Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  It was too late for anyone except the Australian public, who declined to vote for the republican proposal as it was put to them, and might well do the same again even if the proposal is different. It should be evident, indeed, that unless all the proposals are the same – i.e. unless there is an agreed republican model – then the republic will remain merely a nice idea, like a popcorn mine or the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Personally I hope that the republicans can agree on a model: firstly because we might need it – the Royal Family might decide to give up – and secondly because, during the necessary discussion, the intelligentsia will be obliged to examine what it did wrong last time, and might reach the salutary conclusion that its propensity for questioning the loyalty of its ideological enemies came home to roost.

  Whether a wise expatriate should come home to roost is another question, especially if he has been tagged as a conservative. But it probably wouldn’t matter much if he stayed away. I called Alomes’s book ‘timely’ because in the débâcle of the lost referendum it should teach his fellow savants, simply by its grotesque example, that the nationalist line of thought, especially when applied to culture, is a busted flush. But I fear it could still take many other books to teach them that the ideal of cultural autarky has always been a pipe-dream, in whatever country the pipe is smoked. Heine, without whom German poetry would be cut in half, spent two thirds of his life in Paris. He was sheltering from repression and prejudice, but Thomas Mann, even after Hitler’s death, never came home to Germany, because he doubted whether Germany was ready to come home to him. Stravinsky operated on the principle that Russia went with him wherever he went, which was everywhere except the Soviet Union. Picasso was Spain in spite of Spain, and for James Joyce the condition for returning eternally to Ireland in the circulating river of his work was never to set foot there again.

  An artist is the incarnation of his country, wherever he might happen to hang his hat. And as for those countries that have never had direct experience of what tyranny, repression or officially imposed obscurantism are, they have always exported cultural figures as copiously as they have taken them in. Why William James stayed in the United States and his brother Henry never came home is a question open to a hundred answers, but sensibly the Americans long ago gave up on wondering which of them did their country the bigger favour, because it became evident that they both belonged to their country only in the sense that their country belonged to the world.

  A nation’s culture either joins it to the world or it is not a culture. Although Australians should try to be less impressed with the size of their country on the map, and remember that it contains far fewer people than Mexico City, they are right to be proud of how large their little nation looms in the world’s consciousness. The expatriates have played a part in that. It might not be the biggest part, or even a necessary one – Les Murray got the whole of the modern world into his marvellous verse novel Fredy Neptune without ever leaving home for long – but they have certainly played a part. Which is not to say that a nation’s expatriate Creative Artists need always be thought of as ambassadors, or think of themselves that way. The place they came from, even if it is the first thing in their hearts, might be the last thing on their minds, and they might remain convinced that they came away only to commit what Franc¸oise Sagan once called the crime of solitude. But if they commit it with sufficient grace, their homeland will claim them anyway, in the course of time.

  TLS, 26 January, 2000

  Postscript

  I could write a book about Australian nationalism, and have recently been plagued by a nightmare in which I actually have to. In the nightmare I occupy a cell in the old Long Bay gaol, an institution now happily disestablished, but which in my youth was still playing host to the most hard-to-hold recidivists in New South Wales, including, off and on, the notoriously elusive Darcy Dugan. A small man who could make himself smaller to wriggle between iron bars, Dugan got himself into the language by getting himself out of any form of incarceration the screws could devise. There was a prison tram, a windowless steel box on wheels, which used to take criminals back and forth from Long Bay to the court in Paddington. It once left Long Bay with Dugan inside it and arrived in Paddington without him. He was next seen in Queensland. From the top of the hill near my house I could look across Botany Bay to Long Bay gaol and wonder whether Dugan was still there. He made me feel better about school, but I was well aware even then that I lacked his talent. In my nightmare, there is no getting out of the cell. (Scratched into the wall about five feet from the floor is the rubric ‘D. Dugan was hear breefly.’) The screws want to see a fresh thousand words at the end of each day or they won’t feed me. No outside exercise is permitted.

