A First Place

by David Malouf

  There was a time when we came to such gatherings like poor relations to a table where the British played host, bringing with us, each one, a wariness of the rest that came from the reluctance of one poor relation to see his lowly status reflected in another’s. Australians and Canadians, Australians and Scots, tended to ignore one another.

  Those days are gone. Britain no longer sits at the head of the table. The rest of us no longer use the British, or need them, in our dealings with one another. As often as not it is the British representatives at such gatherings now who feel marginalised and out of place.

  The fact is, there is no longer a ‘centre’ around which we circulate and dance. We have all shifted place. In terms of where Australia and Britain now stand in relation to one another, the world has turned upside down.

  In the nineteenth century Australia was an underworld place, literally at the bottom of the world; exactly opposite where Britain stood. It was as far off as you could go, people told one another, before you started coming back again. A place where it was glaring sunlight while you slept, and when you were awake was wrapped in a darkness swarming with unlikely blacks and even more unlikely animals; a place at the antipodes – not just of the globe but of consciousness; of everything that belonged to normality and light.

  And now?

  Almost the reverse has become the case. Australia, just twenty-two hours from London, is the place of perpetual light – of perpetual lightness – where it is always sunshiny and warm; a place that is different but familiar; where people make good, and which has itself made good; and where, if you are lucky, your own freer self might suddenly break loose. We have slipped out of the shadows and out of Britain’s own shadow. What they see in us is a lighter version of themselves, which had always been there, at least in potential, on the other side of consciousness, and has now at last revealed itself, and for just a few hundred pounds can be had.

  This is a romantic view, of course, and we can’t live up to it, as in the old days our view of England, London, ‘home’, was also romantic and almost always let us down; as those volunteer Diggers of 1914 discovered, the ‘six bob a day’ tourists who set off expecting to see Piccadilly at last, and Leicester Square, and instead saw Passchendaele, and the many artists and writers and others who were drawn to one of the great flesh-pots and glories of the planet. We smile at such things today.

  Our being British took us into the world the first time round by providing us with a network of English-speaking relations, some closer than others, all over the globe. Later, when Britain joined the Common Market in the early seventies, it took us out into the world in a different way, forcing us to find new markets for our wheat and wool, our meat, hides, minerals, in China, Korea, Russia, the Middle East; forcing us – and this was the real challenge – to reconsider our attitudes to these new trading partners as people; to take account, as we might put it now, of their ‘sensitivities’, both cultural and political, but also to reconsider our migration policies with regard to them, to see them not only as neighbours but as fellow citizens.

  A whole complex of changes in the sixties determined our move away from the White Australia policy. Some of them were local – like the Yes vote in the ’67 referendum that was the culmination of twenty years of slow change in our thinking about the place of Aboriginal people in our society but also in our history. Others were part of a general move, in nations like our own, to a rethinking of racial attitudes under the influence of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Others again were determined by our need to be more open-minded in our dealings with the world, with thinking again about the kind of country we wanted to be and the way we wanted others, now, to see us. Britain’s selling us down the river (as some saw it) in the early seventies may turn out, in the long view, to be more significant than that other and more obvious ‘betrayal’, Singapore, in that it pushed us out at last into a complex and demanding world where we were forced to discover in ourselves the qualities we would need to meet it: qualities of alertness, competence, improvisation, openness that would make us a more complex and inventive people. The captive market in Britain that we had for so long relied on had kept us captive – to a lazy belief that all we had to do was go on producing the same old goods at the same price. Being tumbled out of the nest was the making of us. It set us free at last to be something more than we had been and more than we might otherwise have imagined.

  At the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, India ceased to be a British colony. After more than 300 years of occupation and rule by a foreign power it reverted to a culture and civilisation that had already been in existence for nearly three millennia when the British arrived and, in all its variety and richness, had gone on interruptedly while they were there. Very sensibly, they retained the laws and institutions the British had brought that would allow them to become a unified modern nation rather than a collection of rival princedoms.

  For us the end of colonialism can never be ‘declared’ as it was for the Indians at a single stroke, because we were never a colony as India was. Made in England and exported like so much else, we were a bit of the motherland set down in a new place and left to develop as the new conditions demanded, as climate, a different mixture of people, changes in the world around us, and our reaction to them, determined: an overseas province of Great Britain, but allowed, in an experimental fashion, to govern itself and go its own way and to its own ends. We have, most of us, no previous history in the place that we can, like the Indians, ‘revert to’, and those who do cannot give us one. Our culture is the one we brought with us and adapted, in an experimental and improvisatory way, according to what we found here and to immediate need. We laid it down over the existing native culture, which slowly, over the years, has seeped through and begun to colour what we are, and to modify any conviction we might have had, as Westerners, that our way of seeing the world, and our way of dealing with it, is the one right way; but it is not a culture we can revert to because it was never ours. Unlike the Indians, it is not only Britain we have to deal with, it is our own Britishness – a very different thing, and much more difficult to track down and confront.

