by Donald Horne
The concept of fair goes is of some significance in estimating Australia’s adaptability and its reflexes of survival. It is essentially a non-competitive concept, a demand for protection, an attempt to gain security and certainty.
Whether it is an underdog in a factory or a top dog demanding tariff protection, the feeling is that justice lies in a guarantee of existence. To fight for existence in an open market must be avoided although one may use legal or other lurks. Even the system of arbitration between employers and unions has some of this quality: the parties are not left to fight it out for themselves. I am not arguing the merits of this: it is a common human demand to want to feel safe and a sensible one if it works. But the concept of the fair go has no international currency. Its wide acceptance in Australia sometimes renders Australians naïve when faced with nations who do not share their kindnesses.
The doctrine of fraternity, still largely meaningless in most countries, has received great ideological attention in Australia. It is just possible to live in Australia without realizing this. A man who doesn’t use public transport or taxis, doesn’t bump into people in the streets, or ask the way, or come into contact on anonymous terms with ordinary people may not hear the word ‘mate’. There are other men to whom its use is as ordinary as ‘comrade’ to a Communist.
In the narrower sense ‘mates’ are men who are thrown together by some emergency in an unfriendly environment and have become of one blood in facing it. In this sense its use is strongest in the unions and in the armed forces. Mates stick together in their adversity and their common interest. Mateship of this kind is not a theory of universal brotherhood but of the brotherhood of particular men. However the emphasis on adversity can lend a suggestion of theatricality at a time when there is not much adversity: a mate situation of this kind can become paranoid when mates all get drunk together and express their suspicions of a conspiring world.
There is a wider, but still exclusive sense, in which mateship is simply comradeship within a male fraternity. There is a socially homosexual side to Australian male life (of a ‘butch’ kind) that can involve prolonged displays of toughness in male company. Men stand around bars asserting their masculinity with such intensity that you half expect them to unzip their flies.
There are many pressures to conformity. This is not unexpected from a civilization that has been suburban for such a comparatively long time. Opinion studies carried out by Ronald Taft showed that the Australians tested put greater emphasis on observing conventional manners than on expressing one’s individuality, and preferred superficial but correct social relations to deep and intimate ones. The same opinion studies applied to a sample of Californians showed that the Americans were less likely to endorse conventional manners than the Australians. Australians like people to be ordinary. One reason might be the inability to imagine a way of life different from one’s own. For instance, talking about sport, money and motor cars takes up so much of male conversation – indeed it provides a lingua franca between income groups and gives reality to the convention of equality – that sometimes to engage in a conversation it is necessary to have mastered these topics. Not to have done so is not to be a man. Interests run so evenly throughout the community that not to share them is to be an outcast. To be different is considered an affectation.
There are pressures to conformity in the concepts of ‘sincerity’ and ‘consideration’. For ‘sincerity’ one can sometimes read ‘stupidity’. Sometimes to be clever is to be insincere: ‘I know you’re wrong but I can’t work out why.’ And to be ‘considerate’ is not necessarily to be kind; it might simply mean not to unsettle conventions of behaviour. Cross-question an Australian on what she means (‘consideration’ is mainly a woman’s word) and ultimately you are likely to unearth a complex of resentments against difference. A considerate person is one who fits into the majority pattern, follows the rules.
On the other hand – apart from the interventions of the puritans – Australian society has a great degree of public tolerance. People don’t care about what goes on unless it directly confronts or interferes with them. This is just about as high a degree of public tolerance as one can expect from a community: not to go out of one’s way to interfere with others. Tell an Australian about something nasty that’s happening in another suburb, or another street, and he may express a harsh opinion about it and then conclude that it takes all sorts to make a world. He doesn’t start a reform movement. It’s no business of his. Some critics profess to find Australians intolerant because they use rude words about migrants. But all over the world people attack other people. Perhaps this draws more attention in Australia because the climate is so professedly egalitarian. When it comes to action, Australians usually don’t care. There have been few significant protests against migrants. Almost all acts of interference in any field of Australian life are inspired by the puritans and activated at the top. There are no significant mass movement fanaticisms. It is only when a difference stares them in the face that ordinary Australians become truculent; and then only in a personal way.
The concept of the essential humanity of all men is a noble one and – as long as it also allows for difference – it is also a shrewd assessment. But it needs slicking up in Australia to include a few kinds of people other than those who live in one’s own suburb. Where it still flowers quite splendidly is in the openness of manner of Australians, and their informality and friendliness. The marked openness of manner sometimes offends as roughness. Sometimes it is roughness – the old feeling for the boisterous and robust or the anxiously male. But sometimes it is a directness that is nothing more complicated than honesty. London-oriented Australians can often be ‘taken in’ by people who display the mannerisms of English gentleness and politeness (but are really quite fraudulent), while they deplore the crudities of direct men. (Directness, of course, can also be fraudulent.) The Australian way is to distrust extreme politeness. ‘Eh!’ says the Australian. ‘What’s he after?’
