by David Malouf
It is true that we are important and powerful. What we do has an effect in the world quite out of proportion to our numbers. But there are millions of Indians and Chinese – Africans, too – who know as little of us as we do of them. They look about and in the world they see we are invisible. There is a whole other consciousness, Islam for example, in which history – now, I mean, but also the future – has a quite different shape from the one we find ourselves in, and keeps no special place for us.
The fact is that for most of the men and women who crowd our planet, even the minority of them who share our calendar, 1 January 1990 isn’t a date, the beginning of a new year or decade, but a day like any other, belonging to weather rather than history, and to work, the repetitive, monotonous, inescapable routines of a rice crop, wheat crop, dairy herd, or to olive or date or poppy or maize harvests; or it is another twenty-four hours of trying to stay alive on the pavements of Calcutta or Sao Paolo or New York. It takes affluence and leisure (paid holidays), but also a high degree of selfconsciousness, to see your life in the sort of literary perspective that demands a term like ‘the eighties’. But here we are.
Of course there is a place in our head, or bowels, where we too live in immediate sensation and event; where we are under the pressure of moments rather than decades; where we exist, not in the twentieth century even but in our ears, eyes, breath, and among the same needs and hopes and panic fears that have moved men and women at all times everywhere.
It is worth reminding ourselves of that, too, since so much of what is created on TV – but also in the part of our consciousness that belongs to dates and decades and bicentenaries – is meant to save us from the reality of our own experience; to make us believe that time, as it opens before us, is not a field of continuous and potentially dangerous being, in which history is what we are doing now, but a space for commemorating what others have done, one, two, ten centuries ago.
So 1988 is the bicentenary of white settlement in Australia, 1989 of the taking of the Bastille. Fashion revives the fifties, the forties, the 1890s. Post-modernism – that conservatism in smart modern dress – elects itself the curator of a vast echo chamber or mind museum where the past is ransacked, de-structured, recycled in a brilliant display of allusion that shifts the exhibits into new and striking juxtapositions. Re-enactment replaces being and a selfconscious knowingness the difficult and demanding business of exploring the unknown. We may not know who we are or where we are going, but we do know, when it comes to decades and centuries, what we are at the end of.
This taking of the long view flatters our intelligence and gives us a fine illusion of power, because it places us so firmly in the line of those who have made history.
But it deprives us of something, too. It deprives us of a belief in our own lives, our real present and presence in the world, and it robs us of the real past as well by reducing what was, in its own time, open and dangerous (the French Revolution for example) to mere spectacle. A muddled and muddling present that was once a matter of hope and terror and suspense, ideas that had a real form as blood, guts, sweat, acts of emancipation and murder, noble aspirations, deep disillusion – all these are turned into theatre, with everything that is difficult to swallow in them, or refractory or problematical, squeezed out in the interests of a bland consensus that will allow us – 500 million or 600 million of us – to enjoy it all on a 21-inch screen, between the ads for Mitsubishi and Safe Sex.
One of the many astonishments of this past year, when events struck back and showed once again their capacity to run away with us, is the way 1989 was hijacked by men and women who were determined to make it their year, and to create history rather than passively commemorate it.
The abiding image of 1989 is not the ideologically safe and trendy one of a black woman, draped in the tricolour and singing at dirge-like speed all three, or was it nine, verses of La Marseillaise, but the students in Tiananmen Square, and the vast crowds in all the squares of Eastern Europe, who assembled not to re-experience history as entertainment but to take it by the throat and shake the life out of it.
We need to tread warily when we come to defining ‘the eighties’. Which eighties, where?
There are years, 1789 for one, 1989 too as it happened, that have a nasty habit of disintegrating decades and sometimes whole centuries in an explosion of unpredicted and unpredictable action, while all the rest of us were doing was punching out pin-numbers at the Flexiteller or partying on.
Here then is a checklist, for which readers can provide their own notes, of some names and terms that were unknown a decade ago or had quite other associations, a kind of dictionary of the eighties.
Under A: acid house parties, aerobics, AIDS; under C: Chernobyl, child abuse, condom, consensus, corruption … and so on through deregulation, ‘dob in a you-name-it’, Ecstasy, fundamentalism, Gorbachev, insider trading, J-curve; to privatisation, Rat parties, supergrass, Uluru, video-clips, white-collar crime, yuppies. It is, on the whole, a depressing parade, or would be if it wasn’t itself such an example of eighties modishness.
One of the paradoxes of the eighties is that in being so resolutely and profoundly superficial it was never quite what it seemed. For all its shoulder-shrugging cynicism, its unapologetic selfishness and cupidity, its Brasserie News and Business News and shabby glitz, this decade has seen some of the most radical shifts of consciousness of any in our century. The open face of the eighties may be docile and conservative but its secret face has been revolutionary. We have been forced, against our will as always, to take the full weight of our experience, which does not lead, as we might hope, to a safe and self-protective knowingness, but to what it always was: muddle and immersion in the immediate, the unknown, the creative/destructive element, none of it optional and none of it to be taken – in a typical phrase of the eighties – as simply a ‘learning’ experience.