  We may treat Britain itself in any way we please. We may remove the Union Jack from our flag if it seems useful to do so, and the Queen from our political life. What we cannot remove is the language we speak, and all that is inherent in it: a way of laying out experience, of seeing, that comes with the syntax; the body of half-forgotten customs, and events, fables, insights, jokes, that are at the root of its idioms; a literature that belongs, since there is nothing that ties it mystically to one patch of soil, as much to the English-speaking reader in Perth, WA as in Perth, Scotland.

  We may modify and ‘naturalise’ the institutions we brought here, the Westminster system, the Common Law, so that they make a better fit with what we now are, but they have provided so much of the context of what we have created here, and value and would want to preserve, that to abandon them, or allow them to be diluted or to decay, would be an act of national suicide. And there, for the moment, we stand.

  This venture we call ‘Australia’ was always an experiment. It has taken us a long time to see it in this light, and even longer to accept the lightness, the freedom, the possibility that offers as a way of being. It keeps us on our toes, as curious observers of ourself. It has made us value quick reflexes and improvisation – lightness in that sense too. It ought to make us sceptical of conclusions, of any belief that where we are now is more than a moment along the way.

  An experiment is open, all conclusions provisional. Even the conclusiveness of a full stop is no more – so long as there is breath – than a conventional gesture towards pause in an open and continuing argument.

  First published as ‘Made in England’, Quarterly

  Essay, by Black Inc.

  THE STATES OF THE NATION

  BACK IN 2001 WHEN THE centenary of Federation was looming, I was inclined to joke that we had to make a song and dance about it b
ecause the thing itself had never really happened.

  It had of course; in history and in the history books, and we had a constitution to prove it, but not in the many places where Australians actually live; in Cunnamulla or Queenstown or Port Hedland, and in those even more numerous places, the hearts of those of us who, without hesitation or doubt, call ourselves Australians, and have a vivid sense of what the country itself is, but in our daily lives, and in the place where our feelings are most touched, have little interest in the idea of nation.

  The day of the centenary came and went like any other. Flags were raised, medals struck and distributed, speeches made, but there was little excitement. The country returned next day to life as usual. Boat people arrived and asked to be taken in, life support systems were turned on or off, a new generation of five-year-olds posed and were photographed, smiling or not, in their school uniforms.

  Federation may have established the nation and bonded the people of the various states into one, but nations and peoples, unless they arise naturally the one out of the other, rather than by referendum or edict, are likely to be doubtful entities, and the relationship between them will be open to almost continuous question. Of course when they arise too naturally – that is when they claim to belong to nature rather than to human choice – they are dangerous.

  Our Federation is on the whole an easy one. We take it lightly as suits our cast of mind, which is pragmatic (anti-theoretical), wryly off-hand, and sceptical of big ideas and their accompanying rhetoric. The union works and we can be proud of the society it has created, but we don’t care to talk about it, and unless the country is under threat as it was in 1941, or involved in conflict overseas, we take it as given – and even then, as with Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, there are some who will remain doubtful, or embarrassed, or openly hostile. We are easiest with ‘Australia’ when what we are referring to is a national team.

  To quote the authors of The Oxford Companion to Australian History (2001 edition), the states remain ‘set in their ways and as suspicious of one another as they were before the union was declared’ – though we should be as wary of making too much of the suspicion as of the union.

  These days the suspicions between the states are as low-key – except when it comes to water management – and as intermittent, as our sense of nationhood. A lot of the rivalries are joking ones, and when they are formalised in such institutions as the State of Origin matches between Queensland and NSW, might just as easily be read as bonding. Most people, like men and women everywhere, are concerned with local questions and local affairs. Their lives take place within a few square kilometres and are determined by local conditions: local needs and customs and habits, local opportunities for schooling and shopping and entertainment, local forms of speech. They turn to community rather than nation when they ask themselves where they belong, and think of those they share their days with as neighbours rather than fellow Australians. ‘Fellow Australians’ carries with it an air of fake familiarity that belongs to the political platform, the political speech. Fellow Queenslanders, on the other hand, or fellow Tasmanians, is another matter.

  Federation, as we might expect, came to us in a very Australian way, one that is consistent with the rather off-hand manner in which it has been received and is still considered. Not the flowering of a great utopian ideal, or the coming together, after a long period of yearning, of a people that had known the anguish of division, or the achievement, through national unity, of a ‘manifest destiny’ – though there were some, especially in the latter case, who felt that way.

