A First Place

by David Malouf

  Equally important to our two worlds has been the separation of powers we inherited with the British system; and, most important of all, the fact that since the dissolution of Cromwell’s New Model Army in the 1650s, no political power has ever been accorded in our system to the military. When Australians occasionally play the game of alternative beginnings, of imagining an Australia that might have been French, for example, or Spanish, it is worth reminding them of something. That in failing to be French we missed out on four bloody revolutions, as well as French cuisine and Gallic stylishness and wit, and in failing to be Spanish spared ourselves an almost continuous history of coups by army factions and the rule of a series of brutal juntas. Stability may be dull, and our society may lack passion – fire in the belly as Manning Clark used to call it – but it does allow people breathing space – and if what this results in is a history without ‘interest’, it also produces fewer graves. There are not many nations in the world where authority has passed without bloodshed from one administration to the next for more than 150 years, as in our case, and more than 200 in the case of the United States. We owe this to the dullness of our British origins.

  This shared heritage has made the example of the United States an unusually close one. When it came to Federation, the American model was clearly one of the possibilities we might have followed, and for our Upper House we did take some elements from it. In recent arguments about the republic, the American model of a popularly elected president has seemed to many Australians the one we should in our own way reproduce.

  This use of American experience as a reference point for our own goes back to the very beginning.

  It was, for example, the British experience of convict transportation to Virginia that determined the new and very different way convicts were dealt with in New South Wales, and the British Government took great care at the beginning, but also later, not to reproduce in its relations with their Australian colonies the mistakes that had led to the loss of the American ones. This meant the establishment of freer conditions here, both for convicts and colonists.

  So did the decision, again a lesson learned from the United States, to use convict labour to do the hard work of establishing the colony rather than the labour of slaves. We were saved something in that. A convict, once he has served his time, is free; his children are born free. If the convict stain has remained hard to forget, and the brutalities, for some, even harder to forgive, it has not been carried down from generation to generation like the stain of slavery.

  But if the American model was there as one to be avoided, it also, in other ways, provoked expectations, a good many of which have proved delusory.

  The long search in the nineteenth century for an inland river system that would water the interior and provide a cheap means for the transportation of goods was based on the analogy of America. So was the idea of an Australia Unlimited, the confident expectation that by the end of the twentieth century Australia would rival and maybe even surpass the United States both in population and power. The hope died hard. When Professor Griffith Taylor, in 1911, made the abominable suggestion that by the year 2000 Australia might have a population of no more than twenty million, he was greeted by howls of patriotic rage and driven out of the country.

  Almost from the start, our relationship with America and Americans was a special one, a kind of fraternal twinship. The earliest contact was through the shared industries of whaling and sealing. Later, during the two decades of the gold rushes, there was the movement back and forth between here and California of an army of hungry gold-seekers.

  This meant not only an extraordinary exchange and mixing of populations, but the introduction into what had been a predominantly English and Irish place of American ways of speech, and folk songs come to us in their American version rather than in the original Irish or Scots. All this is part of a continuous cultural relationship, especially with the West Coast, that out of loyalty perhaps to our British origins we have allowed, in our accounting of these things, to be forgotten or suppressed.

  San Francisco and Sydney in the nineteenth century were already twin cities. The Lyster Opera Company for example, which for more than two decades after 1861 provided Sydney and Melbourne with regular opera seasons, had its home base in San Francisco. Australian vaudeville, which was still very much alive here until the late 1950s, was closer in style to American vaudeville than to English music hall; and American Country and Western music, after nearly a century of acclimatisation, has become in both senses of the term one of our liveliest indigenous arts. As early as 1827, Peter Cunningham, the convict-ships’ surgeon whose Two Years in New South Wales is one of the best accounts of life in the colony, writes of the many foreigners who had taken up residence in Sydney. He speaks of French and Germans and Italians, and goes on, ‘I had almost said Americans, but kindred ties prevent my ever proclaiming them as such’. The kindred tie persisted. When, not long after Federation, the new Australian Government invited the American Fleet to visit, the British had to be assured that this was not, as it clearly was, an attempt on our part to form our own Pacific ties.

  There is a sense in which the Australian East Coast and the West Coast of America can be seen as opposite banks of a shared body of water. The reflection back and forth is a strong one, as it has always been, especially if we look these days at the demographic make-up of the two places (the strong presence of Asians, for example, in both populations), or at the lifestyle – surf culture, gay culture, food. (What we call ‘modern Australian’ cuisine is very like what the Americans call Californian.)

  Once again the idea of ocean has been essential to how we define where we are and who it is we are most closely related to. In that shrinking of distance that is a characteristic of our world, even the Pacific, largest of oceans, has become a lake.

