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'How Australian Is It?'
Ihab Hassan
For Don Anderson, Gay Bilson, Bernard Smith
THE QUESTION IS PROBABLY ALL WRONG.
* * * *
The bush first, the bush again, because I find it easier to access, though I claim no kinship to Leichhardt, Burke, or Wills. The bush oppresses, or simply presses on, much nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian writing, and lowers in foreign works like Lawrence's Kangaroo. Surprisingly, I have said, it persists in more recent fiction, re-imagined through earlier imaginings, through Voss, A Fringe of Leaves and The Twyborn Affair, down to media kitsch, down to Crocodile Dundee.
* * * *
And Aborigines? That is a topic I can neither evade nor satisfy, a knot of violence no foreigner can hope to cut, let alone untangle. (Piety here will not serve: like all moralising, it is but the shadow of virtue, unearned rectitude.) Still, I took heart from Patrick White's deep tact in portraying Aborigines. And I learned from Bernard Smith's The Spectre of Truganini, his 1980 Boyer Lectures, that veracity demands nuance. Smith's premise is that a culture needs to 'put down firm ethical roots in the place from which it grows'. A culture cannot live off the universals of another, though it may challenge or modify them. Hence Smith's 'Antipodean Manifesto', which avoids essentials -- how Australian is this or that -- in favour of dialogical, historical arguments, subject to the ambiguities, more, the outright paradoxes, of history.
* * * *
So how Australian can anything remain in this geopolitical climate? I have ventured: the bush and its Aborigines, setting aside Australian English, a daunting topic, crying for sustained treatment by a native Australian -- if you doubt me, browse Les Murray's Fredy Neptune or The Penguin Book of Australian Slang. Yet even bush and Aborigine may be more distinctive on a literal than on a subliminal level, there where symbols hum and meanings buzz, and change brushes by like a bat in flight. Put otherwise, all life is translation, as the poet James Merrill said, and we are all lost in it. Lost and metamorphosed, I think. But that still leaves the titular question unanswered, precisely because in subliminal Australia values shift, languages slide -- the pundits of theory call it 'semiosis unending'.
* * * *
I know: I keep asking the question only to duck it. Is there any other way? Perhaps it's what the query itself demands. At least, that is what contemporary Australian writers -- the best of them, the most inward with their culture and craft -- seem to do. Of course, it would be tempting to isolate tropes and strains in classic Australian writing, recalling Manning Clark's `Tradition in Australian Literature' (1949). But I prefer to let contemporary artists speak. They rework their own tradition and in so doing answer, as much as it needs answer, the pesky question. But they will not speak with one voice.
* * * *
How can an American -- well, an Egyptian-born American, if hyphenate we must -- pronounce on Australia? I came to the Antipodes late in life, drawn to the Pacific, that great wink of eternity, Melville called it, drawn to horizons more than to origins. I made friends and became in Australia a wintry celebrant.
That's personal. Geopolitically -- and I believe the political is also personal -- questions of national identity threaten to consume us in their rings of fire. Imaginary communities? In each, the instinct to belong is primal, like earth, like water or fire. The mass soul, Elias Canetti said, 'foams like a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal.' Kin, clan, co-operative behaviour, E.O. Wilson would concur, are governed by 'epigenetic rules'.
Still, I resist the atavism of identity politics, the dark lure of the cave. Am I, then, the one to ask: 'How Australian is it?' Perhaps the question can be goaded with reflection into a wider light. Les Murray, writing nearly a quarter of a century ago about reservations, preserves, ghettoes, all those enclaves of exclusion we know about, declared: 'What I am after is spiritual change that would make them unnecessary.' It is also what I'm after, in this brief and blatantly selective essay: distant convergences, broader sight.
But slowly now. Australia does have a distinctive locus and history, to which myth clings. The sense of place, coast or outback, seems ineluctable, even in a modern novel like Christina Stead's For Love Alone, set mostly abroad. In a prologue titled 'Sea People', Stead acknowledges the 'inversions' of the Antipodes, then makes the case for 'the many thousand miles of seaboard' her ancestors hug, shrinking from the interior, a 'Sahara, the salt-crusted bed of a prehistoric sea'. And so, people of that 'sea-world, a great Ithaca', are always asked abroad, 'Men of what nation put you down -- for I am sure you did not get here on foot?'