  On the other hand, any visitor is allowed in. Gough Whitlam shows up. He demands to see my references to him. I show him the one about his habit of quoting verbatim from the Almanach de Gotha being somewhat anomalous for a professed Republican. He replies with a long exposition of the Bowes-Lyon family tree. Representatives of the Australian intelligentsia arrive. They tell me how shameful it was that our diplomats once had difficulty explaining to President Suharto of Indonesia why our Head of State did not live in Australia. They do not tell me if the Indonesians had any difficulty explaining why every occupant of their administrative structure above the level of receptionist was called Suharto and half the economy was in Switzerland. Paul Keating arrives to read the bits about him. He calls me a maggot for suggesting that he lowered the tone of parliamentary discourse by calling anyone who questioned his Republican policies a maggot. My cell is full. So is the corridor. I will never get my book finished, but I am not allowed to stop writing it. Stephen Alomes arrives, wanting to know why I tried to nuke his book before it could get out of the silo. I tell him this is why: because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life here, compelled to make sense of a subject with the same ontological status as the man who shagged O’Reilley’s daughter.

  Darcy Dugan arrives, weighed down with chains. An Australian journalist recognized him in Vancouver.

  2000

  LET’S TALK ABOUT US

  In the 1950s, John Douglas Pringle caused a sensation in Australian intellectual life with the publication of his book Australian Accent. A real, live, distinguished British journalist and editor had written about us! He had found Australia interesting! Half a century later, it is a measure of how interesting Australia has become that another real, live, distinguished British journalist and editor, Michael Davie, is unlikely to cause an equal sensation with his book Anglo-Australian Attitudes. Davie’s book is at least as good as Pringle’s, but times have changed, and where there was once a famine of commentary there has in recent years been a feast, a feast which in the year of the Sydney Olympics threatens to escalate into a saturnalia. The delicious suspicion that the whole world might be watching lends an extra, international cachet to this wonderful new national sport of self-examination at which Australians have so quickly become so good. It’s the biggest thing since synchronized swimming, and it’s all ours. Hands up anyone who hasn’t written a book.

  With so much activity on the part of the home team, it is harder for the visiting pundit to get a look-in, no matter how impressive his paper qualifications. In the post-Whitlam period Davie had a two-nations connection with Australia, rather like Pringle’s in the late Menzies era. Where Pringle was the Pommy ring-in editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Davie was the Pommy ring-in editor of the Melbourne Age. Davie was even better than Pringle at cracking the whip over the unruly prose of his young Australian journalists while simultaneously laying himself open to the burgeoning cultural life around him – and by his time, of course, there was a lot more burgeoning to deal with. Beyond those capacities, however, Davie was the carrier of an extra propensity which could help this book make its voice heard even in the current hubbub. He had an acute ear for bluster. He liked the confidence of Australians, but when they were all shouting the same thing at once he showed a subversive tendency to won
der why. Anglo-Australian Attitudes is the fruit of that tendency. Davie gives his endorsement to the rise of national self-awareness. But the rise of self-assertive nationalism earns his disapproval, all the more damning for being so quietly expressed.

  Davie has always had the kind of whisper that can shout you down. One of his most piercing whispers in this book is addressed to the orthodox nationalist precept that Australian troops at the Dardanelles were used as cannon fodder by a cynical British high command. Not after Gallipoli but after Gallipoli (i.e. after the movie, not the event – a sign of the times) the idea became very popular among the Australian intelligentsia, probably because it so neatly encapsulated the Manning Clark train of thought about the permanent colonial status underlying Australia’s parade of independence, a necessary subservience dictated by the machinations of capitalist imperialism. In recent years the idea has buckled under academic scrutiny: in the fourth volume of the Oxford History of Australia, Stuart Macintyre quotes the statistic that matters. The film, of course, didn’t mention any British dead at all, and it’s quite likely that hardly anybody who saw the film is aware that the British were even present. But they were, and suffered a total of fatalities more than double that of the Anzacs, and just about three times that of the Australians taken alone. The notion that the Australians were sent in by the British to die in their stead at Gallipoli should therefore have been a non-starter. But the film Gallipoli ensured that there was no stopping it. Davie’s whisper might help to slow it down. He quotes the figures, having always been in favour of the kind of journalism in which the hard facts appear in an early paragraph, and aren’t left to the end, where they might be cut.

