A First Place

by David Malouf

  This is a world so distant from our own, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that we are inclined to misread its cultural homogeneity as simpler than it was; to see it as unsophisticated and nationally unaware. In fact people were very aware of themselves as Australian, not English, when it came to such local symbols as Bradman, or the Light Horse, or Phar Lap or Gallipoli. But no distinction was made in other areas. In the case of food, for example, Yorkshire pudding was Australian. It was what we had always eaten, what else could it be? When my father declared it his favourite, it was because, like his other favourite, Worcestershire Sauce, which he poured even on his roast beef and peas, it was what, in growing up as an Australian, he had quite unselfconsciously taken as local, and adopted with all the rest.

  To what extent all this was part of Australia’s economic dependency on Britain, on the fact that we made very little of our own, and that most of what passed through our hands in daily use came from England – because we belonged to the British market, and because ‘Made in England’ was an indisputable guarantee of quality – is another question altogether. We were part of the Empire, what other market would we belong to? The American? – But we did. What about all those Buicks and Pontiacs and Chryslers on the road? What about Caltex? What about the movies? The Japanese? – That too. The place was flooded with cheap Japanese goods in exchange for the wool they bought from us and the pig-iron we sent them. Which is why, after Pearl Harbor in 1941, people smashed virtually every cup, saucer and dinner plate in the house. Japan is where the contents of whole kitchen cabinets had come from. Only the best tea-cups and dinner plates were English.

  The feelings that were bound up for us in old songs like the ‘Eriskay Love Lilt’ or ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ were part of an emotional world that was deeply Australian because we could not have seen it as anything else; and the feelings of loyalty such emotions embodied – to England or Scotland certainly, but also to that Australia to which these things had always belonged, and since we shared them, to one another – were what held that world together and defined it, defined us. As Australians. And much else, too, that did not strictly belong: Max Julius’ Communist Party, the sort of country music Tex Morton sang (American in origin like the rodeo world that went with it but since he was singing it Australian by adoption), even, at a pinch, The Pink Elephant. All these disparate elements could be gathered in and included, because providing a place for what was contrary – the non-conformist and dissenting – was a quality of the culture itself. If some of these fellers chose other affiliations and loyalties, people like my father simply shook their head, shrugged their shoulders and left them to it. What a man chose to believe and devote his life to was his own affair. Part of the ethos – and this was so deeply British as to be essentially Australian – was that you did not interfere.

  Like Nothing But Itself

  But this ‘Britain’ we evoke so glibly, as if we were all agreed on what is to be understood by it, is in fact a multiple phenomenon and one that is continually shifting shape; as how could it not be when for so long before the founding of Australia it had been made up of two separate states and kingdoms, not to mention Ireland, the principality of Wales and such distinct regional worlds within England itself as the West, the North of England, the North-West, each with its own history and dialect and culture, and all existing, at best, in an uneasy relationship with the centre and with one another. In the half-century before 1788, England had put down two rebellions in Scotland, one in 1715, the other in ’45, and before the century was out would face another in Ireland.

  This is significant because these divisions at home were also transported. Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scots would carry over to the new place a history, passionately embodied in such names as Drogheda, The Boyne, Culloden, that would go on being remembered here. In so far as they were for a long time, most of them, Englishmen or Irishmen or Scots-in-Australia, this would continue to affect their relationship, as ‘Australians’, with England and with one another.

  All this ought to make us wary of what we mean by ‘British’ or ‘English’, and more alive than we sometimes are to the contradictory factors involved on both sides when we speak of the attitude, at any time, of ‘Australians’ to either.

  I say ‘at any time’ because Britain, as well as being in itself diverse and divided, has also, over the two centuries of our relationship with it, been in a state of almost continuous transformation. A good many of what we think of as changes in our own history have been a repetition, or at least a reflection, of changes there.

  The Britain of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, that in 1855, sixty-seven years after the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, granted New South Wales and other states their own legislative assemblies, was a very different nation from the one that had founded the colony in 1788; different in itself, but different as well in its attitude to its possessions and to the world at large.

  As the supreme maritime and industrial power of the day, though already under challenge from Germany and the United States, it was moving rapidly, in the 1850s, to that period of high empire that would reach its peak between the 1880s and the First World War, when something like a quarter of the globe would be under its sway. The various Australian colonies – as independently governed English-speaking offshoots of the motherland, with their own economies and armies – had a privileged place in this patchwork ensemble, with a status quite different from that of, say, India or the West Indies, or the newly acquired territories in Africa.

  But by 1926, less than a decade after the Great War, Britain had entered a new phase, and allowed the Empire to devolve. On the urging of the Canadians and South Africans, but with resistance from Australia and New Zealand, the four ‘Dominions’ were declared, under the Statute of Westminster in 1931, to be ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and fully associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.