For Love Alone appeared in 1945; the year augured the postwar era. Yet mythic Australia -- true always in its ghostly, affective way -- continues to haunt writers, even those who try to exorcise it with postmodern ironies. Classics like Henry Lawson's 'The Drover's Wife' still seem unappeased, echoing in Russell Drysdale's painting and Murray Bail's story, both by that name. (More of them later.) And Lawson's flawed, little masterpiece, 'The Bush Undertaker', can't leave myth alone. Its closing sentence, compulsively superfluous, reads: 'And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush -- the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird'. Did it need to be said after what we had read?
Perhaps it did. Inga Clendinnen takes up this story again in her Boyer Lectures for 1999, True Stories. Its grisliness and parsimony, she feels, make Sam Beckett seem 'anodyne'. Really, anodyne? (Even in refined minds, it seems, cultural identity can assume superiority, not simply difference.) No matter. Myth lives on like an amputated limb, an imaginary wound. Nibbling baklava or sipping latte, nowadays, we suddenly experience the ache, or think we should experience it, till something else makes sense of our lives.
In America, driving SUVs to the supermarket, we pretend that four things shaped our history: Puritanism, Slavery, 'Indians' (genocide, that is ) and the West. (Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Bill Gates came too late.) And in Australia? The Bush, Aborigines, Transportation, Gallipoli? How many New Australians would agree? No accidental tourist, an amateur (loving) visitor rather, I whisper to myself: the Bush and its Aborigines, yes, and Australian English too. But I would not dare say this out loud, only in print.
A few instances. In Thomas Keneally's Bring Larks and Heroes, Australia is still that 'obdurate land', that 'grotesque land', 'evil' to its afflicted settlers 'because it was weird'. In that desolation, people unite 'to ward off oblivion'. (American Puritans spoke in the same accents two centuries earlier.) Thus the bush, no less than colonialism or the carceral system, disfigures both victim and victimiser -- all the way back `home' to England or Ireland. It is as if the wildness of it all could creep westward across the Indian Ocean to taint Europe, as it crept eastward across the North Atlantic even after 1776.
In David Malouf's The Conversations at Curlow Creek, however, the land appears as 'an infinity of cold and light'; it raises 'the ceiling of the world by pushing up the very roof of your skull'; it demands legend -- Adair becomes O'Dare -- and delivers marvels to bored or brutalised minds. Ever on the prowl for the imaginary, Malouf also sees the bush as a kind of excess, abandon, vertigo, like opera, reaching for that impossibly high angelic or demonic note, an excess that civilisation must repress, that colonialism must choke. This much Captain Adair understands about himself, and about his operatic parents still alive within him. But opera gives joyous form to the irrational -- back to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy -- as colonialism never can. And so the bush remains formless, the true secret and irrepressible domain of our condition, just like that wild patch of land, somewhere in Brisbane, which bulldozers threaten to turn into a shopping mall in Malouf's recent story, 'Jacko's Reach'.
My point is that the bush is Australian, indeed, but that it alters with the times. It mutates in the artistic twilight zone. It can become an aspect of myth, opera, sexuality, colonialism, the uncanny, or the human condition. How Australian is that?
In that paradoxical sense, may not Bennelong, or any 'Jacky Jacky' for that matter, remind us, painfully, parodically, that hybridity is our destiny? Does not a native 'clown' mime the desperation of living in multiple, divided worlds? The question is prickly, not because it hints political incorrectness but because suffering in Aboriginal mimicry overwhelms laughter. Yet mimicry, in the conflict and evolution of cultures, may point a way beyond assimilation, through and beyond pain. Mimicry assumes a certain empathy; empathy both acknowledges and effaces difference.
Can Aboriginal suffering offer itself to any restitution or better, any future widening of life? Clendinnen remarks: 'But there remains a scar on the face of the country, a birthstain of injustice and exclusion directed at the people who could so easily provide the core of our sense of ourselves as a nation, but who remain on the fringe of the land they once possessed.' An ennobling, perhaps enabling, idea. But how many Australians, again, believe it, outside academe? And what can the statement practically mean? That collective guilt and right recall can create a decent society? That the revived debates about Reconciliation, the Stolen Generation, and a Prime Ministerial Apology can serve as foundational moral acts, guiding future policies toward all minorities, not only Aborigines?
Possibly. Memory, however, has seldom stanched ethnic or racial violence. Walter Benjamin, much quoted if seldom understood, thought that no document of civilisation is free of barbarism -- or, as someone forthrightly put it, civilisation rests on the shambles. This is less cynicism than unillusioned historical clarity: we should learn what history never seems to teach us.
