by Clive James
To trace the rise of the Republican movement in modern times, Davie characteristically sets about investigating the background to Geoffrey Dutton’s trendsetting Nation article of 1963. Somewhere in the middle eighties (Davie is sometimes a bit vague about when he did things: British reticence) he called on Dutton in Melbourne and got the full story that Dutton himself never wrote down for publication. It turns out that Malcolm Muggeridge, down under on a visit, provided the spark. It was not long after the Queen Mother’s Royal Visit of 1958, enjoyed by Dutton as a comedy. (In his journal – from which Davie, again characteristically, is able to quote – Dutton poured scorn on those intellectuals who boycotted the ceremonies and thus cut themselves off from the entertainment.) Muggeridge’s own, non-Royal visit took place during the aftermath of the ruckus he had kicked up in Britain by disparaging the Royal Family. At dinner in Adelaide, Muggeridge put the question of what was being done about an Australian republic. Two of his interlocutors were Rohan Rivett, editor of the Adelaide News, and its young proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. They said something had to be done but it was too early. In other words, before they got behind the idea it would have to be a ball already rolling. Dutton’s article rolled the ball.
An obscure, smoky restaurant on the Anzac Highway, a group of influential men deciding their country’s destiny – here is a play by David Williamson in the making. But what to call it? My own title would be The Silvertail Conference, thus to emphasize an aspect that Davie could have made more of. The opening section of his book is a penetrating analysis of the class structure that Australia is not supposed to have – an evocation from which the squattocracy emerges in all its easy splendour, complete with its hallowed ties to ‘home’. Davie notes that the grand families have traditionally not taken an overt part in Australia’s political life, preferring to exert their influence behind the scenes rather than run for office. (Malcolm Fraser might have been cited as a conspicuous exception to this rule, but it will still serve as a rule of thumb.) He also notes that of the participants at this historic dinner, Murdoch (Oxford) and Dutton (Cambridge) were both from grand families. But he neglects to note a possible connection between the rise of a republican movement and a moneyed elite exerting its influence in an extra-parliamentary manner. Such a connection can be denied, but its possibility has to be considered, because when it came to a referendum there were plenty of Australians who suspected that their libertarian sympathies were being manipulated by an elite. When Malcolm Turnbull, another glittering son of a grand family, found himself too prominently placed for the good of his cause, it was an illustration of the real reason for that political shyness on the part of the gentry that Davie seems so puzzled by, and even to regret. The Australian electorate is very unlikely to accept any constitutional system that overtly transfers power in the direction of an oligarchy, and wise oligarchs know it.
Davie might well object at this point that during the forty years since I left Australia he has spent almost as much time in my homeland as I have in his, so he has a better right to speak about recent developments. I would gladly concede that, but with one proviso: nothing quite beats being born and brought up in the country you want to pontificate about. It isn’t just that I know for a fact, without having to look it up, that the Australian Prime Minister whom Davie calls Joe Chifley was really called Ben. It’s that I sat there on the carpet in front of a radio set taller than I was and listened to Ben Chifley’s grating voice while my mother told me she respected him as a true man of the people. She always voted for Ming anyway, but that was politics: Australian politics. It was made clear to me from an early date – bred in my bones, in fact – that patriotism didn’t just mean pride in the Fair Go, it meant pride in my country’s innate distrust of any form of dogma that treats people as a mass. In this book Davie gives me several elegant strokes of the cane for a crime he can’t quite bring himself to specify, but it sounds like a lack of patriotism. Let me caution him in turn that he should beware of what Orwell once called transferred nationalism. One of the tragedies of the transferred nationalist is to miss the point about the new country he adopts, and the point about Australia is that its citizens never cease to be patriotic until patriotism becomes compulsory, whereupon their individuality takes over.
Caught in the middle between two national loyalties, Davie’s book gives the sense that it has been squeezed out of him: for all its freshness of perception, it is short of breath. Bill Bryson’s Down Under is big and brash: HMS London, make way for USS Nimitz. Bryson is an outgoing American personality on a generous mission to find out whether there is any kind of country joining up the Australian cities where he has previously been on book tours. On the flight in, he still doesn’t know the name of the current Prime Minister. I once landed in Mexico without knowing the name of the current President, but that was because the President whose name I had looked up had been deposed during my flight after his sister was caught in Switzerland trying to put half of Mexico’s GNP into a private bank account. The Australian Prime Minister’s name is John Howard, for Christ’s sake: it isn’t hard to remember. He might be, but his name isn’t. To make such breezy condescension even less appealing, there is Bryson’s comic style, which depends on exaggeration without benefit of metaphor. When I say, for example, that to read Bryson on the subject of crossing the Nullarbor by train is like crossing the Nullarbor on foot, I am exaggerating, but also speaking metaphorically. If I were to say that reading his book took me a hundred years, I would merely be exaggerating.
