A people can face the future only when they have fully recognised their past, and in one form or another relived it. If the literature does not exist, it has – even a hundred years later – to be imagined and made. Robert Hughes’ reading of Australian experience belongs to this process, as well as to the simpler one of telling us ‘what happened Down There’.
The New York Review of Books, 1987
PUTTING OURSELVES ON THE MAP
WHEN I WAS IN THE fourth grade at primary school we spent a lot of time drawing the map of Australia. It was hard to get right. Too often you ended up with something in which, in order to close the outline, the southern tip of Western Australia was like a limb affected by polio and the east coast, perhaps because we knew it better, was suffering a hysterical pregnancy.
We worked on the outline. What mattered was to get the island into its proper shape and then fill in, all round, the names of the natural features, the capes, gulfs and bays. The centre, even when the map was finished, remained empty save for a few dotted lines – some of them rivers, the rest, if the hour was up and geography had become history, the routes of the explorers.
The year was 1942. Australia was at war and under threat of invasion. The scary thing was that our coastline was so extensive and unoccupied that if the Japanese landed it might be several days before anyone knew it. The comforting thing was that if they did struggle ashore the country itself would deal with them. No need to adopt, like the Russians, a scorched earth policy. Geography had already taken care of that. The land was permanently scorched.
All meditations on history in Australia begin as geography lessons. Geography is fate.
Cultures tend to be either time-oriented or space-oriented; they are seldom both. They tend, that is, to measure their experience either in Ages, Periods, Dynasties, all with dates affixed, or by the amount of territory they have covered, the distance they have come by conquering, occupying, settling.
The very nature of our continent, together with our late arrival on the scene, has made our history of the second kind.
If you want to see Australian history there is no point in looking for ‘significant events’. It is pretty difficult, in our case, to name an event that is significant in the conventional sense: one, that is, that has struck the Australian imagination and made itself as significant as Magna Carta or the Battle of Crecy or the Restoration or the Bill of Rights in English history, with dates that any reasonably educated person is likely to recall. Our experience of Australia (and one immediately puts it that way rather than saying simply ‘our experience’) knows no dates, no sharp turning points in time – though I suppose advertising has made it certain that everyone now is aware of 1788.
Australian history is of a quieter kind, and that isn’t because ours is modern history in which nothing dramatic ever occurs. Other places, France or Germany or Italy or Spain, in the same 200 years, have had more drama, more noisy and murderous events, than anyone in their right mind might care for. In those terms our history is invisible. It consists of happenings so small, so everyday, so ordinary, so endlessly repeatable that they draw no attention to themselves, and so momentary as to defy dating. They are the sort of events that have made up almost the whole of history – if what we mean by that is the lives of all those who have shared this planet. The remains are visible but the individual events and lives are not.
If we want to see this sort of history we look out of an aeroplane window, on any regular flight across the country, and take in the pattern of cultivation, the mile on mile of wheatfields stretching to the horizon; or we stand at South Head and try to imagine the view without the Bridge, the Opera House, the city towers, the suburban roofs and parklands reaching to the mountains westward and out of visible distance to the south. What we are seeing there is our 200 years.
Two hundred is a paltry number as these things go, and we might be intimidated into believing, if we were to forget the millions of lifetimes that have been crammed into it, that such a stretch of time is insignificant and barely amounts to a history at all. Until we see the achievement in space. That is breathtaking.
So we are back once again with Geography.
We measure our life on this continent by how far we have got, at any point, in our knowledge of it, in crossing mountain barriers, uncovering river systems, assaying its mineral resources; how much of it has been felled and fenced and made productive; how far our cities have extended beyond the original cluster of huts into the surrounding countryside. Or, for those who would put it another way, by the amount of land our farming and grazing methods have stripped or soured, the topsoil gone, the forests lost, the species of bird and animal life – and not only those – exterminated to make room for us.
These things, rather than ancient monuments or ruins, or the crossed swords that mark a battle site, are the signposts, the mile posts in our story. The land itself is the record of our 200 years.
Still, time does have a part to play in human affairs, and the paucity of it in our case is decisive.
In the Old World, but also in Africa and the Americas, ‘culture’ means the long association of a native people with their land: the process of coming in out of the wilderness, bringing with them the wild grasses and fruits and beasts that over the years have been improved and domesticated to provide a diet, and which, after long sophistication, may become a cuisine.
This is the culture that is present and renewed at every table at every mealtime, an ordinary sacrament in which man’s relationship with the earth he belongs to, and which for that reason belongs to him, is lightly commemorated.
Native Australians have such a culture, though we have learned nothing from it. White Australians do not. We came as immigrants and brought our culture with us – not just a language and the many forms of social organisation, but the crops and animals to feed us and from which, through effort and industry, our economy has grown. There was no need to begin, as others had, from the beginning.