As a boy in Egypt, I read James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, and moved freely, fancifully, in their wooded worlds. But to say this is not to say I believe that the genocide of Native Americans can provide the core experience of my citizenship in the United States.
Many decades later, I read with dread and admiration -- admiration also in its older sense, wonder -- Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung. I felt the power and passion of the book, its brutal truth, its craft in an alien tongue. I marveled, too, at the sheer supernatural energy in the novel. But drawn as I am to spiritual things -- again, more of this later -- I found it allegorical magic alien: I could never make sense of my world with what the Kadaitcha sing.
The indigenous claim to social justice and shared humanity is unassailable. But we need also to recognise that if intellectuals have an iron obligation to speak the truth to power, as Edward Said says, they must also speak it, in whispers or in thunder, to themselves. That may be harder in our impacted, hybrid moment, rife with ideological mendacity, internet terrorism, media hype, nationalist frenzy, fatwa justice.
The matter is neither theoretical nor abstract. Consider America, for an instant; an instant may be all we have in technoculture. According to a US census, persons speaking Spanish at home increased, between 1980 and 1990, by 50.1%; Arabic, by 57.4%; Chinese, by 97.9%; Vietnamese, by 149.5%; Hindi and Urdu, by 155%; Mon-Khmer, by 676.3%. (Many of these new immigrants are smart, talkative, educated; some of them will return home.) Though statistics can lie, the 'ethics of impermanence', which Bharati Mukherjee applies to the new Americans, seems to have become a demographic law. Who thinks, who dares now to ask, 'how American is it?'
Is change any less flagrant in Australia? No doubt, Australians themselves live their own changes while others merely pretend to perceive it. Still, cultures are famously invisible to themselves. And the brute numbers are there: so many tourists, students, immigrants, trading partners from East Asia alone, so many military and economic concerns touching the Pacific rim. So much public and private anxiety about Australia's identity, role, destiny in the world. The Anglo-Celtic heritage, of course, remains vital -- it's claptrap to say otherwise. But like all strong cultures, that heritage knows how to adapt, adopt, absorb, and sometimes refuse what comes its way. It knows how to translate or refigure whatever migrates.
Translation in cultures or languages, however, is never a cinch. It brings confusion, error. It brings worse: baneful conflicts imported from other times and other places. (Watch what you say to a cabbie, in Melbourne or Sydney, about Lebanon, Bosnia, or Kashmir.) And yet translation works, seems to work better in Australia than in America, though neither will be loved universally for what ever it does. And if translation works, does it not make sense, after all, to ask 'how Australian is it?'
Though I find cultural nationalism self-indulgent, and the cultural strut as tedious as the cultural cringe, I do feel, when I visit Australia, a zest and vibrancy that suggests an Athenian moment. Is it the 'lucky country' all over again? Has it finally overcome the 'tyranny of distance'? What is this rich efflorescence in all the arts? And yes, how Australian is it?
I return to that emblematic story, Lawson's 'The Drover's Wife' (1894). It will not escape our stereotypes about grit, self-reliance in the bush, its mean pleasures and prodigal solitudes. That's what survival takes. But the story also limns a mother's love, facing down evil, all those black, slithering snakes in a stringy-bark shack. What is it all about? Try answering that and you come nearer to answering the question about 'Australianness' before it dissolves into the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Now re-view Russell Drysdale's painting, 'The Drover's Wife' (1945), which many Australians will have seen, seen in reproduction, at least. No children, no snakes here; bare, spindly trees; a wagon, a horse, an ant-like man in the far distance; hard, blue sky above the red earth. The rest is the woman, hulking in the foreground, with her suitcase and shadow. As in Lawson's story, the sense of bleak, of clumsy, endurance comes through; the big feet press firmly on the ground. One wonders how a woman could stand so full in such a spare, ungiving space -- where did the fat on her body, her legs, come from? But the real difference between story and painting is loss: the eyes in the small face, half--hidden by the sadly tilted hat, the eyes have a thousand-yard stare. Right over the viewer's head. Do they express bewilderment, resignation, old hope, terminal loss? Where is the woman going with her suitcase, her back to the puny man? Right out of the frame? And what else, of Australia, is going out with her? Myself, I think this lumbering woman, with small head and shaggy dress, stands up front, at once curvaceous and columnar, saying: I am here, I may be Australia, take it or leave it. But is that what the picture really says?
