In 1902, in an attempt to contain Russia, Britain entered into an alliance with Japan, an act that must have rung alarm-bells in the new Federation, which had always seen Japan as a possible threat. Then, in May 1905, the Japanese destroyed the Russian navy in a decisive battle in the Tsushima Strait, and the whole balance of power in the Pacific shifted. Japan became a threat to Britain’s Asian and Pacific interests; especially if, as seemed likely, the United States thwarted Japanese ambitions in China and drove them south.
But the arrival on the scene of Japan as the dominant sea-power in the Pacific alarmed the Americans as well. From 1907 to 1909, thirty-one ships of the United States Pacific Fleet made a grand tour of the region, and the visit to Australia, in August 1908, of what came to be called the Great White Fleet, is one of the shining moments of our national memory. What began to be clear, in the huge outpouring of emotion for America and Americans, was that it was not only Britain whose kindred ties might be appealed to if we needed protection, or the British navy that might protect us, and this precisely at a moment when Britain had begun to worry about the change in the pattern of Australian imports – away from Britain towards ‘others’; chiefly, as a Board of Trade enquiry of that year made plain, the United States.
The trend increased. By the end of the next decade the American film industry had a virtual monopoly over film distribution in Australia, the big boys of the American automobile industry, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, were displacing British cars from our streets, and American petroleum (Standard Oil) had made such inroads into the Australian market that in 1920 the Commonwealth Government, in collaboration with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), formed the Commonwealth Oil Refinery to protect British interests. By the end of the twenties, British anger over America’s refusal to write off Britain’s debt for war materials in the 1914–18 War, American anger at Britain’s refusal to let United States oil-companies into the Middle-Eastern territories it had occupied (Iraq and Persia) after the collapse of the Turkish Empire (Britain now controlled 50 per cent of the world’s oil-resources) led American military leaders, in 1929 – extraordinary as this may now seem – to draw up contingency plans for a possible war with Great Britain.
It is within the context of these tensions, in some of which Australia was intensely involved, that we need to think of the triangular relationship in the difficult years that led up to December 1941 and the Pacific War.
In September 1939 Britain, and as a natural consequence Australia, went to war with Nazi Germany. In September 1940, with Britain fighting alone in Europe and hard-pressed in North Africa, and three Australian divisions involved there and in the Middle East, Japan signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, occupied air and military bases in Vichy French Indo-China, and demanded further bases on the Malayan border in southern Thailand.
At that point, in a moment that looked back more than three decades to the apparition in our world of the Great White Fleet, the American navy made another ceremonial visit to Australian waters. What Australians saw in the occasion, though the Americans had offered no commitment, was a guarantee against what now presented itself as an alarming future. I remember being taken by my father to Newstead Park one morning in March 1941, just before my seventh birthday, to see two ships of the United States Pacific Fleet sail grandly into the Hamilton Reach of the Brisbane River, with hundreds of white-capped and white-uniformed sailors – the ones we knew already from the ‘Shanghai Lil’ sequence of Footlight Parade – lined up in dazzling rows along the decks.
Events moved rapidly after that. On 8 December the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On the 10th the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, which constituted Britain’s major naval force in the Pacific, were torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Malaya. On the 25th Hong Kong surrendered. On the 27th, with Japanese armies sweeping south, the Japanese navy poised to invade, and Australia virtually defenceless, Prime Minister Curtin made the announcement that had in many ways been coming for nearly half a century: ‘Without inhibitions of any kind,’ he told us, ‘I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’
One might have assumed that this was it, the turning point. That from here on there could be no way back. That the place of Britain as the predominant power in our consciousness, the predominant influence on our lives, was done with forever. But that is not the way things went.
For all that it had been the Yanks who saved us, Australian loyalty to Britain, and Australian affection for the little island that had gone it alone and triumphed, for the people who had fought the Battle of Britain, endured the Blitz, and come through, was stronger than ever in the years immediately after the war and in the Menzies years that followed.
The big P & O and Orient liners once again carried Australian tourists to London on the old ‘colonial’ route via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden, Suez, and on the return journey brought us British migrants on assisted passages – they paid ten pounds for the one-way trip. Postgraduates still went off to Oxford and Cambridge, or to London University, rather than to Harvard or Johns Hopkins or Stanford, and we could still read American authors – including thinkers who, from their new base in America, were creating sciences and disciplines that would reshape the age – only if they came to us through English publishers. Outside the obvious area of popular entertainment, it is astonishing how little influence America had on us in its great high period in the two decades after the war. A prejudice still prevailed among our ‘best minds’ – poets, academics, editors, intellectuals of every kind – in favour of all things European or English over the cheapness and commercialism of what came from ‘across the Atlantic’: American movies, American jazz and pop music and musicals, American plays and novels, the barbarisms of the New York school of painting, all splash and dribble.