  After thirty-five years of intermittent lobbying and resistance, and a lot of bickering over such non-idealistic questions as Preference versus Free Trade, the opposition lapsed and the federationists took advantage of a moment of unexpected agreement to pop the question. The popular election that voted for union was not based on universal suffrage, was not uniform throughout the states, and the turnout itself was low: 30 per cent of eligible voters in 1898, 43 per cent in 1899. The areas of control granted to the new federal government were limited – chiefly defence and trade; the rest remained reassuringly with the states. Of course the central government was expected to evolve over time and has done so. In the 100 years since 1901, the Commonwealth government has replaced or duplicated state powers to the point that it can be argued that in our present three-tiered system, state governments are not only redundant and wasteful but also obstructive, and should go. The federal government alone would be left to govern, with below it a system of regional bodies. The states, with no effective powers, and no visible reason to exist, would wither away.

  Given our preference for practical solutions, and the tendency these days for all problems to be presented and resolved in terms of economy and good management, it is inevitable, I suppose, that this question too will be reduced to what is the best value for money and the most efficient way of bringing uniform practice to what is now a set of multiple authorities: roads, railways, social welfare and health systems, and seven different police forces and courts of law. As if the real goal of Federation had all along been uniformity, and the only criterion needed for justifying it was efficiency and cost.

  But if uniformity from ocean to ocean is what we are to have, then that represents a radical change from what the fathers of Federation intended and what the people of the various states, with their strong histories and their ‘set ways’, believed they were getting. And what about us? Is this really our preferred choice?

  If the argument is couched solely in economic and management terms, then clearly there is no argument at all. But perhaps we need other terms altogether, that have to do not with efficiency and cost but with the sometimes untidy and diverse and contradictory needs of those who are to be managed.

  So what does it mean to be a nation, and how is that large concept related to place and land, or as we experience it personally – on the ground as it were – as locality, a particular tract of land: a town or a few streets in a town; a church hall, a local pub, schools, a football ground, a shopping precinct? And how is nation related to that other large and emotionally charged concept, a people?

  In most places, the transition from people to nation is clear, or is at least presented as clear. A single people, inhabiting a particular homeland, is at last politically united and becomes a nation.

  It is never quite clear of course: the borders of the land may be open to dispute, and no people is entirely pure. But this is how it happened over three or four centuries among the ancient Greeks, when a scatter of independent city-states became an empire, and among the Romans, the French, the Russians, and in the mid-nineteenth century the Germans and Italians. Australia, like other settler nations, did it in reverse. Having declared that we were a nation, we had still to attract the people to fill it and decide who those people might be.

  What defined our nation was not people but geography. The various states – all settled at different times by different groups and classes, and, within the British political system, under different conditions and with different aims – happened to occupy a continent whose borders were fixed because it was an island. Once the British, eastern half of the continent and the Dutch west were declared a single possession under an undisputed (British) claim, political unity became first a possibility and then an imperative, though a mild one. For all the talk in some quarters in the late nineteenth century of a New Britannia that would carry forward the torch of British civilisation when the old country had fallen into decay, there was little of the fervour here, or the passion for political theory, that characterised the great constitutional conventions of the 1760s in America. We produced no political thinkers of the quality of Madison or Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin. Our local fathers of Federation, practical men of the late nineteenth century, level-headed traders and politicians and lobbyists, good Christian gentlemen but of a secular bent, did want to create a free and fair society, but unlike their counterparts in a more
radical and utopian age had no feeling for rhetoric of the French or American variety. A ‘fair go’ is a very down-to-earth version of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and no-one here expected, or wanted, the tree of Liberty (or the wattle) to be watered even occasionally with blood.

  This down-to-earthness extends to the land itself.

  In other places, and to other peoples, the land has presented itself as sacred or holy. This, as we know from Russian novels, is the way Russians have seen it, how indigenous people, including our own indigenous people, see it and how the Nazis saw it when they articulated the philosophy of Blut und Boden: as a deep ancestral tie between a people and the soil they inhabit.

  A settler population can hardly make such a claim. The Roman and British imperial cultures, with their founding myths of an arrival from ‘elsewhere’, offered a different model: one in which nation was transportable and national identity or citizenship transferable. If Australians see in the land something they might feel as transcendent or mystical, it is land in its form as space rather than soil, an almost infinite openness; and that is a very useful notion if you are a settler. It suggests that there is always room. That just as the land made room for you, so, with no threat or pressure, it will find room for others.

  The idea of nationhood was embodied, in 1901, in a constitution, but the question of who the nation’s people were to be remained open. White and British in the first draft, no more Chinese, the Queensland Kanakas to be sent back to the islands. No black Africans of any kind. No Muslims. A language test (European) to be applied against the rest. Then increasingly after the wave of European – including southern European – migrants after World War II, it was to be a mix; then, after the lapse of the White Australia policy in the late sixties, a multi-ethnic mix, then a mix that would be both multi-ethnic and multicultural – an interesting experiment, but not so easy to make work. Just as well that the idea of nation was a light one, and that lightness in the approach to difficult questions, an anti-theoretical stance, easy-going and humorous, should be the temperament of the people who had to live with it.