The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  The old belief that Australia swallows its migrants whole and does not itself change as a result of their digestion no longer seems true. It is true that children of most migrants cease to be Europeans but in the process somewhere Australians are also ceasing to be ‘Australians’. It is normal liberal thought to wish to see old national minority cultures preserved, though integrated; but what now seems to be the Australian way, in which both old and new grope towards something different, has a great deal to be said for it. Since it is extremely unlikely that Australia is going to have much of a future without continued immigration, and that the immigration might have to increase in rate and change in kind, it would seem a good idea if the ‘assimilation’ theory could be re-worded somewhat less arrogantly, although the old assumption that inter-marriage is desirable in a migration programme seems sensible enough. Australians do not wish their nation to be a muddle of permanent national minorities. Assimilation is best made in bed.

  The effect on Australia of this post-war migration has been enormous. It has leavened the lump in Australia. It is doubtful if Australia would have got as far as it has in increased sophistication without the accelerated migration of the last two decades. In some ways this has been obvious enough to become generally accepted – in the development of small factories that have added specialist products to the Australian markets, in the development of specialist shops and restaurants, in changing taste in food and the arts.

  But it is also the ambition and talent of immigrants that have made continuing Australian prosperity possible. It is true that most migrants still work in relatively unskilled jobs in manufacturing, building, and construction and that, except for the British-born, they do not yet play much part in public life. But it is also the talent of immigrants, or their unusual cultivation of talent in their children, that has helped to keep the whole show going. Almost two-thirds of the research staff of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization are immigrants; so are more than a third of university staffs; the children of immigrants tend more towards university courses than the children of native Australians; immigrants or their children are beginning to play an important part in some government departments; when the government wants more skilled tradesmen it now shops for them overseas. However, as the economic differences between Australia and Western Europe diminish, the supply may run out.

  The underprivileged

  According to a currently fashionable method of calculating minimum basic needs, while at least 20 per cent of American households and 14 per cent of British households are in severe need, only 8 per cent of Australian households live at the poverty level. This is no cause for congratulation to Australians. The structural deficiencies that cause high poverty rates in the USA and Britain barely exist in Australia. There is no Negro problem (the Aborigines are equivalent to a Red Indian problem, not a Negro problem) and nothing like the British class problem. There is very little slum problem and at the bottom educational opportunities are more equal in Australia. Employment is high; automation is not yet a grave threat to employment in Australia; and the Australian minimum wage arrangements are unique in the world.

  What has gone wrong? The answer is probably that now that the more obvious miseries have been relieved in Australia the mass of the people have lost knowledge of those who are still depressed and the politicians either do not know – or see no percentage in it. Social service in Australia has now proceeded beyond the stage of grand struggle and general rhetoric and become a matter of different areas of detail. Most of this detail has not been taken up.

  Treatment of widows is mean; in a country where standards of comfort and the proper raising of children are part of the real meaning of life, widows and their families are thrown from one standard of comfort to a much lesser one through no fault of their own. When a man dies a woman cannot hope to keep things as they were. She receives an inadequate pension on which there is a means test. If she earns extra money she must do so with stealth. If the inspectors find out she will lose her pension. Deserted wives are in even worse position. For six months they just do the best they can; it is only after that time that they can draw a pension.

  The greatest single disaster in Australia, however, is to grow old. The single family group is now almost universal. Unless they are wealthy, heads of families may lose respect as they grow older. There is no place at the fireside for them. There are reasons why this might be so. But nothing has taken its place. The old are left to fend for themselves, or to rely on the many fine voluntary schemes that have come from the natural kindness of Australians. Old age is unhappy for all except the most fortunate but when it is accompanied by loneliness and a disappearance of all meaning from life it is doubly so. Often parents grow very old, alone, except for an occasional visit from their children. Old blind people sit in small apartments listening to the radio. Bedridden old people know only the kind charity lady who brings them lunch. Deserted old people rely on the landlady to keep their rooms clean and cut their fingernails.

  Australians are likely to pride themselves on being pioneers in general social advance, but they haven’t been as good as they think. Although for most of the century their pension schemes were ahead of the United States and Britain, they did not originate any of these ideas, and in fact, they have usually been a bit behind New Zealand. Since the Second World War their rate of advance has been slower than in the USA and Britain; they are well behind some of the more progressive smaller countries, such as Sweden (where a retirement scheme now allows for a pension providing 60 per cent of average annual income over the fifteen highest paid years of a working life).

  The Australian approach – except for the health service scheme – has been confined mainly to income security. It ignores the many other factors that can cause misery and the minimum incomes now guaranteed are too low, by the more affluent standards of the last twenty years. This is a matter in which simply to steal some good ideas from overseas and transplant them in the particularly favourable conditions that apply in Australia would help put Australia back where it is supposed to be: a country where there should be no external reason why ordinary people should be unhappy.

