Even as We Speak (43 page)

Not even Davie, however, is clear-headed enough to get beyond the assumption that it took incompetent generalship on our side to give the victory to the Japanese. There will be no fully mature
opinions on the subject until it is accepted that the Japanese army would have taken Singapore anyway, even if our forces had been deployed to their optimum effectiveness. The disaster would have
just taken longer. Writers who glibly suppose that only a failure on our part could have permitted a Japanese success are succumbing to racist assumptions without knowing it. At the beginning of
the war the Japanese were superior in almost every department and their command of the air alone would have been enough to make them hard to stop. Failure to realize this opens the way,
paradoxically enough, to underestimating the magnitude of Australia’s achievement when they
were
stopped, in New Guinea. In the story of how the Japanese onslaught in Asia and the
Pacific was turned back, Kokoda was a crucial moment, and it was ours: it happened because the Australian soldiers were valiant. Revisionist history, by displacing attention towards the moment when
Britain supposedly machinated to leave us in the lurch, has had the effect of diminishing our country’s real status – an unfortunate but not unfamiliar consequence of rewriting history
along nationalist lines.

To trace the rise of the Republican movement in modern times, Davie characteristically sets about investigating the background to Geoffrey Dutton’s trendsetting
Nation
article of
1963. Somewhere in the middle eighties (Davie is sometimes a bit vague about when
he
did things: British reticence) he called on Dutton in Melbourne and got the full story that Dutton
himself never wrote down for publication. It turns out that Malcolm Muggeridge, down under on a visit, provided the spark. It was not long after the Queen Mother’s Royal Visit of 1958,
enjoyed by Dutton as a comedy. (In his journal – from which Davie, again characteristically, is able to quote – Dutton poured scorn on those intellectuals who boycotted the ceremonies
and thus cut themselves off from the entertainment.) Muggeridge’s own, non-Royal visit took place during the aftermath of the ruckus he had kicked up in Britain by disparaging the Royal
Family. At dinner in Adelaide, Muggeridge put the question of what was being done about an Australian republic. Two of his interlocutors were Rohan Rivett, editor of the Adelaide
News
, and
its young proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. They said something had to be done but it was too early. In other words, before they got behind the idea it would have to be a ball already rolling.
Dutton’s article rolled the ball.

An obscure, smoky restaurant on the Anzac Highway, a group of influential men deciding their country’s destiny – here is a play by David Williamson in the making. But what to call
it? My own title would be
The Silvertail Conference
, thus to emphasize an aspect that Davie could have made more of. The opening section of his book is a penetrating analysis of the class
structure that Australia is not supposed to have – an evocation from which the squattocracy emerges in all its easy splendour, complete with its hallowed ties to ‘home’. Davie
notes that the grand families have traditionally not taken an overt part in Australia’s political life, preferring to exert their influence behind the scenes rather than run for office.
(Malcolm Fraser might have been cited as a conspicuous exception to this rule, but it will still serve as a rule of thumb.) He also notes that of the participants at this historic dinner, Murdoch
(Oxford) and Dutton (Cambridge) were both from grand families. But he neglects to note a possible connection between the rise of a republican movement and a moneyed elite exerting its influence in
an extra-parliamentary manner. Such a connection can be denied, but its possibility has to be considered, because when it came to a referendum there were plenty of Australians who suspected that
their libertarian sympathies were being manipulated by an elite. When Malcolm Turnbull, another glittering son of a grand family, found himself too prominently placed for the good of his cause, it
was an illustration of the real reason for that political shyness on the part of the gentry that Davie seems so puzzled by, and even to regret. The Australian electorate is very unlikely to accept
any constitutional system that overtly transfers power in the direction of an oligarchy, and wise oligarchs know it.

