The Australian Republican Movement has put out a release saying it has suspended campaigning in this period of mourning. How can it tell? How can anyone?
The movement has the air of the Henry George League. You keep being surprised to discover it’s still there. That maybe an insult to the Georgists who became the Tax Reform Association and stayed active largely due — ah, irony is the saving grace of politics — their substantial CBD property holdings. They’re in better shape than the ARM.
When the greatest awareness you have got for a while comes from an announcement that you have suspended campaigning, you have a real problem. But what’s the nature of it? Well, for the republicans, almost everything.
The cause has not met with genuine grassroots enthusiasm for half a century. It is not connected to any fundamental division, of race or of history — as is the case with Jamaica, which appears about to take the republican route. It offers no guarantee of change in anything that a swell of people are most passionate about, most particularly the environment, racism and inequality. There is no class or social group to drive it, for whom it is an identity struggle, essential to its existence as they want to be.
Indeed, it is the exact opposite of all these things. Australian republicanism appeals to a common identity and a universal condition, as Australian. But many of the people who believe in that most fervently are monarchists; conversely, many of the people who would prefer us to be a republic believe that the notion of unity is a false one, covering over the fundamental divide of colonialism.
The constituency that republicans needed to give their movement heft — left nationalists — has gone, or at least, been shrunk by history. It arose in the 1960s, peaked quickly and declined slowly, and then rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. When it began most of its members — young, mostly Anglo, some but not all tertiary educated — would readily acknowledge that the arrival of Europeans in 1788 was the violent occupation of a continent.
But that was far from the main game, which was throwing off the British yoke, and resisting being swamped by American culture. This was institutionally real; we were still subject to the rule of the UK Privy Council, among other things. By the early ’70s, the sentiment had coalesced into the Australian Independence Movement, a group organised by the China-oriented Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA (M-L)). The CPA (M-L) had taken up the patriotic themes the CPA proper had adopted in World War II but had later dropped. It had revived bush folk songs, co-opted the Ned Kelly legend, and adopted the Eureka flag. The Maoists and the AIM took it further, featuring a redrawn Blinky Bill with adult arms and legs, and rendering him as a sort of Marxist bush guerilla.
But the AIM had something the ARM doesn’t have: a social base. Affiliated unions such as the Plumbers and Gasfitters (their magnificently austere brutalist concrete headquarters of the time, still stands, behind Trades Hall Victoria), the Victorian BLF and others could swell AIM meetings and demonstrations. Greek, Turkish and other workers from countries who had experienced “perfidious Albion” were involved. The AIM had great raucous gigs; the notion of an Australian rock music was central to the wider cultural revolution it wanted. Nor did the Maoists deny dispossession; their bookshops were called Kalkadoon, after conflicts in Queensland where the Kalkatungu people of Queensland put up concerted guerilla resistance against whites — something recognised as organised resistant warfare before the frontier wars concept had become generalised.
The AIM was never huge, but it was dynamic, and had the Whitlam government survived into the late ’70s it might have got a referendum. What kicked the guts out of it, though it took a while, was the Dismissal/coup of 1975. Not the coup itself, but the voters’ massive endorsement of it in the December 1975 election.
The Maoists and their unions withdrew to more industrial struggle. Social movement activists turned away from the idea of massive imminent social upheaval to working on smaller and more separated campaigns. This set the pattern for the next 20 years. Paul Keating’s revival of it in the ’90s, from the top down, and geed on by author-intellectuals he had started to celebrate — largely from the left Catholic-Australian tradition, opposing a British interpretation of our history — really brought the ’90s movement into being, not vice versa. When the referendum was lost in 1999 there was no movement beneath it to sustain activity.
No bloody wonder. In the ’70s, Australia was still economically and industrially semi-independent, even if the whole system was wheezing a bit. We made our own shoes, clothes, cars and a selection of heavy machinery. Our food was under local brands. Cities were built by boards of works. Radio quotas kept Australian rock music in the public ear. TV quotas kept local studios going. Qantas was a source of real public pride. The Age and the SMH were regularly named as two of the 10 best newspapers in the world. Political independence would thus have been a completion of a real independence, in a more collective and solidaristic nation.
When Keating and Malcolm Turnbull brought back the idea of a republic, it was more like an episode of Minder, two spivs trying to sell us it out of the back of a car boot. Keating and Bob Hawke had destroyed local industry and privatised everything. The housing bubble-boom was taking off, union membership was plummeting. We were being subjected at a daily level to the flows of global capital and culture in a way we had previously been subjected to in a more collective fashion.
This categorical structural change in Australian life sucked the life out of the republican dream. What did it matter who was head of state, if the state was just a caretaker at the stock exchange and the obsequious host of Pine Gap?
