L. J. Hume
The publication of this occasional paper signals an ambition on the part of the Centre for Independent Studies to pay more attention to broad cultural issues. This is not to say that such issues have been entirely overlooked in the past. But because of the need to maintain priorities for the allocation of limited resources, there has been an emphasis on economic and social issues. Of course liberalism is not just an economic doctrine, and its intellectual leadership from Adam Smith to Hayek has spoken to the human condition in the round. The cultural initiative extends the exploration of the liberal principles of freedom and individual responsibility into areas such as education arid the arts, which are afflicted by excessive state interference and debilitating fashions.
Those who are concerned with public policy might question
a turn to cultural issues on the ground that these do not really call for any
government initiatives at all. But governments at all levels are becoming
increasingly involved in cultural matters. This needs to be challenged, or, at
the very least, monitored and subjected to appraisal. A 'cultural agenda' might
include issues like the threat to free speech posed by 'political correctness',
government subsidies for the arts, intellectual property rights, and
obscurantist fashions in the humanities.
Public policy apart, there are all manner of myths abroad
that undermine the vigour of our social and intellectual life. One of the most
pervasive of these is the subject of this essay by the late L. J. Hume. The
notion of the Australian cultural cringe is one of the great cliches of our
times. According to legend, the humble colonials of yesteryear were
"inert, deferential and passive' before the great overseas powers,
especially Britain, but this dismal state of affairs changed for the better
during the 1960s, or perhaps with the accession of the Whitlam Government in
1972. Hume's painstaking analysis of
the legend is fascinating and devastating, revealing a tapestry of ignorance,
selective quotation, and misreading of documents.
Hume's task would have been more difficult if the 'cringe
theorists' (practically the whole galaxy of progressive historians and social
commentators) had been more circumspect in their statements. The phrase was
coined by A. A. Phillips in the very limited context of imaginative literature
and has since been generalised to the whole Australian experience. But the
theory collapses at every point where Hume prods it.
For example, the economic historian Edward Shann is
described as one who 'untiringly defended Anglo-colonial economic
dependency'. In fact, he opposed tariff
protection (a genuine cringe); he deplored the accumulation of foreign debt
(for the benefit of investors in London and New York, as he put it); and he
felt Australians should exploit their advantages in primary industries and the
proximity of growing Asian economies. Stated in 1930, this has a strongly
contemporary ring, and not one of cringing subservience to the Home Country.
Hume also speculates on the purpose that is being served
by such a feeble yet popular misconception.
He considers that progressive intellectuals seek to draw inspiration
from the myth that they have heroically escaped from a hideous spectre (the
cringe). They wish to be regarded as uniquely robust, optimistic and assured,
while they rekindle the fires of nationalism. But Hume points out that
nationalism is a product of insecurity and self-doubt because communities that
are truly sure of their place in the world do not embrace nationalistic
postures or feel a need to assert their independence. The nationalists protest
too much.
The debate on the republic has provided a vehicle to
maintain their nationalistic rage, but in the light of Hume's critique they
will need to lift their game considerably to provide enlightenment rather than
mere sound and fury.
Rafe Champion
The death of
Leonard John Hume in a car accident in February 1993 deprived Australia of
one of its most remarkable scholars. Since he was a modest man for whom
notoriety was utterly valueless, it is among his family, friends, and
colleagues that his loss will most sorely and immediately be felt. Yet in
an era in which the slick 'ideas man' often outshines the truly deep thinker,
the cost to Australian intellectual life of his premature passing may well
be even greater.
Len Hume was
born in 1926, the son of Frederick Roy Hume and Alice Clare Hume, nee
Stapleton. His first acquaintance with the study of political thought came at
the University of Sydney, from which he graduated as a Bachelor of Economics in
1947. He then took up a Teaching Fellowship at Sydney University, at the same
time undertaking research for a dissertation on working-class movements in
Australia, for which he was awarded the degree of Master of Economics in 1950.
He spent 1952-54 in London, and returned with a PhD from the London School of
Economics and Political Science. After nearly seven years' service in the Prime
Minister's Department and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, he returned to
academic life in February 196l when he was appointed Senior Lecturer in
Political Science at the Australian National University. In 1965 he was appointed Reader in Political
Science, the position from which he retired in 1988. For many years he offered
courses on Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Political Thought, but his concerns
stretched much further, and he was able to offer considered, well-informed, and
astringent views on an astonishingly wide range of topics.
Hume was a
renowned specialist on the thought of Jeremy Bentham, about which he published
extensively. He took leave in 1967, 1975, and 1981 to work on Bentham's
manuscripts at University College London, and his book Bentham and Bureaucracy
(Cambridge University Press, 1981) is widely recognised as the classic study of
Bentham's political thought. However, his pre-eminence in this sphere was not
won at the expense of his long-standing interest in Australian history; and in
his retirement, although continuing to work on the arduous task of editing
Bentham's Constitutional Code for publication as part of Bentham's Collected
Works, he increasingly found time to turn his attention, and his pen, to issues
about which he had long felt strongly.
Another Look at
the Cultural Cringe is a product of this period. Hume had little in common with
that school of historians for whom the election of the Whitlam Government in
1972 had inaugurated a kind of social and cultural annee zero. This was not
because of any visceral hatred of Whitlam's agenda — to this day I have no idea
what his party-political views might have been — but because he felt a distinct
lack of sympathy for the insensitivity to the significance of earlier times and
earlier figures that an annee zero view implied. He was struck by the dynamism
of earlier periods, and once remarked that the Australia to which he returned
in 1954 seemed to him 'another world' from the country that he had left behind
in 1952: in this sense, Another Look at the Cultural Cringe is not simply a
masterly example of historical writing, but also a cri de coeur from
someone who lived through the times that other writers contemptuously
travestied, and who knew that things had happened otherwise than their accounts
suggested. It is a work in which a number of the characteristics of his
scholarship are apparent. It blends theory and history in very subtle ways. It
provides a splendid example of the 'exact scholarship' that he so much admired.
And while on occasion pointed, or even cutting, it is also a graceful
essay. Hume saw no virtue in being
gratuitously offensive to his opponents. He could be a devastating critic, but
he was never a self-indulgent one.
This last
characteristic derived as much from his personality as from anything else. He was honest, fearless, and entirely free
of affectation. To his students and colleagues he presented a somewhat serious
visage, but this simply reflected the fact that he took the concept of
university education seriously. His
solemnity was no more than skin-deep, and those who knew him for any length of
time came to realise that it was born of contentment, to which his wonderful
wife Angela, and his children and wider family, were the principal
contributors. He was a cherished friend to a vast number of people, and his
arrival raised the tone of every function he attended.
William Maley
Department of Politics,
University College
The University of New
South Wales
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It has become a very
common practice among contemporary historians, writers of letters to
newspapers, book reviewers and other commentators on Australian affairs to
refer to a cultural (or a colonial or a colonial cultural) cringe when they are
describing the attitudes and behaviour of earlier generations of Australians.
The content of this notion was aptly summed up by H. P. Heseltine a few years
ago as an assertion that Australians formerly had an ‘unthinking admiration for
everything foreign (especially English) which precluded respect for any
excellence that might be found at home' (Introduction to Phillips, 1980:vii).
The cringe is usually said to have flourished in that form among Australians up
to the early or mid-1960s, but to have subsequently been replaced by more
self-respecting and independent attitudes. Used in this way it serves to
distance the contemporary writer from the failures and inadequacies of the
past. Less commonly, it is employed as
a critique of elements in present-day society, in suggestions that they have
not yet completely eliminated this ‘colonial’ style of thinking from their own
mental activity.
I want to take here a
critical look at this way of writing and thinking about the past and I want to
do so for three main reasons. The first is personal: the charge that one is or
was in the habit of cringing is very serious, and I think that one should
neither disregard it nor simply confess to it, even to oneself. One should, instead look very carefully at
the evidence on which it is said to be based. The second reason is that the
notion seems to me to be inimical to precise or systematic thinking about the
character of Australian life, either before or after 1966. Its inherently
pejorative content is admirably adapted to the needs of publicists in a hurry,
but it inhibits close reasoning and close attention to evidence My third and most important reason is that
I think it simply misrepresents the past, or at least the 30 years of it before
1966 that I feel that I can remember.
The thesis implies that Australia and Australians were then ‘inert, deferential and passive' (Thomas, 1989:118), that they were incapable of making and did not in fact make judgments about the rest of the world and its products in the light of experience, that they unquestioningly accepted rulings and advice or even instructions issued from London and other places. In its most common form it implies, too, that there is a great difference in these respects between Australia then and Australia now, that the inert have been replaced by the innovative, the deferential by those resistant to ideas and products and fashions coming from overseas, and the passive by the active and the creative.
All of this seems to me
to be grossly inaccurate. Australia 'then' was not inert, deferential and
passive: people did judge the ideas and
the products that were offered and recommended to them, they did question
rulings and assurances that came from overseas, they were sometimes innovative
and creative, they did on the whole feel ‘confident in being themselves' (Head
& Walter, 1988:127). And while the Australian community has undoubtedly
changed in many respects since the mid-1960s, and still more since the
mid-1950s, it does not seem to me to be on balance less receptive to
overseas ideas, products and fashions, or more inclined (or better equipped) to
subject them to critical analysis or to provide local alternatives to them.
It may be, however, that
I am mistaken in my perceptions of the present and the past, especially the
past. It may be that what I took and take for self-assurance and self-possession
were really self-deception and internalised submission, and that these are
failings from which most of the Australians born after the war (and the few
survivors from earlier periods with whom they feel affinity) are happily free.
In these circumstances, it seems to me, the proper course is to look for and
look closely at the body of argument and evidence on which is based the
diagnosis of a prevailing cultural cringe in pre-Whitlam Australia. And that is
what I am trying to do on this occasion.
As it turned out,
finding the argument and the evidence was a harder and untidier task than I
expected, and I may not yet have discovered the key items. I have turned up few examples of even
moderately sustained attempts to establish the diagnosis. The article by A. A.
Phillips in which the notion was given its 'seminal articulation' consists of
only seven, not very densely-argued, pages (Phillips, 1958:89-96). It comprises
little more than an (ambiguous) anecdote and a few supporting comments. Later
writers who have followed Phillips have often relied on dismissive (and
sometimes self-preening) one-liners rather than on extended discussion. Places
where one might expect to find a good deal about this allegedly dominant
tendency in the outlook of earlier generations sometimes have very little: for example, in The Penguin New Literary
History of Australia (Bennett et al., 1988) the index lists only five
references to a 'cringe' or 'cultural cringe', four of which are so brief and
glancing as to be inconsequential, while the more substantial fifth is also
quite incidental to the author's argument and might have been omitted to his
advantage. The important and valuable volume Intellectual Movements and
Australian Society (Head & Walter, 1988) contains a good many more
references to the notion, but it too lacks any substantial attempt to
demonstrate that there was or is a cultural cringe. It provides only brief
descriptions of what are alleged to be illustrations and examples of such a
stance. The same is true of other wide-ranging pictures of Australian
intellectual life, such as Australia: The Daedalus Symposium (Graubard,
1985), Mark Thomas's (1989) Australia in Mind, and the volume on
Australia edited by L. A. C. Dobrez in the series Review of National
Literatures (Dobrez, 1982).
Nevertheless, a critical
examination of the evidence is not altogether impossible. There is at least one more or less
substantial discussion in one of the crop of bicentennial publications, Stephen
Alomes's A Nation at Last? The Changing Character of Australian Nationalism,
1880-1988 (1988). Like others
operating in the field, Alomes has a liking for the dismissive one-liner, but
his discussion includes other kinds of material as well. And when one puts
together the one-liners and the longer passages from these several works, one
can see that they express certain themes and make some reasonably identifiable
claims about Australian life before the mid-1960s. There are some claims to be tested against the evidence, and some
evidence offered which can itself be tested.
A striking feature of
the claims is that they are very strongly-worded. Their authors seem to eschew
qualification. I have already quoted Heseltine's formulation of one of them,
namely that there was 'an unthinking admiration for everything
foreign…which precluded regard for any excellence that might be found at home'.
Similarly Alomes has referred to the 'assumption that value and worth
came from metropolitan imperial Britain', and that 'everything colonial
or Australian was inferior to the British equivalent'. He sees ‘indigenous culture and
self-expression' as having been 'thwarted', and in their place an 'apathetic
acceptance of the metropolitan culture' (1988:56, 215, 217; emphasis
added). Brian Head, too, writes about the cringe in terms of 'assumptions',
such as 'the central assumption that intellectual work was thought to be
necessarily derivative ... or awkwardly provincial', and an 'assumption
of local inferiority [which] permeated the cultural and educational Establishment
until the end of the Menzies era…'. And with his co-editor James Walter he
suggests that Australians have meekly accepted the reminders of 'critics' that
they occupy a 'subordinate cultural place on the
periphery' and that 'intellectual standards are set and innovations occur
elsewhere' (Head & Walter, 1988:1, 2, viii).
