by Anne Summers
The first and the most influential post-Federation commentator on Australian life was WK Hancock whose book Australia was published in 1930. Hancock’s analysis of Australian history pursued three main themes: the taming of the land, the emergence of sectional strife and the development of a nationalism that was democratic and egalitarian. RW Connell has pointed out that ‘the themes developed or crystallized by Hancock have been taken over by his successors with only minor modifications, though with many new illustrations. The result has been a homogeneous tradition of social comment and criticism’.2 He argues that Donald Horne, JD Pringle, Peter Coleman, Max Harris, FW Eggleston, Sol Encel and Craig McGregor, the best known and hence presumably the most influential commentators on Australian life, have generally just elaborated on Hancock’s themes. Yet, as he points out, Hancock’s book was flawed in many respects. It concentrated on rural history when in fact the majority of Australians have always lived in the cities. He insisted that Australian political life was devoid of ideas although, as Connell shows, ideological clashes have been a constant feature of our politics, beginning with religious conflicts in the 19th century and persisting into the 20th century with the battles over conscription and the Vietnam war. Hancock also plied the myth that Australia was an independent nation, again a half-truth in the post-1918 era of distrust of nationalism and the emergence of an international culture.3 A further, and more serious, flaw of Hancock’s work, one which eluded Connell and the Hancockians he selects, was that Hancock used the terms ‘Australian’ and ‘men’ synonymously: the Australia he described was a wholly male universe depicted from a man’s point of view. His basic framework partly precluded any other interpretation; had he examined city life he might have had at least a cursory look at ‘the family’; had he conceded ideology in politics he might have been forced to glance at the emergence of the demand for equal rights for women; had he placed Australia in an international context it may have occurred to him that women in Australia were uniquely tied to home and family when compared with their sisters in other industrialised nations.
It has already been pointed out that most of the more recent commentaries have paid some fleeting attention to ‘the family’, but this has been the full extent of the revision of Hancock’s ignoring of women’s role in the development of the Australian nation; in every other instance they have been content to reproduce those themes, particularly the assertion of egalitarianism, which Hancock first articulated. The egalitarian thesis has been subjected to criticism by recent writers who have pointed out that class and race divisions have always characterised our culture, but what none of these writers has done is to make the same comments about how we have been divided on sex lines.
The standard example used by the commentators to illustrate our supposed egalitarianism – ‘Australians sit beside the taxi driver on the front seat’4 – has become something of a joke among those who reject the accompanying thesis, but what none of these critics has noticed is that the example, and the way it is always written up, applies only to men. Australian women do not as a rule sit in the front of taxis. Certainly middle-class women do not and any woman who does open the front door and sit beside the driver is automatically regarded as declassee, or somehow disreputable and her action thrusts a wedge through any posited female egalitarianism. An example that supposedly proves something about men, proves exactly the opposite about women and therefore should cast doubts on the universal validity of the thesis. The criticisms of this thesis that point out its limitations on class or race lines, but do not recognise its sexist implications, are not making a very radical challenge. They can be seen as merely demanding that the fraternity be opened up, and that more men be included in the definitions of national characteristics. They do not necessarily challenge the values, categories and deep-rooted assumptions based on sex that are part of our national self-portrait.
Most of the standard commentaries on Australian culture have taken up and reiterated the ‘lucky country’ theme, portraying a nation endowed with endless possibilities for national aggrandisement and the acquisition of personal fortune, a land free from bitter sectarian and racial conflict, a homogeneous paradise where sun-loving Australians, beguiled by their belief that they are ‘Godzone’ continually congratulate themselves on their good fortune at having been born in, or migrated to, this best of possible worlds. This vision of Australia has been arrived at by tabulating the vast physical expanses, the revealed mineral wealth and the absence of bloody wars or revolutions, and correlating these with a selective panoramic version of our history: the first country to receive the secret ballot, the eight-hour day and conciliation and arbitration. The resulting vision dovetailed nicely with the themes elaborated by colonial literature and gradually a consensus was arrived at. Even where this did not match the actual experiences of those who read about it, challenging the happy hegemony meant calling into question not merely the integrity of the dream-spinners but also of the generations for whom the vision was some kind of existential prop. The experiences of the first AIF as well as the industrial struggles of the early labour unions were both integrated into the egalitarian myth and eventually became seen as its basis. Therefore to challenge it involved at least questioning, if not actually denying, the seminal experiences of a substantial proportion of the male population of Australia.
