Chris Feik - The Words That Made Australia: How Australia Made Its Own Luck - And Could Now Throw It All Away

Several popular anthologies of Australian essays, speeches and historical documents have been published recently. There is, however, so far as we are aware, no book that collects those illuminating passages in novels, histories, polemics, magazine or newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and even theatrical revues that opened the eyes of Australians to what was peculiar or particular to one or another aspect of their society. Sometimes phrases associated with these passages the workers paradise, the forgotten people, the cultural cringe, the lucky country, the Australian ugliness, the great Australian silence remained in national consciousness long after the details of the arguments from which these phrases were drawn had faded from memory. Through these passages, the nation came to understand itself. This is why we call them the words that made Australia.

This volume brings these passages together for the first time. We hope that in doing this the anthology will offer its readers more than the sum of its parts. The passages in The Words That Made Australia not only reveal a series of influential but separate claims about the nature of Australian society. In our view, in addition, they form a record of some key moments of what the former prime minister John Howard used to describe as the perpetual Australian symposium on national identity, or what we prefer to call the century-long Australian national conversation.

The anthology begins roughly at the time of Federation. As an overture, we offer the fresh and delightful closing passage of My Brilliant Career , written when Miles Franklin was a young countrywoman in her late teens. In our reconstruction of the conversation that followed, however, the opening gambit is a bold claim advanced by the Frenchman Albert Metin Australias more modest Tocqueville in his Socialisme sans Doctrines . In essence, Metin argued that despite the absence of socialist theory, Australia (or Australasia, for he included New Zealand) was the first society on earth where the working classes truly flourished, where in practice the social experiment of trying to create a roughly egalitarian society had succeeded, and where as a consequence the workers paradise of which socialists had long dreamt was to be found. Metin was scarcely interested in the place of women in the workforce. Maybanke Andersons 1920 essay, Women in Australia, provides a valuable addition, entirely consistent with Metin. According to Anderson, class division in Australia was far less salient than in Britain; working-class women avoided domestic service if factory work was available; by international standards they were generously paid.

The idea of the workers paradise did not provide material suitable for a national myth of origin. In his dispatch from the front line of Gallipoli, published throughout Australia, the English journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett galvanised the new nation with his report that on 25 April 1915 the young men of Australia had for the first time been tested in combat and had not been found wanting. At that moment, the nations myth was born. Its hold on the national imagination was not threatened by the terrible suffering of the Australian soldiers at Gallipoli or the failures of the British military command, which the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch observed at first hand and conveyed in his long-remembered letter to the Australian prime minister, Andrew Fisher. Nor was it threatened by the subsequent retreat. Ellis Ashmead-Bartletts words instilled pride in the Colonials; Murdochs spoke of the suffering and the folly that followed. In combination, these words helped ensure that the story of Gallipoli, which has remained Australias myth of foundation, was untainted by jingoism or swagger. This left its mark. As Inga Clendinnen observed movingly in her 1999 Boyer Lectures, True Stories , Australians had continued to pay solemn tribute to their war dead without a hint of military vainglory.

Following the war, the conversation about Australian society and Australian nationalism took a different turn. In 1922 the English novelist D.H. Lawrence visited Australia briefly. His novel Kangaroo suggested that he was repelled by both the shapeless and classless democracy he encountered and what he took to be the attempt to create a European society without roots in landscape or in culture. Lawrences challenge was not easily shrugged off. In her defence of the temper of Australian democracy almost eighty years later, Clendinnen still recalled with anger Lawrences aristocratic contempt for Australian egalitarianism.