The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  Even if the world were not to make demands on Australia – and Australians often seem to assume that since they leave the world alone it should do the same by them – the prosperity of the country might diminish compared to other countries. Throughout the world the basis of material prosperity in the future is likely to lie, for the first time in history, with clever, educated people. The need to build up a certain kind of cleverness will cause great social tensions in all industrialized countries; but especially in Australia, where cleverness can be considered un-Australian. Except in those few fields where it has a history of enterprise, Australia has not been a country of great innovation or originality. It has exploited the innovations and originality of others and much of its boasting is that of a parasite. As a transplanted society, it has had sufficient working similarities with the societies from which the innovations came to be able to exploit them with only a margin of inefficiency. But as the technological revolution passes into its new forms Australia may be left behind. It may not understand what is happening, or have the skills to implement new techniques. The present very great tendency for overseas firms to buy up Australian firms may accelerate. Australia could end up as an economically colonial country again – in manufacturing industry it is not far off it now – with foreigners managing its main economic affairs.

  Australia faces an amazing number of other challenges. As Barbara Ward wrote in the New York Times, although each of these challenges is not in itself unique, no other ‘Western’ nation has had to face so wide a cross-section of the mid-century’s typical dilemmas. One might add that, because of its history, Australia may also be uniquely unaware of the nature of challenge. To list these challenges – and they are another reason for writing this book – is to list most of the principal headings of the way the world talks now: the collapse of European colonial empires; the emergence of Communism in Asia; the lack of stability in the new states; the development of anti-racialism and of anti-colonialism; the pressures of underprivilege and of over-population; the surplus of temperate foodstuffs; the problems of maintaining growth in a sophisticated society; the problems of developing a physically ‘have-not’ country.

  Australia merits sympathy for providing an encyclopaedic study of the main dilemmas of the mid-century. Until it has much greater strength – and ultimately that would seem to depend on a huge increase in population – there is nothing much it can do about some of its problems, except hope for the best. But it moves very slowly in doing anything about any of its problems. There are no great debates, there is little effective public discussion. The men in power do not seem able to excite first their own imaginations and then those of others into becoming familiar with these challenges. The government does not seem capable of getting a far from incompetent bureaucracy on the move. There are few ‘new men’ gathered together in the precincts of power to re-visualize the images of the nation so that change may become possible. The men at the top, the tribal leaders, are not in training for such a set of awkward situations. Their imagination seems exhausted by the country’s achievements. Their own ideals – those of a more modest and earlier Australia – have been met and there are few people to whom they will listen to tell them that those ideals are now obsolete. Those who are now successful hold conventional wisdoms that belong to the first chapter of Australian history, a chapter that finished somewhere in the mid-twentieth century. There is no longer in Australia a generally accepted public sense of a future.

  It is as if a whole generation has become exhausted by events, a provincial generation produced in a period when mindlessness was a virtue, the self-interest of pressure groups was paramount, cleverness had to be disguised, quick action was never necessary and what happened overseas was irrelevant. In some ways the study of contemporary Australia is a study of that generation. It was not a generation that allowed a place for the kind of extraordinary man who can see the new shapes of the future – or the present – and enjoy challenge, living life at a fuller pitch. There is little of the sophisticated political discourse that can refresh politicians; there are few channels for an intellectual breakthrough; in the universities (with exceptions) clever men nurse the wounds of public indifference; government officials are exiled in Canberra, away from the people they govern. A society whose predecessors pioneered a whole continent now appears to shun anything that is at all out of the ordinary. The trouble is that, by Australian standards, almost everything that is now important is out of the ordinary.

  2. WHAT IS AN AUSTRALIAN?

  The first suburban nation

  Most Australian writers seem to find it impossible to come to grips with their own people. They caricature their fellow countrymen or idealize them for qualities most of them do not possess. There is no Australian Orwell, searching for the temper of the people, accepting it, and moving on from there. This failure to take Australian life seriously leads to a hollowness and hesitation in attitudes: since the realities of Australian life have not been written about in detail they do not exist for the bookish; what they see of Australian life seems somehow unreal and perhaps temporary. They feel betrayed by their own people.

  This betrayal can take different forms. As if they were a foreign elite trying to run a rebellious colony, the London-oriented Australians laugh at the ‘Australian accent’ or say of someone ‘he’s very Australian’: to them Australians are a crude and ‘uncultured’ lot. Those who cling to the Australian rural myth consider the fact that four out of five Australians live in towns to be a betrayal of one of history’s trusts. Some of them still act as if Australians were not mainly a suburban people; they shut their eyes and imagine a race of laconic country folk. Those who still maintain the ‘working class’ myth hate ‘affluence’, the young people who most strongly symbolize it, and the dwindling away of the old ‘working class’ rhetoric. The bohemians and rebels attack ‘suburbanism’. Indeed ‘suburbanism’, one way or the other, is likely to be the target of practically all intellectuals. And since most Australians live in the suburbs of cities this means that intellectuals hate almost the whole community. It is a fact highly inconvenient to national myth-making that Australia is probably the most urbanized nation in the world.

