The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  Four hundred and fifty air miles south-west of Sydney, Melbourne, capital of Victoria and, with about 2 400 000 people, second in population to Sydney is seen as more ‘English’ than Sydney – not the England of London and the South, but of Manchester and provincial business. The top of its society coagulates into a recognizable pattern; there is still a significant club life, with the outward forms of gentlemanliness. You walk into a Melbourne club and, unlike Sydney, you see who’s running the place. Melbourne’s streets lead down not to a harbour, as in Sydney, but to the huge, ugly Flinders Street Railway Station. And a winter obsession with Australian Rules football seems to help Melbourne people make the adjustment that is so difficult to make in Sydney: what is there in life without sunlight? People are said to be milder, less aggressive in Melbourne than in Sydney; they are also said to be more cliqueish and group-conformist. Even social groups are inwardly quarrelsome in Sydney, but it is easy to move between them. In Melbourne groups are more friendly within themselves, but interact less and suspect outsiders more. Melbourne is more outwardly puritan than Sydney. Melbourne has been described by Billy Graham as one of the most moral cities he has even seen and by Ava Gardner, when she was there to star in On the Beach, as a fine place to make a film about the end of the world. Melbourne worries about its crime rate. Its intellectuals consider themselves more devoted to ideas than Sydney’s pragmatic lot, and, in general, it accepts itself as a more cultured city than Sydney but this is not so. Its intellectual life is different – that’s all. Melbourne knows more about the management of money than any other city in Australia. It is the home of much of Australia’s big business. In Sydney many rugged individualists make a lot of money and English visitors, used to tolerating almost anything as long as it pretends to be something other than itself, see Sydney as a city of crude and newly gained wealth. (It is in fact the centre for Australia’s oldest rich.) But while money talks a lot in Sydney it does not talk in one voice. In Melbourne it does – in a provincial gentle man’s voice, blended with social conventions and respectabilities. At the top Melbourne provides what is left of an Australian ‘Establishment’ – a particularly pompous and obsolescent Establishment. It may be that Australia’s obsolescence is most effectively perpetuated by the Melbourne Establishment. Until recently, all four political parties were led from Melbourne.

  Brisbane, capital of Queensland, about a third the size of Melbourne, and as far from it as Istanbul is from Rome, is a city with its jacket off and its sleeves rolled up, hot, languorous, at times sensuously indolent – generous in tropical flowers, beer, hospitality, dominated in politics by Catholics for a quarter of a century, now by the Methodists. (The brothels have been closed.) It is the least capital of Australian cities, least in self-importance. To the tropical north, in the sugar ports and the cattle country and the developing mining and industrial areas they do not look to Brisbane. They want a separate North Queensland State they can run themselves. The big firms in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia see Brisbane as just a branch manager town, a city of also-rans. Brisbane is a man’s city – matey, slow to change and a bit rough around the edges.

  Adelaide, capital of South Australia, about as big as Brisbane and as far from it as London is from Lisbon, is in conflict with itself. The accepted picture was of a gracious city of wide boulevardes, grass squares and stone colonial buildings, set out on the grand scale; of men of property and family running affairs in a gentlemanly way from behind the green shutters and cedar doors of the Adelaide Club; of a community established without the ‘Irish element’ or the ‘convict strain’; assured, in control of powerful interests, but puritanical and dull; dedicated to civic pride, high business ethics, good works, good taste. This picture was attacked by some as a façade for political gerrymandering and a cynical and conspiratorial social conservatism. However this may be, the undeniable criticism of the accepted version of Adelaide is that it is now out of date. Adelaide has moved into the technological age. Despite the tradition of conservatism it is a go-ahead place where industries migrate. Much of it is now noisy, dirty and confused; people now work there who may not have heard of the old families, and the new class of managers and experts provides a new social force. And – despite the gerrymander – the Labor Party finally gained power in Adelaide. Compared with their own past relations to each other, Brisbane falls backwards, Sydney falls apart, Melbourne moves forward to stay where it is, Adelaide goes ahead.