  4. BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AMERICA

  Lost bearings

  It is usually said that Australia is a part of European civilization transplanted to this big south land and it now finds itself in the alien world of Asia. What can be said at once is that Australians do not yet seem to know where they are – a great deal of public discussion could still equally well be carried out somewhere in the United Kingdom. It may be worthwhile remembering exactly where Australia is. It lies south of Indonesia and the rest of South-East Asia – Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, a subcontinent containing almost as many people as there are in Africa. Dominating this subcontinent are the subcontinents of India and China, with more than a third of the world’s population. Near China are Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (and Quemoy and Matsu) with a population about half that of Africa. To the north and east there is the South Pacific Ocean, with New Zealand, New Guinea, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, Fiji and the other islands of Oceania. And across the Pacific are the Seventh Fleet, Pearl Harbor, and the USA. This is the strategic world of Australia.

  It is a paradox of Australian history that as communications elsewhere in the world broaden horizons, Australia’s horizons have become more narrow. Until 1941 all that mattered to Australians was Europe, and the European colonial powers that ruled Australia’s world. In the early days of the settlement, not nearby people but the French were the most likely enemies; and for most of this century, the Germans. When in 1939 Australians enlisted in an expeditionary force to defend the Middle East from the Germans, everything seemed much the same as it did when their fathers landed at Gallipoli in 1915 to fight the Germans’ allies, the Turks. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and were about to seize all South-East Asia and invade the Australian territory of New Guinea most of Australia’s
front-line troops were 7000 miles away. Churchill tried to stop the return of the Australian troops to defend their own country; quickly measured from the other end of the map Australia may have seemed expendable. On 27 December 1941, John Curtin made the single most significant statement ever made by an Australian Prime Minister: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links on kinship with the United Kingdom. We know the problems that the United Kingdom faces … But we know, too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go.’ Then, as any Australian will tell you, the Americans saved Australia from invasion (with Australian assistance) and subsequently won the war. The Japanese destroyed the old power situation in the Pacific and from the paroxysm of disorder and chaos there is a new power situation, to which Australians are – even yet – not effectively orientated.

  To Australians much of this is still a dream. Names … Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia … impinge on Australian consciousness. Almost half the Australian diplomatic service is deployed in Asia. But there is still a sense of unreality. Asian names come and go in the newspapers according to external events, and they form patterns in Australian politics when they meet a party political demand. But most Australians have not gained a real ‘feel’ for the part of the world they live in, even if many of them now talk about it. There are names on a map, statistics in handbooks, events in newspapers, passages of voguish rhetoric; but working attitudes reveal little feeling for the texture of life in Asia and the Pacific. Australians talk of Asia as if they were still living in Europe.

  Looking to Britain

  Despite the strong obsessional system that still marks Australian attitudes to Britain and Western Europe, to describe Australia as ‘British’ is wrong. ‘The British’ have been a kind of confederation of social classes and regional types that go under one name. These regional types and social classes were represented in Australia in a different mix (significantly there were more Irish) and the regional strains were not maintained. Only the Catholic Irish continued interbreeding and even some of them married non-Irish or non-Catholics. They have not gone on feeling as ‘Irish’ as many Irish groups in the USA. For some time their priests remained Irish, but that has now changed. They did, however, remain Catholic, and this meant that there is a much bigger Catholic influence in Australia than in England. Other regional types married more widely; their children had no real feeling of continuity with the place their parents came from. There are still Highland Games and so on but often this is mere dressing up. According to one set of guesses the ancestry of the people now living in Australia might run: less than two-thirds English, Scottish, and Welsh; less than a fifth Irish; more than a fifth other European.

  This new people, the Australians, fused out of old ingredients and separated in new ways, have taken British and European history to be their history (they could scarcely claim the history of the Aborigines) and have retained many of the forms of British political and social life without examining the differences. Words like ‘democracy’, ‘monarchy’, ‘trades union’, ‘parliament’, ‘upper class’, ‘working class’ and a whole terminological apparatus are used in the two countries with different meanings. Australians are not merely transplanted English. When they reach London the tens of thousands of Australians who, since the war, have migrated for a season or two to England often enjoy the theatres, the music and art shows, the natural beauties of England, its closeness to Europe, without achieving any rapport with the English. Their conversation reveals the alienation of people in someone else’s country. Almost every Australian feels a sense of difference when arriving in England.

  Yet a Prime Minister of Australia could take pleasure in allowing the Queen of Great Britain (also constitutionally the Queen of Australia) to make him a Knight of the Thistle, as if he were some great Scottish gentleman, and allow himself to be surrounded by those who jostled for honours with some of the energy of nobles in a petty German court in the eighteenth century. There is no Australian national anthem, only ‘God Save the Queen’; ‘Advance Australia Fair’ merely has the status of a national song, something the natives might chant after they have made their major obeisance. On ceremonial occasions the British flag often hangs beside the Australian flag. Migrants who come from European republics have to swear allegiance to a monarch before they can become naturalized. Melbourne businessmen sit amid their brown leather and mahogany and play English gentlemen in clubs that they believe to be the same as London clubs (in which some of them would not be accepted as members). Service officers still draw their commissions from the Queen as they did in the First Settlement (although they no longer have to buy them). Until recently almost all Governors-General and State Governors were still imported from England.

