by Donald Horne
Snobs
The basic snobbery in Australia has been connected with ownership of land but despite the continuing importance of land ownership in the ‘Societies’ of the various States, the ordinary suburban Australian is now quite indifferent to the landowning families unless they can arrange some metropolitan distinction for themselves such as winning the Melbourne Cup or being involved in a sensational divorce. So far as almost everyone in the cities is concerned, a landowner is now just another man. In a survey of occupation status conducted in Sydney, landowners were given only ‘B’-grade social status, ranking nineteenth (between editors and heads of government departments). Doctors were rated first in the ‘A’ grade, university professors second. In the town nearest his property, however, a landowner is still likely to rate at the top. In a small country town people see enough of each other for a recognition pattern to be inevitable – it may be one of the important distinctions between city and country in Australia that in the country there is more sense of status difference – and something of the ancient relationship between landed family and town still survives, although by the harsh standards of history the difference has been softened almost out of existence; the towns in which the difference is expressed are so democratic in outward manner that to some there might not seem any difference. However to those who participate in it, it is still there.
One of the most rigid institutional manifestations of this difference appears at the annual picnic races. The races have some of the features of an English point-to-point picnicking from the boot of a car and so forth. But it is flat racing, not steeplechasing; the horses are worse; there is more drunkenness; and entry to a point-to-point is more democratic. Dinner parties at country properties follow the races (most houses arrange house parties for the occasion) and precede a dance.
The landowners of Queensland lead their own country life, so secure in their position that even Brisbane seems just another country town. In the West they lead Society – but hardly anyone knows. In South Australia and Victoria they are still integrated with other Society leaders. In New South Wales they follow traditional rituals; they still see themselves as the centre of Society but they face a lot of opposition in the tough Sydney game. Although they once led in sophistication, the truth is that many of them are now old-hat – wealthy country cousins.
Connected with ownership of land are questions of ‘Family’. To most Australians such questions do not exist. Among ordinary people to be able to claim an early arrival in the colony as an ancestor – even a convict – may give some slight prestige and there are some status differences between families, based mainly on source of income, that can become important when there is a marriage between two people whose fathers earn their incomes in strikingly different ways. But the myth of unique birth and breeding – of a family strengthened by generations of selectivity and uniquely chosen by God or Destiny to bear certain desirable attributes – is extremely weak. It can, however, become the obsession of the few. In some landed families and among those who seek social prestige there can be an intricate concern with genealogy that reaches an English exactitude. A social climber might buy some antiques (perhaps on hire purchase) to suggest family background, or at least the understanding of its importance and even the most brash arriviste who professedly scorns Birth will clutch at an ancestor or an heirloom if he stumbles across one.
As in England, schooling can help penetration of in-groups when landed estate or ‘good family’ are lacking. A man makes money and sends his children to a ‘good school’. Once again the mass of the people are indifferent to all this, and ignorant of it, but there is a subtle story yet to be told of the social climbing achieved through ‘good schools’, of the creation of sub in-groups that are little more than old school groups somewhat extended and confused by marital connection and of the importance of ‘good schools’ in business. Going to a ‘good school’ improves a young man’s business prospects (especially if he is rather dim-witted; if he is talented he may take up a profession) and there are some firms where an old school tie cliqueishness can be ruinously strong, with its English-type emphasis on the habit of command, distrust of specialists and animosity towards ideas and skills. As in England, it also has a grip on the stock exchange.
Position can be of importance in Australia. Among ordinary people there is no necessary esteem for businessmen or high officials but some of the professions – particularly medicine – have universal esteem. In the suburbs to say ‘he married a doctor’s daughter’ gives off a social glow. This is probably the only test of snobbery in Australia that has almost universal acceptance, because professional men can also penetrate the in-groups if their wives wish them to. Esteem for professional men is not as high among the in-groups as among the outsiders but it is hardly ever realized among the in-groups how little those of them who are not professional men are esteemed. There are no possibilities in Australia of determining status by simple inspection. You can’t place a man in a social scale by listening to his accent or what he talks about or by looking at his clothes or observing his manners. Ordinary people are not likely to be able to detect a ‘real gentleman’ with that sensory accuracy that used to be characteristic of ordinary people in England. The schools do not produce a standard product and there is no overriding code of behaviour. In-groups are formed bv self-acclamation. With some members of in-groups (particularly the non-professional men) there can be a brusqueness and crudity that would exclude them from the in-groups of most other parts of the world. As with so many other forms of success in Australia, socially Top People are often not world class.
From reading the women’s pages of the newspapers one can get an impression that a Society exists in each of the cities, but in most cases what is being presented is a women’s Society dominated by women who organize the big charities: this has created images sharp enough for the newspapers to project and to many of those who read about it, this is Society. Society has so disintegrated in Sydney that many of those – especially the younger people – who would consider themselves in it are now happy to avoid doing almost all the things they were once supposed to do.
