A First Place

by David Malouf

  Falstaff, the randy, disreputable anti-hero of that play, is the great embodiment in our literature of the spirit of carnival, the direct descendant of the Vice that larked about at the centre of the old morality plays, and before that of the Lords of Misrule who presided over medieval Fools’ Days. Falstaff, and the disorder he represents, is what has somehow to be included in the world of Rule. ‘Banish plump Jack,’ he tells Prince Hal, ‘and banish all the world.’

  Falstaff, with his shameless insistence on the flesh, his dirty jokes and phallic shenanigans, is a necessary aspect of what it is to be alive. So is the challenge his non-conformism offers to the coldness and impersonality of the law. Finding a place for Falstaff, acting imaginatively in the spirit of lightness he represents, is the way to wholeness; and wholeness, haleness, as the roots of our language tell us, is health.

  The Boyer Lectures, 1998, first broadcast on

  ABC Radio, later published in A Spirit of Play,

  ABC Books, 1998

  THE PEOPLE’S JUDGEMENT

  THE REFERENDUM ON THE REPUBLIC

  GEOFFREY BLAINEY’S GREAT PHRASE ‘the tyranny of distance’, when it was formulated nearly forty years ago, offered a powerful explanation of the problems of being Australian and of Australia’s relationship to the world. It pointed to geography, seen in terms of position and distance, as a determinant of what we call history, that is, of our daily lives as they are lived through events and conditions.

  The Australia Blainey was placing was nineteenth-century Australia, six weeks’ sailing distance from Europe, in the age before international cables had made possible the wonder of instant communication; and of course by the time he formulated it the conditions it described had already changed. Air transport had reduced travel time to a single day, satellite images were about to make every event on the globe instantaneously visible. And it was never quite true, even before technology intervened to change forever how we see the world and where we stand. We live in feelings as well as in conditions and events. Distance is also measured by the heart. In those terms, Europe – Britain – was close, not far off. As for now, and the century to come, the new communications systems mean that mere geography will never again determine our sense of where we stand.

  In space as the net defines it – language space – El Paso Texas, Aberdeen and Longreach are equidistant from what can only be an imaginary centre: some forms of international business can be conducted as easily from Longreach as from Los Angeles. Once again the fact that our language is English has made us powerful well beyond our size. This is the new form of geography we live with, and if it collapses the distance between hemispheres it also collapses the distance between, say, Longreach and Sydney. The space they exist in now belongs to mind, imagination and the new skills that make them function, and this has meant a redefinition, a radical one, of what we do and who we are. No wonder that some of us need time to catch up.

  Australians, and especially Australian men, have traditionally defined themselves by the sort of work they do. This is where their pride in themselves, their sense of worth and honour resides. That work had until recently been on the land. It depended on muscle, on hard physical labour and endurance.

  The new economy is based on softer skills. The predominance now of service industries such as teaching and tourism means that we have had to redefine what we think of as real work, and this is a psychological change as well as a change in ‘conditions’. At this level, the level of feeling, it involves real pain, a strong sense, especially in the bush, that older Australian values, like the older skills, are no longer wanted and for that reason no longer respected; a sense of fracture, of alienation. And this has been intensified by the belief that those who manage our lives are driven by theories that take no account of how people actually live; that they have no ear, behind what sometimes appears as truculent opinion, for the pain, the anger, the frustration and foiled pride of individual lives. But people, in our system, always have the last word. Policies that take no account of feeling inevitably fail.

  Take the attempt to convince Australians that they are really part of Asia. It failed because it was based on a ‘fact’ of geography that had no life in what people actually felt. Asia, of course, is a loose concept, but even when it was translated into something particular – India or Thailand or Vietnam – people still could not feel the tie; even those who had been to Phuket or Bali, were interested in zen or yoga, or had neighbours from one of those countries that they had been to school with; neighbourliness is about sharing things here. Neither did it touch us that we had strong trading links with these places. There was only one place in Asia that we felt close to: Timor. That closeness was based on events that went back half a century but were still alive in our consciousness as real experience, and on a debt of gratitude and responsibility that we also feel, and for similar reasons, to the people of Papua New Guinea; a bond of feeling based on shared suffering and sacrifice, in which any difference of culture or skin colour is cancelled out by our common humanity. Bonds of this sort are not easily forgotten and not honourably shrugged off. They are the only ones that really move us. In the case of Timor, there was a gap between what most Australians felt and what politicians thought was practically good for us, but in the end it was feelings that won out.

  Then there is ‘our link with Britain’. It upsets many among us that after 150 years of de-facto independence this link should still be so strong.

