The Lucky Country

by Donald Horne

  The ordinary Australian intellectual or decision-maker often lumps all the blame for this on to the daily newspapers, as if they could provide all the expertness and complexities of an intellectual community. The popular newspapers sell their 3 500 000 copies a day at less than cost to ordinary people to reach a circulation high enough to attract enough advertising revenue to make money. They cannot be expected to provide a capsule of intellectual life, taken once a day, like a pill before breakfast. Intellectual life needs many regular forms of expression. The weakness or absence of forms of intellectual expression is probably a more important factor than the inadequacies of the daily newspapers in the infertility of much discussion on public affairs in Australia, in its sheer inexpertness and naïveté.

  One fair way of evaluating Australian newspapers is to compare them with the local newspapers of the USA. In general, in coverage and interpretation of local news, Australian newspapers do not come out so well in this comparison; in coverage and interpretation of overseas news they come out better. In Australia coverage of foreign affairs is usually scrappy, without background or depth, but often ahead of American coverage. Newspapers already devote more space to foreign news than mere motives of profit-making would suggest as prudent; they are not likely to increase the proportion. If Australian intellectuals or decision-makers want to know what’s going on in the world they must supplement with overseas publications. On local news, Australian newspapers lack the vigour and cynicism and the detail of American newspapers. They don’t often go out and get stories. Many of these stories might help to sell newspapers but stereotyped attitudes to what is a ‘story’ mean that whole areas of Australian life remain unexplored. One gets a narrow and freakish view of Australian life that excludes detailed reporting of, say, migrants or even – with the exception of Alan Reid – of the union movement.

  The established part of the Australian Press, very largely, has stayed in a rut. On his return from six years in London John Pringle said: ‘My first impression on returning to Sydney … was how little the press had changed since I left six years before. The type and make-up were the same. Very often the stories themselves seemed the same … I couldn’t find a single new feature or single new writer – though some of the writers, of course, had changed papers … I couldn’t find a new columnist, a new cartoonist or even a new comic strip. Oh yes, one new comic strip bought from England.’ The rewards for being a good writer can be comparatively low; an ambitious journalist often gets out of writing and into administration – or out of the industry altogether.

  Some journalists are nothing more than hired hands on call for odd jobs. There is little attempt at cultivating a sense of joint professional involvement; the journalists’ union provides no professional initiative. The status of journalism and its attractiveness as a way of earning a living have declined.

  Australian newspaper managements have not reduced their papers to the kind of comics that in London tell everything except the news, and most of them do not trump up stories with ridiculous sensationalism. They are usually proud of their products and are affected by considerations other than profit-making. However they are far too sensitive to attack. Men who dish out criticism with considerable verve can become very cross when someone attacks them. Almost any criticism is seen as an attack on the freedom of the press. There is not enough criticism and such criticism as there is is often wild, or self-interested. Newspaper people sometimes take themselves far too seriously, reaching out for all the honours associated with the written word. Like so many other Australian Top People they seem to wish to be given a great deal more credit than is their due: history rests heavily on them and generates unease. If they would only confront the world with a more open manner, with less pretence of disinterest and more Australian humorous self-denigration they might not be so unpopular.

  However there have been some new developments in Australian publishing – first in periodicals and now in a ‘national newspaper’ – and three of the four main mass media groups can take credit for most of this. The fortnightly intellectual review the Observer was started early in 1958, with Australian Consolidated Press paying the bill, and this was followed later in the year by Nation, produced by a group of individuals. These two magazines achieved larger sales than those who despised the Australian potential had thought possible and they gave Australian general intellectual life a kind of substance that had previously evaded it. The Australian Financial Review (produced by the Sydney Morning Herald) began to assume a more general appeal and its cover of management and economic affairs also added to informed discussion. The takeover of the Bulletin by Australian Consolidated Press and its transformation by people connected with the Observer dramatized this minor publishing revolution. The Bulletin was a symbol of the old Australia, an Australia that started to die fifty years ago, and suddenly this relic of old attitudes was ripped to pieces and replaced in a few dreadful months in 1961 (dreadful for the victims of the change) by something that bore the image of contemporaneity. When the News Limited Group launched the Australian in July 1964, another element entered the situation. The Australian is Australia’s first national newspaper, printed simultaneously in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. It represents the first attempt to produce a ‘quality’ newspaper in Australia (mixed with elements of more popular appeal). In the same month the Canberra Times (bought and refurbished by the Sydney Morning Herald) was also transformed into a quality-type paper.

  What has happened in Australian publishing is that while the main newspapers simply stood still, the field for experiment moved into new publications, produced by university-educated men and bringing new kinds of people on to their staffs. There is more change going on than is evident from a glance at the news stands but these changes had no immediate effect on the main newspapers, even though all of these new publications (except Nation) had been published by groups who also controlled the main newspapers. In association with their publishers, a very small group of journalists effected this change.

