Even as We Speak (40 page)

Nor should he put too much faith in the argument – much touted by the Murdoch press and slyly put forward as fact by the Australian broadcaster Mike Carlton in his entertaining article in
the
Sunday Times
– that as Australia’s demography alters to put people of Anglo background in the minority, the majority are bound to prefer going it alone. Whether from Europe
two generations ago or from Asia in the last generation, many of Australia’s migrants were refugees from political instability, and won’t necessarily favour any proposal that encourages
more of it in their chosen home. Their progeny might be persuaded, but let it be by reasonable argument, on a basis of truth. Meanwhile for Australians like myself, resident in Britain but still
holding on loyally to their Australian passports, caught between Mr Sewell and Mr Keating, queuing in the ‘Other Passports’ channel while ex-SS tank commanders are given the quick
welcome reserved for the EEC, there is nothing to do but wait, and screen all incoming calls.

Spectator
, 7 March, 1992

When London Calls
by Stephen Alomes, Cambridge

Billed as a senior lecturer in Australian Studies at Deakin University, Stephen Alomes, with his latest book
When London Calls
– subtitled ‘The Expatriation
of Australian Creative Artists to Britain’ – has made a timely intervention in the perennially simmering local discussion about why the Australian expatriates went away and what should
be thought about them by the cognoscenti who stayed put. As its provenance and panoply suggest, this is most definitely an academic work, but the reader need not fear to be dehydrated by the
postmodernist jargon that threatened, until recently, to turn humanist studies in Australia into a cemetery on the moon. Instead, the reader should fear a different kind of threat altogether.

There was a time when Australian academics could be counted on for a donnish
hauteur
when it came to treating journalistic opinions relating to their subject. Alomes goes all the other
way. Without knowing much about it, he loves the world of the media. If there is ever a Chair of Cultural Journalism at Deakin University, he could fill it the way he fills his reporter’s
notebook. He gets out there on the interview trail himself. Most of the big names he wants to talk to, if not already dead, don’t want to waste any more of their lives giving soundbite
answers to the kind of questions that their work exists to answer in full, but he has the professional pest’s remedy for that. He either gives them short shrift or plugs the lacunae from his
clippings file, in which, it seems, any British journalist’s merest mention of an Australian expatriate’s activities – especially if the opinion is adverse – is preserved
like holy writ, and in which anything that even the most uninspired Australian journalist makes of the British journalist’s opinion is carefully appended, the whole dog-eared assemblage being
regarded by its assiduous compiler as a pristine
Forschungsquelle
out of which he may construct his own opinions by an elaborate system of cross-reference. This method seems particularly
Swiftian in a book which nominally devotes itself to the proposition that Australia need no longer be in thrall to how its creative efforts are perceived in the mother country. Australia is a land
mass of three million square miles and geographers have long debated whether it should be called a continent or an island. The bizarre spectacle of Alomes’s self-cancelling thought processes
should be enough to settle the discussion. It’s an island all right, and it’s flying like Laputa.

No doubt seeking to legitimize his gift for inaccurate précis, Andre Malraux recommended telling the kind of lies that would become true later. In Australia it is by now widely proclaimed
among the intelligentsia that the era of provincialism is over. Would that it were true, but on the evidence provided by the mere existence of a book like this it isn’t yet, and later might
mean never if the facts aren’t faced. One of the facts is that in Australia any discussion of the arts is likely to be bedevilled with politics. Another is that the politics are likely to be
infantile. As opposed to the quality of the discussion, the quality of the arts is not the problem. With a size of population which only recently overtook that of the Ivory Coast, Australia has for
some time been among the most creatively productive countries on earth. In the mortal words of Sir Les Patterson, we’ve got the arts coming out of our arseholes. Painters, poets, novelists,
actors, actresses, singers, directors: our artists are all over the world like a rash, and the days are long gone when the stars who stayed away were the only ones we had.