  Perth, capital city of Western Australia, is about as far from Adelaide as London from Leningrad, about as far from Sydney as Saigon from Tokyo. It is separated from the rest of Australia by thousands of square miles of desert and scrubland. Perth is the most isolated city of its size in the world. Set near the Indian Ocean it is as close to Cocos Island as to Sydney. Its people did not want to join Australia at the time of Federation; the migrant gold miners forced them to. It is the centre of a world in which much of the southern part is fertile with light seasonal rain and the northern part is in the wet–dry rainfall belt but most of it is one of the driest lands on earth. The State Perth governs is ten times as big as the United Kingdom but contains only a million people. Perth is relaxed, hospitable, a world of fishing, backyard beer parties and nice gardens. It works as hard as it can but takes it a bit easy when the sun flares in the summer sky. It distrusts the ‘East’. (In Adelaide they distrust the ‘East’ but Perth distrusts Adelaide, too.)

  The next largest city in Australia is not Hobart, Tasmania’s capital (with less than 150 000 people, Hobart is eighth on the list) but Newcastle, whose expanding southern edge now lies only about fifty miles from the expanding northern edge of Sydney. Sprawling around the shallow, silting port where coal from the Hunter Valley fields is loaded, its skyline formed by a significant part of Australia’s heavy industry, dominated by the government and opportunities of Sydney and the great heavy industry business complex of Melbourne, Newcastle is now struggling to achieve the character of a more mature city. Its tone is set by old families, steelworks managers and local professional leaders. To the south of Sydney, Wollongong, seventh-largest city, site of the biggest steelworks in the British Commonwealth, is not yet so ambitious. Wollongong is a mystery thrown up from the puzzles of industrial change. Building and rebuilding are conducted with twentieth-century technique but in a goldrush muddle. Wollongong is a series of settlements spread along the coast rather than a city. The central part of this agglomeration is still a one-street town. People from forty or fifty nations make up Wollongong – in the steelworks migrant labour runs as high as 50 per cent. It is by far the most frontier-like of Australia’s bigger cities, spreading and sprawling to God knows where. In the less than fifty miles of coastline that encompass Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong live about a quarter of the people of Australia. Sydney has broken the bounds of definition; Newcastle is attempting a new definition; Wollongong is creative disorder. It may be in this turbulent area where, on present trends, there will be five million people by the end of the century that much of the shape of the new Australia will be comprehended.

  Hobart started life on the frontier and then went to sleep. It was one of the earliest convict colonies and a roystering whaling port. Then it stood easy. A ten-mile stretch of blue water lies in front of it and a dark blue mountain crouches behind it, covered with snow to its foothills in winter. Streets of old colonial houses in yellow stone will remain and the town slips so quickly into the port that ships seem to be anchored in the streets. Those who play this kind of game say that its people are more reserved and cautious than the mainlanders. It is now being jerked into modernity with new buildings and so forth, but has not yet known the kind of new development that now shakes Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Wollongong. Existence is said to be somewhere between small-town serenity and small-town vindictiveness. Mainlanders think little about Tasmania and foreigners want to know who owns it.

  Canberra, although the national capital, is still smaller than Hobart, and it has some charact
eristics of a town rather than a city, although it is the centre of the administrative power game. It is not primarily a political town. Except for political party meetings (which can be decisive) and parliamentary sessions (which are now of little importance), the quilt of Australian politics is patched together all over Australia, not in Canberra. Canberra is an administrative garrison, beautified by parks and gardens, laid out across a plain that is ringed with hills, a power complex of officials isolated from the Australian people. Their pressures on the politicians – perhaps the strongest single force in government – are not usually informed by that feeling for the texture of national life that might come from living among the people one governs. In their judgment of the possible they can be out of date. They must live on memories of what the Australians seemed to be like some years ago. There is the world of government buildings and the world of small quiet houses set in garden suburbs; for some there is contact with a diplomatic community (of very uneven quality) or with members of the Australian National University; there is the kind of entertainment and cultural life one might expect in an intellectuals’ garden suburb.

