A Life To Live...

by Israel Kipen

  For me, this alone would have sufficed. But there was more still that excited me that seemed unique to Australia, a dimension of Australian life that had been consecrated through its history, conserved through its increasing self-sufficiency, and protected and consolidated through its geography. That was the concept of mateship. Enshrined in European culture and its associated social protocols and courtesies were attitudes of distance and deference between people. Sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, partitions kept individuals and classes apart. Whether one addressed another as Monsieur, Herr, Pan, Gospodin or other similar appellation, one was not permitted more than to follow it with that other’s surname. English etiquette required that a letter was to be headed “Dear Sir” and that verbal address was in the form of “Sir”. One could only write “Dear Mr Brown” if one had actually met Mr Brown. In Russia, one addressed a person one knew by his or her first name followed by the patronymic. In Japan, one’s name wore the suffix “san” as a mark of respect. In formal matters, Australia had continued to employ the British “Sir”, but the broader mass of people, in the main, dispensed with such artificial and divisive protocols. The next man was a “bloke” or a “mate”, whether one knew him or not. Unused to this, I found such informality difficult to adjust to, both in the receiving and in the reciprocating. My deeply-ingrained deference to a stranger, coupled with my early sense of insecurity or uncertainty as a newcomer, made me nervous and ill at ease with such “unnatural” means of human intercourse. Even today, more than four decades after my first encounter with this national trait, I have not yet mastered this informality in the folksy sense indigenous to the people. The European influence continues to lurk deep within me, holding me back from fully crossing the threshold of those opened doors.

  Historically, similar means of ease of social interaction had been attempted before and in other places. The French Revolution had introduced the appellation “Citizen”; the Russian Revolution had brought in “Tovaritsch”, that is, “Comrade”. Each, in essence, was akin to the concept: “mate”. But truth was that the new phraseology, in its artificiality, was both empty and irrelevant. I had both seen and heard low-ranking individuals address their superiors in keeping with the new revolutionary dictate, yet tremble in their boots before them even as they used the title “Comrade”. Where Australia differed radically was in the spontaneity with which a stranger could call another “Mate” and act with an out-going friendship and helpfulness as if to confirm that he truly meant it. In time, I learnt other expressions that basically meant the same as “mate”. But the word that intrigued me most was “cobber” because of its similarity in both sound and meaning to the Hebrew chaver. I was later to learn that cobber was indeed derived from chaver, this indicating, however indirectly, of the presence of Jews among Australia’s early settlers and of their contribution to the egalitarian idea of mateship in the harsh conditions that had then prevailed.

  On recalling how my high-school Polish literature teacher had insisted on being called “Professor”, and having heard a Frenchman at an international conference being introduced in the same way when he, too, was but a high-school teacher, I have learned to understand and value the Australian spontaneity and distaste for pretentiousness all the more. At times, however, it has seemed that Australians had gone overboard in accentuating its egalitarianism and liberty-taking informalities. What is worthy of note is that the world at large has changed, while the stiffness and formalities that have for so long been part of social intercourse everywhere have increasingly been more relaxed as bridges for human understanding and rapprochement have been laid down between peoples.

