MY AUSTRALIA … A PERSONAL VIEW
By Ruth Pihl*
Chapter 1. Reflexions
“Australia” as a topic is far too broad for people like myself, isn’t it? It’s probably far too broad for any Australians, other than those on commercial radio who know about everything. Despite this, or perhaps because of the great Australian cringe about being an expert in anything, it’s easy to begin immediately to apologize for your shortcomings. Therefore I would like to begin by not apologizing for anything, but warning you that this is a personal view. One view of a possible l8 million others.
About a decade ago we all watched a television program called “Australia – You’re Standing in it” and when you’re standing in it, your view is far from objective. It’s coloured by the landscape, your family, race, class, sex, education, political or religious views. It’s a view from the inside – and inside the body we find not only the heart but the guts, the part of us that digests some things and spits out others.
My view of Australia is a pea-soup, a patchwork quilt, a fruit-salad of the things I learned at school – the flag, the empire, the sacrifice of the men who crossed the Blue Mountains, my grandfather humping his bluey during the depression, my father going to war, my mother playing the organ in church and, after the death of my father, a family of small kids struggling to survive on a Widow’s Pension in the cold comfort of "Menzies' fifties".
Far from an idealized picture of blokes in the bush, my childhood view of Australia is that of the suburbs of Melbourne, a working-class protestant Irish immigrant background. It’s the view of moving from migrant camp to concrete Housing Commission house. Of leaving school at l4 to become a typist, a good occupation for uneducated girls, prior to moving to regional Victoria to marry and raise a family. Later, when a Labor Government made higher education freely available to the likes of me, to gain a degree, see something of the world, explore politics and academia, embrace feminism – and finally to seek to master the greatest of all mysteries – the five string banjo.
Growing up, I loved to read, though not necessarily in this order, CJ Dennis, Henry Lawson, Enid Blyton, Miles Franklin, H.G. Wells, Frank Hardy, and I loved Ethel Turner’s ‘Seven Little Australians.’ There was no bush in the suburb I grew up in but the romance of the bush, minus its indigenous residents who didn’t seem to rate more than a passing mention, seemed to be just about everywhere in the domestic literature, books, school papers and readers of the l950’s. Alongside this was an uncritical view of the British Empire, complete with country lanes, rose gardens, toffee-nosed royals, spiteful schoolgirls in boarding schools and the derring-do of Boys Own Annual fiction. A strange mixture for a country far away from it’s English ‘home’ and, for most Australians, not even living within coo-ee of the bush.
Every Christmas, I would pore over the latest edition of the Girls Crystal, wondering occasionally why it didn’t ring particularly true. I can remember feeling occasional twinges of wonder, almost of nostalgia, that this English publication was reflecting a world somewhere else going on without me. This being the case, what was wrong with the one I was living in?
History at school was a boringly tedious litany of the deeds of great and not so great males, explorers, politicians, those who brought sheep to Australia and the men who sailed off to support the Empire. Convicts were either lower-class poor wretches transported for stealing the proverbial loaf of bread to feed starving children, or heinous criminals no longer worthy of citizenship in mother England. The expanding empire was plastered in red all over the world map, and pointed to with a great sense of pride. Australia, like the big blob called Russia up North, was red and I never imagined it as desert with a green fringe around the outside where most people lived.
I don’t remember hearing about women’s struggles, apart from Lawson’s Drover’s Wife, or of the plight of women convicts, or prostitution, or death by starvation, venereal disease or the numerous fatalities caused by poverty in a harsh, unyielding country.
And now, the bush is the part of Australia I’m standing in. It had to happen, didn’t it?
So, along with everyone here, I’m standing in an Australia that is a mixture of great and wonderful myths, some of which are based on truth, but most of which have been filtered through the flour-sifter of domestic life, full of ambiguities, compromises and “necessary lies” (the stuff of folklore) and an adjective that draws an analogy of the material that emanates from the rear end of bovines.
Because of this, it’s important to lay a groundwork in something approximating an objective truth – the facts and figures that became the tracks for historians to build roads over. Like most countries, Australia is shaped and moulded by it’s past. It’s not a very ancient past if you only take the white settlement part of it, but it is unique and interesting. It’s also a past of tyranny and struggle of the rag-tag and riff-raff, the dregs of an over-populated, unrefined petty criminal class of English and Irish society, with the objective dumping its human refuse far enough away to lessen the likelihood of return. A demoralized, degenerate ancestor bullying and bashing, in turn, an even more demoralized aboriginal.
