The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  The central concern of the book is a general description of Australia. The ‘lucky country’ theme is really a subplot. It comes and goes. Overall this book is not polemical: no single point is being driven home all the time. Nor is there any singleness of approach. A country can be looked at from a number of different points of observation. I have tried six of them, one after the other. The first chapter offers two quite different overall ‘images’ of Australia. The second looks for similarities amongst Australians. The third looks for differences. The next two chapters are concerned with the effects on Australia of its relations with Britain, the United States and ‘Asia’. The next four chapters look at Australia another way: in social sections – businessmen, unionists, politicians, and so forth. The last chapter is concerned with the subplot. This difference of approach is deliberate, I did not want the whole thing to fall too pat.

  PROLOGUE

  Peopled from all over Asia

  We were on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, drinking whisky and looking down on the glare of Hong Kong. My Chinese host was discussing the White Australia policy. ‘Be careful of the Chinese,’ he said. ‘We are the most intelligent race in the world. If you let too many Chinese into your country they will take you over’ … In Taipei I was in the Foreign Office drinking coffee with a Chinese official. I told him we often wondered what the Asian students in Australia said about Australia when they returned home. ‘You invite Asians into your country to study?’ ‘There are about twelve thousand at present.’ ‘Twelve thousand! Why don’t you tell people about it?’ … At lunch at the University of the Philippines we were talking about Australia’s reclassification as an Asian country in ECAFE. The Filipino beside me said: ‘Why do you remain a monarchy? Asians distrust you because you are a monarchy. You should declare yourself independent of Britain and become a republic. We are all interested in Australia. It is a huge continent. In a hundred years’ time it will be peopled from all over Asia.’

  I came back from a trip to the Far East early in 1963 and decided that Australia was worth a book. In the future it might be of interest to know what the huge continent was like in those early days in the 1960s before it was peopled from all over Asia. Then I went overseas several more times during the year; this seemed to make it possible to evaluate my own country all over again – in the disorder of other people’s reactions to it.

  In Fiji colonial officials said how hard they found it to arouse interest in their colony in Canberra. In Honolulu a girl, half Japanese and half Hawaiian, who did a nightclub act as a Tahitian dancer, asked: ‘Is Australia as comfortable to live in as it is here in America?’ In Singapore, beside a swimming pool at the Goodwood Park Hotel a Malay began his conversation by saying that some of his best friends were Chinese and then questioned me about the political influence of the Chinese merchants in Sydney. In Bangkok I was questioned on land reform in Australia and the conditions of its peasants. In Hong Kong the second time, over dinner, an Englishman attempted to toast Australia for keeping out Asians; he thought it was the last bastion of civilization in the East. In Tokyo when I said to a Japanese woman that many Australians now considered themselves to be Asians she said: ‘No, that is wrong. Australia is in Oceania, not Asia. You are civilized like us.’ She then said she would like to come to Australia for the skiing. Back in Manila, at lunch beside Lake Taal, a young Filipino reminded me of the expulsion from Australia of the Filipino Sergeant Gamboa. ‘But that happened in the 1940s.’ ‘Ah no, Mr Horne, I remember it. It happened last year.’

  In Delhi there was talk of how the Indo-European races must combine against the Chinese, of how ‘old empire countries’ like India and Australia had so much more in common than new arrivals like Ghana. At a private beach in Alexandria two Lebanese who were thinking of migrating to Australia said that ‘the niggers’ (meaning the Egyptians) did not come to this beach. ‘How do you treat your niggers in Australia?’ ‘The Aborigines? Oh we’re beginning to give them citizen rights now.’ ‘You can’t give niggers civil rights. I won’t migrate to Australia.’ In Athens a young Greek nodded towards the Acropolis. ‘This is all the past. We all love Australia here. Australia is the future.’ In Rome an Italian senator dismissed Australia: ‘Ah, you have no Communist problem there.’ In Berlin an anti-Communist expert on Communism told me that China was not aggressive towards ‘The West’. When I replied that China was undoubtedly aggressive towards ‘The East’ (including Australia) there was agreement. In Frankfurt, in a chance encounter in a beer garden, I was asked about the Australian philosophy of life. When I explained it: ‘So you are all existentialists there!’

  In England, returning to the village where I lived for a while, there seemed to be in the electric appliances, bathrooms and bingo games something of a touch of Australia. In London an editor said that when England abandoned the monarchy the Royal Family would probably migrate to Australia. In New York a friend explained that for American intellectuals Australia did not exist. ‘Even a Zionist would have more interest in you if you were an Egyptian. There is no image of Australia in America and there will not be until the intellectuals create one.’ At two cocktail parties I was several times addressed as ‘you English’. In San Francisco, where they were holding the mayoral elections, the maid just did not believe me when I tried to explain that in Sydney we did not hold our mayoral elections at the same time as they did in San Francisco.