  Though hailing from a city, I had come from an essentially agrarian country. Poland’s population was overwhelmingly rural; its economy was largely rural-based. Therefore, at first glance, I had no difficulty in countenancing the existence of a large rural element in Australia – which had for long identified itself as an agricultural and pastoral society. However, on closer analysis, my Polish experience had not prepared me for the existing antipodean realities which were so different from my till-then accepted norms. In Poland, the land-workers, the peasantry, was poor, while rural living was synonymous with deprivation, backwardness, illiteracy and ignorance, and with naive susceptibility to exploitation by the city folk with whom they traded. My image of the peasant may have become a stereotyped one, but the sight of one such peasant walking to church on a Sunday morning with his shoes dangling from his neck until he reached the churchyard has remained with me as a vivid symbol of the Polish peasantry as a class. What first struck me as different in Australia was the fact that when people spoke about men on the land, they did not do so with any tone of compassion or sympathy for an unfortunate, deprived and helpless class. Rather, they did so as if those men of the land constituted an elite. This emerged repeatedly, whether in the newspapers, or on radio, or in political discussions. People on the land were equated with wealth, power and self-assumed meritocracy. To a newcomer with a background so patently different from a multitude of things I was encountering in Australia, this constituted yet another intriguing puzzle. Part of the solution was easy enough to assemble. Australia was an enormous land mass with a population of only 7 million, compared with 33 million in pre-War Poland settled in an area that, by comparison with Australia, was very diminutive. The Australian farmer, therefore, had certain objective factors in his favour. But even that could not be all, I reasoned, to explain the high-ground he held in society, nor his self-assurance, nor the attention and deference accorded him by the urban sector. The fuller solution came to me one day as, on emerging from my office in Oxford Chambers, I caught sight of a new poster that had been placed in the showcase of the old Dalgety’s adjacent building. The poster depicted a fat, heavily-woollen lamb, beneath which a bold-lettered inscription ran: “AUSTRALIA’S WELL-BEING RIDES ON THE SHEEP’S BACK”. I studied that poster a while, trying with my limited English to comprehend its meaning. In the end, I understood, and, in understanding, felt myself initiated into one of Australia’s semi-hidden truths. Seeking to understand more of the rural dimension of Australian life, I was told stories of wealth and power, of a class that was competent and confident in its competence, of folk who, pitted against the elements, reaped whatever benefits nature had to offer, even while tackling, and usually mastering, the ravages incurred by bushfires and floods, rainless seasons and soil erosion. I was told, too, of the country’s primary industries – wool, wheat, barley, grain, dairy foods, fruit and cattle; I listened to stories of golden crops and the silos to store them; I learned of a railway system geared to serve an agrarian economy; and heard of a shipping network carrying the land’s produce to all corners of the world. There was fascination to be had in those tales I collected of families who owned a quarter of a million acres of land, or of jackaroos and their nomadic escapades, of month-long fence-mending activities, of the accumulation of wealth, Rolls Royces and Jaguars, and of the country-man’s own distinctive pecking order and value system so different from urban norms. A whole exotic mythology had been constructed about this landed aristocracy. It lived by its own rules, dressed according to its own fashions, conducted itself in line with its own protocols of etiquette, and looked down upon city slickers with a mixture of detachment and scorn. I understood, of course, that not every farmer was a millionaire; I was aware of the government’s post-war rehabilitation schemes of settling returned soldiers on the land and of those raw settlers’, often unsuccessful, struggles to tame the land to their advantage. On the other hand, there was no talk of absentee landlords. The farming community was identified with hard work and rightful wealth, the latter not always evident to judge from their ruggedness and often unprepossessing external appearance.

  Also allied to the land – an aspect for which I had not in the slightest way been prepared – were the Aborigines and the social issues they represented. In Europe, Aborigines were, at most, an anthropological curiosity. They were certainly not seen in any po
litical or social light. The presence of an Aboriginal in a Melbourne street was an infrequent occurrence at the time of my arrival. When I did, finally, come face to face with an Aboriginal, I was overwhelmed by the encounter. His appearance evoked a variety of responses. By then, I had become very familiar with Asian features; similarly, with the physiognomy and blackness of Negroes. The Aboriginal, however, was different. The man’s facial features, his gait, the colour of his eyes all told a story of transition and evolution. More momentous than that initial response, however, was the challenge the encounter stirred in me to seek to learn more about the Aborigines’ origins, culture and lifestyle, and of the impact of white settlement upon them – a lesson that opened out on many issues, among them the less salutary ones of shameful dealings, national guilt and political expediency, which remain to this day on the front burner of Australia’s political dilemmas.

  Being a city dweller, I knew of rural Australia more by proxy than by direct experience. Melbourne itself, however, provided me with ample opportunities to acquaint myself well with Australian life.

  The first impact Melbourne made on me was its geographical size and the almost uniform possession of separate homes by most of its people. Such homes may have been very modest cottages or dilapidated, almost tumble-down structures, but they were at least the occupants’ own. They invested their owners with pride and self-esteem, and, more than being seen in terms of financial value or as castles of security, the possession of a home projected a sense of permanence, of rootedness and of inviolability of one’s rights which were every citizen’s prerogative and overriding aspiration.

  In middle school, I had been taught about the world movement of “house and garden” as a desirable mode of living. The concept, which was so unrealistic in the cramped and crowded conditions of Europe, was here, in Melbourne, a wholly realised actuality. This was quite new to me. I had grown up in apartment blocks, in what were called flats in Melbourne, of which there were still very few when I arrived in 1946. Allied to this, what was novel, too, was the amount of time and effort an owner put into his home, the care with which he tended to his garden, and the knowledge he had of his flowers and of their separate properties and requirements. Meanwhile, the streets were uniformly empty of people. Here and there, a car would pass, a baker’s van would make its rounds, or a horse-drawn cart would bring milk in the morning or perhaps a block of ice wrapped in a jute bag which was carried over a shoulder and delivered to households for their ice-chests. Sometimes, women put on their hats and gloves to go shopping and engage in chats with other shoppers. Otherwise, the streets were ghostlike, curtains were usually drawn, people were invisible.

  The workplace, too, was different from that which I had known in pre-War Europe. In overcrowded Poland, work was scarce, people were discounted. In Melbourne, the converse was true. Jobs of all sorts were available in plenty; workers were in constant demand. (Admittedly, during the depression of the ‘thirties, it had not been so; but by 1946, these were already but bad memories). Also, organised labour had a long history of power and influence which went back virtually to the country’s very beginnings. Allied to this was a sense of national pride. Demobilised, the victorious soldiers, on returning, wore their service buttons in their lapels as badges of honour and privilege and, armed with a new self-assertiveness which transmitted itself to the wider population, they set about to claim their rights, exerting their collective muscle to secure them.