Australia, my country, the land that evokes both love and shame, joy and frustration and a patriotism that can turn into unfettered jingoism. An Australia of warmth and charity and open-heartedness on the one hand and a deep mean-spirited racism and ignorance on the other. A country that can swing wildly from generosity and tolerance to savagery and indifference. A country of the ‘fair-go’ and ‘mateship’ of our PM’s abortive preamble and yet remains divided when we come to decide just who our mates are. A country where female breasts are used to sell cars, adorn calendars, titillate lunchtime diners on tabletops but yet are mysteriously banned from view when used to feed infants.
Not being one of the above, I can only give a personal view, backed up by a few facts and figures. These alone are probably above dispute. The rest is open for comment and dispute
Growing up in the sixties I saw women excluded from drinking in bars, earning a little over half the male wage, a few intrepid souls attempting to break through the men-only stranglehold of the Public Service and the rush of migrant women pouring out of the Sennits ice cream factory at evening. Alongside all of this was the emerging involvement of Australia in America’s abortive Vietnam war and the horror of watching naked Vietnamese children streaming down the road, their bodies punctured by napalm. I felt the loss of a dear friend, one of the early conscripts to die over there and later the loss of my brother-in-law, a Vietnam vet who could not live with his memories and shot himself dead.
Perhaps I was too serious as a young woman and did not, as Barry Humpries outlined in his wonderful Flashback series, gain the poise much valued by mothers of young ladies growing up in this period in order to prepare them for the, however unlikely, possibility of being presented to the Queen. Like many other young Australians at that time I began to wonder just what it meant to be an Australian.
Chapter 2. The Other Sex
Most important, I learned that as an Australian woman, a sheila, I belonged to ‘the other sex’, the less important one, the women’s auxiliary of life clustering on festive occasions with others of my sex in corners or in the kitchen talking about boyfriends and babies. The ‘real’ or important conversation (or was it – I wonder now?) took place in rowdy packs called ‘mates’ who, beer glasses in hand, contemptuously ignored their womenfolk and never dreamt of including them in their conversation. After a nodding introduction, the sexes parted ways and the rules of Australian society demanded that never the twain should meet. At least not until the car honk reminded her that they were going home.
Historians tell us that this type of male bonding, some unkindly call ‘latent homosexuality.’ began early and was influenced by the particularly masculine landscape of Australia, a country where women were almost invisible. Russell Ward, writing about the l840’s, says that …
“… the basic elements of that outlook which later came to be thought of as ‘typically Australian’; a comradely independence based on group solidarity and relative economic plenty, a rough and ready capacity for ‘stringy bark and green-hide’ improvisation, a light-hearted intolerance of respectable or conventional manners, a reckless improvidence, and a conviction that the working bushman was the ‘true Australian’ whose privilege it was to despise ‘new chums’ and city folk. We have seen that this ethos sprang mainly from convict working class, Irish and native-born Australian sources.”
Most of us might nod our heads and say, ‘yes that’s the Australia that’s romantically recalled in school readers and school papers, the Bulletin, the bush poets and their verse and more recently, our PM’s failed Preamble to a potential new Constitution. But it’s about blokes and not sheilas. It’s not about us, it’s about them. I get quite irritated at the blokey emphasis in Australian history, though I suspect that, nobody cares whether I do or not. History belongs to the dominant, the conquerors, those with a legitimate right to be heard.
Miriam Dixson, in her book The Real Matildas (page 57) tells us that …
“Our ancestors stalk us as we walk through the days, invisible and relentless ghosts whose power may be exorcised only when we start to recognize it: the past lives on in the present. So my work is ‘past-into-present’ history. Unhappily the concept of woman has to be virtually uncovered, disinterred, inferred, teased out, from the received versions of our national identity."
Despite their differences, those versions of our history share a crippling central characteristic: almost without exception, they are written by males about males, yet claim to tell us about national characteristics. In l96l, for example, Charles S. Blackton wrote an article entitled ‘Australian Nationality and Nationalism, l850-l900. To this day, no one has pointed out, in reference to his article, that women are part of our nation. In l969, during a fifteen page article ‘Australian Historians in Quest of a Theme’, Geoffrey Bolton devoted six lines (on page l9) to women.’
Chapter 3. An Uninspiring Beginning
Where did it all start? People who know more about this than I do will say it began with the First Fleet and the landing at Sydney Cove. What do we know about it?
On the 26th January, l788, l9l female convicts arrived on the Lady Penrhyn, the Friendship, the Charlotte and the Prince of Wales. Twenty eight women were not convicts and there were 21 children. The convict women were aged from l3 to 82 years, more were in their twenties.
The total number of convicts sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, according to Robson’s survey, were l22,620 males and 24,960 females, that is l5 per cent were women (and half went to Van Diemen’s land). The l8l2 British Select Committee on Transportation said that while the most serious male offenders were chosen for transportation, ‘it has been customary to send, without any exception, all (females) whose state of health will admit of it, and whose age does not exceed 45 years.
