'Serbian-style solipsism' - interesting imperialist lengauge games
Another Country
The Guardian Unlimited
September 17, 2000
You probably think the Olympic Games is a vastly important event for all of
us
Australians, a huge national rite that will "put us on the map" - the same
map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in
1956,
failed to inscribe us. Actually, despite our traditional obsession with
sports, despite the coercive drumming of pre-Olympics hype, some of us don't
care that much about the Olympics. We think we matter for other reasons. We
suspect we're on the map already.
Australians tend to be natural pagans. Everything favours this: the
delicious climate of the coasts; the dramatic and seductive landscapes of
pounding surf and golden sand; the tanned bodies strutting; the food (some
of
the finest in the world); and the wines, which are superb. In such a
setting,
Australians have evolved a natural ethos as pleasure seekers in all areas of
life. As the writer David Malouf points out, we don't even think of
ourselves
as hedonists, because that would be too self-conscious. Australian culture
is
for the most part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no
longer
"provincial", a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial
centres. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social
revolution
conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more
complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of
American domination, and learned to trust its own talents.
But a reasonable equipoise is with us only some of the time. Jingoism
still disfigures the lowbrow end of our journalism. "One of the ways in
which
we have matured is that we don't give a stuff about what other people
think,"
blustered the columnist Susan Mitchell in the Australian, a national daily,
last month. "We no longer feel we have to explain ourselves to anyone but
ourselves."
This dismal, Serbian-style solipsism was actually meant as self-praise.
But on some levels it is, alas, true. One sees it, for instance, in the
bristling posture of denial that the Australian government recently took
against UN criticism of its flouting of the human rights of aborigines.
Australians still tend to be worried about what outsiders think, keep asking
and then get furious if the answer is even fractionally less than
flattering.
Australia is often seen, especially in the US, as the last stand of the
wild west, the place and ethos that were buried in America a century ago: a
celluloid fiction, reinvented with kangaroos. In reality, Australians are
among the most urbanised people on earth. They have seen their national
animal, the kangaroo, only in a zoo or as roadkill on the highway. Nearly
90%
of Australians live on the coast, not in the outback, wherever that elusive
place may be. Our country towns are in decline. Their inhabitants keep
moving
to the coast. Because Australia has no fertile centre, there is no place for
them in that immense, empty outback.
So the "typical Australian" is not, as foreigners once thought, a
bushman. He is a slightly worried guy with a tan, a bald spot, a mortgage, a
mower and two kids, whose Australian dream is a double-front brick bungalow
on
a quarter-acre lot in the suburbs less than 30 minutes' drive from the
nearest
beach, with two other nice, two-kid, one-PC families on either side of him.
And yet there are traits that do, indisputably, come down to modern
Australia from the vanished days of the bush, and even from the convict era.
They are wound tightly into our social history. One of these is the value
set
on "mateship". Essentially male bonding, mateship began in the harsh world
of
the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of
labour that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands and
shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a
scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its
traces are very much alive in Australia today.
A less admirable trait is the Australian fetish of anti-elitism. If you
want to nuke an enemy, call them an elitist, especially if they are an
intellectual. The word is empty, since no society has ever been able to
function without elites of skill, intelligence and ordinary competence. Yet
Australians can rarely bring themselves to say they value human superiority.
It sounds undemocratic.
The one field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the
real
religion of down under. The idea of non-elitist sport is, of course, an
absurdity. No Australian would waste their time watching a football match in
which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag
plunked along at exactly the same speed. And, of course, Australians find no
contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name.
Some Australians will tell you they have a classless society. This is
the
merest fantasy. We began with the most ironbound of all class distinctions,
between prisoners and the free. The freeborn (the "sterling") were bitterly
opposed to giving up their social placement above the ex-convicts and their
children (the "currency"). But the "lower orders" fiercely resented the
pretensions of the nobs and were well aware that in a pioneer environment
lady
luck was a more powerful queen than Victoria Regina. Today's Australians may
be more sophisticated than the 19th-century digger with his pockets full of
gold dust, but at root the dot.com millionaires of the late 90s are not so
different from their mining ancestors. The metaphor of all wealth production
is gambling, and Australians are among the most shamefully obsessed gamblers
in the world. We have 20 times as many "pokies" - poker machines - per
person
as the Americans. Our styles of wealth production enforce the belief that
superiority is luck and only luck: no moral lessons apply.
We are poor at symbolising ourselves. Many of us would like to snip the
union jack off our flag, but no one can agree on a new design. Our official
Olympic mascots and emblems are kitsch, climaxing last month in the Great
Medal Screwup. It turned out that all the Olympic medals had been designed
to
feature not the Parthenon in Athens, not even the Temple of Zeus at Olympia,
but the Colosseum in Rome, less noted for Olympic-style friendship than for
gladiatorial butchery. What the hell, the officials of the Sydney organising
committee of the Olympic Games apparently reasoned; it's still the ancient
world, right? Then it befell some luckless Socog flunky to claim it wasn't
meant to be the Colosseum, just a colosseum. Nice try, kid. It was too late
to
make new medals.