That has only got worse in the past 20 years, and something else has come along: the “settler colonial thesis’ which first transformed the way Black and white academics thought of our history, and then spread to most First Nations writers and activists and many whites as well. The “settler colonial thesis” argues that colonialism isn’t over simply because of 1967; it perfuses the entire society, and First Nations’ relationship to the state. It leaves left nationalists with nothing they can advocate that people should attach to.
Many people who would prefer a republic — as opposed to actively, passionately wanting or working for one — want it as a further defeat of colonialism, not as an affirmation of a radical nationalism. The affirmation of such a nationalism, and its separate resistant traditions — strong unionism and struggle, outbreaks of independence of mind, a lack of ancient ceremony and the deference that comes with it, a relation to distinct landscape, and more — has now become suspect, and colonialist. This cultural shift on the left/progressive side has broken the continuity with radical traditions we could draw on as our own heritage, such as would fill a republican campaign, and an Australian presidency with meaning.
This application of the thesis became one-dimensional and disastrous for the left some time back. It has hollowed out our history to such a degree that the only way progressives can find some continuity is through ever more elaborate, and eventually, servile, “acknowledgment”. It’s obvious that this became appropriation some time ago, people who own $2 million houses telling you they’re on Woiwurrung country. Not many appear to be paying ground rent.
We’ve simply taken the richest heritage around, like we took the actual land that anchors it, because we needed it. The right still have their tradition; we don’t have its complement. They can celebrate Simpson and his donkey, and Gallipoli; pointing out that Simpson was a radical socialist and union organiser, who was anti-war even as he was at Gallipoli, doesn’t connect to anything. The Menzies Information Centre at Melbourne “University” is housed in the buildings the workers walked off building in 1856 to start the global eight-hour day campaign. The global campaign! But it is, per someone like Julianne Schultz in The Idea of Australia, white privilege and masculinist to celebrate it. On it goes.
So here is the absolute paradox we now face. If Charles III remains our king, and his governor-general our head of state, then it is simply a continuation of something no one chose. But if we imagine the sort of president that republicans would dream of — someone like David Pocock say, at the juncture of mainstream and progressive culture — then what would once have been his affirmative qualities, now fade behind the notion that an Anglo is being voluntarily, consciously installed as head of state, as the personified representative of who we are. That simply re-inscribes colonialism in an active way.
That lies at the heart of the problem for ARM. But there are others. The young are actively turning away from it, possibly because the world is so much in ceaseless flux in their daily culture that many are either utterly indifferent to the state or have some regard for monarchical anchoring, a sort of Game of Thrones made real. Many non-Anglo second-, third-, fourth-generation Australians are monarchist because they have family memory of what unanchored power looks like. As Osman Faruqi pointed out in the (much-shrunken) Age, the movement needs younger and more diverse faces. Hey, why not Faruqi? C’mon, someone give this man a job. It’s about time!
Such a change in personnel would surely help. The current line-up of ARM office bearers reads like the cast list of a Stan sitcom set in Whale Beach. Whether it would be enough remains to be seen. No it doesn’t. It isn’t. The couple of wonkish types in the ARM leadership are going to have to lead their colleagues to Gramsci, and the basic insight that culture is upstream of politics, and internal wars of position are sometimes necessary.
In preparation for a possible referendum five years ahead, ARM needs to fight an entirely different campaign from the political-institutional focus it has had for years. The messy, nasty fight has to be for an unashamedly direct reconnection to our positive historical conditions, which is going to mean a direct confrontation with the notion of saturating colonialism. Part of that will be finding multicultural traditions, sure — boy, the shade of Zelda D’Aprano will be doing a lot of heavy lifting — but there’s no avoiding it’s finding the general spirit in a country that was overwhelmingly Anglo for a long time.
We were the ones who made the eight-hour day. We resisted conscription. We made a life worth living for working people decades before most. We remade ourselves in 1948. We made the Mardi Gras from illegality to global celebration of love in a generation. We came together, Black and white, at Wave Hill to resist Vestey, a British agribusiness firm, denying Black people workers’ rights and land. It’s a question of making that “we” all of us. That’s five years’ work, just to establish that campaign.
That will be a hard fight, some of it against friends and comrades, and competing narratives. But you’re not making any progress unless you’re losing friends and comrades — that’s pretty much the sign of political progress. If some of this is making republicans squeamish about what such a campaign entails, then you may as well give up now, stop wasting our time.
There is no other path to a republic, and you have to do what should have been 20 years’ work in five. There is a path to victory, but only one, and this is it, and men must have legends lest they die of strangeness.