It is notable that women have rarely participated in this kind of writing; they have written histories and historical biographies, but no Australian woman this century has dared to participate in the intellectual exercise of trying to formulate theories about Australian life. A likely reason for this is that the dominant themes that, as we have seen, have been reproduced over three generations with little modification are so patently at odds with the life experiences of almost all Australian women. The one woman to even venture into this field, and her work is largely historical, has been Kylie Tennant with her book Australia, a volume that is ironically subtitled Her story.5 A more inappropriate title for a book that concentrates on pastoral, industrial, political and mining development, all processes that have not involved women or have engaged their energies only in a peripheral way, could hardly be imagined. This book devotes even less attention to those areas of social life inhabited by women than do those of Hancock, Horne et al. The book was commissioned by businessmen and this partly explains the focus, but Tennant’s services, rather than those of an academic historian, were engaged because the sponsors of the book wanted a ‘readable’ account. Such a specification could have easily been interpreted to bring in the kind of material that the other works have neglected, but Tennant obviously felt unable to do this.6
Her difficulties would have been manifold: she wrote the first draft in the late Second World War years, a period when even primary source material pertaining to social history was available only to the most intrepid archivist and secondary works were virtually non-existent. Secondly, it would have involved forging another furrow, elaborating a ‘new’ interpretation of our past and present at a time when Hancock’s vision went completely unchallenged. The feminist movement, to the extent that it was able to exist at all in those years of self-protective solidarity, still confined its energies to campaigning for tangible, legally enforceable ‘rights’ and to recording the achievements of visibly successful women, women whose accomplishments were recognisable to a society that valued political, economic or altruistic achievements. The movement did not feel it necessary to question these successes, nor to relate them to the life chances of the majority of women. It did not attempt to identify as oppressive those sexist values that social theorists projected as national characteristics. The devastating effects of this sexist culture on the female psyche had not then been recognised. So there was little inducement for Tennant to write any other kind of book. In the postwar period, the only commentaries on Australian mores written by women have come from visitors from other countries.7
As the previous chapter argued, women writers of fiction have had to work in a re
alm that was outside the mainstream of the development of Australian literature, but at least they have, even if at enormous personal cost, still continued to write. The complete absence of women commentators on Australian culture requires further explanation, one that is necessarily related to the exclusion of women from those areas of national life that preoccupy the male theorists. This exclusion has explicitly denied the contributions that women have made by declaring these unworthy of celebration or recording, or has assumed that the female role in national life has been an unchanging constant that need not be singled out for examination at any particular period.
Women have often been excluded, not merely from the books, but from celebratory events. A banquet held in 1914 to celebrate the simultaneous reaching of a railway, a water-pumping scheme and a post office to Loxton, South Australia, was apparently a riotous, Bacchanalian affair, but one that, as the Murray Pioneer of 20 February pointed out, was ‘for men only’: ‘A storm in a teacup over the exclusion of women from public and semi-public jollifications raged for several weeks. Some were moved to institute reforms. But seven Institute Committee men voted, instead, to remove the Pioneer from the Reading Room of the Institute’.8 When it was realised that the sesquicentenary celebrations planned for New South Wales in 1938 did not include tribute to the efforts of the pioneer women, women’s organisations made urgent representations to the organisers and, only after much astute politicking, succeeded in obtaining some official recognition for their planned celebrations. But even these were token recognitions and women in three states were moved to compensate for this official black-balling at their centenary or sesquicentenary celebrations by publishing their own tributes.9 When the National Library of Australia was established, feminist groups that had made representations on the subject were promised that a special women’s collection, housed separately, would be established.10 It has yet to materialise, and the researcher of women’s history in Australia has to work through an inadequately indexed general catalogue in the hope of finding material germane to the subject. There is a general assumption that, before the recent upsurge of interest in women’s issues, there had been ‘nothing written about women in Australia’ and yet in 1973, when I compiled a general bibliography on this subject, I had no difficulty in amassing a collection, still very incomplete and dealing only with printed works from 1900 onwards, of 523 items.11 Much material is there and the women whose lives it deals with have had existences as various and as difficult to categorise as men’s. But to be able to utilise it, to thread it into coherent and illuminating patterns, will require challenging the assumptions and frameworks so far employed by the definers of this level of our culture.
It will mean completely scrapping Hancock’s thesis on rural, non-ideological and nationalistic themes, and the assumptions of fraternal egalitarianism that they shored up, and developing a concern with family life and social and sexual mores. Already the egalitarian view of our past has received a heavy challenge from the work of people like Humphrey McQueen, and historians of the destruction of Aboriginal society such as CD Rowley, Peter Biskup and Lorna Lippmann.12 But opening up the subject area with respect to Aborigines has not necessarily included a simultaneous recognition that a society dominated by narrowly circumscribed views on individual and group achievements has had other victims as well. It is no longer enough to note the absence of Aborigines or women or any other cultural minority (such as homosexuals) from our official history. We have also to ask what functions their exclusion served, both economically and ideologically, for the dominant hegemony, and whether or not these functions persist.