It is at first sight surprising that these experienced academics, belonging to a class famed for its caution and its instinct for self-preservation, should have given so many hostages to fortune. If they are to defend claims of this kind they will need strong evidence indeed. It will not be enough for them to show that there existed in Australia a considered admiration for some or many foreign things, or considered judgments that some or many of the things produced in Australia were pretty bad or that things of value and worth (including culture and social and political ideals) had come from metropolitan Britain, or the opinions that some or much that had been done in Australia was derivative or that most of the innovations that had been adopted in this country had come from overseas. In each case what they have to demonstrate is the existence of a mere assumption or the uncritical acceptance of an imported opinion. Moreover, they have to show that these assumptions and this form of acceptance were pervasive in Australian society, and not confined to coteries and enclaves.
One might think that
they would have been behaving more prudently if they had referred more vaguely
to prejudices that were perhaps difficult to overcome in some cases, or to
occasions on which the burden of proof seemed to be placed on the critic of
British or foreign culture or the competitor with imported products. But that option was not genuinely open to
them. If they had adopted it, it would
have been immediately obvious that they must give up the word ‘cringe' in any
realistic description of the situation, and that of course was something they
could not afford to do. Equally, they could not afford to confine the cringe to
coteries or enclaves, because they wanted and needed to represent it as a
feature of Australian society as a whole (though not necessarily of all its
individual members).
Another general feature
of this body of literature is uncertainty or indecision about its focus, and
therefore about the scope of its hypothesis and of the evidence to which
defenders or critics of that hypothesis must appeal. In the context in which
its seminal articulator, Phillips, was writing, it related primarily to
literary criteria and judgments, and in particular to the reluctance of EngLit
departments in Australian universities (above all in Melbourne) to include
courses on Australian literature in their offerings. It was taken up and made common currency, however, because
publicists and others felt either that they could detect what Phillips was
complaining about in other aspects of Australian life, or that it might explain
features of Australian life (notably the structure of the economy) that they
heartily disliked. Accordingly, the use of the notion expanded from the
discussion of literary affairs to other branches of intellectual and artistic
activity, and thence to attitudes, behaviour and policy in the community at
large. But in some respects interest in the position of literature in the
community remains central to the discussion, and its participants tend to drift
back to literature and the attitudes of literary critics when they want to
produce really telling evidence.
There are several
reasons for the centrality of this field.
The fundamental one is the familiar fact that, long before Phillips
coined his phrase, the status and value of Australian creative writing, and the
standards by which it should be judged, had been widely and often acrimoniously
debated. Phillips was intervening decisively on one side of the debate, but he
was providing a new battle-cry, not firing the first shots in the war. [Note
1] And much of the debate was already
focused on the questions whether it was appropriate to accept English judgments
(assumed to be mainly adverse) of Australian writings, and to adopt English
standards in making one's own judgments. There is available here a relatively
large and accessible body of argument and evidence from which the
diagnosticians of a cultural cringe can start, and to which they can return
whenever they run short elsewhere.
On the one hand, many
Australian writers and their champions have felt that their work has been
insufficiently respected or even noticed by English critics and — what has
seemed worse — by Australians whose tastes have been moulded directly or
indirectly by English literary criticism. They have felt that its distinctive
Australian qualities, or even the fact that its source was Australia, has been
sufficient to damn it in the eyes of such people. The importance of the issue
for them has been reinforced by a sense that the writings they have been
championing are not only distinctively Australian but also incorporate what is
or was most distinctive of Australia and most authentically Australian. To
judge the writings adversely, or to accept adverse judgments made by English
critics or reviewers, has thus apparently been to judge Australia adversely. As
Alomes puts it, '[the] colonial cultural cringe demeaned [Australian writers'
and painters'] worth as it demeaned Australia' (1988:28). It was this sentiment in particular that
facilitated the extension of the notion of a cultural cringe from literature to
art and then to Australian culture in the wider sense.
On the other hand, there
have been writers and critics who have felt that the partisans of the
distinctively Australian were proceeding beyond a critique of English taste and
its limitations, to a rejection of world literature and international
standards. The promotion of Australian writers and writings through the
denigration of English or other foreign literary criticism, it has been
suggested, is a device for creating a protected environment for mediocrity, and
would produce a narrowing of Australians' intellectual boundaries. Moreover,
some of the 'internationalists' have argued, the 'nationalists' were concerned
to promote, and to promote as authentically Australian, not Australian writers
(or artists) as a whole, but a particular group distinguished not necessarily
by literary talent but by the possession and expression of political and social
views of which the promoters have approved (see Kiernan, 1971:163).
The debate, it must be
said, has not yet ended in a decisive victory for one side or another in EngLit
departments, and it is (fortunately) not necessary to pursue it here. There are, however, some particular claims
made by or on behalf of the 'nationalists' that are crucial to the whole
subject of the cringe. Is it true, for example, that English critics, reviewers
and publishers neglected Australian writings and failed to see their merits,
perhaps because they had no understanding of the Australian environment or
Australian experiences? Is it true that
cursory or prejudiced English judgments were readily accepted, in unthinking
admiration, by Australians, or that Australians were accustomed to wait on
English judgments before buying, reading or admitting to liking Australian
works? And, if the answer to these questions
is 'yes', can it be extended to local attitudes to non-literary phenomena and
artefacts, including characteristically Australian habits and beliefs and
material products?
I suggest that the
'nationalists' can make out a fairly strong case, though not a fully convincing
one, as long as they stick to their narrow chosen ground, but that when they or
others venture off it the case disintegrates.
It is strongest when it refers to the response of the English literary
world, and of Australians who might be regarded or who might regard themselves
as an extension of that world, to Australian writings. Its supporters can
produce evidence showing that English publishers were reluctant to publish
Australian works and, when they agreed to do so, wanted it reshaped to meet
English tastes; that English critics paid little attention to Australian
writers and their works, or were often obtuse in their criticism when they did
happen to notice them; that university departments of English were sometimes
reluctant to include the study of Australian literature in their courses; that
their implied judgments were sometimes echoed by people outside those
departments, and so on. But the evidence falls well short of showing that there
was total hostility and neglect. The further the discussion has moved away from
the particular group of writers for whom the 'nationalists' wanted to win
respect, and from their kind of writing, the more difficult it has proved to
find evidence to support the case, and the more cavalier have its supporters
been in their treatment and use of evidence. They have ignored a large body of
contrary evidence, and they have presented much of what they have produced in a
remarkably loose and inaccurate form.
Although those two
shortcomings have similarly malign effects on historical knowledge and
understanding, and although they often relate to the same areas of Australian
life, they need to be treated in rather different ways. I have therefore decided to deal with them
separately, and to start with the material that has been neglected by the campaigners
in their eagerness to paint a picture of a cringing society. In neither
section, however, can the treatment be systematic or proceed according to some
logical plan. Since the literature of
the cringe lacks systematic exposition and flits from topic to topic as its
authors' fancies take it, one can do no other than follow it in its
flittings.
Much of the material to
which I shall be referring in this section relates to the work of writers and
to the performing arts in various forms, but I shall also have something to say
about economic life and about broader attitudes within the community. In
general I shall be setting the evidence against the generalisations about
Australia before the Enlightenment of the late 1960s, in order to determine
whether they can be sustained in the face of that evidence.
In the first place it
can be said that the reluctance of English publishers to accept work from
Australia was never absolute. In practice quite a number of Australian
novelists — among them Boldrewood, Miles Franklin, Louis Stone, K. S. Prichard,
Dale Collins and Eleanor Dark — did find publishers in England. Academic works
and commentaries on Australian affairs by Australians were also published there
from time to time, as were anthologies of Australian verse. Some of these
publications attracted critical attention, not all of which was unfavourable.
Not all members of Australia’s EngLit departments were hostile to or contemptuous
of Australian literature, and some did a good deal to promote interest in it,
notably Brereton, Walter Murdoch and J.J. Stable. Neither they nor others who collected or wrote about Australian
work regarded it as necessarily or invariably inferior to English writing, and
they did not always or unquestioningly accept English opinions or expectations.
The claim that respect
for Australian work was refused by Australians, and refused out of prejudice,
looks even weaker if we transfer our gaze from students and critics to
publishers and readers, especially from the 1930s onwards. Writers complained
that publishers were unwilling to produce books and publishers complained that
economic circumstances were against them, but in practice many Australian books
were published, and many copies of them were purchased, and probably many were
read many times. (The private circulating libraries were important in that
period.) One of the complicating
factors is that some of the most successful of these books were not of a kind
that the nationalists liked or wanted to be liked, but they were nevertheless
Australian products and many Australians found excellence in them.
Among the most-widely
welcomed of those Australian products were the works of the popular writers
Frank Clune, Ion Idriess, E. V. Timms and FJ. Thwaites (for these writers, see
the entries in Wilde et al., 1985). Clune (with and without the help of P. R.
Stephensen) was probably the most prolific of them all, and has been credited
with more than 60 volumes published between 1933 and 1971. Idriess was only a
little less productive, with nearly 50 in roughly the same period (including
more than a dozen during the 1930s), and he may have found more readers. His
works were reprinted many times, possibly 40 or 50 times in the case of the
most popular ones, and they established their popularity very quickly. Men of the Jungle (1932) was
re-issued four times within a year of its publication, Flynn of the Inland
(1932) eleven times within two years, The Cattle King (1936) eleven
times within one year, and Lasseter's Last Ride (1931) 15 times within
three years. All of this was
accomplished, it should be recalled, at a time of economic depression and slow
recovery, and when the population of the country was only about two-fifths of
its present size. (The population of New South Wales and the ACT — 5.9 million
— now exceeds that of Australia in the census year 1921 — 5.4 million — and is
approaching the 6.6 million recorded for Australia at the next census in 1933.)
Thwaites's 30 or so
novels were also very popular, especially the twelve he published in the 1930s.
Some of these were again reprinted 40 or more times, and he could claim sales
of more than 100 000 for some of them within a relatively short period. In
1947, for example, his publishers maintained that the ten-year-old Rock End
was in its 17th printing and that 130 000 copies of it had been sold. A feature
of the publication of his works was that the size of first printings of them
grew substantially in the course of his career. In the late 1930s the print-run
seems to have been about 7000-10 000 copies; by the early 1950s it was said to
be 30 000. It is unlikely that Timms
could match those figures, although on the dust covers of his later novels Angus
and Robertson claimed that he had 'an immense following'. After producing some
miscellaneous works (including an account of T. E. Lawrence's exploits) in the
1920s, he established a reputation in the 1930s with a series of historical
novels set in various parts of 17th-century Europe. The earlier volumes in the set were published in England, the
later ones in Australia. After the war,
which had interrupted his writing career, he focused on Australian settings and
produced what he described as an 'Australian Saga' consisting of eleven
novels. Like Thwaites, he has not
received much attention, during his lifetime or later, in historical or other
accounts of 20th-century Australian literature, but his failings from a
literary point of view do not seem to have deprived him of readers.
In addition to those
frankly 'popular' writers, there were of course a good many other novelists and
authors of travel and other non-fiction works who were successful on a more
modest scale in finding Australian readers.
Some had established their reputations before the 1930s, others were
doing so in that decade or later. As
examples of the two categories one might take Miles Franklin and Xavier
Herbert. All That Swagger and Capricomia enjoyed considerable
popular as well as official patronage. The publishing record tells the story
again in Franklin's case. All That Swagger was printed twice in 1936,
the year of its first publication, and for the eighth time in 1952. Another but rather different sign of the
acceptability of Australian material to the Australian public was that for many
years large and appreciative audiences were found for John Byrne's readings of
the verses of Father Hartigan, after large numbers of copies of them had been
sold in the 1920s.
The case of Byrne may
serve to introduce consideration of the performing arts of various kinds, and
public response to them and the performers. It is convenient to begin with
films, because the 'renaissance of Australian film' in more recent times has
often been presented as a sign and an expression of the break with the passive
and inert past. There is no doubt that Australian film-making — the making of
feature films — was in a depressed state between 1940 and 1964, but its
situation in the 1930s was rather different.
According to Pike and Cooper in their chronicle of Australian film
production, in the quarter-century after 1939 there were 48 new Australian
films; in the earlier period, despite the difficulties created by supersession
of silent by sound films, and by the tightening grip of American distributors
on exhibition in Australia, there were 51 (Pike & Cooper, 1981). Not all of
the 51 were released, and not every one that was released was financially successful,
but many were. As Pike and Cooper relate, one company — Cinesound — was able to
maintain production 'throughout the 1930s on a self-supporting basis, with the
income from one film providing the finance for the next' (Pike & Cooper,
1981:199). Cinesound adopted the policy of importing some of its actors from
overseas for leading roles in its films, but that has been common enough in the
film industry at other times and in other places. Most of the human resources
that it and other companies employed were already in Australia. Perhaps the
most interesting example of this was one of the last of Cinesound's pre-war
crop, The Broken Melody (1938). The story was derived, rather freely,
from Thwaites's first novel (1930), and the script was prepared in Australia. As
the central character was a musician, the musical score for the film was very
important and this too was supplied locally.