  Before the Second World War Darwin was a left-over from Joseph Conrad; it was a sleepy, half-Asian port, debilitated by a century of almost entire failure to do anything with the Northern Territory. It was a gambling, drinking town of pearl buyers, trepang fishermen and crocodile hunters, sprawling in the heat beside the Arafura Sea. In 1942 Japanese bombers blew most of it away and some of its people looted what was left and drove off towards the desert. Now it is a town of neat houses on stilts. Government officials make up half its population. They administer 600 000 square miles of territory where 40 000 ‘whites’ (most of them government employees) still experiment with development and cannot yet report their success. Darwin is a very different sort of administrative garrison from Canberra; it is still a town where ‘grog parties’ set the tone. A lonely man might still sneak off to some rusty iron shanty and get an Aboriginal woman for a bottle. It is hot, only 12 degrees south of the equator and in latitude a little further from Hobart than Khartoum is from Rome; its long wet season sometimes drives men mad; in the dry season buffaloes have broken into the golf course. The integration of part-Aborigines proceeds, the integration of full Aborigines moves more slowly. In its long history of fiasco, of the ruin of a hundred schemes, three definite hopes now stand out for Darwin and the Territory: the breeding of cattle, the encouragement of mining and the development of Australia’s first genuine and broadly based multiracial society.

  Broken Hill is not the administrative centre of anything except itself. It is a city of only 30 000, out in the hot, dusty west of New South Wales. Silver, lead and zinc are mined there. Broken Hill is run by its trade unions and so far as Broken Hill is concerned the Barrier Industrial Council is stronger than the State of New South Wales. ‘Badge Show’ days are held to check on financial membership of unions and prices in shops are controlled by industrial action. If a price is considered too high the shop is declared ‘black’. The miners have even boycotted beer to keep prices down. The Barrier Industrial Council owns the morning paper and is prepared to declare ‘black’ firms that don’t advertise in it. Purchase of this paper is compulsory for all unionists, even if there are several of them in one household or if they are migrants who cannot read English. When women marry they are given three months to resign from their jobs. Broken Hill follows its own laws and ignores the rest of Australia.

  These sketches of the eight largest cities in Australia, and of Canberra, Darwin and Broken Hill are not meant to be taken too seriously – and I hope my bias in favour of Sydney is obvious. They are examples of the kind of things that Australians say about their cities and, like the rest of this chapter, they are provided as a qualification to the generalization of the previous chapter. However it may well be that whatever differences there are between the Australian cities are differences within a range of similarity. The two main theories about Australians (minus migrants) are that they are all the same and that they are all different. Both theories are true. A grog party in Darwin, a backyard party in Perth, a King’s Cross party in Sydney have different forms but may be versions of the same thing. The laconicism of a Brisbaner may be much the same as the reserved manner of a Tasmanian. It is one of the miracles of Australia that, despite the extraordinary differences in the settlement and development of the nation, its people are so much the same.

  The bush

  About 58 per cent of Australians live in capital cities, and another quarter in sizeable towns. Little more than 15 per cent live in conditions that could be described as rural; of the workforce only 8 per cent derive their living directly from the land (this figure has declined from about 15 per cent in the late 1940s). Even in Alice Springs the old rural values are threatened. Set in the centre of Australia, where the dust sometimes clouds the air for thousands of square miles, a place where Aborigines have been massacred, still a place where men can die in the desert, a centre for radio school and radio doctors in the 80 000 square miles of Australia of which ‘the Alice’ (population 6000) is the centre, Alice Springs is suburbanizing itself for the tourist trade. As tourists drive by in air-conditioned buses they still see the white sands of the dry Todd River, ghost gums on its banks, run through the town like a forgotten dream. But they also see modern hotels, motels and stores and well-kept gardens that would grace a suburb in Melbourne.