  Davie has the patient humility to pick up on the results of dull-looking academic archive sifting and transfer them to the world of the media: a task that the higher journalism should always tackle, but seldom does. Better than that, he is ready to do some hard graft in the archives on his own account. A latterday wandering scholar, he has somehow found time to journey from state to state, request access to the papers of previous state governors, and actually read them. The results should be equally fascinating to those who smile on the old imperial connection with Britain and to those who would like to be rid of its last vestiges. Particularly before Federation, some of the governors were formidable men. In the twentieth century the standard of originality went down as place-men settled in, but there was still the occasional star figure. Starriest of all was Alexander Hore-Ruthven, the first Lord Gowrie, who practised for being Governor-General of Australia with a preliminary period as Governor of South Australia from 1928 to 1934. Davie has read Hore-Ruthven’s papers and found much to admire on top of their impeccable style.

  Hore-Ruthven began his turn of duty under the impression that a governor might have a role in politics. When he attempted to mediate between the wharfies and the shipowners he was told by the state government not to do it again. Governors were doomed to spend much of their time being masters of ceremonies and incarnating, along with their hard-working wives, the apex of social life. Especially since they were likely to bring large resources of cultivation to the latter role – along with plenty of their own money, the post being designed for gentlemen who would not complain about ending up out of pocket – Davie rather admires them for their dedication to a non-job, while he fashionably allows that the whole arrangement has always been superfluous to requirements. But on that point he might have drawn a more edifying conclusion from the story he recounts of how Hore-Ruthven helped the Governor of NSW, Sir Philip Game, to dismiss Jack Lang. Unusually for one so pertinacious, Davie glosses over the significance of that incident.

  Like Gough Whitlam forty years later, Jack Lang really proposed to govern without a parliament, the very thing that reserve powers are designed to stop. In Lang’s case they stopped it efficiently. One might conclude that the governor system thus proved itself to be the very opposite of powerless, even if its one and only power was to supersede all other powers at a moment of crisis. But Davie feels safer calling the state governor system antiquated and cumbersome, while simultaneously conceding its quiet charm. He doesn’t seem keen to dwell on the awkward fact that at the vital moment it worked, perhaps because that would lead him into the uncomfortable side of the perennial debate about the Whitlam dismissal, which turns on the question of the reserve powers. There have to be some. So who gets them? The answer you give dictates not just whether you are for or against a republic, but, if you are a republican, what kind of republican you are. Judging from internal evidence, most of this book was written before the referendum, but there would have been time to add a few pages of protest if Davie thought that its outcome had been a debacle. Instead he takes the calm attitude that the republic will arrive anyway. But he is probably glad that it didn’t arrive at a time when Australia’s past was still a subject of caricature. The strength of his position depends on his capacity to see the inevitability of the unravelling of the Anglo-Australian ties while simultaneously wanting to tell the complicated truth about what they were like when they were still ravelled.