The most spectacular part of it was 'an operatic sequence composed by
Alfred Hill' (Reade, 1979), [Note 2] the sometime professor of theory and
composition at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and a prominent
figure in the musical life of Sydney (and, earlier, of New Zealand). Pike and
Cooper 1981:277) say of The Broken Melody that 'it made an easy profit'.
Perhaps even more profitable for Cinesound was Lovers and Luggers which
had been released six months earlier than The Melody Lingers. Eric Reade (1979:111-12) reports that when
it was shown at the Tivoli Theatre, Brisbane, 'this picture altered the
theatre's normal policy of a weekly change of programme to that of a
fortnight's season due to the overwhelming response from the public', and Pike
and Cooper (1981:236) concur in seeing it as 'one of Cinesound's most
profitable ventures'. It is evident that the Australian public had a liking
for, not a prejudice against, locally-made films when they were available.
The fate of some of
those involved in film-making, mainly the actors, has a bearing on another
issue that has been raised concerning attitudes to public performers. It is
apparent — undeniable — that many people who had grown up or settled in
Australia, from vaudevillians to radio actors and 'personalities', to stage
actors and dancers, to classical musicians of various kinds, were very popular
and were greatly admired. But it is sometimes argued, in support of the
cultural-cringe hypothesis, that the pervasive practice has been the 'knocking'
of local talent, and the pervasive attitude 'the assumption that real stars
come from overseas' and a refusal to make people 'real stars in Australia
without [their] being blessed at the courts of London, New York or Hollywood'
(Alomes, 1988:234). It would be hard to produce evidence for these claims,
especially if one sought one's evidence in the field of popular culture to which
Alomes explicitly refers in this passage. Some of the 'real stars' had worked
at the foreign courts, some not; some of those who had done so had been
'blessed' with success, others not; in some cases stardom in Australia preceded
the pilgrimage to the foreign courts; in most cases it would be difficult to
show that their local reputations depended on overseas success. For example,
Bert Bailey, Gus and Fred Bluett, Roy Rene, Dick Bentley, Jack Davey, the team
of George Edwards, Maurice Francis and Nell Stirling, Cecil and Alec Kellaway,
Gladys Moncrieff and Shirley Ann Richards built their careers in Australia.
Bailey's failure in London seems to have done him no harm when he came back to
Australia. Moncrieffs relative success there in the 1920s is unlikely to have
counted much with Australian audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. Kellaway and
Richards went to Hollywood after, not before, they appeared successfully in
Australian films. Peter Dawson is perhaps a more doubtful case, but it is again
unlikely that those who bought and listened with pleasure to his records in the
1930s knew much about his career in Europe earlier in the century or were
greatly interested in it. Perhaps the
partnership of Madge Elliott and Cyril Richard would provide a better example
for Alomes; but even in this case it would be difficult to disentangle the
respective effects of overseas reputation and performance, since each of the
partners had a previous Australian reputation as an additional asset.
This topic is, however,
subject to some additional points that also have a bearing on the basic
controversy between the nationalists and the internationalists in relation to
literary culture. And Australian
attitudes have been shaped here by practices and concerns that are no less an authentic
part of Australian life than the egalitarian and nationalist sentiments
expressed by Furphy and Lawson, namely the practices of sport, including
international sport. It is and was apparent that one could create a local
reputation, become a local hero, by being (for example) a run-machine at Bowral
or unplayable at Wingello. But if one wanted a wider reputation one had to
participate in wider arenas, ultimately international ones, and establish one's
competence in them. To do that did not necessarily involve adopting established
or traditional techniques, or even refraining from attempts to change the
rules, but it did involve meeting external tests of some kinds and not making
up your own rules as you went along. Similarly — as most Australians well
understood — if you wanted to be an international star or celebrity in the
arts, or even wanted international respect for your achievements, you could not
do so by catering for purely local audiences.
This points to a
weakness or ambivalence in the nationalist literary case put forward by, say,
Vance Palmer. One of Palmer's complaints was that Australian writings were not
known and respected in London. He consequently urged his fellow-Australians to
recognise them more enthusiastically as significant for Australia (The Age,
9 February 1935). But acceptance of his advice could have done little to change
perceptions in London. Something more
(such as, at the least, a demonstration that certain unique or unusual
technical problems had been solved) would have been required. These
considerations were particularly important at the 'high culture' end of the
performing-arts spectrum. And it applied to or was understood by audiences as
well as performers. A claim to be an international
celebrity had to be supported by international respect.
None of this implies,
however, that local talent could not be or was not appreciated at home. On the
contrary local recognition, and often local financial assistance either
official or private, provided the means by which the transition to an
international setting was effected. Stanley Clarkson and William Herbert were
fully professional and widely-admired singers in Australia before they went to
England in the 1940s. The Sun and Shell Aria contests, Elder Fellowships, and
the Mobil Quest, all of which were in some respects outgrowths of the
well-established network of Eisteddfods, provided valuable help to Arnold
Matters, Richard Watson, Marjorie Lawrence, June Bronhill and of course Joan
Sutherland, among others. The fund raised
for Joan Hammond in the 1930s was a late example of a practice which had
enabled a number of earlier artists, such as Florence Austral, to get wider
experience and more opportunities (the careers of these musicians are described
in some detail in Mackenzie, 1967). It
should be obvious, but perhaps it needs to be spelt out for the benefit of
those who evangelistically denounce others' cringing, that these various
initiatives and arrangements imply confidence in local talent, and one's own
talent, not a sense that the local is inferior. Attempts to create a protected
environment, and to encourage people to stay within it, suggest the reverse.
Attitudes
Within the Universities and the 'Educational Establishment'
Literature and the arts
are not, of course, the only fields in which it is alleged that the prevailing
attitudes have been a worship of imported items and a sense of inferiority in
relation to local products and talents. Educational institutions, and in
particular the universities, have received a fair amount of abuse. [Note 3]
There are some specific issues here that I shall be taking up later, but in
relation to the general cringing or obsequious attitudes that are said to have
dominated the universities, I think that negative evidence is once more readily
available. One example is the notorious Ern Malley affair, which I treat as an
expression of campus attitudes; not 'typical' campus attitudes, because there
were not any, but well-established ones. The affair had many aspects, but one
of them was precisely a repudiation of certain English views of the value of
particular trends in recent poetry and of particular poets. It signally lacked
any cringe to those well-publicised views.
Two other examples can be found in the pages of the Australian Journal
of Philosophy (.and its predecessor). J.A. Passmore (1943, 1944, 1948)
provided a searching assessment and critique of the then-fashionable
philosophy, of overseas provenance, called Logical Positivism. Whatever may now
be thought by other philosophers of his specific criticisms and judgments, what
is significant for the present discussion is Passmore's readiness to make them,
and the cool and confident tone in which he did so. Equally significant was the
tone of the debate, in the same journal, between John Mackie (1951) and Peter
Herbst (1952) concerning the character and value of contemporary Oxford
philosophy. (This had been prompted by
some published comments on Australian philosophy by the distinguished Oxford
philosopher, Gilbert Ryle [1950].) Mackie criticised the Oxford style of
philosophy and Herbst defended it, but on neither side was there any suggestion
or assumption that the authority of Oxford counted for anything in the
matter. These are only scattered
illustrations of the ways in which university people thought and argued during
and shortly after the war, but they would be incredible if the cultural cringe
really operated as Alomes, Head, Walter and others allege.
Another area which is
said to have been dominated by the cringe is that of material products, and
especially manufactures. This is one of the important fields where, it is
alleged, indigenous enterprise has been hampered by the common assumptions that
innovations are made only by foreigners and 'that the best comes from overseas
or is, in the words of the ads "Imported"' while the 'merely
Australian is thought inferior to that from the more sophisticated world of
"OS" (or overseas)' (Alomes, 1988:233). It is often suggested that
these attitudes are still influential in this area, but they are supposed to
have been even more prevalent in the benighted pre-Whitlam era.
Now it is undoubtedly
true that many Australians did think that many imported commodities were
superior to competing Australian products:
that the materials incorporated in them were superior or more ample,
that the finish or (in the case of clothing) the cut was superior, or that the
range of styles and kinds was greater or better adapted to consumers' or users'
needs. But this set of preferences does not establish that Australians were
merely making assumptions about these matters or had been brainwashed
into holding unjustified beliefs. In many cases they were simply right, and the
Australian products were inferior. And on many occasions they did not
judge the imported products to be superior, or to offer better value when they
might be technically superior. The customs tariff was at least partly
successful in diverting demand from imports to local products, as in
agricultural machinery, numerous sorts of chemicals, motor car bodies and some
parts, and clothing and textiles. In
relation to some of these things, suitability to local requirements or tastes
was also a factor, perhaps especially in clothing (e.g. Akubra hats — the
brand, not the currently fashionable style) and also in foodstuffs (e.g. the
common Australian contempt for English beer, the notorious preference for
Vegemite over Marmite, and the equally notorious resistance to kinds of food
brought to Australia by post-war migrants).
The evidence is consistent only with the conclusion that the behaviour
of Australian consumers and purchasers was guided widely and persistently by
the practical and discriminating judgments that they made, not by unthinking
prejudice.
In this area of
manufactures, too, the idea that most Australians regarded innovation as an
alien activity, or one for which Australians had no talent, seems equally
without foundation. There can have been few children in Australia between the
wars who had not heard of, and felt some pride in, the development in this
country of the stump-jump plough, the stripper, the harvester and
leader-harvester, and wool- shearing machinery. Some may have heard, as some of their elders certainly did, of
such things as the Potter-Delprat flotation process, the Nicholas brothers'
(re-)discovery of the process for manufacturing aspirin and their success in
producing and marketing it on a large scale, the centrifugal process for the
manufacture of concrete pipes, and the automatic totalisator. In due course
they encountered and embraced the rotary motor mower, the Hills hoist, and the
Siroset process for treating woollen cloth. Innovation was regarded as a quite
normal part of industrial life in Australia, although one that would
necessarily be limited by the small size of the local markets for most
products, the distance of the country from the most lucrative foreign markets
and the cheapest and most reliable suppliers, and a shortage of capital.
A related issue concerns
the repeated suggestions that the beneficiaries of the allegedly unthinking
admiration for things foreign were 'especially British'. (This is very important, of course, in
establishing that any cringe was, genuinely, colonial.) The interwar motor trade provides a striking
falsification of any purported generalisation along those lines. British-made
vehicles were familiar enough on Australian roads, but American vehicles were
still more common and were preferred for many purposes. The appeal of the
British products was principally at the bottom end of the market, where
Austins, Morrises, Standards and some other brands sold quite well. But in the
middle of the market, and commonly in country districts, purchasers preferred
the more robust American cars, of which many kinds were successfully marketed:
several from the General Motors range (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile,
Buick); Ford; different versions of Chrysler products (Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto,
Chrysler); Hudson; Studebaker; Packard; Willys; and possibly others. Once more
the behaviour of purchasers reveals that they were not acting as the dupes of
imperialist ideology, but were carefully measuring performance against
requirements (which in this case were determined by Australian roads and
distances), and were spending their money accordingly.
More general attitudes
which were widespread in the community are hard to document, because the people
who adopted them did not ordinarily record them in a form that is accessible to
us. Fortunately, however, we have recently been given access to 'the spirit of
the times' in the published reminiscences of John Bowden (1989) of Tasmania.
Bowden belonged to the urban lower-middle class. He was the son of a government
official who rose gradually to the middle ranks of his department, and was
himself at different times self-employed and an employee, and was more often
the latter than the former. As we shall see later, the members of this social
stratum and the lives they lead are not greatly admired by Australian
intellectuals, but their numbers ensure that their views and sentiments have a
better claim than most, and as good a claim as any, to be treated as
representative or typical. This makes
Bowden's opinions particularly valuable as evidence.
Some of his underlying
views come through most clearly, and least affected by tricks of memory and
hindsight, in the letters he wrote to his wife while he was in the Army,
serving with or alongside British troops and sometimes being transported on
British ships. These letters and other comments make it clear that he began his
Army service with less than unstinted admiration for the English or their
arrangements. When he identified people as 'Poms' or Englishmen' it was not in
a spirit of natural or automatic admiration or even approval. He found some of them tolerable or even
likeable, but he did not really expect to do so. As he put it on one later
occasion, 'Nutty Almond was a Pom, but there are Poms and Poms, and he gave us
a good go' (Bowden, 1989:230). In performing his military duties as an officer
in a technical training unit, he was quite willing to be judged by British
officers, confident that he could stand up to their scrutiny, and equally
willing to assess what they had to offer. He recorded while at a British Army
school at which he had already given at least one lecture on the work of his
unit:
‘I have been attending British lectures here, and I like
their methods, in spots well ahead of us, and in others well behind. Our equipment
has staggered them and we have shown them some of the instructional films we
have. They have met with enthusiasm.’ (Bowden, 1989:210)
If that is an example of
cringing,it would be difficult to see how anybody could ever achieve an upright
stance. And in Bowden's case it all comes out perfectly naturally, without any
attempt to show that he is behaving independently or any sense that he might
need to show it. His attitudes seem to me to be typical of Australians in the
1930s, 1940s and 1950s. About later periods, I shall have more to say
presently.