  Except for those places where it is still seen as a migrants’ opportunity and a hope for the future, the world is not very interested in Australia – mainly because its intellectual life is second rate, and it is intellectuals who cast images of the world (however much other kinds of people then purvey them). Much of its public life is stunningly bad, but its ordinary people are fulfilling their aspirations and this is a rare thing for ordinary people to do; they have developed a style that provides a greater potential than is at present being drawn on; in some ways Australia is a ‘newer’ country than the USA, casting images of the future that the USA, with its conventions of inequality, cannot yet do. Australia may be something of a mirror to the world of what the world is likely to become if it does not blow itself up. The possibility that the world should become like Australia would profoundly alarm most cultivated people in the world; but there is solace for them in the fact that Australia may be about to undergo – or is already undergoing – changes, perhaps revolutionary changes, that are introducing those diversities without which – for the few anyway – life can become almost intolerable. Interest is added to this process by the reflection that if change does not proceed fairly rapidly, Australia in its present form may cease to exist.

  1. THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

  Innocent happiness

  The South Sydney Junior Leagues Club, 558a Anzac Parade, set in a suburb of what may be – in certain senses – the most democratic city in the world, would still be described in some countries as a working men’s club. It has a membership of thousands of men and women of only average weekly wage who arrive by bus, taxi or private car to play its ‘pokies’ – the poker machines before which members stand or sit, their glasses of beer beside them, and pull levers to win an average of several thousand dollars a day. The club makes a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from its pokies after expenses are allowed for, and puts this money into bars, restaurants, a swimming pool, squash courts, steam rooms, gymnasia, bowling alleys, a roof garden (glassed in, with $120 000 worth of air conditioning), a small library, and a nursery. There are dances four nights a week (two are held simultaneously on Saturdays), $52 000 worth of floor shows a year, a car park, six tennis courts and ‘the most beautiful billiard room in the Southern Hemisphere’. The general tone is of suburban good taste – vases of gladioli, goldfish tanks, parquet floors, pastel colours, light wood furniture and an Aboriginal mural pay tribute to the cultural standards of the women’s magazines. People dress as they please, men in shirtsleeves and shorts, or suits; women in party dresses or stretch pants. The club represent
s the Australian version of the old ideals of equality and the pursuit of happiness: that everyone has the right to a good time.

  In outward form, and as far as ordinary people know or care, Australia is the most egalitarian of countries, untroubled by obvious class distinctions, caste or communal domination, the tensions of racialism or the horrors of autocracy. Taxi drivers often prefer their passengers to sit with them in the front seat and sometimes tip them the small change. A person who doesn’t like ordinary people to think they are as good as he is, or to enjoy some of the things he enjoys himself, will not like Australia. The spirit of fraternalism permeates the nation. Sometimes the substance of an accompanying equality is missing; there are still inequalities of wealth, power and opportunity, but the ordinary people have won – or had delivered to them – a profound and satisfying ideological victory. Australia is a nation that for a large part accepts the ideology of fraternalism.

  There are underground tensions of snobbery or power but these are almost unknown to the mass of the people. Whatever kind of a bastard the boss might be, he usually rolls up his sleeves and looks like one of the boys. Usually he does not outwardly contest the belief that those who work for him are as good as he is. Ordinary Australians no longer envy their bosses, although they may hate them or pity them. They attribute success to good luck or sharp conduct (thereby providing a more accurate view of success than most) and to them the economic advantages of getting ahead (they do not detect any social advantages) sometimes seem too slight to be worth the trouble. Ordinary Australia is not a society of striving and emulation. Ordinary people are not concerned with the ways of the rich or the highly educated. What they want they can usually get – a house, a car, oysters, suntans, cans of asparagus, lobsters, seaside holidays, golf, tennis, surfing, fishing, gardening. Life assumes meaning in the weekends and on holidays. In the ocean cities Australians can live the life of the Mediterranean or the South Seas. To some they seem lazy. They are not really lazy but they don’t always take their jobs seriously. They work hard at their leisure.

  Australia has one of the highest per capita national incomes in the world; there are more cars and TV sets for its population than almost anywhere; there is the largest rate of home ownership in the world; there are more savings accounts than people. Even these figures do not give an idea of Australia’s economic equality. Not only are very rich or very poor people rare; the average income is not just a simple average, it is also close to the typical income.

  As Australians line up at the polling booths in schools and halls at election time most of them do not know that Australia, which has been enjoying manhood suffrage and the secret ballot since 1860, was one of the first to show that society could survive what was then attacked as the triumph of ‘selfishness, ignorance and democracy’. There are less than a dozen countries like Australia that, throughout the century, have been ruled efficiently by stable democratic governments that have been accepted by a vast majority of the people as legitimate.* As in these few other countries, the opponents of a government in Australia (except for the small Communist Party) are not prepared to use any except democratic means in their attempts to replace it. And there is so much political democracy in Australia. Less than 13 000 000 people, but there are six State Governments and a Federal Government – altogether thirteen legislative chambers (including the upper houses), more than 700 politicians, about eighty Government Ministers. And the system of compulsory voting at elections, with fines for non-attendance, makes the ‘donkey vote’ – the vote of those who just vote down the list from top to bottom – a factor in political planning. And the system of preferential voting (in which every candidate for the one position must be voted for in order of preference with preferences being distributed until one candidate has a majority) encourages a ‘fair go’ for minority parties that pesters the bosses of the two major parties.

