The Idea of Australia: A Search For the Soul of a Nation. Julianne Schultz. Allen & Unwin.
Not so well known as it once was, the “whither Australia?” book. For decades, from the 1880s onwards, it was a staple of Australian publishing, culminating in the one example most people know, or know of: Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Aside from a few stragglers in the ’80s and ’90s, the final flurry was in the ’70s, with book titles like Whither God’s Own You Beaut Land or somesuch, and a cover photo of an R.M. Williams boot crushing a beer can in front of a white scrim (no Photoshop then; getting it right would have taken most of a slab).
The most celebrated practitioner from the conservative side was a crotchety bloke named Ronald Conway, author of Land of the Long Weekend, a real intellectual celebrity in his day, whose posthumous unmasking as a serial paedophile rather took the gloss off the approach. By that time, decades of multicultural immigration had fractured both reality and image of a unified land, and the start of the knowledge class/mainstream split was creating two disjunctive value systems. Since the values of that proto-knowledge class included “not co-opting other peoples’ experiences or assimilating them to a generalised whole”, the “whither Australia” book fell into abeyance replaced by sectional accounts, which refused notions of a country as a whole that could be synthesised.
There is thus a grand paradox at the heart of Griffith Review editor Julianne Schultz’s attempt to revive the genre, The Idea of Australia: A Search For the Soul of a Nation, since Schultz is uncomplicatedly an advocate of any attempt to assimilate section experience to the whole. For example, the conservative attempt to wrap up First Nations peoples’ experience as ultimately, despite suffering and oppression, part of the Australian rise to justice — “We are one, but we are many… ” etc, etc — is part of a long history of silencing and forgetting. How then can the boomer daughter of a Lutheran pastor pull off such a book?
The answer is that unless you agree with her very specific formulation of how the parts fit together — and this reviewer does not — you can’t, and the book decomposes into several volumes that contradict one another and that do not even remotely try to find the nation’s soul. The master idea is pretty much that Australia is at its best when it is turned outwards to the world, and inward only to First Nations peoples, and defines its present through the process of self-criticism of the past.
Alas, from 1788 on, we have mostly been consumed by fear — of the outside world, of the people we oppressed to colonise the place — and with that comes an inwardness and wilful blindness, resulting in a stunting self-satisfaction. That argument I would suggest is not only not proven, but actively undermined by much of the history that Schultz adduces to her case.
Thus the book collapses into several: one is a survey of Australia over the past 30 years; another is an inquiry into the history of Australian institutions, back to 1788; another is a personal memoir of growing up with a view of Anglo-Australia through a Germanic, and rather isolated, child/youth’s-eye view; and another still is an account of the survival near culture-death, and resistance and renewal of Australia’s First Nations peoples against invasion and colonisation. This last passage is held to implicitly determine the meaning of Australia for non-Indigenous people; a popular approach in the era of the utter dominance of the settler-colonialist thesis. It does so even when the white response is silence or ignorance.
With a work this ambitious, the more seasoned (old, defeated) reviewer reminds oneself to avoid turning someone else’s decade of work into an occasion for cheap shots. You read, get irritated by an asinine judgment or a pompous phrase, get up, walk around the book, and sit down again. I had to do a few turns of the room to walk out much of the arrogance, saviourism, elitism and misconstruction of this version of our continent-nation.
The spine of it is the deep history, but let’s start with Schultz’s account of the past 30 years. There is a serviceable enough institutional history here, of politics since the early ’90s, and one has to remind oneself that much of it will be new to anyone under 50. But it is wrapped up in the conventional knowledge class two-step: a Keatingolatry, made possible by ignoring much of what St Paul actually did, and centring on what he aspired to; and a Howard demonology, in which his decade-long success is taken, in the last analysis, to be a sleight of hand, dependent on piping to the surface the subterranean fear-swamp on which we live.
Keating, we are told, turned the economy “outward to face the world, and a social compact had ensured that the excesses of neoliberal economics were curtailed by targeted income support, increased educational opportunities superannuation for all and more equal opportunities … he sketched a vision that: ‘our children … will employ [their inheritance] not as an enclave marooned on an abundant island, but as a nation with a destiny flowing from the most generous benefaction of history'”.
“By contrast,” Schultz argues, “John Howard’s [1996] stump speech accentuated the negative.”
