by Donald Horne
The emergence of new publications referred to earlier was accompanied by the development of a new style of ‘little magazine’, socio-cultural rather than old-style literary; and there have been influential pamphlets. In book publishing there are now books of intellectual interest; in history there has been a period of diffuse re-examination; there are some beginnings of a detailed examination of Australian society; there is an increasing number of conferences and seminars. However before diagnosing a ‘renaissance’ one must also note that while a country of small population such as Australia may need proportionately higher intellectual activity than larger countries, Australia has not yet achieved even a proportionate share; that the provision of interpretative information is still patchy; and that one could not yet really say that there was any competitive sharpening of ideas. To get rigorous, continuing discussion with standards of excellence is not yet possible in the new magazines.
It became the vogue to find two main strands in this new intellectual activity: that of Melbourne, with its emphasis on social improvement, Australianism, a belief in the perfectibility of mankind, and a sense of high morality; and that of Sydney, with its emphasis on high culture, cosmopolitanism, acceptance of the inadequacies of life, political indifference and a sense of scepticism and gaiety. For one the Putney debates was required reading; for the other Plato’s account of the trial of Socrates. At Melbourne University: a feeling that the English Puritan Revolution was still being fought (if in social terms), a continuing concern with moral affirmation and sincerity of motives, and a belief in the implementation of eternal righteousness. At Sydney University: an avoidance of ‘illusion’ and ‘confusion’, a destructive analysis of practically everything and the consolation of feeling oneself one of the elect. For the one, Professor Max Crawford: for the other Professor John Anderson.
However, these comparisons became a bit old hat. Intellectual life has become more diffuse as people are working through old positions.
10. THE LUCKY COUNTRY
Living on our luck
Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on the other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. A nation more concerned with styles of life than with achievement has managed to achieve what may be the most evenly prosperous society in the world. It has done this in a social climate largely inimical to originality and the desire for excellence (except in sport) and in which there is less and less acclamation of hard work. According to the rules Australia has not deserved its good fortune.
The rules may be wrong. It is already becoming obvious that the belief in hard work may become one of the impediments to happiness in the future technological societies: some way will have to be found in which most people will work less without suffering comparative economic hardship. Australia has been one of the pioneer countries in cutting down hours of work and increasing holidays. In this sense Australians may be more progressive than the world thinks – in the very field about which they feel guilty. And however hard it is to imagine that a feeling for originality and excellence is not necessary for continuing prosperity, some people might say: if Australians can get away with it, good luck to them; after all, in a commercialist society, much of the originality and feeling for excellence is absorbed in matters of immense triviality – a new knob on a TV set, a new way of slicing beans.
Others raise the question that I have excluded from this book: what is the sense in there being an Australia at all? When it looked as if the Japanese might conquer Australia early in 1942 Vance Palmer wrote in Meanjin: ‘The next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at any rate in the sight of the outer world … we could vanish and leave singularly few signs, that, for some generations, there had lived a people who had made a homeland of this Australian earth … There is very little to show the presence of a people with a common purpose or a rich sense of life.’
Then Palmer gave his own answer to this question: ‘If Australia had no more character than could be seen on its surface, it would be annihilated as surely and swiftly as those colonial outposts white men built for their commercial profit in the East – pretentious façades of stucco that looked imposing as long as the wind kept from blowing. But there is an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate, that is quite different from these bubbles of old-world imperialism … sardonic, idealist, tongue-tied perhaps, it is the Australia of all who truly belong here … And it has something to contribute to the world. Not emphatically in the arts as yet, but in arenas of action, and in ideas for the creation of that egalitarian democracy that will have to be the basis for all civilized societies in the future. That is the Australia we are called upon to save.’
This was an unusual outburst of rhetoric even in a wartime Australia that feared it might be destroyed. (And in which sardonic idealists in some of Sydney’s water suburbs sold out cheap, afraid that their houses might be shelled by the Japanese.) However the perils of war showed – on the whole – how, being laconic, Australians can take surprise in their stride. The very scepticism of Australians and their delight in improvisation have meant that so far Australia has scraped through. On the face of it Australia has had gamblers’ luck. Even to use the phrase ‘gamblers’ luck’ can be misleading; it suggests a knowledge of risk and insecurity, when it is a feature of Australian life not to take insecurities into account. The saving Australian characteristic – and this has some of the gambler’s coolness about it – is the ability to change course quickly, even at the last moment, and seek a quick, easy way out. This can happen almost without discussion or dramatization of the change. Australians have good nerves. They hate discussion and ‘theory’ but they can step quickly out of the way if events are about to smack them in the face.
Will the luck last?
