The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  What still exists in the country, out of the towns, is the fascination that any farmer anywhere in the world finds in his animals, his crops, the weather, the seasons, the markets – the feeling that those who live on the land have for the land, that goes beyond love and becomes knowledge. It is the world of worm drenches or stickfast fleas, of saffron thistle or pasture improvement, of shooting hawks or reading pamphlets on copper deficiency in cows. There are the haunting landscapes of Australia – the great herds of cattle drifting across vast, shadeless plains, glaring with heat; and the hot, pale sky. There is the long, slow, monotonous spread of the wheat farms; the scrubby, boulder-dotted paddocks of failing cow cockies; the deep green of the cane fields, with low white clouds scudding in from across the reef; the neatness of the fruit-growing irrigation districts; the lonely houses and rose gardens of the ‘old families’; and the mad struggle against destiny beside swamps, deserts or ravaged hills.

  There are the bleak little townships on the western plains, a dozen or two houses, a pub, a post office, a police station, a store, a school, where a dusty stock route makes do for the main street and a mob of goats grazes on the Common. Or the little townships near the sea, set in gullies where the bell birds sing.

  In this Australia they distrust the smart alecs in the cities and towns. They have a liking for difference in personality, for ‘characters’, some of them half-crazy, whose doings can fill in hours of yarning over a beer. There can be suspicion and scepticism, and a demand from governments for a ‘fair go’, but there is a much greater sense of individual judgment and individual responsibility than in the cities. In some sleepy backblock, hundreds of miles from anywhere, there can be more feeling for the demands of the world outside Australia than might be found in a whole suburb of a coastal city. Whether the Japanese are buying wool or the Chinese wheat or the Americans meat is a matter of immediate importance. Although there is cheerfulness it is the cheerfulness of people who acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe – from flood, fire, plague or drought, or the collapse of markets. There is not the gentle optimism of the suburban Australian, although there can be gamblers’ dreams. There can be open-hearted cooperation, or hatreds of blood-feud intensity. Except for the rich, the chances of having a good time are quite different from those in the cities and there is a constant dribbling away of the young. The rural dwellers of Australia have another distinguishing characteristic: they actually live in ‘The Bush’. The mythic landscapes of the writers and painters are home to them. They are also becoming familiar to those city dwellers who take their long-service leave on an air-conditioned bus tour, photographing the myth with their new cameras and perhaps noting its height above sea level, if there is a tourist signpost nearby. This kind of information comes in useful when showing colour slides.

  The wowsers

  Churches no longer matter very much to most Australians. Although 89 per cent of the population still claims religious adherence when it fills in a census form (34.8 per cent Church of England, 24.6 per cent Catholic, 10.2 per cent Methodist, 9.3 per cent Presbyterian), private surveys suggest that as many as a quarter of Australians will admit to not having any religious belief. Church attendance is less than in the United States and church attendance of non-Catholics is less than in the United Kingdom. Of 770 army recruits surveyed by a Church of England team only 19 per cent could write out the Lord’s Prayer and only 21 per cent could identify the three Persons of the Trinity. Only half knew what was being celebrated on Easter Sunday.

  Australians still like to use their churches for marriages. Almost all marriages are celebrated in church, but as Ken Inglis suggests in Australian Society, this may be a habit left over from nineteenth-century culture, rather than any indication of religious adherence. In disposing of their dead, Australians have a bet each way: they like a clergyman to perform the ceremony but they prefer a funeral parlor to a church as the place of service. Non-Catholic Australians show a greater preference for cremation than any other people in the world. (And Australian women may be, proportionately, the world’s largest users of oral contraceptives.)

  If the conversation turns to religion (it is often considered bad taste to talk religion) there may form misty memories of Christian belief, principally those associated with the Golden Rule, which becomes an expression of mateship. In whispers of immortality there are concepts of a fair go: hell has been abolished as unfair to underdogs. If there is a happy eternal life it’s for everyone. Belief in the salvationary role of Christ is no longer strong and the concept of evil is un-Australian: one must look for the good in people. The instincts of puritanism still remain; having a good time, especially among older people, can become an extremely ambivalent matter. And the sexual morality of the Churches is still accepted doctrine, although statistical information* and ordinary observation suggest that practice falls short of official precept. Belief in the dignity of man, in the human potential and in the value of human life is almost universal. The official beliefs of Australians are essentially humanist and those parts of Christianity that fit this belief are retained.

  While about half the Catholics go to church regularly (and a third of the Methodists) only about one in seven professed Anglicans and Presbyterians are still regular churchgoers. The non-Catholic churches are now often stripped of almost all except the most vague doctrine. Religion becomes a mysticism, offering comfort and reassurance. The prevailing emphasis, in the Australian fashion, is often on practical matters: doctrine is unimportant. Young executives immerse themselves in the practical affairs of a parish – with money-raising gimmicks, church attendance figures, and so forth – as they might otherwise immerse themselves in the affairs of a bowling club. Mother’s Day becomes a religious occasion. There has been a small liturgical revival, confined mainly to clergymen and a few sympathetic laymen, but, generally speaking, in practice, Protestantism has been drained of almost all serious intellectual and moral content. Seriousness might keep people away from church.

