history HOME-MADE CITIZENSHIP
Russell McGregor
John Murphy
Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia
UNSWPress/Pluto Press $30.00pb, 264pp
0 86840 690 2
In popular and political culture today, the fifties are invoked persistently and contradictorily, as an idyllic decade of security, comfort and prosperity, and as stuffy years of conformism, insularity and intolerance. Murphy disrupts such simplicities, revealing a decade more turbulent, fractured and tense than either the nostalgic or the contemptuous representation allow. Particularly in its first half, the fifties were marked by economic instability and Cold War crises, both of which were interpreted by adult Australians, reasonably enough, in terms of their own experiences in the thirties and forties, as portents of disastrous depression and devastating war. Add to these the spectre of communism, the uncertainties of consumerism, the anxieties of modernity, and we have a decade that was neither rosily secure nor smugly complacent. At times, Murphy exaggerates the extent to which the discords of the fifties have been forgotten. But his achievement lies not so much in merely retrieving these disruptions and anxieties, as in integrating them into an analysis of the domestically-orientated citizenship that came to the fore in fifties' Australia. Domesticity was more than a mere knee-jerk reflex, a simple retreat from a hostile and uncertain world into the warm security of home. Through their domestic lives, middle-class Australians affirmed their commitment to the values of self-reliance, self-discipline and responsibility, thereby affirming their membership of a national community bound together by shared adherence to those values. In their domestic lives they sought self-realisation, self-expression and identity. Far from being merely a continuation of 'traditional family values', fifties' domesticity expressed a distinctively modernist concern with the self, its fulfilment and containment. At its most grand -- or grandiose -- domestically-centred citizenship was upheld as a resolution to the perennial liberal dilemma of how to reconcile individuality with sociality, the responsibilities of family and home fostering personal autonomy while simultaneously reining in the excesses of unfettered individualism.
Sometimes ambivalently, at other times forthrightly, these ideas were expressed in the popular magazines, newspapers, opinion polls and political commentaries from which Murphy extracts his raw material. His own exposition combines subtlety with lucidity, occasionally slipping into the pitfalls of repetition and verbosity, never into the morass of obscurity. Nor does he stoop to the tone of disdain or the heavy-handed moralising that mars too many contemporary scholarly critiques. This is emphatically not to suggest that Murphy neglects the moral dimensions of his material; merely to indicate that moral issues are handled with sensitivity and without assuming the moral superiority of either the present or the author.
Take, for example, his chapter on Aboriginal assimilation. Murphy displays an acute appreciation of the ambivalences and contradictions of assimilation, the disjunctions between its promise of equal citizenship and its premise of loss of identity. Indigenous Australians were expected to perform the same act of forgetting as settler Australians had so successfully accomplished, expunging the memory of dispossession, marginalisation and subordination. They were expected not only to forget the past but also to forego the future, their own children taken from them for the sake of the 'better opportunities' that lay beyond the Aboriginal domain. That child theft could continue at the same time as family life and domesticity were fulsomely celebrated suggests the limitations of middle-class moralising on the family. Precisely because the family was imagined as the site of sturdy self-reliance, those families who failed to measure up encountered the hard edge of rejection and the still harder edge of enforced reformation. The practice of child theft, Murphy remarks, 'could mix the contraries of cruelty, ignorance and generosity of intent. Consequently, assimilation could show the political culture at its most civil and repressive, its most cruel and its most open-hearted.' Murphy crafts a close contextual study of the fifties, explicating its achievements, anxieties and inadequacies in terms of prevailing cultural and political preoccupations. He fails, however, to provide a broader historical context for the discourses he examines.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000