The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  Despite the realism that marked Sir Robert Menzies’ policy towards South-East Asia (his performance fell behind his commitments and his rhetoric) throughout the 1950s and until the shocks of the Common Market debate, Menzies was more British than the British, always running several years behind London, expressing dreams of Commonwealth that had something of the flavour of progressive discussion in 1908. He still worked on reflexes learned in his youth. The debate on Britain’s first try for the Common Market caused a reassessment in the Australian ‘Right’. If President De Gaulle had allowed the British to enter the European Economic Community the results on Australian opinion might have produced an illuminating and useful crisis. That was why some Australians hoped that Britain would enter. Whatever the inconveniences to Australia the psychological shock of being dumped might have hastened that dramatic reorientation, of admitting where in the world Australia really is and doing something about it, that may be a necessary condition for Australia’s survival. As it is there remained a fairly general suspicion that Australia was still living on borrowed time, allowed to sell foodstuffs to Britain until Britain entered Europe.

  Looking to America

  The strategic relation between Australia and the United States is obvious. This dependence on American power does not seem to arouse in Australia the bitterness it arouses in other parts of the world. From their occasional outbursts of megalomania in foreign policy one might not guess it, but Australians are used to being insignificant and relying on the power of others. They have lived in a state of such protected comfort and innocence for so long that one of their noticeable weaknesses is to have taken the power of Britain and then of America so much for granted that they often ignore the realities of power and do not take it into their calculation. Australians have lived with the recognition of American world power longer than any other nation outside the Western Hemisphere – since early 1942 when General MacArthur escaped from the Philippines to Darwin, Australia was the first country in the contemporary world to be saved by the Americans.

  It is one of the few that will admit that it was saved by the Americans. It has even forgiven the Americans for saving it. Australians are helped in doing this by knowing that in the Second World War with a huge proportion of their population in uniform and a high degree of skill and courage they went as far in saving themselves as their resources would allow. This is not always true of those America saves. (Nor is it now true of Australia.) This almost unique ability to live with American power may derive some of its strength from the fact that Australia is one of the few countries in the world that has not received American economic aid. Americans can show signs of emotional insecurity when this is pointed out to them by Australians. They may not even believe it. Americans have become so used to believing that everyone in the world has drawn economic assistance from them that it seems an affront to American generosity for Australians not to have drawn on it.

  One walks into a field of mystery and guesses, but it seems likely that Australia could enter into a quite massive relationship with America without generating any politically effective anti-Americanism among ordinary Australians, although there would be considerable opposition in the ‘Left’ of the Labour Movement. Why is this? One can only guess. One answer might be that Australians and Americans are in some ways – only some ways – the same kind of people. Exactly what the word ‘American’ is supposed to mean is hard to say; there are so many different Americans. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that Australians do not find distasteful the official story of what America is supposed to be. Freedom, equality, affluence, the pursuit of happiness … these words are all right by Australians. When Australians and Americans use these words there may be more common meaning in them than when Englishmen and Australians use them. Australians accept American talk of competitiveness, even if they do not know what it means. The rhetorical expression of American idealism may sometimes leave Australians cold, suspicious as they are of all idealism. (What’s in it for him?) But Australians have what they would consider to be a hard-headed respect for American material success and expertise.

  Guessing about Australian ‘images’ of the United Kingdom and the United States is perhaps worthless, but it is irresistible. My guess would be that the United Kingdom would come out associated with the Queen, culture, dowdiness, Westminster Abbey, snobbery, the West End theatre, with swinging London as a puzzling symbol of the present. America would come out associated with electric washing machines, military strength, MacArthur, Kennedy, TV, egalitarianism. Relations with England prickle with familial misunderstandings. It’s like growing away from one’s parents and seeking new patterns of identity with them, looking for common hobbies and topics of interest so that one can keep up a connection. Relations with America are those of a young cousin to an immensely successful and older cousin, with plenty of criticism, practically no hero worship; it is a more straightforward relation. Australians seek companionship from strangers, extend an open hand of equal friendship. This can get them into a mess with the English, with their mandarin manners. With Americans they think they can get on with the conversation.

  To a limited extent the two countries have shared the same experiences, come to the same ‘conclusions’. Or at least there are some common elements in their histories that cannot be shared with any European country. Australia has been spared the brutality of civil war and racial violence; it has not known the aggrandizement of colossal power; life in Australia is more equal and less competitive than in America; but there are dozens of similarities … migration to a new land, the mystique of pioneering (actually somewhat different in the two countries), the turbulence of gold rushes, the brutality of relaxed restraint, the boredoms of the backblocks, the feeling of making life anew. There may be more similarities between the history of Australia and America than for the moment Australians can understand. Australian history may have been much more of a mad explosion of power and craziness than the historians allow for – with goblets of congealed gentility thrown out to be collected and put in a case marked ‘history’. Patrick White’s study of an explorer in Voss and the first volumes of Manning Clark’s new history show the possibility of interpretations quite different from those of the official versions.

