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. The