Up to this point I have
been accumulating evidence which seems to me incompatible with the broad
generalisations that appear in the literature about allegedly prevalent forms
of cringing. I want to turn now to examine various pieces of evidence and
argument which have been produced as examples of the cringe or in other efforts
to support the generalisations.
I propose to argue that
almost all of this material is flawed in various ways, often by sheer
inaccuracy but sometimes by the inept use of statistics or by faulty or
gratuitous inference. It covers a variety of matters similar to those that I
have already discussed, including attitudes as broad as those of John Bowden,
Australian beliefs about heroes and heroism, the opinions of our early literary
historians, the employment practices of universities, research and teaching in
Australian-oriented topics in schools and universities, and the economic policies
of Australian governments and some of their advisers.
A significant part of
the evidence concerning broad attitudes consists of various anecdotes (some
reporting facts, some in fiction) about what was said or done on particular
occasions. Among these are Phillips's report of the sycophantic laughter with
which a Melbourne audience greeted what it took to be a derogatory remark about
ordinary Australians (Phillips, 1958:91); the exchanges between several characters
(one Australian and the others cultured foreigners) in the Cusack-James novel Come
in Spinner (1988:403-6); and an account, related by Alomes, of the refusal
of the Adelaide Club to supply -colonial' products to its members (Alomes,
1988:27, 213).
The reports are
doubtless accurate and they may well relate to the tip of an iceberg, but one
should understand that it was a local iceberg and was formed in a rather
peculiar locality. The people who figure in the anecdotes are members of the
wealthy upper classes, and those to whom Phillips refers on this and other
occasions are primarily the upper classes of Melbourne. What those people said
and did was of little concern to most Australians, except those who had a
direct interest in seeking their custom and their patronage. Few Australians
knew anybody who belonged to the Adelaide (or the Melbourne or the Union) Club,
had any expectation or practical desire to enter it, or cared about what its
members thought or did. The club members may have looked down on the rest of
the community, and in particular on those who bought the novels of Thwaites or,
later, Hills hoists and Holden motor cars, but most Australians continued to
buy those things and refrained from looking up to those who were looking down.
What the anecdotes
illustrate, and are intended to illustrate, is a sense of insecurity, but what
they do not make clear is that this sense of insecurity was, effectively, an
upper-class phenomenon, the insecurity of the nouveaux riches. The riches in
Australia were all pretty nouveaux, and nowhere more so than in Melbourne.
While that city was founded in 1834, it was a small country town until it was
transformed by the Gold Rushes. When Phillips was born in 1900, that
transformation had occurred less than 50 years earlier, and much of the wealth
had been acquired much more recently. So it was a case of very nouveaux riches
in a parvenu society. Added to this was the fact that the city in the early
years of this century was the home of not one but two Vice-Regal establishments
through which social acceptability and assurance could be sought. This all
produced a classic recipe for social insecurity and the jostling and
pretensions that might function as a means of overcoming it. Perhaps these
conditions survived into the 1940s, although they must have been weaker by that
time. But most members of the community, in Melbourne as in other parts of
Australia, did not share the anxieties and did not need to look for an antidote
to them. They were much more like John Bowden.
Another general attitude
that is said to have prevailed in Australia, and to have encouraged people to
cringe, is a sense and a celebration of failure and defeat. This line of
argument is conveniently summed up by Alomes (1988:214-15):
‘Colonial inferiority
was reinforced by colonial experience of defeat . . . Defeat has long been
enshrined in Australian symbols, folklore and history. Like all colonies it has few heroes of its
own, and long saw its past as not worthy of much interest. Australia's heroes
have been mainly anti-heroes the defeated or dead, or horses, including the
boxer Les Darcy, Ned Kelly, the lost explorers Burke and Wills, and champion
racehorse Phar Lap ... The celebration of defeat has always found its
apotheosis in Anzac Day and in war memorials.’
Alomes's particular
claim that Australia -long saw its past as not worthy of much interest' is one
that he states in several different ways in a number of contexts. It is also
echoed by other people who associate it with the cultural cringe. It deserves
and will be given a fairly extended discussion of its own. Most of the rest of
the detail here I suggest, is either seriously inaccurate or irrelevant to the
claims that it is supposed to support.
Most of every country's
heroes are dead, and many heroes have achieved their truly heroic status in
defeat or death. Hector Beowulf Roland and Oliver, King Arthur, the Young
Pretender, Horatio Nelson, General Gordon, and Captain Scott and his companions
are moderately well-known examples. The incidence of the dead and defeated has
not been shown to be unusually high in Australia It has been made to appear so
only by the omission of the names of others and the repetition of a popular
(among publicists) misinterpretation of the significance of Anzac Day. Henry
Parkes, Melba, Billy Hughes Mannix, Kingsford Smith, Jack Lang, Gladys
Moncrieff, Bradman and possibly Monash became heroes while they were alive and
because they were successful; in some cases, notably that of Lang, death or
failure brought about their demotion. Anzac Day recalls (or used to recall
before contemporary ideologists got to work on it) the belief that in their
first serious test the troops of the new nation were not defeated, although
they faced terrible difficulties that were not of their own making. They did not gain much, but they were never
driven back. That interpretation of what happened at the Dardanelles may be
correct or incorrect, but it sustained the ‘myth of Anzac' during and beyond
the interwar period. And the broader ideology of Anzac and the RSL — that
organisation which is both goad and enigma to Left intellectuals — has not
depended only or primarily on the events at Gallipoli. Its main constituents have been achievements:
the achievements of the Light Horse in the Middle East and above all -the
Australian victories in France in 1918', from Villers-Brettoneux to Amiens and
beyond. The whole popular attitude to Australia's participation in the War of
1914-18 was suffused with a sense of success not failure (Wood, 1944:317-22).
That sense was not in any way contradicted or undermined by the erection of war
memorials. The mourning or praise of the dead who have helped to bring victory
is familiar enough as a human practice to merit no special comment.
Alomes's (now-conventional)
treatment of the significance of Anzac Day indicates that the cultural-cringe
hypothesis not only relies on false information, but that it also generates
false information as facts are reshaped in order to fit its requirements or the
predilections of those who embrace it.
Another form of this process is the hasty or careless attribution of the
cringe to people on the basis of casual or unexamined assumptions. An interesting example of this is the
passage in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia to which I referred
earlier as the fifth and most substantial reference to the cringe in that work.
The relevant passage appears in Peter
Pierce's article in the volume, and it follows a brief account of the contents
of Douglas Sladen's A Century of Australian Song, published in the Centennial
year 1888. It runs:
‘A decade afterwards…Henry Gyles Turner and Alexander
Sutherland considered the extent of The Development of Australian Literature
(1898). They opened with a lament
which — in a later year — would have been regarded as cringing: “'even if our history had been
pregnant with the sublimest material, instead of hopelessly commonplace,
we have, by the very nature of our
surroundings, been precluded from developing the local Motley or Macaulay’.'
(Bennett et al., 1988:80). [Note 4]
Well, Turner and
Sutherland did not do that. They did not open with that lament, and if their
lament is enough to convict them of cringing, few indeed could be declared
innocent. What they opened with was a few paragraphs that might — in a later
year — be paraphrased as a claim that Australians used to display a cultural
cringe but by 1898 were ceasing to do so:
‘Australian literature
begins to assume some definiteness of form. Though still of utter immaturity,
it is gathering a certain individuality of its own, and asserts its usefulness
in its own department and in its own fashion. During half-a-century it has had
of necessity to be judged entirely by an alien standard, the test being always
what the English reader was likely to think of it, what an English critic would
be likely to say of it.
But now, less
frequently, do we ask what other people have to say about Australian
literature; we are growing more and more concerned to know what Australian
literature has to say to ourselves. And, of a certainty, we begin to realise
that its writers, though their rank is far from the very highest, have the
power of raising in Australian minds emotions that are peculiar, and agreeable,
and such as are not elsewhere by us to be attained.
This is especially true
in the domain of poetry.’ (Turner & Sutherland, 1898:vii)
The two authors were
quick to dissociate themselves and other Australians from 'any great tendency
to exclude the greatest of our Anglo-Saxon literature', and thus to avoid any
commitment to purely local criteria (p.x).
But they developed with some force and some subtlety their point about
poetry. This, they argued, 'must be judged by its capacity to awaken emotions',
and the reader's emotional response depends on his or her prior experiences
(pp. vii-viii). ('Clearly', they maintained, 'the reader has to bring to his
reading of poetry, fully as much as the poet had to bring to the writing of
it.') Since Australian experiences are in various ways different from English
ones, they explained, persons brought up in Australia will respond more readily
to a good deal of Australian verse than to a good deal of English verse: 'Australia has now nearly four millions of native-born
population to whom a great deal must be second-hand that is most delicious to
the Englishman in the descriptions of the natural poets' (p.x). For example,
they suggested, 'the most musical description of scented hawthorns and
nightingales warbling through the twilight dusk will waken but a far-off
emotion' in these native-born Australians (p.viii). The greatest English works
will retain their appeal, but only because they focus on universal experience,
and transcend a concern with local European conditions and circumstances.
It was only after 30
pages of text that Turner and Sutherland reached the passage quoted by Pierce.
It too was a development from their general point about the significance of
experience, and it was directed in the first instance at the character rather
than the quality of Australian writing. In this aspect it was not very
different from the fairly common complaints that '[one] of the difficulties
confronting writers who wished to write about postwar Australian life was the
boredom of actual existence for most people' or the fact that 'Australia ... is
the land where nothing happens' (McKernan, 1989:42-3); these complaints do not
appear to prompt charges of cringing.
But the real subject of the authors' lament was not the 'hopelessly
commonplace' character of Australian history.
It was 'the very nature of our surroundings', that is the smallness of
the Australian literary market with its consequence that, except for fulltime
journalists, 'we have not yet got any men or women in Australia living
exclusively by the products of their pens' (Turner & Sutherland,
1898:25). This again is a very familiar
point, accepted and voiced no less frequently by those who are anxious to
detect and expose examples of cringing than by those whose misdemeanours they
expose. In sum I think that it would be impossible to maintain either that
Turner and Sutherland had an unthinking admiration for
everything English, or
that they held any view which precluded regard for any excellence that might be
found at home. As pioneers in the location and discussion of Australian writers
and their works they had some influence on later students, but that influence
was not exercised in favour of a cringe.
I mentioned earlier,
when referring to the intellectual atmosphere within universities, that some
more specific complaints had been made concerning their operations and
performance. One of these is a claim that — in the words of Alomes (1988:224-5)
— in their employment of academic staff they awarded too many posts to
'foreigners or to returning graduates of the same institution who [had] been
sanctified abroad', and had thus adopted a 'habit of bowing before overseas
degrees'. On this occasion, Alomes does
provide some concrete evidence to support those claims.
One piece of his
evidence is that '30 per cent of lectureships' in the traditional centres of
the cultural cringe go to the unwelcome foreigners and the sanctified returning
graduates. Unless an overseas degree awarded to an Australian is to be regarded-as
a disqualification, these raw figures — applying, apparently, to lectureships
in all subjects — strike me as enormously unimpressive. The other piece of
evidence relates to 'English departments, the apotheosis of the cultural
cringe'. It consists in the fact that '[despite] a staff increase in English
departments in Australian universities between 1947 and 1973 from 26 to 246',
the proportion of those with 'Oxbridge or London degrees' had only dropped from
50 to 45 per cent. Again this is pretty unimpressive, and indeed
uninformative. In the field of English
language and literature, possession of a degree awarded in England might
reasonably be regarded as an advantage in the making of at least some
appointments. But even if that
consideration is disregarded, the figures do not establish any bias against
local talent primarily because they do not give any information about the
numbers of staff who had obtained their first degrees in Australia.
In that connection, and
if we revert to the period when the cringe is supposed to have been
all-pervading, it is interesting and relevant to note that - if the figures are
correct - already 50 per cent of lecturers in English departments did not have
Oxbridge or London degrees. It appears
that local talent was then being recognised, or had been recognised. To this I
will add a personal recollection about the Faculties of Arts and Economics at
Sydney University in the 1940s. At that
time Australian candidates were appointed to Chairs in Economics (two),
Government French German, History and Psychology. Some of them had degrees from
overseas as well as Australian universities, some not Several of them were succeeding Australians in their respective
Chairs At the same time, it is true, non-Australians were appointed to posts
within the university, but it seems to me that any attempt to show that there
was a systematic bias against Australian candidates in that university and at
that time would soon founder. If it were not to do so it would require, as a
necessary but by no means a sufficient condition a much more careful and
comprehensive collection and analysis of statistics than Alomes has undertaken.
Until and unless he does undertake it successfully, his complaints do not
deserve to be treated seriously.