That is the knowledge-class party line, and it emphasises a deep flaw of the book: the absolute incuriosity about the thinking and values of millions of “everyday” Australians, as compared to the values people such as Schultz think they should have. Many, many Australians in 1996 saw it the other way round: it was Howard whose “comfortable and relaxed” approach encouraged Australians to be more positive about who they had collectively turned out to be.
It was Keating who had, in less than half a dozen years as prime minister, eviscerated the industrial core of the capital cities most of us live in; rendered a working class that had once led the world in progressive struggle surplus to requirements; imposed a slashing budget of them when improbably reelected in 1993; saw inequality yawn wide (“superannuation for all”? Where?); and simultaneously began a campaign of enforced cultural nationalism, founded on middlebrow expression mistaken for high culture — concert pianism, Kokodalotry — to which many were indifferent.
These are the judgments of a former AFR journalist who believes herself to be centre-left, but is centre-right economically and a postmodern liberal on cultural matters — pretty much the standard neoliberal framework of our time. That in turn leads her to give a distorted account of the mainline of our history.
We were an Anglo-Celtic society whose pulse, post genocide and ethnic cleansing, was the struggle to make, for the greatest number of people, a place that enshrined the “positive freedom” that society should guarantee a life worth living. This was first at the root of the doctrine of protection, and then of the labour movement as it became independent and set a national, then global, agenda — most strikingly through the 1907 Harvester judgment. Here’s Schultz:
The dirty little truth about the Australian attachment to fairness is that it has always been partial. It was not long after Federation that a social contract was struck with white Australian men to ensure a minimum standard of living for most. It was a bit like mateship. You choose your mates. You look out for them, rather than committing to an all encompassing principle of liberte, egalite, fraternite.
Yes, what could mateship have to do with fraternite? Quite aside from that solecism, the judgment on the judgment is nasty, ignorant and stupid. Harvester was based on Pope Leo XII’s “rerum novarum” of 1893, and the notion that the state had a duty to guarantee living conditions for men and their families. Yes, it was familialist, because the culture was. But far from prizing isolated mateship, it turned men back towards their family obligation. In its extension, not of fairness — it actually entrenched hierarchy — but of the principle of a meaningful and secure life, to a particular group, was the embryo of a universalism.
Schultz later praises Louisa Lawson and Vida Goldstein as bringing a new feminine spirit to politics around Federation, not realising, it seems, that both were socialists first and feminists second, and saw material politics, as everyone did, as necessarily prior to the politics of gender relations — that Schultz anachronistically applies, in any case.
This disdain for such a collective achievement is the root error of Schultz’s judgment: the idea that notions of protection, security and bordering within our history are purely a product of fear — fear of the outside, and of the return of the repressed knowledge of what we have done within our borders. In fact, they are themselves the active expression of a positive set of values, held to guarantee a good life, and that shared belief has been what it is to be Australian for most of our history.
But that is an easy thing for Schultz to elide because the actual Australian people make almost no appearance in this book. In a search for the soul of the country, there is almost nothing about (a partial list): the suburbs and how we made and live in them; the inner cities and how they changed; what it was to feel oneself simultaneously British and Australian, in the decades to the ’60s; football and sport and its meaning for us (save for a section on Adam Goodes and racism); a consideration of both the popular and middlebrow culture (Indigenous expression aside) that, judging by its popularity, expressed something of us — no The Slap, The Castle, Fat Pizza, Ion Idriess, Cold Chisel, Love Serenade, The Big Pineapple, the Deni Ute Muster (whatever that is); and nothing of the highbrow response to our national condition: no Gerald Murnane, no Glenn Murcutt, no Peter Booth, no Inga King.
There is little about the momentous transformation of Australian culture by the post-1948 arrival of Meditteranean people of all nationalities, pretty much save for a sneering, incorrect reference to Arthur Calwell’s alleged preference for blond, blue-eyed Balts. It’s the exact opposite: the Balts were landed first to get an Anglo-Celtic monoculture accustomed to the idea of “new Australians”. There was never any doubt the bulk of immigrants would be olive-skinned. You may call that trick a little sleazy, but “preference”? Nah.
There is, instead, a namechecking of the “brilliant” people who left and the “brilliant” young people coming up, for whom this largely absent, actual Australia functions as a backdrop. There’s nothing on the TV we watched and how it expressed and shaped us; there are about 20 pages on Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Grace Tame (Schultz is even more obsessed with the latter than I am). Good people both, but an utterly distorted apportionment of a book exploring a nation’s soul.
