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Moore, Keith (2012) Disobedient citizens: Press depictions of striking school teachers in NSW and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in NSW and in 1968. In Elder, C & Moore, K (Eds.) New voices, new visions: Challenging Aus- tralian identities and legacies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, United Kingdom, pp. 242-258.

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Moore, Keith (2012) Disobedient Citizens: Press Depictions of Striking School Teachers in NSW and Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrators in NSW and Victoria in 1968. In Elder, Catriona & Moore, Keith (Eds.) New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, United Kingdom, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 242-258. (In Press)

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Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formatting may not be reflected in this document. For a definitive version of this work, please refer to the published source: New Voices, New Visions

New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies

Edited by

Catriona Elder and Keith Moore

New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies, Edited by Catriona Elder and Keith Moore

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Catriona Elder and Keith Moore and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3756-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3756-9

Catriona Elder For the blokes in the family: Reg, Kurt, Luke and Mark

Keith Moore And the women: Lynne, Lisa, and Sarah

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables ...... x

Acknowledgements ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1 Catriona Elder and Keith Moore

Part I: Communities and Spaces

Chapter One...... 17 Un/settled Geographies: Vertigo and the Predicament of ’s Postcoloniality Francis Maravillas

Chapter Two...... 37 City Meeting Places: ’s Hungry Jack’s and ’s Flinders Street Station Lesley Hawkes

Chapter Three...... 50 Revolution by the Beach: Surfies and Hippies in in the and early John R. Atwood

Part II: Adventure and Land

Chapter Four...... 69 “Meadows and Hedges”: Rereading Space through the Lens of Travel Writing in Colonial 1880–1906 Cindy Lane

Chapter Five ...... 86 Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes Jennifer Hamilton-McKenzie viii Table of Contents

Chapter Six...... 102 Re-enacting the Extreme: History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance Catriona Elder

Chapter Seven...... 118 “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia Linda Thompson

Part III: Nation and Belonging

Chapter Eight...... 137 The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing Maria Chisari

Chapter Nine...... 152 The Illusory Everyday: Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV Emma Price

Chapter Ten ...... 167 Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia: Recovering Inherited Voices and Perspectives Chiara Gamboz

Part IV: Politics and the Public

Chapter Eleven ...... 187 “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media Stephen Alomes

Chapter Twelve ...... 203 Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth Samantha Green

Chapter Thirteen...... 220 Buying the Good Society: The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism Ariadne Vromen and Rodney Smith

Chapter Fourteen ...... 242 Disobedient Citizens: Press Depictions Of Striking School Teachers in NSW and Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrators in NSW and Victoria in 1968 Keith Moore New Voices, New Visions ix

Part V: Sexuality, Gender and the Regional

Chapter Fifteen ...... 261 “ The Man”: Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality Kate Ames

Chapter Sixteen ...... 277 “Feminine Women”: Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity Fiona Gill

Contributors...... 289

Index...... 293

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 1-1 Cartoon by Nicholson published in 5 April 2005 ...... 26 Figure 1-2 Guan Wei, Trepidation Continent 2, 2003. Drawing on maps, 98 x 82 cm ...... 29 Figure 1-3 Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001. Plywood and silk print. Site installation, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, ...... 31 Figure 1-4 Suzann Victor, Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre III, 2008. Chandeliers, stainless-steel tubing, pendulum drive units, variable dimensions. Site installation, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney...... 32 Figure 4-1 Illustration for the chapter on Western Australia in Brassey, Lady Annie. 1889. The Last Voyage, to and Australia, in the “Sunbeam.” New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., p. 229...... 72 Figure 10-1 Commemorative walk in , December 2003 (Trevorrow 2007). Courtesy of the Ngarrinjeri Heritage Committee Inc...... 174

Table 13-1. Delineation between political and non-political consumerism...... 220 Table 13-2. Political activity of , 2005...... 222 Table 13-3. Trends in political consumerism compared with other forms of political activity, ...... 223 Table 13-4. The six issues associated with the highest levels of political consumerism...... 226 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the following people and institutions for their support. Both the and Queensland University of Technology provided financial assistance for the two conferences from which these chapters are drawn. In particular, we acknowledge at the University of Sydney the School of Social and Political Sciences, the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, and the School of Languages and Media and at Queensland University of Technology the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education for their contributions. Special thanks go to Professors Glenda Sluga, Simon Tormey, Tim Fitzpatrick, Annette Patterson, and Clive Bean. This book emerged from International Australian Studies Association conferences and reflects the scholarly excitement of this field. Thanks to all the scholars who attended these conferences and produced an enjoyable intellectual buzz. We acknowledge with gratitude the helpfulness and patience of the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing in bringing this publication to fruition. Copy editor Wendy Monaghan was central in the preparation of the manuscript and has produced a most elegant and streamlined product for which we thank her. We would also like to thank Owen Leong for permission to use his artwork Tidal Skin on the front cover. It is a beautiful image, which reflects so much of what we have attempted to examine and think through in the book. Thanks also to Francis Maravillas for assisting in the talks about how best to frame the cover and the choice of image. Thank you to all the authors who worked so rigorously and thought so creatively about their research to ensure each chapter was the best it could possibly be.

Catriona Elder and Keith Moore

INTRODUCTION

CATRIONA ELDER AND KEITH MOORE

“Damn the law; my will is the law, and woe unto the man that dares to disobey it!” shouts Governor William Bligh from the pages of E. A. Hughes’s Bligh of the Bounty (1928, 177). Yet, some did dare, and twenty years after his crew mutinied on board his ship, Bligh encountered another uprising—this time as governor of New South Wales by the military officers serving under him. Many historians share Hughes’s view that the Bounty captain was a bullying tyrant, undeserving of compassion or sympathy over the mutiny by his crew. They portray Bligh as cruel and inflexible, a martinet devoid of the skills necessary to successfully occupy the position he held. However, another vision, which highlights the voices of Bligh and his supporters, challenges those who argue that Bligh, as captain of the Bounty, was a tyrant. Those who support this viewpoint see Bligh as an expert navigator who was compassionate towards his crew. They argue that it is the first mate, Fletcher Christian, who deserves the blame for the Bounty mutiny. Also, many historians assess Bligh’s performance as governor of New South Wales favourably, considering him a principled and competent administrator surrounded by powerful and corrupt officers. Bligh was a victim of circumstance, his supporters claim. Although numerous historians have attempted to settle the matter, new voices or new research facilitating new visions and new formats for telling the tale continue to surface. Although the crew of the Bounty would not have known it at the time, they were making Australian history. The shipboard rebellion took place a year after Australia was colonised, and the location of the ship at the time and the crew’s ultimate destination reflected the British interest in the South Pacific. When Bligh re-emerged as a colonial governor in New South Wales, it was as a member of a circulating group of British military officers overseeing the governing of the expanding British colonies. More specifically, the endless debate on whether Bligh was a “blunt and zealous … public servant actuated … by honest intentions” (Bennett 1867, 367) or someone who “offended by his rudeness until, at last, there was scarcely anyone in the colony who was his friend” (Allen 1882, 32) has played an 2 Introduction important part in the production of national cultures and histories. The centrality of the issue in early Australian history reflects the place of the first colony of New South Wales and the political history and narratives of challenge, rebellion, and disobedience in Australian history and popular mythology. In a volume such as this, which explores the new visions and voices in twenty-first-century Australian life and culture, it is interesting to consider the myriad of narratives that have emerged around William Bligh over the last two hundred years. They help to highlight the changes and the continuities in the voices and the visions that have circulated about Australian cultures. The collection of works on Bligh can help us trace the patterns in the themes and issues that in and out of daily social and political life in Australia, and the fora—local, national, and global—in which these stories play out. The Bounty mutiny attracted the public’s attention almost as soon as it occurred, and the voices that contributed to the production of the narrative of the rebellion were varied. William Bligh’s account, titled A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty ..., was published in 1790. Also in that year, the Royalty Theatre staged The Pirates: Or, the Calamities of Capt. Bligh (Clement and Larsen 1989, 1, 49). The capture of some of the Bounty crew members in Tahiti and their return to London where, in 1792, they were court-martialled and some executed heightened public interest in Bligh’s role in the mutiny, especially when Edward Christian, the brother of prominent Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian, published the proceedings (Clement and Larsen 1989, 17). Already, the story of the mutiny was circulating as popular theatre, legal documents, and memoir. Accounts of the uprising penned by the mutineers were published, though the authenticity of some was questionable. When The Letters of Fletcher Christian emerged in 1796, readers were informed that the contents were about Christian’s participation in “numerous South Sea adventures.” Lord Byron produced a favourable portrait of Christian in his 1823 narrative poem The Island, or Christian and His Comrades (Clement and Larsen 1989, 51, 55). In the late nineteenth century, the Bounty story and the NSW corps rebellion were sutured into Australian history, with varying conclusions. In History of Australia from 1787–1882 (Allen 1882, 32), James Allen wrote favourably about Bligh, whereas Alexander Sutherland in his History of Australia from 1606 to 1888, published in 1897, was scathing in his denunciation of the New South Wales governor. When Australian and New Zealand students in the early twentieth century were introduced to colonial history, they received a negative story of Bligh as “overbearing” and “unfitted” for the post of governor (History of Australia and New New Voices, New Visions 3

Zealand 1927, 26–7). In the twentieth century, some of the literary and historical visions of Bligh morphed into celluloid, and new dramatic or fictionalised narratives of his life emerged. In 1933, the Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty was released, with Errol Flynn making his acting debut as Fletcher Christian. However, the film had limited influence, as Greg Dening (1992, 346) explains, “MGM bought it up to clear the ground for their 1935 version.” The 1935 film Mutiny on the Bounty starring Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Christian won the Academy Award Best Picture that year (Clement and Larsen 1989, 69). In both films it is possible to see how the intersection of a “good versus evil” story, a matinee idol, and an exotic South Seas adventure was imagined as box- office gold. The appearance of the Bligh story on film highlights the role of new media—television and cinema—in envisioning a nation. These media expanded the spaces where national narratives could be aired; they also connected Australia with particular circuits of culture: the Hollywood film industry and the American and British television cultures. The rivalry between the two films about the Bounty demonstrates how visions of Australia or Australian visions of the world were filtered through the two dominant English language behemoths—the United Kingdom and the United States. Provided the dominant vision of Australia continued to be that of a Western culture mistakenly located in Asia, this relationship would continue to shape the narratives of belonging, place, and identity. Bligh scholarship continued to be produced in the late twentieth century, and again new modes and themes emerged. Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, published in 1992, is an ethnographic examination both of the crew members’ lives and of the beliefs and social mores of the Polynesians. In an academic scene transformed by poststructuralism and postcolonialism, Dening’s book exemplifies the power of these conceptual turns. The Tahitians, who had been absent or mute in much of the analysis of the mutiny, emerged as actors in the scene. It became more obvious to many that the issue of colonialism was central to analyses of Australian life. More narratives exploring Indigenous and non-British visions of place and identity emerged (Moreton-Robinson 2007; Perera 2006). The relations between the dominant Anglo-Celtic Australian population and other groups came to the fore. Although Governor Bligh does not appear in the exploration of contemporary narratives of Australia in this volume, he might be seen to have a ghostly presence. The early twenty-first-century narratives about Australian culture are produced in a space and time where ocean tragedy has again gained significant attention. The Tampa stand-off in 2001, when 4 Introduction the captain of a Norwegian freighter rescued asylum seekers from their sinking boat and was then refused permission to bring them to Australia, reoriented many citizens’ thinking about Australia towards the seas to the north. The more recent tragedies of death at sea when vessels filled with asylum seekers have foundered, as well as the stand-offs between the Royal Australian Navy and boats carrying asylum seekers, have increased the awareness of the high seas as a space for national drama.

Identities and Nations

Central to the endeavour of this volume, as with many other volumes that analyse nation-states, is an engagement with the ideas of identity and place. As the Bligh narrative demonstrates, when thinking about nations, space, and identity, an important element is the need to recognise the long- standing place of archetypes in the production of national narratives or visions. In Australia, one of the most long-lived archetypes is that of the “Aussie bloke” or Australian legend (Ward 1958), a masculine figure who emerged from the space of the bush. In the twenty-first century, this archetype has been thoroughly worked over and has emerged as a slightly battered and bruised trope that is more likely to be deployed ironically than with mid-twentieth-century fervour. Critiques of this mode of Australian identity have been made from the perspective of gender and sexuality (Biber et al. 1999; Lake 1986; Thomsen and Donaldson 2003) and race and ethnicity (Ang et al. 2000; Burke 2008). A critical approach to this mythic masculine type and his ironic doppelganger appears in Linda Thompson’s chapter in this volume where her analysis of the crocodile as an Australian symbol is undertaken with reference to the two best-known, media-savvy crocodile men: and Steve Irwin. Catriona Elder’s chapter on Antarctic explorers also engages with this classic masculine type, thinking through the ways in which twenty-first- century men engage with early-twentieth-century versions of this form of masculine identity. John Atwood discusses the clash that took place in the 1960s when rural or regional places—the home of the Australian legend— began to attract surfies and hippies, and the primacy of a particular way of life was challenged. Fiona Gill considers the legendary rural bloke in relation to the types of femininity that were understood as companion pieces to his needs. Gill coins the term “masculine femininity” to explain the ways in which strong but acceptable roles for women were represented in Australian literature. Continuing to focus on regional spaces but also analysing a completely different medium, radio, Kate Ames studies the affects of the heteronormative character of the traditional dominant New Voices, New Visions 5 masculine forms. She undertakes a close analysis of the discourse of a small number of DJs in order to explain how the masculinity of gay men is sometimes disparaged through humour, while in other contexts it is embraced as part of diverse twenty-first-century regional life. Identities formed around national archetypes or stories do not attach only to individuals, as with the Aussie bloke, but also to broader discourses focused on place. Francis Maravillas’s chapter on the location of Australia, “south of the West” as described by Ross Gibson (1992), provides an overarching analysis of some of the narratives about the place of Australia. In particular, Maravillas explores the discourse of Australia in Asia and the ways in which this narrative manifested during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1962, Judith Wright used the experience of vertigo to help describe Australia’s unique geographical location. Maravillas elaborates upon Wright’s term to suggest that the vertigo results from Australia’s postcolonial present and its geographical location to the south of both Asia and the West. Using examples drawn from contemporary art practice, he explores how various artists reflect on the mostly white, uneven efforts of Australia’s late-twentieth-century efforts to identify more closely with Asia and to reduce its focus on Europe. Maravillas suggests that the tensions created by a desire to be both of the West and of Asia is further unsettled by new and confronting understandings about the country’s colonial past. Tracing the political and cultural discussions that occurred across the end of the twentieth century, including Indigenous critiques of native title legislation and the of the , Maravillas’s argument makes visible the various forms of colonial desire underpinning the dominant Australian understandings of an Asian and Aboriginal ‘other.’

Space and Place

Whereas Maravillas takes a macro view, John Atwood and Lesley Hawkes consider how identities are produced and challenged in smaller spaces. Focusing on the urban, Hawkes examines local attachment to place through a consideration of the ways in which people use meeting places. Concentrating on two popular meeting places—one below the clocks at Melbourne’s Flinders Street Railway Station and the other outside Hungry Jack’s fast-food store in the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane—Hawkes analyses the cultural role these places play in the lives of locals and visitors. She explains that, despite their seeming differences, both are public spaces that offer a sense of legitimacy for people while they wait. Further, Hawkes argues that these two spaces are “sites of social exchange 6 Introduction and social cohesion” that promote a sense of community. Chiming with the notion of a “line of desire” (Tiessen 2007), Hawkes explores how these meeting places emerge organically in response to the needs and everyday desires of workers and tourists. Designers and architects might have envisioned the spaces and the traffic moving through them in particular ways, but these two meeting spaces provide people with a sufficient sense of ownership that they linger. In his chapter, John Atwood focuses on the regional rather than the urban space. As with Keith Moore’s chapter, Atwood re-envisions an aspect of Australia in the 1960s and, like Kate Ames, he explores the process and consequences of large-scale social change. Atwood investigates Byron Bay in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when it became a haven for surfers and a site of the counterculture revolution. Through an analysis of the local media and memoir, Atwood pieces together a story of change and argues that the two waves of arrivals challenged the values of farmers and businesspeople living in Byron Bay and the surrounding region. Drawing on letters to the editor published in the local papers as well as the more relaxed modes of communication found in surfer magazines, Atwood portrays the clash that took place when a rural space was remade as a hippy nirvana. Atwood elaborates that although, with time, the radicalism associated with the new groups dissipated, the emerging tourist industry ensured the continuation of a superficial link to the radical countercultural past. Issues of desire and conflict over space also emerge in Jennifer Hamilton-McKenzie’s chapter on the debates about the introduction of irrigation in early-twentieth- century Australia where, yet again, various groups of Australians clashed about the how land should be used and peopled. As the chapters by Hamilton-McKenzie, Ames, Hawkes, Atwood, and Maravillas suggest, the meanings and functions of spaces are enmeshed in “broader historical patterns that link places together” (Dourish 2006, n. p.). This means that a way of life that animates a place half a world away is often refigured and replayed in Australia. In her chapter, Cindy Lane demonstrates the spatial links that emerge between Australia and Europe. She analyses the diaries, landscape sketches, and paintings made by nineteenth-century visitors to Australia as a way of understanding how they experienced and represented the colony. In doing so, she brings to light some of the spatial “power geometries” (Massey 1993) that were emerging in colonial Western Australia. In trying to convey their sense of wonder, these visitors often interpreted the natural world from Renaissance and classical viewpoints, imposing these views upon the unfamiliar Australian landscape and making links to various European New Voices, New Visions 7 locations. They compared Western Australian locations with the Swiss Alps, for example. Despite the obvious dissimilarities, they derived pleasure from recognising as European the quaint houses, cultivated paddocks, and the endless parklands that Aboriginal fire-farming had created. Yet their desire to see and value the picturesque in the Australian landscape was frequently disappointed. The visitors considered much of inland Australia as monotonous. Nevertheless, despite the predominance of Eurocentric ideas, some visitors felt they understood the uniqueness of inland Western Australia and conveyed in their writing a sense of spaciousness and an appreciation of the unfamiliar. In a later period—the early twentieth century—when non-Indigenous Australians had familiarised themselves with the land, their desires often emerged in plans to tame and reshape the spaces they occupied. Jennifer Hamilton-McKenzie’s examination of Alfred Deakin’s Murray-Darling irrigation policy is a study of one such plan. In her chapter, Hamilton- McKenzie explores the underpinnings of Deakin’s support for a farming system that was opposed at the time and has become a long-term disaster adding to the fragility of the Murray-Darling Basin. Hamilton-McKenzie draws attention to the link between the irrigation technology Deakin championed and the race ideologies he supported, placing him within a milieu that privileged whiteness and celebrated the freshness of the new settler colonies, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States. Deakin’s love of most things American and his racial beliefs resulted in his promoting an irrigation scheme based on Californian principles and experiences, despite warnings of its inappropriateness to the Australian situation. National visions of desire and space also animate the chapter written by Catriona Elder. As with the chapters by Lane and Hamilton-McKenzie, it is possible to read Elder’s chapter in terms of de Certeau’s notion of “space as a practiced place” (de Certeau 1984). In this sense, the national polar expeditions and their twenty-first-century re-enactments can be understood as ways of “transform[ing] the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” (de Certeau 1984, 36). Drawing on the 2006 televised re- enactment of Sir Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition, Elder considers the ways in which this documentary/re-enactment program might reflect the changing way in which Australians see Antarctica, from that of an adventure science location to a destination for adventure tourism. However, by re-walking Mawson’s route and confirming the expeditionary desire lines, the television program also produces for Australians a stronger sense of ownership of, or belonging to, the Antarctic. Moving from the far south to the far north, Thompson’s chapter about the crocodile 8 Introduction demonstrates the transition of the saltwater crocodile from a feared predator to an Australian symbol. As with the Antarctic, this transition can be seen as a way of domesticating and making a space and its reptilian inhabitants more familiar. Again, it is the media—in this case, domestic news coverage and global film and television—that embeds the crocodile in dominant Australian narratives, producing a perverse response to this dangerous creature.