Nobody now would be surprised to hear that the only reason Cate Blanchett left home was to get away from her more gifted sister. In Sydney a new Baz Luhrman lurks on every block, and Brisbane
bristles with
prêt-à-porter
Peter Porters. Alomes has predicated his book on the up-to-date assumption that if Australia should happen to go on producing cultural expatriates,
it won’t be provincialism that they flee from, because there no longer is any. The way he says so, however, would be enough in itself to make any current expatriate think twice before coming
home for anything longer than a brief incognito visit, and might well recruit new expatriates by the planeload.

On a world scale, the average cultural expatriate in the twentieth century took flight because if he had stayed where he was he would have faced death by violence. His average Australian
equivalent has faced nothing except death from boredom. It might sound like a privileged choice until you find out how lethal the boredom can be. Try a sample sentence.

To be fair, Alomes doesn’t always succeed in being as unreadable as that. There are lingering signs that the once-excellent Australian school system has not yet fully given up on its
initial aim of teaching pupils to write coherent prose. Apart from the use of ‘manifest’ as an intransitive verb (‘Sayle’s happy knack of being on the spot where things were
happening manifested early’) and a failure to realize that the adjectives ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ are too similar in meaning to be used as if they were different
(‘The film was innovative and new’) he writes a plain enough English for someone whose ear for rhythm either never developed or was injured in an accident. There are whole paragraphs
that don’t need to be read twice to yield their sense. The question remains, however, of whether they sufficiently reward being read once, except as an unintended demonstration of the very
provincialism whose obsolescence their author would like taken for granted.

The answer to the question is yes: just. Leaving his overall interpretation of them aside, the raw data are of such high interest that they inspire even the author to the occasional passage of
pertinent reflection, some of it his own. He names the names of those Australians who came to London when that was still the thing to do. After World War II the tendency for the painters who went
away to stay away became ingrained. Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman all made a life in England, even when their imaginative subject matter was drawn either from their memories of
Australia or from the visits home they could make more frequently as they prospered. Alomes gives details of which painters resettled in Australia later in their careers, or else merely appeared to
while maintaining their British base, and of whether their work was regarded as Australian-based or international. He occupies himself with the questions of domicile and national loyalty as if his
subjects thought about these things then as hard as he does now. What seldom strikes him is the possibility that to
stop
thinking about such matters might have been one of the reasons they
took off in the first place.

If Alomes had widened the scope of his book to include other destinations besides London, he would have had to deal, among the painters, with the problem posed by Jeffrey Smart, who, at the
height of his long career, not only remains a resident of Tuscany but rarely paints an Australian subject even from memory. Smart had a clear and simple reason, freely admitted in his
autobiography, for leaving Australia half a century ago. As an active homosexual, he had a good chance of being locked up. But his other reasons are of more lasting interest, and one of them was
that he had no personal commitment to a national school of painting that depended on Australian subject matter. He knew everything about what the national painters had achieved, but he saw them in
an international context. In short, he wasn’t interested in nationalism.

The same can be applied to the musical luminaries here listed: Richard Bonynge, June Bronhill, Charles Mackerras, Malcolm Williamson, Yvonne Minton, Joan Sutherland and so, gloriously, on.
Alomes flirts with the idea that the performing artists – the instrumentalists especially – might have hindered the development of Australian music by leaving, but he doesn’t
follow up on the possibility that by raising the prestige of Australian music throughout the world they might have helped more than they hindered, simply by making a musical career seem that much
more exciting to a new entrant. Postwar, the arrival of Sir Eugene Goossens raised the level of Australian orchestral music, but the departure of Joan Sutherland made Australia a planetary force in
grand opera – like the extra shrimp that Paul Hogan later threw on the barbie. Our Joan’s impact on Covent Garden resonated throughout the world.

