathing was unacceptable, and for the sake of decency restricted all bathing to the hours before six in the morning and after six at night!

  By 1870 Australia was importing one third of all books printed in Great Britain; we were already a nation of voracious readers, and not only of pulp fiction. As Michael Cannon shows from library records in Victoria, the average borrower from the Sandhurst Mechanics Institute read forty books a year, ten of them history or biography or political economy.

  Sydney and Melbourne had a lively theatrical life: vaudeville, melodrama, the dramatisation of popular novels like East Lynne or The Three Musketeers or A Tale of Two Cities, but also of such local works as For the Term of His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms – the same fare that was available in English and American cities.

  German immigrants (Germans were, until the First World War, our largest non-British group; at the time of Separation, one in ten Queenslanders was German speaking) introduced musical clubs – Liedertafel – to all the capital cities and to dozens of smaller towns all over the country, importing their own conductors and performing locally composed pieces.

  The Lyster Opera Company from San Francisco gave 1459 performances in the eastern capitals between 1861 and 1868.

  An English visitor, Henry Cornish, whose Under the Southern Cross is one of the classic accounts of nineteenth-century Australia, found Sydney in 1870 ‘not at all the dull second-rate English town of my expectations’. Archibald Michie, a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly and author of Readings in Melbourne, writing of the southern capital in the 1860s, when it was larger than Sydney by 45,000 people, speaks of it as ‘a great city, as comfortable, as elegant, as luxurious (it is hardly an exaggeration to say it) as any place out of London or Paris’. When young Australians of talent went overseas they were not fleeing a cultural desert. They were doing what ambitious young people from Manchester did, or Boston or New York: taking their genius, if they had one, to where it could be put to the test. And London, even for Australians, was not always the Mecca. They were provincial not chauvinistic. For painters it was Paris, where John Peter Russell and Hugh Ramsay went to study, for musicians like the young Henry Handel Richardson it was Leipzig, as it was also for the composer Alfred Hill, who played in the Gewandhaus Orchestra at the first performance of the Brahms Fourth.

  So what went wrong? Where did it all go, that early self-confidence and ebullience, that bouncy belief of the clever lad from the provinces, the seventh son, in the world’s infinite possibilities and his own abounding good luck?

  Some of it disappeared into the sand with those inland rivers; much more in the downward turn of the economy that began in the 1890s and lasted right up to the Second World War. More again was drained away in the horrors of the trenches and the 62,000 deaths in a population of less than four million that robbed the country of so much vitality and talent, struck at the heart of country towns and left so many women for the rest of their lives without men. The big houses of my Brisbane childhood, the old patrician houses, were inhabited by lone women, the widows and sisters and fiancées of those who had been killed, and whose names were everywhere: on the honour boards at school, on war memorials in suburban parks, in the lists of employees who had served and been killed at the post office and at railway stations and banks. It was a psychic blow from which the country in some ways never recovered, and which it suffered, for the most part, in silence.

  Added to this was the long agony in the 1920s and 1930s of the soldiers’ farms, where men who had survived the trenches and taken up what turned out to be marginal farming land found how harsh the land could be, and how little reward they had received for their years of sacrifice. Then, when the Great Depression struck, the bitter lesson that however hard you might be, however you clung to the bushman’s code, the Digger code, of mateship and stoicism and hard-won independence, your life was not in your own hands. The country was at the mercy of outside forces, overseas banks, and market trends that neither you nor the government, it seemed, could control.

  Add again the shock of discovering, as was brought home to Australians again and again in the new century, that loyalty to empire did not necessarily assure you a special place in the priorities of the British Government.

  Even more alarming, that the wholeness of the society you thought you lived in was an illusion; that Germans, your go
od, hardworking neighbours, were really the enemy within – or so it appeared – and then, when things settled again, the shameful discovery, or recollection, of how those old friends and neighbours had been treated: the attacks against them in the streets; the law that had prevented them from hiding the disloyalty of their origin by changing their names; the deportation of those who had been interned, and with them their Australian wives and children. So what was it to be an Australian? What did it mean to be loyal – to the nation, to your own people? Who could you trust?