Politics and Politicians

The stories of William Bligh that have circulated in Australia have long made clear the power and role of political elites in this country. The chapters by Samantha Green and Stephen Alomes articulate some of the central dilemmas of the policing and reporting of misconduct by public officials. These two chapters explore the logic of institutional and public space in contemporary Australia. In her chapter, Green investigates the media’s role in determining whether Governor-General Peter Hollingworth, as Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, had failed in his duty of care to a victim of child abuse. Green focuses on the way in which the media influences attitudes and values in Australian society. She examines the media’s simplification of a complex and multifaceted set of circumstances and the moral panic that emerged through sensationalist reporting. Stephen Alomes, in his chapter, examines the print media’s increasing interest in and exposure of misbehaviour by politicians and senior public servants. He suggests this was not always the case, arguing that in the past the tabloid “gossip” in Australia restricted the publication of salacious gossip and other indiscretions to the private lives of celebrities, many of whom welcomed the publicity. Alomes suggests that this emphasis on gossip influences and distorts the content and nature of political reportage, frequently creating the impression that Australia’s politicians are overpaid and their behaviour in debate unrestrained and immature. Keith Moore writes about politics in his chapter also, but unlike Green and Alomes who consider elites and institutional power, Moore turns his attention to citizens and their troubling of dominant power structures. He compares the New South Wales teachers’ strike in 1968 with two highly publicised anti–Vietnam War demonstrations during that year. Examining reports, Moore notes that although the teachers and the demonstrators received front-page prominence, the short- and long-term consequences of the two actions differed. The teachers, who caused massive disruption affecting children and their parents, persuaded the New Voices, New Visions 9 government to accede to their demands. In contrast, the more visually exciting anti-war demonstrators caused negligible disruption to the community and their action may not have been very effective in helping to end conscription and Australian involvement in the war. As do Thompson, Green, and Alomes, Moore sees the media as a key place where visions of the nation are produced, and he reflects on why the Vietnam War demonstrations have eclipsed the more successful teachers’ strikes in popular cultural memory as the archetypal 1960s’ protest. In their chapter, Ariadne Vromen and Rodney Smith consider political action that occurred forty years after the demonstrations of which Moore writes. Drawing on scholarship that tracks the decline of formal political and community involvement, and taking note, as does Alomes, of the increasing tendency to view politicians and political parties negatively, they argue that new forms of political action are emerging, and alongside are new spaces where action occurs. Political dissent no longer takes place only in the streets; a new form of opposition is enacted through consumption—a form these two authors call “political consumerism.” Vromen and Smith explain that political consumerism is mostly embraced by those with the financial means and the knowledge to implement actions in support of their beliefs. For many political consumers, participation is not an individual activity: it relies on networking. Again drawing on Doreen Massey’s (1993) idea of power geometries, this argument demonstrates that some affluent social groups have a certain amount of financial “mobility” and can initiate actions that affect—even if only slightly—economic flows and the movement of goods in a community. Vromen and Smith, in part, map the mobile relationships between Australian citizens, their desire for change, and the activities of governments and multinational corporations. The authors trace the lines of desire mapped out by citizens’ support for community enterprises and local or national social-justice initiatives through their practices of consumption. Vromen and Smith’s chapter articulates the relationship between local actions in relation to national or global networks of power. Kate Ames examines a challenge to dominant politics of a different kind; however, her focus is on the normative and everyday politics of sexuality. She analyses the impact of regional radio on the lives of young people living in Rockhampton in the mid-1990s, examining the sometimes-uneasy intersection of gay sexual identities and regional identity in the on-air banter between radio hosts and their audiences. Again, the chapter works through the intersection of power, space, and identity (Massey 1993), suggesting that although normative “heterocentric” views continue to predominate in the media, there were at the local level 10 Introduction some changes taking place as Hot FM provided space for new voices and so challenged older discourses of typical and acceptable forms of regional or bush masculinity.

Belonging and the Nation

Ames carefully analysed the on-air exchanges of radio hosts in order to trace the shifts taking place in a regional town in Australia. She was mapping the way that the space was changing. One of the outcomes of the subtle shifts she tracked could be an increased sense of belonging for gay men and lesbians in regional Queensland. National narratives work to produce feelings of belonging for citizens, but many of the normative narratives have excluded equally as many citizens as they have hailed. Maria Chisari, in her chapter, examines the 2007 Australian citizenship test, which was instituted to address a mood within many conservative circles that multiculturalism enabled migrants to be indifferent towards Australian values, lifestyle, and the rule of law and was therefore diminishing the cohesiveness of Australian society. The citizenship test was designed to calculate the level of belonging of migrants and to instil in them what were described as “core values.” Chisari argues that ’s concept of national unity promoted through the citizenship test demanded that migrants and refugees reject their cultural practices and embrace integration within a narrow set of norms. Chiara Gamboz explores a governmental practice that sought to integrate non-white Australians into a normative sense of the national. Her chapter traces not only the ways in which governments have restricted the ability of Indigenous people to control their own lives but also their resistance through the form of the petition. Gamboz argues that petitions are a valuable means of furthering understandings of Indigenous and non- Indigenous interactions in the past. The voices and perspectives detectable within petitions can act as a corrective measure to help compensate for the under-representation of groups and individuals in the recording of historical accounts, she explains. Petitions from Indigenous groups have included requests for land, greater freedom of movement, wages, freedom to marry and of employment, and the alteration of oppressive legislation. In particular, Gamboz examines two distinct petitions: the first written by Ellen Kropinyeri in 1923 responding to the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and the second, originating eight years later, from the Aboriginal settlement at Lake Tyers in Victoria written in support of a local manager. Gamboz mobilises the concepts of power and identity, arguing that petitions reflected an attempt to interact with the “‘pre- New Voices, New Visions 11 existing structures of power’ identified in the domination contract as a result of previous human causality.” Within the space of the nation—a state that limited Indigenous rights—these texts were a way of engaging and speaking back to non-Indigenous colonisers. Emma Price explores a very different situation from that of Gamboz. As with Chisari and Maravillas, Price engages with a post–September 11 Australia where migrants are perceived as potential problems. Drawing on the popular television program Border Security, a series filming the work of the quarantine and customs department in Australia, she analyses the vision of Australia that the program produces as it engages with ideas of “good” and “bad” travellers through the format of reality TV. Price challenges the producers’ claims that the events are representative of everyday Australian life. The space of Customs House—on the border between Australia and the rest of the world—becomes, in Price’s analysis, a place where unwitting passengers and in-the-know government officials perform a particular version of welcome and control of visitors. The role and culpability of William Bligh both in the Bounty mutiny and as governor of New South Wales has promoted a debate that has generated new visions and new voices for more than two hundred years. As the myriad of authors, screenwriters, historians, cultural theorists, documentary makers, and even the original participants in the mutinies have made clear, the places where the insurrections occurred—on the high seas and in a newly colonised land—shaped the narratives produced. The narratives about life in -colonisation have continued to be formed in relation to space and identity. The sixteen authors in this book draw on ideas, concepts, and theories about nation, identity, space, place, and power in order to rethink stories or reread large-scale and everyday media, private, or public events in new ways. In many cases, the authors are promoting debate on topics where a single viewpoint currently predominates. These authors are introducing to readers new visions and new voices about Australian society and the Australian identity.

12 Introduction

Works Cited

Allen, James. 1882. History of Australia from 1787–1882, Melbourne: Mason, Firth, and McCutcheon. Ang, Ien, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, and Mandy Thomas, eds. 2000. Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. Sydney: Pluto Press. Bennett, Samuel. 1867. The History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation. Sydney: Hanson and Bennett. Biber, Katherine, Tom Sear and Dave Trudinger. eds. 1999. Playing the Man: New Approaches to Masculinity. Sydney: Pluto Press. Burke, Anthony. 2008. Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Clement, Russell T., and A. Dean Larsen. 1989. Mutiny on the Bounty: An Exhibition Commemorating the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of the Mutiny, Provo, Utah: Friends of the Brigham Young University Library. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dening, Greg. 1992. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, Oakleigh Victoria: Cambridge University Press. Dourish, Paul. 2006. “Re-space-ing Place: ‘Place’ and ‘Space’ Ten Years On.” In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, November 2004–08. Banff, Alberta, Canada. Gibson, Ross. 1992. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. History of Australia and New Zealand: A Short Account of the Early Discoveries and Settlement. 1927. Sydney: Cornstalk Publishing. Hughes Edward A., ed. 1928. Bligh of the Bounty: Being the Narrative of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the Voyage in the Open Boat London: Dent. Lake, Marilyn. 1986. “Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context.” Historical Studies 22 (86): 116–31. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner, 59–69. London: Routledge. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, ed. 2007. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, New Voices, New Visions 13

Perera, Suvendrini, ed. 2006. Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001. Perth: Network Books. Rawson, Geoffrey. 1934. Bligh of the Bounty. Second edition, London: Philip Allan. Sutherland, Alexander and George Sutherland. 1897. History of Australia from 1606 to 1888. Tenth edition. Melbourne: G. Robertson. Thomsen, Stephen and Mike Donaldson, eds. 2003. Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities. Melbourne: Pluto Press Tiessen, Matthew. 2007 “Accepting Invitations: Desire Lines as Earthly Offerings.” In rhizomes. 15 winter 2007. . Ward, Russel. 1958. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

PART I:

COMMUNITIES AND SPACES

CHAPTER ONE

UN/SETTLED GEOGRAPHIES: VERTIGO AND THE PREDICAMENT OF AUSTRALIA’S POSTCOLONIALITY

FRANCIS MARAVILLAS

When East becomes North and West is under your feet, your compass spins frighteningly. To calm it you must find yourself a new axis. –Judith Wright (1962)

Written in 1962 for The London Magazine, Judith Wright’s pithy description of the experience of vertigo induced by Australia’s paradoxical geographical location—as a “Western” nation on the edge of “Asia”—is remarkable for its historical acuity as much as for its prescience. It alludes to the spatial dimension of the settler-colonial project, which historically established Australia as a far-flung outpost of “the West” through the occupation of a vast, distant “Southern land” perceived to be virtually empty. It suggests also the sensation of vertigo palpable in the heady mix of hope and anxiety that marked not only Australia’s “turn” to Asia late into the twentieth century but also the more recent re-imaginings of the nation and its place in the world at the beginning of the new millennium. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which vertigo, as an affective function of space that also produces spatialising effects, is constitutive of the psycho-geography of Australia’s settler-colonial and “postcolonial” culture and identity. I argue that vertigo results from Australia’s predicament of postcoloniality and the various efforts of the nation to come to terms with its paradoxical geographical location—south of both the West and Asia. By deploying the trope of “the South” as the means to understand Australia’s paradoxical geographical location as a white settler colony on the edge of Asia, I seek to evoke what Paul Carter describes as the “spatial forms and fantasies through which a culture declares its presence” (Carter 18 Chapter One

1988, xxii). At the same time, I argue that the South is not simply a historically and geographically constituted site; it is also an evolving cartography. By examining the textual, visual, and affective registers underlying the figurations of the nation across various domains—ranging from political rhetoric and cartoons to selected works of artists of Asian origin in Australia—the shifting outlines of this cartography will be discerned.

Vertigo in the South

While the “affective turn” in critical and cultural theory has focused attention on the emotional and intensities of the body, subjectivity, and identity, it is only recently that there has been a growing recognition of the affective economies of space, place, and territory (Probyn 2005; Smith et al. 2009; Stewart 2007). In her work on the “cultural politics of emotion,” Sarah Ahmed draws attention to the spatial dimension of affect by focusing on what emotions do and how they circulate. As she suggests, “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of contact with others” (Ahmed 2004, 10). In this way, the economy of affect is defined by spatial relations of proximity and distance and shaped by our “encounters with forces and passages of intensity that bear out … folds of belonging (or non-belonging) to a world” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 3). As a particular mode of relating to space, place, and territory, the experience of vertigo that constitutes the psycho-geography of Australia may thus be viewed as symptomatic of the imaginative coordinates and symbolic cartographies that locate the nation as a white settler colony, far from Europe and on the edge of Asia. As a deep-seated form of disorientation and anxiety about space and place, the sensation of vertigo also is akin to a “structure of feeling” in the sense developed by Raymond Williams. According to Williams, structures of feelings are:

… specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. (Williams 1977, 132)

In this way, vertigo can be understood as a kind of “lived” geography: a deeply ingrained structure of feeling induced by Australia’s precarious sense of its location and identity as a nation in the wider world. This sense of vertigo is accentuated by what Meaghan Morris refers to as Australia’s Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 19 status as a “dubiously postcolonial” nation whose geo-body continues to be shaped by the aftermaths of its colonial past even as it seeks to find a place for itself in the wider world (Morris 1992a, 471). Vertigo thus stems from Australia’s predicament of postcoloniality and its various efforts to come to terms with its paradoxical geographical location. In this context, the trope of the South is a space–time configuration that is both a historically and geographically constituted site and a dynamic, relational, and multiply-inflected spatiality. As a mode of location, the trope of the South is a marker of Australia’s postcolonial predicament and its anxious experience of antipodality and decentredness. As an epistemic category, the trope of the South brings into view a set of vectors that intersect with the making and remaking of the spatial and temporal coordinates of the paradoxically located entity of “Australia.” In this way, the South can be understood as a site in the sense described by John Frow and Meaghan Morris as “the point of intersection and of negotiation of radically different kinds of determination and semiosis” (Frow and Morris 1993, xv). As a site at which a multiplicity of forces— determinations and effects—are articulated, the South is always pluralised and hybridised as well as partial, provisional, and open to contestation. Significantly, understanding the South nominated as Australia as a constellation of relations at a particular conjuncture enables one to grasp its experience of vertigo as relational, that is, as arising from its simultaneous relation of proximity and distance to both the West and Asia.

Anxious Ground

In her essay, “Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire,” Ella Shohat highlights the role of geographical knowledge in the expansion of empire by drawing attention to the map and the compass as emblems of power and authority:

Colonial narratives legitimized the search for treasure islands by lending a scientific aura to those quests … Numerous narratives of penetrating new regions, involving detailed descriptions of maps, were inspired by the growing science of geography. The image-making of the land determined the significance of places through its power of inscription on the map with the compass on top as the signifier of scientific authority. (Shohat 1991, 45)

As an instrument for setting the cardinal points of cartography, the compass was a technology that facilitated the development of geography as a spatial science. While the designative function of the compass point 20 Chapter One defined the vectors for colonial exploration and cartographic representation, the process of occupying and controlling space began with the provisional markings and annotations on the blank page that would become a map. Yet, as an artifact of modernity, the imperial map obscures the very journeys that underwrite it. In his account of the production of space, Michel de Certeau considers the modern practice of cartography, observing that “in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e. from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility” (de Certeau 1984, 122). Unlike earlier, pre- modern maps that recorded the experiences of a journey pictorially, modern maps “became more autonomous,” gradually eliminating the visible signs or evidence of their production (de Certeau 1984, 120–1). As a modern technology that produces a form of spatio-temporal amnesia, the map not only obscures the colonial voyages of discovery and the making of empires that predicated its creation but also displaces alternative geographies and itineraries of movement (and their troubling signs of difference and indigeneity) through the foundational acts of possession that it performs. Indeed, it is precisely in this way that the space of the South nominated as Australia came to be figured in terms of a fatal slippage—from the land that was unknown (terra incognita) to that which was uninhabited (terra nullius)—that paved the way for the foundational occupation of the land in Australia. The static and totalising tableau of the modern map that guided the colonial voyage of discovery and conquest is thus haunted by the very ground upon which it performs its appropriative acts of dispossession. Vertigo, in this context, refers to what Paul Carter (1996a) describes as the “anxiety of groundlessness” that underlies Australia’s violent history of settler colonialism and which continues to plague present-day efforts to dwell comfortably on a land that was stolen before it was settled. For Carter, the colonisers’ efforts to stabilise or “ground” themselves through the eradication of difference and the exclusive possession of the land—the usurpation of which was licensed by the prior transformation of the space of Australia into a tabula rasa—was constantly haunted by the possibility of becoming “ungrounded,” of being confronted with the tenuous grounds of such possession. According to Carter, by “dissolving the ground of difference,” the early European colonisers were paradoxically left with “nowhere to stand … surrounded by abysses and cliffs or, more insidiously, by swamps or sands that hovered ambiguously between the solid and the liquid” (Carter 1996a, 29–30). As a result, “[w]e live in our Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 21 places off the ground … [and] we sense our ungroundedness, the fragility of our claim on the soil” (Carter 1996b, 2). This sense of groundlessness and moot legitimacy is evident in Judith Wright’s own unease about the foundational occupation of the land in Australia. She describes her sense of affective attachment and belonging to Australia in the following way:

These two strands—the love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of the invasion—have become part of me. It is a haunted country. (Cited in Read 2000, 14; my emphasis)

By figuring Australia as a site of haunting wherein the spectre of the nation’s colonial past constantly forecloses (or at least, defers) the possibility of a settled repose and easy intimacy with the land, Wright critically acknowledges the conflict-ridden and contradictory structures of feeling that are constitutive of what Meaghan Morris (1992a) refers to as the “white settler subjectivity”. According to Morris, this subject position is steeped in a deep sense of ambivalence and moral ambiguity, “oscillat[ing] historically between identities as colonizer and colonized” (Morris 1992a, 471). The precariousness and incoherence of the white settler subject thus arises precisely from a primal sense of unease: the vertiginous condition of groundlessness, a disconcerting state of “unsettled settlement” that produces a deeply ingrained anxiety about any attempt to secure a fixed or rooted sense of belonging and place on a land violently wrenched from its Indigenous inhabitants. Significantly, at a time when the past and the stories that are told about the past remain a highly fraught and contested terrain in Australia— evident in the periodic outbreaks of the so-called History Wars at the turn of the century (see Macintyre and Clark 2003)—the question of belonging and possession of the land is a potent, albeit deeply discomfiting, one. Moreover, it is one that carries an active and pressing mnemonic force in Australia’s cultural and political unconscious, a force that transcends the vastly different and seemingly incommensurable positions that mark the often-vitriolic public intellectual and political debates about the meaning and interpretation of Australia’s colonial history. This history, as Paul Carter (1988) has shown, is a deeply spatial one (involving a process of transforming space into place), but it is also one that has given rise to mythic narratives, chronologies, and lineages of events that masquerade as founded on a seemingly secure footing of “facts” taken as given, rather than ones whose grounds have yet to be found via an unfinished dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. In this context, what the trope of vertigo highlights is the pervasive yet often suppressed sense 22 Chapter One of anxiety about the constitutive deeds of genocidal practice lying concealed beneath the mythic footings of Australia’s foundational narrative that upholds and sustains its claim to national sovereignty. Indeed, one can discern an undercurrent of such anxiety in the affective and rhetorical structures that underlie the repeated injunctions of former prime minister John Howard (1996–2007) against the so-called black armband view of history and his call for a more affirming, “balanced” view of Australia’s colonial past. His speech on racial tolerance delivered in the federal parliament in October 1996 is particularly telling in this regard:

I profoundly reject the black armband view of Australian history. I believe the balance sheet of Australian history is a very generous and benign one. I believe that, like any other nation, we have black marks upon our history but amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history … I believe it is tremendously important, particularly as we approach the centenary of the Federation of Australia, that the Australian achievement has been a heroic one, a courageous one and a humanitarian one. (Howard 1996, 6158; my emphasis)

In choosing the phrase “black marks” to describe what he has euphemistically referred to elsewhere as the flaws, imperfections, or blemishes of the past, Howard here reveals the repressed thoughts that he is anxious to deny, or erase, in the name of a national and nation-building history: the brutality of the frontier where Indigenous people sought to resist the violence unleashed by the colonisers with their muskets. In his speech, Howard unconsciously insinuates that this scene of racial terror is a dark stain that not only tarnishes but also haunts his view of the history of Australia as one of triumph and heroic achievement. For in the very process of focusing on and extolling an idealised narrative of the nation’s past—and in his expression of an individual rather than a national apology for the legacies of that past—Howard unwittingly reveals the vertiginous sense of groundlessness and the fear of being ungrounded (in the face of Indigenous struggles for self-determination) that his metaphorical topos of the “balance sheet” (the smooth template that functions as the “objective” ledger and final arbiter of history) seeks to rationalise, occlude, or suppress.