Alomes extends his
critique of the prewar universities into the courses they offered and the
subjects for research that they approved Some of his points are best considered
in common with similar ones made by other people, but a couple have a
distinctive form and can be discussed separately. These are his claims that
until the 1970s the universities displayed an -indifference to Australian
culture' and paid virtually no attention to Australian subjects'. He then offers evidence of a sort, to back
up those claims in the form of two questions: ‘In what other country, it might
be asked, are there so few courses dealing with its own culture, society and
history? How many universities still
only have one or two undergraduate courses in Australian history, geography,
literature or politics, or even less when staff are on leave?' (Alomes,
1988:224-5).
The answers to those
questions might well be interesting if (contrary to experience) the statistics
could be presented in a rational form with acceptable definitions of ‘a course’
and other variables, and with due attention to institutional, historical and
other differences between the countries being compared, and to the modes in
which the statistics were collected and aggregated. But Alomes seems not to be
able to supply any information in any form which would help to provide answers,
and it is therefore pointless to pursue the matter m the way he has raised it.
But I expect to show conclusively that neither Australian universities nor
Australian schools (5) were indifferent to Australia or Australian subjects,
and that Alomes and others who advance such claims are either confused about or
indifferent to the evidence. .
In inquiring into this
matter, it is important to look carefully at the terms in which the claims have
been stated and the further evidence that has been brought forward in support
of them. I propose to do that by first quoting a number of passages which
either make or bear upon the claim, and then commenting on the quality of the
evidence on which their authors are relying. [Note 6]
The first two of these
passages come from Geoffrey Serle’s (1973)
book, From Deserts the Prophets Come, and might be said to bear
upon rather than to make the claim:
‘The universities [in
the interwar period] made little contribution to the study of Australian
society, partly…because the social sciences were so undeveloped and because of
lack of interest…One seeks in vain for any major research in Australian
government, sociology or current affairs, other than in economics or history,
from the universities in the inter-war period, (p. 151)
It is extraordinary
that, not forgetting G. W. Rusden, H. G. Turner and Timothy Coghlan, there had
been such little interest in investigating the Australian past before the
1920s.’ (p.152)
The rest of the authors
whom I quote make the claim about neglect in unmistakable terms, although some
refer to a general neglect, some direct their remarks at the universities, and
some refer mainly to the schools:
(i) Michael Davie in Australia: The Daedalus
Symposium (Graubard, 1985:371):
‘Why, then, did the
British settle [Australia]? It is only in the past twenty years that Australian historians have begun to investigate their
own origins, an omission attributed, by Australian historians themselves, to a
misguided absorption in European history, especially British, at the expense of
their own An outsider may surmise, without evidence, that the
omission may have been connected with a feeling that the first years of
Australia were, until very recently, too painful to contemplate .0nce
latter-day Australian historians began to investigate the origins of Australia,
they questioned the old idea that the pathetic occupants of the prison hulks
had been shipped off to the other side of the world merely to get them out of
the way The British government's motives were, as now seems to be established,
largely imperial.’
(ii) Andrew Wells in Intellectual Movements and
Australian Society (Head & Walter, 1988:214-15):
’[Some] attempts to describe, interpret and explain Australia's history had
been made. Insofar as the ruling culture in Australia maintained
powerful links with British institutions attitudes and traditions, Australia's
past remained neglected' The university system, which reinforced the
Anglo-cultural dominance, kept the study of Australian history largely outside
its precincts and thereby reinforced its somewhat eccentric framework.’
(I find it hard to reconcile these statements about
universities with what Wells says on the next page, but the meaning of
‘…kept…largely outside its precincts' seems clear enough and clearly intended.)
(iii) Brian Head in Intellectual
Movements and Australian Society (Head & Walter, 1988:17):
‘Despite the formation of public affairs institutes during
[the 1920s and 1930s] there was little research on political and social issues
in the universities, and the quality of current affairs discussion in the press
was very poor.’
(iv) Stephen Alomes in A Nation at Last? (1988:29):
’The virtual absence of Australian heroes and the Australian past in school
curricula was another form of colonial culture denying historical memory to the
settler colony.’
(v) Stephen Alomes in A Nation at Last? (1988:222):
’The imperial and European orientation of school geography, history and
literature reinforced the superiority associated with language [i.e. attitudes
to the Australian accent]. Maps of the world on Mercator's projection inflated
the size of Europe and reduced the size of the continents of the southern
hemisphere in a projection of northern narcissism. World time zones were
measured from Greenwich Observatory on the Thames near London. History
and geography were largely British and imperial with the Australian reduced to
imperial tales of explorers and primary industry. Such an emphasis
confirmed for students the view that the real and interesting was British and
European, the dull and dreary Australian. In novelist Shirley Hazzard's memory
of schooling in the 1930s and 1940s, literature “had placed Australia in
perpetual, flagrant violation of reality”…History varied from the rich
colourful story expressed in the colonial's view of the coronation on the
class-room wall to “Australian history, given once a week only” and “easily
contained in a small book, dun-coloured as the scenes described”.’
It seems to me that what we have here is a process similar to the game of
Chinese whispers, starting from Serle's statements but producing something very
different at the end. Serle's statements were already contestable but were also
carefully (and rather strangely) qualified. In the course of transmission the
contestable came to be treated as incontestable, and the qualifications were
simply overlooked, so that the message in its final form consists of a set of
gross distortions. The character and extent of the distortions can best be seen
through a closer look at what Serle said and the evidence for his assertions.
In the first place it must be recognised that Serle explicitly excepted history
(along with economics) from his generalisation about the lack of major research
in the interwar period. Indeed, he went on to remark, and to illustrate his
point, that during that time 'the few university teachers of history and
research students…made a remarkable contribution to blocking in outlines of
Australian history' (Serle, 1973:152). His comment that there was 'such
little interest' applies to the period before 1920. But what constitutes a
little and what a lot depends partly on one's expectations. Serle's
expectations seem to have been high here, and his supporting reference to the
work of Rusden (1897), Turner (1904) and Coghlan (1894,1918) does less than
justice to many other people who wrote about Australia's past before the
university-based work of the 1920s got under way.
The bibliographies in the Australian volume of the Cambridge History of the
British Empire reveal that about 20 works dealing with the history of one
colony or the Australian colonies as a whole were published in the 19th
century, and in the early years of the new century there were many more than
Turner and Coghlan writing on specialised topics such as exploration. In
New South Wales in particular, there were important works by Flanagan (1862),
Bonwick (1882), and Barton and Britton (1889-94). Rusden's History of
Australia was preceded by the Sutherlands' much shorter work with the same
title (1877), and it was succeeded by a series of relatively short general
histories designed for the general reader and the more serious student, by
Jenks (1895), Jose (1899), Scott (1916) and Dunbabin (1922). It is once
again true that most of these volumes did not fall still-born from the press
but went through several (in some cases many) editions. Moreover governments
and their agencies in several of the colonies, and later in federated
Australia, gave some official and monetary support to historians and their
projects. They helped to finance the making of Bonwick's transcripts, to
house the collections of Petherick and Mitchell, to produce official histories
and to publish collections of official records, and thus to provide more, and
more accessible, material for the use of later historians. The
general histories were soon accompanied by works designed more deliberately to
be used as textbooks in schools at various levels. The Sutherlands'
little volume was perhaps intended for that market and certainly found an
enduring place in it. Its later competitors included works written by academics
such as Walter Murdoch (n.d.), W. K. Hancock (1934) G. V. Portus (1936), and F.
L. W. Wood (1944), and others involved more directly in the school system such
as K. R. Cramp (1935) J P Chard (1928), C. H. Currey (1933), H. L. Harris
(1936) and G. T Spaull [who wrote primary school textbooks in history,
geography and English between 1926 and 1960]. Even if we discount the textbooks
written in the 1920s and the 1930s, it seems unduly exacting and censorious to
say that the Australian community had shown little interest in investigating
the Australian past. To say that the Australian past remained neglected seems
utterly absurd. And to say that the university system kept Australian history
largely outside its precincts is to indulge in fantasy: what it did was to
appoint people interested in Australian history to posts within itself (Scott,
Mills, Roberts, Shann, Portus, Hancock, etc.), and to watch benignly as they
did further work in the field and encouraged others to do the same.
The absurdities and the fantasies multiply as one looks more closely at many of
the statements in the passages quoted above. Davie was quite wrong, for
example, when he claimed that until 20 years earlier Australians had not
investigated their own origins or had left unquestioned the 'old idea' about
the convicts in the hulks. There can be very few textbooks or other general
histories of Australia from earlier periods which do not show a lively interest
in the topic and do not refer to various possible reasons for Britain's
interest in establishing a colony at Botany Bay. (Presumably Davie had
not heard of the Sydney suburb called Matraville which, like Banksia, is not
far from the shores of the Bay.) And not 20 but 40 years before Davie wrote,
there had been published a widely-admired work devoted specifically to The
Foundation of Australia, whose author (E. M. O'Brien) included a careful
summary of preceding discussions of the British Government's motives. O'Brien,
working with the evidence that was then available, rejected the 'imperial
thesis', but his account makes it clear that the thesis was quite familiar to
himself and other Australian historians (O'Brien, 1937:126-7). The outcome of
Davie's foray into Australian historiography is a body of misinformation about
the priorities and the achievements of earlier generations of Australian
historians.
The stock of misinformation is sensibly increased in the passages that I have
quoted from Alomes. It should already be clear that Australian history
was not 'virtually absent' from school curricula: people do not write, publish,
or revise and reprint textbooks for subjects that are either not offered, or
have very few students. Australian history was studied, in both primary and
secondary classes, and it was taken seriously. As Alan Barcan records,
Australian as well as English history was introduced into the state schools in
the 1880s, and it remained there until it was partly absorbed for a time into
the 'progressive' subject Social Studies in the late 1930s and early 1940s
(Barcan, 1980:157, 281-2). Much the same is true of the geography and the
literature of Australia: places for them existed in the curricula, textbooks
and maps were produced for them by academics (e.g. J. W. Gregory) and
schoolteachers ― S H Smith (n.d.), Spaull, C. A. Wittber (1923), and E.
Ford and A. R. Mclnnes (1940)7 ― and pupils studied the books and the
maps.
Alomes tries to support his case by quoting Shirley Hazzard's memories of the
teaching of Australian subjects in the 1930s and 1940s. There are two
fundamental flaws in his appeal to this material as evidence. The first is that
the work from which he quotes (The Transit of Venus) is a novel, not a
set of memoirs; the relevant passages are best read as an imaginative account
of a young girl's response to what she encountered, not as an historical
record. The source of the second flaw is that Shirley Hazzard is too young to
have first-hand memories of the teaching of history or geography (or much in
the way of literature) in the 1930s. If the guide-books are correct she
was aged eight in 1939, and is unlikely to have studied any form of history or
geography by that time. And when she did begin to study them, the Coronation
(which took place when she was six) had been quite overtaken in the classrooms
of New South Wales by later events such as the spectacle of the
Sesqui-Centenary celebrations, the excitements and fears of the Munich Crisis
and then the War. By 1940, little girls' memories of the Coronation, and
teachers' interest in it, must have been as faded as any surviving posters
relating to it.
On more specific issues the memories of the character in the
novel are demonstrably either false or unrepresentative. Textbooks
of Australian history came in various colours and various sizes in both the
1930s and the 1940s. Some were blue, some were red and some had other colours
including ‘dun'. Their outward appearance did not differ much from that of
books dealing with British or European history, partly because all publishers
wanted to supply 'serviceable' covers, and partly because books dealing with
Australian and non-Australian topics were sometimes produced by the same
publisher. They tended to be smaller than the non-Australian ones ―
Australia's history was noticeably short ― but this was not always or
invariably the case. Thus Chard's History of Australia for
Commonwealth Schools, Cramp's A Story of the Australian People, and Modem
British History by Roberts and Currey (1932) (covering the period from
1688), all look to be of much the same size, although the last of these is in
fact more tightly packed. The contents of
the works dealing with Australia varied as much as their colours, but the view
that they consisted entirely of ‘imperial tales of explorers and primary
industry' or failed to mention Australian heroes is quite fanciful. They of course included tales about
those things; any book that purported to be a history of Australia and did not
have a fair bit to say about them would really be a history of some other
country with the same or a similar name (Austria, perhaps?). But they included
other things as well, such as descriptions of the convict system, the conflicts
between Exclusives and Emancipists, constitutional changes and 'the growth of
responsible government', the gold discoveries and the Eureka Stockade, the
federation movement, secondary industry and the tariff issue, native writers
and their writing and Australia's involvement in the War of 1914-18 and beyond.
A treatment of all of
those things is to be found, for example, in a book that I have mentioned in
another connection, namely Wood's A Concise History of Australia, which
might be described as ‘dun-coloured' in some of its printings and might
therefore be the target of Shirley Hazzard's denigratory remarks. In describing
these activities and developments, the authors of the texts naturally gave
prominence to the leading or easily-identifiable participants, from Wentworth,
Macquarie and E.S. Hall to Peter Lalor, Parkes, Deakin and Barton, and ensured
that they came to be seen as heroes. If any one theme could be said to run
through most or all of the histories, it would be 'the growth to nationhood'.