Questions again. It's what Murray Bail proffers us in his story, 'The Drover's Wife' (1975). Bail: sly, knowing, ironic, secretive, acutely intelligent, gruffly urbane, always sere. That's a distance from Lawson. Watch him go at Lawson, and how Australian it is, through Drysdale. (No need here to invoke postmodern reflexivity or intertextuality.) In Bail's story, a dentist speaks: that's Hazel there, my former wife -- why do they say she's a drover's wife? Bail, ever the trickster, is at it from the start: 'There has perhaps been a mistake -- but of no great importance -- made in the denomination of this picture' (reproduced on the cover of Bail's book). A 'mistake made'? By whom? 'Perhaps'? `Of no importance'? And where did Drysdale find Hazel to pose? Come off it now, Bail.
This is not the place for a fussy explication de texte. The point is that Bail's smart narrative takes up an icon of Australian culture, wraps it in ambiguities, casts upon it a hundred lights and shadows -- and ends by reaffirming it somehow. The trick is in Bail's flickering realism, a style of enigmatic banality, which undermines the world of common appearances without quite erasing it. That person there in the picture is Hazel, a real person, the dentist avers. (Real just in what sense?) And she does -- or does she? -- elope with a drover. But why does she elope at all? Because she feels `in her element in the bush' and the silence of the drover `woos' her? Because, unlike her husband, she likes snow on Ghost Gums; she enjoys chopping wood; she kills snakes. She is 'Australian', all right, 'the silly girl'. In brief, the stereotypes somersault back on their feet; reality wavers, but only for a moment; and even those bushfires, absent in Drysdale's picture, make their way back into the story. This is 'a serious omission', the dentist grumbles, deadpan. 'It is altering the truth for the sake of a pretty picture or ''composition.''' Is Bail kidding us, or what? Not entirely. The tacit pain in the tale, the husband's loss and wife's loneliness, put reality back into place. Beyond all ironies, the Drover's Wife lives.
Is that Australian? Australian enough so that, though the mystique may mutate in history or flicker in language, it won't dissolve. Thus in Bail's recent, magic romance, Eucalyptus, the author feels obliged to say on the first page:
But desertorum to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number. And anyway the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let's not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women, the crude language, the always wide horizon, and the flies.
Again, really, 'largely irrelevant here'? So what is this passage doing at the commencement of this Calvino-like, yet very Australian, fairy tale called after the Eucalypt? Repudiating the stereotypes by perpetuating the archetypes, no doubt, unsettling the scene. And, of course, making space for himself.
It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-coloured -- can we say that?) hard-luck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here.
This can be hazardous. In Bail's earlier novel, Homesickness, for instance, the attempt to 'flicker' Australian reality largely fails. Bail, however, is crucially right: scratch any so-called distinctive culture, and what do you see? Our common condition, the museum of personal obsessions and human conceits. Thus, thirteen Aussies on a world tour begin -- gradually, zanily -- to see themselves in an entirely empty museum, let's say in Russia:
...they followed remaining squashed together before disintegrating: shoulder-blades, ear, pelvis, heart, movement, elbow, nose, eyes, air, rib cage, bladder, cigarette, trees, thorax, shoes, penis, shadow, postcards, memory, mountain.
So, how Australian are these body parts? (The passage I quote is no more cryptic or elliptic than any other in the novel.) Still, Bail manages to insinuate whimsical little essays, micro parodies, and allegories of Oz throughout the novel: bits on gum trees, Racial Laws, Australian Speech, Drysdale's 'The Drover's Wife' (again!), corrugated iron structures (Australia's answer to the Ionic column), explorers of the outback, Ayer's Rock (like the nose of a man in Derbyshire, 'it rose out of the red skin and stubble with monolithic force'), boomerangs and kangaroos, the great Australian emptiness ('a country...of nothing really', a character mumbles).
These riffs are sometimes comically brilliant, sometimes merely bizarre. But Bail has a larger ambition than to inflict arcane jokes on bemused readers. He seems to say: look at Australians abroad, look for the odd detail, and you might perceive Australia anew. A right good novelistic notion. Only, Homesickness failed to renew my perceptions of the Antipodes. What it does renew, despite assorted infelicities -- taxonomic fugues, tremolos of erudition -- is our insight into postmodern tourism; and by guiding us through some fantasmic museums of the world -- the museum of the leg, of marriage, of gravity, and, yes, of corrugated iron -- the novel glimpses the interior museum of us all. But all this is not to say that in an age of both global tourism and cybertravel, none of us have or need a home. Surely, that's one abstraction we have already seen horrifically blooded.