  A bond of emotion, of spirit, that for the vast majority of those who feel it has no hint of colonialism, and in no way compromises their sense of themselves as wholly Australian, it has to do with family – identity in that sense; personal identity rather than their identity as Australians. It is no coincidence that so many Australians have a passionate interest in family trees, and understandable that they might be curious about where their ancestors lived, for centuries in some cases, before they found themselves here. It is a link of language, too, and of culture in the sense of shared associations and understanding, of shared objects of affection, and a history of which we are a branch – a growth quite separate and of itself, but drawing its strength from an ancient root. We will know that this link has been broken when we hear an old hymn such as ‘To Be A Pilgrim’, a folk song like ‘Waly Waly’ or a ballad like ‘Comin’ through the Rye’ and are no longer moved, or when we no longer laugh spontaneously at old jokes from The Goon Show or Fawlty Towers.

  The fact is that the part of ourselves in which we live most deeply, most fully, goes further back than one or two generations and takes in more than we ourselves have known. To have no roots in time is to have no roots in place either.

  We admire indigenous people for belonging deeply to time and drawing from it. We encourage non-English-speaking Australians to hang on to their language, accepting that in doing so they will also hang on to what is inextricably one with language, the culture it embodies: not just in song and story but in patterns of thought that are inherent in syntax and idiom. How odd that when it comes to those among us who are of British origin we feel they will only be fully Australian when they have cut themselves off from what we see in others as the nourishment of a complete life.

  This, I suspect, had more influence on the recent referendum than we care to recognise; not because Australians are still colonial, or have a weak sense of national identity, or have not yet come of age, but because the case for the republic was put in terms that people had no strong feeling for, or which ran counter to what they felt.

  An Australian republic can only be argued for convincingly at the level of feeling – on what we feel towards the place and for one another. When it comes at last, some time in the next century, it had better be a true republic, one that is founded not on the loyalty of its citizens to their head of state but on their loyalty to one another: on bonds, which already exist and which we already recognise, of reciprocal concern and care and affection. A republic based on loyalty only to a head of state is a monarchy in disguise, even
when the monarch is elected and temporary. An elected monarch, as in too many republics one might name, can very easily become an autocrat.

  Perhaps, after a century of theories and ideas and ideologies, some of them murderous, we might try listening at last to what the people have to say; paying attention to what they have to tell us; accepting, too, and without resentment, that in being human they are imperfect, and that theories, even the most beautiful and idealistic, are for angels of the imagination, not real men and women. We might grant people the dignity of a life determined not by cold principle but by what they will recognise as true to what they are.

  Sydney Morning Herald, 1999

  THE ONE DAY

  I DON’T THINK ANYONE THESE days would deny that Anzac Day has established itself in the minds of Australians as the one day that we celebrate as a truly national occasion; a day, that is, when we look around and observe who we are; in the sense, first, of who is present, but also in the larger sense of what it is, in the way of experience, but also of shared attitudes and affections and loyalties and concerns, that brings us together, whatever our individual differences and divisions, as a single community, a single people involved in a common enterprise.

  I say ‘the one day’ because our official National Day, 26 January, the anniversary of the first day of settlement, Australia Day, seems to me to have no general claim on our affection and to be seen by many of us as an occasion that is not fully inclusive – as it never can be while for indigenous Australians it is seen, and more importantly felt, as a day of conquest and dispossession. Australia Day has been declared our National Day, imposed officially from above, and Australians on the whole are pretty resistant to choices they have not made for themselves. Anzac Day has been chosen, and part of the strength of that choice is that it has happened slowly, over time, and with many changes both in what the day represents and who has the right to define and manage it. Over time and through long and sometimes bitter argument.

  How has all that happened, and why? What has changed? Is it us, or the day itself? What has Anzac Day come to mean that is different from what it meant, say, fifty years ago? And what does that tell us about the way we now see ourselves? The day has a history, and its history is in some ways our history over the past fifty years.

  The present status of Anzac Day is astonishing to those of us who remember the way things were in the fifties. Back then, it was, officially, a holiday – that is, theatres were closed, so were the shops, but not, significantly, the pubs – and it was pretty well accepted that Anzac Day was a dying institution. The numbers that turned out for the Dawn Service were small and dwindling. Many of the men who had served in the two world wars, especially those who had served in the second, had become disaffected with the RSL; a lot of them no longer marched, and had always, in a very Australian way, a good many of them, been non-joiners. The day had no appeal to young people, and for a good many in my generation was a source of actual hostility.