The women who set the standards of the social world that is reported in the women’s pages are not necessarily very rich; they occupy a commanding position because their charity committees organize the kind of entertainments that only the possession of wealth once provided. To become a member of this Society is mainly a matter of calculation. To appear to be a member of it, by getting one’s picture in the paper, can be easy – just arrange things so that you make a pretty picture at the races, an art opening, a first night, a gala film preview; or at a cocktail party, a barbecue, a yacht club, a wine tasting, a ball; or by getting married at a fashionable church (most of them Anglican) or a University College Chapel.
The most publicized figure in this world in Sydney came to be Mrs Marcel Dekyvere, chairman of the socially powerful Black and White Ball Committee and several others. She began writing a weekly diary in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph. To hold a mirror to her world, consider what this world is from a paraphrase of her diary for a busy week in February: On Sunday she went to church. The Sermon was ‘I Have a Dream’. She comments: ‘We must all keep our dreams, even if sometimes they don’t come true. Don’t you agree?’ On Monday she got a Christmas card from Bob Hope whom she had met at a charity occasion in Sydney some time ago. She had lunch at the Australia Hotel and then went to the showing of an autumn–winter collection. She dined at the Chevron Hilton Hotel. ‘Altogether it was a grand evening.’ On Tuesday she chaired a meeting of a charity committee, went to a bible class and then mused on the fact that she was going to travel by air on a business trip with her husband. ‘I suppose this modern air travel is good experience … I have flown before … that was thirty years ago.’ On Wednesday while driving along Macleay Street she reflected that it looks ‘a little like a corner of Paris’. Later she went to a preview of an exhibition of paintings. The colours were ‘brilliantly beautiful’.
She ended the day by seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Old Tote Theatre. On Thursday she had a slimming treatment and bought a hat to wear in the aeroplane (‘I know nobody wears hats in aeroplanes but I’m going to’). She had a charity meeting in the afternoon and went out to dinner. On Friday she admired the new air luggage her husband had given her and went to a cocktail party. On Saturday she went to the races and at night she watched TV.
Cultural breakthrough
In literature and some of the arts in Australia there has been all the confusion of a breakthrough. The old certainties have gone and the changes are in such contradiction and of such comparative violence that contemporary detailed evaluations are worth very little. In these, committed critics often give a bleak picture; they are confused and sometimes made angry by the sudden variety. What overwhelms is the activity. For a nation of Australia’s type and size a lot of people are writing verse, novels and plays or painting pictures, running art galleries or little theatres, going to concerts or the theatre.
So far as public design is concerned it is no longer possible to be as universally scathing as one could once so easily be. There is still the confident amateurishness that Robin Boyd (in The Australian Ugliness) found amongst businessmen and as part of the national style; newspaper typographic and layout policies are designed by editors; showrooms by salesmen; suburban couples like to design their own houses and so forth. But there is now some awareness of standards – at least of fashion – although it may be only the first flickerings. Some of the new buildings that are going up all over Sydney and Melbourne are not bad; at least there is somewhat more unity and style in their glittering glass than in the nondescript Victorian buildings that have been knocked down. There are few grand visions, although in Sydney one can detect the beginning of dreams of architectural grandeur.
People are now interested in such old buildings as still exist, especially the few examples of colonial Georgian. Old terrace houses with filigree iron decorations have long been fashionable. The restorers are at work in Paddington as they are in Gramercy Square. There are even ‘Iron Shops’ that sell nothing but bits and pieces of filigree ironwork. And the big new city buildings are subjects for conversation: at last people are now expressing opinions on how their cities should look. Many now spend a great deal of time and money worrying about the design of new houses – sometimes with disappointing results. Most of this trend seems an interest in the right direction. There is change and improvement and one cannot say this about many of the other fields of activity in Australia. With the lack of professionalism and the slow appreciation of originality the standards may fall short of desire but one can at least say that, as things sort themselves out and especially as the older generation loses control, there may be much greater concern with design in Australia than has existed since the early colonial period.
In the meantime much of what remains still looks like something slapped up in a gold rush. And the more it is nervously fiddled with, painted and prettified, the more it reaches ‘The Great Australian Ugliness’ described by Robin Boyd. The great dabs of vivid primary colours, the split stone veneers, the stripes, wiggles and squares of decoration, the laminated plastic – these were the first symptoms of the new Australian craving for ‘taste’.
In music the boom in concert performances is now well established. In a year there are now almost a thousand separate public performances at professional level of serious music. Almost all of this is controlled by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The ABC controls all the permanent professional orchestras (two full-sized orchestras in Sydney and Melbourne and small orchestras in the other capitals) and engages almost all overseas musicians who tour Australia; it also provides the orchestras for the Elizabethan Trust opera seasons. The main criticism that is made of the ABC’s concert policy is of its preference for the middlebrow. Australia is said to be isolated from live performances of contemporary music. In a kind of musical mateship the ABC goes for the big numbers.