Future Fall

Although the struggle over the past is neither isolated nor unique to the Australian body politic, the past has become such a fraught terrain of national political and cultural struggle in Australia precisely because the Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 23 nation’s very identity is constituted by a deep-seated antagonism between its settler-colonial history and its geographical location. It is this tension between Australia’s history and its geography—a tension that is periodically articulated as a pivotal confrontation between the past and the future—that precipitates a form of vertigo, a sense of anxiety and fear in relation to space that arises as a result of Australian efforts to find its “place” in a region, far from Europe, in Asia. Indeed, it is more than just a passing coincidence that the word vertigo is etymologically derived from the Latin vertere: to turn (Khoo 2002). In this sense, the experience of vertigo can be understood as symptomatic of a particular turn or movement around Australia’s antipodean axis, a turn marked by a profound shift in sensibility and orientation as Australia sought to re-imagine and secure a place for itself, as a nation, in the wider world—particularly within Asia, the geographical region that has often been described as Australia’s “near North”. Significantly, Australia’s turn away from Europe towards Asia not only accented Australia’s desire to find a place within space, it also involved the reorganisation of the nation’s space through time, in ways that registered an existential sense of urgency and foreboding about the future. As Suvendrini Perera has observed, the various discourses of the new millennium—such as the discourse of republicanism and reconciliation—mobilised a “national teleology of space” in a way that “says something about the kind of place we are, and about where we are as a nation in the world” (Perera 2000, 7). Indeed, what appeared to be increasingly at stake was Australia’s future survival in the face of the rising economic power and dynamism of its geographical . Motivated by a perceived economic necessity to align itself with the booming economies in the region to its north, Australia’s turn to Asia has been, in part, shaped by its aggressive pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies since the early 1980s and the shift from post-war Keynesianism to a progressively deregulated economy in which the goal of national competitiveness in the global capitalist economy is paramount (Wiseman 1998). At the same time, Australia’s experience of the profound structural changes wrought by the forces of globalisation have given rise to a set of anxieties and fears in relation to the space of the global economy. These anxieties and fears about space can be seen as constituting what Meaghan Morris calls “phobic narratives”:

Widely used today in the media to frame economic and political debates about Australia’s future, phobic narratives constitute space in a stifling alteration of agoraphobia (fear of “opening up” the nation to an immensely powerful Other, typically “the global economy”) with claustrophobia (fear 24 Chapter One

of being shut away from a wider, more dynamic, typically “Asian-Pacific” world): pressure accumulates in this way on the figure of the border between forces pushing in and forces pushing out. (Morris 1998, 246–7)

These alternating forms of phobias register Australia’s profoundly vertiginous sense of anxiety and fear in relation to its place in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world. Indeed, for Morris, Australia’s phobic responses towards the wider world produce a reactive sense of self in the face of a threatening other:

History is then caught in an oscillation between entropy, slow running down of closed, communal time, and an explosive temporality of catastrophe unleashed by the Other coming from elsewhere. (Morris 1998, 246–7)

Significantly, a vertiginous sense of fear and anxiety about Australia’s place in a globalised world can be discerned in the repeated evocations in public debates in the early to mid-1990s of an immensely powerful and proleptic image of Australia’s location and future destiny as being within and part of Asia. Moreover, Asia was imagined as a region that would underwrite Australia’s future in the wake of the global geopolitical and geo-economic shifts and realignments that had loosened Australia’s historical ties with its traditional allies. This was evident following a statement by former prime minister (1991–96), calling for greater integration with the region:

So if Britain would no longer secure our future, nor the United States or any other country, and our commodities alone would not secure it … how could it be secured? ... We can find a place in the world as never before. And we can find it primarily in our own region—in that part of the world which the Australians of a century ago looked at with a mixture of fear and disdain. We can secure our future in the huge and rapidly growing Asia- Pacific region. (Keating 1995, 163)

By figuring Asian dynamism as a guarantee of Australia’s future in a new, rapidly changing global order, Keating participated in the affective politics of anxiety and hope that characterised much of the authoritative discourses of Asian engagement in the early to mid-1990s. Although Australia has for the last decade no longer imagined Asia as the site of its future destiny and eventual belonging, a mixture of hope and anxiety about the future continues to shape its engagement with the region as evinced by former prime minister ’s (2007–10) proposal for the establishment of an Asia-Pacific community to grasp the “the regional and Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 25 global challenges [that are] crucial to our nation’s future” in an increasingly fraught strategic, geopolitical, and geo-economic environment (Rudd 2008). Indeed, it is precisely this complex psychodynamic of fear and fantasy, and anxiety and desire, in relation to the region that moulds Australia’s experience of its “postcolonial” predicament—its simultaneous experience of being located south of both the West and Asia.

Anxious Footings

Significantly, a vertiginous sense of space and place is induced by the fundamental tension between Australia’s history and its geography. The sense of vertigo is evident in the anxiety that attends Australia’s efforts to secure a place for itself in a new globalised world (dis-)order alongside its culturally similar, yet geographically distant, powerful traditional Western allies while attempting to advance its strategic security and economic interests through bilateral dialogue and regional discussions with countries in Asia. This vertiginous sense of place and space was the subject of Peter Nicholson’s cartoon published in The Australian on 5 April 2005 on the occasion of the visit of the President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (see Figure 1-1). Published in the country’s leading national newspaper, the cartoon functions as a mediatised cultural form through which Australia’s relationship with Asia is graphically depicted, framed and commented upon through humour, paradox, satire, irony, and metaphor (Gombrich 1963, 127–42). The humour and parody that underlies Nicholson’s depiction of Australia’s historically fraught relationship with Indonesia appears to have been inspired by a speech delivered by the Indonesian president in the Australian federal parliament in April 2005 in which he described both countries’ enhanced bilateral relations in terms of a re-imagining and reorienting of their geographical standpoints:

Indonesia looking south would now see the richest country in the southern hemisphere, one of the fastest growing economies in the OECD. A bastion of stability, progress, dynamism. Indonesians looking south would also see a confident country down under which has reinvented herself successfully, with an open, tolerant society based on multiculturalism. Australians looking north would now see that along the equator spans the world’s third largest democracy that is Indonesia—third, after India and the United States … Australians looking north would also see a country that is home to the world’s largest Muslim population … a wondrous place where Islam, democracy and modernity thrive together. And Australians looking 26 Chapter One

north would also see in Indonesia a bridge to East Asia. (Yudhoyono 2005; my emphasis)

Figure 1-1. Cartoon by Nicholson published in The Australian, 5 April 2005. .

In Nicholson’s cartoon, Australia’s rapprochement with one of its closest and arguably most important neighbour in Asia is depicted through the seemingly straightforward figurative and symbolic device of the handshake between the two countries’ heads of state standing on a bridge that spans the maritime expanse separating the two countries. At the same time, a sense of vertigo is subtly conveyed by the contrasting postures and comportment of Yudhoyono and Howard: Yudhoyono appears seemingly at ease, even wryly indifferent, while Howard appears, tellingly, somewhat tense and disoriented, unsure of his bearings. Here, Howard’s wrinkled brow and tensile body alludes to the deep-seated ontological uncertainty of a nation still searching for terra firma. In this way, the figure of Howard— as representative of the nation—takes on a specular and allegorical form, a kind of mirroring that Meaghan Morris has described as the “constitution of the nation in the body of the leader” (Morris 1992b, 25). The text in the speech bubbles is even more telling. Yudhoyono’s speech bubble—which reads as “We’ve been looking North for too long”—deploys a cartographic index in a conventional way (implying that “Indonesia will now, however momentarily, look to its neighbour in its south”) thereby foregrounding Australia’s sense of estrangement and uncertainty over its place in the region. In contrast, Howard’s speech bubble—which reads as “We’ve been looking West for too long”—is Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 27 neither a sudden epiphany nor a feigned apologia; rather, it draws its semantic force from its enunciative anxiety, an underlying angst-ridden sense of Australia’s location as south of both the West and Asia. In this context, the upbeat, anticipatory sense of hope and desire (as well as occasional panache) that attended Australia’s cultural and geopolitical reorientation towards Asia during the period of the Keating government—the intense sense of “ecstasy” that Meaghan Morris described as “an upheaval internal to the subject [wherein] the normal hierarchy of relations between its constitutive parts is overthrown” (Morris 1992b, 34)—has given way to a more cautious, calculated approach whereby an ecstatic engagement with Asia is defined as aberrant, and counterpoised to a more sober, realist approach to the region, one that is nevertheless marked by a profound sense of disorientation and imbalance. Howard’s vertigo thus arises from the skewing of the familiar geographical and ideological coordinates that have historically defined—from the point of view of Australia—the location of Asia (to its north) and the West (located precariously under its feet). In this scenario, such geographical coordinates have been rendered awry by Australia’s pragmatic turn towards one of its closest neighbours.

Going South

Geography as a cartographic sign-system and order of knowledge locates and represents people and identities in relation to bounded territories of place (Rogoff 2000, 4–7). Irit Rogoff suggests this epistemic map is now being unsettled by artists whose “‘unhomed geographies’ … offer an alternative set of relations between subjects and places” (Rogoff 2000, 4– 7). As diasporic subjects with transnational connections and linkages with the region, Asian artists in Australia engender such a “crisis” within cartographic systems of representation that anchor identity and subjectivity in stable and seamless topographies of nation and region. These artists are not, however, part of a homogenous, undifferentiated Asian diaspora in Australia. As subjects with different levels of affective attachment and identification with their culture of origin, these artists experience the condition of diaspora in highly varied and irreducibly specific ways. Moreover, while the diversity and specificity of the work and experience of these artists counters the idea of Australia as a bounded and homogenous entity fundamentally separate from Asia, the very presence of variously constituted Asian diasporic formations in Australia foregrounds the country’s location as distinctly south of Asia. Indeed, despite their varied experiences of travel, migration, and diaspora, and the diverse 28 Chapter One range and specificities of their practice, Asian artists in Australia share the common experience of being part of a southward migratory movement from various countries in Asia to Australia. In her account of the transnational relations that characterise the Asian diaspora in Australia, Audrey Yue has sought to recast Australia’s dual location of south of the West and south of Asia in terms of the cognate geographical and theoretical trope of “going south”:

Inscribed in a migratory movement of literal displacement and reoriented in the racialised landscape of a postcolonial settler Australia, the trajectory of “going south” aligns itself with (Australia as) south of the West, (Australia as) south of Asia, and (both Australia and Asia as) south of the East and West. Implicit in the trajectory of “going south” is an interrogation of how Australia, as south of the West has also come to construct itself as specifically south of Asia. (Yue 2000, 192)

By tracking a specific migratory movement and trajectory from Asia to Australia, the trope of “going south” points to the way these movements and flows do not take place in empty space but move across the already constituted space of the island nation of Australia, a “racialised landscape” marked, as it were, by multiple fault lines and checkpoints, and uniquely defined by a heightened sense of decentredness in relation to the West. The terrain of the South—nominated as “Australia”—is thus deeply fraught and contested, a “dubiously postcolonial” geo-body whose internal fissures and boundaries appear as the gaping legacies and after-effects of a haunting past. At the same time, as Stuart Hall observes, fault lines and borders are also productive “sites of surreptitious crossings” where new relations, practices, and forms of connection emerge (Hall 2003, 34–5). The South is thus an evolving cartography, a product of the interrelations of a multitude of histories and trajectories, and one that is open to remapping as a complex, multidimensional living spatiality.

Geo-poetics of the South

These overlapping spatialities and temporalities come into view when one reflects on the ways in which Asian artists living and working in Australia creatively negotiate the complex entanglements, tensions, and interconnections between the “past” and the “present” and between “here” and “there” that is constitutive of the condition of diaspora. In this context, the work of these artists highlights the way in which Australia and Asia are not two separate and distinct entities, but are entangled in a complex set of historical, social, and cultural relations. Their work can thus be Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 29 viewed as constellative forms wherein multiple times and spaces are creatively reconfigured by bringing them together in relations of affinity and tension.

Figure 1-2. Guan Wei, Trepidation Continent 2, 2003. Drawing on maps, 98 x 82 cm.

This creative reconfiguring of the spatial and temporal coordinates of the South may be seen in Trepidation Continent (see Figure 1-2), a work by Chinese-born artist, Guan Wei. In this work, Guan explores the complex topographies of difference, identity, and belonging in Australia by figuring its geography as a site of migration in an increasingly fraught and racialised geopolitical world. His work charts the flows of human movement across the vast terrestrial and maritime territory of Australia. Local vernacular interdictions are, moreover, inscribed onto the continental territory (“Not Welcome,” “Piss Off”) alongside the injunctions of officialdom (“Urgent,” “Confidential,” “Secret Document”). Indeed, Guan’s work figures the bounded and heavily militarised space of Australia as a contested space. In particular, his graphic reworking of the map of Australia challenges the claims to singularity, stability, and closure that characterise the modern cartographic representation of the nation. In contrast to this modern practice of cartography, Guan’s work foregrounds precisely the very conditions that have given rise to the modern map of Australia. In this way, Trepidation Continent can be 30 Chapter One viewed as a form of anamnesis, a recollection of the spatial practices of colonialism (such as the violent “naming” of Indigenous land by the early settlers) that the modern-day map of Australia has, through its taxonomic and ordering procedures, sought to forget or consign to the order of (repressed) memory. In Guan’s work, moreover, the once fabled island continent of Australia trepidates with both anxiety and fear as it seeks to violently reassert control over its territory through a performative assertion of its sovereignty in an increasingly turbulent and dislocated world order. In this fictive scenario, the imagined geography of Australia is figured as a site of haunting, where spectres of both purity and contagion ominously cast their shadows. Australia thus appears as haunted as much by the spectre of invasion from its north—a haunting that resonates with earlier anxieties about the spectre of Asianisation (as well as Sinicisation) of Australia that the sought to exorcise. By foregrounding the overlapping and disjunctive spatialities and temporalities of Australia and Asia, Guan’s work presents a particular image of the space of the South, one where the past and the present, and the here and the there, reveal themselves through ghostly presences and figurations, and engage in a form of mutual haunting. The complex configuration of relations and trajectories that constitute the multiple spaces and times of diaspora is also evident in The Boat, 2001 (see Figure 1-3), a work by Vietnamese-born artist, Dacchi Dang. The work features a life-size reconstruction of the boat in which the artist and several of his siblings undertook their southward-bound journey to Australia. An austere yet imposing work, Dang’s The Boat registers its presence through its enormous wooden frame, clad entirely with rice paper, which functions as a fragile and permeable outer membrane wrapped around the solid surface of the boat’s structure. Projected onto the rice paper in the hull of the boat is a series of photomontages depicting the sea and the sky, and bound hands as well as families separated or reunited by their voyage across the high seas. This visual narrative of loss and hope, composed from the fragments and imaginary glow of memory, is re-enacted and dramatised by the very act of encountering the work. In order to observe these images, viewers had to enter through a hatchway at the rear of the boat, whose passage across was such that one had to crouch down and thus vicariously experience the claustrophobic swell of bodies confined in a space often reeking with urine (which in the high seas is a lot more drinkable than sea water) and the stench of fear, as the boat to freedom also held out the grim Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 31 possibility of turning into a coffin, one of many floating sarcophagi that never made it to shore.

Figure 1-3. Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2001. Plywood and silk print. Site installation, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.

By registering and embodying affect through memory, Dang’s work engages in what Jill Bennett refers to as “poetics of sense memory.” Bennett describes the workings of sense memory in this way:

[S]ense memory is about tapping a certain kind of process experienced not as a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of the present with indeterminable links with the past. The poetics of sense memory involves not so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience. (Bennett 2005: 38)

In Dang’s The Boat, the poetics of sense memory is engendered by the complicated positioning of the work, the artist, and the viewer(s) across and between the present and the past, and the here and the there. By registering and embodying the southward-bound journey from Asia to Australia, Dang’s The Boat presents an alternative geo-cultural configuration of the South, one that foregrounds its complex topography of difference, identity, and belonging. In so doing, Dang’s work refigures 32 Chapter One

Australia, not as an island continent entirely unto itself and separate from Asia but as a landscape of encounters, a site constituted by its multiple and complexly entangled histories. Dang thus participates in what Derrida calls a “politics of memory and inheritance” (Derrida 1994, xix), a form of remembering that challenges the boundaries between Australia and Asia by creatively reconstructing the past and reinserting it within the vastly different context that his present being inhabits.

Figure 1-4. Suzann Victor, Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre III, 2008. Chandeliers, stainless-steel tubing, pendulum drive units, variable dimensions. Site installation, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney.

It is precisely this complex entanglement of histories and trajectories that is figured in the recent kinetic installation by the Singaporean-born artist Suzann Victor entitled Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre III, 2008 (see Figure 1-4), which was exhibited in the Australian exhibition held at the Vertigo and the Predicament of Australia’s Postcoloniality 33

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (the Powerhouse) in Sydney. Installed in the main Turbine Hall of the Powerhouse, the work comprises twelve red chandeliers suspended in midair and assembled as a row of red pendulums that swung over the building’s permanent Koori Floor designed by Brisbane-based Waanyi artist Judy Watson to commemorate the Indigenous people of the region. Timed to swing in various patterns to a designated schedule, the work alludes to the layering of time, marking both the burden and passage of history with its kinetic signature. Significantly, Victor’s work produces a countermovement of the viewer’s eyes in tracing the swings and turns of the pendulums, which then affects the body as a disorienting mimicry of the chandeliers’ movement. Standing beneath the swinging chandeliers, one experiences a vertiginous sense of groundlessness and unease about the foundational occupation of the land in Australia. The kinetics of the work and its physiological effect on the viewer thus gives rise to a heightened awareness of Australia’s colonial past and the sense of groundlessness that it produces. With air and space as the canvas, the waves from the glow of Victor’s swinging chandeliers collectively morphed into light drawings. The choreographed movement of the chandeliers, moreover, gradually formed a pattern and trail of light that recalled the mythic Chinese red dragon sinuously “swimming” through the air. This sinuous movement was mirrored as a shimmering reflection in Watson’s polished floor work, prompting the Indigenous artist Gordon Hookey, whose wall painting is displayed in the background, to remark that “the Rainbow Serpent had been woken!” (Millner 2008). By evoking the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal mythology, Victor’s work averts the gaze of the viewer from its performance near the ceiling back to the ground and, in so doing, submits itself to the gaze of Indigenous Australian sovereignty represented by Judy Watson’s Koori Floor (Victor 2008, 171) The kinetics of the artwork, along with its vertiginous affect, produces a sense of precariousness in relation to the space, place, and identity of Australia, one that foregrounds the South as a temporary constellation composed of an unstable, open-ended coexistence and an interweaving of a multiplicity of histories and trajectories.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have sought to explore critically the uneven landscape of Australia’s settler-colonial and postcolonial culture and identity. In evoking the trope of the South as both a mode of location and epistemic category, this chapter has foregrounded not just the central role of the 34 Chapter One spatial imagination in apprehending the geo-body of Australia but also the vertiginous effects induced by its paradoxical geographical location. As we have seen, the South is not simply a historically and geographically constituted site; it is also an evolving cartography, the shifting outlines of which are shaped by multiple histories and trajectories. In this way, the trope of the South challenges the notion of Australia as a distinct, self- enclosed entity that is fundamentally separate from Asia and marks the possibility of an alternative cartography of the nation, one that is attuned to its complex, multiple histories and spatialities that arise from a crucial vector of the diasporic: the vertiginous southward-bound migratory trajectory from Asia to Australia.

Works Cited

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Howard, John. 1996. “Racial Tolerance: A Motion by the Prime Minister.” Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives Official Hansard, Wednesday, 30 October 1996: 6158. Keating, Paul. 1995. Advancing Australia: The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister. Sydney: Big Picture Publications. Khoo, Olivia. 2002. “Whiteness and the Australian Fiancé: Framing the Ornamental Text in Australia.” Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation 27 (2): 200–8. Macintyre, Stuart and Anna Clark. 2003. The History Wars. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Millner, Jacqueline. 2008. “Entwining China and Australia.” Real Time 85: 4–5. —. 1992a. “Afterthoughts on ‘Australianism’.” Cultural Studies 6 (3): 468–75. —. 1992b. Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes. Sydney: Empress Publishing. —. 1998. “White Panic or Mad Max and the Sublime.” In Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, edited by Kuan-Hsing Chen, 239–62. London: Routledge Perera, Suvendrini. 2000. “Futures Imperfect.” In Alter/Asians: Asian- Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, edited by Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas, 3–24. Sydney: Pluto Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Read, Peter. 2000. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogoff, Irit. 2000. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Rudd, Kevin. 2008. “Address to the Asia Society Australasia Centre, Sydney: It’s time to build an Asia-Pacific Community,” 4 June 2008. Accessed 25 November 2010. . Seigworth, Gregory J. and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth. Durham, US: Duke University Press. Shohat, Ella. 1991. “Imagining Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire.” Public Culture, 3 (2): 41–69. Smith, Mick, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron, and Liz Bondi, eds. 2009. Emotion, Place and Culture. London: Ashgate. 36 Chapter One

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press. Victor, Suzann. 2008. “Abjection: Weapon of the Weak.” PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney, Penrith. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiseman, John. 1998. Global Nation? Australia and the Politics of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Judith. 1962. “Context.” The London Magazine 11 (1): 37–8. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang. 2005. “Speech by His Excellency Dr. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono President of the Republic of Indonesia at the Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra, 4 April 2005.” (accessed 12 May 2005). Yue, Audrey. 2000. “Asian-Australian Cinema, Asian-Australian Modernity.” In Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia edited by Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jacqueline Lo. St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press.