  The intellectuals

  So far the word ‘intellectual’ has been used without being given any clear meaning. This seemed safe because whatever meaning is given to the word, in Australia, as a strong and publicly influential type of person, ‘intellectuals’ do not exist. This makes Australia one of the oddest countries in the world. People who might be described as intellectuals are assuming enormous importance almost everywhere in the world except in Australia. It seems unlikely that such a situation will last in Australia. In fact it is now changing. There is a developing middle-class of the intellect and of taste, although it still lacks leaders, self-confidence and established forms of communication and influence.

  By ‘intellectuals’ I do not mean only creative thinkers. Creative thinkers display curiosity about their environment, either systematically or by insight; or they make patterns; or they both examine some of the mysteries of existence and also try to make patterns of them. Other intellectuals are simply their conducting medium. An intellectual community may be the force by which a new vision is conducted into general attitudes. Or it may be an insulating medium, of the conservative kind that may stifle creative intelligence, even making it look foolish or wilful. There is no necessary relation between creative intelligence and universities; indeed the conservatism that is necessary to most academics in their monastic tasks of maintenance and transmission or their tasks of elaboration (‘research’) often stifles the creative intelligence. All of these processes have occurred in Australia: there have been creative intelligences, and their new visions have been conducted into general attitudes; or they have been frustrated in a society whose structure does not allow for the concept of originality. There have been Australians who have entered the world’s intellectual community: Sir John Eccles and Sir Macfarlane Burnet became Nobel Prize winners because they extended the boundaries of a field of inquiry. Australian radiophysicists are doing the same. Australian writers, painters and philosophers give visions of which some part of the w
orld takes note.

  Where Australia has been weak, in matters of High Intellect, has been in a determined lack of serious consideration of human destiny, or in prolonged consideration of the Australian condition. Australian intellectuals tend to shelter from the major challenges and ideas of the twentieth century. It is usually not possible to conduct in Australia the kind of conversation that would be immediately acceptable among intellectuals in Europe, or New York.

  What is even more remarkable is weakness in matters of Middle Intellect. There is a lack of a general class of educated persons who are familiar with the history of human thought (at least in outline), and see their connection with it, who are familiar with analytical, categorizing and generalizing approaches, who work in many different fields in which the only common characteristic is a ‘relatively high degree of abstraction or of ordering of some common experience’, who can apply knowledge and curiosity to the things they are interested in and who, despite their occupational differences, can communicate with each other, as equals, in sustained and rigorous discourse on the affairs of the day. It is a lack of this kind of class that may present a danger to the future of Australia. This is the main meaning I have been giving the word ‘intellectual’.

  A ‘new’ country may need urban living (as distinguished from suburban) to develop this kind of person and more communication between occupational groups than exists in Australia. It needs regular reading matter in which there is information and a knowledge of what ideas are doing the rounds. It has been the Australian style to deny the intellect; sometimes its only social acceptability seemed to lie in some professor clowning on a television discussion panel, displaying his ordinariness. This suppression has meant that one thing wrong with many individual Australian intellectuals is that they rust away, or freeze into postures that are years out of date. A self-pitying loneliness becomes the intellectuals’ style. They contract out.

  There has been a growing cafe culture, of a sort. Coffee shops and espresso bars are popular meeting places for migrants; during the day for occupation groups (barristers or advertising men or hat salesmen); and for the young. For a few years young people might lead the life of an intellectual in-group in espresso bars or pubs, then it all peters out. As they get older they retreat to the suburbs. There is not much intimate conversation or sharing of opinion between the young and, say, people of forty. If a man of forty started a round of the young people’s espresso bars they would probably decide he was looking for a pick-up.

  The most flourishing in-groups are usually of the literary or arty kind, whether old bohemian or new beat; where dispossession is a virtue and alienation a matter of principle. Australia has its share of ‘writers’ who don’t write and ‘painters’ who don’t really paint, for whom to be a ‘writer’ or a ‘painter’ is more a matter of a way of life than of creative activity. These groups are often anti-intellectual. Even among those who write or paint well, the normal tone would be anti-intellectual. They are ‘feelies’, as Peter Coleman put it, rather than ‘thinkies’. To be a ‘thinkie’ is to be academic.

  Central among Australia’s problems is that some of the values of the culture it has inherited from Europe are in conflict with the realities of Australian life. As A.A. Phillips said in Australian Civilization, a belief in easy achievement of happiness is basic in Australia, yet it has not become ingrained in people’s temperaments like the joyousness of the Polynesian; cultural influences in Australia reflect the sense of dissatisfaction of European culture. The notion of people getting their deserts is strong in European culture, yet it is an inaccurate picture of Australian society. (Australians get more than their deserts.) The European novelists’ obsession with the class system is as interesting a study in its own right in Australia as the study of ant colonies, and about as relevant.