  This represented a different relationship again with Britain, and in fact a different Britain; one that, while retaining the benefits of empire (imperial preference for example), was eager to free itself from some of the obligations – such as the need for its fleet to operate across the whole globe in defence of its Pacific colonies, which had become a particular burden, and got harder and harder to bear with the arrival, early in the century, of a new power in the area, Japan.

  Then, after the Second World War, there was a further change and more radical devolution. A Britain that had been severely debilitated by war granted India and Pakistan their independence in 1947, and the old Empire became a Commonwealth.

  This post-war Britain was no longer the world’s largest naval and industrial power, and no longer the place that older members of the ‘white’ empire had for so long looked to as the source of all things good and true. It was by now a power of the second order, and, following a path we too would follow, but a decade later, a multi-ethnic and multicultural place. By the mid-fifties, whole suburbs of London – Brixton and West Kensington, for example – had become West Indian or African enclaves, and towns like Leicester in the Midlands and Bradford in the North were largely Indian or Pakistani. A decade later, just as we were beginning to change our migration policy to something more open, the British, overwhelmed by Indians who had been expelled from Uganda, changed theirs to a more restrictive one that would catch us too in its net.

  In the world Britain now saw itself in, the old dominions, even the white ones, could have no special place or privilege in its decision making. When, after nearly a decade of negotiations and passionate debate at home, and with great bitterness on the part of Australia, New Zealand and other members of the old Commonwealth, Britain at last became a full member of the European Common Market, Australia had to recognise that in its old form – one based, in the most cynical view, on the flow of wheat, butte
r, beef, hides in one direction and rolling-stock, machine tools, investment, capital, Mini-Minors and impoverished migrants in the other – the tie was broken. We needed to detach ourselves and discover new ties elsewhere. No wonder our relationship with this protean monster is so difficult to track.

  Consider our extraordinary reluctance, in the thirties, to take up the independence that was offered us by the Statute of Westminster.

  Canada ratified it at once; and so, in 1934, did South Africa – the delay there had to do with a belief, on the part of Malan’s National Party, that it did not go far enough. We and the New Zealanders rejected it as ‘unnecessary’, and it was 1942 before we had an overseas representative of our own, even in Washington. Canada had representatives, first in Washington, then in Paris and Tokyo, in 1927.

  This may have been timidity, an unwillingness to stand on our own two feet in the world; it may have been, as is often suggested, a misguided loyalty and affection for a mother who basically didn’t care a damn for us. But the thirties were anxious years in Australia. The Depression had come earlier here than in other places – there is a good argument to be made that the economic slump of the 1890s, so clearly visible in Sydney in the kind of houses and public buildings that went up before the nineties and the meaner sort of buildings that followed, had never really gone away. Then there was the question of our security in a world of shifting alliances that was moving rapidly towards war.

  But other possibilities also suggest themselves. We tend to assume that Federation was a union that was universally desired. It was not. The states deeply distrusted one another, they still do. The tie with Britain was sometimes seen not as a threat to independence but as a guarantee of it against what we would now call ‘Canberra’ and the other states. Britain could be relied on because it stood at a certain distance. It was the other states that were predatory and too close.

  In a late Kipling story, ‘A Friend of the Family’, a group of Freemasons and First World War veterans is meeting at Lodge ‘Faith and Works’, 8537 E. C.

  A thin, dark brother on my left, who had been attending to a cold pork pie … suddenly lifted his long head, in which a pale blue glass eye swivelled insanely.

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘My motto is “Never again”. Ne-ver again for me.’

  ‘Same here – till next time,’ said Pole, across the table. ‘You’re from Sydney, ain’t you?’

  ‘How’d you know?’ was the short answer.

  ‘You spoke.’ The other smiled, so did Bevin who nodded. ‘I know how your push talk, well enough. Have you started that Republic of yours down under yet?’

  ‘No. But we’re goin’ to. Then you’ll see.’

  ‘Carry on. No one’s hindering,’ Bevin pursued.

  The Australian scowled. ‘No. We know they ain’t. And – and – that’s what makes us all so crazy angry with you.’ He threw back his head and laughed the spleen out of him. ‘What can you do with an Empire that – that don’t care what you do?’

  Perhaps the real truth, as Kipling’s not so gentle irony suggests, is that it was the easiness of the tie that made it so difficult to break. After all, we had not had to fight for our independence, it was freely offered. We could make the final break whenever it suited us. Why hurry?

  Of course not everyone felt like this, any more than every Australian feels now that there is no need to hurry on the republic because we are still free, eighty years later, to take it ‘when we please’.

  When we look at the long history of our relationship with ‘the mother country’, what we might chiefly be impressed by is the large privilege it has offered us, and how wary we have been of endangering the advantages it brought us.