Thus began what Manning Clark called “a broken, cold and unnatural form of society,” its beginnings bound down in the pragmatic displacement of a surplus people, a disproportionate number of poor Irish. Men outnumbered women by almost 4 to l and convict women, according to many sources, were perceived to be worse than men in their demeanour and behaviour. Whether or not this is so, convict women, our founding mothers, had a deeply crippled sense of self.
What about women in general? Miriam Dixson reminds us that (p.122) ..
“…even adding free landed women of substance such as Elizabeth Macarthur, Ann Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb, there is no tenable case for suggesting that either convict women or free women were regarded as anything other than of trivial economic importance during formative decades in eastern Australia. Women in our formative times then, to an extreme and ususual extent, clustered into low status, demeaning occupations. Of about l90 jobs advertised in the Sydney Gazette in l8l0, only 7 were for women. Further, it’s pretty clear that the English elite thought of convict women – to the extent that they did think about them – mainly as a kind of sexual servicing outcast group."
Lacking an early, enlightened middle class, Australian women were polarized at either end of a spectrum of wealthy landowners on the one side and an enormous clustering of destitute landless on the other. Along with this vast disparity of means comes the moral description Ann Summers uses as a title to her book Dammed Whores and God’s Police. A country populated by finger-pointing, tut-tutting Mrs. Grundys to a rabble of Jezebels who almost defied description. Maybe these descriptions are still apt, but that’s another story.
Ours was not a country settled by those seeking relief from religious persecution or for a utopian dream of earthly bliss. On the other hand, for our first half century imprisonment was the colonies’ main industry. And this, it is believed, still influences the people we are today. No proud beginning of humanitarian enlightenment to native peoples. No democratic idealism here. This was not a ‘New World’ of the type immortalized in Dvorak’s famous symphony dedicated to America.
Chapter 4. Moving on … Women Count at Last
Well, you need to raise your head out of the gloom and doom of ‘the dark ages’ of Australia’s early settlement to ponder awhile what has happened since. The next chapter tells us that women won the vote early but weren’t able to capitalise on it until about four decades later when the first ladies ventures in the male bastions of Parliament.
It’s a tribute to the tenacity and vision of our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and their ilk that progress was made, and we need to take off our bonnets and salute them ….
Here’s a short summary of their achievements …
Women voted in Australia in l901 after Federation.
Of course it’s a mistake to read progress merely in terms of ladies in parliament. The opening up of a wider and wider range of options for women, as indeed for men, has seen Australia go ahead in leaps and bounds.
We have rallied to the call of the British Empire in three wars, sunk deeper into economic depression in the late twenties and early thirties, repaying debt in order to alleviate ‘British suffering.'
We have a cruel and heartless history of the removal of aboriginal people from their land, and maintain today little empathy with the struggles of a dispossessed and unhappy people.
We have treated our aboriginal people shamefully by removing their children in the name of misguided charity and more purposefully in order to breed out the so-called ‘half-caste.’ We never considered the effects of the destruction of an ancient culture and its by-product, the training of imprisoned children in so-called Christian establishments called missions, was meant to take them little further than domestic service and labouring. Small wonder they are asking our political leaders to say sorry, albeit a generation or so down the track.
We have seen both sides of politics cling to a White Australia Policy in a two-pronged attempt to protect white Australians’ jobs and to ensure a homogenous community of similar color and habits. This policy was finally extinguished in the l960's, when we embraced, for humanitarian reasons as well as for mercenery commercial considerations, the principles of multi-culturalism. To date this has served us well and, despite for some bigotry and self-seeking rascism (hence the emergence and ultimate demise of the One Nation party) we continue to mostly view our racial mix as a worthwhile one in building diversity into Australia's culture.
We have been ambivalent in our relationships with ‘true and powerful friends’, seeking security and defence in a land of changing political systems and power blocs. We have seen small, tentative steps taken in recent decades to join with the peoples of Asia, as the British fleet sails off into ancient history. Despite what may be our best intentions, this has often been met by indifference or downright hostility by the countries to our North, unhappy at what seems to be our harping European morality towards their lack of democracy and racial and religious intolerance, while we continue to treat our own indigenous people as lepers.
There have been times when Australia’s GDP has led the world, when other countries have clambered for our primary products and mineral wealth. And happiness has been measured in terms of money in the bank. Women, in boom times, have been happily enthroned as “Queen of the Home” and the Woman’s Weekly churns out copies advising us how to bake the lightest scone and keep our hubbies happy.
And we’re still wondering just who we are.