  I sensed very early that organised labour had a strong influence on society. The structure of the union movement was clear enough, but not so the mainsprings that gave it its strength. This remained a mystery to me for a long time, for thirty years in fact, until I came upon the Louis Hartz’ celebrated theory on “The Founding of New Societies”. In telling of such societies, Hartz, in 1964, wrote as follows:

  “When a part of a European nation is detached from the whole of it, and hurled outward onto new soil, it loses the stimulus towards change that the whole provides. It lapses into a kind of immobility.”

  “It is the irony of that impact that it has hurled back at the fragments… the very Western revolution they originally felt.”

  “It is reborn, transformed into a new nationalism arising out of the necessities of fragmentation itself. Feudalism comes back to us as the French-Canadian spirit, liberalism as the American Way of Life, radicalism as the Australian Legend.”

  In a separate and analytical essay contained in the same book, Richard Rosencrance, describing “The Radical Culture of Australia”, wrote: “Australian society today has umbilical connections with the egalitarianism of the gold camps, the struggles of exclusives and emancipists, and even the sullen resentments of the early convict settlements. More than other frontier countries, perhaps, Australia was isolated from the mainstreams of European culture: in consequence, it was destined to find its political and social tendencies immanent in the foundation population… The Australian social adult of today is prefigured in the social embryo of yesteryear… Australia was and is a land of toilers, and even the graziers have not been notable exceptions to this rule.”

  He made another penetrating observation in the same essay:

  “In Australia the state has never… represented a ‘final value’, nor has it enjoyed nationalist legitimacy. Because of the social basis of nationalism, the state has been primarily instrumental in character. It was not the embodiment of the nation; it was the nation’s tool… To be Australian was to adopt the radical myth… [and yet] Henry George had much more impact in Australia than Marx.”

  The internal political situation in Australia at the time of my arrival in 1946 had an assortment of puzzles waiting for me. The fact that a Labor government was in power was nothing extraordinary, considering the political events that took place in England immediately after the war. But a number of the government’s actions were difficult to understand. For instance, the restrictive immigration policies for which Australia was renowned had generally been attributed to the Labor movement which was anxious to protect the jobs of the workers against any influx of newcomers. And yet, just after the war, it was the Labor government in office which had radically changed its tradition towards immigration, with Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration at the time, actually going abroad to enter into inter-governmental discussions regarding immigration from Italy, Greece and the D.P. camps with the positive intention of opening Australia’s gates to European migrants over and above the component drawn from England. Mr Calwell had even sent a prominent Melbourne Jewish personality, Mr Alec Masel, to Shanghai to investigate the potential of Jewish migrants from there. Such a new attitude represented a political about-face, monumental in terms of Australia’s future, however unorthodox for the Australian Labor Party.

  Still another paradox was brought out in the wake of the miners’ strike in the Hunter Valley. This strike paralysed heavy industry in New South Wales and threatened the nation’s post-war economic recovery. In response, it was again a Labor Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, who acted against the workers that the Party represented, by sending in troops to break the miners’ stranglehold on the economy. At about the same time, Chifley sought to nationalise the nation’s private banks, a radical step even in terms of socialist philosophy and practices of those days and a policy that brought about Chifley’s fall from office and the subsequent misfortunes that befell Labor. In opposition, the Labor movement considered the time ripe for strengthening and radicalising its rank and file. The top leadership of some of the essential industries fell into the hands of members of the Communist Party and the political climate of the day took on a dimension of acute combativeness and confrontationism which lasted till 1983 when Robert J. (Bob) Hawke regained government for Labor on an election platform of consensus.

  I often wondered during the ‘fifties and ‘sixties about a particular characteristic of the Australian worker. It happened often that when a new arrival joined a work gang in a public works job or in a factory assembly line and w
orked in the way he had been accustomed in Europe, he was gently, but firmly, advised by his mates to slow down and observe the established norms of output. He could ignore such advice but only at his disadvantage. An invisible hand controlled work, dictated the numbers of people that a certain task should employ, determined the levels of productivity and bargained a quid pro quo for any increase in these. Such ploys were understandable from the unions’ point of view, but they were less than constructive in benefiting the nation as a whole. Whenever I questioned such destructive manoeuverings – commonly referred to as “bloody-mindedness” – on the part of the unions, I was told that the secret behind them was the fact that every Australian knew in his heart that the country was well-endowed by nature, that it was potentially rich, and that no matter to what excesses the unions ran to, none of them would disturb the basic enormity of the nation’s wealth; hence, the workers, both individually and collectively, could afford to indulge in such actions. Accordingly, no excuse was so petty that it could not be used to provoke confrontation with management. As if by some pre-determined strategy, one union and then another would submit its demands – or log of claims, as it was known in union parlance – to squeeze further concessions from the market place, continually keeping the industrial cauldron boiling. The practice set into an established and predictable pattern.