Accordingly, signs of initiative and independence were sought and identified:
the anti-transportation movements, the successful demands for the establishment
of parliamentary institutions, the work of the Constitutional Conventions, the
change in the country's status from part of the Empire to membership of the
Commonwealth, the Australian Government's participation in the Versailles
Conference and its membership of the League of Nations. Members of later
generations may not regard those things as important but to the authors and
their readers they were very significant.
Similarly, and despite
Alomes's strange complaint about the Mercator projection and his still stranger
complaint about time-zones, the authors of geography books went to some trouble
to draw attention to the size and significance of the Australian land-mass.
They reminded their readers that Australia was not an island (like Britain) or
part of a continent (like France or Germany), but that its mainland was itself
a continent (Smith, n.d.:43); that Sydney and Melbourne were among the largest
cities in the Commonwealth, having outstripped some of the most famous British
ones; and that the size of Australia as a whole was not greatly less than that
of the United States of America, was vastly greater than that of Britain, and
bore comparison with that of continental Europe (Ford & McInnes, 1940:1;
Wittber, 1923:4). A not unfamiliar teaching device of the period was a map of
Australia on which most of the countries of Europe had been superimposed, in
order to illustrate how easily they could be accommodated within Australia's
borders. Chard's History of Australia for Commonwealth Schools contains
one of these as its Frontispiece; G. S. Browne's Australia: A General
Account (1929) contains another.
It turns out, then, that
the complaints that the study of Australian history (or geography) was
neglected are quite strikingly ill-founded. It is, however, always possible to
ask for more, and to ask why more was not done, for example in the
universities. We have seen Serle's judgment that the contribution of university
teachers and others in the interwar period consisted in 'blocking in outlines'.
'Should they not', it may be asked,
'have gone on to fill in the details?
Can we explain their failure to do so except by positing the existence
of a cultural cringe that acted as a curb?' The answer to those questions is
that we can readily explain the volume of their output without referring to a
cultural cringe. A perfectly adequate explanation is supplied by Serle, in a
couple of sentences immediately before his observations about the smallness of
the universities' contribution:
‘The universities continued to operate on a pinchpenny
basis; it was common for a professor to teach half a dozen courses with the
help of one or two lamentably paid junior assistants. Research was a luxury, not reasonably to be expected.’ (Serle,
1973:151)
In the circumstances,
the question to be asked is how they achieved so much, not so little. The
cultural cringe is an unnecessary entity in this environment. It cannot be
inferred from the facts as we know them. And I think that it remains an
unnecessary entity if we take up the rest of Serle's point that there was no
major research in Australian government, sociology or current affairs.
That judgment seems to
under-rate the work of the lawyers (who were interested in more than
constitutional law in the narrow sense) and of F. A. Bland. The latter's Government
in Australia (1939, 1944) looks to me like the product of major research.
But if we accept Serle's judgment, it becomes pertinent to ask where in the
universities, except in departments of history and economics, such major
research might have been carried on. In
fact a little was done, or at least initiated, in departments of geography and
anthropology, but they had other commitments and few resources to spare. [Note
8] And in order to explain the relatively small range of departments we once more
do not need to proceed beyond the pinchpenny (or impoverished) state of the
universities.
The discussion necessarily becomes more complex when we turn to the other main area where the cringe is either inferred or employed as an explanation, namely, the character of the economy and the determination of economic policy. The source of the complexity is that most of the theorists of the cringe incorporate into their characterisation of the economy a certain amount of controversial theory, and it is difficult to avoid being drawn into a debate about the merits of that theory. It may yet be possible to establish common ground and to avoid the debate on this occasion. But it will not be possible to avoid saying something about the theory and how it is employed.
The theory is
'dependency theory', which was 'all the rage' a few years ago as a purported
explanation of the poverty and underdevelopment of so-called Third World
countries. Its crucial features are the identification of some economies and
some kinds of economy as dependent upon others which are dominant, and the
assertion that the dependent adopt patterns of economic activity and
organisation which serve the interests of the dominant and independent but not
those of the dependent. Different versions of the theory can give greater or
less weight to consciousness, motivation and political organisation on the one
hand, or to underlying economic forces on the other. But they cannot
accommodate a significant sharing of power or of benefits (a coincidence of
interests) between the different participants in the relationships: either of
those circumstances would imply interdependence, not dominance and dependence.
The signs (or sometimes the sources) of dependence are said to be such things
as having a high proportion of primary and unprocessed or little-processed
products in one's exports, being an importer (not an exporter) of capital, and
having either a small and weak secondary sector or one which produces consumers'
goods but few or no capital goods. An economy with such a secondary sector is
sometimes described as having experienced a truncated or semi-industrial form
of development. Correspondingly, an economy which produces capital goods on a
significant scale is a mature one, and one which has to import foodstuffs and
raw materials, and to rely on returns from foreign investments or the export of
capital goods, is dominant.
This sort of analysis
has been applied to Australia by various observers, and those who write about
the cultural cringe seem to find it
very attractive. At
one level its
application both contains
some obscurities and involves controversial claims. The principal
obscurity relates to the ground on which a truncated or immature form of
development is judged to be objectionable. Sometimes the suggestion seems to be
that it leads to the enrichment of others (the imperial and dominant countries)
at the cost of the impoverishment of Australia; but at other times it appears
to be that the lack of a highly-developed secondary industry (including a
capital-goods sector) is incompatible with national and individual
self-respect. If either of those is adopted it becomes a controversial claim
which other people might be disposed to dispute. But at another level one can
render these issues irrelevant by acquiescing in a definition of a
‘dependent economy’ as one that exports primary products and imports capital
and manufactures, and accept that Australia is - by definition - such an
economy It then becomes possible to
focus on the questions how and why it became an economy o that kind, and this
is what - up to a point - the theorists of a cultural cringe want to do.
Their answer is of course that the dependent economy is the product of attitudes of dependency and subordination, a willingness to serve others-interests and to neglect one's own, and to follow indiscriminately the lead of others and to accept whatever subordinate role the others allocate. (They thus, at least in this part of their argument, adopt a ‘motivational’ or ‘voluntarist’ rather than a ‘material forces’ form of dependency theory.) Alomes, as one might expect, makes this kind of point a number of times. ‘Pastoral, commercial and financial capitalists', he maintains, ‘saw their role as dealing in and financing the export of wool, wheat and minerals and the import of British manufactures and investment capital' (1988-213) To this he attributes the circumstance that ‘economic growth in manufacturing has been left mainly to foreign-owned companies' (p 214) The primary-industry orientation of the CSIRO, and the -limited development of the universities', he similarly attributes to the persistence of colonial attitudes- (p.231). In order to explain further the ‘truncated’ development of manufacturing, he deploys his claim that any preference for imported goods is a mere “colonial assumption” (p 233). It is presumably on this basis that he feels able to say that the persistence of the 'nineteenth-century imperial division of labour, the exchange of wool and wheat for manufactures' is 'no longer natural but contrived' (pp.213-14).
Another commentator who takes the same sort
of line is Donald Horne. He maintains that 'it was not by necessity but by
"choice" that, after Canada, of the prosperous capitalist societies
Australia is the world's most dependent and foreign-controlled economy ... [by
a choice] not related to economic pragmatism, taking one's economic good where
one finds it, but to a whole inherited cast of mind that can see no
alternatives'. He implies that Australians' pride in the fact that the country
had not sought a moratorium on its foreign debts during the Great Depression
rested on and bequeathed 'an attitude towards foreign capital that is far more
deferential towards foreign capital than mere considerations of prudence would
dictate. It is as if foreign capital is good in itself and foreign money (at
least from prestigious nations) is better than Australian money' (Graubard,
1985:187). In more detail, he maintains
that even after the war 'the conventional wisdom was that the industrialisation
of Australia was better conducted by foreign companies. A Labor Government, for example, when
wishing to establish a motor vehicle industry, ignored Australian initiatives
and called in General Motors' (Graubard, 1985:189). In more detail still,
Andrew Wells has identified the historian and economist Edward Shann as a
leading publicist who took 'a classical free trade attitude in his economics
and economic history' and 'untiringly defended Anglo-colonial economic
dependency' (Head & Walter 1988:218).
It is not hard to find
claims of this sort. It is much harder
to find evidence for them. It would be interesting to know whether Alomes has
any ground at all for his belief that pastoralist, commercial and financial
capitalists dealt in and financed the export of primary products and the import
of capital and manufactures because they 'saw it as their role' and not because
they saw these as the most profitable of the activities available to them; if
he has, he is being remarkably discreet about it. The same comments apply to
the claim that industrial development was 'left' to foreign-owned companies. On
the face of things, when the foreign corporations seized the initiative and
moved into gaps that Australian investors had left unoccupied, they did so
because they were much better equipped than any Australians to engage in the
relevant activities. What Alomes needs to establish is that the Australians
were just as well-equipped but had been duped into believing that they were
not, or that they would have been just as well- equipped if the CSIRO had
behaved differently or some parts of the
universities had been financed more generously. He does not in fact try
to demonstrate either of those things, either in general or in any particular
case; prudently, I think. (We shall return to this question a little further on,
when we reach
Home's beliefs about the
motor industry.) His view that
preferences for imports over domestic products rest on a mere 'colonial
assumption' remains itself a mere assumption, and a very implausible one as we
have already seen.
Home's remarks suffer
from the same defects, and from some additional ones. He does not seem to appreciate that in one important respect
foreign money (and especially money from the prestigious nations) is better
than Australian money. It can be used to purchase foreign goods and thus in the
short run to add to the supplies available to Australians, as Australian money
cannot. It is true that in this matter
there is an alternative and therefore a
choice, but it is ridiculous to suggest that governments or their advisers had
"an inherited cast of mind that [could] see no alternatives' or that they
were not conscious of making a choice.
Home's own offhand remarks do nothing to elucidate the nature of the
alternative or the choice. The alternative was (as it now is) to do without the
goods and services that the foreign money could purchase, and then to make a
whole series of further decisions about adapting the economy to its more
straitened circumstances. Adapting it
in a way that would promote secondary industry, or the Australian ownership of
secondary industry, would have been very difficult. It is easy enough to create regulations, and not too difficult to
establish regulatory agencies, but it is very difficult to enforce shifts in
resources and difficult for regulatory agencies to put themselves in control of
events and to avoid being controlled by them.
What Home says about
Australia's record as a debtor during the Depression is equally ill-founded,
and his complaints about the Chifley government's treatment of the motor
industry are hard to reconcile with the known facts. Early in the 1980s when
international bankers and other lenders, stimulated by sustained inflation and
vicariously generous governments, were freely distributing their largesse
around the world, it may have seemed irrational to establish or maintain one's
record as a good credit risk. It no longer does so, and it certainly was not so
during the Depression. Mere dictates of prudence were quite enough to encourage
the Australian authorities to show 'loyalty to' (i.e. to keep faith with) their
creditors. Incidentally, it is
misleading to say that this 'loyalty' was directed to 'the Bank of
England'. It was directed to the body
of holders of Australian bonds and other securities, whoever they were.
In a consideration of
Home's references to the motor industry, there are two major difficulties. The
first is to identify the 'Australian initiatives' that he believes the Labor
government ignored. There seem to have been four of these: Australian
Consolidated Industries (whose pre-war plans to begin the manufacture of
vehicles had been frustrated by the war), Liberty Motors, Pengana Motors, and
the company created by L. J. Hartnett, the former Managing Director of General
Motors in Australia (see Butlin & Schedvin, 1977:752-62; Berulsen, 1989:131). But Home may have had
in mind some other, more obscure, candidates for the role. The second problem
is to judge whether any of these was credible as an alternative to the
foreign-owned companies such as General Motors Holden; that is, whether any was really able and
willing to produce an 'Australian car' and not merely to assemble vehicles from
mainly-imported components as the existing, foreign-owned, companies had been
doing. The production of a genuinely Australian car required not merely the
establishment of motor vehicle plants and processes, but the establishment (by
the principal manufacturer or others) of a whole series of ancillary plants and
processes adapted to the production of components that were shaped to the
particular requirements of the manufacturer and were not already produced in
Australia. The need for the ancillary
equipment and operations was simultaneously one of the principal attractions
and one of the principal problems to be faced in the development of an
Australian car. The problems were especially serious when the Labor government
was in office, because the 'dollar shortage' was then so prominent a feature of
the international economy.
The nature of some of
the problems can be illustrated by reference to the best-documented and most
nearly successful of the Australian initiatives, namely Hartnett's. (Hartnett
was an Englishman, but he had lived in Australia since 1934, he had been a
strong supporter and perhaps a principal sponsor of the Holden project, and he
continued to live here after he parted company with General Motors in 1947.) He
hoped to raise the capital for his project in Australia. Initially he seemed to
receive a good deal of encouragement from both State and federal governments,
but gradually they cooled, especially after the Labor government was replaced
by a non-Labor one in Canberra at the end of 1949. The project finally
collapsed, according to Hartnett, when the Australian company that had
contracted to supply the body panels for the vehicles could not or would not do
so. Whatever the justice of Hartnett's complaints against the governments,
there is a vital point that needs to be understood (and that seems to have
escaped Home's attention, if it is Hartnett's experience that he is referring
to). As an exercise in the manufacture of
motor vehicles, what Hartnett was proposing was considerably less ambitious and
significant than the production of the Holden. It was to involve the assembly
in Australia of a French-designed front-wheel drive vehicle, and the materials
were to include a large component of imported parts and equipment. 'Our plan', Hartnett related, 'was to have
the overseas manufacturers make the engine, transmission, the castings, and
send them to Australia where we'd assemble them with Australian-made panels'
(Hartnett, 1981:249). He went on to
explain that the imported parts were to include the gears and gear boxes, the
engines, the brakes, the instruments, the universal joints in the front-wheel
drive, the electrical equipment, the clutch, the steering wheels and the
wheels.
