I called the imperative to nationhood geographic, as if the continent itself, once it found a single name (‘Australia’ in 1804), made the emergence of a single nation the obvious next step. But this is about as far as our notion of the ‘gift outright’, as Robert Frost called it in the case of the United States, would ever get. Very few of us here have ever fallen for the notion of ‘manifest destiny’, it’s not our style.
The odd thing in our case – but odd things are apt to be the most revealing – is that our earliest appearance as a single people was on the sporting field, as a team rather than a nation.
‘Australia’ first presented itself to the world (that is, to the British) in the form of the combined cricket teams that toured Britain in the 1880s (the earlier Aboriginal team was too exotic to be representative) and created the myth of the Ashes. What they brought news of was a new tribe, a new ‘type’, a new society. The qualities they represented were ones the British could recognise and respect because they were looser versions of their own, the product of a later and different history in a new place, and it helped that sport, and especially cricket, was already seen as the proper sphere for the creation of a moral and social elite – the challenge in this case being that these ‘colonials’ were not an elite. The other sphere of course was war.
Following on what the cricket teams had created in the national consciousness – the image of Australians as a single tribe and a new and original ‘type’ – it might be best to ignore the usual evocation of our national coming of age, in 1915–16, as a baptism of sacrificial fire, and consider the Diggers at Gallipoli and in France as a team rather than an army.
Once again, what was being demonstrated, this time on the larger stage of history, was a national character and style: courage certainly, endurance – the extended campaign at Gallipoli, the fifty-three continuous days in the front-line trenches at Villers-Bretonneux – but also a licensed indiscipline that was not quite anarchy, the ‘civilian’ triumph, among the professional army generals, of John Monash, and at home the refusal, in two referenda, of conscription.
The observers of all this may have been the world at large, but when we speak of it as the moment when nationhood itself was confirmed, what we are really registering is the reflection back from outsiders to the players themselves, and even more importantly to their people back home, of what, against all the usual class and colonial prejudices, Australians were now seen to have achieved.
That is the original Anzac story, but it is only half the story. The other half has to do with something else altogether: the understanding that war is not sport. That it involves injury, trauma, death, and to wives and parents and children and fiancées, in hamlets and towns and working places all up and down the country, a sense of irreparable loss that was made actual, in the years after the war, in thousands of war memorials, small and large, from one side to the other of the continent.
These are mourning places that mark a national tragedy: a recognition of loss and grief as being central both to the community, the nation – 62,000 men, mostly young men, lost from a population of fewer than four million – and to individual families and lives. That, a binding of the people at every level in a shared grief, is what ‘coming of age’ might be about, and explains the power of Anzac Day, and how it has come to be chosen, by the people themselves, as our day of national unity.
When young people these days are drawn to Anzac, it is partly, I think, because they are moved by the drama of youthful death, and partly because, in a nation that makes so little of public ceremony, this day offers a larger, and more solemn view of what life may be, than is general in a culture whose norm is chatter, noise, almost continuous sensation.
What Anzac Day offers is quietness, contemplation. It appeals, in the young, to what is serious in them. Asks them to attend. Invites them to take part in an occasion that speaks, at both a personal and communal level, for continuity. And this may be what attracts another group that might otherwise see this day as an occasion from which they are culturally excluded: recent migrants. What Anzac Day offers them is the possibility, which may be rare, of seeing what it is that these people they have attached themselves to are moved by. As an occasion whose commemoration of loss is something they too feel for, it becomes, for recent migrants, a way of entering emotionally into the life of the community at large. As Auden puts it in the very last of his poems: ‘only in rites / can we renounce our oddities / and be truly entired.’
These are delicate matters. At an individual level, difficult questions of identity or belonging, of what it is that might bind us as fellow citizens, may be resolved more simply than we believe.
Where argument, however open and enlightened, may get nowhere, or lead only to further complications that cannot be resolved, a moment of ‘drama’, of empathy and understanding, will simply annul the question at a stroke. And one might add here – and by no means as a mere footnote – that a wounding sense of loss, and a perception, deeply felt, of the place of the tragic in our lives, does not strike a community only in one place or on one occasion. Perhaps if we were to institute a Sorry Day to mark the sufferings inflicted on indigenous people in the establishing of a nation whose existence we take lightly, but which has been a heavy fact in indigenous lives, some shared understanding of that grief too might be possible, a second occasion, shaped over time as Anzac Day has been, in which we would discover yet another point of national unity.
It is the fragility of such moments of cohesion, of shared emotion and presence, that alert us to equally fragile but no less significant moments of difference. It is not only unity that characterises a nation or a people.
For most of the time what distinguishes a nation, like any other community, is the variety provided by difference; variety of need and interest, of response to such local factors as climate and land and water use; forms of domestic architecture and language, local custom and lore – even local forms of suspicion and potential conflict; all those conditions, that is, that will have grown up over time among people who live in a particular place and have created their own version of the nation’s history.