I would also be lying. Once the reader gives up on the idea that any of the author’s heftily visible preparations for a wisecrack will ever yield results – page two is a good spot to call it quits – the book turns out to be not without value. Bryson has the genuine curiosity that comes down through the American tradition of travel-talk reportage from Mark Twain, who rode on stagecoaches and paid attention to the other passengers when they conversed, argued or shot each other. Bryson talks to everyone he meets, visits museums no matter how unpromising, and is generally not afraid to do the corny thing – a very important attribute, because there is nothing like sophistication for cutting you off from experience. A big smile in a rented car, Bryson gets a long way on bonhomie. He can even, despite his relentlessly facetious style, be amusing: perhaps because death and tragedy are involved, his account of the monumental incompetence of Burke and Wills is sufficiently deadpan to elicit an appropriately hilarious response. Burke and Wills’s qualifications for exploring the dead heart of Australia were exactly those of Laurel and Hardy for painting a house, and Bryson, for once, proves that he knows enough about vaudeville not to spoil the comedy with too much whizz-bang punctuation from the band in the pit.
One might say that Bryson has never been in Australia long enough to find much to dislike, but there is a killing description of a bad meal in Darwin to show that he is capable of invective. The bottom line is that he likes Australia, and being so famous he will probably sell millions of books saying so, many of them within Australia itself. But it is becoming a nice question whether there is much room left for visitors from civilization to come flying in and marvel that we have hotels more than two storeys high. Back in the 1950s, there was a story in it when the black musician Winifred Atwell crossed the Pacific to play the piano and liked Sydney so much she wanted to stay. There was another story in it when she wasn’t allowed to. In the razzmatazz of Australia’s current jamboree, it is sometimes forgotten just how narrow-minded Australian society seemed only forty years ago. Sometimes I forget it myself. From the perspective of social-democratic politics I nowadays find the Ming dynasty underrated, but if I had been condemned to live through its protracted decline, would I have wanted to face a future in which I wasn’t allowed to read Portnoy’s Complaint? We were barely allowed to have Portnoy’s complaint. There was a fantastic amount not happening.
Peter Conrad hasn’t forgotten any of it. His icily scintillating article about his life-long alienation from Tasmania heads up a
very keepable special issue of Granta devoted to Australia. Patiently edited by Ian Jack, who must have needed a cattle-prod to corral some of the more elusive among his illustrious contributors, the booklet is clear proof that writers born and raised in Australia are nowadays quite capable of discussing their country’s drawbacks without feeling that they are lending ammunition to foreign philistines. Among the bleak views, Conrad’s is the bleakest. ‘Australian troops were always available to die in Britain’s wars,’ he intones. ‘At Gallipoli, they were used by the imperial generals as cannon fodder . . .’ The riff is familiar, but less usual is the way in which Conrad detects a more comprehensive imperialism, as an envious world closes in on its last theme park.
Conrad might be on to something here. Those of us who think that Barry Humphries was not just joking when he identified Australia as the newest top dog among nations should remember that this is the age of celebrity, in which to be loved by the whole world is to be in some danger. On the whole, though, Conrad’s article is less a disquisition on geopolitics than a cry from the heart. It was because of his personal circumstances that he thrived as a literary pundit in England. For the same reason, the Englishman Howard Jacobson – whose contribution is as sensuously funny as you might expect – thrived as a literary pundit in Australia. Each man wields a brilliantly inclusive style, but neither has a chance of summing up what has really been going on in Australia since they first passed each other in mid-ocean. For all we know, the key event of the whole period since World War II was something Menzies didn’t do – he didn’t, for example, put Arthur Calwell’s immigration policy into reverse. If Ming had really been so committed to Australia’s future as a British nation, he might have tried to do that. But he didn’t, and the way was left open for his beloved, sleepy, conformist and wowser-ridden country to change in ways he could not predict.
Australia’s literary intellectuals might have to face the possibility that their effectiveness as political commentators is coming to an end, and that this might be a good thing. The journalists are taking over, just as they did in the United States, where the advent of expert political commentators such as Elizabeth Drew left the inspired but tendentious pastiche of the Mencken heritage where it belonged – in the past. As that excellent volume The Best Australian Essays 1999 revealed, no poet or novelist is going to write political commentary as pertinent as Mungo MacCallum’s, because he is right there on the campaign plane with his raw material. Michael Davie remembers when the political journalists always mistook the country’s mood because they never left Canberra. But now the politicians travel and the journalists travel with them. With insularity no longer the keynote, the ivory tower is no longer the vantage point: leg-work, contact and close observation are everything. It’s still Australia, but it’s a different country, and its writers and artists had better accept that they can no longer get an overall grasp of it just by intuition: they’re going to have to read about it in the newspapers and the magazines, just like everybody else.
In the newspapers, the magazines and the books – and most of the books are nowadays by journalists, and thank God for it. Since the middle 1970s, we have gradually become accustomed to such books being on hand when we need them: Paul Kelly’s fine trilogy is only the most conspicuous example. In the Pringle period they scarcely existed. When Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country came out in 1964, it was so singular that its underlying thesis was taken as holy writ, an ex cathedra endorsement of the exciting idea that our country could be saved from its long failure only by political realism, which would entail a preliminary admission that the country’s international position up to that point had been essentially servile. From that time forward, most of the informed voices spoke on Horne’s side, but there were signs even before the referendum that a true discussion was developing. The mere presence of Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians on the bestseller lists was an indication that those who looked with disfavour on the wholesale denigration of Australia’s anglicized past didn’t necessarily consider themselves romantic – they thought they were realists, too.