If the plan had
succeeded, its mode of production would have resembled much more closely that
of General Motors before rather than after it embarked on production of the
Holden. It could not have done much to reduce Australia's dependence on the
dreaded rest of the world, and indeed (like many other import-saving projects)
would have increased that dependence in certain respects. To change the character of the enterprise to
one which would employ Australian-made components would have been extraordinarily
difficult and perhaps impossible. It would have required large injections of
capital and the creation of a sophisticated components industry in an economy
which had already failed to produce an adequate supply of body panels. In terms of the government's ambition to get
an Australian car into production, it could never have been a serious
competitor with the General Motors project or have had an equal claim on
government help or promotion. [Note9]
It is doubtful whether
any of the other three Australian companies was as well placed as Hartnett's to
produce a car with significantly increased Australian content, or as determined to do so. The ease with which the
Labor government sidestepped Australian Consolidated Industries (headed by the
pugnacious W. J. Smith) suggests that this company was no longer very
interested in this form of enterprise. Information about the remaining two
companies is very sparse. Liberty Motors is said to have intended to base its
vehicle on an American design (Berulsen, 1989:131); it is difficult to see how it could have injected more Australian
content than Hartnett intended to do, or could have avoided or overcome the
problems he encountered. Pentana made
greater claims, but these were not tested and they must be subject to the same
doubts about the company's ability to achieve what General Motors was in fact
able to do. On the evidence, there is no reason to believe that the Labor
government made anything but a rational decision in regarding the 'Australian
initiatives' as unworthy of encouragement in relation to its objectives, and in
looking to the more experienced and highly-developed foreign enterprises. [Note
10] As on so many occasions, the treatment of rational discrimination as the
product of simple prejudice is gratuitous, and it acts as a barrier and a
disincentive to the gaining of understanding.
A blatant example of
misunderstanding is Andrew Wells's description of Edward Shann as one who
'untiringly defended Anglo-colonial economic dependency'. What is
unquestionable is that Shann untiringly criticised tariff protection and
what he regarded as the artificial cultivation of secondary industry, and
untiringly advocated the expansion of exports of primary products. He therefore supported the retention of one
aspect of the dependency-by-definition that I referred to above. Wells simply
jumps from that point to the assumption that Shann wanted to defend all aspects
of it and a real dependence on Britain. Shann's actual position was very
different from that one. As is well known, his activities as a publicist were
directed mainly to reducing Australia's dependence on overseas (i.e.
mainly British) lenders,
and to dissuading Australia from remaining tied to an increasingly
protectionist (and therefore, in his view, increasingly stagnant) British
economy. The course that he favoured for Australia, as he made very clear in
his Preface to his Economic History of Australia (the immediate target
of Wells' slighting remarks) was to seek 'self-reliance' by eschewing foreign
borrowing and by exploiting Australia's proximity to the markets of South and
East Asia. He believed that 'India, China and Japan [were] well started on the
road to industrialism' and would need the foodstuffs and other products in
relation to which Australia possessed comparative advantage, and that they
would be able to pay for them (Shann, 1930a:vii-viii). Those recommendations
summed up much of what he had been saying and writing on earlier occasions, and
he repeated them in slightly different and sometimes more aggressive forms in
the changed circumstances of the
Depression.
Some of those more
aggressive statements are to be found in the pamphlet entitled Quotas or
Stable Money? Three Essays on the Ottawa and London Conferences. 'If
"autarky" is to be [Britain's] future', he wrote in the first of the
three essays, 'we Australians must look squarely at the change in our
position. We are no longer children at
the maternal knee' (Shann, 1933:4). And the conclusion that he drew when
looking squarely was that Australia 'must…seek for herself fresh market
openings, especially where as in the East she has geographic and economic
advantages' (p.26). In the same set of
essays he was sharply critical of the British policy and policy-makers that
were on display at the Ottawa and World Economic Conferences. The real aim of
the British delegation at Ottawa, he wrote, was 'a sheltered home market for
British farmers and [rural] landlords as well as for British industrialists'
(p.5). Their strategy was "to throw on the Dominions the onus' of restricting
supplies of cheap foodstuffs to British working class families, they
gave undertakings which
were 'mere eyewash' and they made 'offers of co-operation' which were really
disguised commands and threats (pp.14-15).
And he was just as sceptical about the pretended disinterestedness of
the Australian Association of British Manufacturers when it came out in support
of struggling Australian manufacturers who were seeking an embargo on the
import of goods from Japan (p. 28). He did not have great expectations of
British altruism. But more fundamental than his attitude to contemporary
Britain was his hostility to overseas borrowing, and his confidence that there
was an alternative. He expressed this most fully and succinctly in a passage in
his paper of 1928 on 'Restriction or Free Enterprise?':
‘If we continue to
borrow abroad we shall mortgage with the interest bill every increase in our
productive power and send it to
swell the loanable
funds of New York
and London. Probably, as Mr Dyason argues, we can do
this without growing poorer. But why not manage and set our pace of development
by our own loanable capital? That would be ultimately to the advantage of both
public and private finance.’ (Shann,1930b:27)
There is evidently a
good deal in Shann's ideas with which Donald Horne, if not Wells, could agree.
But Shann was putting them forward in the 1920s and 1930s, and apparently
without damage to his role as a respected and sought-after adviser to
governments and private corporations.
Deference to London and New York and a desire to promote the interests
that they were promoting were evidently neither universal nor requisite in
economic life at that time.
IV. RISING ABOVE THE CULTURAL CRINGE
Donald Home is a thinker who fears that a
cultural cringe may still be hindering Australia's movement towards the kind of
country he would like it to be. Many others occasionally voice similar fears.
But more commonly, as I suggested at the outset, the cringe is seen as a
disease of which Australia was cured in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and
later symptoms of it are noted as regrettable consequences of the earlier
infection. 'I am much less cringing
than thou' is an important part of the message that allusions to the cringe are
intended to convey. It 'was a little
while ago', according to Thomas, that Australia was so inert, passive and
deferential. It was 'until the end of the Menzies era', according to Brian Head
that the assumption of local inferiority permeated Australian life. There is
much use of the past tense in other references to it and its
manifestations. This inexplicit
distancing of contemporary 'intellectual movements and Australian society' from
the cringe is sometimes complemented by specific claims that things are
different now. Several of the contributors to Head's and Walter's book point to
the innovations and the new spirit of innovation in the areas and activities
that they discuss. In other places Jim
Davidson writes of a new self-confidence, both among writers and the public at
large (Smith et al., 1984:19-23), lan Turner of 'a new awareness and a new
hope' among Australian artists (Dutton, 1976:76), and Craig Munro of an
'upsurge of Australian self-confidence beginning in the late 1960s and early
1970s (Introduction to Stephensen, 1986:vii-viii'). The historians of the cringe are claiming, in however qualified a
way, that there has been a break from the cringing past.
But the truth of that
claim is something that can also be tested, and one place where it can be
tested is in the intellectual life from which it and like claims issue. The setting for its testing is, of course,
to be found in attitudes to foreign things, that is in the extent and the basis
of the admiration accorded to them.
Particular tests are provided conveniently by Alomes in his article in Intellectual
Movements and Australian Society: he illustrates there 'the dependent
character' of earlier Australian intellectuals and their 'deference to overseas
models' by pointing out that their new departures were merely 'comparable with
changes occurring in other countries', and that their research and analysis
showed 'a strong emphasis on the reporting and assimilation of the latest
overseas ideas'(Head & Walter, 1988:81,82). The question to be asked, then,
is how far the newly-confident intellectuals, appreciating the worth of
Australia as never before, have avoided these
dependent and
deferential modes of behaviour.
The answer is clearly
and immediately available. So far from avoiding them they have enthusiastically
embraced them. They have hardly paused from praising or adopting foreign models
of behaviour, foreign modes of artistic activity, foreign governments' policies
and institutions and foreign modes of thinking, and hardly paused from trying
to impose these on the Australian community.
Their foreign modes and models have included fewer British ones than
before the war, or before the election of the Whitlam Government, but that does
not make them any more Australian, and those of British origin have not been
entirely absent. Much of the evidence
is conveniently gathered together in Intellectual Movements and Australian
Society, as the editors and some of the contributors seem uneasily aware.
A reader of that work
would have to look very hard to find even one new idea or one intellectual
movement that is not 'comparable with changes occurring in other countries' or
is not built around 'the reporting and assimilation of the latest overseas
ideas'. (Perhaps the notion of the cultural cringe is itself the most promising
candidate; but even that is not without precedent in the history of other
ex-colonies, including the United States.)
As the contributors to the volume have recorded local successes and
tried to explain them, they have repeatedly found the starting-point for
innovations or for their own analysis in foreign thinkers. The list of such
sources includes Althusser, Hester Eisenstein, Fanon, the Frankfurt School,
Gramsci, John Grierson, Marshall McLuhan, Wright Mills, the New Wave
film-makers of France, Wilhelm Reich and Virginia Woolf, as well as a
vaguely-defined 'non-Western thought'. Several attempts are made to suggest
that while this might look like an undue admiration for things foreign, it is
not really so. John Docker remarks that while the New Left and counter-cultural
movements 'were certainly heavily and directly influenced by overseas student
and black, feminist and gay liberationist ideas and forms… they also developed
and transformed them in distinctive ways in the particular conditions of Australian
society and in terms of Australia's history' (Head & Walter, 1988:299).
Dennis Airman also acknowledges that those movements were 'strongly influenced
by overseas ideas' but describes them as 'stressing their appeal to Australian
values' and selecting those that had 'a certain resonance in recent Australian
history' (p.319). The editors take up and generalise that last point into a
claim that 'the process was one of the selective adaptation of overseas ideas'
(p.236). But these provide a quite lame, or even limp, case for distinguishing
the supposedly independent moderns from the dependent ancients.
No less could be said
for the ancients (such as Shann) than the self-applauding moderns say for
themselves. In fact, in this volume no less is said of the early post-war
film-makers by Albert Moran (p.118), or of psychiatrists earlier in the century
by Stephen Garton (p. 184). The
crusaders against the cultural cringe evidently put as much effort into
building glass houses as they do into throwing stones.
Why the
Crusade?
An obvious question to
ask is why these intellectuals are so committed to a thesis that they explain
so rarely and defend so poorly. One answer is just as obvious: the thesis meets
a need. The sources of that need, and of the several subordinate needs that it
generates, lie in a number of interconnected circumstances in the background to
their thinking.
The most fundamental of
those circumstances is the enthusiasm with which contemporary Australians
intellectuals have taken up the notions of ideology and 'cultural hegemony' and
have made them the starting points for their own thinking. Closely related to this is their concern
with the role of intellectuals in society, and in particular concern about
their own not-very-satisfying role in Australian society." Impinging on
those factors, but not deriving from them, is the further commitment of most of
the Left intellectuals to a revived Australian nationalism. That commitment
itself requires some explanation, but I propose to leave it aside until after I
have dealt with the other points that I have raised.
The first relevant point
about the theory of ideology and hegemony is that it treats the life of a
community and the lives of its individual members as dominated by thought in
the form of ideas and ‘myths', especially those of an abstract or general
character such as 'free enterprise', 'equality', 'development', 'the Empire',
'exploitation and the class struggle' and the like. These ideas and myths are
seen as typically the creation of ideologists or intellectuals. Accordingly,
any community is seen as divided into two sections, one consisting of the
intellectuals who do the thinking and the publicists who disseminate the
products, the other consisting of the rest of the community who receive the
ideas and myths and ultimately reproduce them in their own thinking.
At any one time, it is
supposed, there will be within a community one more or less coherent set of
myths and ideas (a culture) which will be predominant or enjoy 'hegemony', but
there may at the same time be alternative ideologies or counter-cultures which
have been produced by non-hegemonic ideologists who hope to become hegemonic.
The important political processes will be the struggles for hegemony between
rival ideologies and their respective sets of ideologists and publicists. The character of social life will be, in
important respects, a reflection of the character of intellectual life:
ideologies will beget their own movements, movements will depend on ideologies.
This is the approach to
intellectual and social life that has been adopted by the editors and many of
the contributors to Intellectual Movements and. Australian Society. 'This book', write the editors, 'begins from
the assumption that the formulation, dissemination and control of ideas is a
central shaping influence in any society …[and intellectuals] are those who
organise and articulate the ideas that help us to make sense of the world
..." (Head & Walter, 1988: vii). The book is primarily an attempt to
give an account of Australian intellectual movements and their relationships
with society in those terms.
