The truth is that our history has not been one of unbroken progress, either materially or socially. It has been a continuous shifting back and forth. Between periods of economic boom and long periods of depression. Between a confident openness to the world, to our own capacity for experiment, and a cautious drawing in behind defensive walls. Between a brave inclusiveness and a panicky need to make distinctions and exclude. But it is a continuity, and we need to take it whole.
What each of us takes on, at whatever point we enter it, is the whole of what happened here, since it is the whole of our history that has created what now surrounds and sustains us. We cannot disassociate ourselves from the past by saying we were not present. It is present in us. And we must resist the attractive notion that the past is, as they say, another country. It is not. It is this country before the necessities of a changing world changed it.
As for the wish to return to the past in the belief that it was somehow simpler and more truly ‘Australian’ because less diverse – all one can say is, there are no simplicities, there never were. Life is always more complex than the means we have for dealing with it. It always has been. We change, but not fast enough. That’s the way things are. As for our Australianness, that has always been a matter of argument, of experiment. What is extraordinary in the society we have developed here is the rapidity of the changes it has undergone, and we feel this all the more when we see them tumbling in, one upon the other, within the span of our own lives.
Some of these changes are changes of attitude, of the way we see the world; others, more radically, are changes in the way we see ourselves.
When Europeans first came to this continent they settled in the cooler, more temperate parts of it. This was where they could reproduce to some extent the world they had left, but it was also because they saw themselves as cool-climate people. The wisdom, fifty years ago, was that white men would never live and work in the north.
Well, we seem to have re-invented ourselves in these last years as warm-climate people. Not only do we live quite comfortably in the north, it is where a great many of us prefer to live. If present population trends are anything to go by, a large part of our population in the next century will have moved into the tropics, and Queensland, our fastest growing state, will be our local California.
This is a change of a peculiar kind: a change in the way we define ourselves and our relationship to the world that is also a new way of experiencing our own bodies. And the second change I have in mind is related to this. It is the change in the living habits of Australians that we can observe any night of the week in Lygon Street in Melbourne, in Rundle Street, Adelaide, in various parts of Sydney: people eating out on the pavement under the stars in a style we recognise immediately as loosely Mediterranean, a style that has become almost universal in these last years but which fits better here than it does in Toronto or Stockholm.
It seems to me to be the discovery of a style at last that also fits the kind of people we have now become, and that fits the climate and the scene. And the attitudes it expresses, also loosely Mediterranean, make the sharpest imaginable contrast with the way we were even two decades ago, the way, in that far-off time, we saw life and the possibilities of living.
Look at these diners. Look at what they are eating and drinking. At the little dishes of olive oil for dipping their bread; the grilled octopus, the rocket, the tagines and skordalia, the wine. Look at the eye for style – for local style – with which they are dressed, and their easy acceptance of the body; their tendency to dress it up, strip it, show it off. Consider what all this suggests of a place where play seems natural and pleasure a part of what living is for; then consider how far these ordinary Australians have come from that old distrust of the body and its pleasures that might have seemed bred in the bone in the Australians we were even thirty years ago.
These people have changed, not just their minds but their psyches, and have discovered, along the way, a new body. They have slipped so quickly and so easily into this other style of being that they might have been living this way, deep in the tradition of physical ease, a comfortable accommodation between body and soul, for as long as grapes have grown on vines or olives on trees.
But half a lifetime ago, in the 1950s, olive oil was still a medicine and spaghetti came in tins. Eating out for most Australians was steak and chips at a Greek café if you were on the road, or the occasional visit to Chinatown. We ate at home for the most part and we ate pretty much what our grandparents had eaten, even those of us whose grandparents had come from ‘elsewhere’: lamb chops, Irish stew, a roast on Sundays. It would have seemed ludicrous to take food seriously – to write about it in the newspaper for example – or to believe that what we ate might constitute a ‘cuisine’ (something new and original), a product of art as well as necessity, an expression, in the same way that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ or ‘Shearing the Rams’ might be, of a national style and of the local spirit at play.
As for those other changes – of attitude, ways of seeing ourselves in relation to one another and to the world – I shall mention only two. Both were once so deeply embedded in all our ways of thinking here that they might have seemed essential to what we were. We could scarcely have imagined an Australia without them.
The first was that belief in racial superiority and exclusiveness that went under the name of the White Australia policy, but was really, until the end of the Second World War, an exclusively British policy. As The Bulletin put it with its usual brutal candour: ‘Australia for the Australians – the cheap Chinese, the cheap Nigger, and the cheap European pauper to be absolutely excluded’.
These sentiments, this sort of language, which was common to The Bulletin and to later popular papers, like Smith’s Weekly, right up to the early 1950s, expressed the policy of all political parties, left and right, and seemed not only acceptable but unremarkable. Both the attitudes and the language were inextricably tied in with our concept of nationhood. Or so it seemed.