Davie might well object at this point that during the forty years since I left Australia he has spent almost as much time in my homeland as I have in his, so he has a better right to speak about
recent developments. I would gladly concede that, but with one proviso: nothing quite beats being born and brought up in the country you want to pontificate about. It isn’t just that I know
for a fact, without having to look it up, that the Australian Prime Minister whom Davie calls Joe Chifley was really called Ben. It’s that I sat there on the carpet in front of a radio set
taller than I was and listened to Ben Chifley’s grating voice while my mother told me she respected him as a true man of the people. She always voted for Ming anyway, but that was politics:
Australian politics. It was made clear to me from an early date – bred in my bones, in fact – that patriotism didn’t just mean pride in the Fair Go, it meant pride in my
country’s innate distrust of any form of dogma that treats people as a mass. In this book Davie gives me several elegant strokes of the cane for a crime he can’t quite bring himself to
specify, but it sounds like a lack of patriotism. Let me caution him in turn that he should beware of what Orwell once called transferred nationalism. One of the tragedies of the transferred
nationalist is to miss the point about the new country he adopts, and the point about Australia is that its citizens never cease to be patriotic until patriotism becomes compulsory, whereupon their
individuality takes over.

Caught in the middle between two national loyalties, Davie’s book gives the sense that it has been squeezed out of him: for all its freshness of perception, it is short of breath. Bill
Bryson’s
Down Under
is big and brash: HMS
London
, make way for USS
Nimitz
. Bryson is an outgoing American personality on a generous mission to find out whether
there is any kind of country joining up the Australian cities where he has previously been on book tours. On the flight in, he still doesn’t know the name of the current Prime Minister. I
once landed in Mexico without knowing the name of the current President, but that was because the President whose name I
had
looked up had been deposed during my flight after his sister
was caught in Switzerland trying to put half of Mexico’s GNP into a private bank account. The Australian Prime Minister’s name is John Howard, for Christ’s sake: it isn’t
hard to remember. He might be, but his name isn’t. To make such breezy condescension even less appealing, there is Bryson’s comic style, which depends on exaggeration without benefit of
metaphor. When I say, for example, that to read Bryson on the subject of crossing the Nullarbor by train is like crossing the Nullarbor on foot, I am exaggerating, but also speaking metaphorically.
If I were to say that reading his book took me a hundred years, I would merely be exaggerating.

I would also be lying. Once the reader gives up on the idea that any of the author’s heftily visible preparations for a wisecrack will ever yield results – page two is a good spot to
call it quits – the book turns out to be not without value. Bryson has the genuine curiosity that comes down through the American tradition of travel-talk reportage from Mark Twain, who rode
on stagecoaches and paid attention to the other passengers when they conversed, argued or shot each other. Bryson talks to everyone he meets, visits museums no matter how unpromising, and is
generally not afraid to do the corny thing – a very important attribute, because there is nothing like sophistication for cutting you off from experience. A big smile in a rented car, Bryson
gets a long way on bonhomie. He can even, despite his relentlessly facetious style, be amusing: perhaps because death and tragedy are involved, his account of the monumental incompetence of Burke
and Wills is sufficiently deadpan to elicit an appropriately hilarious response. Burke and Wills’s qualifications for exploring the dead heart of Australia were exactly those of Laurel and
Hardy for painting a house, and Bryson, for once, proves that he knows enough about vaudeville not to spoil the comedy with too much whizz-bang punctuation from the band in the pit.

One might say that Bryson has never been in Australia long enough to find much to dislike, but there is a killing description of a bad meal in Darwin to show that he is capable of invective. The
bottom line is that he likes Australia, and being so famous he will probably sell millions of books saying so, many of them within Australia itself. But it is becoming a nice question whether there
is much room left for visitors from civilization to come flying in and marvel that we have hotels more than two storeys high. Back in the 1950s, there was a story in it when the black musician
Winifred Atwell crossed the Pacific to play the piano and liked Sydney so much she wanted to stay. There was another story in it when she wasn’t allowed to. In the razzmatazz of
Australia’s current jamboree, it is sometimes forgotten just how narrow-minded Australian society seemed only forty years ago. Sometimes I forget it myself. From the perspective of
social-democratic politics I nowadays find the Ming dynasty underrated, but if I had been condemned to live through its protracted decline, would I have wanted to face a future in which I
wasn’t allowed to read
Portnoy’s Complaint
? We were barely allowed to
have
Portnoy’s complaint. There was a fantastic amount not happening.