So in what way revolutionary? What ‘shifts of consciousness’?
There was a time, not so long ago, when we lived, even the richest of us, in a world where the body was a paradoxical entity, to be treated by modern standards in a rough and ready way, without fuss but with an awareness always of its absolute vulnerability. Ordinary life was full of risk. Women died in childbirth or, as men did too, of blood-poisoning or pneumonia. Children died of whooping cough or diphtheria or polio, and as barefoot kids in Brisbane we kept a good lookout for rusty nails. In the world outside, smallpox was raging and we bore the scars of our immunity. We all knew that more people had died – uncles, aunts, neighbours – in the world flu epidemics of 1919 and 1922 than in the Great War.
This common vulnerability made us see our bodies, and our lives, in a particular way, and the presence among us of killer viruses made us see our relationship to one another too in a particular way: we were vitally connected. A writer like Dickens could use smallpox in Bleak House as a secret agent connecting all the disparate social worlds of his novel, a real agent but an image as well of the hidden relationships it was the role of his plot to lay bare. The world Dickens was writing of was the world we were still living in as late as 1944.
But the appearance of antibiotics after the war removed most of the risks – at least where we lived. Death from anything other than old age, or road accidents or domestic murder, came to seem an unnatural thing, a violation of what was orderly and expected. For forty years or so we learned to see our bodies as places that science had made safe for us, areas of play, and our connection with others as socially or sexually optional.
Of course this was true only of some places; elsewhere people went on being subjected to the same old risks, or most of them, so that when AIDS appeared among them it wasn’t a new and incomprehensible thing, as it has been with us, but one more of the many ills that might at any moment carry you off.
There is nothing good to be said of AIDS. But the change it has made in our awareness of what the body is, and how we are connected, is worth pointing to. It marks, in one sense, a return to normal. That for
ty years was an anomaly, it was freakish. The norm is risk. We’re back again with mortality and interconnectedness, and the reality of this imposes itself equally on the hard-line moralists among us and the libertarian sensualists. No-one is off the hook. The world of the seventies is gone and seems as remote and exotic now as the age of Pericles.
When the great powers launched their space programs back in the fifties, those new stars or satellites, and later the moon-shots and planet-shots, seemed no more than extensions into an extraterrestrial arena of our global politics; another boyish form – all wars, as Melville says, are boyish – of the Cold War. Even later, when men did actually walk on the moon, it was difficult for most of us to see any more in all this than a playful exercise in human curiosity, ingenuity and love of adventure; it was hard to believe, I mean, that it was a genuine attempt to establish new colonies or new areas of human habitation.
Space-fever has cooled off in this decade, but paradoxically its real importance has revealed itself and is enhanced. What all that swashbuckling was about, or so it now appears, was not man in space but our planet in space. The real message was in the pictures that came back, those impressive but poignant images of a lonely sphere in orbit out there, seen as from far off, with all its oceans and continents just as we knew them on some schoolroom globe we could set spinning with a finger – as close and familiar as that, but seen now as God might see it, so that we could grasp it, finally, in two senses at once: in all its closeness as something we could get our hands around, an object about the same size as a human head, but objectively as well, in all its immensity out there, but with the immensity so diminished by distance that that too was ‘graspable’.
Maps, if we can read them, tell us where we are on the surface of the globe. We have got used to that. But what this new thing told us was something different. It did not set us on an extensive surface. It made the planet and our awareness of it co-extensively one.
What we were being prepared for by all that space-adventuring was an apprehension that may be essential now to our survival, and to the survival of the planet itself: a vision of where we are, and all it involves in the way of loyalty and affection and concern, as ‘global’, and the problems we have to resolve as equally ‘global’. The awareness is evolutionary, and the rapidity with which it has occurred is as astonishing, and as indicative of what is human and remarkable in us, as the moon-walk itself.
The other changes we have seen, so many of them in the past six months, in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but also in the relative shift in power between Europe and the United States, are too new and extraordinary – too obvious as well – to be more than pointed at and marvelled over.
Only a crank or madman could have predicted a decade ago what has been happening daily in these past weeks: the work of cranks and madmen pulled down at last by ordinary citizens. History was the privilege of tyrants and their treasonous clerks. Now whole worlds and systems come tumbling down that we had been told were the product of a history that could not be resisted because it was inevitable and necessary. Events have taken care of that as well, and there is more to come. To try to predict what it might be is for cranks, madmen and those who have learned nothing, this past year, of how events can shift the ground under our heels.
