by David Malouf
The other Australian states, where opposition to cheap ‘coolie’ labour had become a plank of the labour movement, were passionately hostile, and until the Kanaka question was settled no move towards Federation could be made. In the end Queensland gave in. Most of the Pacific Islanders were repatriated. The rest became Australian citizens.
Shameful as this episode is, one point needs stressing. These were indentured labourers, not chattel slaves. The most enduring effect of all this came after Federation, in the move against any but European (and for a time any but northern European) migration, the White Australia policy; which began as a protection of Australian workers and ended, farcically, as a search of the displaced persons camps in Europe, after World War Two, for blond, blue-eyed Balts and others who might pass in time for British.
All these ways of experiencing the world, of thinking about it and creating institutions for dealing with it and with the affairs of women and men, were for better or worse passed on to us at the moment of our founding. And along with them – inherent in them we might say – another quality, less easy to define and talk about than institutions or the ideas on which they are based.
This is that ‘habit of mind’ we think of as being essentially and uniquely Anglo-Saxon: one that prefers to argue from example and practice rather than principle; that is happy, in a pragmatic way, to be in doubt as to why something works so long as it does work; is flexible, experimental, adaptive, and scornful of all those traps it sees in theory and principles. It is the habit of mind that created the Common Law, devised the British parliamentary system, gave Britain its head-start in the new Scientific Age and the Industrial Revolution that grew out of it, and was vital, here in Australia, to the capacity of the early settlers to abandon whatever expectations they had arrived with, and adapt, quickly and with the success that is noted by so many early commentators, to new and unknown conditions – and this at every level. On the part of ordinary men and women as well as governors and administrators.
Like all forms of strength it has its weak side: anti-intellectualism and complacent philistinism; a preference for moderation that can all too easily become mediocrity – deficiencies that Charles Darwin identified in the new colony as far back as 1836, along with material progress and the energy that produced it, and which, as they dismayed him then, would dismay him even more perhaps today. But the strengths are real ones.
Most of all, it is a habit of mind that is inherent in the very shape and tone of the language we speak. As how could it not be, when the language is its most complete and perfect creation?
I referred to the language earlier as what we all, as English speakers, come home to; that other country of which we are by nature citizens. But what do we mean when we think of ourselves, and of the Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, and the very diverse inhabitants these days of the British Isles, as ‘English speakers’? Don’t we need to ask ourselves, in each case, in what sense ‘speakers’, and ‘which English’?
It is all very well to regard language as simply ‘a means of communication’. It may be that for those to whom it is new and unfamiliar, who use it only for the most basic exchanges. But for most of us it is also a machine for thinking, for feeling; and what can be felt and thought in one language – the sensibility it embodies, the range of phenomena it can take in, the activities of mind as well as the objects and sensations it can deal with – is different, both in quality and kind, from one language to the next. The world of Chinese or Arabic is different from the world of German or French or English, as the worlds those European languages embody and refer to differ from one another. A language is the history and experience of the men and women who, in their complex dealings with the world, made it; but it is itself one of the makers of that history, and the history it makes is determined – limited – by its having developed in one direction rather than another; in one direction to the exclusion of others. It is also shaped and changed by what is said in it.
The English, for example, that contains the works of Shakespeare, the English we know and use, is a very different language from the one that existed before he took hold of it and showed that the real motive force of thinking in English is the creative leap that occurs in metaphor.
Other languages move by logic, English, as we see from even the most common idioms – a ‘tower of strength’, ‘a dog’s breakfast’ – by association. Whether or not Shakespeare actually invented this use of language, he demonstrated how it could be put to use, and in using it, taught us to do so. He changed the way men and women think in English, and feel through it, wherever the language is spoken, and this over and above what is there in the works themselves: in characters, in metaphysical or psychological insights, political arguments, in vividly dramatised situations, or in quotations and idioms that have become part of daily usage.
But a language, as a living organism, is always changing. New objects or new technologies come tumbling in and require new terms and new formulas to express them. New technologies and the ideologies that come with them change people’s relationships with one another, in factories and other workplaces, in families, on the land. New poems, songs, books and other cultural artefacts introduce new modes of feeling and new passwords in the exchange of feeling. Shifts, large or small, in the relationship between the governors and the governed bring changes to the tone and rhetoric of public discourse, that language of explanation or persuasion or negotiation through which power speaks to its constituency and the constituency speaks back.
We can track such changes very easily through written texts, and when it comes to daily speech from the language of plays, and later, novels. By the way characters in the fast-moving ‘journalistic’ comedies of Thomas Middleton for example – the card-sharps, pickpockets, confidence tricksters and whores of Your Five Gallants (1607) or the Puritan shopkeepers and householders of The Familie of Love (1602) – address one another, within families and across classes, in shops, taverns, chapels, eating-houses, and the very different language through which characters interact in, say, Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell, or later again in Ulysses, or in a novel by Jonathan Franzen or a play by Harold Pinter or Edward Albee.