Since these were the very people that the less judicious republican activists had grown fond of calling unpatriotic, the result of the referendum can be seen as a blessing for everyone, and especially for the republicans. Had they won, they would have faced the impossible task of presenting, to an audience they had only just finished insulting, a model of the state on which they themselves had not yet managed to agree. Now they have time to clarify matters both for themselves and others, although the latter part of the task, especially, will require listening as well as talking. We can look forward to a battle of the books, in which books written by journalists are bound to play a key role. As this article goes to press, the justly lauded Australian expatriate journalist Philip Knightley is about to publish his magnum opus called Australia: A Biography. I have seen the unbound proofs, which teem with pertinent facts and original judgements. Reviewing the finished work will take an article not much shorter than the book, but perhaps I can jump the gun legitimately by citing a real-life conversation Knightley had with Ryszard Kapuscinski.
Knightley records how Kapuscinski assured him that there was an answer for despairing citizens of the quondam Soviet satellite countries who now found it impossible to live the way Americans would like. There was such a thing as a just society that was also free: it was called Australia. Knightley believes it, and the belief makes his book a labour of love even at its most caustic. As I write these last lines here in London, Knightley has just said in the Sunday Times that Australia seems so attractive to live in now that he wonders if he was right to leave. I know what he means, but the fact remains that we all remain: nobody leaves, and nobody forgets. As Knightley recalled in his contribution to The Best Australian Essays 1999, he once, so very long ago, pestered Menzies for a quote outside Kingsford-Smith airport in Sydney. ‘Young man, I don’t know you,’ said Ming. ‘I have not been introduced to you, and I have no wish so to be.’ Travel as far and as long as you like, you can from your mind a moment like that banish never.
Australian Review of Books, September 2000
WRITTEN TO BE SPOKEN
In the years of my apprenticeship I devoted a lot of effort to making writing sound like speech. Ideally, I think, any kind of sentence, at any level of ambition, should obey the rule of never needing to be read again to get the sense. If it can obey that rule – which is the rule of speech – then it is more likely to invite being read again to get more of its meaning. But there is still a difference between prose written to be read and prose written to be read out. Prose designed in the first instance to be spoken will tend to be much more linear in construction, and thus susceptible to – because more tolerant of – rhetorical tricks. For the pieces reproduced in this section, I don’t claim the title of oratory, but I do hope to avoid the accusation of rhetoric. One of them is a television script, on the subject of Hamlet, whose hero warned about the negative effects of sawing the air with one’s hand. It is a piece I might have reproduced earlier, but thought to leave aside because at the time I still believed there were no exceptions to the rule that words written to pictures could not survive being melted out of the amalgam. But on second thoughts, the pictures for this Hamlet script were pretty skimpy – I wandered around castles of the type that Shakespeare ‘must have’ known about even if he never actually entered them, etc. – and a lot of people kindly wrote to say that they would like to possess the script in a less unwieldy form. Eventually, of course, one hopes that the audience feels the same way about anything one writes to be spoken. Indeed I can’t think of any other way to be impressive, as a would-be latter-day Pericles, except to say something that sounds more carefully composed than it needs to be – which is practically the definition of good writing anyway. Whether these pieces pass that test I leave the reader to judge, but the reader can be sure that I was trying hard. The Anzac Day address, for example, is the kind of thing nobody should ever take on unless he has a fair idea
of what he wants to say, and a better than fair idea of how to get it said. People remember. Admittedly it is said that the people who actually heard Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg forgot every word of it, but that just proves the favour he did us by allowing it to be reprinted. (Sir Kingsley: ‘Yes, but you aren’t Abraham Lincoln, are you?’)
HAMLET IN PERSPECTIVE
Fifteen years ago I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and then later on I stuck around for a while as a postgraduate. I hope I was too weatherbeaten to fall for the mystique that these old dens of privilege supposedly generate, but I can’t deny that I’ve got the sort of affection for Cambridge that anybody feels for a place where he read a lot and thought a lot and wasted a lot of time. Hamlet feels the same way about his university – Wittenberg.
Hamlet has to act out his destiny on the sleet-spattered battlements of Elsinore, while Horatio makes regular trips back to Wittenberg for the port and walnuts and the relative safety of academic intrigue. Many a time in Fleet Street, as I’ve sat there sucking my typewriter and waiting desperately for inspiration, I’ve envied those of my contemporaries who stayed on to become academics – the Horatios. In other words, I identify with Hamlet. In my mind’s eye, he even looks a bit like me. Perhaps a couple of stone lighter, with blond hair and more of it: one of those rare Aussies who happen to fence quite well and stand first in line of succession to the throne of Denmark.