  Social stability is high: Australians are too easy-going to become fanatics and they do not crave great men. People count on orderly reform to right whatever they consider to be their wrongs. It is part of the nature of Australian government to juggle things around, to avoid sharp issues so that questions of final judgment do not suddenly arise. Even Australian nationalism – once strong – is now so hesitant that it no longer achieves self-definition. No one any longer tells Australians who they are, nor do they seem to care. They have their families, their leisure, they know what to do with their lives. They seem to know who they are but their easy-going definitions of themselves do not meet the fashions of intellectual or political rhetoric so that when Australian writers or politicians speak of their own people they often speak falsely, or with contempt. Whatever opinions Australians express personally, ordinary Australia is now a more tolerant country than it used to be. The mass of the people have available to them as full a range of civil liberties as a mass of people usually wants except, paradoxically, in the field that interests them most: having a good time. Generally, authority is despised. Politicians and government officials are distrusted and the police are often hated, although there is more unconscious acceptance of authority – perhaps indifference to authority – than Australians recognize. There are displays of aggressive individualism, although fewer than there used to be. But the aggression often springs from the feeling that someone else is being aggressive. Normal friendliness can be quickly resumed.

  The remarkable openness of manner impresses – and sometimes appals – those who are used to social stiffness or deference. Truth is sometimes blurted out with a directness that can disgust those who come from more devious civilizations. A cult of informality derived from a deep belief in the essential sameness and ordinariness of mankind reduces ceremony to something that is quietly and self-consciously performed in a corner. Australians are self-conscious if they have to take part in ritual. Their wartime armies must have had the lowest saluting rate in the world. The only really national festivals are Anzac Day, Christmas and New Year. Anzac Day is the Festival of the Ordinary Man; Christmas the Festival of Family; New Year the Festival of the Good Time. Other holidays are just days off – except for people of religious conviction. On Anzac Day, commemorating the landing of Australians at Gallipoli in 1915, in every town in Australia ordinary veterans in very ordinary clothes march down the streets (many out of step), go through a brief ceremony and then many of them go and get drunk. There are themes of death and sacrifice: but the appeal of Anzac Day is as an expression of the commonness of man (even death is a leveller), of the necessity for sticking together in adversity. It is not a patriotic day but, as Peter Coleman said in the Bulletin, ‘a tribal festival’, the folk seeing itself as it is – unpretentious and comradely.

  Australia is not a country of great political dialogue or intense searching after problems (or recognition of problems that exist). There is little grandiose ideology and politics is usually considered to be someone else’s business and a dirty business at that. For many Australians, playing or watching sport gives life one of its principal meanings. The elements of loyalty, fanaticism, pleasure-seeking, competitiveness, ambition and struggle that are not allowed precise expression in non-sporting life (although they exist in disguise) are stated precisely in sport. The whole business of human striving becomes a game. In 1950, Bertrand Russell said that Australia pointed the way to a happier destiny for man throughout the centuries to come; ‘I leave your shores with more hope for mankind than I had when I came among you.’ In 1886, J.A. Froude said of Australians: ‘It is hard to quarrel with men who only wish to be innocently happy.’ On an Australian beach on a hot summer day people doze in the sun or shoot the breakers like Hawaiian princes on pre-missionary Waikiki. The symbol is too farfetched for Australian taste. The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice cream. His kiddy is beside him.

  Nation without a mind

  Why write a book about such a happy country? One reason is that in some ways it is not so happy: one can learn something about happiness by examini
ng Australia – its lingering puritanism, the frustrations and resentments of a triumphant mediocrity and the sheer dullness of life for many of its ordinary people. Another reason is that it is a matter of some general interest – of considerable practical interest to Australians – whether Australia will be able to maintain its happiness; have the conditions that led to so much success also weakened adaptability and slowed down the reflexes of survival? Another reason is that – in a sense – Australia does not have a mind. Intellectual life exists but it is still fugitive. Emergent and uncomfortable, it has no established relation to practical life. The upper levels of society give an impression of mindlessness triumphant. Whatever intellectual excitement there may be down below, at the top the tone is so banal that to a sophisticated observer the flavour of democratic life in Australia might seem depraved, a victory of the anti-mind.

  This is not a special plea for the comfort of intellectuals. And there will certainly be no argument against ‘affluence’, the satisfaction of ordinary appetites by ordinary people. I shall accept as given the attitudes to life of most Australians (although they are not all my own preferences). One then asks: Is it possible in a modern society to preserve all the prosperity and happiness of a nation that is so strongly inimical to ideas? There is another part of the question: is Australia really inimical to ideas? Or has there been something wrong with the ideas presented to it?