Chapter 5. The Coastal Dwellers
There’s something quite odd about sitting at a computer out in the country, not another house within coo-ee and the view outside one of dappled sunlight through a mixture of gums and exotic trees. A garden that, like me, can’t quite make up it’s mind where it’s going and has a toe-hold, or its roots in two worlds.
I’m not ambivalent about one thing – my love of the countryside.I love it with a passion and can’t contemplate living anywhere else. But I’m aware that this passion is not shared by the majority of my country-women, the type that are not country women. The clanking chains of convict women (yes, many were chained) do not echo in the flats of Toorak or the suburbs of Mt. Waverley. The struggle of the Drover’s Wife to protect her children from a dangerous snake may not be the reading matter of this generation’s children, clustered around television sets, and Dorothea McKellar’s love of a Sunburnt Country may be little more than the stuff of voice-overs in packaged travel shows.
And the sophisticated urban miss probably couldn’t contemplate the friendship and camaraderie of rural women like yourselves, (Members of the Hamilton Branch of the Country Womens Association) coming together to share experiences, talents, a lovely meal, simple joys and the desperate tragedies of working together in times of flood, bushfire or other disaster.
Australia is changing. Let’s look at some figures, taken from the l996 census ….…
Chapter 6. Lost And Seeking Directions
In the Bicentennial edition of the Bulletin, January l988, Manning Clark states … "we now say with Henry Lawson that we are Australians, that we know no other country. But, if anyone asks us who we are and what we want to be, we lapse into the great Australian silence. We inherit from the past no professions of faith. No one has written an Australian Declaration of Independence. No one has drawn up for us a list of self-evident truths – that among these are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have had no Boston tea party. As Friedrich Engels pointed out, the Australian has built a bush hut: there is no sign that he will start a Paris commune. We have been prepared to lay down our lives for foreign causes, to spill our blood on foreign fields. But so far we have displayed a vast indifference to any proposal that human blood should manure the soil of Australia for the sake of some future harmony. We are all inheritors of the Australian Dream and that has at least two manifestations. One is that in Australia blood will never stain the wattle. The absence of civil wars and revolutions has been one of our boasts. That was relatively easy so long as there was one dominant group in Australia, so long as violence against the Aborigines did not count. Now the Anglo-Celts and the Europeans recognize or almost recognize that there are at least two cultures in Australia – the Aboriginal and the Australian."
Thirteen years on, Manning Clark is dead. Perhaps it’s just as well for I wonder what he would make of our government’s ‘dead in the water’ Reconciliation Program and mean-spirited approach to the decimation (on their own figures l in l0) in the removal from their families of it’s aboriginal children. We have seen in what I hope has not been a long and boring monologue that Australia is a huge country made up of many fragments and viewpoints, including the lives of its ancient people losing out to the invaders from Europe.
We have looked at an emerging masculine society that, from it’s convict beginnings, did not, and some may say continues to downplay and devalue the contribution of its women, a country uncertain about what it believes in and where it’s going. A country tied by tradition and habit to the British Empire on the one hand and struggling, with its multi-racial, multi-cultural population, to create its own separate identity on the other. A country uncertain whether to embrace its Asian geographic status or maintain emotional ties to Europe.
In the final analysis, Australian identity and future may well be something that we have little say in but is taken from us not by wars or invasion or nuclear holocaust, but by the overwhelming waves of globalisation – the final colonisation of the undeveloped by the unprincipled. As e-mail, internet, satellite television and hourly international newscasts narrows and shrinks the world, we may well become little more than another stopping off place for the jets of foreign money markets, venture capitalisation, mining magnates, international tourism or, in the worst scenario, the world’s nuclear waste rubbish dump.
This is a world I feel far too tired to contemplate on a sunny Thursday afternoon and hope, like Manning Clark, I might seek refuge planted in our fine volcanic soil before this final chapter is played out.
© RUTH PIHL, 6TH April, 2000
General References:
Cathcart, M., Manning Clark’s History of Australia, Melbourne University Press, 1993.
Coupe, S., Andrews, M, Was It Only Yesterday, Longman,1983.
Dixson, Miriam, The Real Matilda, Scribe, 1978.
Gurry, Tim, Focus on Autralian History; An Emerging Identity, Heineman, 1981.
Horne, Donald, The Lucky Country Revisited, Dent, 1987.
Lowenstein, Wendy, Weevils in the Flour, Scribe, 1971.
Page, M, Ingpen, R., Turning Points in the Making of Australia, Rigby, 1980.
Summers,Anne, Damned Whores & God’s Police, (quoted from the author’s memory)
The Bulletin, Australia Day Edition, 26/1/1988
* This invited talk was given to the Country Women's Association, in Hamilton, 7/4/00. It was serialized at Mt. Rouse & District Historical Society's website in April-May 2000, and archived 28/5/00.
Sunday, 04 June 2000
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