  There are politically effective ‘anti-Americans’ in Australia but they should be distinguished from Australians who are merely critical of America (as they have every right to be). On the reading ‘Left’ they often draw their ammunition from overseas matter. On the mindless ‘Right’ they rely on fading memories; the Americans lack the finesse of the British and so forth. But by far the greatest source of criticism of America in Australia comes from America itself, perhaps now the most self-critical society in the world. Power Elites, Paper Economies, Organization Men, Radical Rights, Hidden Persuaders … these ogres marched upon Australians with such force that Australians sometimes looked for Radical Rights or Organization Men under their own beds, just as they falsely applied London criticism of Britain to Australia.

  Americans – even the most influential and educated – often display an ignorance of Australia, seeing it in terms of England or in terms of America, or in no terms at all. That can wound Australians. They innocently feel that Americans should understand them better than that. Australia has not yet been satisfactorily created as an image in America, by either Australian intellectuals or American intellectuals. To many Americans it seems a dull sort of place, not interesting like Laos or Saudi Arabia. Yet given the pragmatism and relative straightforwardness of Australians, considerable communication should be possible between America and Australia. Nations never ‘understand’ each other, no more than groups within a nation do, or individuals. But Americans could find here some of the best friends they are likely to find in an envious world. Partly because in the pursuit of happiness for ordinary people Australians believe they are already ahead of America.

  Provincial Australia

  In a sense, Australia has remained a province of Britain. It i
s, in a sense, now also a province of the USA. (It is also, in a sense, a comparatively aging ‘emergent nation’. And also, in a sense, an Asian power.)

  I do not wish to push the metaphor of Australia’s provincialism too far, and certainly not in the direction that London intellectuals have recently pushed it: that there is a great world of the intellect flourishing in the metropolis that the provincials cannot understand. (This in itself may be a symptom of the increasing parochialism of London.) And one must disassociate oneself from Auden’s cosy snobbery: ‘The dominions … are for me tiefste Provinz, places which have produced no art and are inhabited by the kind of person with whom I have least in common …’ For some reason this has always reminded me of Arnold Bennett’s patronizing entry in his diary: ‘Lunched today with D. H. Lawrence, the provincial genius.’ Arnold Bennett! It may not have been accident that Lawrence wrote so well about Australia and even thought of settling here. Some writers can flourish in provinces.

  However what other word than ‘provincial’ does one use to describe a nation in which most activities are derivative and most new ideas are taken from abroad? In which the main decisions in manufacturing and strategy are dominated by overseas centres and in which vogues are usually out of date? Which not only lacks a feeling of importance in the present, but has no feeling of importance in the past? That sometimes watches the policies and trends of its twin metropolises (Britain and the USA) with more interest and knowledge than it watches its own?

  There is a certain type of Australian who can be understood only as a provincial – unless ‘colonial’ is an even better word. He was brought up to believe in the ‘Britishness’ of pomp and destiny, in the master race philosophy that God chose the British to run the world. This belief in ‘Britishness’ was one of the most effective ideologies among trendsetters and decision-makers in Australia until the Second World War and some of those who were influenced by it still hold power. If you were ‘British’ you knew who you were and what you were supposed to be doing; you enjoyed a sense of the past and a sense of the future. For these Empire loyalists, loyalty was primarily a matter of the Empire and the Monarch. Loyalty was due to Australia because it was ‘British’. To the extent that Australians deviated from ‘Britishness’ they denied their heritage and their destiny. To distinguish between the interests of Australia and Britain was disloyal. Many Establishment men saw themselves as those who would keep the natives (their fellow countrymen) in line, keep them loyal to the Empire and the Throne – and punish them if they deviated. They were doing the Empire’s job out here in this distant, unlikely place where they happened to have been born.

  The old Empire loyalists, when they judged the ordinary people of Australia by what they believed to be the standards of the metropolis, found them lacking. They developed a contempt for the ordinary people of their own country. They blamed ordinary Australians for not possessing characteristics that you do not find in ordinary people anywhere – and that were also missing in most of those who make the criticism. This habit may have been one of the main reasons why, in Australia, ordinary people are blamed for not possessing elite characteristics and, why, if it is noted that the elites often lack these characteristics, the ordinary people are blamed for that, too. To despise one’s fellow countrymen can be very provincial.