  Involvement for the first time in a total war had changed things. That was what it was all about. And they could not be changed back.

  Emergency restrictions that had been imposed under the extraordinary conditions of war, on pub hours for instance, the famous six o’clock closing, tended to establish themselves, become permanent. Then there was the setting up of a counter-espionage bureau in 1917, an internal spy system to keep a watch on aliens and dissidents and other wartime undesirables, and which, in the decades after the war, became the agency of a growing paranoia about the presence among us of un-Australian elements whose aim was the destruction of everything we stood for. And the emergence, as a reaction to the presence of Wobblies, anarchists and local Communists inspired by the Russian Revolution, of secret armies, mostly of ex-Diggers, the White Army, the Old Guard, the New Guard, who were ready if necessary to seize power and set up their own version of Australianness and order.

  Then in 1942, as a final blow, came the fall of Singapore, and the end of the old belief that we might be left to make our own life here, away from interference by a larger world. Nearly 30,000 of our men were marched into captivity in darkest Asia. It was the fulfilment at last of what had been from the beginning our great nightmare; that those borders that nature itself seemed to have established with just us in mind might not hold. Two hundred and forty-three dead in a single raid on Darwin. Two weeks later, seventy-three more at Broome. Nineteen dead in the midget submarine raid on Sydney. The Americans arrived to protect us from invasion, and some of our saviours, despite our protests to the United States government, turned out to be black.

  After 1928, black jazz musicians had been banned from entering Australia on the grounds that they were a moral threat to our women. When the American government insisted that blacks must be included in their forces here, we insisted in turn that they should be used only in Queensland and must not be landed either in Sydney or Melbourne.

  In the dark days after Singapore, Australia, which had put so much faith in the goodwill of the British and the power of the British Fleet, was mocked in Nazi radio broadcasts as ‘the Orphan in the Pacific’.

  Once again we had been too trusting. Or – another temptation of living on an island – too sleepily closed off in our own little world to see how completely the world around us had moved on.

  Through most of the 1920s and 1930s we seem to have been too stunned to take any sort of initiative. It had taken us eleven years to ratify the Statute of Westminster which recognised us as an autonomous nation, and we were thirteen years behind Canada, and eleven behind South Africa, in having our own rather than British representatives overseas – even in Washington. We drew in behind our ocean wall and sulked. We turned our back on everything foreign or new or contemporary.

  One or two of our painters, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith for example, who studied outside the country, did work that was modernist, and Kenneth Slessor might be called a modernist poet; but this was rare. Most of our writers were still devoted to bush realism and later to socialist realism. Even Nettie Palmer, the most internationally aware of our literary critics, was anti-modernist. So were Stewart and Hope and McAuley. A. D. Hope, in one of his most frequently quoted poems, speaks from the very heart of educated Australian philistinism, of ‘the chatter of cultured apes, which is called civilization over there’. Who are these cultured apes, one wonders, who have failed to pass the test of civilisation as we Australians understand it? Wittgenstein, Benedetto Croce, Walter Benjamin, Jung, Ortega y Gasset, Simone Weil, Thomas Mann?

  A fair indication of the cultural climate of the 1930s can be seen in the response of local experts to the Herald art show of 1939, when Australians first had the chance to see paintings by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and other twentieth-century masters.

  For Lionel Lindsay, as for the Nazis, the School of Paris was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’. Australia, until now undefiled, was, he tells us, ‘threatened by the same aliens, the same corrupting influences that undermined French art’. Explaining why the Victorian gallery would not be buying any of the show’s works, the director, James MacDonald, told journalists: ‘The great majority of the work called “modern” is the product of degenerates and perverts … As the owner of a great Van Dyck, if we take a stand by refusing to pollute our gallery with this filth, we shall render a service to art’.

  This is the same J. MacDonald who believed that if we kept ourselves pure, and free of taint from inferior types like Asians and southern Europeans, we might become ‘the elect of the world, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility’.