  In 1985 Davie’s contribution to The Daedelus Symposium was called ‘The Fraying of the Rope’. He welcomed the decline of the old deference but made a telling citation from his hero Sir Keith Hancock, who had quoted an Indian professor to the effect that Australia, if it repudiated its European inheritance, would be no use to India. Davie has elaborated his position since then but his sense of historical responsibility is still at the core of it. For Robert Gordon Menzies the ties with Britain were so important that he held back his country’s Asian future with an almost treasonable zeal – or so we were encouraged to think, until Macintyre established that Menzies, at the opening of the war, did a better job than his legend allows in resisting pressure from Churchill to neglect Australia’s specific interests in favour of Britain’s. Davie is not inclined to follow Macintyre’s lead on that particular point: while questioning the validity of the classic David Day thesis that Britain deliberately left Australia at Japan’s mercy, Davie still believes that Menzies in 1941 should have been thinking and acting closer to home, instead of hoping to share with Churchill the task of running the Empire’s war. But whether or not Davie is right about Menzies’ behaviour, he is surely right about Menzies’ motivation: Menzies was acting from quite the opposite of a colonial inferiority complex.

  To arrive at this conclusion, once again Davie has gone unerringly to the document that matters: in this case the diary that the young Menzies kept when he visited Britain in the mid-thirties. Davie shows convincingly that for Menzies the tradition that mattered in British politics was Whig. What really counted for him about Britain was its parliamentary freedom, not its royal panoply. He was a Cromwellian, not a Cavalier. If the absurd ecstasies of pomp and circumstance that marked his twilight years – the plumes and velvet of his honours royally conferred, the vow of eternal love to the Queen – were compensation for any feelings of being an eternal outsider, it was because he was a Scot, not because he was an Australian. In the post-war period, his pride in Australia and faith in its future made untenable any suggestion that he thought of his own country as a backwater. The suggestion was made anyway, and still is: but Davie’s opinion of Menzies is a useful contribution to a necessary process by which Menzies is slowly emerging in his true stature as a creative political leader who did at least as much looking forward as harking back. It was the harking back that made him a joke, but had he been just a joke, so would have been the large proportion of the electorate that voted for him – and for any country’s intelligentsia there is no more dangerous moment that when it unites in finding the common people politically inadequate.

  On the general question of whether Britain abandoned Australia at the beginning of the Pacific war, Davie has nothing original to offer except common sense. Not long ago, during the full ascendancy of the Other People’s Wars thesis, there was not much common sense to be heard on the subject. Lately there has been more, but you could scarcel
y call it a glut, so a fresh contribution is always welcome. Although he never looked it when I knew him, Davie is old enough to have seen service in the Royal Navy (on the cruiser HMS London) at a time when a Japanese torpedo might easily have provided explosive evidence that Britain was doing its best in our part of the world. The question turns on how good that best was. Davie faces the full, sad facts about the inadequacy of Britain’s preparations and our foolishness in thinking that everything was going to be all right. But he also shows that with the Singapore catastrophe, as at the Dardanelles, Britain did too much damage to its own interests to allow any validity whatsoever to the idea that it was intent on betraying Australia. The Donald Day theory simply doesn’t wash. The disaster in Malaya wasn’t a conspiracy, it was a cock-up. Plenty of people have said this by now, but it is always useful to have someone say it well, with such a clear head, and in such a clear style.

  Not even Davie, however, is clear-headed enough to get beyond the assumption that it took incompetent generalship on our side to give the victory to the Japanese. There will be no fully mature opinions on the subject until it is accepted that the Japanese army would have taken Singapore anyway, even if our forces had been deployed to their optimum effectiveness. The disaster would have just taken longer. Writers who glibly suppose that only a failure on our part could have permitted a Japanese success are succumbing to racist assumptions without knowing it. At the beginning of the war the Japanese were superior in almost every department and their command of the air alone would have been enough to make them hard to stop. Failure to realize this opens the way, paradoxically enough, to underestimating the magnitude of Australia’s achievement when they were stopped, in New Guinea. In the story of how the Japanese onslaught in Asia and the Pacific was turned back, Kokoda was a crucial moment, and it was ours: it happened because the Australian soldiers were valiant. Revisionist history, by displacing attention towards the moment when Britain supposedly machinated to leave us in the lurch, has had the effect of diminishing our country’s real status – an unfortunate but not unfamiliar consequence of rewriting history along nationalist lines.