It is typical of slapdash Australian exuberance that there are complaints that although in Sydney alone there are now about 200 exhibitions of painting in a year there are ‘only twenty top class artists and fifteen others of promise’. There is a great deal of activity. Painting has become fashionable. PR Departments (or the wives of managing directors) persuade firms to put up art prizes or commission paintings or sculpture. Art openings are part of the round of society women. Attendance at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, at a gallery-estimated 750 000 a year, is now almost four times what it was in the early 1940s. But the permanent collections are poorly endowed with public money and most of them are of low international standard. To acquire a thorough knowledge of painting – that is to say, to find out what all these paintings one has prints of actually look like – it is necessary to go overseas.
In the theatre, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust spends public money, sometimes well, sometimes badly; the Commercial Theatre has revived and there is a nest of Little Theatres. In Sydney or Melbourne at least one can usually see fairly quickly whatever is being talked about overseas, even if it is sometimes in an indifferent performance. There are fourteen theatres in Sydney, including the firmly established Little Theatres. The success of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll started demands for a renaissance in Australian drama but renaissances are hard to organize. There have been five or six good plays put on since then but this has not satisfied Australians, whose standards seem to be those of Shakespeare’s London. They blame theatre managements. Others say that it is easier to obtain some kind of a performance for a new play in Australia than in many other countries. A dozen new Australian plays are likely to be presented by the commercial and top repertory companies in a year. What is lacking is a film industry. Although the world’s first movie, Soldiers of the Cross, was made in Australia in 1901 and about 200 full feature films followed it in the next twenty years, for many years after the Second World War the rate slowed down to less than one a year. The result was that Australians, among the greatest of cinema-going people until TV, did not see images of their own country when they went to the movies.
There are several dozen poets whose work is known to those who are interested; and – as the publication of verse goes – publication is not difficult to achieve. The number of copies printed of a volume of Australian verse is often as great as the print run in countries of much bigger population. However an Australian interested in poetry may lament that the country has only half a dozen, perhaps a dozen, good poets – as if that were possible! As in painting, there are highly developed senses of difference and considerable talk of ‘schools’; but some of this is gossip rather than literary criticism. Novels are being written all over the place, and not only by ‘literary’ people. About two dozen of fair standard are printed in Australia each year – others are printed abroad. Publishing is now becoming more sophisticated and there is increasing interest in Australian writing in the world publishing market. It is hard to imagine that any work worth being published is not finally published. There are about a dozen literary or semi-literary magazines.
This is not the place to attempt to evaluate all this activity. However there are things to learn about Australia in this cultural breakthrough. For example, Australians with cultivated tastes, or the desire to have them, largely consider theatre, music, and books as something to enjoy, to consume like a good meal: talk about it for a bit, then forget it. Culture is part of the enjoyment of life, part of happiness. They do not demand exclusively the happy or the fantastic; they can enjoy the sad and the real – as they enjoy The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the verse of A.D. Hope or the more melancholy Australian paintings. But they have not developed that solemn high reverence towards Art that has been the fashion since the nineteenth century. Nor have they developed very much detailed knowledge. The result is that their reactions are spontaneous, unlearned and, very largely, ill-informed.
It is also significant that there is sometimes a bustle of optimism among
those who do the creating; some of their work is slapdash. There is a give-it-a-go flavour about it; a virtue is fabricated out of lack of style, spontaneity and even sincerity, as if these were art standards. Not with everyone; among some of the best-known writers especially there is a much greater sense of care and responsibility than is usual in Australia – perhaps because the participants are aware of international rather than purely local standards. For most of the century there was a kind of Tariff Board approach to art and literature, a nationalism that applied purely Australian standards, as if there were some special artistic virtue in being Australian. Among some there was a desire to hoard up old traditions as if one should go on writing forever as people did in the late-nineteenth century. These demands remain, but now they are being lost in the rush.
Criticism of literature and the arts is poor, and some of it extremely cliqueish. There is a lot of ‘knocking’ and backbiting, sometimes reflecting in-group battles and sometimes perhaps a very real frustration about what to say. It is an illusion to believe that a man must be familiar with the whole history of painting before he paints, or of writing before he writes, but of critics one might expect thorough knowledge and systematic position. These standards are often missing in Australian critics; discussion on Australian literature is sometimes better informed in the American Universities that have taken it up, than in some of the Australian Universities. In the past there has been such an obsession with rattling off the genealogies of Australian writing that there was little sense of contemporary judgment. It was like having to sit through all those early flashbacks in a saga before you could find out what had been happening recently.