  One sees here, in the language as well as the attitudes, why Australia did not benefit from the exodus of European intellectuals in the mid to late 1930s that created, in America, the new disciplines that would be so influential for the rest of the century. In this sense, too, Australia was closed. Between 1936 and 1940 just 3828 migrants landed on our shores.

  James McAuley’s great phrase, ‘the faint sterility that disheartens and derides’, seems to me to express most clearly the mood of Australia in the 1920s and 1930s and it was still there, along with all the old terrors of life both within and without, and with tea and butter and petrol rationing, at the beginning of the 1950s.

  And then?

  Sheer panic at our lack of numbers, at a birthrate that had fallen 25 per cent since 1870, made the Labor government, after the war, embark on an ambitious migrant program.

  No Asians, of course. As Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell is reported to have put it in 1947: ‘Two Wongs don’t make a White’; our agents were to give preference in Europe to people with fair hair and blue eyes. But the important thing was, we were open to the world again.

  These people would bring more than themselves. They would bring the world and new ways of looking at it; new models of what an Australian might be, might care for, aspire to, sell his soul for; new notions, whatever the demands of local conformity, of how one might want to live one’s life.

  But the real source of change was another newcomer that we let in at last in 1956, and not just into the country but into our homes. Television. That little black box was also a mirror. Looking into it we would see our real faces at last, and how many and various we were: women who argued and had opinions, blacks, homosexuals, young people whose tastes and ideas were different from those of their elders.

  Television taught us to look and listen. It gave us a new image of ourselves and a new version of local culture – a popular, commercial culture that we too, these days, export to the world. Most of all, it got us to open up and talk. To break the great Australian silence. To break out of a disabling tradition of close-lipped devotion to the unspoken, the inexpressible, that had kept so much pain – and so much love, too, one suspects – unacknowledged because it could not find words.

  One of the ways in which we deal with the randomness of what happens to us is by seeing it as a story, imposing on it the shape of story. Perhaps this is why folk tales and fairy tales mean so much to us. They offer a range of story-shapes – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Puss-in-Boots, the Joseph story – that are models for turning the muddle of living from one day to the next into something with a middle and an end. Novels do the same: picaresque novels like Don Quixote; the growing-older-and-wiser novel the Germans call a Bildungsroman; love stories like Jane Eyre; the novel of the divided self like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; novels of self-reliance and salvation thr
ough work like Robinson Crusoe. And national myths, too, follow these prototype narratives. That is why the representation of us as the ‘Orphan in the Pacific’ was so cruel.

  Two elements are worth noting here: our tendency to see ourselves as childlike, forever in the process of growing up or coming of age, and the self-pitying sense of being unloved and abandoned by a bad stepmother in a place far from home.

  Anxiety about where we are, what we are to be, an endless fussing and fretting over identity, has been with us now for more than a century. Perhaps it is time we discovered a new shape for the story we have been telling ourselves.

  Identity can be experienced in two ways. Either as a confident being-in-the-world or as anxiety about our-place-in-the-world; as something we live for ourselves or as something that demands for its confirmation the approval of others.

  Perhaps it is time to stop asking what our Asian neighbours will think of us, or the Americans or the British, and try living free of all watchers but our own better and freer and more adventurous selves.

  6

  A Spirit of Play

  One of the things we seem to find difficult is to see our history – all that has happened and was done here – as a continuity, a whole. And this for more than the usual reasons; that historians differ in their reading of what happened and why – on the reasons, for example, for the founding of the colony – or because we have, each one of us, an emotional or ideological investment in such questions as why the Aborigines died out so quickly after we came, whether by accident through the spreading of disease or through deliberate extermination, and the extent to which the way we acted towards them may have departed from British Government policy. Disagreements of this sort are common to historians everywhere. Our problem is different. It is one of selective memory. We remember the bits that speak well of us, the freedoms we have achieved, the good life we have created for so many here; the dark bits we suppress.