  Few Australians have realized that theirs was one of the first modern suburban societies. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Australia already possessed one of the highest proportions of city dwellers in the world. Australia may have been the first suburban nation: for several generations most of its men have been catching the 8.2, and messing about with their houses and gardens at the weekends. Australians have been getting used to the conformities of living in suburban streets longer than most people: mass secular education arrived in Australia before most other countries; Australia was one of the first nations to find part of the meaning of life in the purchase of consumer goods; the whole business of large-scale organized distribution of human beings in a modern suburban society is not new to Australians. There is no Australian city that is yet really an urban city with a varied and lively centre in which many people live and to which others congregate. Sydney’s King’s Cross area, with its 100 000 people, is the most densely populated area of any ‘Western’ city in the world but Sydney does not yet possess a really sophisticated city life, although it is beginning to imitate one. Detailed recognition of the essentially suburban character of Australia has been slow, partly because old myths have remained virulent and partly because special factors in Australia such as the almost pantheist love of outdoor activity have muddled the pattern of what – according to overseas authorities ‘suburbanism’ is supposed to be.

  It is hard to imagine how one can understand Australia unless one approaches sympathetically the life most Australians lead and the values they follow. For instance, Australia is an extraordinarily stable society. The self-satisfaction that is so often attacked is one expression of this stability. Australians seem to know what they want and it includes a house (with an average of five to six rooms) set in its own garden, a
considerable amount of privacy, domestic comfort and an involvement in family life. There is a strong materialist streak in Australians: they like things that are useful to them in their homes and they will work overtime to buy them on hire purchase. They have a strong philosophy of how lives should be led. You save money and get married; you pay a deposit on a house and furnish it; you hope your children will lead a happier life than you have led; you plan your retirement so that you will enjoy it; and when you die you leave your house to your children so that it can be sold and the money used to help pay off the mortgages on their own houses. To ordinary Australians life has its seasons, there are propagation and replacement. Perhaps it is the acceptance of this not unusual view of life that offends.

  The ‘home’ occupies as central a position in Australian life as land in a peasant community except that it is disposable after death; there can be an equally strong sense of family, except that as children become adult the family group dissolves, the children go their own way. As well as the verities of home and family, Australian life has many acceptable forms of companionship, often a craving for rest and solitude, and an extraordinary identity at times with the elements. Within this context the entire range of human comedy and tragedy has its play. Births are celebrated, the dead are mourned, desires fulfilled or denied. The profusion of life doesn’t wither because people live in small brick houses with red tile roofs. It is the almost universal failure of Australian writers to realize this that causes them either to caricature Australian life, or to ignore it and move into what Robert Burns described in Dissent as ‘the ragged fringes of social life and human consciousness’. As Burns says: ‘Australia’s novelists, the very good as well as the quite frightful, belong in the cluster of those who regard the actual circumstances of daily life as a sort of bead curtain which must be clawed aside before the writer can drink deep at the bar of truth and fulfilment.’ Almost all Australian writers – whatever their politics – are reactionaries whose attitude to the massive diversities of suburban life is to ignore it or condemn it rather than discover what it is.

  In earlier periods of Australian city life there was considerable difference between gentility and vulgarity. The vulgarity came from the ‘working class’ of the big cities: it was pictured as happy-go-lucky, hard-drinking, hard-gambling, matey, thumbing its nose at the sissies and snobs in the lower middle-class suburbs. It was a non-possessive, shiftless society of rented houses and sparse furniture, companionable, reckless and concerned with the expressions of toughness. This picture reflected some of the primitive virtues: a man did not tolerate injury, he rebelled against authority and sometimes might take harsh revenge. He was seen to reflect the verities of human history – a real man, not a suburban creation – as C.J. Dennis saw Ginger Mick:

  ‘To fight and forage … Spare me days! It’s been man’s leadin’ soot

  Since ’e learned to word a tart an’ make a date.

  E’s been at it, good an’ solid, since ole Adam bit the froot:

  To fight and forage, an’ perfect ‘is mate.’

  Such types did exist, but to identify them with all wage earners is romantic. And it should be remembered that when the collarless cavaliers of corner pub and back alley got home from this rollicking man’s world of booze and two-up, they might slobber with sentiment over their wives and kids but if they were in a bad mood they might bash them up. They constituted a self-centred male aristocracy following its way of life at the expense of others. For a number of reasons – greater prosperity, slum clearance, increased education, a greater growth of white-collar workers (now more than half the workforce) – this class is vanishing, although there are still plenty of individuals who display its characteristics (usually minus the physical brutality), by no means all of them ‘working class’. And the assertion of toughness and masculinity is still an outstanding characteristic of many Australian men, along with an exclusion of women from their social life.