CHAPTER TWO

CITY MEETING PLACES: BRISBANE’S HUNGRY JACK’S AND MELBOURNE’S FLINDERS STREET STATION

LESLEY HAWKES

When arranging a place to meet in Brisbane, it has become almost second nature to say, “I’ll meet you outside Hungry Jack’s,” which is located in Queen Street Mall. In Melbourne, the common saying is, “I’ll meet you under the clocks,” which refers to the row of clocks above the main entrance to Flinders Street Railway Station. The saying is loaded with memory and history for Melburnians—from Second World War farewells to after-school meetings. The clocks, and the station, have become part of the symbolic culture of the city. A feature of these two sites is the diversity of people who arrange to meet there, ranging from business people, tourists, teenagers, and lovers to families and local schoolchildren. These two spaces cross boundaries of exclusion and enable people to feel as though they belong in the city. While it seems appropriate for people to arrange to meet at a railway station, it is interesting that many people who meet at Flinders Street Station do not travel by train to arrive there: some walk; some take the tram and then walk; others arrive by bus. Similarly, most of the many people who arrange to meet outside Hungry Jack’s in Brisbane do not intend to enter the store. In many large cities, there are, of course, places purposely designed by urban planners to operate as meeting points, and most large public- transport hubs have designated meeting spots. Victoria Station in London, for instance, has such a meeting point. People do sometimes meet at these “official” points but, more often than not, people arrange their own meeting places. Simply because city planners and urban designers may designate particular points as meeting places does not necessarily mean 38 Chapter Two that people choose to use them. Obviously, Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station and Brisbane’s Hungry Jack’s were not purposely designed as meeting points; one was designed as a train terminus and the other as a fast-food outlet. Most Australian cities have a favoured meeting space chosen by the people who live there. By exploring two favourite Australian meeting sites—Flinders Street Railway Station in Melbourne and Hungry Jack’s in Brisbane—this chapter investigates what it is about these types of sites that draws people to them and why people see them as the place to meet. It analyses how and why people move with a sense of belonging and knowing within these sites. Meeting plays an important role in the construction of our social and cultural lives, yet this phenomenon is often taken for granted. The methodology used in this research is ethnographic observational research—a mixture of observation, participation, and action. This approach works well for this type of project because it highlights how static places can also be moving and active, allowing for new understandings. Discussions and debate about spatial use and public spaces often take the “top down” approach, but ethnographic observational research allows for more participatory, “bottom up” discussion (Richardson 1996, 114). On the surface, Brisbane’s Hungry Jack’s and Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station appear to have little in common. However, observation of the ways in which people use the sites suggests many people feel a sense of belonging, ownership, and connection with these two places. This strong feeling of ownership creates an atmosphere within these spaces that allows meeting to seem a natural occurrence. How did this sense of ownership develop, and what makes it continue to grow? What is it about each of these public sites that influences people to choose to meet there, and how does each site express peoples’ sense of identification with the space? Urban sociologist Manuel Castells says that “space does not reflect society, it expresses it, it is a fundamental dimension of society, inseparable from the overall process of social organisation and social change” (Castells 2004, 83). These two sites— Hungry Jack’s in Brisbane, and Flinders Street Station in Melbourne—can therefore be seen as spaces of social exchange and social cohesion. One of the reasons these two sites have become popular choices as meeting places is because people feel connected to them. People feel they know the spaces and have a sense of legitimacy in being there, which arises, in part, from the way in which each of these two space’s mix the monumental with flux and movement. Sites that contain this mix of stasis and change become gateways to promise and desire. Visitors who frequent these sites develop a spatial understanding, which becomes a way to form City Meeting Places 39 a sense of belonging and ownership. However, spatial understanding and spatial awareness are shifting and changing experiences. As Michel Foucault reminded us in a lecture he delivered in 1967:

We do not live in a kind of void, inside which we could place individuals and things, we do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (Foucault 1967, 23)

What is remarkable about these two meeting places is that this sense of knowing and belonging stems not only from convention, uniformity, and order but also from contradictions and pluralities.

Public Space and Community

Ownership has little to do with what makes a site a “public space.” Flinders Street Station, which is part of the huge public-transport grid operating within Melbourne is the property of the Victorian government— but the other, Hungry Jack’s, is a privately owned business franchise. Rather, what makes them public is their “shared use for a diverse range of activities by a range of different people” (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, 4). For people to accept a space as public, it must encourage diversity and activity. Research undertaken by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that public meeting places are important social resources, because they help to regenerate and sustain a sense of community (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, 1). This sense of community becomes especially important in a capital city, where it is not only the city’s inhabitants who participate in creating the community feeling but also the combination, or what Nigel Thrift (2004, 99) calls the “recombination,” of people, movement, and stability that assists in the creation of public spaces. A capital city represents the wider community: it is an identifiable marker for the state as a whole. The two sites that are the foci of this chapter represent the importance of public space in the contribution it makes to people’s “attachment to their locality and opportunities for mixing with others, and in people’s memory of places” (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, 5). What happens in a capital city also happens on a smaller scale in other cities and towns; there are popular meeting spaces throughout regional areas. Meeting spaces can be understood as constant “recombinations” of social practice. Mainstream cultures, subcultures, and countercultures all openly mix in these two meeting spaces. Locals, business people, visitors, 40 Chapter Two shoppers, workers, and tourists who differ in age, gender, race, and culture freely mingle. These spaces were not originally conceived as meeting places. There is no seating under the clocks at Flinders Street Station; people sit on the steps, which, fortunately, are heated in the colder months. Similarly, there are no chairs outside Hungry Jack’s in Brisbane; people simply stand outside the store, in the open area, milling about the nearby shops or sitting on the chairs near the busway tunnel. The people have made these spaces their meeting places and, in some regards, the urban designers have been forced to follow—adjusting their plans to accommodate the demands of the people.

Flinders Street Station

Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station and Brisbane’s Hungry Jack’s are very different sites with very different histories. Flinders Street Station began its life in 1854 as a series of makeshift buildings. In the 1880s, it was decided that a new railway station was needed, and a competition was held for the best design. The winner was announced in 1899, and the building was finally completed in 1910 to a great deal of fanfare (Department of Transport 2008, 1). The winning design was described by Andrew Ward as having an “entrance like Luna Park and a dome like the Taj Mahal” (Ward 1982, 33). Ward’s description is apt as it emphasises the unusual combination of the everyday and the monumental. The winning designers, James Fawcett and H. P. C. Ashworth, two railway employees, described their entry as “French Renaissance treated in a free manner” (Walking Melbourne 2009, 7). It was not only the external structure of the station that was hybrid in form; the former Victorian Railway Institute rooms inside the building were “more akin to a gentlemen’s club than a railway station” (Department of Transport 2008, 1). As well as being a travel hub, Flinders Street Station has always had other uses, extending peoples’ sense of attachment to the site. The station’s location once accommodated a fish-market, but this was moved west in 1892. Flinders Street Station was one of the few railway stations in Victoria to have a permanent nursery, which offered women a safe place to leave their children while in the city. The nursery closed in 1933. Flinders Street Station has also been home to a gymnasium, a billiards room, and a grand ballroom. During its construction, some of the workers felt such a strong sense of ownership of the station that they “tagged” the structure. Within the wooden dome, there is evidence of this tagging: some engraved graffiti on the beams. One worker carved “BS 20 1909” and another “R.S.C. 20.6.11” (Walking Melbourne 2009, 7). From its City Meeting Places 41 beginnings, Flinders Street Station embraced notions of plurality and diversity, and it has always been, and continues to be, a combination of the monumental and the everyday. Railway stations are often seen as part of monumental history. Their completion and development can be read in official history books, and their locations found on official maps. Their construction is well documented in financial reports and in political histories. Anyone interested can easily read about different types of railway tracks and their relative economic benefits. But official history books and official maps are rarely used by people to get to know the layout of these sites. Maps do not always provide a clear indication of the journey: the direction, the topographical relationships, the movement, and the shaping of the mind’s memory of the site. One way in which people gain a sense of belonging and knowing is through the mental maps they construct. Arid Holt-Jensen describes a mental map as “the mentally stored images people have of spaces and places which they draw upon in their interpretations of spatial desirabilities and in the organisation of their spatial routines” (Holt-Jensen 1999, 222). Mental maps allow for appreciation of the texture and feel of everyday movement in a city. In the case of Flinders Street Station, it is the mixing of the monumental and the everyday that has enabled people to take the site into their mental maps. Michel de Certeau (1988) claims that railway stations force people back into an ordered and controlled world:

And, also, as always, one has to get out: there are only lost paradises. Is the terminal the end of an illusion? There is another threshold, composed of momentary bewilderments in the airlock constituted by the train station. History begins again, feverishly, enveloping the motionless framework of the wagon: the blows of his hammer make the inspector aware of the cracks in the wheels, the porter lifts the bags, the conductors move back and forth. Visored caps and uniforms restore to the network an order of work within the mass of people, while the wave of travellers/dreamers flows into the net composed of marvellously expectant or preventively justiciary faces. Angry cries. Calls. Joys. In the mobile world of the train station, the immobile machine suddenly seems monumental and almost incongruous in its mute, idol-like inertia, a sort of god undone. (de Certeau 1988, 114)

Michel de Certeau (1988) maintains that while the train trip offers the traveller a sense of freedom and escape, the station itself brings people back to their ordered lives. This sense of order returns because the once- mobile train becomes another immobile artifact within the station. With the arrival at the platform and the return to conformity, the sense of freedom ends. While de Certeau (1988) is writing specifically about 42 Chapter Two travelling rather than meeting, his examination of the close of the journey and of travellers meeting or venturing into other spaces is relevant. However, this sense of closure that de Certeau (1988) discusses does not occur at Flinders Street Station. The station has the conformity and order of clocks, ticket machines, timetables, and maps, but it also has the amusement-park-style main entrance, which offers the promise of more. Flinders Street Station does not function simply to force people back into conformity; rather, the site is a curious mix of routine and desire. This promise of more (or desire for more) is what places Flinders Street Station not only on official maps but also on the mental maps of travellers—local, national, and international. The unusual design of Flinders Street Station has made it one of the most recognisable landmarks in Australia—on both the official maps and the mental maps of Australians. When it was suggested that the mechanical clocks above the main entrance be replaced with electronic timetable displays, there was a public outcry, and the plan was abandoned. The clocks not only function as train timetables but also as part of a shared community site of desire where the familiar clocks are part of memory. It is the combination of the flux and movement that occurs within the site, combined with the monumentality of the site itself, which makes this space so important in people’s mental mapping processes.

Hungry Jack’s, Queen Street Mall

The Hungry Jack’s site in Brisbane has a very different history from that of Flinders Street Station, but there is still the blending of the official and the everyday. Hungry Jack’s is in the centre of the Queen Street Mall. There is nothing remarkable about the design or structure of the store, and it has the standard recognisable appearance of other Hungry Jack’s. Although nondescript, it has created a space within people’s mental maps. The site now occupied by Hungry Jack’s has quite a colourful history. In 1825, Brisbane was a penal colony. Captain Henry Miller selected the triangular piece of land because it was surrounded by the meandering and difficult-to-navigate ; the bends in the river made it virtually impossible for prisoners to escape. Today, the site is bounded by the Riverside Expressway, Eagle Street, and the City Botanic Gardens (de Vries 2003, 10). During the convict period, the prisoners’ barracks was a large building dominating the landscape of Brisbane, and it determined the position and layout of Queen Street. The original barracks building no longer exists; in its place stands the Queen Adelaide Building (home to the popular young women’s fashion store Sportsgirl). All city streets were City Meeting Places 43 constructed to run parallel with Queen Street. There was a period before the 1840s when free settlers were not allowed within 50 miles (80 kilometres) of what is now Queen Street—it was deemed a closed-off area. This changed in 1842 when the Brisbane penal colony became a free settlement and there were attempts to remove the vestiges of the former convict connection. There was significant rebuilding after the fire of 1864, which destroyed many buildings. By 1888, little evidence of the convict history remained in Queen Street. After the Second World War, Queen Street experienced a boom period. It became the main shopping street of Brisbane, and in the 1950s to go to Queen Street was considered a “day out.” Hungry Jack’s arrived in Queensland in the early 1970s; the Queen Street store was not the first in Queensland (the first was in Eagle Farm), but it was one of the earliest. The Queen Street Mall was completed in 1982, the year of the Brisbane Commonwealth Games. Much has been made of the speed with which the mall was constructed; it was completed within eighteen months of the initial planning. In 1988, the Myer Centre opened, with Hungry Jack’s on the corner. It was an important year for Brisbane as the host city of World Expo ’88; Brisbane City Council and the Queensland government wanted to represent themselves in a positive manner on the world stage. It was also the year when the Queensland government finally lifted bans on public open-air eating facilities. The Commonwealth Games and World Expo ’88 exposed Brisbane to the world, and Queen Street Mall became a symbol of the newly globalised Brisbane. In much the same way as the entry to Flinders Street Station became a gateway to promise and desire, Queen Street Mall offered an unexpected mixture of order, structure, freedom, and commerce. Entering the space directly outside Hungry Jack’s was like walking through the “Luna Park” entry to Flinders Street Station.

Reinscribing Sites

Each of these two spaces functions as a palimpsest: the original inscription has been erased, another inscription written—the process occurring over, and over, again. Traces of each earlier inscription remain, blend, and blur the new inscription. With these two sites, the inscriptions come from many locations: from multiple histories, including Indigenous, convict and free- settler histories, from mental and official maps of the spaces, and from people who move through and make contact in the sites. The layering and transience of these inscriptions strengthen these two sites as spaces of contact, belonging, and community. The traces of histories—deposited, 44 Chapter Two partially lost, or erased—are accessed differently by each visitor, allowing a diversity of people to feel a sense of belonging to the sites. People discern traces or detect echoes of past journeys and stories and incorporate them with their own stories. History and spatial understanding have a close, intertwined relationship. Spatial understanding influences the way stories are told and remembered, and these stories, in turn, influence the way history is told. A palimpsest allows these retellings to blend, causing boundaries to blur and become unstable. A palimpsest allows the static and the flux to coexist. Flinders Street Station originated with an open competition; Hungry Jack’s began in circumstances that were more restrictive. However, both sites are spaces of heterogeneity. Michel Foucault argued that some spaces have “the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault 1967, 23). These two sites have become far more than the purposes for which they were officially designated. Both sites can be understood as contradictory spaces; that is, they are spaces of controlled order but also of freedom; they are sites of immobility but also of mobility. Both sites are under constant surveillance, but, paradoxically, this surveillance allows the freedom to not be observed. People do not watch or judge each other, because they are aware that the entire space is under surveillance.

Mapping the City

Michel de Certeau’s well-known essay “Walking in the City” (de Certeau 1988) highlights the way in which the official grid-like layout of cities (or “concept cities” as in the case of Melbourne, which was designed on a grid plan) is not the way people find their way through cities. Although urban planners and architects need an all-encompassing view of structures, the people who walk through cities do not always operate in a rational, predetermined, or logical manner. Michel de Certeau’s (1988) notion of spatial stories as the routes by which people travel through a city to “arrive” at their destinations emphasises the many ways people make sense of, and move through, space. Mike Crang calls de Certeau’s approach “street level social theory” (Crang 1998, 136). The “concept city” and the “mental map” do not always go hand-in-hand. People have the ability to blend the official map of the concept city with the communal mental map, giving them a sense of ownership and belonging in these two city spaces. The official map is the static record of places; the mental map is in a constant state of flux. Michel de Certeau (1988) suggests that City Meeting Places 45 people in cities are not totally restricted or governed by rules. People have agency and seldom follow the same trail to get to their destinations. Each person follows their own mental maps and tells their own stories as they move throughout the city. People have to move through the city to “arrive” at their destinations, but the arrivals can also involve loitering. Meeting will seldom involve people arriving at the exact same time; at least one person will need to loiter or wait for another, and these spaces allow people to loiter. People are not asked to “move on”; nor do they feel the need to. The spaces do not demand that people move through them; people may wait until they “meet.” Loitering is often viewed unfavourably, and public spaces are frequently designed in such a way as to reduce the opportunities for loitering. For example, the intention with the new design for Queen Street Mall was to cut down on clutter and junk to liberate the environment, and to improve the pedestrian traffic flow (Brisbane Marketing 2007). Improving pedestrian traffic flow suggests that the aim is to keep people moving through the space and to discourage them from loitering. However, people feel a sense of ownership of these sites, and therefore they do loiter and linger—people are more likely to stay and wait in a space where they feel a sense of comfort and belonging. “Loitering” and “lingering” are terms often used to group people. Proprietors in commercial spaces want people to linger and view the merchandise in their window displays, but they do not want people to loiter and not buy. These are not static terms. Although people may say, “I’ll meet you under the clocks,” or “I’ll meet you outside Hungry Jack’s,” there is still a sense of movement and energy. In contemporary society, meeting people in public spaces can be seen as a combination of loitering and moving; chosen meeting points are points that allow for this combination. Manuel Castells says that “moving physically while keeping the networking connection to everything we do” is a new realm requiring further investigation (Castells 2004, 87). This new realm adds further dimensions to Walter Benjamin’s (1999) idea of the flâneur (an outsider who observes, but is not connected) and de Certeau’s (1988) idea of movement. Advances in communication technology have changed the way meetings take place. Nigel Thrift stresses that the social practices of people in places are “recombinations” and that certain spots can be complemented, rather than replaced, by technology (Thrift 2004, 99). As meeting places, Brisbane’s Hungry Jack’s and Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station are examples of sites that are complemented by modern technology. The enthusiasm for mobile phones now means people are often in contact and 46 Chapter Two in motion as they arrange a meeting. People describe their location as a point of reference: “I am just walking past the bank; I will be there in two minutes, and I can just see the spot.” The person waiting may reply, “I can just see you,” or “I am in front of the building.” One result of this technology is that the shared mental or official landmarks are no longer as important as they once were when planning meeting places. Yet, even though meeting has become a more fluid process, there remain particular sites that are often referred to when people are planning meetings. Zac Carey says that meeting in cities now involves “a very public choreography of physical movement” (Carey 2004, 133). “Choreography” is an apt term for meeting, because it emphasises the active process involved. This public choreography is evident at both Hungry Jack’s and Flinders Street Station. The use of communication technology affects this choreography, but the use of other technologies, such as walking, are also part of the complex web of connections. It is not only the people meeting who participate in this choreography. A quick search on the internet reveals that retailers located on Queen Street Mall help shoppers locate their stores by describing their location in terms of their proximity to Hungry Jack’s. A jewellery store gives its location as “just above Hungry Jack’s”; a CD store specialising in heavy- metal music is “just up from Hungry Jack’s”; Bubbles Café is “just down from Hungry Jack’s”; and even the historic Regent Theatre, which opened in 1929, describes its location as “just down from Hungry Jack’s”. In this situation, the store has become the fixed point from which other places can be located. Hungry Jack’s is the accepted starting point from which people move off to other stores. The question, however, still arises: Why and how does a particular location become “that point of physical proximity” and the site for common meeting? The process of mental mapping has a long history in Australian stories. In discussing how Australians have used the figure of the wanderer or traveller in general, Ken Goodwin argues that the trope of the wanderer is not used only for topographical meaning but also metaphysically. He argues that topography affects the traveller, often leading them to dissociate from preset maps, forcing them to find their own points of reference and create their own maps (Goodwin 1986, 3). This allows the traveller to construct a personal mental map. It is not the physical structure of Flinders Street Station or of Hungry Jack’s that people place into their mental maps; it is the location. Both Hungry Jack’s and Flinders Street Station occupy a corner site. Hungry Jack’s is opposite Police Beat; there is a small newsagency just outside, the Body Shop is on one corner, and the tunnel to the Brisbane busway is City Meeting Places 47 outside the store. It occupies a site that allows access from many directions, and people can enter into its space in a variety of ways. This is also the case with Flinders Street Station. It is opposite a well-known, historical city pub. It sits at the intersection of two main tramway thoroughfares and is now opposite a major cultural centre: Federation Square. The openness of each site means that each can accommodate multiple arrival routes, revealing the plurality of each of these spaces. These two sites have become embedded in social networks that involve imaginative mental maps as well as proximity choreography. Both sites have undergone recent changes. The space outside Hungry Jack’s has been expanded and, in a sense, legitimised as a meeting point. Town planners have once again attempted to turn a chosen meeting place into a more controlled area. The tunnel to the new busway is now located immediately outside Hungry Jack’s, and there are bench seats beside the tunnel. The decision to install these benches could be interpreted as an attempt to discourage people from loitering outside Hungry Jack’s and to induce them to a more “appropriate” waiting area. However, many people still choose to stand and wait in the Hungry Jack’s space. There are officials wandering through the area: an information booth has now been replaced by mobile volunteers, indicating yet another attempt to direct people to other spaces—the thinking being that once people have the information they require they will move on. Yet again, however, people are not deterred from waiting in the space. Across from Flinders Street Station is Federation Square—a new, mixed development—with a vast public area with spaces designed for meeting, sitting, and gathering. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that “spaces that support sharing cannot be created by designers and architects alone. Public space works best when it is co-produced” (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, 12). City designers and planners have begun to take into account the local attachments to spaces and are beginning to realise that “design alone cannot produce places that become liked and well used” (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2007, 12). The two public spaces discussed in this chapter reveal the playing out and coming together of social spaces and that the ways in which people make sense of, use, and interact in these spaces reveal how they see themselves as belonging to the surroundings. Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station and Brisbane’s Hungry Jack’s illustrate that Australian cities consist of flows, spaces, and places. The interconnectedness of the flow, the movement, and the physical and material sites maintains the popularity of these sites as meeting places. Manuel Castells writes that it is “the synthesis between places and flows that is realised in public space” 48 Chapter Two

(Castells 2004, 91). The two spaces explored in this chapter give people— who move through them, linger outside them, and orient themselves by them—a sense of order, control, structure, and history; yet, at the same time, they provide a sense of freedom, desire, and the promise of a city with more to offer.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press. Brisbane Marketing. 2007. “Brisbane Marketing Fact Sheet: Queen Street Mall—History and Highlights.” Accessed 21 September 2011. . Carey, Zac. 2004. “Generation Txt: The Telephone Hits the Street.” In The Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, 133–8. London: Routledge. Castells, Manuel. 2004. “Spaces of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age.” In The Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, 82–94. London: Routledge. Crang, Mike. 1998. Cultural Geography. London: Routledge. de Certeau, Michel. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Vries, Susanna. 2003. Historic Brisbane: Convict Settlement to River City. Chapel Hill, Queensland: Pandanus Press. Department of Transport. 2008. “History of Flinders Street Station.” State Government of Victoria. Melbourne. Accessed 10 November 2008. . Foucault, Michel. 1967. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1) (spring 1986): 22–7. Accessed 11 November 2008. . Goodwin, Ken. 1986. A History of Australian Literature. London: Macmillan. Holt-Jensen, Arid. 1999. Geography, History and Concepts. London: Sage. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 2007. “The Social Value of Public Spaces.” . Richardson, John, ed. 1996. Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods. Leicester, UK: BPS Books. City Meeting Places 49

Thrift, Nigel. 2004. “Cities Without Modernity, Cities With Magic.” In The CyberCities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, 98–101. London: Routledge. Walking Melbourne. 2009. Flinders Street Station forum. Accessed 21 September 2011. . Ward, Andrew. 1982. Railway Stations in Australia. South Melbourne: Macmillan.