  In the mid-nineteenth century the white, Athenian-style colonies as we might call them, the ones that were largely transplanted offshoots of the mother country – the Australian states, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa – found it easy to think of themselves as overseas provinces of Great Britain rather than colonies, standing in much the same relationship to the centre as other provincial places, Yorkshire or Scotland or Wales; and this was especially true after 1872 when the telegraph was completed. A message sent overnight from London – travelling by submarine cable from Falmouth to Lisbon, Gibraltar and Alexandria, overland to Suez, by cable again to Aden and Bombay, overland to Madras, by cable to Penang, Singapore and Batavia, overland to Benjaewangi, by cable to Darwin and overland to Adelaide – could be in Sydney or Melbourne before morning. As The Argus put it: ‘the deep sea cables have linked the whole British race together’. Sydney was now as close to London as Aberdeen.

  ‘Too close’ for Francis Adams, and dangerously so for Archibald Michie, who as early as 1859, when the line was still being laid, foresaw a time when at a single call from the Empire ‘millions of British citizens may any morning be mustered by the wires for the defence of any part’.

  But in feeling at least these places had always been close. Melbourne especially, but Sydney too in the 1860s, saw itself as related to London, and all it stood for, in the same way as any other large provincial city – Manchester, for example, or Leeds or Birmingham; places that had grown to be cities in the same period, and where much the same culture was to be found. The same grand buildings, the same plays and operas (Melbourne saw its first performance of Gounod’s Faust just six months after the London opening), the same books in the public libraries and reading-rooms, the same serialisations of new novels by Dickens or Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot to be breathlessly awaited and passed from hand to hand.

  It was only later, when the Empire itself became nationalistic, that a similar nationalism grew up in the various ‘regions’; in the form of Scots and Welsh nationalism, and, as the centenary of settlement approached in the eighties, and increasingly in the nineties, in Australia. In the pages of The Bulletin for example, and as we see it in Joseph Furphy’s defiant reference to his ‘bias’, in Such is Life, as ‘offensively Australian’. In all of these places nationalism was a passionate movement, and a noisy one. Whether, except in Ireland, it was very widespread is another matter.

  The move towards nationhood in Australia was to say the least leisurely. The strongest argument was geographic – to make the borders of the nation and the continent one. Outside The Bulletin and its supporters, and some Irishmen and Scots who remained more anti-English than pro-Australian, very little of the push towards union was fed by the wish to assert a local identity over a British one.

  What did exist among Australians in the late nineteenth century, and for a good deal of the twentieth as well, was the uneasy feeling that in being ‘provincial’ they were also, in all those aspects of Australian life that had to do with education and culture, second-rate – though it’s worth pointing out that people would have felt pretty much the same in Cardiff or Belfast.

  The best Australian families sent their sons to get a ‘real’ education at boarding schools in England, then to Oxford and Cambridge. Our most ambitious artists and intellectuals, like their provincial counterparts elsewhere, went to London, and in most cases never came back.

  We get a good idea of the bitterness this provoked in those who stayed from Victor Daley’s ‘When London Calls’, where the great metropolis at the heart of the Empire appears as a bedizened harridan, ancient and malign, a heartless Lorelei calling her victims to what looks like a festival but is really a cannibal feast:

  They leave us – artists, singers, all

  When London calls aloud

  Commanding to her Festival

  The gifted crowd.

  She sits beside the ship-choked Thames,

  Sad, weary, cruel, grand;

  Her crown imperial gleams with gems

  From many a land …

  She sits beside the ship-choked Thames

  With sphinx-like lips apart –

  Mistress of many diadems –

  Death in her heart!

  If there was a disease at the heart of colonial life, it was the haunting suspici
on that it was only outside Australia, in that source of all value and meaning, and of all objects too, since virtually everything we used was imported from there, that experience was authentic and real. Only in England were real lives to be lived, real books to be written, real conversations had and real loves discovered. It was also, as Joanie Golson in The Twyborn Affair knows, where an Australian had to go to get to the ‘real shops’.

  All this points to the deepest imbalance of all between Australia and the ‘motherland’: a sense that life here was somehow thin and insubstantial. After all, what happened in the books one read happened there, and Australians were inveterately bookish. Not only in that they read a great deal, but in the belief that what happened in books was the way life really was – and since there were no books, no real books, that were Australian, what that meant was, not here.

  If one thinks of the average Australian reader of the late nineteenth century as a middle-class or lower-middle-class woman living in the suburbs, say, of Melbourne or Adelaide, it is difficult to see what appeal she might have found, either to thought or feeling, in the kind of Bulletin writing that presented itself in the nineties as the only form of writing in Australia that spoke for true national spirit. Only life in the Australian bush, and bush values as embodied in the lives of bush workers – all male of course – are authentically ‘Australian’. Any form of suburban existence, and the whole world of women, is rejected. Half a dozen of Lawson’s later stories, admittedly not his best, are devoted to the spectacle of a once independent male, a mate of the narrator, who has fallen victim to marriage, a regular job in town, temperance and religion – the last two especially being the sphere of baleful female influence. (What a bold and intelligent woman thought of all this we know from the stories of Lawson’s contemporary, Barbara Baynton, where the bush male of Bulletin fiction appears in a different light altogether.)