The resonance reached Australia itself: when the winner of the
Sun
Aria Contest set out for England, she sailed on a ship that launched a thousand sopranos. The effect that the
international prestige of our expatriates had on aspiring artists in their homeland is a big subject for our author to pay so little attention to. But he pays no attention at all to an even bigger
subject. He notes that the
prima donna assoluta
got a rapturous reception on her 1965 homecoming tour but neglects to mention that her every record album was received with the same
enthusiasm – quietly, in thousands of middle-class households. Throughout the book, he takes it for granted that the expatriate artists ran the risk of being out of touch with an Australian
audience: not even once does he consider that they might have been
in
touch with an Australian audience in the most intimate possible way – through their art. He is keener to treat
the whole phenomenon of expatriation as if it had a
terminus a quo
in the old colonial feelings of inferiority and a
terminus ad quem
in the now-imminent attainment of independent
nationhood: because the stage at home was too small, gifted people needed to leave, and now that it isn’t, they needn’t. But the Sydney Opera House was already built when Joan
Sutherland repatriated herself as a resident star, and although she was congratulated by music lovers for choosing to spend the last part of her career at home, she also had to cope with the
patronizing opinion that her career must have been over, or she wouldn’t have come back. She also faced persistent questioning – of whose impertinence Alomes seems not to be aware
– about why she was not in favour of an Australian Republic. Nostalgia for Switzerland must have been hard to quell.

On the continuing problem of how a successful expatriate can make a return without being thought to have failed, Alomes could have been more searching, but at least he mentions it. The
theatrical expatriates have always suffered from it most. They are all here, starting with Robert Helpmann before the war, and going on through Peter Finch, Bill Kerr, Leo McKern, Diane Cilento,
Michael Blakemore, John Bluthal, Barry Humphries and Keith Michell. Michell is usefully quoted as telling a journalist ‘the trouble is, when you go home, everybody says you’re on the
skids.’ This is a handily short version of a Barry Humphries off-stage routine that he has been known to deliver to anyone
except
a journalist. Humphries relates that when he stepped
off the plane on one of his early trips home, a representative of the local media asked him how long he planned to stay. When Humphries explained that he was back only for a few days, he was asked
‘Why? Aren’t we good enough for you?’ For his next trip, he armed himself with a more diplomatic answer to the same question. When he said that this time he might be back for
quite a while, he was asked ‘Why? Couldn’t you make it over there?’

Perhaps Alomes might like to use this parable in a later edition, although he is unlikely to get it confirmed by Humphries himself, who has already committed suicide often enough without handing
the Australian press any more ammunition. Meanwhile Alomes reports a usefully rueful comment from the distinguished theatrical producer and film director Michael Blakemore, who apparently wondered
whether his film
Country Life
– a retelling of
Uncle Vanya
in an Australian setting – might not have been better received in Australia if he had launched it in America
and Europe first. Blakemore was really saying that the home-based Australian journalists did him in. Alomes might have made more of that, but true to his title he is more interested in the
Australian journalists who went abroad.

The list starts with Alan Moorehead, who in Europe built a justified legend as a war correspondent before moving on to write his best-selling books about the Nile. Robert Hughes has several
times paid tribute to Moorehead’s influence as exemplar and mentor. Moorehead was a true heavyweight, but the pick of his many successors who took the road to glory in the Street of Shame
form a by no means trivial list: Paul Brickhill, Sam White, Philip Knightley, Barbara Toner, Bruce Page, John Pilger and the explosively charismatic swagman Murray Sayle, he whose happy knack of
being on the spot when things were happening manifested early. They all had that happy knack, and they all shared the conviction that wherever the spot was, it wasn’t in the land where they
were born. You would think that at least a few of the survivors might have gone home by now, if provincialism was really over, but among the big-name byliners no instance of a permanent return is
here recorded. There are less illustrious figures whose sojourns in Fleet Street and subsequent repatriation are solemnly celebrated. No doubt they brought something home with them, but what they
took away with them in the first place seems, on this reckoning, no great shakes, and one would have thought that their inclusion stretched the term Creative Artist pretty far. Two women who turned
out yellow drivel for the British tabloids (‘You can tell a man by his underpants’) have their itineraries traced in detail, in keeping with Alomes’s tendency, throughout the
book, to count heads without caring about the size of hat.