These questions are not asked by two recent works that give the superficial appearance of challenging the Hancock-Horne vision. Ronald Conway’s work, an attempted psycho-history of Australian culture, does move right away from the old framework and does concentrate on those areas, such as ‘the family’ and sexual relationships, which necessitate taking cognisance of the activities of women. He writes with some sympathy of the wasted and ravaged lives of so many Australian women, but his solutions lie in a reassertion of the traditional nurturing role and in trying to impose upon this a more egalitarian relationship between men and women. He fails to recognise that what he poses as a solution is in fact the problem for many women, and that his twin-headed panacea is, for many, a contradiction. The traditional mother/wife role has been structured around an unequal social and economic relationship between men and women, with the ‘separate but equal’ ideology cloaking a multitude of legally sanctioned and de facto inequalities. As will be outlined later, it is the very dissatisfaction and confusion engendered among women by the structural changes in their roles that is causing so many problems; they will not be solved by resort to a 19th-century patriarchal fantasy.
Ian Moffitt’s book, The U-Jack Society13, is an experiential account of one man’s Australia, but it also has a savage lash at the old ‘She’ll be right mate’ attitude and argues that our hapless drift has not brought about the benign Utopia painted by the myths. His book challenges the ‘lucky country’ thesis by insisting that we have to grasp the future and forge it for ourselves, for it will not magically unfold before our wondering eyes, but it does not go any way towards beginning the kind of reinterpretation that was posited above.
Conway and Moffitt are in a sense the new guard in the process of defining our culture, but they remain within the old tradition of articulating their themes in book form. They were preceded over a decade ago by a group that defined themselves as rebels for they attacked not only the ingredients of the vision but also the form in which it was propagated. Oz magazine burst onto the Australian publishing scene in 1963 with a satirical iconoclasm that speedily brought about a reaction in the form of an obscenity suit and condemnation by all kinds of social and political leaders. But the radicalism of Oz remained circumscribed; it was a men-only affair, edited by a triumvirate of talented men who have all become successful in publishing or artistic ventures since, and their satire and comment fitted fairly easily into the Australian tradition of ‘knocking’. In ‘An Australian Catechism’, which appeared in a 1964 issue, the Oz credo was by implication outlined:
In Australia one may not read about, write about or think about sex. In fact, one may only practise it in so far as it is necessary to keep the population figures respectable. One should not mention urination, criticize Royalty or the R.S.L. or god, or do anything that might conceivably cause the least embarrassment to any single person. Soldiers have died for such freedom. May their souls rest in peace.14
It was a late-adolescent oedipal revolt, an assertion by a new generation of impatient young men that they were no longer content to subscribe to the view of the world defined by their fathers, that they had a few ideas on previously taboo topics, which they were going to air and to hell with you oldies. Oz crystallised and for a while was the vehicle for a revised version of the national self-portrait. It cut through humbug and hypocrisy, voiced moderately radical postures on domestic and foreign policy and challenged, with its cartoons especially, the rampant puritanism of Australia in the mid-1960s. It devoted a lot of attention to the boorish and rapacious behaviour of drunken Australian men, particularly that of their generational contemporaries, but its attitude was only mildly critical; it contained a good lashing of indulgent tolerance:
… there were a few king birds there but they were holding hands with these fairies – So DENNIS belted them and we all got onto the birds and Frank got one of them so pissed that she passed out so we all dragged her out to the garage and went through her like a packet of salts – KING! Then the old lady of the bird who was having the turn said she’d ring the Johns so Sid chucked all over her and she got hysterical so Dennis BELTED her and then Phil did this king hambone on the kitchen table and ran round the house in the raw ripping the gear off all the birds – God he’s KING! …15
The attack on sexual puritanism contained no explicit repudiation of the old Australian denial of female sexuality and t
he concomitant middle-class view that women outside one’s own acquaintance could be employed in whatever fashion was necessary to satiate male lust.
Women have rarely been engaged, except as girlfriends, wives or the operators of typewriters, mimeograph machines and tea urns, in any of the radical/underground activities of the past decade. The little magazines and newspapers and the later anti-Vietnam and anti-conscription campaigns were organised and their ambit defined by men, and women had either to participate in accordance with terms already laid down, or to join other male-organised oppositional factions. It was not until women began to form their own groups, and the beginning of women’s liberation in Sydney in late 1969 and in Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra in 1970, that any real challenge to the old hegemony began to be articulated. A women’s liberation newspaper, Mejane, was begun in 1971 and is still publishing [in 1975], a remarkable feat for a publication that enjoys neither paid advertising nor government grant. Yet its accomplishments – both in staying alive and in the kind of world-view it is trying to expound – get little recognition outside the movement. A recent survey of the underground press conducted by a national newspaper spent an inordinate amount of space on commercial newspapers devoted to surfing or rock music, both avenues that ensure advertising revenue, and barely mentioned Mejane.16