  This position in which a Europe-derived society has developed aberrant characteristics but is expected to judge itself and see itself totally in terms of European culture, not even of contemporary European culture, but of European culture as it has been, may be responsible for some of the extreme anti-intellectualism of many educated Australians. They are baffled by what seems to be the irrelevance of what is held up to them as true. Some of it is obviously not true, but those who do the holding up are not themselves thoroughly familiar with the values they purvey: they sell the whole job lot, throwing doubt on the relevant by including with it the obviously irrelevant. The humanities teachers know there is something wrong; the society in which they live does not follow the prescriptions they have learned by heart. They become angry with society; it becomes an unimportant, freak society rather than a challenging one which they might try to interpret. One finds even left-wingers lamenting affluence and alleging that moral fibre declines once the economic struggle lessens, when all they mean is that there has been a change in the rules.

  What is lacking among Australians is a real feel for the history of the human race, and a sense of belonging to a long-lasting intellectual community that reaches its great moments when it seeks out in wonder towards the mysteries of its environment, that has concerned itself with more momentous problems than the nature of Australia but whose present members could well take this question up in the light of the history of human knowledge.

  Australians ‘learn’ their culture. They ‘learn’ it as if it described their own life and attitudes, when in part it does not, and this process seems to make the relevant in the culture they ‘learn’ also unreal. This sense of unreality can affect even those who have ‘learned’ their culture very thoroughly: they cannot detect the difference between their own society and the societies of the culture they have ‘learned’. But some of the valuable parts of the culture they ‘learn’ – its awareness of horror, failure, inadequacy can also seem unreal. Yet it is Australians’ failure to understand the tragic (or the comic) in life that may place them at a disadvantage in a world in which happiness is largely still hard to achieve. It is as if a ‘cultured’ Australian rejects the Australian concept of happiness because it is not in the culture he has ‘learned’; at the same time he is still sufficiently a ‘happy’ Australian not to absorb the reality of horror and tragedy in the culture he has ‘learned’. He is déclassé, unable to talk to other Australians of the culture he has ‘learned’ because he lacks a real feel for both it and his own society. To rational, pragmatic, happy Australians the conduct of foreigners seems either crazy, or they seek rationality where it may not exist: the ‘cultured’ Australian is not able to make real the concept of ideological irrationality in the foreign conduct. The problems of a culture that is ‘learned’ are not unique to Australia, but it is in Australia and several other countries that they reach their strongest forms. Throughout the developed nations new qualities of life are emerging, largely mysterious and undescribed. In some ways there are already new kinds of people living in new societies; one of the fascinations of Australia is that it may be one of the first of these societies to emerge.

  Presumably the alienation of intellectuals both from their own people’s ways of life and from the culture they have ‘learned’ accounts for some of the weakness of intellectual life. The Intellect becomes a precious thing. It is learned and transmitted, but beyond some minor elaborations it is not dynamic. You don’t use it. It’s not part of the affairs of the day. It was this problem that I had in mind when I said in the first chapter: Is Australia really inimical to ideas? Or has there been something wrong with the ideas presented to it?

  Whether it comes from this alienation, or their own addiction to happiness, Australian intellectuals often lack stamina. After years of wondering some collapse into silence; others, who do engage in intellectual performance, do not usually seem fully extended. They don’t try very hard; they seem to lack the impulses of excellence. Discussions on public affairs often become shouting matches; nobody has much detail. Either they think too big or they think too small; they shout without knowledge or they wilt, overwhelmed by detail. Those who understand the need
for a rigorous examination of alternatives often get lost in the examination and come to no decision; those who come to decisions do not always comprehend the possibility of alternatives or that decision-making is a realistic practicalism that examines alternatives and possible effects but nevertheless still reaches decision – if partly without belief.

  It is a characteristic of intellectuals anywhere that some of them prefer obscurity in style but this is of particular interest in Australia. Among those who have ‘learned’ culture there can be a distrust of clarity. Closed systems of beliefs on public affairs are also common. Subtleties of argument are ignored (unless it is a professional matter); intellectuals react for or against their ‘image’ of an article, without making any investigation of detail. Detecting one argument, they assume others. It is as if they reject the possibility that there could be subtlety or unpredictability in any article outside a professional publication or by any author other than a specialist. And if an article is by a specialist it has the sanctity of being within a ‘field’.

  However there is more development or organized intellectual life in Australia now than at any other period in its history and there is some understanding among practical men that intellectuals can be recorders of change, transmitters of new problems and new attitudes that can be of immense importance in practical affairs. Half the Cabinet does not read Encounter, as Kennedy’s Cabinet did, but a few of the better ministers are reading what is available; some of the younger businessmen and professional men are now also doing some reading.