Nations, as I suggested earlier, grow out of the desire of a single people to be one. It is an historical imperative driven by ties of language and culture but also of shared experience. Federation on the other hand is a political union made on practical grounds, though the hope is that state loyalties and affiliations will in time be supplemented at least by national ones, and may even grow to replace them.
In a Federation where separate tribes and people come together, as in most African states, and as has happened in ex-Yugoslavia, ex-Czechoslovakia and Belgium, the two loyalties will often pull against one another and the tension between them may not be capable of resolution.
Our case is unusual, because for all the difference in class and style of their founders, the different environmental conditions they faced and the economies they created in response, the Australian colonies had for the most part the same demographic make-up, spoke the same language, inherited the same culture and legal and political system, and were accountable, in the matter of aspiration and restraints, to the same authority, the British Colonial Office. There is little danger here of the Federation’s collapsing. We have none of the deep-seated cultural and religious divisions that broke the old Yugoslavia and, in a less violent way, threaten Belgium. Our threat is the more insidious one of a tidy uniformity.
Is it only, I wonder, because I grew up in what I hear referred to as one of the ‘outlying states’ – outlying from where, I ask – that I am so keenly aware of the different styles of our state capitals? The subtle or not-so-subtle difference in the way people deal with one another in Brisbane and Melbourne for example, or Brisbane and Adelaide, and what this represents of different ways of thinking and feeling. The variation from place to place of building materials and domestic habits that have created the houses people live in, the way they move about and dress. The turn of mind that has created our var
ious education systems. The demographic mix that has shaped not only the forms of speech we use but our different ways, from state to state, of addressing one another and establishing intimacy and ease or the opposite. It isn’t sentiment alone that might make us want to preserve these distinctions, but a belief that variousness is also richness, and that different ways of solving a problem or meeting a difficulty may make possible a new, or more original or creative way that would otherwise fail to emerge.
We need to be discriminating here. It is entirely proper that control of all cross-border issues – interstate highways, railway links between the capitals, water management of our river systems, workplace conditions, banking – should be in the hands of a single authority, and that decisions in these areas should be made on a national basis and in the national interest, overruling if necessary the interests of individual states. But I wonder if those parts of our lives that involve individual needs and are shaped very largely by local conditions – distance from a major town or city, availability of transport, weather (seasonal floods for instance) – or by local ways of doing things and word-of-mouth contacts that are socially or culturally based, are really best managed from a centre that may be thousands of kilometres off, and by decision-makers who, however well-intentioned, may have little grasp of how differently people see things in inner Melbourne, or Kalgoorlie, or Far North Queensland.
Cost and efficiency cannot be the only consideration here, or even fairness. These are bureaucratic criteria that speak only for one side of the contract. The other, the human side, is about how close people feel to those who are dealing with them; how comfortable they feel with the style and language of the transaction. People act in ways that suit their needs, and follow the unpredictable and sometimes irrational lines of their own nature and habits. They live in places within themselves that know nothing of jurisdictions or borders. This is not necessarily a perversity. It is a fact, and a society of the kind we mostly support, and would hope to achieve, should remain open and flexible enough to make provision for this, so long as it is not obstructive to others. The last thing we want, however gratifying a vision it might be to a federal minister for education, is an entire generation of six-year-olds singing sweetly from the same page.
First published in The Monthly,
June 2010
About the Author
David Malouf is the internationally acclaimed author of novels and stories including The Great World, Remembering Babylon, An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Harland’s Half Acre, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make, Collected Stories, Ransom and the autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street. His most recent books are A First Place, The Writing Life and Being There. He was born in Brisbane in 1934 and lives in Sydney.
Also by David Malouf
Fiction
Ransom
The Complete Stories
Every Move You Make
Dream Stuff
The Conversations at Curlow Creek
Remembering Babylon
The Great World
Antipodes
Harland’s Half Acre
Child’s Play
Fly Away Peter
An Imaginary Life
Johnno
Non-fiction
12 Edmondstone Street
The Writing Life
Being There
Poetry
Selected Poems: Revolving Days
Typewriter Music
First Things Last
Wild Lemons
Neighbours in a Thicket
Bicycle and Other Poems
Libretti
Jane Eyre
Baa Baa Black Sheep
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Version 1.0
A First Place
ePub 9780857984067
Copyright © David Malouf 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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First published by Knopf in 2014
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: (ebook)
Malouf, David, 1934– author.
A first place/David Malouf.
ISBN 978 0 85798 406 7 (ebook)
Malouf, David, 1934–
Authors, Australian.
Australian literature.
820.80994
‘Made in England’ reprinted with thanks to Black Inc.
Jacket design by Christabella Designs
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David Malouf, A First Place
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