CHAPTER THREE

REVOLUTION BY THE BEACH: SURFIES AND HIPPIES IN BYRON BAY IN THE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S

JOHN R. ATWOOD

The lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation. (Taylor 1991, 36)

“The beach is for everyone,” wrote Philip Drew. It represents the freedom of people to “leave society and its restraints behind” (Drew 1994, 116). As Craig McGregor (1995, 56) concurred, “one of the loveliest things about the coast, and the beach idiom which is its focus, is the way it continually gives rise to alternative cultures which are outside the Oz mainstream.” “It is no accident,” he added “that this sort of experimental utopianism should thrive in the very regions which have themselves become emblems of Utopia for everyday Australians. There’s a bit of freedom around the beach” (McGregor 1995, 57). From the 1960s through to the early 1970s, the Byron Bay region—a rural backwater—began attracting tourists seeking a quiet alternative to Queensland’s Gold Coast, which was, at that time, developing into a tourist mecca. Among these visitors to Byron Bay were many young adults: pleasure-seeking “baby boomers” in their late teens and early twenties who constituted a youth “scene” described as “surfies” and “hippies.” In Byron Bay during the 1960s, and particularly in the early 1970s, these young people epitomised the desire of many young people in the Western world to free themselves from the bourgeois values of their parents and mainstream society who, following the horrors and deprivations of the Second World War, had embraced white goods, cars, and middle-class respectability and moral values. These young people Revolution by the Beach 51 rejected, sometimes with revolutionary fervour, what they saw as stale ideas of freedom in a democratic land. This chapter explores how revolutionary ideas manifested in the local context of the Byron Bay region of northern New South Wales during the 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that what I refer to as a “revolution on the beach” came in two waves. The first wave began in the 1960s with the arrival of the surfie scene, when many young Australians frequented the area in search of leisure and freedom. The second arrived in the early 1970s when visitors and new residents to the Byron Bay region, many fuelled by the passions surrounding the Vietnam War and the experience of isolation from mainstream society caused by rising unemployment, brought a counterculture revolution, which would transform the character of the region. This chapter argues that as with other revolutions, the new ideas that came with these two waves conflicted with the existing—in this case, bourgeois conservative—order. As Hannah Arendt (1973, 29) argued, “[C]rucial ... to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is the idea that freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.” In a visitors’ guide section of the North Coast Pilot on 14 March 1964, Byron Bay was described as “highly industrialised for its size,” with a butter factory, a number of abattoirs and meat-processing centres, and a sand-mining industry. Seemingly as an afterthought, the visitors’ guide alerted potential visitors to Byron Bay’s “up-and-coming tourist industry” and its pleasant “year round temperature ... as well as the state’s only north facing beach which provides good board riding conditions.” Byron Bay in the early 1960s was a town where the locals possessed what McGregor (1967, 166–8) described as “many of those admirable qualities which people think of as ‘typically Australian’ including being ‘down-to-earth, sardonic, forthright, friendly and hospitable’ and ‘small, parochial, and incurably old-fashioned’.” It was a place where the local newspapers regularly reported on knitting demonstrations (see Star Advocate, 12 April 1962) and kitchen teas at which “guests were received [and] presented with a shoulder spray of rosebuds ... and dancing and games were enjoyed,” and the ladies of the community were invited to “please provide cakes” (see Byron Bay – Bangalow Beacon, 7 February 1963). There was a strong conservative religious vein in Byron Bay, evidenced by the popularity of lectures at the Byron Bay Literary Institute on such topics as: “The Space Race and God ... Will God Allow Our Spacecraft to Visit Other Worlds?”, “Are Other Worlds Actually Inhabited?”, and “Is There a Devil? Does He Have Hooves and Horns?” (Byron Bay – Bangalow Beacon, 1 January – 30 December 1963). The 52 Chapter Three

Christian moral values of many Byron Bay residents were evident in a letter to the editor of the North Coast Pilot published on 1 April 1965 in which J. Simpson wrote: “Birth control in my opinion … [is] condemning God’s work [it tells the] Almighty what he should do with us.” The anti- religious political views of communism were also rejected by the Byron Bay community of the early 1960s; numerous anti-communist articles appeared in local newspapers including in the North Coast Pilot, which declared on 31 October 1963 that “no intelligent Australian can afford to be uninformed on the greatest international conspiracy the world has ever known, viz. militant communism.” These values echoed those of mainstream Australia. As Kenneth Dempsey (1990, 7) wrote years later, “Many of the differences between life in a [rural] community and in an Australian city are ones of degree.” Donald Horne (1978, 20–1) painted an interesting picture of 1960s mainstream Australian society, writing that the culture lacked both “the gaiety of the Chinese or continental Europeans” and that “for many decades puritanism—bizarre in the sunshine of Australia—seemed to stifle Australian society.” The character of Byron Bay in the early 1960s was influenced mostly by the generation of Australians who had been born during or before the Great Depression and who were, as McGregor (1967, 277) wrote, “sure of their own traditional Australian values.” During the early 1960s, traditions were being challenged in much of the Western world, including in Australia. Young Australians were being exposed to new, radical ideas about music, sexuality, leisure, and dress, which marked the beginning of what Drew (1994, 113) described as a “revolution in teenage habits.” Newspapers around Australia reported of morally confronting phenomena, such as bikini-clad young women, the advent of birth control, and the youth hysteria known as Beatlemania (Moore 2005, 58–71). One bewildered response to the emerging youth scene appeared in the story “Crazy Man Crazy” published in the North Coast Pilot on 26 March 1964:

One becomes used to seeing weird and wonderful sights these days but apparently Byron Bay-ites were stunned by the two apparitions who (it was presumed they were human) took seats at a local entertainment house last Saturday night. The females were dressed in boots, one minus laces, old blue jeans, faded denim shirts, and black waist coats. One wore a bowler hat, the other a top hat. Their hair (to all appearances their own) was brunette and hung down to their waists. They were quite oblivious to the goggle-eyed stares of the locals who could not believe their eyes.

Revolution by the Beach 53

The proprietor, assuming they were some sort of “entertainers,” asked when they were going to put on their act. He was really taken aback when told they were not actors and this was their “normal” way of dressing. They departed in the night with no one knowing who they were or from whence they came from. Anyone seen a “beatle” crawling around lately?

That residents of Byron Bay were shocked by the women’s Beatle-inspired fashion is evidence that locals continued to firmly embrace a conservative bush-Australia narrative, which treated as radical any ideas, or even styles of dress, that did not conform to that narrative. Here was clear acknowledgment that times were changing and, although the Byron Bay community were becoming more “used to seeing weird and wonderful sights,” many in the area did not like the idea of change. The arrival of new visitors with totally different ways of thinking was only just beginning; the next wave was yet to come with the arrival of substantial numbers of surfers during the mid to late 1960s.

Surfies in Byron Bay

One of the primary stages for the new fashions and new ideas in Australia was the beach, with surfers among the most prominent actors on that stage. The surfing scene spread along Australia’s surf beaches in the 1960s, paving the way for young people to explore notions of personal freedom that broke away from the suburban, bourgeois goals of home ownership, nine-to-five jobs, and the neatly trimmed lawns of life in the suburbs. The beach offered wildness, spontaneity, and unpredictability. Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt (2000, 149) argue that this “well-articulated and well- publicised beach culture” in Australia in the 1960s emerged from “the carefree mood of society [and] full employment [that] created a safe backdrop for school leavers to peroxide their hair, drop out for a while and cruise the beaches.” McGregor (1967, 278–81) observed that in the late 1960s, for the first time in Australia, significant groups of highly educated young people had passed through a “liberalised university system that encouraged them to think, probe, question and challenge” and subsequently they sought to “define Australia as a place that had room for them.” He described them as “virtually a new race of Australians who have never existed before” who were “part of the ‘with it’ generation which has developed throughout the Western world since the war” and who were “much readier to absorb overseas influences than their parents.” It was a generation, according to Horne (1989, 36–7), that concentrated “on material possessions and having a good time” but also, as Douglas Booth (2001, 112) argued, “a 54 Chapter Three free thinking generation.” McGregor elaborated upon the identity of this new generation:

Since the war a new generation has grown up in Australia which is radically different in its attitudes, beliefs and way of life to any previous one ... This new wave of young Australians has freed itself from the old social mould more completely than any other. Its members hold the key to the future shape of Australian society. (McGregor 1967, 281)

Booth (2001, 112) believed that this new generation of Australians not only felt “the freedom to explore” but also “the freedom to express dissatisfaction.” A central domain of the “with it” generation was the beach. John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner (1988, 55) discussed some of the many meanings of the beach, including the paradigm of the beach being associated both with the comfort of the city and “culture” and with the wild domain of the “natural,” an alternative to the “comfortable security of the suburb.” Drew (1994, 115) viewed the 1960s surfing culture in Australia as signifying a “total way of life based on leisure and youth.” As has been the case with other revolutionary eras, new ideas created conflict with the existing order. This was evident in the Byron Bay area with local newspapers in the 1960s regularly reporting on weekend visits from long-haired surfboard riders. The Star Advocate on 3 August 1962 reported Byron Shire Councillor Kibblewhite’s complaints about the presence of “a dozen youths known as the ‘peroxide gang’ [who] brought surfboards to the bay on Sundays.” These early surfies were also discussed in Lismore’s Northern Star on 1 August 1962 with Councillor Kibblewhite reported as saying that “surfboard riders and speedboat owners ... played ‘chicken’ at Palm Valley Beach [and] could cause a fatal accident.” The councillor claimed he had had “three Byron Bay residents complain to him [and] said it was not fair for a few ‘troublemakers’ to endanger the safety of bathers.” Surfers found themselves coming into conflict with other arms of government, including the Byron Bay constabulary. In an article entitled “Byron Bay” in the magazine Surfing World in March 1963, a young university student and keen surfer wrote:

Despite a somewhat intolerant attitude by some local officials [in] Byron Bay, on the upper NSW North coast ... some surfers have had their stay in Byron Bay abruptly curtailed as long hair has evidently become a dubious lawful reason for exclusion from the village (Witzig 1963, 8)

Revolution by the Beach 55

Maxine McTavish (1997, 46), in a thesis on tourism in Byron Bay, provided accounts of long-haired surfers being “deported” from Byron Bay during the 1960s, with a local resident at the time recounting how Sergeant Howes “took umbrage at the surfers’ unkempt appearance.” Surfer, John Lewis, in a letter to the Byron Shire Echo published 27 May 2003 reminisced that “if you had a surfboard on your car [in the 1960s] and a cop saw you he immediately pulled you over and told you, ‘Go to Queensland, we don’t want your type in Byron Bay’.” In a surfing memoir, Murray Walding described his experiences of the conflict with authority caused by these young people with their new ideas. He recounted:

Byron Bay police were continually harassing anyone with long hair, searching their panel vans and kombis or combing their crumbling farm houses looking for dope … Byron Bay police were not alone in their behaviour. The “authorities” in every small coastal town were becoming alarmed as their towns were flooded with [surfers]. (Walding 2003, 77)

Hippies in Byron Bay

In the late 1960s the carefree, leisure-lifestyle revolution occurring in the Western world was carried forth by a fresh wave of young visitors to the Byron Bay region. This group, often described as hippies, were seeking an enduring alternative lifestyle beyond the beach. On 8 January 1969, the Brunswick and Byron Advocate reported that “more than 400 people attended a ‘hippy’ dance” organised in the Byron Bay area, with the Voids band joining in “the spirit of the evening with ‘hippy’ attire.” Many who had been part of the surfing scene were now becoming an integral part of the hippy counterculture. Margaret Henderson (2001, 320), drawing on Booth, argued that Australian surfing’s “meanings and practices” started to be influenced by counterculture during this era. Stuart Scott (2007, 12) described a “dawning counter culture” with surfing at its heart. Surfing magazines such as Tracks, student publications such as Adelaide University’s On Dit, and independent radical newspapers such as Melbourne’s Revolution and Digger and the Byron Express, which mirrored the likes of Good Times and the Berkley Tribe published in the United States, gave voice to the counterculture. These alternative voices were somewhat reminiscent of the proliferation of pamphleteers around the time of the French Revolution who, according to George Rudé (1988, 7) not only wrote “political tracts as the ‘philosophers’ had done, but were deliberately setting out to mould public opinion and to marshal public support.” The early 1970s publications were full of articles criticising the 56 Chapter Three involvement of Australia and the United States in the Vietnam War (especially draft conscription). They advocated protection of the environment, women’s liberation, and Indigenous and African-American rights, and expressed carefree attitudes to recreational drugs and sex. Underlying these publications was a strong desire for change, for revolution. Between 1968 and 1973 there was an upsurge around the world in the number of underground newspapers covering these issues. In an article entitled “Shit” published in Tracks in September 1971, surfer Garry Keys gave voice to many of these concerns:

What’s going wrong? Is the question on lots of people’s lips at the moment. No we are not talking about Vietnam, rutile sands, pollution, development, etc. we all know what’s up there ... we all want things to change, we all want peace, love, brotherhood as a living fact not just something to write and talk about. We all have seen the movies, read the books, heard the music, been stoned, and thought about it. Isn’t it time we started living it. Yes we can change this world and the responsibility lies with us to revolutionise ourselves for we can’t change a world without changing ourselves cause [sic] we are it. (Keys 1971, 19)

In 1971, Revolution republished ’s article “Bounce Titty Bounce,” in which Greer described a “Mafia that controls the shape of [women’s] bodies” (Greer, 1971, 7). Revolution ran articles exploring illicit drugs, including marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms, and in August 1971 it reproduced a piece from America’s Village Voice called “The Erotica Explosion,” which described un-simulated sex on stage at Club Orgy (Revolution 1971, 5–7). In 1972, another radical Australian newspaper, Digger, in its 18 November – 2 December issue, published a cartoon in which a character shouted to another, “Christ! Ya call yourself revolutionary? Ya gotta get out there ‘n’ tear down walls baby,” and on the front page of the issue dated 13–27 January 1973, an unnamed dealer of “Sunshine Marijuana” suggested to Digger readers: “If you’re gonna buy dope [marijuana], you ought to buy Australian.” The revolution involved a plethora of alternative political, social, and moral points of view that revolved around personal freedoms and rejection of the legitimacy of the government, authorities, and mainstream bourgeois society’s conservative moral values. It has often been described as counterculture, and, as Peter Cock (1979, 93) wrote, it embodied a radical departure from past lifestyles and vehement opposition to the so- called “Corporate State.” A cartoon entitled “Happy Daze in the Pond” in the August 1971 edition of Revolution provided a light-hearted sense of the frustrations at the heart of the belief in the need for and the immanency Revolution by the Beach 57 of the revolution: “Don’t you realise there’s a world around you?” a character asked of an innocent frog sitting on a lily-pad, adding the diatribe, “Jesus Adrian, aren’t you going to do anything but sit there— what about Vietnam, what about pollution [?] Shit! And Laos and drugs and education and unemployment???” An element of the counterculture movement embraced a peaceful revolution, which included escaping the bourgeois city life, or the “rat- race,” and getting “back-to-earth” at places like Byron Bay, Nimbin, and , where the aim was to become self-sufficient and, at least in part, to opt out of what was perceived as a capitalist, war-mongering society. Steve Hein, in a letter published in Revolution in 1970 reported how he had moved to the Byron Bay region to acquire a farm and establish “a ‘cool your head’ scene to offer relief to city struck people” where he and like-minded people could “grow [their] ... own food, have goats for milk, make handicrafts and enjoy music and lead a solid life [which included] meditation and devotion [and, above all] freedom” (Hein 1970). Publications such as Earth Garden met demand from those going “up the country,” offering tips for living the simple life, including how to keep bees, grow organic vegetables, bake bread, and—indicating the fear of war and violence at the time—build one’s own nuclear-fallout shelter (“All in its Place,” 1973; “Bread,” 1973; “Fallout Shelter,” 1973; “The Honey Bee,” 1973) . It was not only hippies, students, and radicals, who conceived of a revolution; by the early 1970s even mainstream academic journals such as the History of Education Quarterly were publishing articles that acknowledged the existence of a real and potentially dangerous revolutionary atmosphere in many parts of the Western world. Clarence Karier (1972, 57) wrote in the History of Education Quarterly that “the idea of revolution is no longer dismissed as some absurd anarchist dream but increasingly entertained by men of more moderate persuasion.” The revolutionary atmosphere in Australia in the early 1970s was clearly fuelled by the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Margaret Munro-Clarke (1986, 61) believed that this alternative culture grew, in part, from “repressive counter-measures against campus rebels and, above all, the mobilisation of resistance to involvement in the Vietnam War.” Indeed, in both Australia and the United States, objection to participation in the Vietnam War was mobilising hundreds of thousands of young people, as well as “oldies,” to protest against the war and, for many, to reject the society and the bourgeois values often associated with the promulgation of war. 58 Chapter Three

References to the Vietnam War and metaphors of war often appeared in Byron Bay newspapers during the early 1970s. In the Brunswick and Byron Advocate on 18 February 1970, Byron Shire councillors declared “War on Surfies” and took “action to enforce a no camping restriction at the Palm Valley Picnic Ground.” Councillor Hargraves went as far as to suggest that some of the surfers camping on the picnic ground “should probably be in gaol anyhow.” In the same edition, the shire president, Councillor James, added that “surfies had been attracted by wide publicity given to the surf in that area [and] now that we have them we want to get rid of them.” One of the surfers using the pen name “Long Haired Bum” drew on the Vietnam War when he responded in the Brunswick and Byron Advocate on 4 March 1970 to the councillor’s idioms of war:

Sir – it’s a gas! Byron Shire to wage war on the surfies! Don’t you councillors know it’d be like Vietnam all over again? Me and my pals have been doing as we like in Byron Bay for years now, so don’t think you’ll change things by putting up a few signs. No need to make them indestructible either, we haven’t hurt the big ones down main beach have we? They are too good for a giggle. As a fact, we think you people are going about the tourist trade the wrong way – all this squabbling about tourist associations etc. is behind . Byron Bay should branch out on its own with unique attractions. You’re going to get the wrong crowd – all those people with their boats cluttering up the place when any fool can see it’s a surfies town ... resign yourselves to the inevitable and go all out to further the image Byron Bay already has. I suggest a sign on the highway for a start, along the lines of: “Turn off, turn on, turn in – Byron Bay the easiest town in the east ... a Mecca of surf, sand, sun, and sin.” With planning along such lines, Byron Bay could develop into a gathering place for hippie-surfie culture to rival anywhere in the world. Of course all the oldies and squares would have to get out. They don’t appreciate the place as we do so it would be no loss to them.