But 1941 had been a turning point, and Vance Palmer recognised and found words for it in a piece he published in the March 1942 issue of Meanjin Papers, as it was then called, just three months after Curtin’s December address:
The next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at any rate in the sight of the outer world. We have no monuments to speak of, no dreams in stone, no Guernica, no sacred places. We could vanish and leave singularly few signs that, for some generations, there had lived a people who had made a homeland of this Australian earth. A homeland? To how many people was it primarily that? How many penetrated the soil with their love and imagination? … If Australia had no more charter than could be seen on its surface, it would be annihilated as surely and swiftly as those colonial outposts white men built for their commercial profit in the East – pretentious facades of stucco that looked imposing as long as the wind kept from blowing. But there is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate, that is quite different from these baubles of old-world imperialism …
What had changed under the threat of imminent invasion was the willingness in the early part of that paragraph to take a hard look at what Australia actually was, free of the usual swagger and whistling in the dark, and to accept the challenge to get below the surface. To penetrate the soil of Australia, as Palmer puts it, ‘with love and imagination’; to give that submerged and inarticulate spirit voice.
The threat of invasion, and the arrival of the Americans to save us, did not break our tie with Britain, or make it inevitable that we would one day become a minor constellation among the Stars and Stripes. What it did was bring Australia – the land itself – fully alive at last in our consciousness. As a part of the earth of which we were now the custodians. As soil to be defended and preserved because we were deeply connected to it. As the one place where we were properly at home, the one place to which we were related in an interior way by daily experience and, as Vance Palmer put it, through love and imagination, and which related us, in a way we were just beginning to grasp, to thos
e for whom the land of Australia had always been this: the people we thought we had dispossessed but who had always ‘owned’ the place in a way we were just beginning to appreciate. The possibility of our own dispossession had woken in us a preliminary understanding both of what we had and might lose, and what those people might feel who had already, in one sense, lost it. But also that there is another sense in which, in love and imagination, it never can be lost.
If there is a break here, it has nothing to do with our having ‘seen through’ the British at last or with our replacing one dependency with another, but with a new way of seeing Australia itself, and ourselves and one another. Not through the eyes, now, of newcomers, unsettled settlers, but through eyes that had experienced the business of seeing only here, in the light as it falls in this place only; through what life had revealed to us, and would continue to reveal to us, only here. The freedom this offered was that we could now, without losing ourselves, make whatever relationships we pleased with the rest of the world; they would always be conditional: on events, on opportunistic political or economic factors, on passing modes of thought, on who was in or out of power. The one relationship that was unconditional, that mattered and would define us, was with Australia itself.
Made in England
We sometimes speak as if the question of what we refer to as ‘identity’, and the need to negotiate where we stand in the world – with neighbours in our immediate vicinity but also with those elsewhere who share our language and history – was somehow unique, a condition of our colonial past and the fact that we are a settler nation with a population, largely, of long-standing and recent migrants. As if there were countries elsewhere whose identity existed on an unconditional basis, and whose place in the world was fixed. Which countries, one wonders. Italy? Poland? Turkey? Great Britain?
One of the first facts we learn about English history is that Britain was invaded and settled in the fifth century by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and in the eleventh by the Norman French. Britain too is a settler state, though of long duration; a composite nation with a population, largely, of long-standing and recent migrants. And the fact of that original invasion and settlement, which the English keep strongly alive as part of the narrative, is not only a fact of history but a condition of identity (it is worth noting that the Romans too presented themselves in this way, not as natives of Latium but as invaders and settlers, immigrants from Troy). Such a notion of identity is unusual, and unusually liberating. Independent of the tie between blood and soil, between race and Heimat, it is not limited by it either. Identity is portable. It can be transported, and with no risk to its particular virtues and strengths, reconstructed on another shore. It is ideally suited, that is, to the creating of empire.
John of Gaunt may speak of ‘this England’, and Rupert Brooke, as late as 1914, write of a foreign field that will be ‘forever England’. People who work on the land – and some too who do not – may feel a tie of closeness to particular tracts of land and to the land itself. Poets may write passionately about particular landscapes. But the identity argument in Britain is not made in terms of blood and soil. It is made in terms of the social and emotional ties between individuals based on shared experience; shared occasions, ceremonies, symbols, and the emotions they give rise to: Agincourt, Shakespeare, John Hampden and John Milton as the upholders of English liberty; Nelson and Trafalgar, ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, Dunkirk. The advantage of this form of identity, and especially for an immigrant society, is that in being experiential rather than essentialist it is also, as the old Roman version was, transferable. It can be acquired.
Loose and provisional as it may be, the British have from the beginning found this a very practical way of binding a divided and sometimes divisive population, for as long at least as a sense of national unity is required; it being part of this kind of thinking that the need for such unity is mostly short-lived and intermittent.