And the authors'
references to other writers, such as R.J. White and Tim Rowse, make it clear
that they are part of a broader tendency and are not adopting an entirely
idiosyncratic approach. Within the volume, John Docker (whose viewpoint is much
closer to traditional Marxism than to the neo-Marxism of other contributors)
has some pertinent remarks on the distinction that is assumed between the
active (and virtuous) intellectuals and the passive and dominated 'underlying
population' (pp.300-1).
The same point is
brought out, perhaps less deliberately, in two glosses by other contributors on
the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the heroes in the identification of
cultural hegemony as a social and political phenomenon. One is a reference to Gramsci's notion of
'organic intellectuals', who are 'the thinking and organising elements of a
social class who specialise in giving it homogeneity and an awareness of its
social function', and on whom we must focus if 'we are to understand the
function of ideas and the role of the bearers of ideas in political debate'.
[Note 12] The second reference to Gramsci is in Patrick Buckridge's article on
'Intellectual Authority and Critical Traditions in Australian Literature 1945
to 1975'. Buckridge explains that he is using '"authority" in a
loosely Gramscian sense to denote cultural power that is able to command the
respectful acquiescence of a large majority of those it rules' (p.189). In sum, the theory is one that holds out to
intellectuals the prospect of acquiring and exercising real power in the
community, of setting its guidelines and providing not so much solutions to its
problems as the definition of its problems and its means of recognising them.
Buckridge's use of the
Gramscian notion of authority is valuable for a further reason. He shows that
it can be applied to the ambitions if not the achievements of the literary
nationalists, whom he refers to as those adopting a 'liberal' perspective or
belonging to 'the liberal tradition'. The constant feature of the liberal
perspective, he maintains is a notion of 'responsibility' on the part of
writers and critics which becomes 'the chief ground of their authority as literary
intellectuals' (p.191). This
responsibility is firstly to Australian literature and its preservation,
development and promotion, but secondly to 'national well-being and
self-respect' which are assumed to depend on literature and its creators and nurturers.
He supports this interpretation with some telling extracts from Chris
Christensen's contributions to Meanin, but it was not peculiarly
Christensen's outlook. Brian Kiernan
(1971 :l6l) had previously found substantially the same sentiment in the thought
of Vance Palmer, pointing out that it was one of Palmer's persistent objects
'to generate a sense of national identity in and through literature'. This line
of argument indicates that Altman was right in claiming that the newly-imported
ideas of the 1960s and 1970s had some 'resonance' in Australian history: the expectation that building a sense of
national identity would be the work of intellectuals was well established among
some Australian intellectuals long before the works of Gramsci and the phrase
'cultural hegemony' were made familiar in this country. The fact that the
expectation was established first in relation to literature provides another
reason why the contemporary discussion of Australian society tends to drift
back to the status of literature.
When it is understood
that it was from this intellectual base that the campaign against the cultural
cringe was launched, many of its features, including the deficiencies in the
arguments it employs and its errant use of evidence, begin to fall into
place: The Australian intellectuals who
occupied the base were predominantly of the Left, and especially of the New
Left. They had apparently been allocated the task of providing other members of
the community with the conceptual and other skills that would enable them to
make sense of the world, and concomitantly been offered the glittering prizes
of power and authority in the community. But the prizes, disappointingly, had
not and have not yet been awarded to them. Their generous offer to do other peoples'
thinking has not been accepted, although for a time it appeared that it would
be. As Brian Head soberly records, for a few years starting in the late 1960s,
'it seemed that everything was changing. New issues and new social movements
were undercutting the hegemony of a complacent conservatism'. But the 'sense of optimism about social
reform' did not survive beyond 1973, and 'since 1974-75 it has been clear that
the intellectual tide has turned. The initiative in social and political
discussion passed to the conservative liberals' (Head & Walter, 1988:28-9).
This turning of the tide seemed to require explanation, and in terms of their
theory the intellectuals could explain it in only one way. Their ideology had
been overcome by another one, a more deeply-entrenched or more
advantageously-placed set of ideas and myths which resisted the inroads of the
Left's offerings.
It did not take long or
prove very difficult to identify that rival and successful ideology. It was the
'Australian Liberalism' described and analysed by Tim Rowse (1978). But while this went a long way to explain
the Left intellectuals' failures and problems, it did not satisfy all their
needs because there were other strands in their thought. They were influenced by and sought to contribute
to and ally themselves with a revived nationalism that appeared at about this
time. For that reason they shared the desire, common in settler societies with
a relatively short history, to see their New World as relatively virtuous and
innocent and the Old World as relatively corrupt and as the source of local
evils. At the same time they retained in their thinking vestigial elements from
the 18th-century stages-of-civilisation account of history which had
contributed powerfully to the development of socialist thought. That account predisposed them to see any but
a highly
industrialised economy
as inadequate and immature.
In this situation
dependency theory had obvious attractions.
It incorporated the tendency to export and externalise the source of
problems and barriers to national progress, for it made them the responsibility
of the dominant partners in international intercourse. It also incorporated the
tendency to see the not-highly-industrialised countries as necessarily in a
state of tutelage and as lacking the capacity to be dominant. It could therefore provide a model for a
description of the failure of the Australian economy to take the form — to
reach the 'stage of civilisation' — that they preferred. But it then enabled
them to push their argument in another direction. In terms of their theory of
ideology, a dependent condition must be matched by and the product of an
ideology of dependence, with its creators, its disseminators and its
captive 'underlying population'.
Phillips had already identified such an ideology with his notion of the
cultural cringe. All that remained to be done was to embrace it and extend its
application to Australian social life as a whole.
One of the advantages,
to its adherents, of this particular theoretical approach is that it requires
no more than perfunctory efforts to demonstrate that the dependent ideology
exists and is influential. These things can be inferred from the fact (if such
it is) of dependence. Alternative explanations of the supposed signs of dependence,
such as the small research output of Australian universities in the interwar
period, can be treated as merely inconvenient complications, not real
competitors. What is required is no more than a few illustrations of attitudes
and forms of behaviour in order to fill out the account. And these can be
safely found in the segments of society that possess some advantage in relation
to the rest, for in this model of the functioning of society opinions and
judgments always flow downwards and are never formed among or combated by the
bulk of the community, unless the latter are fortunate enough to possess their
own group of organic
intellectuals to advise
them. Accordingly, the prejudices of
the Adelaide Club can be taken to represent the outlook of a large swathe of
the community; and the fact that intellectuals concern themselves with
questions of 'national identity' is taken as sufficient to establish that this
is a vital issue in the community at large. Moreover the theory — especially
that part of it that explains the frustrating success of the complacent
conservatism in maintaining its hegemony — allocates certain roles to
particular people in the community, especially those engaged in education at
one level or another. As in relation to the cringe itself, there is no need to
demonstrate that they perform those roles because the theory guarantees that
they do. The more ambitious theorist needs to do no more than illustrate the
circumstance, and almost any piece of evidence, however unreliable or fanciful,
will serve that purpose.
The grip of this
theoretical approach on latter-day Left intellectuals therefore explains their
apparently slack treatment of evidence, their neglect of a large body of
evidence that seems to contradict their assertions, and their summoning in
support of further evidence that turns out to be either spurious or to point
towards quite different conclusions.
The least easily
explained feature of their thinking, but one that is nevertheless instructive,
is the Anglophobic form of their nationalism. It is not easily explained
because it has been anachronistic. It
has flourished at a time when Britain has shown a steadily declining interest
in Australia, and her ability to influence or threaten Australia has been
declining just as quickly. Even if we supposed that Britain's real sin had been to constitute a barrier to
Australia's ready acceptance Of the American and Continental European Cultural
products that so strongly attract the Left intellectuals, we would have to
judge it to be a pretty insignificant
sinner. The Anglophobia may, however,
be informative if we Explore it with
the help of some of the things 'that
Phillips said about the cultural cringe, and some of the things that
we know about nationalism.
In his brief analysis of
the cringe, Phillips asserted that it 'mainly appears in a tendency to make
needless comparisons'. This seems to me to describe precisely the content of
much of the cringe-denouncing literature that I have been discussing, and the
making of those comparisons seems to have been observed by commentators who
have themselves contributed to that body of literature. The point is illustrated most clearly in two
passages in Mark Thomas's Australia in Mind. The first is in a comment
that one of the notable features of Geoffrey Blarney's treatment of Australian
pioneering is -the lack of any anti-British feeling' (1989:158). We might well
ask why that is notable why anti-British feeling should be expected. The answer
is provided in the second passage, which remarks that David Williamson's
position is novel because -he has not needed to define himself as an Australian
by the criterion of hostility to the English' (p.189). To say that is to define
the condition of the normal Australian intellectual as one of desperate
insecurity: only the desperately insecure can need to define their own
identities through hostility to other people. And we can now understand the
campaign against the cringe as an extension of that hostility to people who
failed or fail to join in the expression of it.
This leads to a further
point about the recent history of Australian intellectual life. We have seen that those who talk about the
cringe commonly contrast the infamous inertness of the past with their own
'robustness, optimism, buoyance and assurance' (Thomas, 1989:183).13. But their claims must now be doubted, for
they are contradicted by the evidence that I have just been discussing. And the
significance of that evidence is strengthened when we remember that talk about
the cultural cringe was associated with, and was an aspect of, a revival of
nationalism. Nationalism is another product and aspect of insecurity and
self-doubt, not of robustness, optimism, buoyance or assurance.
Communities which are
comfortable with themselves and sure of their place in the world do not embrace
nationalism: people who habitually act independently and feel independent do
not feel a need to assert their independence.
Conclusion
The conclusion we are
left with is that the late 1960s and the 1970s were not a period of new
optimism or assurance but a period in which those qualities had been
undermined. When Munro, Turner and others wrote of self-confidence, optimism
and the like, what they were really referring to were the rising expectations of
Left intellectuals that they would be much better treated and supported by an
imminent and then actual Labor government than by its predecessors over the
previous 20 years. Those expectations are understandable, but they are not, and
do not even slightly resemble, self-confidence or independence or self-respect.
Other evidence of the existence of those qualities is altogether lacking. Their absence emerges as precisely the most
striking feature of the period in which talk about the cultural cringe has flourished,
and it is an aspect of our recent history that deserves close study. Its
existence is perhaps the most important thing revealed by an examination of the
campaign against the cringe and previous generations of cringers.
The best way to sum up
the whole campaign may be to paraphrase Voltaire's famous aphorism about the
existence of God. The cultural cringe — that pervasive, unthinking, admiration
for British and foreign things — did not exist, but it was needed, and so it
was invented.
Notes
1. There are numerous
account of the course of this war, or parts of it. They include Heseltine’s
Introduction to the second edition of A. A. Phillips’ The Australian
Tradition (1980), Patrick Buckridge's essay on 'Intellectual Authority and
Critical Traditions in Australian Literature 1945 to 1975' in Head &
Walter, Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (1988), and Craig
Munro's 'Introduction' to the second edition of P. R. Stephensen's The
Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self Respect
(1986).
2. Hill has been the
subject of a biography by John Mansfield Thomson (1980).
3. See the comment by
Head and Walter quoted by on p. 3 above; and see also the claim by Alomes
(1988:234) that 'the larger and older universities' were 'the traditional
centres of the cultural cringe'.
4. It is not quite clear
that Pierce is adopting the cringe-hypothesis in a general form, but his use of
it in this context is very misleading.
5. As we shall see, the
charge of indifference and neglect is sometimes extended from universities to
schools, notably by Alomes.
6. The passages and the
evidence relate almost entirely to the so-called humanities and the nascent
social sciences. I assume that none of the accusers would dare to maintain that
Australian university scientists — botanists, geologists, zoologists — ignored
Australian topics.
7. In the 1930s, Angus
and Robertson were producing a whole series of geography textbooks and
reference books for Australians, some by unnamed authors, some by J. Macdonald
Holmes and J. Andrews of the University of Sydney.
8. J. Macdonald Holmes's
The Geographical Basis of Government specially applied to New South Wales
(1944) did not win an enduring body of admirers, but it was clearly the product
of much research, extending over a good many years.
9. They were not, of
course, competitors. Hartnett had got plans for the production of the Holden
well under way before he was eased out of his post with General Motors.
10. The more plausible
charge is that the government favoured General Motors Holden at the expense of
the other foreign, and especially American, producers. See Butlin &
Schedvin, 1977:761-2, where the evidence is summarised.
11. Cf. Brian Head in
Head & Walter, 1988:5: '…many
Australian intellectuals have felt unappreciated and misunderstood by the
general public, by the wielders of social power, and by some of their
colleagues in adjacent fields.' Quite so.
12. James Walter, pp.240-1. On p.4, Brian Head gives a less
class-bound account of organic
intellectuals, but he still has them providing the 'conceptual, strategic and
organisational skills' for their respective groups. See also Andrew Wells's
references to Gramsci's concept on
p.217 and the accompanying Note 15.
13. The phrase is a
gloss on Williamson’s views.
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