At least one Byron Bay resident took umbrage at the comments by Long Haired Bum, responding in the Brunswick and Byron Advocate on 11 March 1970:

Sir – I shall endeavour to answer paragraphs as they come. What would you know about Vietnam? ... you and your pals are wet behind the ears so let’s not say you have being [sic] doing what you like for “years.” You are right in saying Byron Bay has unique attractions. Throw a net around you all and toss in a few tins of “pot” and that would keep the tourists Revolution by the Beach 59

interested longer than the other goats at the lighthouse1 ... As far as Palm Valley is concerned you blokes haven’t started anything new you know. Twenty-five years ago it was a lovers’ haunt. Think it over, Captain Cook had long hair, tight pants and snuff for kicks and didn’t wash. You guys have long hair, smoke pot and don’t wash. So I’m sorry if you come to earth with a bump and realise you are now doing what the so despised “oldies” did centuries ago.

Again in the Brunswick and Byron Advocate on 11 March 1970, “Uncensored by Onlooker” drew on imagery of the Vietnam War when he argued that:

[Surfies] are a product of modern times and there’s nothing much you can do about it. Suppose you do shift ’em out of Palm Valley? Why, they might even take to the hills like the Viet Cong and the Ibos. What I say to the councillors is, if you can’t beat ’em by golly – then join ’em.

In addition to the effects of the Vietnam War, Australia in the early 1970s was experiencing slowing economic growth and rising unemployment for the first time since the early 1960s. The negative effect of the slowing economy upon people’s lives was most apparent among youth. In an article entitled “Surfies,” Tracks provided an insight into this situation:

Surfies. Word of advice for those who are about to join or have already joined the many thousands of unemployed in this country. The Department of Social Services has recently issued a circular to its heavies concerning unemployment benefits. It lists the following categories of persons: a.) Members of “Hippie” colonies b.) Members of the “Surfie” element c.) Persons who have newly arrived in the area mainly for the purpose other than seeking full-time work. Unemployment benefit is not ordinarily to be granted to young single persons who come within any of the above categories ... university students are not to be accepted as unemployed. In other words ... eat shit baby. (Tracks 1971, 5)

A cartoon by Nicholson published in Digger 9–23 September 1972 depicted a graph with unemployment spiralling out of control. The line leaving the graph was giving “the finger” to what was presumably an unemployed person. On 4 January 1973, , then minister for

1 There were a number of feral goats at Cape Byron that had become a tourist attraction at the time. 60 Chapter Three social security, informed Cabinet that about 38,000 people were receiving unemployment benefits, which represented a 90 percent increase in little more than a year (Hayden 1973). Frank Crowley (1986, 257) suggested that many of these unemployed people wished to “serve out their sentence of unemployment in pleasant surroundings, unharassed by parents or police, using their dole cheques as a rural subsidy whilst hobby farming or merely subsisting.” The Byron News on 25 November 1973 provided some evidence that Byron Bay had become particularly attractive to unemployed youth with the cartoon “On the Local Scene … by Bill” depicted two hippies sitting under a tree with cob webs on their feet, accompanied by the caption: “Sitting here guarding this tree and collecting unemployment relief sure beats working!” These easy-going and, what many in the mainstream considered anti-social, attitudes irritated Byron Bay authorities, which led to further confrontations. By 1973 the revolutionary counterculture had established a niche in the predominately conservative rural area of Byron Bay as demonstrated by the publication of the alternative Byron Express. On 15 February 1973, this new newspaper promised to become “a centre for expression and reflection” and claimed to be prepared for some “sock it to ya criticism.” In the same edition, it advocated “a balance between the full on work hog stuck into the 9–5 and the complete lay back beach surfie” and suggested that “one is not necessarily more honourable or right than the other.” It also showed an anti-authoritarian attitude towards restrictions on recreational drugs:

Dope raid expected. Our inside information centre has just told us that ze [sic] police are planning a big raid in the next weeks. So all you nasty dope crazed offenders better clean up around the edges. Byron has a horrible reputation for such goings on and although there has been no major “catches” seized in the area many farm houses have been searched [and] many cars (especially the ones with surfboards on top) have been stopped and searched.

On 11 May 1973, the Byron Express welcomed of Aquarius, describing it as a “time on this planet when man will relate science and art to evoke a new era and direction.” This new age was crystallised by the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973. On 13 March of that year, reported that a “gentle invasion of young people” had taken place in Nimbin, west of Byron Bay; they were described as “paint- wielding, junk-collecting, vegetable-planting ‘beautiful people’ [that] have Revolution by the Beach 61 subtly won over most of the business folk.” On 27 April 1973, the Northern Star reported:

Many Aquarians attending the Nimbin festival plan to stay on after it finishes or return later and settle ... Some have aspirations of becoming farmers, others of forming small communities, a few of just “settling” ... Visitors have already canvassed the idea of buying old dairy farms or cottages after the festival closes. They claim the climate, locality, lack of pollution and “peace” of the area makes it ideal for one or more small communities.

Billy Garner, an Aquarius Festival organiser, argued that Nimbin lent “itself to the counter culture” and wrote that the festival would attract 5,000 “freaks” and students over its ten days (Garner 1973). The Aquarius Festival confirmed that the northern New South Wales region—where Byron Bay is located—had gained a reputation as a hub of alternative lifestyles. Janie Conway-Herron (2003, 167), who relocated from southern Australia to the Byron Bay region around the time of the Aquarius Festival, recalled being told prior to her first visit to the region that she would “like it up there” as Byron Bay had “lots of alternative things” like health-food shops and organic bakeries. The Byron Bay region became a destination for those who sought to escape the rat-race of Australia’s larger cities. On 27 April 1973, the Northern Star confirmed this:

It seems likely that a North Coast “umbrella” will be set up today to provide a working basis for those who want to stay on in the area after the [Aquarius] festival finishes and put to use the “alternative lifestyle” education received. These groups will add to those already in the area such as Mullumbimby and Byron Bay.

Many locals and long-term residents resented and felt threatened by this “gentle invasion.” The Byron News reported the reactions of these locals to the revolutionary visitors and new settlers, such as on 7 March 1973:

Unfortunately it is the no-hoper who makes it hard for the genuine holidaymaker who wants and needs a carefree break from the stress and rush of city life. It is time that the locals became aware of what is going on in their town, and the very definite attempt by a radical, but dedicated minority of newcomers of a counter culture who see their life styles as the only answer to society.

62 Chapter Three

In a letter to the editor of the Byron News, published on 14 March 1973, one resident indicated their opposition to the counterculture:

I’m sure that the Byron Express is a merely passing hysteria ... if drug addiction, idleness, drunkenness, sexual permissiveness and presumably homosexuality ... all adds up to the making of a counter culture, then I’m glad to say I’m thirty and belong to a generation that is now beginning with hard work and application to realise the things our forefathers struggled for in their time and have left to us.

Many locals displayed displeasure at the alternative moral values of the counterculture revolution. “BareFacts” of Suffolk Park wrote in a letter to the editor of the Byron News published on 22 January 1975:

Sir, Being a very keen fisherman who finds Suffolk Park a good place when they are biting, I appeal to the budding Godivas and their male counterparts to keep their clothes on for a while as it’s interfering with my fishing. I am aware that retarded development is the reason for their behaviour but I also suspect that they are unable to read, so would some kind person tell them about my plea, and help me get back to my fishing.

By the mid-1970s somewhat of a counter-revolution was occurring in Byron Bay with a conspicuous increase in the number of bourgeoisie purchasing prime real estate in areas such as Wategos Beach. This was parodied in “On the Local Scene … by Bill” in the Byron News on 14 May 1975 in a cartoon that depicted houses at Wategos Beach. The cartoonist had added an elegant gate and a Nazi-style guard posted out the front. A sign read: “The most exclusive Wategos Beach country club ... maximum 28 peasant vehicles” with the caption: “Surely, this is not what is intended!” The freedom that Byron Bay’s beaches offered in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the radical ideas that hippies and surfies embraced during that period, were being fenced off, pushed further to the boundaries of the town’s mainstream, and replaced with the commodification of an “alternative lifestyle” beside the beach that only the rich could now afford.

Conclusion

For many years the Byron Bay region has been a focus for alternative lifestyles, viewed by many as sitting outside Australia’s mainstream bourgeois society. This chapter has contextualised the development of the alternative lifestyle during the late 1960s and early 1970s within the Revolution by the Beach 63 revolutionary fervour at the time, fuelled by anger about the Vietnam War and the increasing levels of unemployment among young Australians, and within a genuine desire to create a new society that would provide freedom from capitalist domination and the conservative Australia embraced by their parents. Although the aspirations for “real” revolution appeared to dissipate along with the end of the Vietnam War, leaving the Byron Bay region with a somewhat diluted version of the Utopian lifestyle many had initially sought, the 1960s and early 1970s marked a time in Australia’s history when revolutionary ideas brought younger Australians in particular into conflict with authorities. The many letters and newspaper articles written by Byron Bay locals and the new surfers and alternative lifestylers—broadly described as hippies—who settled in the Byron Bay area during the 1960s, and particularly in the early 1970s, illustrate the issues around cultural, economic, and political values contested during the period. They also provide a link to the revolutionary fervour that existed at the time in some of the large Australian cities, such as Melbourne, and in hot-beds of radicalism, such as Berkley, California. The revolution beside the beach examined in this chapter marked a transition in the nature of Australian society from conservative and inward-thinking to open to new ideas from around the world, which were embraced and “naturalised” in the Australian context. Although the initial zealous desire for radical change was soon sidelined in the Byron Bay region by the commodification of freedom as wealthy Australians purchased prime beachside real estate and the authenticity of the counterculture revolution gave way to a romantic, superficial link to its former glory days, the revolutionary legacy with its central themes of freedom and new beginnings lingers on today.

Works Cited

“All in its Place.” 1973. Earth Garden 4 (February): 43. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. On Revolution. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Booth, Douglas. 2001. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf. London: Frank Cass. “Bread.” 1973. Earth Garden 4 (February): 40–41. Cock, Peter. 1979. Alternative Australia: Communities of the Future? Melbourne: Quartet Books. Conway-Herron, Janie. 2003. “Metaphoric Landscapes: Writing the Rainbow Region.” In Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the New South Wales North Coast, edited by Helen Wilson, 163–78. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press. 64 Chapter Three

Crowley, Frank. 1986. Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies. Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia. Davidson, Jim and Peter Spearritt. 2000 Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Dempsey, Kenneth. 1990. Smalltown: A Study of Social Inequality, Cohesion and Belonging. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Drew, Philip. 1994. The Coast Dwellers: Australians Living on the Edge. Melbourne: Penguin Books. “Fallout Shelter.” 1973. Earth Garden 5 (May): 56. Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. 1988. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Garner, Billy. 1973. Digger. 27 January–13 February. Greer, Germaine. 1971. “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Revolution 2 (3). Hayden, Bill. 1973. Commonwealth Government Cabinet submission no. 11, copy no 36, 9 January. Accessed 3 June 2011. . Hein, Steve. 1970. Letter to the editor. Revolution 1 (4): 2. Henderson, Margaret. 2001. “A Shifting Line Up: Men, Women, and Tracks Surfing Magazine.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15 (3): 319–32. Horne, Donald. 1978. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. —. 1989. Ideas for a Nation. Sydney: Pan Books. Karier, Clarence. 1972. “Liberalism and the Quest for Orderly Change.” History of Education Quarterly 12 (1) spring: 57–80. Keys, Garry. 1971. “Shit.” Tracks 12 (September): 3. McGregor, Craig. 1967. Profile of Australia. London: Hodder and Stoughton. —. 1995. “The Beach, the Coast, the Signifier, the Feral Transcendence and Pumpin’ at Byron Bay.” In The Abundant Culture: Meaning and Significance in Everyday Australia, edited by David Headon, Joy Hooton, and Donald Horne, 51–60. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McTavish, Maxine. 1997. “A Century of Tourism in Byron Bay.” Graduating seminar report, bachelor of business in tourism. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University. Moore, Keith. 2005. “Beatlemania: The Beatles in Melbourne 1964.” In Go! Melbourne in the Sixties, edited by Seamus O’Hanlon, and Tanja Luckins, 58–71, Beaconsfield, Vic: Circa. Munro-Clark, Margaret. 1986. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. Revolution by the Beach 65

Revolution. 1971. “The Erotica Explosion.” 2 (4) August: 5–7. Rudé, George. 1988. The French Revolution, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Scott, Stuart. 2007. Noosa: Surfing the’60s. Nambour, Qld: Complete Printing Services. Witzig, John. 1963. “Byron Bay.” Surfing World 2 (March): 8. Taylor, Alan John Percival. 1991. The Origins of the Second World War. London: Penguin. “The Honey Bee.” 1973. Earth Garden 4 (February): 11–23. Tracks. 1971. “Surfies.” Tracks 14: 5. Walding, Murray. 2003. Blue Heaven. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books.

PART II:

ADVENTURE AND LAND

CHAPTER FOUR

“MEADOWS AND HEDGES”: REREADING SPACE THROUGH THE LENS OF TRAVEL WRITING IN COLONIAL WESTERN AUSTRALIA 1880–1906

CINDY LANE

The country was more English-looking in that remote part of Western Australia than anywhere else that I had been to on the vast island. We went for a drive through cornfields and meadows with noble red gums isolated like the old oaks at home, with hedges and numerous gates which had to be opened and shut in the same tiresome way as at home. (North 1894, 161)

This description by British botanical painter Marianne North, written in 1880 while visiting Australind in the southern part of Western Australia, is a clear example of the impulse to make comparisons upon arriving in a new country. As pointed out by Paul Carter. (1992, 2), in an attempt to attribute meaning and dimension to unknown space, newcomers seek to find resemblances between the new and the old country. North reinforced her belief that the Australind region was “English-looking” with terms such as “meadow” and “hedges,” creating the distinct image of an enclosed English countryside. This example gives further weight to Carter’s (1987, 81–4) argument that landscape is not a tangible or physical reality but a construction created by the person viewing it, shaped by the historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which that person lives. Carter (1987), in his canonical text The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, challenged the traditional historiographies of Australian landscape with his radical views of spatial history as he engaged with the texts of colonisation. His exploratory and theoretical works, much referred to, have inspired contemporary discussion of Australian landscape and 70 Chapter Four traveller/migrant experiences. Carter’s work, along with that of Simon Ryan (1996) and Maria Nugent (2005) have resulted in the development of research into colonial imaginings of Australia, concentrating mainly on the eastern colonies. By focusing on the landscape of Western Australia between 1880 and 1906, a neglected area in this field of study, this chapter provides new visions and adds new voices to research on Australian landscape. Drawing on the travel writings of a range of European visitors to Western Australia, this chapter analyses the ways in which Western Australian space is constructed. As early as 1803, there were views similar to those of Carter. Francois Auguste Rene Chateaubriand, in his book Voyages en Italie, wrote: “Every man [sic] carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world” (quoted in Kahn 1996, 195). This is exemplified by North’s comparison of the Australian landscape with her home. Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan also support this line of reasoning within the context of space:

[S]pace isn’t emptiness, a void to be filled, the neutral scene for action. Rather, space is imagined—called into being—by individuals and the cultures of which they are part. … that is, that the biological, geological, material world around us is discursively imagined, understood and produced. (Barcan and Buchanan 1999, 7–19)

Space is a complex construction of social and cultural histories, “personal and interpersonal experiences, and selective memory” (Kahn 1996, 167) all influenced by discourses and ideologies of the age. It is, ultimately, an emotional landscape that reminds the person experiencing it of other places. Travellers often construct a sense of space through the uniquely tinted lens of their writings and illustrations. Consequently, by investigating the diaries, letters, journals, and memoirs (published and unpublished) of European travellers, this chapter examines the predominant influences on European travellers’ perceptions of Western Australia’s space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For many visitors, their educational background provided them with a variety of visions of the natural world. This chapter highlights four different ideologies, which shaped the way these writers imagined the land through which they travelled. Some were influenced by Renaissance thought and classical interpretations of the Great South Land. The Enlightenment and Christian values were also influential, often mutually confirming the impulse to promote the ideals of improvement. This period also saw a more spiritual “Meadows and Hedges” 71 view of the natural world, which evolved from the romantic movement, generating a desire to see features of the environment conserved. Highly influential were ideas about aesthetic aspects, with the effects of scenery objectified in the pursuit of wonder. Expectations of the picturesque generated difficulties with interpreting the “monotonous” space of the Australian interior, which affected some travellers’ conceptions of space in colonial Western Australia. Although these various European worldviews were highly influential, the writings of travellers often reveal moments of appreciation and understanding of the unfamiliar landscape—perhaps due to predispositions, a result of their personal and interpersonal experiences.

The Influence of the Great South Land

A commonplace notion about Australia documented, and often exploited, by many enthusiastic nineteenth-century European travellers in their sketches and writings was that many of Australia’s natural characteristics were curious, sometimes disturbing, and even grotesque. These images were inspired by their readings of early classical scholars’ assumptions made about the Great South Land. Centuries of interpretations of the unknown South had evocative power, with Australia conceived to be the Antipodes of Europe. Travellers therefore looked for the unfamiliar, recording what they saw as incomprehensible dissimilarities to “home,” such as reversed seasons, egg-laying animals, marsupials, and flightless birds (Arthur 1999, 39; Hetherington 2000, 4; Powell 1972, 3). The importance placed on this extraordinary ecology is evidenced by renowned writer and traveller Lady Annie Brassey choosing unfamiliar fauna and flora to illustrate the introduction to the chapter on Western Australia in her book The Last Voyage published in1889 (see Figure 4-1). However, a kangaroo, a platypus, and (possibly) a pelican are not wholly representative of Western Australian fauna. Kangaroos live throughout Australia, and pelicans are found worldwide even though there is an Australian species. It is unlikely that Lady Brassey saw a platypus: firstly, because they are only found in the waterways of eastern Australia and, secondly, because they are very difficult to see as they build their burrows deep in the sides of riverbanks. Lady Brassey’s pastiche of fauna suggests travellers were being influenced by their existing knowledge about the Great South Land rather than by their own observations. When Lady Mary Anne Broome, author and wife of a colonial governor, first arrived in Western Australia in 1883, she reacted to the native fauna in terms of the grotesque: “We also passed several iguanas basking in the sunshine—hideous rugged lizards, a foot or more long—frightful to look 72 Chapter Four at, but perfectly harmless, and a favourite native delicacy. They declare it tastes exactly like chicken” (quoted in Hasluck 1963, 76). By connecting the two ideas—hideous creatures, and the diet of the local Indigenous people—Lady Broome was validating the belief in the perversions of the Antipodes.

Figure 4-1. Illustration for the chapter on Western Australia in Brassey, Lady Annie. 1889. The Last Voyage, to India and Australia, in the “Sunbeam.” New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., p. 229.