Or we might compare the throwaway style of the editorial in yesterday’s Herald with the formal tone and sentence structure of a similar editorial of a hundred years ago, or the language of Triple J with the language of a commercial station of the fifties, or John Howard or Kevin Rudd’s answers to a caller on talk-back radio, or in an interview on TV, with the sort of rhetoric that would regularly have been heard from a Menzies or Doc Evatt.
The tone that is acceptable from any politician now has been changed utterly by the reduction in ‘distance’ over the past forty years between audience and speaker. The public figure is no longer sixty feet off on a platform, or a mere voice on the air-waves, but right there in our living-room. Different perceptions of sincerity and trust must be taken account of, different conditions of intimacy apply.
Australia was founded at a particular turning-point in the evolution of English, and the form of English we inherited has been a strong shaping influence on what happened here, and on the way it happened.
The American colonies, founded in the first decade of the previous century, inherited a different English altogether. Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of the Diggers, Levellers, English Separatists and other religious dissenters of the early seventeenth century, who left England to found a society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by Church or Crown. It was far removed from the cool, dispassionate English in which, 180 years later, in the 1780s, a parliamentary committee argued the pros and cons of a new colony in the Pacific. This was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language, modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth.
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What had happened to change the language so radically in that 180 years?
Elizabethan and Jacobean language, like the society it expressed, had been violent, and violently abusive. That was a large part of its liveliness. We see this in the plays of the period in the so-called ‘Wars between the Theatres’, and in satirical poems, pamphlets – like those that were tossed back and forth in the scurrilous ‘Marprelate’ controversy – and in the ‘cony-catching’ novels of such muck-raking adventurers as Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene. All these writings, right down to the pamphlets of a figure as austerely fastidious as Milton, are marked by an extraordinary level of public vituperation.
Englishmen abroad, as contemporary observers present them, are swaggering bully-boys, drunken loud-mouths, forever on the lookout for a quarrel and constantly provoking brawls. Ben Jonson, who knew something of all this from his tour of the Continent with the young Wat Raleigh, Sir Walter’s loutish and ungovernable son, gives us a good picture of such a figure in Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone.
When the scion of a good county family came up to London, as young Kastril does in The Alchemist, it was to learn to ‘quarrel’, to be a ‘roaring boy’. Quarrelling and the language of quarrelling were at the heart of the sectarian and political violence that led to the Civil War, which had from the beginning been as much a war of words, of the way opposing ideas found violent language to clothe and arm them, as a war with muskets and pikes.
What had to be reformed in the aftermath of the war was not simply factional politics and a tradition of angry dissension and dissent, but the language through which these were encouraged and spread. English had to be purged of all those forms of violent expression that had led men to violent action. By limiting the one, you would limit the other. The language itself was to be disarmed. Irony would replace invective; good-humour, a middle tone, balance of syntactical structure, would ensure the proper weighing of pros and cons that would make extremist views so crass and undisciplined, so ungentlemanly, as to have no place in polite society. Moderate language would produce moderation.
And it worked. By the early years of the eighteenth century the English ‘roaring boy’ had become, in the description of Continental commentators, the phlegmatic English gentleman. Young men who had previously gone up to London to learn how to quarrel now learned to be ‘polite’. The business of politics became negotiation, and of conflict compromise. This was the ‘reasonable’ language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment that became the language in which social institutions in Australia argued and resolved their difficulties, and in which, when the time came, our plain, uninspired Constitution would be written – nothing there of those utopian aspirations and emotional appeals to the great abstractions that we get in the American version.
It was, very largely, the language we inherited – late-Enlightenment English – that created that peculiar mildness of social interaction here that has for more than two centuries kept all kinds of extremism beyond the possibilities of acceptable public discourse and the worst forms of social violence at bay. And this despite the many dissidents, rebels, Chartists and agitators, some of them violent, from the Scottish Martyrs of 1793 to the Tolpuddle Martyrs of 1834, who were brought here to make things ‘quieter’ at home.
One might have thought that in a place that had already set out to become a working man’s paradise, the presence of all these radical imports would produce movements here that were revolutionary at least, if not violently rebellious. But with some exceptions, notably the great Shearers’ Strike of the nineties, it was negotiation and arbitration, not violent confrontation, that secured workers’ rights in Australia. And Patrick O’Farrell has this to say of another group that is sometimes seen, in potential anyway, as violently disruptive, the Irish rebels who were first transported to Australia after the Rebellion of 1798: ‘Thus was established a duality vital to the practicalities of Irish behaviour in the colony. Rebels conformed in peace, setting up a marvellous tension between myth and reality which gave the Australian Irish the best of both worlds – the proud and fearsome reputation for rebellion, heroism and devotion to principles of freedom, and a quite profitable stake in the new colony … the heroes had taken the quiet path.’ This is all the more remarkable because the history of Ireland itself in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was very violent.
