by Donald Horne
The desire for simple pleasure, so strong in Australians, still plays no part in the official view of life; presumably this is one of the reasons for the spuriousness and boredom of official statements. It may not be possible for a political party to campaign about the things that people really care about – more roads to the beaches for instance – but a party that can begin to imply its acceptance of enjoyment as part of Australian life might find itself attracting votes, especally among the young, who are liberated from some of their parents’ guilts.
Give it a go
The scene is the Domain, Sydney’s Sunday afternoon orators’ corner. The speaker is shouting at the crowd: ‘Tell me this! What is an Australian? I say what is an Australian?’ Someone in the crowd puts up his hand. ‘An Australian is a lazy boozer.’ The crowd laughs. That’s it. We must poke fun at ourselves. Or is it poking fun at ourselves? What’s wrong with a lazy boozer? Australians get bored with serious talk unless it is expressed in the most laconic terms. By any standards public oratory is appalling: the usual style is to speak as if one is not interested in the subject. Enthusiasm and rhetoric are likely to be treated as ratbaggery. A usual form of social intercourse is ‘chiacking’, pulling someone’s leg. This kind of act might sometimes go on for minutes in the most complicated way. With some people it is now a considerable art. It is a form of affection convenient for a people who distrust sentimentality and are likely to sniff around a florid phrase like a dog sniffing a bait. Australians don’t want to be taken in by words and they are suspicious of public emotion. They seem to prefer their public occasions to be as dull as ditch-water; no one will take them seriously that way.
On this most pervasive and important national characteristic Max Harris said in Australian Civilization: ‘The modern Australian, in so far as he thinks about the world at all, does it in an offhand unsentimental way, without self-pity or self-assuredness. From the minor daily exigences to the Eumenidean events, there is no purpose in making a fuss … Human relationships (the mateship hangover) are pretty sacred, but most aspirations and ambitions are “bullshit”; this cynicism-beneath-purpose feeds our notorious philistinism, but it also prevents blind individual egocentrism. The Australian finds it difficult to go in for consistent self-delusion. In his moments of serious thought he sees an awful lot of bullshit in the world. He can identify, recognize and make short work of such bullshit as comes within his experience. Unfortunately he extends it to those experiences and phenomena with which he cannot cope. But within a given critical range there is dry intelligence, good sense, a good-humoured resistance to all pretensions and over-valuation … the Australian is cynical and self-denigratory towards himself as well as towards the world he sees around him. He is always having a shot at his own bullshit. Normally the Australian is “sending himself up”, even when he appears to be boasting. As with the Scots, it is difficult to tell when the Australian is “fair dinkum”. It’s not very often.’
This deeply inlaid scepticism is a genuine philosophy of life, a national style determining individual and group actions. Its influence can be detected throughout Australian society. It may be the most pervasive single influence operating on Australians. It has much to its credit. A sceptical people like the Australians is more likely to achieve change organically than by cataclysm: things move along more or less comfortably in their own directions, without the horrifying personal disasters of more catastrophic societies. And it is surely in the interests of freedom that the normal posture of Australians towards authority is one of ridicule. In the Australian armies men were brave and resourceful in action, but off duty many were Good Soldier Schweiks. They were in the army to engage the enemy, not to engage in military ‘bullshit’. The very lack of any definite nationalism, of statements on who Australians are and where they stand in history, cannot be wholeheartedly deplored in an age that has seen so much horror and cruelty unleashed in the name of nationalism. History has resounded with ceremony and ideology that has almost always been ‘bullshit’; in the end the common man copped the lot. From this process Australians try to stand apart. Even promises of material advantages are treated sceptically. At election time Australians take pleasure in looking gift horses in the mouth. Excessive promising is said to help lose elections in Australia. Bosses of all kinds lament lack of discipline but as far as the ordinary Australians are concerned they can go jump in the lake. Intellectuals lament the unadventurousness of Australians but they can jump in the lake too. Considering the quite preposterous nature of many ideas intellectuals put up this reaction is not necessarily stupid. In general one might agree with the ordinary Australian: most of what is pumped out of the word factories is ‘bullshit’.
Combined with this scepticism is a sense of the practical that is interested in material things and, within a narrow range, prepared to experiment with them. The scepticism of Australians is not a reactionary conservatism: it is a caution in relating action to words. The high material prosperity of Australia would not have been possible in a completely unadaptable society. Scepticism does not stop Australians from at times suddenly making quite drastic changes. Once they accept a change they are all for it. They seem to have very little sense of continuity with the past, and changes, when they occur, occur suddenly and with little regret; the past is all over and done with.
They are a largely non-contemplative people who often like the thought of action and the future; that they do not engage in action more often or think of the future in more detail seems to come from a narrowness of imagination, the product of scepticism: they have a limited view of the possible but if something new is demonstrated as being possible – and this demonstration often takes place in a more innovatory country overseas – then they accept it. Good-oh. The Yanks can do it. We’ll have a go at it too. What they find it difficult to do is to imagine the new for themselves. And they have no class in their own country which regularly does this for them.