  All this complicates any argument we might need to make about the ‘superstitious valuation’ of Europe, or of our colonial link to Britain.

  Our fate has been more complex than the American one, as Henry James defined it, and was so from the start. The tension for us is not simply between the old world and the new, or even, as I have been suggesting, between new and newer.

  Unlike the Americans, we found ourselves in an opposite hemisphere to Europe, with contrary seasons, different plants and animals and birds, and different and disorientating stars overhead. This has meant a greater tension, for us, between environment or place on the one hand and on the other all the complex associations of an inherited culture. We have our sensory life in one world, whose light and weather and topography shapes all that belongs to our physical being, while our culture, the larger part of what comes to us through language for example, and knowledge and training, derives from another. This is indeed complex, though complexity is not an intolerable burden to minds as flexible as ours – or oughtn’t to be. We are amazing creatures, we humans. Our minds can do all sorts of tricks and somersaults. And this form of complexity, the paradoxical condition of having our lives simultaneously in two places, two hemispheres, may be just the thing that is most original and interesting in us. I mean, our uniqueness might lie just here, in the tension between environment and culture rather than in what we can salvage by insisting on either the one or the other.

  One of the ‘superstitious valuations’ I wanted to point to in Henry James’ definition of ‘complex fate’ was that of age as opposed to newness; a valuation, as we have experienced it here, that has sometimes made our 210 years seem too small a purchase on time to constitute a genuine history.

  But 210 years is not so short. Not if we think of it in terms of lives lived and of all the events and activities and passionate involvements that went into those lives: the things bought and sold, the ideas developed and given a new form, the work, the talk, all that is part of a single life in any single day and which, if we were to grasp the whole of it, we would have to multiply a million times over. Sometimes the only way we can get a sense of those lives, and all who lived them, is th
rough the objects that they made and handled. An ancient midden, an axe-head, a fragment of wall painting: it may be no more than that, as we know from the way such survivals bring alive for us the 40,000 years of Aboriginal presence in this place.

  The truth is that history, as we commonly conceive of it, is not what happened, but what gets recorded and told. Most of what happens escapes the telling because it is too common, too repetitious to be worth setting down. Even in places like this one where records are kept, the history that is in objects may need to be excavated and made visible before we can experience the richness it represents.

  When I was growing up fifty years ago, what I think of now as the iconography of Australia – the visual record of all that has been done and made here – had not yet been gathered and made visible. Compared with Europe, the local world we had come out of seemed empty and thin.

  Now, largely through the work of scholars and museum curators and editors, we can see that that world was not empty at all, but crowded with a making and doing as dense and productive as that of any other offshoot of an advanced civilisation. The evidence now is all about us. In town and country houses and grand public buildings; in country pubs and court houses and fire stations and old stone bridges, in barns, shearing sheds, bark huts; in the working landscape of ports. In all those necessary objects that make up our sort of living; bookcases and chaise longues and silver trophies and cast-iron railings and shoe buckles and biscuit tins. These things speak to us. They also speak for us, and for the many lives that lie behind us and lead up to us.

  And 200 years is not so short a time in the life of a city, if we set Sydney and Melbourne, for example, beside Washington or Chicago or Leeds – or, to choose European cities that had their major growth in much the same period, Budapest or Berlin.

  This business of making accessible the richness of the world we are in, of bringing density to ordinary, day-to-day living in a place, is the real work of culture. It is a matter for the most part of enriching our consciousness – in both senses of that word: increasing our awareness of what exists around us, making it register on our senses in the most vivid way, but also of taking all that into our consciousness and of giving it a second life there so that we possess the world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact. This has been especially important in the case of the land itself, and I mean by that everything that belongs to the land: its many forms as landscape, but also the birds, animals, trees, shrubs, flowers that are elements of its uniqueness; and most of all, the spirit of the land as it exists in all these things and can be touched and felt there.

  Painting can do that for us – we have a long history here of landscape painting. So, with its subtle response to light, can photography. But it is in and through the written word, and especially poetry, that the process works best. This perhaps is because reading is itself an interiorising activity, a matter of ‘taking things in’; perhaps because language, with its combination of image and rhythm, its appeal to the eye and to the way our bodies move, is continuous with some activity in us that involves, in the most immediate way, mind and body both.

  But the process is not always a simple one. Subtle adjustments may have to be made in the way we look at things before we can bring them within the range of our feelings and then, through words, give them a new life as consciousness.

  One of the most eloquent of our early writers is the explorer John Oxley. His Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, 1817–18 is the work of a man of real literary sensibility and an exuberant, if sometimes thwarted tendency to the romantic.

  So long as what lies before him is desolate plains, ‘deserts’ he calls them, we see him struggling to find words for their undifferentiated dullness and for his own disappointment in them both as explorer and writer.