Nevertheless, there were some travellers, such as North, who appreciated Western Australia’s native flora and landscape. On her journey to Perth in 1880, this traveller and painter was delighted to find native flowers growing in the hot sandy ground:

[W]e passed a mile of everlasting flowers, one perfect bed of them in the burnt-up grass. Then we came to another marvellous sandy plain, and every kind of small flower—great velvety “kangaroo’s feet” [sic], with green and yellow satin linings, exquisite blue or white lobelias, heaths, and brooms. (North 1894, 152)

“Meadows and Hedges” 73

Furthermore, when North saw her first Eucalyptus macrocarpa, she claimed: “I screamed with delight when the small tree came in sight ...” (North 1894, 156). North’s interest in painting unique flora in their natural habitats must have been a positive influence on her impressions of Western Australia, an example of how travellers’ predilections affect their perceptions of new space. Many Europeans were curious about the new land. The manifestation of this ardent curiosity—collecting flora and fauna, and Indigenous artifacts—developed into an export industry, with ships’ passengers making purchases before returning to England. Just prior to her departure in 1887, Lady Brassey visited two curio shops in Albany, which sold feathers, stuffed birds, and Indigenous weapons:

Fortunately for us … he [the owner] had only recently returned from one of his expeditions, and we were therefore able to pickup some of the specimens in the condition in which he had found them, all rough and broken from the effects of recent fights. [There were] spear-heads … tomahawks … knives … womaras [sic]… numerous specimens of kylies, and curious message-sticks … We bought some opossum-skins and rugs of various sorts, and admired the beautiful live birds, including parrots and cockatoos. (Brassey 1889, 252–3)

Lady Brassey’s pleasure in finding recently used Indigenous weapons reinforces the idea that the travellers held expectations of finding not only unusual flora and fauna but also exotic human cultures in the Great South Land. Eight years later, London architect Robert Tyler, having travelled with his son in the Western Australian goldfields, also made a few purchases in Albany before he left, possibly from the same shop:

We called on a well known character, a collector of seeds, birds, animals, reptiles and insects. He very much wanted me to purchase a fine young eagle … I contented myself with purchasing some seeds, a few birds— dead ones—and an opossum. (Tyler 2003, 243)

By indicating that he had received a little pressure from the collector to purchase a live bird, Tyler’s tone was not as enthusiastic as that of Lady Brassey. 74 Chapter Four

The Influence of the Enlightenment and Christian Attitudes

John Gascoigne (2002, 169) believes that the goals that gave shape and direction to the conduct of life in early European Australia drew heavily on the worldview of the Enlightenment. As well, most Europeans held an inherent understanding of Christian doctrine. Together, these philosophies were highly influential in the Western world. The general premise of the Enlightenment was that society’s problems could be solved by improvement and progress. Albert Calvert, a mining engineer who visited Australia a number of times during the 1890s and who wrote a series of books about his journeys, carried with him this premise when he visited Western Australia in 1895. He spoke of the need for cultivation: “Sir John [Forrest, premier] is the enemy of the land grabber, who leaves his ground in a state of nature; and he is the friend of the cultivator” (Calvert 1901, 22). Calvert assumed, as did Forrest and many other colonialists, that with enough persistence the countryside could resemble that of Europe—this being, they believed, “the natural order of things for agriculture” (Gascoigne 2002, 99). Travellers who visited Western Australia often arrived with some of the same ideas as the first European colonists but without the settlers’ advantages of their experience with the land. J. M. Powell (1972, 3) writes that “the first colonists were committed to Australia before they came to understand it.” As with the travellers, the first colonists carried with them images of their homeland with which they made comparisons. They needed first to live with Australian space, then to accept it, and finally to appreciate it. Jane Davis (2008) in her thesis found that, in this way, many colonists developed an attachment to the land. Without this experience of forming feelings of belonging and an understanding of Australia over time, many travellers were disappointed with the “unimproved” landscape they found; they depicted it as infertile and dreary and, unable to recognise features in common with European space, they imagined it as monotonous. Generally, European travellers were uneasy with the vastness of the space they confronted in Australia. The overwhelmingly tamed, fenced, and pathed European landscapes with which they were familiar tended to bestow more of a sense of intimacy and connectedness for them (Grellier 1996). North’s description, at the opening of this chapter, demonstrates this. Virtually all travellers felt comforted when finding land under cultivation and seeing evidence of the colonists’ struggle to subdue and shape “nature” into familiar and acceptable domestic scenes. The English journalist and adventurer Julius Price disclosed this emotion when he “Meadows and Hedges” 75 approached the cultivated fields surrounding Perth after journeying from Beverley by train in 1895. He desired the image of the European cultural landscape, the picturesque concept of “nature perfected.” He wrote, “The last portion of the journey was delightful, and in the bright sunlight all looked so old-fashioned and settled that it was hard to realise one was still within touch of the desolate solitude of the bush” (Price 1896, 25). Under the influence of Enlightenment principles, some travellers were preoccupied with the advance of European settlement. For example, when Calvert travelled by train between Albany and Perth, he commented, “The train passes over leagues of country upon which there is not a sign of stock, not a single habitation” (Calvert 1901, 6). Christian heritage coexisted in reasonable harmony with the Enlightenment philosophy that promoted the ideals of improvement and had a particularly powerful influence over visions and attitudes to landscape. The Europeans who travelled to Western Australia were nearly all ostensibly Christians influenced by the Church’s interpretations of the book of Genesis. They had been raised in a society that believed humankind was superior to all other creation and therefore had the right and the responsibility to transform the environment into greater productivity (Genesis 1:28). This was reflected in centuries of cultural traditions where power was based on ownership of land. Therefore, vast tracts of cleared, shaped land dominated by a country house were an indication of wealth and power. For example, traveller, Italian diplomat and later vice consul for Western Australia Leopoldo Zunini described Leake Farm in Kellerberrin:

The house was built at the foot of a … granite outcrop ... where we enjoyed a view of the property; like a wide green belt, standing against the grey of the bush, it spread out around us. … It must be remembered … that many of these country landowners are very well-off and spend the summer either in Perth or Melbourne or, sometimes, in Europe. (Zunini 1997, 105)

Typical of his contemporaries, Zunini believed that the essential mark of a person was the ownership of property, distinguishing the individual from fellow citizens. The middle and upper classes asserted what they believed were their God-given rights by filling Western Australian space with objects and cultural behaviours that symbolised their position in society (Bolton 1981, 12); hence, Zunini’s inclination to link a country house surrounded by property with the “very well-off” landowners. The travellers’ sense of what was pleasing was very much a product of their experience of their home environment, which in turn was shaped by Christian edicts of land, transformation, and power. Part of the reason for 76 Chapter Four the lack of standing of Indigenous peoples in the eyes of many nineteenth- century Europeans was that they thought Indigenous peoples had no ambition to mobilise the earth’s resources and transform its environment, and that they made little contribution to the shaping of the Australian landscape. By contrast, Europeans prided themselves on transforming the wilderness into a great pastoral empire, which they believed marked the beginnings of civilised society (Bolton 1981, 3–4). Consequently, Europeans were surprised to find that some areas of Australia not developed by the colonists resembled home. Nearly all travellers made the comment that parts of Western Australia looked like a park. Lady Brassey (1889, 246) wrote, “[W]e drove … through more enclosures for cattle and sheep, and finally over some virgin land, across what might have been an English park.” The enclosures for cattle and sheep represented the pastoral empire, and the description of the land as virgin verifies Lady Brassey’s conviction that there had been no previous human intervention. The writings of Italian traveller Zunini (1997, 196) demonstrate that this impression was widespread throughout Europe. When approaching the Kojonup area in the southern parts of Western Australia in 1906, he commented, “The trees were of medium size but widely set apart. The ground was flat and covered with thick grass which gave the scene the appearance of endless parkland.” Both Lady Brassey and Zunini had produced an imagined landscape, which, paradoxically, had been created by Indigenous peoples, who used fire-stick farming to drive game out of scrub or bracken and to burn off old feed in regions of good rainfall to promote new growth and attract game. This practice produced the open, park-like country that lured pastoralists and satisfied European visions of landscape norms (Bolton 1981, 8). As Geoffrey Bolton (1981, 15) points out, Europeans had not been trained to appreciate the qualities of a landscape as different from Europe as was the Australian bush. Not all travellers had the desire to change the landscape to fit European ideals or only saw beauty in space that resembled home. North once again marvelled at the wildflowers and tall forests of the southwest: “I spent four delightful hours sketching or resting under those gigantic white pillars” (North 1894, 164). The words “delightful” and “rest” suggest she was comfortable with the wilderness, showing no evidence of the unease other travellers felt—perhaps her love of painting and wildlife outweighing other influences. “Meadows and Hedges” 77

The Influence of the Romantic Movement

The pleasure that North experienced in the bush intimates a more spiritual view of the natural world, which was developing from the romantic movement. This provided a counterpoint to the materialistic, utilitarian view typical of the Enlightenment period (Martin 1993, xix). People were beginning to record their desire to see aspects of the environment conserved. For example, nineteenth-century English critic and social theorist John Ruskin redefined science as “wonder at nature” rather than “control over nature” (Weltman 1999, 156). Thus far, this chapter has discussed late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travellers who observed large parcels of cleared land, European seed crops, European animals, and European gardens introduced and developed by European colonists. These travellers described Western Australia as they would a European ecosystem, expecting the same responses to agriculture and animal husbandry practices and the same potential for productivity (Flannery 1997, 347). Clearing the land for agriculture, mining, settlement, and water storage; the introduction of foreign plants and animals; and the declining water quality all contributed to the loss of natural vegetation cover and the extinction of many native species (Dodson et al. 2002, 164). Yet, early colonists and travellers often thought of the Australian continent as being so vast that the resources of the land were limitless. For example, the European attitude that timber supplies were inexhaustible was evident in its extravagant waste (Flannery 1997, 360). This is verified by comments made by Lady Brassey (1889, 237) when she visited a sawmill village near Albany: “Tons of wood not large enough for sleepers were being burned in order to get rid of it. It seemed a terribly wasteful proceeding, but there was more material than was wanted, and space after all was the great thing needed.” Also Zunini (1997, 168): “[U]nfortunately,” he wrote, “we do not live in a world of poetic idylls and clearing the bush is a necessity in Australia, covered as it is by an endless forest.” Zunini appeared to sneer, perhaps at appeals for conservation that were only just beginning to be considered at the time of his visit in 1906. Not all travellers accepted this penchant for widespread land clearance that was intended to transform Western Australia’s space into a resemblance of the pastoral scenes of Europe. Julius Price was appalled at the destruction of the forests in the southwest in 1895:

[Because of ringbarking] the effect of miles and miles of dead trees waving their gaunt leafless branches in the bright sunlight is indescribably weird and depressing, whilst the sight of so much reckless waste of fine timber is 78 Chapter Four

positively irritating, for there appears to be quite a fever for tree destruction. In fact to such an extent is this the case that often not so much as a bush is left … All around was such a scene of utter wreck and confusion … to my astonishment I was informed that in less than a week the whole lot would be burnt up. (Price 1896, 17–20)

Price’s lament for the loss of thousands of trees suggests not the Enlightenment zeal for productivity but the romantic ideals of preserving nature, notwithstanding the power of the Industrial Revolution.

The Influence of the Picturesque and the Pursuit of Wonder

Travel writers wanted Australian space to conform to European tastes for the picturesque, and, as many of the writings quoted in this chapter indicate, there was a tendency for travel writers to evoke comparisons with European scenes and to employ descriptive techniques that were “acceptable” to European readers. Particularly in landscape painting, “the picturesque” was an ideology that emerged to reconcile ideas of beauty and the sublime. These ideas were systematised by late eighteenth-century British artist and writer William Gilpin1 and were employed by colonial artists who painted Australian localities that demonstrated the recent achievements of individuals and the houses they built. “Their paintings were arcadian … in their sense of ease and plenitude and their concealment of the hardships faced by the early [European] settlers” (Bonyhady 1985, 40). Travel writers conveyed this sense of the picturesque in their words. For example, when Lady Broome described her trip to York, she wrote, “Large fields of fine wheat and oats and barley, made immensely big and beautiful green patches in every direction; the houses also looked picturesque and comfortable, and nearly all of them had gardens round them” (quoted in Hasluck 1963, 77). According to Carter (1987, 243), by using the descriptive term “picturesque” the traveller heightened their sense of possession of the landscape and the “sensation of suddenly being at home in the world.” Broome’s description of a European-like scene, linked with her use of the word “comfortable,” certainly conveys this sense of possession and “being at home” in Western Australia. Aesthetic judgements in travel writing were usually made in response to a learnt feeling, guided by interpretations of the picturesque and upper-

1 The eighteenth-century aestheticians Archibald Alison, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight developed Gilpin’s theory further. “Meadows and Hedges” 79 middle-class cultural values and conventions. Gilpin expressed an appreciation of wild and rugged mountain scenery when developing his ideas on the picturesque (Andrews 1989). The “pursuit of wonder” was also one of the driving forces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists (Horne 2005, 9, 37). A desire for the picturesque and an enthusiasm for mountain scenery drove many travellers to the Swiss Alps to marvel at their majestic wonder. These influences inspired Europeans in Australia to impose certain European cultural expectations on an environment that was substantially different. Hence, Zunini’s description of Kojonup, a slightly undulating area no more than 200 metres above sea- level:

It had a charming aspect and reminded me in some ways of little villages in the high Apennines. In a similar manner, the houses here are mostly built of wood set in green fields and shaded by majestic trees. The air also is fresh and sparkling. (Zunini 1997, 154)

Zunini travelled in spring when pastures were green, the skies blue, and the air cool, which would have contributed to his imagined alpine landscape, similar to home. As soon as he saw a feature he could compare to the European landscape he knew best, he would use the language of the picturesque to describe it. In Bridgetown, he saw the hills as “high rocky mountains,” the imagery forming a direct contrast to the usual flat appearance of the land, which he labelled “monotonous,”—a term frequently used, and discussed later in more detail.

Bridgetown … is probably the most picturesque town in Western Australia. Although situated only 580 feet above sea-level, the high rocky mountains which surround it … give it a look something akin to Switzerland, and very different from the usual aspect of the country which is monotonous and uniform. (Zunini 1997, 171)

And yet some travellers, such as North, could find elements of the picturesque in natural Western Australian scenery, without needing to evoke European imagery. Unlike most travel writers who generally avoided any indications of the Indigenous people’s original occupancy of the land, North sometimes included them:

[W]e saw a sight worth some weariness—25 emus all in a group feeding … all amongst the grass-trees. The grass-trees were in enormous quantities, covering large tracts of country … banksia-trees were then covered with their young leaves and shoots of rich yellow, brown, or 80 Chapter Four

white, and the native wigwams of bark or leaves looked picturesque under them. (North 1894, 154)

Although North acknowledged the presence of Indigenous peoples, her inclusive account—seemingly in one breath—of banksias and Indigenous dwellings implied they were an element of the fauna and flora she was describing. She then associated the scene with the picturesque, as if the Indigenous homes provided an ingredient that gave the scene a rustic quality, a desirable aspect of the picturesque. Nevertheless, even though she showed interest in the natural landscape, her painting of Western Australian bush revealed a European density and lushness that belied the reality of much of the Western Australian landscape.

Interpreting the Monotonous

Late in 1893, traveller Norman Sligo, a metalworker who arrived in the Western Australian goldfields with the hope of prospecting for gold, wrote, “There was nothing picturesque in the scenic surroundings of Coolgardie” (Sligo 1980, 40). Generally, the vastness of space in the interior and on the goldfields of Western Australia presented European travellers with unfamiliar sights and did not fit the romantic ideals of the picturesque. It was more difficult to make general comparisons using the customary aesthetic language, and the travellers’ descriptions became focused on specific items with which they could identify. However, given their penchant for speculation about how the land should be tamed, a broader view was beyond them. As a result, comparisons to home came to be about the mundane. The Boulder mine reminded Price of an English “north-country” mining village: “The continuous din of the many stamps, the dull roar of engines, the hissing of escaping steam, and the hammering of saw-mills, made to my ears almost sweet music after the silence of the bush” (Price 1896, 92). Price only described recognisable sounds because visually the scene would have borne little resemblance to an English mining village. With no romantic backdrop of forests, or mountains, or even prominent landmarks to appeal to the travellers, there were fewer descriptions of the landscape: “a spacious plain made dreary reading” (Carter 1987, 245). Or perhaps this was because, as Carter (1987, 245) claimed, the “unpicturesque” view damned illusions of prospects for the future, of inhabitation or cultivation that the picturesque may have held. The frequent claim by travellers that Australia’s space was monotonous continued until a sense of differentiation and contrast became evident after “Meadows and Hedges” 81 development and residence by Europeans. (Carter 1987, 245; Gentilli 1979, 11). This can be seen in Price’s description of his rail journey from Albany to Perth:

The country … was more than monotonous; dense flat wastes of forest and bush lay on either side, though the many miles of this dreary wilderness were occasionally lightened by extensive clearings or even by patches of cultivation, betokening the presence of the enterprising settler. (Price 1896, 15)

Price’s feelings of monotony and dreariness were only “lightened” when evidence of work by “settlers” was encountered. Calvert also used the word “dreary” when he compared Australia to the “old country” on his journey to Southern Cross and the goldfields:

[Looking] out on a dreary expanse of sandy country but the repellent features of the landscape will soon become familiar to the eye … Onward to Coolgardie … not through smiling cornfields, orchards, pasture grounds dotted with homesteads, but over arid wastes, which would be left silent and deserted to the end of time, but for the talismanic power of gold! (Calvert 1901, 28–32)

Calvert found the natural features of the landscape “repellent,” whereas any evidence of a European mode of cultivation he personified as “smiling,” representing, as Price also did, a penchant for “improvement” of the land. Paul Miller (1997, 55) argues that when describing landscape, the monotonous depicts moving through the land, not establishing a sense of personal familiarity and identity of location, whereas the picturesque depicts the observer as static, finding something recognisable for the eye to seize upon, name, and identify. This explains the sense of dreariness of which Price and Calvert wrote—they could not see the world with which they were familiar. For example, in his description of the journey from Southern Cross, Price emphasised his sense of the monotony by using repetitive nouns:

Once the freshness of novelty [of seeing the various varieties of eucalyptus trees and “black boys”] wore off, there were … simply trees, trees, trees as far as the eye could see on all sides; whilst the endless vista of track stretching as straight as a line for miles and miles ahead, hour after hour, has a most depressing effect. (Price 1896, 54)

82 Chapter Four

Here Price implied that when moving through a landscape novelty is “fresh,” while “endless” views of the same is “depressing.” Some travellers’ observations of the goldfields revealed a reinterpretation, an acknowledgment of an adjusted culture, creating an opportunity for travellers to relinquish their traditional mores for new imaginings. For example, despite Price’s negative descriptions (above), he found new ways to express the picturesque: “Camel caravans were frequently met, and, with their swarthy Afghan drivers attired in Eastern costumes, imparted sudden touches of the picturesque which were quite unexpected” (Price 1896, 33). Price’s vocation as an illustrator may have inspired this unusual depiction of the picturesque. And Sligo revealed an understanding and an acceptance of new space, and a modified culture in the goldfields. Of his approach to Hannan’s (Kalgoorlie), he wrote:

[W]e sighted great clouds of red dust … swirling away in a huge cloud … and as we drew closer tracks from all directions … become swallowed up in the dust clogged road, while ever and anon we pass outlying camps until in a few moments we are in the thick of huge mounds, and like miniature Vesuvius emitting clouds of flame coloured dust, while the man on top of each heap, dust begrimed and dry, gives us a nod and he hurriedly picks up his dryblowing dish in case he should lose the benefit of the breeze. (Sligo 1980, 43)

Sligo used evocative language, conjuring visions of volcanoes, and yet with a “nod” from the miners he manages to portray a warm, friendly culture on the goldfields. By making comparisons with Vesuvius, Sligo still produced an imagined landscape constructed from other places within his existing knowledge. Vesuvius is in the Bay of Naples, a port often visited by steamers on their way to Australia, supporting the argument that everyone carries within them a composition of all that they have seen.

Conclusion

Travel writers visiting Western Australia between 1880 and 1906 interpreted the region’s space symbolically. That is, as Paul Carter has argued, viewers drew from representations of their historical, geographical, cultural, and personal backgrounds to create the landscape. The new voices of the travellers produced new visions of Western Australia. The travellers’ writings constructed a space that reflected both the society in which they found themselves and the society from which they had come, a space where they persistently expressed a desire to remake the newly colonised space in the image of their European heritage. “Meadows and Hedges” 83

Influenced by a melange of European ideologies—classical scholarship, the Enlightenment, Christian values, and the descriptive jargon and ideals of the romantic movement—European travellers revealed an imagined space filled with objects and cultural behaviours that reminded them of home. The profusion of comments depicting cultivated fields, quaint homesteads, and parks reflected their desire to clear Western Australian native bush in order to “improve” the land. Travellers’ claims that the bush and the landscape of the goldfields were monotonous expose their distaste for, and their inadequacy in describing, a space that bore no relationship to their known world. However, although primarily dominated by their Eurocentric visions and shaped by their personal dispositions, some travellers at times revealed a pleasure in the unique flora and fauna of Western Australia and an understanding of the issues associated with establishing their world on unfamiliar soils.

Works Cited

Andrews, Malcolm. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press. Arthur, Paul Longley. 1999. “Fantasies of the Antipodes.” In Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry, edited by Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan, 37–46. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Barcan, Ruth, and Ian Buchanan, eds. 1999. Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Bolton, Geoffrey. 1981. Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment 1788–1980. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bonyhady, Tim. 1985. Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801–1890. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Brassey, Lady Annie. 1889. The Last Voyage, to India and Australia, in the “Sunbeam.” New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Calvert, Albert F. 1901. My Fourth Tour in Western Australia. London: Dean. Carter, Paul. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1992. Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language. London: Faber and Faber. 84 Chapter Four

Davis, Jane. 2008. “Longing or Belonging? Responses to a “New” Land in Southern Western Australia 1829–1907.” PhD thesis, University of Western Australia. Dodson, John, Feea Itzstein-Davey, Lynne Milne, and Annabel Morris. 2002. “Vegetation and Environmental History of Southern Western Australia.” In Country: Visions of Land and People in Western Australia, edited by Andrea Gaynor, Mathew Trinca, and Anna Haebich, 147–67. Perth: Western Australian Museum. Flannery, Tim. 1997. The Future Eaters. Sydney: New Holland Publishers. Gascoigne, John. 2002. The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gentilli, J. G. 1979. Western Landscapes. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press. Grellier, Jane. 1996. “Awe, Disillusionment and Fear: Attitudes to Landscape among Christian Colonists of Far South-West Australia.” MA thesis, University of Western Australia. Hasluck, Alexandra, ed. 1963. Remembered with Affection: A New Edition of Lady Broome’s ‘Letters to Guy’. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. First published 1885. Hetherington, Michelle. 2000. “The World Upside Down: Early Colonial Records at the National Library of Australia.” In The World Upside Down: Australia 1788–1830, edited by National Library of Australia, 1–7, Canberra: National Library of Australia. Horne, Julia. 2005. The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia's Landscape was Explored, Nature Discovered and Tourism Unleashed. Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press. Kahn, Miriam. 1996. “Your Place and Mine: Sharing Emotional Landscapes in Wamira, Papua New Guinea.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith Basso, 167–96. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Martin, Stephen. 1993. A New Land: European Perceptions of Australia 1788–1850. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, State Library of New South Wales. Miller, Paul. 1997. “Monotony and the Picturesque: Landscape in Three Australian Travel Narratives of the 1830s.” In Land and Identity, edited by Jennifer McDonell and Michael Deves, 52–58. Armidale: Association of the Study of Australian Literature. North, Marianne. 1894. Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, Volume II. New York: Macmillan and Co. “Meadows and Hedges” 85

Nugent, Maria. 2005. Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Powell, J. M. 1972. Images of Australia, 1788–1914. Melbourne: Dept. of Geography, Monash University. Price, J. M. 1896. The Land of Gold. 3rd ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company Ltd. Ryan, Simon. 1996. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sligo, N. K. 1980. Mates and Gold: Reminiscences of the Early Westralian Goldfields 1890–1896. Perth: Hesperian Press. Tyler, Robert Emeric IV. 2003. My Dear Emma. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky. 1999. “Myth and Gender in Ruskin’s Science.” In Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, edited by Dinah Birch, 153–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zunini, Leopoldo. 1997. Western Australia as It Is Today 1906. Translated by Margot Melia and Richard Bosworth. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. First published 1910.

