history COBBERS AND COBBLERS
Robin Gerster
Richard Nile (ed.)
The Australian Legend and Its Discontents
UQP $19.95pb, 354pp
0 7022 2985 7
Over the past couple of decades, Australian cultural inquiry has enlarged the discipline by querying the conventional elements of the national identity, and by pushing overlooked figures and subjects centre-stage. The Australian Legend and Its Discontents, a collection of more than twenty essays edited by Richard Nile, is the latest investigation of the 'storylines' we (or some of us) prefer when describing ourselves. Its appearance, in this Olympic Year of Living Nationalistically, is timely; its contributors are mostly well known, articulate commentators on the national scene.
The so-called 'Australian Legend' -- the blokey bush myth of the 'typical Australian' historically baptised around the 1890s and academically blessed half a century or so later by Russel Ward -- may be a load of cobblers, but rubbishing it has provided gainful employment for a generation of academic critics. Indeed, it has made careers. Deconstructionists, new historicists, feminists, urban cynics -- we've all lined up to put the boot in. One wonders if there is any point, any more, in propping up this limp, discredited figure only to knock it down again? What was once a subversive reappraisal of Australian nationalism -- its deceptions and delusions, its horrible, hypocritical exclusiveness -- has become a ritual performance rendered meaningless through repetition. This 'revisionism' has been going on for so long now that it makes one think that there may be something to the 'radical' nationalism of The Bulletin crowd and its numerous promoters after all.
It was thus with some trepidation that I opened The Australian Legend and Its Discontents, having noted its back-cover boast that it features the findings, presented in 'clear and concise language', of 'some of Australia's most important public intellectuals', who explore Australia 'from the bush to the backyard barbecue'. (Public intellectual: a popular term of self-praise among contemporary Australian academics, denoting those who bravely venture outside the ivory tower, who 'engage' with the real world in order to explain it to the dumb masses in a language even they can understand.) Richard Nile's introductory attack on the reductiveness of Australian mythmaking offered little encouragement. Blithely ignoring empirical good sense, Nile asks why convicts, miners, bushrangers and soldiers should been seen as having 'greater historical significance' than (from an admittedly long list of marginalised groups) 'German educators' or 'Afghan camel drivers'.
The sense of a straw man materialising before one's eyes was confirmed in the opening chapter, Ann Curthoys' 'Mythologies'. Curthoys' discussion of the 'victimological' element of 'foundational' white settler narrative guides us through the list of forces which have conspired (so the nationalist myth has it) to make life in alien Australia one long trial. These include the hostile land itself, the indigenes, and of course the Yanks and the Poms, in particular the fighting of foreign wars in which Australian male innocence and bravery were cruelly betrayed. The focus on the latter reaches some kind of conclusion through reference to the 'increasing mythologising' of the Second World War POW surgeon Sir Edward Dunlop. Now, the Weary Dunlop legend -- a gross simplification of the man, and tiresomely elaborated over the years -- is genuinely worthy of interrogation because it confounds the masculinist emphasis of Australian war heroism. This was no man-of-action in the conventional martial sense. But all we get from Curthoys is a long quotation from Sir Ninian Stephen's eulogy at Dunlop's state funeral, appropriately celebrating his service in the abject circumstances in the Japanese-run death camps of Thailand. This is followed immediately by Curthoys' 'clinching' concluding comment: 'Thus do white Australians become courageous battlers in the face of enormous odds'. Such contemptibly crass pseudo-analysis would be considered unacceptable in an undergraduate essay.
Fortunately, the discursive nadir of The Australian Legend and Its Discontents comes early. After Curthoys' essay the book picks up almost immediately, beginning with David Carter's measured consideration of multiple, repatriated if renegotiated, Australian identities. As is suggested by the collection's subject matter -- which covers traditions, frontiers, coastlines and cities, wars, feminism, ethnicity and Aboriginality, mainstream ideologies, diverse past and present lives and possible fates and futures -- the notion of diversity provides the intellectual and ethical focus. But Carter's optimistic vision of a creative, pluralistic Australia is not shared by the other contributors, particularly those intent on making mock of easy targets. We need, Carter says, 'to find new ways to make pluralism as popular as populism'. Quite so. Some of the contributors to The Australian Legend and Its Discontents look as if they are speaking to the converted, and to an ageing congregation at that. One example: calling Gough Whitlam -- as Richard Nile does in his essay 'Civilisation' -- 'the politician who woke Australians from their Menzian slumber' may please some of us, but is a slick, smug form of historical shorthand that bespeaks the kind of élitism against which Carter warns. (And so much for Nile's dismissal of reductive mythmaking.)
Nevertheless, and unusually in a collection of essays this big, there are few duds. Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake look like they are going through the motions, but that may be because their essays actually first appeared some time ago, in the Journal of Australian Studies, back copies from which most of the material in the collection is garnered. Almost all the contributors have something interesting to say; a few make you look at familiar material in new ways. I liked Nile's article on Australian writing about the Great War. While I do not share his perception of an Australian military sentiment 'which does not big-note achievement', I admired the creativity and originality of his argument.
To a significant extent, The Australian Legend and Its Discontents is Nile's book. Revealing his breadth of knowledge, he also writes well on the often overlooked urban tradition in Australian cultural representation, as well as on the making of the Henry Lawson legend -- though most contemporary Australian scholarship interested in the gender politics of Lawson's writing still somehow finds it impossible to cope with the complexities of his finest work.
But to me the highlights of the collection are John Rickard's astute sketch of various manifestations of larrikinism and, at the more portentous end of the critical spectrum, John Frow's essay on 'the periodicities of remembrance', 'In the Penal Colony', though it tests the book's boast about its reader friendliness. Not just because the position of Aboriginal peoples vis-à-vis mainstream White Australia is crucial to the cultural critique of The Australian Legend and Its Discontents as it cumulatively develops, Peter Read's 'Stolen Generations', which concludes the book, is also compelling. As David Carter argues, the Australian history that matters most these days, and 'that seems to have most to tell us who we are', is 'the history of the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians'. The most pungent and personal of all the essays, 'Stolen Generations' reminds us that Aboriginal pain and loss are not merely 'academic'.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000