However there are two fields where reliance on luck and last-minute adjustment are not going to work; these are the fields of Australia’s strategic environment and of reactions to the demands of technology. So far as the first is concerned, it is just remotely possible that events in Asia will pass Australia by, but it seems insane to trust to luck that they will do so. So far as the second is concerned, there does not seem to be even a remote possibility of luck coming to the rescue; Australia will not be able to maintain its prosperity in the new technological age without profoundly changing its life patterns. It is because these two demands cannot possibly be evaded that I suggested earlier that Australia has now completed the first chapter in its history. Things are going to change so deeply that some new kind of Australia is emerging; either that, or they will not change, and the present kind of Australia will go under anyway.
In the next few decades one can see such possible catastrophes in Asia that Australia might be overwhelmed whatever it does. There are all kinds of catastrophes less than total victory that could change the world for the worse for Australia. There are also several crises in South-East Asia, that, although not directly related to Communism, might also wreck things for Australia, if only, in the first place, in scaring off migrants and overseas capital. Australia can never have the strength to affect the results of the grand game; but it can play its part, and in some of the smaller games it could play an important part. The more its economic growth and population increase the greater that part can be. When the present ruling generations go, will the rigidities and obsolescence of Australian public life change quickly enough for Australia to accept its connection with events? It is easy to talk about increases in population, in economic development and in military strength and about making changes in attitudes to Asia. These may be necessary (though not sufficient) for Australia to survive, let alone to play a more important part in Asia (or actually play the part it has written for itself). But will they happen?
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bsp; Will Australia be able to accept the wonderful opportunities for greater participation, and sometimes initiative, in the world in which it lives? Will it rid itself of the belief that it is a dull country, that nothing happens to it, that it is safe from the unpleasantness of history? Perhaps Australians are too modest, capable of more than they attempt, believing that as a nation they are not old enough or important enough for great events; too concerned with happiness to understand the possibilities of tragedy, projecting their illusions on to others.
The demands of technology will be less dramatic than the demands of Asia, but of immense economic and social importance. Australia is playing for a high stake: maintenance of a general level of prosperity higher than almost anywhere in the world. That is why the standards one applies to the people who run Australia’s economic affairs must be high. There is no point in comparing them with the economic masters of some small country that is just struggling along. We’re at the top. We must apply the standards of the top. The answer to the question, Can we keep our standards of prosperity and our present way of life? or to put it more bluntly, Can the racket last? appears to be NO. That is to say, that if things go on as they are Australia will slip down the per capita national income scale. (It may be worth noting that since I wrote these words in the first edition of this book, according to one set of estimates, Australia dropped from fifth to tenth in the list of the world’s prosperous countries – in one year.)
It has had its material success because its ordinary people were educated enough and adaptable enough to work in modern ways; because they were eager to buy enough consumer goods to keep the whole show going; and because their masters, although not usually of high calibre, were skilled enough, with government protection, to decode the instructions they received from overseas. Now something more than that is needed. It does not seem likely that in this new age material progress can continue at the highest rate unless society jumps into new life with higher standards of training, with an increasing proportion of scientists, technologists and technicians, with a greater emphasis on administrative and managerial capacity and an absorption of the technocratic approach into ways of thinking. All the industrialized nations are now reacting to this problem, but few of them are doing it as slowly as Australia and in few of them does it represent quite such a change in social pattern. In most industrialized countries cleverness and skill are part of the national ethos, even if they share it with contradictory elements. In Australia they play no part in it. Even if more and more of Australian enterprise is run directly by overseas firms, there must be enough Australians able to decode the new instructions and carry them out. It is unlikely that enough skilled migrants can be acquired to do the whole job for us. And given the present inadequate training programmes it is likely that this crisis may become apparent at a time when it would take up to a decade to meet it.
When most Australians think of their economic growth they think that people should work harder. This leftover from puritanism may be the opposite of the truth. It may be desirable for the ‘workers’ to work less: what will be needed will be a great deal more thinking, training, organization and cleverness. But we are now getting only about half the vocational results from our education system that we could be getting out of it and the position may become worse. It’s easy to say that more money should be pumped into the infrastructure – into education, research and development – and that talent should be sought out and given power and prestige. So it should. But it should be realized that to do this involves a social revolution, something that will change parts of Australian civilization beyond recognition. It is such a social revolution that now becomes necessary in Australia if the standards of material prosperity are to remain the tests of policy.
That a revolutionary change in attitudes towards life is needed to further material progress does not mean that this change will necessarily be achieved. A politician, government official, union leader or company director who does not wish to change his beliefs and the habits that give life meaning for him will simply not change them; they are more important to him than the further material progress of the nation. Normally, people prefer their ways of life to material progress: it is one of the reasons why most nations are ‘under-developed’. What is advocated is a radical overthrow and destruction of the prevailing attitudes of most of the nation’s masters. If this does not happen there is likely to be a general demoralization in Australia; the nation may become run down, old-fashioned, puzzled, and resentful.