Where there is something more visceral, it comes from the third book, Schultz’s life, in various rural parishes, and then in mediaworld Sydney, although even among the effective pen portraits and stories there is self-parody — as when a struggle by harbourfront apartment owners to regain access to a beach privatised by richer residents is compared to the first encounter here of 1788. Yes, Julianne, that must have been exactly what 1788 was like.
That last is an uncommon note, because the book’s treatment of First Nations history is so extensive as to verge on the unctuous. With lived Anglo-Celtic and migrant Australia largely a vacuum, a First Nations history fills it, in a manner that suggests not merely attention towards something silenced and neglected, but the idea that the history of settler Australia is so utterly corrupted, its culture and life so born of negative and defensive response, that the only story that can be told is the First Nations’ one. This is more or less admitted to in the first chapter:
Why do odd fears and threats lie dormant for decades only to bubble to the surface, like groundwater from the vast Artesian Basin? … In searching for answers, I had to dig further into the history I thought I knew: to reconsider the legacies of invasion, settlement and Federation …
She does more than that. First Nations history is so overwhelmingly drafted in to substitute for the absent Anglo-Celtic and European-migrant history, that it is effectively assimilated as our essence.
In one passage, typical of the strategy, Schultz twins Bob Hawke and the 1983 America’s Cup win, with the history of the Yirrkala bark petitions of the time. The former is barely touched on, and the most important moment of it — a prime minister saying “any boss who sacks someone for not turning up today is a bum!” — omitted. The bark petitions become our lost soul of the era. Well, it’s of moment, but most Australians will know nothing at all of it, and it will never have been a presence in their lives in any way. Millions, however, remember the day of the America’s Cup win and Hawke’s remark and the sense of fun and collectivity it generated. There was some co-option about what a great Aussie bloke Alan Bond was, etc, but most of it was simply the pleasure of the cheek of it, knocking off our American cousins at a race they’d rigged to win forever.
I would suggest that in few other cultures of the world would the prime minister have semi-declared a wild-cat holiday, and the fact that it was even possible would tell you a lot about who we were then, and whether we still are that now. But Schultz has no interest in it. In place of its slight blokiness and mild hypocrisy — it turned out, for some people, “Bob said so” did not count as a defence against sacking — she substitutes the event she wishes had significance for the mass of Australians.
Much of the book is like that. It is particularly strange because many First Nations activists and writers do not want to be considered “Australian” in any simple, single and uncomplicated notion. Full citizens of this polity at this time, yes. But of some essence derived therefrom? Nuh-uh. Schultz is surely guilty of that particular mode of colonisation, drawing on First Nations history for rich and compacted meanings that the atomised settler present makes inaccessible to Anglo-Celtics. It is a very odd, and increasingly common, process. Indeed it appears to have become one of the principal drivers of the now near-universal practice of “acknowledgement”, which involves granting everything to First Nations peoples about the land we occupy, except some of the land itself.
The book is, in that sense, a manifesto for the elite “command” section of the knowledge class, and the roll-call of people Allen & Unwin persuaded to endorse it, and shows that a full-court press is underway to push something lacking a sufficiently strong driving idea into the world. Some of the people endorsing it are dimwits, some are part of the Griffith Review crowd, and a few are historians from the labour and radical left who really should have read it more carefully and been circumspect about boosting something that pretty much trashes the argument of their own work, academic and activist.
The dilemma for any account of the soul of a nation founded on genocide, one that genuinely cleared a space, is that they, we, lived and made lives with little present reference to what had come before. To argue that such persists as a social and political unconscious is reasonable enough. But you’ve got to work through the actual conscious to see what it was that the unconscious might be whispering to.
Ah, look, the book has fine writing on Schultz’s German-Australian history, and has deeply felt and documented accounts of the First Nations/settler encounter over two centuries. In a way, it’s a good enough book with the wrong title and a misleading first chapter. But if you are going to try for the soul-of-the-nation thing, you have to face the grisly task of writing about people who did not much mind that genocide had occurred, and kept on not minding for the seven decades of a whole life and beyond.
If you can’t face that, fair enough, but don’t claim someone’s else’s history for the one you can’t tell. There is a touch of the academic graverobber about it. We were mostly Sunnyboys and AC/DC, the quarter-acre block and flat whites, demarcation disputes and Wogs Out of Work, cattle and cane and “Cattle and Cane” — and if those particularities appear to you to be silly or of no interest (certainly insufficient to make it into this book) then your sense of us was less “whither?” than withered, the old tree dead pushing through the dirt once again.