The social servilities of workplaces are lessening. Life for ordinary people in offices used to be more stiff and more outwardly authoritarian than it is now. The long-established cult of informality is now increasing. Power is still there but it becomes devious, wears a more friendly smile. And for most of the community, out of working hours, life is now more relaxed, more freed of the vexations of social forms and ceremony than older societies could have imagined. It is a leisurely life, usually unworried by status. The outward democracy of life in Australia represents a successful revolution. If a Russian aristocrat of 1917 could see photographs of Australia in 1964 he might assume that it was here that the people had taken over, not Russia. So, in many of the forms of social life, they have. And good luck to them.
Max Harris says in Australian Civilization: ‘Mateship became an attitude to human relationship, an easy readiness to strike up contact with fellow human beings in a warm and casual way. This often strikes outsiders as evidence of vulgar over-democratization … In fact the Australian has a rough but ready capacity for immediate affection, a quality which, oddly for an Anglo-Saxon breed, he shares with some of the Mediterranean people.’ Australians like to establish a person-to-person basis. In the cities they can display a traditional country hospitality to visitors, even strangers. One of the many perplexities involved in the visits of Australians to England lies in the frustration of not receiving the same immediate hospitality. Since Australian friendliness often lacks knowledge of social forms and ceremonies it can sometimes seem so strange as to be taken for rudeness, usually for the one reason: that most Australians are bereft of feelings of difference; they think that all people are the same, that what is good for oneself is good for anyone else. Their openness and friendship-seeking is based on this belief. They seek similarity where often it does not exist – even amongst themselves. They reach out for the essential humanity of man but the apparatus with which they do it is too primitive for the task. They retreat into suspicions.
Having a good time
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To understand Australian concepts of enjoyment one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism and that the latter is beginning to win. Old cries about dullness and crudity are still kept up by men who reached their conclusions about Australia in the 1930s and after going to all that trouble are not going to change their minds now. But things are changing – at different paces and in different ways in different parts of Australia. A lot of Australian life is still restricted by the killjoys. But it is improving.
Until these improvements began in the 1950s the story was that Australians took their pleasures solemnly, like true Anglo-Saxons. The gaiety of the Chinese or continental Europeans were not found in their cities. For many decades puritanism – bizarre in the sunshine of Australia – seemed to stifle Australian society. In most states hotel bars shut at six; liquor was not allowed with meals; betting was illegal; there were no social centres in the suburbs; the loss of the old working-class gregariousness was not replaced with new forms of companionship; the community was almost completely philistine towards the intellect and the arts; there were few good restaurants; Sundays were dismal; book banning and other forms of censorship flourished; a woman’s place was in the home. Here was a country of indolent climate, general prosperity and a philosophy of happiness; it was a wonderful set-up for choice and indulgence. Yet life was dismal and such public enjoyment as occurred often degenerated into rowdiness. A pall of ennui spread over the suburbs at night and at weekends. There was all this life to lead and nothing much to lead it with. Apart from the pleasures of family life, three main diversions were open to the people – drink, sport and money.
To drink became one of the tests of manliness among those who rejected at least some of the standards of puritanism. For ordinary people it was a brutal pleasure – jostled in austerely equipped bars, dazed by the bedlam, gulping beer down and perhaps later spewing it up. But some of its special significance may have come from its puritan context. Australians have never been quite the nation of boozers they imagine themselves to be. Beer consumption is high (a gallon a week per adult) but comparative figures show that although Australians rate high in consumption of alcohol and arrests for drunkenness they are not – as they imagine – among the world’s very highest drinkers. At least not on the average. There is no egalitarianism in Australian drinking and, although drinking has played its part in the mateship and bohemian myths, a significant part of the population does not appear to have carried these myths into practice. Australia has never been an alcoholic society in which drink was necessary to practically all social activity. It played little or no part in the lives of the puritans or the genteel, and amongst the boozers it often played a restricted part. A man might get as full as a boot at the pub but he wouldn’t touch a drop of it in his own home. There are some signs now that, as with other matters, drinking is equalizing itself, especially amongst the young. Drinking groups drink less but other groups drink more. Drink is becoming a more universal feature of society, although arrests for drunkenness are slightly declining.
Sport to many Australians is life and the rest a shadow. Sport has been the one national institution that has had no ‘knockers’. To many it was considered a sign of degeneracy not to be interested in it. To play sport, or watch others play, and to read and talk about it was to uphold the nation and build its character. Australia’s success at competitive international sport was considered an important part of its foreign policy. (Australians usually had an inflated idea of this success. They weren’t as good as they thought they were and they falsely assumed that others always had the same regard for their prowess as they had themselves.) In sport, in the view of the nation-builders, there were gradations of goodness: to play was best, to watch was second best: to watch cricket was better than watching horse races; to watch wrestling or motor car racing was not watching sport at all – it was mere entertainment. To stay at home or even to go to the beach and sun oneself was evil when one could be playing a game or watching other people play one. (Look at those louts on the beach: they should be out watching cricket.) At schools games have been coldly organized on impelling competitive principles. In tennis, for instance, a promising young player is likely to be pulled into a competitive machine in which the prize is the Davis Cup. Competitive sport in Australia can still be a ruthless, quasi-military operation. This is one of the disciplinary sides of Australian life.