We too have found it useful, and our view too is that the need for it should be no more than occasional and intermittent. Centred around a few symbolic events and objects that evoke shared feelings or affinities – the Eureka Stockade, Gallipoli, the Burma Railway, the Kokoda Track, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ – it is recognised in flashes, when the playing of the Last Post or the passing of the Olympic Torch (such moments may be unplanned and ephemeral) allows us a sudden revelatory glimpse of ourselves – all of us who are present – so that we look around and say, ‘Ah, so that’s who we are!’
If anything in all this is unique it is the relative peace in which we have been left to deal with such questions; the good fortune of having undisputable borders, a stable political system, and for most of our history a protector that just happened to be the major power of the day.
We have tended to take these advantages for granted, for the simple reason that they were there, but I suspect our politicians did not. They knew only too well what they had got hold of. Men like Deakin or Sir George Reid or Billy Hughes may have used the language of imperial sentiment when they saw a use for it, and the public may have swallowed it, but sentiment is not what really moved them. They had a very canny appreciation of what was to be got out of being a member of such a powerful confederacy as the Empire, and went very cleverly about securing us a special place in it. However much they and others might have complained at times about trade restrictions, bank debts, our lack of a free hand in the Pacific, and, more keenly, about being condescended to or ignored, they were very reluctant to lose those advantages by breaking away. It might be a good question, in the long view, which of the two, Britain or Australia, was the more exploited in our long relationship.
And some of those advantages we are still exploiting, though from a more independent position these days, and as it suits us; in our continuing close relationship with Britain and the US, in trading ties with North Asia, in the responsibilities we assume, now that we do have a free hand, as a rich and stable nation though a small one, and a good neighbour, in East Timor, in Papua New Guinea, in the Solomons. The relationship with Britain is just one of several now through which our presence is established and our interests served.
All that belongs to politics. But there are other ways in which we fit into the world that are closer to the interests of ordinary men and women, and give us a different but no less significant place in the order of things. Sport, for instance.
Sport as we now understand it was an Anglo-Saxon invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The English made it central, both as a physical activity and as moral training, to their whole system of education. Wellington’s famous dictum, that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, must have been as incomprehensible to his Prussian and Russian allies as it was to the French, but has endured as a kind of shorthand for a culture in which the playing field, like the Greek palestra, is seen as a training ground for life; for the development of Athenian minds in Spartan bodies, and for an ethos in which terms like ‘fair play’, ‘sportsmanship’, ‘team spirit’ are meant to be translated out of the narrow world of schoolboy rivalry and endeavour into the world of action and affairs; not as metaphors but as practical forms of behaviour. The supply of dedicated civil servants and subalterns who ran the Empire, especially India, depended on this ethos and on the education system that sustained it. Nowhere but in the Anglo-Saxon world, and in places like India, Pakistan, and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific where English forms of education have been ‘naturalised’ – along with school uniforms, the prefect system, sports halfs, houses – has organised sport become an integral part of the school curriculum, the central place where that discipline of the spirit as well as the body is developed that is at the very centre of the culture.
Can we imagine how much thinner our involvement with the rest of the world might be if this peculiar Anglo-Saxon passion had not worked on us, and on the Pakistanis and Indians, and the West Indians, New Zealanders, South Africans and others, who come together to
play one-day and Test cricket and Rugby Union and League football? It has made alliances for us with peoples with whom we have a special relationship in which we are trusted to ‘play fair’, and to speak fair too, that has been extended, at times, into other areas where we are also trusted – as in our stand on Apartheid in the seventies and eighties, in Fiji during the crisis of the nineties.
It was the teams we sent to England in the 1880s that first established us, in British eyes, as a single nation, long before we had made the move to official nationhood, and it was through rivalry on the field, in which we often turned out to be superior, that a kind of equality grew up between us. The symbol of the Ashes, playful as it was, gave Australia a place in British popular mythology that none of the other colonies enjoyed, and in an area that mattered, had weight, in a way that, outside the magic circle of Anglo-Saxon thinking, would have been inconceivable.
It is small things that make up the real fabric of a relationship; things that ‘history’ may not know about or miss. But then sport is just the sort of area where to make too much of a thing would be to miss the real thing altogether.
The accident of empire has delivered us a network of relationships right across the globe, pairing us with Trinidad and St Kitts, but not with Guadaloupe or Martinique, with Guiana but not its neighbour Surinam, with Sierra Leone and Tanzania but not with Guinea-Bissau or Eritrea. On occasions when we come briefly together, as at the annual judging of the Commonwealth Literary Prize for Fiction, an Australian or Canadian may be astonished to discover a fellow writer from some small African or Caribbean state he has barely heard of whose experience almost exactly mirrors his own, down to the sort of poems and stories that made up his childhood reading and all those myths and popular allusions one takes for granted as universal, but which turn out to be specific to the Anglophone world.