No-one I think would accuse Australian English of lacking boldness or colour, but these arise for the most part from a strong sense of humour and a larrikin sense of play, qualities we might trace back to the cockney and criminal world of the convicts. (We owe a good deal as well to Irish eloquence and fantasy.)
What the local language found no place for was that mixture of libertarian individualism and hostility to ‘government’ that in the United States goes right back to the founding of the various states and commonwealths in the seventeenth century, and to a contemporary (that is, Jacobean) rhetoric of violent dissent; no place either for the language of utopian optimism and a later and related language of the transcendental. And this, for all our similarities and the fellow feeling we share as New World places, marks a difference between us.
We appreciate American eloquence, we are even impressed by it, as when Bill Clinton addressed the two houses of our Parliament to universal applause. But we also distrust it. It is, in the last resort, simply not our style.
This introduction of the USA into what is primarily a discussion of Australia’s relationship with Britain is, as I suggested earlier, neither accidental nor wilful. It is integral to the relationship itself. Invocations of the older New World seem almost from the beginning to have been obligatory in assessing the prospects of a new world here. Peter Cunningham’s engaging and richly observant account of the new colony, Two Years in New South Wales, which appeared in two volumes in 1826–27, consistently uses America, as he calls it, as a reference point for his descriptions of the landscape and resources, the trade, population and manners of New South Wales, and he makes a special distinction in favour of Americans as members of an extended ‘family’ in what is already, clearly, a more multi-ethnic and multicultural place than the purely British one we sometimes imagine. ‘Gentlemen foreigners,’ he writes, ‘of all nations may be met with now in our Sydney streets, tempted by the fineness of our country and climate to take up permanent residence among us. French, Spaniards, Italians, Germans (Americans I had almost added, but kindred feelings proclaim the impossibility of classing them as such) all add to the variety of language current among us.’
These ‘kindred’ ties and feelings begin of course with the language we share, and our common derivation, though at different periods, from the same mother source, but they were inherent as well in the British notion of the colony in Australia as a new and improved version of the former colonies in America.
The American colonies had simply emerged, in an unplanned way, haphazardly; New South Wales was planned from the start. It was to be an Enlightenment experiment, a controlled one, in which the Administration’s mistakes in the earlier case would not be repeated. Which is to say that from the beginning of our life here, what had happened in America was always in the background, shaping, in a shadowy way, what was to be done here; an example of what might be emulated, but also, in the use of slave labour for example and the raising of taxes, of what should be avoided.
The new colony was a creature at first of the East India Company, which until 1819 had a monopoly over its trade and in the early years controlled all ships that entered its port. The only exception to this in the early days was Americans, who were not subject to British trade rules, and after 1802 the ships of the Southern Whale Fisheries, both of whom played a key role in the early productive life of the colony. This was focused on the sea and its resources – not the land: on the whales that crowded the waters off the east coast and the Southern Ocean, and on the seal-rookeries of Bass Strait, and since whaling and sealing, as we might know from our reading of Moby Dick, were industries that were
largely in American hands, this was one early link that kept American know-how and ambition clearly in mind in the new colony, and Americans in relatively large numbers coming and going from our shores, where no doubt their example as independent, non-English English-speakers was strongly felt.
Thirty years later, when gold was discovered, thousands of men, neither American citizens nor Australians but with a stake in both places, moved back and forth between California and the east coast of Australia, mixing the population and sharing jargons, slang, folklore and folk music, but also touring opera and theatre troupes and celebrity entertainers. When, in the years leading up to Federation, a model was sought for the new nation-state and its constitutional arrangements, the United States had a strong shaping influence on the discourse and eventually on the form of the two houses, and this was made easier because the American model was itself a variation of the Westminster system, whose principles and practice both we and the Americans shared.
But a triangular relationship is not always a comfortable one.
Britain and the US had, in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, been enemies, and for the rest of the century they remained watchful of one another culturally and bitter rivals in trade.
Two of the areas in which Britain and the US had increasingly different interests were China and Japan – and in so far as this involved the Pacific, it was of crucial importance to Australia as well. And Australia, as a rapidly growing market, was increasingly the scene of Anglo-American competition. Australian loyalty and Australian sentiment were divided by ‘kindred feelings’ for powers that did not always, themselves, recognise ties of kin.