Yet the White Australia policy, when it disappeared in the 1960s, did so almost without argument. This great tenet of the Australian dream, of a single superior race on the continent, had grown so weak and theoretical by the 1960s that it simply vanished as if it had never been, and despite recent rumblings shows few signs of revival.
So, too, amazingly, did what had been from the beginning the strongest of all divisions among us, the sectarian division between Protestants and Catholics.
When I was growing up in Brisbane, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Catholic and Protestant Australians lived separate lives; they might have been living in separate countries. The division between them, the low-level hostility, was part of the very fabric of things; so essential, so old and deeply rooted, as to seem immemorial and impossible of change.
Catholics and Protestants went to separate schools and learned different versions of history. Secondary students even went to different dancing classes, and when they left school they played football with different clubs, joined different lodges (the Order of Ancient Buffaloes or the Oddfellows if they were Protestant, the Hibernians if they were Catholic), and debutantes ‘came out’ at different balls. People knew by instinct at first meeting, by all sorts of tell-tale habits of speech and attitude, who belonged to one group and who to the other, just as they knew which corner shops or department stores they should patronise. And these divisions functioned institutionally as well as at street level. Catholics worked in some areas of the Public Service, Protestants in others. In Queensland, the Labor Party was Catholic; Protestants were Liberals. In the two great referenda over conscription, in 1916 and 1917, the country divided not on party but on sectarian lines – Protestants for, Catholics against – although in the end the ‘no’s’ won and one should add that serving soldiers were as likely to be Catholic as not.
Part of the bitterness behind this was that Catholics were almost exclusively Irish, so that the division had an ethnic and historical element as well as a religious one. It was a c
ontinuation, on new ground, of the history of Ireland itself, based on ancient resistance to English invasion and tyranny, and on the English side on fear of Irish disloyalty, subversion and a deep-rooted contempt for Irish superstition and disorderliness. All this created its own mythology. The suggestion, for instance, that bushranging in Australia was a new version of Irish rebellion. Now it is true that most of the best-known bushrangers, real and imaginary, have Irish names, but as so often, what is told and strongly felt is not necessarily what is true to fact. The Kelly gang was Irish, but so were Kennedy, Scanlon and Lonigan, the three troopers they killed at Stringybark Creek. So were the police who hunted them.
And what exactly was at stake in all this? To a Protestant militant like John Dunmore Lang, the continent itself.
For Irish Catholics in Australia, Protestants were not only in the ‘ascendancy’ as they had been At Home, but in the majority. For Protestants the fear was that this happy condition might one day be reversed. That they might wake up one morning and find they had been outnumbered and this great continent had fallen overnight to Rome and to Mariolatry.
That Catholics did become the majority at last in the late 1980s, and nobody noticed, is a mark of how large the change has been. Young people today not only feel none of the old hostility, for the most part they have never heard of it. And this is not only because of the increasing secularism of our society, although that too is part of it. It is because these differences no longer matter. The whole sorry business is worth recalling now for only one reason, and it is this. If Australia is basically, as I believe it is, a tolerant place, that tolerance was hammered out, painfully and over nearly 150 years, in the long process by which Catholics and Protestants, the Irish and the rest, turned away from ‘history’ and learned to live with one another, and in a way that, for all its distrust and resentment, was never actually murderous as it had been elsewhere, even in times of the greatest stress: during the Easter uprising of 1916, for example, and the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s; or, before that, during the Home Rule controversy of the 1880s, or before that again, in 1868, when a suspected Fenian named O’Farrell tried to assassinate the visiting Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf.
This rejection of the move from hostility to murder is important. The smell of blood is not easily forgotten. The stain of it is hard to eradicate and the names of the dead are always there to be reiterated and to become the source of a new round of violence.
Something in the tone of Australian society has been unwelcoming of extremes, and if this makes for a certain lack of passion, a lack of the swagger and high rhetoric that begins as theatre and ends as terrorism and war, it has also saved us from something. In contrast to some other mixed societies – Ireland itself, central Europe in the 1930s, and, more recently, Lebanon and Bosnia – some final sanction has always operated here against the negation of that deep psychological work that over something like six millennia has made it possible for us to live with strangers and, however different they might be from ourselves, make neighbours of them.
And isn’t this, finally, what holds civilised societies together? The capacity to make a distinction between what belongs, in the way of loyalty, to clan or sect or family, and what to the demands of neighbourliness; what belongs to our individual and personal lives and what we owe to res publica or Commonwealth, the life we share with others, even those who may differ from us in the most fundamental way – skin colour and ethnicity, religious and political affiliation, customary habits. It is the capacity to make and honour these distinctions, out of a common concern for the right we have, each one of us, to pursue our own interests, that is essential to the life of cities, and beyond that, to their more precarious extension as states.