Peter Conrad hasn’t forgotten any of it. His icily scintillating article about his life-long alienation from Tasmania heads up a very keepable special issue of
Granta
devoted to
Australia. Patiently edited by Ian Jack, who must have needed a cattle-prod to corral some of the more elusive among his illustrious contributors, the booklet is clear proof that writers born and
raised in Australia are nowadays quite capable of discussing their country’s drawbacks without feeling that they are lending ammunition to foreign philistines. Among the bleak views,
Conrad’s is the bleakest. ‘Australian troops were always available to die in Britain’s wars,’ he intones. ‘At Gallipoli, they were used by the imperial generals as
cannon fodder . . .’ The riff is familiar, but less usual is the way in which Conrad detects a more comprehensive imperialism, as an envious world closes in on its last theme park.

Conrad might be on to something here. Those of us who think that Barry Humphries was not just joking when he identified Australia as the newest top dog among nations should remember that this is
the age of celebrity, in which to be loved by the whole world is to be in some danger. On the whole, though, Conrad’s article is less a disquisition on geopolitics than a cry from the heart.
It was because of his personal circumstances that he thrived as a literary pundit in England. For the same reason, the Englishman Howard Jacobson – whose contribution is as sensuously funny
as you might expect – thrived as a literary pundit in Australia. Each man wields a brilliantly inclusive style, but neither has a chance of summing up what has really been going on in
Australia since they first passed each other in mid-ocean. For all we know, the key event of the whole period since World War II was something Menzies didn’t do – he didn’t, for
example, put Arthur Calwell’s immigration policy into reverse. If Ming had really been so committed to Australia’s future as a British nation, he might have tried to do that. But he
didn’t, and the way was left open for his beloved, sleepy, conformist and wowser-ridden country to change in ways he could not predict.

Australia’s literary intellectuals might have to face the possibility that their effectiveness as political commentators is coming to an end, and that this might be a good thing. The
journalists are taking over, just as they did in the United States, where the advent of expert political commentators such as Elizabeth Drew left the inspired but tendentious pastiche of the
Mencken heritage where it belonged – in the past. As that excellent volume
The Best Australian Essays
1999
revealed, no poet or novelist is going to write political
commentary as pertinent as Mungo MacCallum’s, because he is right there on the campaign plane with his raw material. Michael Davie remembers when the political journalists always mistook the
country’s mood because they never left Canberra. But now the politicians travel and the journalists travel with them. With insularity no longer the keynote, the ivory tower is no longer the
vantage point: leg-work, contact and close observation are everything. It’s still Australia, but it’s a different country, and its writers and artists had better accept that they can no
longer get an overall grasp of it just by intuition: they’re going to have to read about it in the newspapers and the magazines, just like everybody else.

In the newspapers, the magazines and the books – and most of the books are nowadays by journalists, and thank God for it. Since the middle 1970s, we have gradually become accustomed to
such books being on hand when we need them: Paul Kelly’s fine trilogy is only the most conspicuous example. In the Pringle period they scarcely existed. When Donald Horne’s
The
Lucky Country
came out in 1964, it was so singular that its underlying thesis was taken as holy writ, an
ex cathedra
endorsement of the exciting idea that our country could be saved
from its long failure only by political realism, which would entail a preliminary admission that the country’s international position up to that point had been essentially servile. From that
time forward, most of the informed voices spoke on Horne’s side, but there were signs even before the referendum that a true discussion was developing. The mere presence of Paul
Sheehan’s
Among the Barbarians
on the bestseller lists was an indication that those who looked with disfavour on the wholesale denigration of Australia’s anglicized past
didn’t necessarily consider themselves romantic – they thought
they
were realists, too.