  It should be recognized that there has long been opposition to religion and ‘bible bangers’ amongst Australians. When Christian practices challenge other beliefs they have often come off second best. When Anzac Day (the Australian folk festival) is commemorated on a Sunday the protests of the churches are likely to be met by the counter claim that Anzac Day is more important than the churches. To many Australians it is. The beliefs associated with Anzac are more stoic than Christian.

  In fact to many Australians religion becomes important only when it stops them from doing something they want to do. This blockage occurs principally in the form of the Nonconformist Conscience, expressed in the person of the ‘wowsers’. The Nonconformist Conscience has been a significant factor in the development of Australian liberalism: Michael Rowe suggests (in Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835–1851) that as early as the middle of the nineteenth century the dominant Australian view of life was already that everyone must become a good, wise, prosperous and responsible citizen. In this development the Protestants played an important part – first in helping to contest the attempt of the Church of England and the landed gentry to impose the patterns of England on Australia and then in exhorting the poor and oppressed to stop their boozing, put on their stiff collars and set themselves up in small houses in the suburbs like good Christians. The Temperance movement (which, as in England, became their principal form of social pressure) was also a movement against poverty and social unbalance but as these evils diminished and its sense of general social uplift languished it became a narrow obsession with forms of enjoyment. In this it was joined by some parts of the Irish-influenced Catholic Church who – in the Irish style – gave expression to parts of the English Nonconformist Conscience. Catholic ‘wowsers’ were less likely to inveigh against drinking and gambling than Protestant ‘wowsers’ but they led the field in inveighing against any except a particular use of sex.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the traditional importance of ‘wowsers’ in Australia or, mor
e generally, of the strong Australian urge to restrict the activities of other people. Before the Second World War (which may have been the beginning of their end) ‘wowsers’ ideologically held most of the field: they attacked drinking, gambling, smoking, divorce, women’s fashions, sport on Sundays, modern verse, contemporary novels, living in flats, working mothers, and lipstick. Subjects such as contraceptives and sexual deviation were so taboo that they were not even attacked. The ‘wowser’ vote was considered to be of political significance and, between the two wars and into the 1950s there was no loosening of control on matters such as hotel trading hours and off-course betting. Since then the ‘wowsers’ have been in slow, disorderly retreat. However it is worth remembering that in the mind of even the most libertarian Australian there often still lingers a little of the conscience of the ‘wowser’.

  Catholics

  Perhaps the single most important issue connected with religion that remains with Australians as a whole are questions of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism. This has been one of the divisive issues in Australia. Traditionally there was an entrenched Catholic community, mostly of Irish origin, that flourished with a sense of alienation to a largely hostile environment.

  Anti-Catholicism has not been as overt as it was in the nineteenth century when fear and hatred of Rome led secularists and Protestants to combine to secularize the State and education; those who have not grown up in Australia do not now always detect the significance of anti-Catholicism and it is now at last declining; but bitter distrust of the Catholic Church is part of the systems of belief of most older non-Catholic Australians. It was nurtured by some of the Protestant clergy; it was an article of faith among many intellectuals (anti-Catholicism is the anti-semitism of the intellectuals); it was a matter of considerable importance in the lower levels of many government departments; there was an anti-Catholic bias in a significant section of the Liberal Party; many business leaders were anti-Catholic; it was a very important factor in the struggle for the Labor movement. Often the Masonic Lodges impelled anti-Catholicism. In the business world, in government departments and in the political parties Masons often took the lead against Catholics; in retaliation lay Catholics, through their own secret society, the Knights of the Southern Cross, a pseudo-Masonic outfit with special handshakes, passwords and ritualistic mumbo-jumbo, used self-protection against what they believed was a powerful and bitter enemy; this increased the suspicions of the Masons. How all this began no longer matters. It was self-perpetuating, with each side in opposition because it believed the other was plotting against it.

  This antagonism has been an important impulse to action in Australia; the rival secret societies have had some of the influence secret societies had in pre-Communist China. Indeed a great deal more of the affairs of Australia are carried out in an underground of conspiracy than most people realize or anyone can describe in detail. Perhaps the outward tone of discussion is so idealistic that it is only in secret that the realities of power can be contrived. Whatever the reason, the minority of Australians who are concerned with power enjoy plots and get a kick out of dirty work.