  What is sometimes still not realized by those who attack ‘suburbanism’ is that the entire gentility–vulgarity confrontation is out of date. The gentility is going, too. The existence of a substantial body of people who valued sobriety and hard work was long suppressed by the myth makers; now it is overstated. New generations are denying the old proprieties and stuffiness. The genteel have been vulgarized, the vulgar made more gentle. People now enjoy themselves more in the same kind of ways. Drive around one of the big cities in the weekend when people are getting ready to pursue happiness and you see, especially among the young, that they even dress the same. The cult of the informal has extended to the once genteel; and kindliness is softening the once brutal. Now brutality or social stiffness are more a matter of personality or of family than of class. A new style of life is developing that is less rigid. It is wrong to describe it as an extension of the ‘middle-class’ way of life. This way of life is itself being destroyed. The mass of young Australians (about half of the population is under twenty-five) seems to be becoming more the same – in some new way that is still mysterious.

  Fair go, mate

  There is a whole set of Australian characteristics summed up in the phrase, ‘Fair go, mate’. This is what happened in Australia to the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. As might be expected, in the transmutation these ideals have been knocked about. But the whole thing cost no lives and it is ingrained in the texture of Australian life. If the outside world will allow it, it seems to be there to stay.

  The general Australian belief is that it is the government’s job to see that everyone gets a fair go – from old-age pensioners to manufacturers. A fair go usually means money. Australians see a government – which they both trust and despise – as an outfit whose job is to help them where they need help. This attitude of expectant distrust involves a great deal of semi-legalism; governments hand over to semi-judicial tribunals like the Arbitration Court, the Tariff Board or the Repatriation Tribunals much of the business of distributing ‘fair goes’.

  With such a calculating approach to government there is little of either State-worship or State-hate. The State is just a lot of other Australians who are assumed to have gone in for politics for reasons of self-interest but who are expected to ensure that the self-interest of others is also secured – otherwise they should be sacked. They are managers doing a job. This cut-and-dried attitude distresses those who call for leadership and the kind of statesmanship that attempts to stir people up and prompt them to unpleasant action that is said to be for their own good. Others are distressed because it is not the kind of attitude that involves eternal struggle against the State. Much of the rhetoric of liberty is missing in Australia yet governments are checked and balanced by most intricate means and attempts to extend their power are often frustrated. Australians are often accused of being indifferent to freedom, of being submissive and potentially authoritarian; this seems a harsh judgment to make on the ordinary people. If the criticism is to be made it should be directed against the intellectuals; they are the ones who are normally expected to fight the forward battles of freedom. So far as political freedom is a matter of institutions and of ingrained attitudes and not merely of words, the position is that Australia politically is one of the most free countries in the world. Democratic procedures are part of national life; there is a distrust of authority; men prefer the self-interest of comradeship or family to the demands of the State. Puritanism excepted, ordinary life in Australia for ordinary people has been more free than, until recently, it was ever believed possible. Australia was one of the first countries in the world to show that this could be so. It is – in some fields – not for an excess of power but for a lack of activity that governments might be criticized in Australia.

  Fair goes are not only for oneself, but for underdogs. Even in international sporting matches Australians have been known to switch from their own side to that of a gallant challenger. Australians love a ‘battler’, an underdog who is fighting the top dog, although their veneration for him is likely to pas
s if he comes out from under. At work – among the unambitious – the feeling for underdogs runs very strong. Covering up for an incompetent mate is common, as long as he is considered to be trying and not simply ‘bludging’. There is a feeling that ‘triers’ should not suffer because of their inadequacies. Thus in education concern for underdogs has played an important role and the tone tends to be keyed to the less gifted. Concern for unemployment far exceeds self-interest. It is considered unjust that those who can least look after themselves and who bear the least responsibility for decisions should be the first and usually the only ones to suffer when governments or business firms blunder or change their minds. Australians do not like to think of other Australians being out of work (they are in fact one of the most fully employed peoples in the world); throughout the long rule of the Menzies governments threats of unemployment seemed to be the one thing that might unhorse the old survivor. However there are blind sides in Australian kindness to underdogs; for instance, lack of imagination and curiosity blinded them to the misfortunes of the Aborigines, and there is a decline in interest in social services.

  There is little public glorification of success in Australia. The few heroes or heroic occasions (other than those of sport) are remembered for their style rather than for their achievement. The early explorers, Anzac Day: these commemorate comradeship, gameness, exertion of the Will, suffering in silence. To be game, not to whinge – that’s the thing – rather than some dull success coming from organization and thought. Since Australia is a commercial society there are many slick operators in Australia and those who admire them. Like other peoples Australians can say one thing and do another. But even here it can sometimes be the brazen rogues who do things with dash who are admired rather than those who are merely clever or organized.