  I am not putting up an idealist appeal for complete rationality in human affairs. Trivialities such as those I have mentioned may still have good effects in England but the ceremonial clinging to Britain was part of the delusional structure of the people who were running Australia. It was a symptom of an inability to recognize and to dramatize the new strategic environment of Australia and the present problems of Australia. The momentum towards concepts of independent nationhood has slowed down, or stopped. Perhaps the world has become too puzzling to Australians; there are too many changes and uncertainties for them to make the final effort.

  To some Australians of fifty years ago this present pause would be unbelievable. The radical position then was to be anti-British, to develop an Australian nationalism and to dream of an independent Australian republic. This represented not only the influence of the Irish, who hated England for good reason, but of the general egalitarian position. England represented privilege and wealth; Australia represented equality and mateship. The nationalism that developed was a rustic exaltation of improvisation and vigour, far too thin and old-fashioned for the needs of today; we cannot any longer pretend we are all drovers boiling our billies. When the political independence and outward acceptance of equality were achieved nationalism became confused and run-down; there might now be less positive anti-British feeling in Australia than ever before.

  On the other hand the other streak in Australian life, the confidently pro-British imperialist jingoistic feeling, is dying with the older generations. Up to the Second World War the Empire still lay very thick on a certain kind of Australian. There was all that red on the map; there were the garrisons and fleets in the Pacific; England was by far Australia’s greatest trading partner; and the whole romantic concept of Empire could seem more full-bodied than the thin flavour of local nationalism. It was easier to feel self-important as an imperialist than as a nationalist. It was possible to imagine that thinking about imperial issues provided a real link with them. (It didn’t. It was simply Australia’s role to agree with the decisions of imperialism.) Yet even those who identified themselves with the British were subject to the shocks of reality when they met the ‘pommies’. Fewer Australians really liked the British than liked the idea of the British, the pomp of empire and the historical and cultural heritage to which they felt they had as much right as their contemporaries in the British Isles.

  Just as the collapse of world power has at times paralysed the British it has perplexed those Australians who were born into the period of British power. Many Australians still suck wisdom from London. In the imperial days the wisdom may have been relevant to the world and Australia. Now it is the wisdom merely of an important European power. Yet the lack of strong intellectual life in Australia has meant that Australian intellectuals who like to keep up with things often – perhaps usually – fell back on ‘quality’ newspapers and weeklies from London. They looked at the world from London and this could mean not only that they were inclined to accept London views of what the solutions to problems were – at least in this there was a variety of attitudes – but they also accepted a London definition of what the problems themselves w
ere, of what a reasonable person might be expected to be interested in. What they saw of Australia’s world was mainly what Britain saw. Even in Australian newspapers there is still likely to be more news about Scotland in a year than about New Zealand, and perhaps not one background article on the Philippines.

  Deriving inspiration from London has helped to befuddle some of the Australian ‘Left’ by raising issues that are of little importance to Australia. The agonizing reappraisals of ‘affluence’, a symptom of the decay of progressive thought in London, become fatuous when repeated in a country like Australia. The whole alienation of progressive intellectuals from ‘the workers’ has little to do with Australian intellectuals, although it may impress the many Englishmen who are employed in the Australian universities.

  The habit of acting as if one were living in Europe is not confined to those who dream of third forces. Migrants from continental Europe, especially from countries now ruled by communist regimes, see Cold War skirmishes with European immediacy. (Their children may have already inherited the gentle Australian dream. When President Kennedy was assassinated the eighteen-year-old son of a Czechoslovak friend said to me: ‘It is impossible to imagine this happening in the twentieth century.’ His parents had evaded the Nazis and later the Communists. His grandfather was shot dead in his apartment by Nazis and members of the family had disappeared under the Communists.) Many Australians think a great deal more about Russia, Eastern Europe, and West Berlin than they do about China or South Vietnam. Their training tells them to do so. This is the kind of area in their textbooks where most history happens. Yet there is nothing Australia can do about Russia, or West Berlin, or Europe, except to put up its hand at the United Nations and append its name to the sentiments of more powerful nations. There is a type of Australian who supports ‘The Western Alliance’, and holds staunch views about a part of the world in which his opinions do not matter. But he may also take a European view on Asia. Yet the Europeans sometimes play with policies on Asia as part of a game of rivalry with the USA. To Australians the issues are more important than that. It is true that the future of Australia – along with the rest of the world – could be settled as a symptom of the USA–Soviet confrontation. And it is also true that the future of Australia could be settled, as it were, privately – without involving the non-Asian world. In our part of the world there is no NATO, no Common Market, no ‘Western Alliance’.