On the whole, we have done well in this. Not only in creating a society in which these distinctions are recognised and honoured but in creating a tone that those who come here from places where they are not, soon learn to value and accept. There is something to be said for mildness. It leaves people the breathing space, and the energy, to get on with more important things. As George Nadel puts it in speaking of the fight for decent working conditions in Australia: ‘The fact that it appeared within reach of everyone made democratic experiment safe, and the working classes were satisfied to secure their share by enjoying a greater return for less labour rather than by political radicalism’. That is, there have been no revolutions in Australia. No blood, at least in this cause, has stained the wattle.
The world these days is global. Australians have not escaped the pressures of an even more complex future. In daring to become a diverse and multi-ethnic society, an open experiment, we run more risk perhaps than most places of breaking up, of fragmenting. But we have faced that danger before. What got us through on those earlier occasions was neighbourliness, the saving grace of lightness and good humour, the choice of moderation over temptation to any form of extreme. These characteristics of our society are still visibly alive in the present; in occasions we take for granted, and so much so that we fail sometimes to see how rare they are.
Consider the atmosphere in which election days are celebrated here. A spirit of holiday hovers over our election boxes. As the guardian angel of our democracy, it is preferable, surely, to the three or four bored paratroopers who descend to protect the ballot-boxes in even the smallest village in a place as politically sophisticated as Italy.
Voting for us is a family occasion, a duty fulfilled, as often as not, on the way to the beach, so that children, early, get a sense of it as an obligation but a light one, a duty casually undertaken. And it can seem casual. But the fact that voters so seldom spoil their vote, either deliberately or by accident, in a place where voting is compulsory and voting procedures are often extremely complicated, speaks for an electorate that has taken the trouble to inform itself because it believes these things matter, and of a citizenship lightly but seriously assumed.
I ended my first lecture with the description of an audience, a mixed convict and military one, at a performance in 1800 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One. What I wanted to see in it was a first attempt here at a society in which all sorts of divisions between groups, but also between individuals, might be resolved by the fact that, in becoming an audience, this heterogeneous crowd had also, for the duration of the occasion, become an entity – and perhaps a single occasion (single occasions) is the best we can hope for and is enough. A recognition that unity is there as a possibility. It does not have to be sustained so long as it is available when we need it to be.
Let me end with another such audience, one in which what was promised in that earlier audience seems to me to be marvellously fulfilled, under more complex conditions and on a vastly larger scale.
An audience comes together of its own volition, unlike a rally, for example, where there is always some element of compulsion, if only a moral one of commitment or duty. An audience simply appears, as the 700,000 or so people do who turn out each year for the gay Mardi Gras procession in Sydney. They have no reason for being there other than interest, curiosity, pleasure, and they are an audience, not simply a crowd; an audience that has been created and shaped by the society it is drawn from, and in which the faculty of watching, listening and judging has been to an extraordinary degree sharpened.
What impresses me about this audience is its capacity to read what it is presented with and come up with an appropriate response. To greet extravagant glitter and camp with delight and a degree of humorous mockery. To see that deliberate provocation is best dealt with by a shrug of the shoulders or live-and-let-live indifference, but that a more sober note is being struck when people incapacitated by AIDS are being wheeled past, and that what is called for by the large throng of their nurses and carers is the acknowledgement of service with respectful silence or applause.
No-one has trained this audience in its responses. They come naturally out of what has been picked up from the society itself, they reflect its ‘tone’. It is, as an audience, as mysteri
ous in the way it appears and reconstitutes itself for each occasion as any other. No-one twenty years ago could have predicted its arrival, but there it is.
As for the actors in this street theatre – could anyone have guessed, back then, that it would be just this group that would call a popular audience into being?
What seems extraordinary here, is that what, until recently, had been a marginal group, mostly invisible, has not only made itself visible but has made the claim as well to be central – that is, as central as any other – and has created that audience for all of us.
Open, inclusive, the parade is made up of virtually every strand in our society: the various ethnic minorities, including Asian and Pacific people and Aborigines; members of the armed forces, the police, and of every other profession, including sex-workers.
In being multiple itself, such a parade offers the crowd a reflected image of its own multiplicity, and all within a spirit of carnival, a form of play that includes mockery and self-mockery, glamour and the mockery of glamour, social comment, tragedy and a selfless dedication to the needs of others; as if all these things were aspects of the same complex phenomenon – as of course they are. It is called life.
Carnival deals with disorder by making a licensed place for it, and with the threat of fragmentation by reconstructing community in a spirit of celebratory lightness. It takes on darkness and disruption by embracing them. Forces that might otherwise emerge as violence, it diverts through tolerance and good humour into revelry and sheer fun.
Such carnival occasions have ancient roots. They go back to the pagan world, and to medieval festivals, days of licence, Fools’ Days, when the spirit of mockery was let loose and a place found for disorder within the world of order and rule. For all its contemporary glitz and high jinks, our version of Mardi Gras retains much of its ancient significance. As a popular festival it reinforces community. It recovers for us, within the complexities and the divisiveness of modern living, a sense of wholeness. And there is a connection here between the carnival world it celebrates, its vulgarity, its flaunting of the flesh, and that first convict performance of Henry IV.