Despite this lack of imagination, Australians – oddly enough – can be skilful improvisors. Impelled to action, Australians cheerfully ‘give it a go’. They try something to see if it works, pretty sure that it will. There is almost a cult of optimistic improvisation, of the slapdash and the amateurish; it may even be an extension of the cult of the informal. Procedural patterns and conceptualization are so ramshackle that some parts of the country’s institutional structure seem to be held together with safety pins and bits of string. Suggest to an Australian that you spend some time investigating a practical problem in detail and outlining rational procedural patterns and you bore him stiff. ‘She’ll be right,’ he will say. ‘We’ll just give her a go.’ Talking too much about what you are doing is ‘bullshit’. It’s best to get on with the job. (The phrase ‘she’ll be right’ can strike terror into the hearts of people who are trying to run things in Australia. What it can mean is: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just let us muck it up for you and leave us in peace.’ It is a phrase of unreasonable confidence – like the merely polite Chinese ‘Yes’, which can mean, ‘No, but I don’t like to say so’.)
The scepticism of Australians produces many weaknesses as well as strengths, especially since it has penetrated many areas of power in the community. A passion for improvisation leads to slapdash attitudes that may become increasingly dangerous in a technological age; it includes distrust of the expert. Scepticism can combine with the egalitarian dislike of cleverness to oversimplify even the simplest issues. Like all optimists, Australians are stupendous simplifiers. As practical-minded optimists they can get away with their dislike of discussion of even practical issues because most of these issues are clarified for them overseas. Their main job is to improvise an adaptation of overseas ideas in conditions that are not very competitive. But these cheerful simplifications will work only as long as Australian society is sufficiently similar to the societies from which the ideas come – and only as long as it is not called on to provide ideas for itself.
Scepticism reacts against imagination of even the most d
own-to-earth kind. Yet imagination is not merely making things up; it can also lie in discerning the shapes of problems, in probing new areas of the possible. For scepticism to oppose this type of imagination, as it does in Australia, is simply to defend conventional stereotypes. It is not really prompted by a sense of reality but by a particular form of illusion. Australian scepticism, as an expression of optimistic nationalism, can sometimes be naïve.
Faced with odd conduct, Australians ask: ‘What’s in it for him?’ Such a view of life can strip calculating self-interest of its fancy clothes; but it does not allow for the irrational, the element of craziness that may be a more important element in affairs than rationality. Themselves calculating, materialist and optimistic, Australians find it hard to accept that quixotry, pessimism, spirituality, desire for defeat, boredom, love of rhetoric or of risk, of wielding power for its own sake – all ratbaggery these – may often impel action. In the narrow shaft of clear, bright sunlight where Australians think, there is little room for the view in which we all just seem to bump around in the shadows with little understanding of what it is all about. Australians think they have life taped.
Racketeers of the mediocre
There is more concern with gaining and manipulating power – more conspiracies and private bastardries – than ever appears in assessments of Australia. It is here that one of the real divisions in Australia occurs – between the mass of the people who pursue innocent happiness and those who attempt to gain the multiple satisfactions of power and ambition. Of the latter, those who seek power openly and openly enjoy it may now be in the minority. These are the men who established careers by pushing on with Napoleonic onslaught, Men of Will, with an eye for an opening and the ability to mass their resources to exploit it. They are often impelled by an un-Australian craving for excitement and achievement, for getting things done. They used to be common enough in Australia, but now they are confined mainly to business and even in this field their numbers are declining. One of their difficulties is that, society having become more complicated, success now demands detailed staff work as well as determination to exploit weakness and although Men of Will can learn to use intricate staff work, in Australia they have been slow to do so.
Men of this kind are sometimes dismissed by their rivals as too crudely ‘Australian’; and there is now something of a reaction against them from a new generation of ‘smoothies’. They must inevitably be more devious than they appear to be but there is an openness and directness about them that fits the style of the ordinary people. However a new kind of ambitious Australian is now apparent who is not straightforward in anything; he learns to conceal his ambition and to follow it deviously, under an egalitarian disguise. Especially in the middle generation, he can become as tricky and deceitful as you are likely to find. And if he is not impelled by cravings for achievement (that is to say, to get something done), but by the desire to possess power and at the same time to be liked, when he treads softly into some area of power he may not be impelled to use power for some external end, but to play with it for its own sake and to follow this secret vice into its darkest mysteries.
At the top, whatever the subterfuges, the practice of power is often inefficiently authoritarian. Men who do not understand originality or professionalism do not delegate efficiently (although they may use delegation to pass the buck): they hold their positions. They are impatient with the time taken to be expert, lack comparative standards and are uninterested in ideas. They dominate. Unlike the Men of Will, whose decisions, though perhaps arbitrary, nevertheless form some kind of public law, they may dominate silently and capriciously – meaninglessly.