  Anti-Catholicism was usually based on the assumption that the Catholic Church was a monolith, a press-button affair in which the Pope or the Cardinal or somebody put a message on the line and all Catholics obeyed it. This belief had been perpetuated by a number of pieces of evidence: there was no doubt that parish priests had influenced some of their parishioners on matters that went far beyond defined dogma; it had often been the Catholic style for Catholic spokesmen to imply a greater unity and therefore a greater strength than existed and for Catholic publications to discourage discussion; Catholics had held disproportionate power in the Labor Party (and, one might add, they had been disproportionately weak in the Liberal and Country parties); Catholic schools often encouraged their pupils to enter the public service; where there were Catholic power systems they favoured Catholics. However none of this was to prove that the Church was a monolith. The very structure of the Church was pluralist, with each bishop responsible to Rome and the Cardinal merely a bishop who, if he was to exert influence over other bishops, had to do it by democratic means.

  Although there are conspiracies of Catholic laymen, the entire Church was not a single manipulable conspiracy. Witness the suggestion that proportionately more Catholics than Protestants voted against the referendum to ban the Communist Party. There is some anti-clericalism among churchgoers and about a third of Catholics seem to be non-churchgoers. The traditional support for Labor (as many as 75 per cent of Catholics may have voted for Labor until the 1950s, when the Labor Party split) has been taken as evidence of conspiracy but there are more subtle explanations. It is true that Catholics obtained control of many Labor Party machines but it may have been the Labor Party that used the Church, rather than the other way around. By capillary attraction personal influences extended widely amongst Catholics and traditional voting patterns developed. There is no doubt that this pleased the clergy and that some of them helped the party bosses; but they didn’t seem to get anything very much for the Church out of it all.

  There had been some intellectual vitality in parts of the Church and a growth of lay influence. This movement began in Melbourne in the 1930s with the formation of the Campion Society, the first (if crude) significant lay intellectual breakthrough; Catholics became more prominent by the teaching staffs of Universities than times used to be (although they do not yet occupy a proportion of positions equal to their numbers in the general community); Australian Catholics have graduated from Oxford and Louvain, making their mark in the universities and within the Church; some of these new kind of Catholics developed their ideas in ‘little magazines’ (of high standard) in their effort to develop friendly dialogue in a free pluralist society. The tensions of this emergence produced some Catholic intellectuals who were seriously concerned with serious issues, keen-witted and looking at life with the vigour of people trying to work things out in a new way.

  All this laid the groundwork for the revolution in attitudes set loose by the Second Vatican Council. When Rome beckoned even the greatest opponents of change became apostles of liberalization. Catholic clerics are now emerging from their ghetto and engaging in dialogues on TV and changes in church services seem to be proceeding more swiftly in Australia than in most other countries. Whatever the outcome of its present tensions, the Catholic Church in Australia will never be the same.

  This sudden pragmatic acceptance of change is itself very Australian. In general the strongly Australian character of the Catholic Church in Australia is not always recognized.

  The emphasis on practicalism, on money-raising and organizing; the frequent impatience with subtle intellectual undertones; the States’ Rightism and factionalism; the social conformism; the practicalism of lay bodies such as the Knights of the Southern Cross (usually too non-doctrinaire for anything beyond business conspiracy) … all of these are Australian characteristics.

  What is ‘un-Australian’ about the Church is that it still instils a belief in the Church’s universal teachings. Catholics are provided with a much more complex set of attitudes to life than other Australians. They are expected to learn these and make them part of their lives. Normally, Australians no longer go through such a discipline. To Catholics life can still seem not necessarily easy and optimistic. The public manifestations of these beliefs were trivial: the obsession with contraception, divorce, mixed marriage and sex were all that most non-Catholic Australians understood of Catholicism. Manning Clark reached more profoundly in Australian Civilization when he wrote: ‘The Irish also brought to Australia their conceptions of Christ and the Holy Mother of God. The former is difficult to characterize in words … while Russian thinking was concerned with the presence of the ideal of the Madonna as well as the ideal of Sodom in the human heart, the Irish believed the saint and the larrikin lived in the one man. The Irish Catholics also knew what they were not: that they were not those upright, honest, ambitious, successful
men the English were always holding up to them as the model.’

  The flavour of both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism is revealed most significantly in the question of Government aid to Church schools; a hundred-year-old debate is now ending. Secularization threw the Catholics back on their own resources in the nineteenth century and profoundly affected the organization of the Church. Only the Catholic Church set up a comprehensive system of private schools. The few other private schools are merely for those who can afford them. There are almost 2000 Catholic schools, about a fifth of all the schools in Australia, educating a quarter of a million children. Making sure that Catholics send their children to Church schools, raising money for schools and running an intricate educational system are often the main preoccupation of many clerics in a diocese. The flavour of Catholic life cannot be understood except to a background of Communion Breakfast speeches on government aid; raffles, bingo games and other money-raising activities; family obsessions with school fees; political pressures. This atmosphere helped the impression of living in a hostile society and perpetuated clannishness.

  The question of State Aid to Church Schools has been one of the questions of realpolitik in Australia. As a matter of expediency, the non-Catholic Liberal Party overcame its prejudices and began offering bits and pieces of State Aid at a time when the Labor Party was as divided on this as it was on other issues. Now no election platform is without it.