One can go on advocating until one is black in the face but the concept of social revolution is nonsense if there are not the people to make it. The ordinary Australian people seem adaptable; it is a matter of the people on top. Here one can draw some confidence in the possibility of change (for better or worse) from detecting a difference between the generations. On top there is a stiff-necked carrying on of old ways based on enervated wisdoms. One has only to watch a top person on television to sense in the lowered eyes, in the inability to reach towards the camera and generalize, in the lack of excitement about the problems of the modern world, in the meticulous muddling around with trivia, that these are the symptoms of a lost generation. What Bagehot said of generations in politics is true of generations generally: ‘Generally one generation … succeeds another almost silently; at every moment men of all ages between thirty and seventy have considerable influence; each year removes many old men, makes others older, brings in many new. But sometimes there is an abrupt change. In that case the affairs of the country are apt to alter much, for good or for evil; sometimes it is ruined, sometimes it becomes more successful, but it hardly ever stays as it was.’
Australians do not take easily to the concept of one generation taking over from another. There has been hardly any study of the process, and none of the journalistic labelling that goes on in most developed nations. Among writers this lack of interest may have come from the obsessive desire to define Australian characteristics in terms of the upsurge of the 1890s, instead of as a dynamic process or from the opposite desire (in rebellion against this one) not to find any Australian characteristics at all. There is a desire to maintain traditional standards of what ‘Australian’ should mean instead of finding out what it does mean. (To admit that generations can change would be to admit that a static concept of an ‘Australian’, based on the writings of the 1890s, is false.) And the continuing dominance of old ideas and ageing men has led to a lot of imitation or appearance of imitation in younger generations. Geoffrey Dutton said in Nation that there are probably more old men of thirty in Australia than in any other country in the world. Among some of the younger generations there is an obsession with ‘maturity’. As Dutton says, ‘A sure way of discrediting anyone whose opinion you disagree with is to tell him that it’s time he grew up.’
However, beneath the pretence of sameness one can detect difference. One can make some guesses, at the same time qualifying generalization by recognizing that men are often born out of their generation. In general the remains of the Menzies–Calwell generation is antediluvian, nurtured in a backwater, strongly provincial. They are of the post-Federation generation, proud that the Australian States had federated; they developed their theories of the world in a context of British power. They can be more old-fashioned than men of the same generation in Britain because their imaginations have not been fundamentally stirred by any of the cataclysms of the last fifty years. The men who came of age between the two World Wars see themselves as the innovators and men of iron will – the one-man shows who in their brilliant improvisations changed the face of Australia. Often the changes they made represent the dreams of the 1930s rather than the demands of the 1960s; though still believing supremely in themselves they have no trust in the men underneath them (often their problems of succession are their own fault); they trust in their own intuition (which is sometimes just luck), willpower and the handling of men. The wartime and immediate post-war generation understands the demands of the age better and sees life
in more complicated terms than the men they are now beginning to replace. They understand the need for expertness and cooperation more. They are the New Generation, the men who see Australia in more sophisticated terms. Some of them have imitated the Men of Will. Others already seem tired. Some of the best may have been so long frustrated by the amateurishness of the Men of Will that they may have lost their punch. But they are Australia’s immediate hope. The younger generation than this seems fresher, but it is still full of mystery, not defined. It is condemned as hedonistic and stupid. Yet some of its apparent stupidity may be indifference to the bogus view of life that is presented to it and some of its hedonism an expression of a strong Australian characteristic that is now less confused by puritanism. It may be a genuinely rebellious generation, developing its own style. It may be the generation that changes Australia.
Why is there no longer any sense of importance in Australia, no feeling that great events (except catastrophe) can still occur? Small nations usually have histories to sustain them or futures to enlighten them. Australia seems to have lost both its sense of a past and its sense of a future. In making appeals, in attempting to make policies ‘rational’ there is nothing to appeal to, no sense of purpose; yet people need some sense of definition to which they can relate their actions as an individual needs a sense of identity: a sense of having had a history, of having reached a particular point in it and of facing a certain kind of future. It may be that all this is because Australia sees itself as a dependent nation. It doesn’t develop ideas; it looks overseas for support and recognition; it doesn’t adopt policies because it has only a small area of decision. This is the way it may seem to the older successful men who are baffled about what they are supposed to do next. Among the more active younger people there is a feeling that Australia can resume its history, but in a different direction. They are fascinated by the idea of Asia. This fascination, combined with a greater concern for education and cleverness, could prove the creative, liberating element in Australia – if there is to be one.