Apart from the kangaroo, the koala and other enchanting marsupials,
Australia seems short of identity icons. There is, of course, Ayers Rock,
the
most sublime stone on earth. There is also the incomparable Great Barrier
Reef, a single coral organism some 1,250 miles long. We have two famous
structures, both in Sydney: the harbour bridge and the opera house, the
latter
a masterpiece by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Perched on one of the
world's most beautiful sites, a headland in Sydney Harbour, and surrounded
on
three sides by sapphire water, this great building was never seen in
completion by its architect. He resigned under stress and never came back to
Sydney, so that the promise of those lovely tiled arcs and shells is not
fulfilled by the interior, awkwardly finished by a local designer.
Where it counts - which is more in production than interpretation -
Australia has a vigorous cultural life. The list of first-rank Australian
novelists, headed up by Murray Bail, Peter Carey and David Malouf - writers
of
exceptional power and social insight - is a considerable one. It has also
produced a brilliant biographer and diagnostician of past culture in Peter
Conrad, an erudite and dark-minded expatriate from Tasmania. Books, of
course,
circulate everywhere, whereas paintings and buildings do not. Consequently
major architects such as Glenn Murcutt and Philip Cox are little known
outside
Australia. This is a pity, and even worse is the general ignorance of
Australian contemporary painting. It is bizarre that artists as excellent as
John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, Tim Storrier and Mike Parr aren't the world
figures they deserve to be. The only Australian art that attracts much
overseas attention is contemporary aboriginal art, which varies enormously
in
quality.
The clarity of Australian cultural achievement is often muddied by our
most irksome cultural shortcoming: a peevishly insecure hatred of "tall
poppies", people distinguished by their achievements in any area. Australia
has never honoured its artists, intellectuals, writers and musicians as
fully
as its sports figures; there is always an undertow of resentment, of the
lowbrows' residual suspicion that the highbrow is conning them. Everyone
bitches about this; nobody does anything about it. It is hardwired into us,
a
proof of "toughness".
Under valued culturally, Australia is also politically obscure. Why?
Because we're so well behaved. We are not the mouse that roared.
Historically,
we have rarely even contemplated roaring. As the former prime minister Paul
Keating has pointed out, Australia has always been short of the defining
value
systems that are gained through conflict. We have never had a civil war or a
revolution. We have never been invaded - though we nearly were during the
second world war, by the Japanese. Nobody has ever called us a Great Satan
or
even a little one. We tend to like Americans more than most nations do,
although we do not have the least desire to be like them.
Historically, Australia felt little resentment about its colonial
control
by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and
Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon
mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun. As a colony we were
content to fulfil our destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat,
wool and (when required) cannon fodder for wars against the Boers or the
Huns.
In these, we had little or no stake of our own. Britain, with grim
enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes.
In
the first world war, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of
330,000
sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a
proportion of the national population, this was the highest figure for any
allied state.
It left us in the 20s as a psychologically devastated nation of widows,
spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalised as a
cleansing, an erasure of the inherited stain of the convict era. Winston
Churchill, who sent our grandfathers to die on the implacable slopes of
Gallipoli, was by no means the only Englishman to think they came from
"tainted" stock.
Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in
1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics
is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be
the country's head of state. That role is reserved for the king or queen of
England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected one: the office
of
the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small
clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsors. This narrows the
field of talent.
According to the Australian constitution - a document written for us by
the British at the turn of the century - it is ultimately the British
monarch
who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the governor-general. This
official may be Australian or may not. They may, on behalf of the King or
Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out
the government and call for new elections. Or they may not. In practice they
almost never do. The last and only time they did was in 1975, when the
governor-general, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government led by Gough
Whitlam.
This caused shock and resentment. Millions of Australians felt that
Whitlam, their hero, the great reformer of government policy in the domains
of
race, immigration, foreign policy and the arts, had been stolen from them.
There are still plenty of people around who regard this as not far from a
coup
d'�tat.
The firing of Whitlam made many Australians sit up with a jerk. It had
never occurred to them before that the Queen had the raw constitutional
power
to do such a thing. It cranked up the long-dormant impulse toward
republicanism. Until the 70s this had been an issue only for intellectuals
and
a few leftwing workers whose vehemence earned them an undeserved reputation
as
ratbags (obsessed eccentrics). The problem was democratising the republican
issue while detaching it from the ownership of the Australian left. And it
did
slowly broaden, though its main political instrument, the Australian
Republican Movement (ARM), didn't come into existence until the 80s.