  When British world power collapsed these older generations were left with their memories – on which they still acted. Most of the rituals of Australia still reinforce their memories. However there is obviously going to be a dramatic change in generations in Australia. For the moment the new generation may be transfixed in horror at what it sees around it: the perpetuation of burdensome fictions and the lack of self-confidence increases its sense of inadequacy and despair. But as it gets on the move it is likely to be less concerned than any previous generation with being either ‘British’ or ‘Anti-British’.

  In the past, Australia has also displayed the other side of provincialism: the boastfulness and arrogance of the liberated province, parading its very provincialism as if it were home-grown. There has been a special raciness of style that is taken to be peculiarly Australian; yet much of this ‘Australian language’ is simply city slang or provincial idiom or even thieves’ cant brought over from England during the settlement. The whole bush ballad movement of the 1890s was shot through with derivation. Even Australian egalitarianism is derived: it should be remembered that, beneath the acceptance of the deferential system in Britain, there has long been an egalitarian spirit too; mateship has been submerged ideology in Britain affecting the lives of a great number of people. When the TV series Ζ Cars came to Australia, Australians saw part of themselves – with North Country accents. Even Australian laconicism has its derivation; it is an extreme form of British understatement. Australia is very ‘British’ in the sense that both societies are outwardly sceptical and pragmatic, distrusting public emotion and any complicated form of conceptualization and systematization. The Australian ‘let’s give it a go’ concept may be an extreme form of the British concept of ‘muddling through’.

  As provincials, Australians can be sceptical about a whole range of decisions that affect Australians but are made in some other country. This is one of the characteristics of provincialism: that decisions are made somewhere else. Australians are also in the position, comforting to an English-speaking nation, of being able to criticize both Englishmen and Americans. If some English lord came out to be Governor-General he was criticized for living like a lord. If some Texas millionaire came out to be US Ambassador he was criticized for acting like a Texas millionaire. Australians criticize Englishmen by American standards and they criticize Americans by English standards. It would be smart for the British to send out Englishmen who act like Texas millionaires and for the Americans to send out Americans who act like English lords.

  A republic?

  There are many comforts in being provincial, but, given Australia’s peculiar relationship to the rest of Asia, these are comforts that Australia may not continue to be able to afford. It is possible that Australia will have to begin making its own decisions in a kind of way that will be painful to existing attitudes. The extraordinarily belated recognition by the Menzies Government in the mid-1960s that Australia should again have a defence force may prove to be the first example of this process. Australia may cease to be provincial – the hard way. If Australia is luckier than this, it is still unlikely that much basis of power will continue to lie behind its relationship with Britain – either in trade, or in strategy. Where Britain was not long ago Australia’s main customer it is now only its third best customer, after Japan and the USA. And while Australia still imports more from Britain than from any other country, this is also likely to change. The British are still the main investors in Australia but new investment comes more from the USA than from Britain. And the British military commitment in Malaysia/Singapore is, at the most, likely to be little more than Australia’s. With trade weakened and strategic protection going, what support will be left in the British constitutional connection? Australians are likely to feel increasingly foolish that their Head of State resides in London.

  In a sense Australia is a republic already. The traditional British forms already run much more shallow than the more elderly Australians realize. To people who are under thirty-five, who were still at school when Singapore fell or not even born, there is no basis of power or performance or reason in the monarchy. To the migrants or the under thirty-fives – and that is now a majority of the population – the Royal Family is a novelty item, charming celebrities. Even in this role they don’t seem to be pulling as well as they used to. Australia is no longer short of visiting ‘celebrities’.

  How Australia will become a republic, and when, is not predictable. However one knows that the older generations to whom such a change is unthinkable are going to die, and that in the younger generations there is likely to be little interest in preserving Australia as a monarchy. Merely to write the word is to invite derision
. Hardly any Australian below a certain age would consider his country to be a monarchy yet that is its constitutional position. It will become politically practicable to make this break; all that is needed is some push from events, some dramatic reason for making it. No one can tell what that push might be, but it will be pushing against a tightly locked door.

  Already the general tone of private discussion among those who do not hold monarchist principles but might oppose change or not urge it, is cynical and whiggish. They argue that the monarchic link is a useful fiction, divorcing ceremony from power … or that Australia does not run to the kind of people who could be elevated into a presidency … or that no one could trust an Australian in such a job; he might turn himself into a dictator … or that although in theory a monarchy is absurdly obsolescent in practice this is a matter of minor importance and it may even do some good, that one should concentrate on the great issues of the day, not on minor matters such as the monarchy.