With so many social restraints on other attempts to give life meaning, money, like sport and drinking became a permissible life object. To many Australians this can be the reality. ‘Money matters.’ It can be a hard, narrow concern with money itself, sometimes associated with the things that money can buy, sometimes not. It is not a way of life pursued by the majority of the community but even those who are not obsessed with money will usually pay it lip-service. In a community where the bulk of the people are unaware of difference the possession of money is a difference they can recognize. In a sense it is an acceptably democratic difference. A man is important because he possesses money and money is important. But one learns nothing about the man from his possession of money. He is probably just lucky, or a money grabber, or something. He is not a better man, but an important man. Ordinary Australians dream of money falling into their laps; in Sydney, for example, lotteries are drawn every weekday and the poker machines in the clubs clatter until late at night. But Australians are not driven to work harder than is necessary to buy their houses and equip them, look after their children and follow their leisure pursuits. ‘Money’s not everything.’
Into this dismal picture there have now been splashed some brighter colours. Hotels now stay open late; dining out is less crude; one can drink with meals and find excellent second-grade cooking in a number of national cuisines: betting laws are liberalized; sexual puritanism is decreasing; even censorship is less idiotic than it used to be, although it is still harsher than in most democracies; the arts are beginning to find public expression; in the suburbs espresso bars, social clubs, restaurants and hotel entertainment break through to a more companionable life; and women participate more openly in the pleasures of life. None of this has been achieved by political protest. Australians have remained sufficiently puritanical to be ashamed to take seriously some of the matters about which they are most concerned. It has been a matter of unorganized and unideological social pressure, probably coming from causes such as a continuing decline in puritanism, the demands of migrants for a life more like the one they are used to, the increasing number of Australians who travel overseas, and the changes in generations. One has only to look at the young to see the difference between them and the older generations. They are more open in their enjoyment, more poised, more easy in mixed company. They seek more variety. They may be about to turn sport worship upside-down, treating outdoor activity as a pleasurable diversion rather than a nation-building institution. They may not care to win the Davis Cup or the Tests. They seem to prefer the individual performances to the team game – surfing, skin-diving, skiing, archery.
Despite the puritanism that seeped into Australia through the Protestant sects, the Evangelical wing of the Church of England, the Irish Catholic Church, the Protestant Ethic (for businessmen) and the Nonconformist Conscience (for political leftwingers) there has been a counter-balancing paganism among ordinary people. When the waves are running right and the weather is fine the crowds at the beaches are doing more than enjoying themselves: they are worshipping the body and feeling identity with sand and sea and sky. Breaking through the disciplines of organized sport, people amuse themselves as they wish in outdoor games or relaxations that express a belief in the goodness of activity and nature. There has long been this element in Australia of delighting in life for its vigour and activity, without asking questions about it. It has received considerable literary expression as an unquestioning (and anti-intellectual as well as anti-puritan) hedonism, often with implied nature worship. It may be the philosophy of living of the you
ng. When young men strap their malibu surf boards (cost $70 to $90) to their cars, drive off to the beach and command the breakers all day they seem to move into a life that is more Polynesian than puritan. In Quadrant Hugh Atkinson quoted a ‘Surfie’ as saying: ‘I dunno, it’s hard to describe. When you’re driving hard and fast down the wall, with the soup curling behind yer, or doing this backside turn on a big one about to tube, it’s just this feeling. Yer know, it leaves yer feeling stoked.’
It might be relevant to look at the life of the South Seas to throw some illumination on life in Australia, instead of the almost exclusive comparison with the United Kingdom and parts of Western Europe (ignoring Mediterranean Europe) with an occasional glance at the USA. Desmond O’Grady wrote in the Observer of the sense of deprivation suffered by European migrants. ‘They feel they are living in a void because the suburb has no organic relationship to the city. Those Italians who are disappointed because they feel that they do not belong, that they have not reached the centre of Australian life will go on feeling disappointed because there is no centre. Once they realize there is no centre and they couldn’t care less about it, they’ll have been assimilated.’ Yet the place to send migrants so that they can feel they belong is to the beach, one of the strongest centres of gregariousness in the ocean cities. Australians do not sit at pavement cafes to watch the promenade. They go to the beach, sun themselves and surf, and watch the promenade there. They still look at people, but the people have most of their clothes off. Here a young man can show his prowess in the water to his peers and the women of his tribe, his existence stripped down to what he alone feels and sees (which isn’t much); his father may be in the men’s quarters telling stories of war, of fishing, or of sporting ritual; others may be sailing or looking to the garden. There is also in Australian life some of the craving for quietness and slow reflection. A man likes to sit in the sun and say nothing, do nothing and think very little. On holidays Australians like to retreat to shacks or even tents beside the water, and enjoy the primitive.