Many of the weaknesses of ordinary Australians are those likely to be found in a people anywhere. It is a sign of how deeply populist much Australian thinking is that when someone wants to criticize Australia he criticizes not the few who run it, but the mass of the people, as if the genius of the nation resided exclusively in them and only spontaneous generation on their part could affect reform. This habit conceals the fact that, while ordinary Australians have many fine and some quite exceptional characteristics, the present elites in Australia are mostly second-rate. Many of the nation’s affairs are conducted by racketeers of the mediocre who have risen to authority in a non-competitive community where they are protected in their adaptations of other people’s ideas. At times they almost seem to form a secret society to preserve the obsolescent or the amateurish. Yet they are very Australian about it. Characteristics that may be admirable or at least harmless in ordinary people may be dangerous if they permeate the areas of power. The passion for fair goes can then become a whingeing demand for fair goes for privilege; those who want to make money run to the government or one of its agencies with a sob story. The passion for improvisation can mean that standards are of the ‘she’ll do’ kind and there is impatience with slow detailed preparation or professional procedure. The passion for scepticism can produce a suspicion of discussion, a tongue-tied lack of practical imagination, a mindlessness in decision and discourse. The passion for egalitarianism may combine with the passion for scepticism to hide and often frustrate talent.
The demand for mindlessness can be so pervasive that able men deliberately stumble around with the rest lest they appear too clever, and therefore too ‘impractical’. Within Australian institutions there is a great deal more subtlety in personal relations than the image of the simple unsophisticated Australian allows for. Much energy is wasted in pretending to be stupid. To appear ordinary, just like everybody else, is sometimes a necessary condition for success in Australia. When this is merely a disguise it can frustrate talent but not suppress it; unfortunately, all too often it is not a disguise.
The elites of Australia sometimes guard their power with a lack of interest in talent that is more open than in almost any other democracy. In this atmosphere even to attempt precise, detailed and orderly statement can sometimes excite ridicule; it is an assault on the conventions of a country whose elites often live by the rules of other people’s thumbs. To be expert and adopt professional standards can be to put a man in the second grade; to argue reasonably an affectation; to take a realistic interest in the present an impertinence; to attempt to project the future a confession of impracticality. The cleverness, conceptualization and procedural skills that go into running things in innovating countries is ‘mere theory’ to many of the masters of Australia.
In this atmosphere cleverness and talent can become devious but still survive in some lower key. What often perishes altogether – in the bureaucracies of business or of government or in the universities and in such intellectual communities as exist – are originality, insight and sensitivity, the creative sources of human activity. In an imitative country no one has to be creative; the creative person is likely to be confronted with distrust – not perhaps in science or the arts, but almost everywhere else. It is as if the masters of Australia have inherited a civilization whose rules they do not understand.
With their distrust for Australian originality and their ignorance of the world the men who run Australia often have a peculiarly narrow view of ranges of the possible. For them, to appraise potentials is to decide to do little more than continue what is now happening. The ‘rebels’ in Australia normally do not appraise the possible at all; they simply express wishes. But those who profess to be practical often lack the great talent of practicality: the ability to seek out to the outermost limits of the possible. The potential for change within the ordinary people of Australia is great; it is their misfortune that their affairs are controlled by second-rate men who cannot understand the practicality of change, who are, in other words, ‘conformist’. It is not the people who are stupid but their masters, who cling to power but fail to lead. Employers find the Australian people lazy; politicians and government officials distrust them; intellectuals hate them. Yet with different leadership, the Australian people might display a proud record. As it is their contempt for those who run their affairs is more than a
mere expression of Australian egalitarianism: it is an accurate assessment.
3. SENSES OF DIFFERENCE
Eleven cities
Fire, air and water … these are the elements of Sydney, the fire of the sun, the freedom of the air, the challenges and diversions of thirty-five beaches on the Pacific and the waters of Port Jackson, Broken Bay, Pittwater, Botany Bay and Port Hacking. Those who see only miles of suburban streets leading away from ocean, bay or river see the form of Sydney but not the way it sees itself. Sydney dreams of surfing, fishing, sailing, swimming in calm bays, lying stretched out in the sun, absorbing heat into the marrow. And it is now at long last taking on some of the feeling of a great city, the first city in Australia to do so. After London, Paris and Berlin, Sydney is now as big as any city in Western Europe and bigger than Madrid, Rome, or Vienna. In American terms, it is about the same size as San Francisco. Its peculiar flavour is of anarchic difference. Its getting-on-for three million people have broken their guidelines. There are no accepted forms in Sydney; it is anonymous; just people following their pursuits, indifferent to others. Sydney does not acknowledge a ‘Society’; there are merely claimants to position, who can, if they wish, achieve positions by self-acclamation. There are no standards. For a quarter of a century politics in New South Wales were conducted with a Tammany lack of policy, a matter of deals and pressure groups unadorned by rhetoric and of little interest except to the participants. Sydney’s indifference to what others do has achieved tolerance without ideology. In Sydney you see more Asians than in any other Australian city but people seem to take no notice one way or the other. It is Melbourne that speaks up for conscience. But it is also in Melbourne that there can be scare campaigns against migrants. Sydney has dozens of migrant communities where English, at most, is only a second language; but there is no public criticism of migrants and there are no scare campaigns. No one cares. Sydney is indifferent to itself, and to the other capital cities. The other capitals are self-conscious and always aware of Sydney. To people in Sydney this is surprising.