So there is, at the centre of our lives here, a deep irony: that the very industry that gives us a hold on the earth has no roots in the land itself, no history, no past; and that sort of past – the experience of having developed along with the land and its creatures – may be precisely what one needs (a sense of continuity, a line passing through from the remotest past into the remotest time to come) if one is to get a grip on the future.
There is, and always has been, something rootless and irresponsible about our attitude to the land. We treat it, we go at things ‘as if there were no tomorrow’, using, wasting, making the most of everything while it lasts, stripping assets, taking the short view; as if we had no responsibility to those who might come after because we have no sense of what lies behind. We took the land, grabbed it by main force, so we miss the sense of its being a gift – something to be held in trust and passed on. Perhaps a deep awareness of history has less to do with the past than with a capacity to hold on hard to the future.
This lack in us – it is a radical one – can also be read in the landscape. If decisions about wood-chipping or sand-mining can be shot home to individual politicians, the basis on which these decisions have been made is general and expresses more than a personal irresponsibility or greed.
There is a rootlessness in us, an anxiety about where and how we belong, that goes beyond such simple questions as what sort of destiny Australia might have, or how we define ourselves as Australians, and which the celebration of a Bicentenary in no way impinges upon. That too has to do with geography, with a disjunction between our immigrant society and the land that sustains it that is still decades, maybe centuries, from resolution.
Isolation: the essential quality of the isle. It created the uniqueness of our flora and fauna and it kept the continent, until only a short time ago, outside history – outside the consciousness, that is, of those who keep records. It has also determined, in us, the angle at which we stand to the world: that timidity, for example, or canniness, which has kept us tied for so l
ong to our mother’s apron strings, terrified that if we broke away, or slipped the mind of England, Europe, we might slide right off the world; or more destructive still, that willingness, which shows little sign of diminishing, to suck up to the biggest bully in the playground, with a mixture of truculence and shameless abjection, so long as he deigns to call us his ‘little mate’.
This horror of being left on our own, of being left out, has led us, with an eagerness that would be pathetic if it hadn’t also produced so much suffering and heroism, to rush off blindly to other people’s wars, from the Boer War to Vietnam – happy to bleed ourselves dry at other people’s significant occasions because we have no belief in the centrality of our own lives, in what happens to us.
In looking at where we stand we have always taken our stance elsewhere, seen ourselves as being at the bottom right-hand corner of things – on the edge, where at any moment we might fly off the globe; at the bottom where, given the laws of gravity, we can only be the passive receivers of what others let fall.
But geography is as much convention as fact. It is a way of seeing. Maps can be approached from any angle, they can be reversed. We have only to turn our minds upside down, stop thinking in terms of our inherited culture, to which we will always be peripheral, to find ourselves standing at the centre rather than the edge of things. Which brings me back, once again, to that classroom of forty years ago; to the idea of Australia which exists in our heads as a map.
If I had tried, back there, to imagine my way across Australia from Brisbane, say, to Perth, I would have run into sand. Once you left the coast and the wheatlands beyond, there was nothing out there to hang on to. The centre, imaginatively speaking, was blank. Just thinking of it, the distances, the emptiness, made you dizzy. Thought stumbled, became a dotted line – like the tracks of explorers. It snuffed out.
And now?
Now the centre of Australia, the Centre, is fixed, occupied by a vivid symbol, a natural phenomenon so powerful that it rivals and counterbalances our man-made ones, those unmistakable marks of our presence, the Bridge and the Opera House. It is even (if we ignore its previous life in geology and think only of the point at which it emerged, out of nowhere it might seem, into our national consciousness) of the same vintage as those products of iron, concrete and mythological sleight of hand. I mean Ayers Rock – and will give it, for the moment, the name under which it first worked its magic on us.
Still unknown forty years ago, and therefore invisible, its emergence in a thousand forms (as a big hamburger or as the mould that breaks open to reveal the new Ford) is one of the few significant events of our history: the hero as rock. It has become the true navel of our consciousness, the great belly-button of the land. All the rest – that coastline, all those capes and bays – are held in place now by its magnetic pull.
So are we. Just how powerfully was demonstrated by its influence in the Chamberlain case. Would any of that spooky terror, that rage, that runaway desire for public expiation and revenge, have burst forth so irrationally, and from such a deep level of our national psyche, if baby Azaria had gone missing from a caravan park at Eden or a camping site at Burleigh Heads?
We can see the centre now. It has been coloured in. We can even see the people who live there, and are curious enough at last about who they are and how they live to recognise in them, and in their relationship to the land, a consciousness so different from our own as to call into question some of our deepest assumptions. Maybe if Burke and Wills had been able to see them they would not have died of starvation in country where others, who were human like them, had known for centuries how to survive: the lines on the map might not be dotted, but double.