  The RSL, which claimed ownership of the event, was one of several pressure groups that in those days were battling, pretty openly, to determine the way Australia might go in the early years of the Cold War, and one of their declared enemies was what was loosely referred to as ‘the Students’, the first generation of young men and women in Australia to get to the university in large numbers. Many of them working class, and some of them returned soldiers, they made up the first generation in Australia of a noisy and articulate youth, a generation of rebels that was university-educated rather than bohemian, as the rebels of the twenties and thirties had been, though it was bohemian as well: university-educated, bohemian and radical, having discovered Hegel and Marx and alienation and the scrap heap of history rather than Hell as a place to which people they no longer agreed with could be consigned, but also Existentialism and Sartre and Camus, and Modernism in all its forms, from Joyce, Faulkner and Dylan Thomas to Stravinsky and Picasso – the same Modernism that the Australian bohemians of the 1920s, for all their non-conformism, had rejected. Student unions had become the training ground of emergent politicians, and the university newspapers of emergent writers and intellectuals.

  It was inevitable, in all this, that Anzac Day should become the focus of bitter argument about Australian aims and values.

  In 1950, Gallipoli and the trenches were still close. They were part of every family’s immediate experience. The men who had fought at Gallipoli, at Pozières, at Villers-Bretonneux, and later on Crete and in New Guinea, were the fathers and uncles and grandfathers of those of us who were growing up into a post-war world that for another decade, after 1945, kept hovering on the brink of a new war to which the new generation might be called. We sometimes forget that no generation of Australians after 1870 had at that point escaped the call to arms. This made the sort of military virtues that were celebrated around Anzac a source of real anxiety and resentment to the young. Anxiety because the fathers had already met their test – which was why Anzac Day belonged to them and was so jealously guarded.

  Some of this was just the usual struggle between one generation and the next given a particular focus. But there were other elements as well that were local. A strong feeling in some cases – and this was a new idea altogether – that by insisting that the masculine virtues were to be discovered only through war, a previous generation had failed to consider the virtues that might be needed in the more ordinary war that we call peace. It was in effect an argument that the old notion of what it meant to be male, and especially an Australian male, was too narrow.

  The attempt on the part of the fathers as I’ve called them to make their experience exemplary, to give it a legendary value, a sacred aura that would put it beyond criticism or challenge, was seen by the generation of the fifties as an attempt to take possession of a history that they felt was theirs to make.

  The fathers had two forces on their side: silence, and C. E. W. Bean.

  This silence was deeply established. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home – or so they felt – from the terrible knowledge of what they had endured and walked away from.

  It was this old habit of silence about what was most deeply felt, a tendency to understate it or turn it aside with wry humour, that had been both the strength and the limitation of Australian writing, which till this point had excluded virtually everything introspective or inward. One result of this was that the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it. They had written letters, and a few of them had kept diaries, but they produced no account, either in fiction or poetry, of what they had seen and suffered. Australian writing offered no place in the years immediately after the Great War for the sort of savage introspection that experience of trench warfare demanded, or for the satirical challenge to patriotism that we get in Siegfried Sassoon or e. e. cummings.

  As for C. E. W. Bean, his journalistic articles before the war, his vivid and inspiring account from the various ‘fronts’, the definitive history he wrote after the war, all created the Anzac legend as an extension of the national character, an exclusively male one as it had developed in the bush, and as it was vividly recreated in the 1890s in that central organ of Australian publishing, The Bulletin. In Bean’s vision of things, this national Australian character had actually needed a war to find its highest and noblest form.

  The generation of the fifties did not reject the virtues of Bean’s legendary Australian: toughness, good humour, stoicism, irreverent irony in the face of officiousness or ‘side’, mateship, the dedication to a fair go. What they rejected was the suggestion that these were the only virtues, or the only ones that were necessary; and that for their fullest expression they needed a war.

  In fact, the stereotype had never gone quite unchallenged, even by Henry Lawson who might be seen as its originator. It had been hard pressed by the ambiguities and
the ironies we get in Joseph Furphy, and pilloried in the savage picture of the Australian bush male – cowardly, lying, lazy, exploitative, irresponsible – that we find in the stories of Barbara Baynton. The attack by the new generation was a more diverse and plural, a more paradoxical view of what it might be to be an Australian; one that would include women, and present a less rigid version of what it might be to be an Australian man.

  A good deal of this is at issue in a play, written in the late fifties but first performed in an atmosphere of violent controversy in 1961; Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year.

  Hughie, its passionately earnest hero, is that new figure in Australian society in the fifties, the working-class boy who has got to university. He is an angry young man who feels that if he is ever to be himself, and independent, he must break with his family, reject their narrow pieties and proclaim what he sees, with the uncompromising certainty of youth, as the ‘truth’. The area in which he sets out to mount his challenge is Anzac Day, ‘the one day of the year’.

  Filled with youthful scorn for the gap he perceives between the myth of Anzac, especially as it is exploited by those who were never there, and the sordid reality of the day itself – the descent from solemnity and commemoration into drunken buffoonery – he takes a series of photographs for the university paper that will present, as he sees it, the real picture of the heroic Digger: as a drunk sprawled in the gutter and covered with vomit.