  Country of this sort does not need the language he has brought along to describe it. It is unworthy of his generous range of ‘feeling’. Each night, like a dutiful schoolboy, he writes up in his journal the landscapes he has crossed. It is heavy going. Then his party gets into rugged mountain country. They see a river that ‘entered the glen’, he writes, ‘in a fall of vast height … A kangaroo was chased to the fall, down which it leapt and was dashed to pieces – like the hero’, he adds, ‘of Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well”’. This is on 14 September 1818.

  Next day, Oxley’s whole literary apparatus swings into action at last, and it is the appearance in the landscape of that literary ghost, the enabling image of Wordsworth’s hart, as much as the landscape itself, that brings the land he has encountered into the realm of what he can now express.

  ‘Quitting this place,’ he writes, ‘we proceeded up the glen, into which many streams fell from the most awful heights, forming so many beautiful cascades. After travelling five or six miles we arrived at that part of the river at which, after passing through a beautiful and level though elevated country, it is first received into the glen. We had seen fine and magnificent falls, each one of which excelled our admiration in no small degree, but the present one so surpassed anything we had previously conceived possible, that we were lost in admiration at the sight of this wonderful natural sublimity.’

  And there it is at last, the Australian sublime. No sense here of that ironic limiting of Australian possibility (which is also, oddly enough, associated with a kangaroo) in which the earliest of our poets, Barron Field, discovers that the only rhyme our language provides for the continent is ‘failure’.

  What Oxley reveals is as good an example as we might find, and one that is especially useful because it comes so early, of the way a landscape that at first seems unfamiliar and estranging, to lie outside any possibility of response, can be brought into the world of feeling so that it belongs at last to the man who has entered it, comes to exist for him, through the power of words, as a thing felt, and therefore fully seen at last, fully experienced and possessed.

  Writing in the 1960s, Judith Wright, who is our best reader of poetry as well as one of our finest poets, pointed out that ‘except for the wattle … there is very little mention of trees, flowers and birds by name or by recognisable description in Australian verse during the nineteenth and early twentieth century’. This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. They carried no charge of emotion. They had as yet played no part in the unfolding human drama. As we saw in the case of Oxley we may need to bring something to natural phenomena before they can reveal themselves to us. As Coleridge puts it, speaking of Nature itself: ‘Lady, we receive but what we give’.

  In writing of Christopher Brennan and the flowers he uses in his poetry, Judith Wright notes that they have a purely literary provenance. These roses and lilies are the flowers of Swinburne and Tennyson, ‘not the familiar and unsung flowers of his new country – flowers which had as yet no ritual or symbolic significance and no meaningful associations in literature, even in the minds of his Australian countrymen’.

  In fact, by the time Judith Wright was writing this, in 1963, it was no longer true. But only because the poets of her generation – she herself, pre-eminently, but also Douglas Stewart, David Campbell and Roland Robinson, and, when it comes to sea creatures, John Blight – had created a body of poetry in which all the common phenomena of our Australian world – flowers and trees and birds, and helmet shells and ghost crabs and bluebottles – had been translated out of their first nature into the secondary and symbolic one of consciousness, in that great process of culture, and also of acculturation, that creates a continuity at last between the life without and the life within. It is one of the ways – a necessary one – by which we come at last into full possession of a place. Not legally, and not just physically, but as Aboriginal people, for example, have always possessed the world we live in here: in the imagination. And I should just add that I am not suggesting this as yet another an
d deeper move in the long process of appropriating the continent and displacing its original owners, but as a move towards what is, in effect, a convergence of indigenous and non-indigenous understanding, a collective spiritual consciousness that will be the true form of reconciliation here. The convergence will take place in the imagination, and imagination is essential to it, as Judith Wright saw more than thirty years ago. And poetry is one of the first places where we see it in the making.

  Earlier Australian poetry, even the best of Henry Kendall, had scarcely attempted this. The Bulletin writers of the 1890s, to quote Judith Wright again, had turned poetry here away from the possibilities of ‘philosophy and interpretiveness towards simplicity, vigour and colloquialism’, or towards ‘sociable yarning’, as another critic puts it, ‘with a group of mates’. This was poetry of the outward life, of the soul in action, of Paterson’s Clancy of the Overflow and The Man from Snowy River. It took another forty years, and a poet of great originality – and considering what had gone before, of extraordinary daring – to write a poem that broke out of these manly restrictions and dived inward, claiming for poetry the right to be inward, to be difficult, even obscure, so that the poem might speak for itself at last and get into words what had not yet come to consciousness, what was still ‘feeling its way to air’. The poet was Kenneth Slessor; the poem ‘South Country’.