Sydney Morning Herald,
‘Summer Agenda’, 27 December 1989
A SPIRIT OF PLAY
THE MAKING OF AUSTRALIAN CONSCIOUSNESS
1
The Island
LOOKING DOWN THE LONG LINE of coast this morning, I see the first rays of the sun strike Mount Warning and am aware, as the light floods west, what a distance it is to the far side of our country – two time zones and more than 3000 kilometres away, yet how easily the whole landmass sits in my head. As an island or, as I sometimes think of it, a raft we have all scrambled aboard, a new float of lives in busy interaction: of assembly lines and highways, of ideals given body as executives and courts, of routine housekeeping arrangements and objects in passage from hand to hand. To comprehend the thing in all its action and variety and contradiction is a task for the imagination, yet this morning, as always, it is simply there, substantial and ordinary.
When Europeans first came to these shores one of the things they brought with them, as a kind of gift to the land itself, was something that could never previously have existed: a vision of the continent in its true form as an island, which was not just a way of seeing it, and seeing it whole, but of seeing how it fitted into the world, and this seems to have happened even before circumnavigation established that it actually was an island. No group of Aboriginal Australians, however ancient and deep their understanding of the land, can ever have seen the place in just this way.
It has made a difference. If Aborigines are a land-dreaming people, what we latecomers share is a sea-dreaming, to which the image of Australia as an island has from the beginning been central.
This is hardly surprising. Sydney, in its early days was first and foremost a seaport; all its dealings were with the sea. Our earliest productive industries were not wheat-growing or sheep-raising but whaling and sealing. It took us nearly thirty years to cross the first land barrier. Right up to the end of the nineteenth century our settlements were linked by coastal steamer, not by road or rail. In his sonnet ‘Australia’, Bernard O’Dowd speaks of Australia’s ‘virgin helpmate, Ocean’, as if the island continent were mystically married to its surrounding ocean as Venice was to the Adriatic.
As the off-shoot of a great naval power we felt at home with the sea. It was an element over which we had control; more, certainly, than we had at the beginning over the land. It was what we looked to for all our comings and goings, for all that was new – for news. And this sense of being at home with the sea made distances that might otherwise have been unimaginable seem shorter. It brought Britain and Europe closer than 10,000 miles on the globe might have suggested, and kept us tethered, for longer than we might otherwise have been, by sea-routes whose ports of call, in the days before air travel, constituted a litany of connection that every child of my generation knew by heart. Distance is not always a matter of miles. Measured in feelings it can redefine itself as closeness.
And this notion of an island continent, contained and containable, had other consequences.
Most nations establish themselves through a long series of border conflicts with neighbours. This is often the major thrust of their history. Think of the various wars between Germany and France, or Russia and Poland, or of British history before the Union of the Crowns.
Australia’s borders were a gift of nature. We did not have to fight for them. In our case, history and geography coincided, and we soon hit upon the idea that the single continent must one day be a single nation. What this means is that all our wars of conquest, all our sources of conflict, have been internal.
Conquest of space to begin with, in a series of daring explorations of the land, which were also acts of possession different from the one that made it ours merely in law. This was possession in the form of knowledge; by naming and mapping, by taking its spaces into our heads, and at last into our imagination and consciousness.
Conquest of every form of internal division and difference: conquest of the original possessors, for example, in a war more extensive than we have wanted to recognise. Later, there was the attempted resolution, through an act of Federation, of the fraternal division between the states; and, longer lasting and less amenable of solution, of the conflict, once Federation had been achieved, between the states and the Federal Government. Also, more darkly, suppression, in acts of law-making and social pressure and through subtle forms of exclusion, of all those whom we have, at one time or another, declared to be outsiders among us, and in their various ways alien, even when they were Australians like the rest.
That early vision of wholeness produced a corresponding anxiety, the fear of fragmentation, and for too long the only answer we had to it was the imposition of a deadening conformity.
Many of the ideas that have shaped our life here, and many of the themes on which our history has been argued, settle around these notions of isolation and containment, of wholeness and the fear of fragmentation. But isolation can lead to stagnation as well as concentrated richness, and wholeness does not necessarily mean uniformity, though that is how we have generally taken it. Nor does diversity always lead to fragmentation.
As for the gift of those natural, indisputable borders, that too had a cost. It burdened us with the duty of defending them, and the fear, almost from the beginning, that they may not, in fact, be defendable.
Our first settlements outside Sydney, at Hobart in 1804 and Perth in the 1820s, were made to forestall the possibility of French occupation (and it seems Napoleon did plan a diversionary invasion for 1804). Then, at the time of the Crimean War, it was the Russians we had to keep an eye on. The Russian fleet was just seven days sailing away at Vladivostok. And then, from the beginning of this century, the Japanese.
This fear of actual invaders, of being unable to defend our borders, led to a fear of other and less tangible forms of invasion. By people, ‘lesser breeds without the Law’, who might sully the purity of our stock. By alien forms of culture that might prejudice our attempt to be uniquely ourselves. By ideas, and all those other forms of influence, out there in the world beyond our coast, that might undermine our morals or in various other ways divide and unsettle us. All this has made little-islanders of us; has made us decide, from time to time, to close ourselves off from influence and change, and by settling in behind our ocean wall, freeze and stop what has been from the beginning, and continues to be, a unique and exciting experiment.