Sixty years ago, out there, one of the last of many massacres occurred – not the worst or the most shameful. In the age of the movie camera and the radio! But the place was invisible; in the map Australians carried in their heads it was blank. They had no responsibility for what happened there. Today the blank spaces on that map have dwindled. We cannot so easily let ourselves off the hook. The inside and the outside of the map have got themselves connected and we know only too well where we are, what we have done, and who is in it with us. We are centred in our own lives.
If I had been asked, back in 1942, to draw the line that most strongly connected me to the world, I would have shut my eyes, thought of England and produced the long series of loops between stopping-places of the Orient and P & O lines. Sydney to Southampton or Tilbury. The names of those ports were magic. I could have sung them in my sleep.
The lines themselves of course (not the shipping lines) were notional, but then so were the tropics, so was the equator. They were the lines of force that held us in History, that reshaped the globe. When they broke at last and the ships went to scrap, we were on our own. So what remains of that original cord?
By a freak of nature, or perhaps a fated affinity, the colonisers of our out-of-the-way continent had themselves once been on the fringes of the known world.
When it was first discovered by the Phoenicians, Britain was a remote and savage island on the way to nowhere, tucked away in the north-western corner of the map. Colonised at last by the imperial power of the day, its native people were disposed of by waves of immigrants – Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Normans – and in the end exterminated, not by policy but by the natural savagery of the more highly civilised. So when our two islands, one small and isolated, the other large and isolated, came together at last in 1788 the colonisers not only brought with them a language, and the ways of seeing and organising of which a language is the most intense expression, but a history as well of having triumphed over a natural disability.
Britain had by then made it to the centre. By 1788 all distances on the globe were measured from Greenwich. What an example! These immigrants, by nature little-islanders, now had to adjust to the biggest island in the world: Lilliputians in Brobdingnag.
It is fashionable to sketch alternative histories of Australia based on the premise of some other colonising presence than the one we got.
Would the Russians, for example, as Bruce Chatwin asks in The Songlines, with their long experience of interiors, of endless horizons, have made a better fist of coming to terms with the whole of Australia? Would they have learned to live more easily with distances and space?
Would we have found some quicker adjustment between culture and climate if we had been colonised by Mediterraneans, the Spanish for example?
Would we have been saved from Anglo-Saxon philistinism by those bearers of light and learning, the French?
And what about a Catholic rather than a Protestant Australia – with the church producing the same enlightened and civilising influence here as in the Spanish Empire of the Americas?
Idle questions perhaps, but they help define both the limitations and the advantages of what actually shaped us and what we have begun, painfully, to outgrow.
English law, for example, since that is what first set the seal of ownership on the land – the pragmatic English law, and the whole mode of thinking and proceeding that springs from its sample: the distrust of absolutes and codes, the determination to take each case as it comes, as it tests and qualifies or proves the rule. Whole education systems derive from that, whole arts and sciences, and the kind of thinking we apply (as if by nature) when facing problems of ordinary living – adapting an old tool to new conditions, trying this, trying that, until the thing fits. A way of dealing with the world that we do not consider peculiar and learned, until we see how other nations do it.
And beyond the law itself, at least notionally, is the independence of the law, and of all our social institutions, from the government of the day – a simple thing, and one that we take for granted as if it too were natural, too obvious to be questioned; except that it has always been rare.
We might remember this when we regret the siesta we would have enjoyed had the Spanish come, since these embodiments of British dullness, plus the absence of a professional officer class, h
ave deprived us of the more interesting history that so many other nations have enjoyed over these past centuries: Revolution and Terror, civil wars, alternating periods of weak democracy and strong rule by thin generals and fat colonels, putsches, soviets, juntas and twelve-year Reichs.
Pity the nation, Brecht said, that needs heroes. Pity even more the nation that needs an ‘interesting history’.
So this celebration of a great event goes against the grain with me because it goes against the grain of our real experience as Australians. Anniversaries are not what this particular enterprise is about. The anniversaries of the real events that made us, the millions of small ones – axe-blows, blows with the pick and crowbar, childbirths, first cries, the squeak of chalk across a blackboard – do not need celebrating, or are celebrated already, by repetition each day. This particular event is too ambiguous – and its repetition in fancy dress is ridiculous. It is too blackened with sorrow for some of us (if we really think of them as among us) and with shame for the rest: too loaded with despair, courage, the slow triumph of surviving and creating, for its re-enactment to be any more than a tawdry farce.
The real achievement, and it is real – even astonishing – we already celebrated yesterday and will need to celebrate again tomorrow and the day after. I salute that.
The Age, ‘Bicentenary Extra’,
Saturday 23 January 1988
THE EIGHTIES, A ‘LEARNING’ EXPERIENCE
ONCE AGAIN, WE HAVE ENTERED the silly season. Because we happen to be on holiday we think nothing serious can occur; the world out there, in gracious compliance with our comfort, will produce no disaccommodating event. Still, as we let ourselves off the hook and settle to beach days and a little light reading, there are one or two things we might remind ourselves of.