  In picturing an Australian country town one projects one’s own memories. My memory is of a town of 3300 people, in the Hunter Valley, hilly and scattered with pepper trees. On the golf course, in the brittle brown grass there are dried cow pats and the crows cry with anguish as they circle in the sky. Out of town there are the white bones of cattle; houses are wooden and simple; sprinklers keep the lawns green unless there is a drought, when the sprinklers are turned off. Each house has water tanks that are fed by guttering from the corrugated iron roofs. From the verandah one can look across the brown valley to a few stubbly old hills. The town has an established social rainbow ranging from the big landowners whose properties surround the town, through the small gentry, the lower middle class and tradesmen to the railway workers and a small community of miners. New ideas in its shops reflect ideas of a little time before in Sydney. There is also a litter of old shops reflecting ideas almost everyone has forgotten. One wonders how they kept going. Catholics worship in a spired church on a hill and are considered a race apart. Methodists worship in a brick chapel in the main street and are considered low class. Presbyterians worship in another church with a spire on another hill and seem to get by. But it is in the Gothic-type Church of England on the river flats that the main Anzac Day service is held before the ceremony at the War Memorial. One wonders why the man who seems so important when he carries the cross before the Rector on Anzac Day is also the man who delivers the gas bill. There are light romantic novels or war adventures to read at the School of Arts and in the wooden schoolroom shaded by weeping willows, on the side of the creek, one learned that one was lucky to be an Australian.

  The schoolroom has been pulled down and the whole memory is thirty years out of date. But even then the traditional rural values were declining. There were differences; it was more placid to walk to work, sometimes across paddocks, than to catch an electric train and people went home for lunch; there was less entertainment to buy than in Sydney (country people were said to ‘make their own fun’ more than city people); speech was a little slower; and there was more sense of social difference. But on the whole the people in country towns were mainly a slowed-down version of those who lived in the suburbs of the cities, although they may have thought they were different. Of the Australia my grandfather used to tell me about, the Australia he discovered when he ran away ‘to get his colonial experience’ and joined a gang of drovers, they knew no more than I did. They had never made damper in a campfire. All of that was some other time, the dreamtime, when a man could walk into a settlement with a swag on his back and start a to
wn.

  Even in the Kimberleys, 100 000 square miles in the tropical north of Western Australia where less than 5000 ‘whites’ and part-Aborigines live and pioneer families control cattle runs as large as medieval kingdoms, now that there are plans for doing something with the millions of acres of fertile virgin soil that lie between the Ord and Fitzroy Rivers the plans include building new towns that will look like neat little suburbs stuck out a thousand miles from nowhere. In more ordinary country towns there are Rotary, Apex and Lions Clubs, the Masons, Returned Servicemen’s League clubs with poker machines, bowling clubs, golf clubs. The repertory societies put on West End successes of ten years before; the pops are played on the local radio stations; an increasing number of towns have TV; and people with suburban good taste serve salad in wooden bowls. In the country towns of some size you are now likely to find the typical ‘night out’ dishes of the cities – seafood cocktail, filet mignon – as well as the traditional steak and eggs.

  I do not think that the values my grandfather used to talk about any longer exist in any significant form although one can still detect them in some individuals and families. They were the values of incorrigible individualism, perhaps preserved from the eighteenth century, more aristocratic than democratic: simple honesty, carelessness of the opinion of others or the effect on oneself of one’s own actions; a driving, almost obsessive sense of independence and hatred for any cohesiveness including even the natural cohesiveness of friends thrown together by the hostilities of physical or social environment; and a belief that disagreement is beneath argument – one just walks out. Values like these sent men off on their own and – in the material sense – ruined or made them. They implied a rebellion against destiny and this may be why they are still found most significantly among some of the old landowning families who can afford to reject new values without losing their overdrafts.