The growth of republican feeling in Australia coincided with, and was
strongly encouraged by, the prime ministership (1991-96) of Keating, a
brilliant and abrasive Laborite much feared for his insults ("pansies" and
"unrepresentative swill" were among the milder epithets he launched at his
foes in parliamentary debate) and greatly misunderstood for his tastes:
given
his passions for antique French clocks and Georgian furniture, Keating was
the
most cultivated Australian ever to serve as prime minister. The ARM's chief
unelected backer was a formidable young merchant banker named Malcolm
Turnbull. (Full disclosure obliges me to say that Turnbull is married to my
niece Lucy, herself the deputy lord mayor of Sydney.) Despite Keating's
defeat
in the 1996 elections, Turnbull and his fellow republicans were able to
bring
the republic issue to a nationwide vote last year.
The result was a triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake
populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters
(55%
to 45%) decided that to have an Australian president appointed by a
democratically-elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an
immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow
democratic.
The monarchists won the referendum, not because Australians were
devoted
to the Queen and her successors but because feuding republicans couldn't
agree
on which model of republic to uphold. Should the new-style head of state, an
Australian president, be appointed by parliament? Or should they be elected
in
a national campaign, in the American manner? The ARM wanted the former, but
Australians hated the idea of an American-style republic - or American-style
anything - in their public life. This split the republican vote, to the
boundless relief of the monarchists, who could never have carried the issue
on
their own.
Soon after the referendum, the Queen and her cold fish of a consort,
Prince Philip, toured Australia. The crowds were small and more curious than
enthusiastic; the media polite but indifferent. The romantic, near-mystical
queen worship that had surrounded her tour in 1954 was gone forever. Being
smarter than the monarchists, the Queen could easily read the signs. She
openly acknowledged the possibility of a stable republic in Australia.
The current prime minister, John Howard, is an obdurate monarchist. But
the next in line as head of his conservative Liberal party, Peter Costello,
is
a republican. The Australian Labor party is republican through and through.
It
is only a matter of time before the less reactionary and nostalgic Liberal
politicians come out of the closet, and then the monarchy in Australia will
be
finished.
It is hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia
for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our
national anti-elitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to
admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the
frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you
don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens,
wasn't
much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not
only
of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity but also of shared folk
heroes. You can count them on the fingers of two hands. Two are alive - the
great cricketer Sir Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn
Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom still live, are invested
with
a collective heroism. The other heroes are dead. They include a racehorse,
Phar Lap; and a criminal, the bushranger, Irish nationalist and
proto-republican Ned Kelly, hanged for theft and murder in Melbourne in
1880.
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease
about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure"
Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine
half
a century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British
descent
and could feel themselves to be, as the then prime minister Robert Menzies
would later put it, "British to the boot heels". But today the picture of
exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia,
has
almost faded away. The white Australia policy, that disgraceful provision
whereby no one of Asian or black descent could settle in Australia, was
abandoned in the 60s, never to be revived. Whole suburbs, such as Cabramatta
in western Sydney, have become south-east Asian enclaves. Though Australia
admits only some 85,000 legal immigrants a year, the Asian component is very
visible and it excites xenophobia. The role of the Queen as head of state
has
a calming effect, suggesting that the "old" Anglo-Australia is still
notionally within reach.
Compared with their older selves, Australians - especially the younger
ones - are a tolerant people. We are one of the world's most successful
multicultural democracies, and this is a triumph of no small consequence.
Australians on the whole realise that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly
bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means
learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of
one's own. They realise, quite naturally, that the desire to "give people a
fair go", which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian
life, also applies to immigrants.
This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culturalism
has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culturalism in
the 80s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity
but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.
Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work.
It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the
dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British empire
has gone. The Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive
linkage
between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a
foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not
insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties
to
the near north, once known as the far east.
Britain is in the EU and will act in accordance with its interests
there,
giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British
because
they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer
"be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are
too
far apart.
. A longer version of this article appears in this week's Time
magazine.
Robert Hughes is presenting Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore on BBC2 on
Sundays at 8pm
Hughes who: an art critic's life
Full name: Robert Studley Forrest Hughes.
Born: 1938, in Sydney.
Status: Senior art critic for Time Magazine in the US, where he has
worked since 1970.
Education: Studied art and architecture at the University of Sydney.
Art
critic of the Sydney Observer (1958-59) and the Nation (1960-64). Was based
in
London in the mid-60s and wrote for many UK newspapers, including the
Observer
and the Sunday Times.
Books: The Art of Australia (1966); The Shock of the New (1980), an
idiosyncratic guide to 20th century art based on his BBC series; The Fatal
Shore (1987), a history of deportation to Australia; Barcelona (1992);
Culture
of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993), which attacks the shallowness
of
American life and the obsession with political correctness; and American
Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997).
Return to Oz: While in Australia last year to film the current BBC
series, Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore, he was involved in a car crash
which almost killed him. He was in a coma for five weeks and is still
recuperating.
To see more of the Guardian Unlimited network of sites go to
http://www.guardian.co.uk.
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