CHAPTER FIVE

IRRIGATION AS SAVIOUR: TRANSFORMING ARID LANDSCAPES

JENNIFER HAMILTON-MCKENZIE

Haste and failure are, I cannot but consider, synonymous terms when applied to waterworks. —Lieutenant-Colonel Sankey (cited in Powell 1989, 82)

In the popular version of Australian history, Alfred Deakin, thrice prime minister, is considered a visionary. This is primarily due to his significant contribution to Australian federation but also to his prior role as the principal architect of large-scale irrigation in the state of Victoria. Deakin is also recognised as a major instigator of the White Australia policy embedded in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. Although this is often minimised in the prevailing historiography and excused as indicative of general Western thinking at the time, the ramifications of Deakin’s concern for racial homogeneity, combined with his establishment of irrigation, resonate in today’s Australia. In this chapter, I contend that these two legacies are intertwined, that Deakin’s racist attitudes led him to choose the wrong irrigation system for the northern plains of Victoria, a choice that has contributed significantly to the current fragile condition of the Murray-Darling Basin. There is a need to re-examine the initial reasoning behind large-scale irrigation in Australia’s semi-arid regions, as a means of finding a new way, indeed a new vision, of interacting effectively with this delicate river system. As part of a search for a new vision, this chapter explores Deakin’s irrigation project. It explains the historical choices around irrigation by analysing Deakin’s ideas about water use in Victoria and his dismissal of an alternative vision. In 1885, when Deakin was the minister for water supply, he established a royal commission to examine ways of providing water to the northern Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 87 plains of Victoria. He looked to Western America, particularly California, for answers on how best to construct irrigation works, and he led a small team there to examine the schemes that he deemed successful. This resulted in his much-lauded report, Irrigation in Western America (Deakin 1885). This version of irrigationist thinking, which revolved around the romance of yeomanry and the civilised, idyllic societies they purportedly created, was highly attractive to Deakin, and his firm belief in irrigation can be attributed to this trip. He spoke of the “picked people” (Alexander 1928, 83) who would be attracted to irrigation settlements and the superior townships that would ensue. Deakin was convinced by the strength of the “irrigationist philosophy.” This philosophy had three main components. First, it was based on the romance of the yeoman, a figure representing civilised agricultural pursuits and promising a family-friendly style of farming close to townships and urban culture, unlike the isolated life of the broad-acre farmer (Tyrrell 1999). Second, the push of progress via technological innovation, symbolised by engineering feats, depicted modern adaptation and human evolution (Bellanta 2008). Third, it was based on the lure of doing “God’s work” by opening up and taming wild lands in order to transform the landscape to make it fertile and productive (Bellanta 2008). Deakin, for whom America was the symbol of progress and modernity and the bastion of white republicanism, was keen to deliver his version of the American dream to Australia. However, during the 1870s and 1880s, one man claimed that—for irrigation purposes at least—few comparisons could, or should, be drawn with America. George Gordon, chief engineer with the Victorian Lands and Water Supply Board, argued with Deakin and Deakin’s irrigation mentor, Hugh McColl, that older, more established irrigation schemes should be examined, as they could provide information that was more relevant. Indeed, when the Canadian engineer George Chaffey arrived in Victoria from California in 1886 to establish an irrigation settlement in , the push for irrigation was only just gaining traction in California—certainly, it may not have been in its infancy, but it was definitely not at the height of its popularity. If irrigation in California and Victoria was developing almost in tandem, why was Deakin so intent on emulating the American model? Why did he not heed the advice to examine older, more established irrigation works? Australian historian Marilyn Lake has revealed that Deakin idealised many things American, particularly the American male (Lake 2007). In essence, Deakin’s intellectual passion for America, combined with his belief in his own racial superiority, led him to ignore crucial environmental concerns about large-scale irrigation in Australia. 88 Chapter Five

The beginnings of irrigationist philosophy in Australia can be traced to 1871 when Benjamin H. Dods applied for three million acres of land from the Victorian government upon which to construct his proposed diversion weir on the Goulburn River linking the northern rivers via canals (Martin 1955, 23). Dods’s company, the Grand Victorian North-Western Canal Company, constantly courted publicity to gain popular support for his concept. Dods’s plan, outlined in the company’s prospectus, concluded:

[O]ne has only to consider that a man will do more in the way of production with ten acres of land on an average soil well irrigated, than he will do on the best soil with 100 acres of land not enjoying the advantage of irrigation. (Dods 1871, 9)

Hugh McColl was appointed secretary of the company and was to become a major contributor to the irrigation debate over the next decade. McColl had been a strong proponent of securing an adequate water supply for miners in Bendigo and did not support the existing local water policy. He had been impressed by the irrigationist literature coming from Western America’s arid states and was a highly vocal and visible advocate for changing the water policy to embrace the tenets of the American approach (Martin 1955, 23). James Grant was minister for land in the Duffy government at the time. Grant agreed in principle to the company’s proposal that it be given an area of land for survey purposes, and he assigned a parcel of land 225 miles (362 kilometres) long and thirteen chains (260 metres) wide. However, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard H. Sankey of the Corps of Royal Engineers India stopped McColl’s dream from eventuating. Sankey was commissioned in 1871 by the Victorian government to report on the Coliban and water supply scheme (Powell 1989, 81). He was scathing and sarcastic in his analysis of the North-Western Canal project, which he took upon himself to review. He believed the promoters had dangerously underestimated the amount of water needed to keep the canal active during the dry months. He advised: “Professional knowledge and research, time and patience, are in these matters necessary” (Sankey 1880, 4). Dods and McColl took great umbrage both at the nature of the criticism and in Sankey having a say in the matter, as Sankey had not been asked to review the project. However, Sankey maintained that he had been directed to go beyond the initial brief if he thought it beneficial. Dods responded sarcastically to Sankey’s review, declaring that Sankey had not consulted the company about its plans (Dods 1880, 4). Sankey raised a point, which proved to be a constant cause of disagreement and would later be echoed by the engineer Gordon, that people were needed Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 89 before, not after, irrigation. Dods angrily proclaimed that his experience of living in the district, combined with his qualifications as an engineer, left him in a better position to judge the viability of the proposed canal scheme. He compared his scheme with the scheme proposed for the San Joaquin Valley in California, with 225 miles (362 kilometres) of similar canal. The trans-Pacific mimicry had begun. On 28 May 1872, as chief engineer of water supply, Gordon wrote to the minister for mines, recommending that data about water flows would need to be collected over a number of years before decisions could be made about the construction of water works (North-Western Canal Papers 1880, 5). He was demonstrating a caution for which he would become notorious with the evangelical proponents of irrigation—Dods and McColl—who wanted swift, large-scale progress. A change of government occurred in June 1872, and James Casey, now minister of lands and agriculture, delayed Grant’s earlier commitment to assign land for the project. He requested a report from Gordon on the practicality of the proposed canal scheme; he was not convinced of its merits, believing that the company wished “to get the means of procuring success from the government” (North-Western Canal Papers 1880, 9). The sticking point was funding; the company was asking for three million acres and a guarantee of bonds. Gordon completed his report, which found that the plan was clearly unworkable (North-Western Canal Papers 1880, 24). He upheld Sankey’s original concern that there was not enough water to carry through the dry months. He had also discovered engineering challenges and suggested that the project was financially unviable. Gordon echoed Sankey’s concern, which he was to reiterate over the coming years, that the population was not large enough to make the project commercially viable and, therefore, “irrigation on a large scale, as is practised in India and Italy, cannot for many years to come be practised in this colony” (North-Western Canal Papers 1880, 27). Gordon did believe, however, that some small-scale irrigation for crops such as wheat could prove effective. In a swiftly composed and long-winded reply to the minister, McColl argued against Gordon’s findings (North-Western Canal Papers 1880, 29). Chief among his arguments was the transformation of California through irrigation schemes such as the one he and Dods proposed, pointing out the geographical and physical similarities of California to the north-western district of Victoria. He drew on the principles of the yeomanry as desirable attributes and reiterated that the Western American irrigationist philosophy should be transported to Victoria. McColl’s tenacity and drive was evident, and his commitment to the Californian ideal of irrigation was 90 Chapter Five absolute. When he failed to implement his beliefs through the private company, McColl stood for the Legislative Assembly with the view to carrying out his irrigation concepts through the legislature. He was elected in 1880. Although the canal project did not eventuate, the dry years of 1876– 1877 combined with the high profile of the Grand Victorian North- Western Canal Company had aroused much interest and discussion about how best to conserve water. To this end, the Berry government conceived the Water Conservancy Board, which was headed up by Gordon, then chief advisory engineer of water supply to the Board of Land and Works, and Andrew Black, who was assistant surveyor-general (Martin 1955, 24). Both Gordon and Black supported local government control of water, wanted each stream to remain in its own basin, and pushed for the utilisation of weirs in natural watercourses (Gordon and Black 1882, 4). This approach flew in the face of the grandiose Western American schemes that had so convinced McColl, who labelled Gordon and Black’s conceptualisation “Gordon’s gutters” (Martin 1955, 24). Although the Water Conservancy Board’s focus had been on the immediate needs of the colony, it also had an eye on the future development of irrigation, realising the need to ascertain the correct gauging of rivers before expensive and permanent headworks for irrigation were constructed. Dissatisfied, McColl initiated the establishment of the Central Irrigation League, a unification of all irrigation leagues from Goulburn to Avoca, which agitated for large irrigation schemes to bring water to the northern plains. It was this plan that captured the imagination of the young Alfred Deakin, newly elected to parliament. On 2 September 1882, Gordon and Black presented their first report on irrigation, noting that the river flow was stronger in winter than in summer when it was most needed. They stressed that large populations prompt the need for irrigation as opposed to irrigation attracting large populations. They were voices of caution pitted against the exuberance of McColl. They identified three types of irrigation: irrigation proper; occasional flood irrigation, which occurred on a seasonal basis; and meadow irrigation, which required consistent, large amounts of water (Gordon and Black 1882, 2). They stressed that irrigation should be viewed as an artificial practice. The report looked at irrigation in other countries, concentrating on India, France, Italy, and Spain. They argued that only crops suited to the climatic conditions should be grown, and in the Murray region that meant growing crops where there was available water. Gordon’s belief in drainage was strongly stated: “Drainage is required wherever irrigation is practised; Without it the land will become sour, and it forms a Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 91 considerable item in the cost of preparing the land” (Gordon and Black 1882, 7). They advised that the prospects for implementing irrigation proper into the northern plains of Victoria would be very limited due to the low population. In attempting to estimate the yields that irrigation would provide, or the amount of water available for irrigation, data would need to be collected and observations made and carefully compared. The two men reported that in countries that had used irrigation for centuries there were natural sources of water:

This seems to be a condition precedent to the establishment of all extensive systems of irrigation, and it may well be doubted whether irrigation on any extended scale is feasible where this is not the natural condition of the water supply. (Gordon and Black 1882, 6)

They drew a comparison with the Po Valley in Italy, which had a similar climate and topography; however, the water supply in the Po Valley was markedly different, coming from the snow on the Alps (Gordon and Black 1882, 9). Gordon and Black acknowledged that permanent rivers like the Murray and Goulburn rivers may have some success in irrigation, but a lack of population would stymie attempts at large schemes. They thought that occasional irrigation along seasonal lines could be practised at the northern part of the county of Rodney in the northern plains, where it would have the best chance of success (Gordon and Black 1882, 9). The price of labour in other countries was also considered, including labour for both the construction of works and agriculture, which needed to be taken into account in any calculations. Irrigation works in long-settled countries were determined to be part of the landscape; they had existed for a long time, and their cost had long since been absorbed. Indeed, India’s entire irrigated area was the size of that part of the north-western plains of Victoria known as the “mallee scrub,” which strengthened their belief in a cautionary approach:

We believe that too sanguine views of its profitableness are often entertained from an under-estimate of the cost and an over-estimate of the results, arising from a want of information or due consideration of the conditions essential to success, and in the public interest we should be glad to see some of the questions we have touched upon thoroughly discussed. (Gordon and Black 1882, 111)

After this report was tabled, the bitterness of the debate between the evangelical irrigation crusaders and the conservatives intensified. Gordon constantly blocked McColl’s scheme for the North-Western Canal project, 92 Chapter Five leading McColl to disparage Gordon as a “departmental disability” (Martin 1955, 33). Gordon did not share McColl’s views on canals. Neither did the two men agree on drainage; McColl scoffed at Gordon’s strong insistence on its significance to irrigation. However, despite Gordon’s concerns, the ideas behind Western American irrigation found fertile ground in the minds of some Australians, particularly Deakin’s.

Deakin and Irrigation in Western America

Although McColl retired from politics in 1884, and died the following year, his influence continued. When Deakin led his small party to Western America in December 1884, he proceeded with McColl’s suggestion of a royal commission into water supply. Deakin wrote most of his famous work, the memorandum Irrigation in Western America, while in America and, as chair of the commission, presented it upon his return to Australia as part of the royal commission report. Examination of this memorandum reveals the familiar prose, tone, and claims that shaped irrigationist philosophy. Deakin commenced his memorandum by rationalising the need to travel overseas to seek information, which he stated was due to what he considered as the crude and primitive attempts at irrigation that had previously been conducted in Australia. He contended that irrigation was of interest to a third of America and that it would become central to America’s agricultural production. He estimated that the water supply over that year would service 2.5 million acres, more than in Italy and other European countries. He argued that the development of irrigation in Western America had gained pace over the previous fifteen years and had “been lifted out of its early rudeness and carelessness into something like science and skill” (Deakin 1885, 9). He estimated that 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometres) of canals had been laid with an investment capital amounting to millions in pounds sterling. Although Deakin’s report from his tour of Western America appears comprehensive in its examination of the landforms, soils, and climatic conditions, it was strongly underwritten with supposition, not scientific analysis. As in Australia, there had been no scientific examination of the suitability of the landform for irrigation. His argument relied heavily on the irrigationists’ belief that irrigation, as a means of controlling the seasons, would provide certainty and security. He reverted to the restorative, transformative imagery of the irrigationist rhetoric, describing the greening of brown lands and treeless expanses as “conquered by the march of settlement from thickly inhabited and closely cultivated districts” (Deakin 1885, 9). He described the sandy deserts surrounding these oasis- Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 93 like townships and marvelled at the greenery. He cleverly juxtaposed the emptiness of the land surrounding the broad-acre farmer—the scattered stock and barren landscape—with an irrigated landscape where “one beholds industry and intelligence transmuting barren surfaces into orchards and fields of waving grain” (Deakin 1885, 10). For Deakin, the logic of irrigation was underpinned by racial ideology. His reason for comparing Victoria to Western America rather than to other countries is evident in his statement that India’s population was an “imperfectably civilized population, whose habits and wants differ from those of our race” (Deakin 1885, 11). He argued that Italy, France, and Spain had more rainfall than did Australia, and they easily accessed markets for their produce. He claimed that the western states of America, particularly California, could be compared to Victoria in terms of climate, sparseness of rainfall and, most importantly, recent European occupation:

[California was] like Victoria—a new country, settled by the pick of the Anglo-Saxon race, attracted in the first instance by gold discoveries, and remaining after that excitement passed away to build up a new nation under the freest institutions and most favourable conditions of life. (Deakin 1885, 11)

Deakin contended that both California and Victoria had been settled for a similar period, their application of water—first to goldfields and then to agriculture—was the same, and their soils were comparable. He even maintained that the cost of labour was similar in the two states, completely ignoring the fact that Chinese and Mexican labourers were often employed in California at low rates of pay. He observed that markets in California, as in Victoria, were at a distance, but he neglected to appreciate the superior railway system in Western America. Deakin’s motivation for irrigation was primarily driven by social imperatives: he believed that the settlements created by irrigation would galvanise the best in human qualities. As J. M. Powell points out, Deakin revealed his view of the Californian experience when he said:

It [irrigation] appeals to a larger class than that usually drawn to agriculture. The physical labour required is not so severe, there is more scope for intelligence, and it offers remunerative employment from a small capital. (quoted in Powell 1989, 110)

In this belief, Deakin was at odds with Gordon whose primary objective was to build sustainable, financially viable operations. Although Gordon often referred to “good British values,” his motivations were more 94 Chapter Five practical. As Lake has established, Deakin had other interests during his Western American sojourn—indulging in a study of American manhood. An admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Deakin visited Emerson’s grave. Lake also relates passages from Deakin’s diary written during his journey, describing American men as having the “distinguishing feature [of] the brightness of eyes and quiet assurance which seem to say America” (Lake 2007, 33). Lake argues that Deakin’s American bent has been largely ignored by past historians who have concentrated on his British connections. She maintains that Deakin had three major American influences: “exemplars of republican manhood: the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher Josiah Royce and the president Theodore Roosevelt” (Lake 2007, 33). This absorption in American thinking precluded Deakin from heeding the very real arguments against inappropriate irrigation in Victoria. In 1885, Gordon addressed concerns he had with Deakin’s American report at a Victorian Engineers’ Association conference. He encapsulated his concern at the commencement of his talk: “Mr. Deakin has with great ability collected an immense number of facts ... The misfortune is not that Mr. Deakin made the report, but that Mr. Deakin is not an engineer” (Gordon 1885, 107). Gordon criticised Deakin’s apparent admonishment of his own people and his excessive admiration for Americans. Gordon questioned the need to copy other countries and suggested that using others’ experiences as a guide rather than as a blueprint would be more beneficial. He believed this to be the “one great blemish in Mr. Deakin’s valuable paper” (Gordon 1885, 108). One-by-one, Gordon contested the individual similarities that Deakin had discerned between Victoria and California. He numbered seven similarities nominated by Deakin but claimed that only three were relevant to irrigation: the produce, the labour price, and the topography of the landscape. Adopting the racial argument posited by Deakin in his report, Gordon strongly asserted that the Anglo- Saxons were the last to implement irrigation, that other races had developed irrigation schemes much earlier. California itself, he pointed out, owed much to the Mexicans who had earlier learnt from the Spanish (Gordon 1885, 109). But perhaps the strongest arguments put forward by Gordon lay in his analysis of the differences between California and Victoria, attacking Deakin’s over-optimistic concentration on the features the two states had in common. He argued that the shallow rivers of California required completely different engineering apparatus for irrigation from that required in Victoria (Gordon 1885, 109). Whereas water was only ever lifted a few feet (1 metre) in California, Gordon estimated that the Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 95

Goulburn River would need approximately forty feet (12 metres) to be traversed. Also, Australian rivers were prone to heavy floods, whereas Californian rivers were not. Significantly, Gordon identified that the snowfields kept Californian rivers flowing all year round, whereas only one river in the northern plains of Victoria flowed all year (Gordon 1885, 109). But, according to Gordon, the defining difference was that the “Murray is distinctly different from the American rivers described; it is, in fact, the main central drain of an immense area” (Gordon 1885, 109). He saw the role of the Murray River, in its environmental capacity, as a drainage system as well as a provider of water. This overarching environmental outlook was entirely lacking from Deakin’s judgement; instead, Deakin was firmly focused on the role of irrigation as a social engineer, along American lines. Gordon also argued that although rivers in both countries lost water to soakage, in California water was returned to the river system. This was not the case in Victoria, where large quantities of water were lost in this way. He believed that only three of Deakin’s similarities were relevant to irrigation, but argued that all of the dissimilarities he himself had pointed out were central to its success. Gordon thought that instead of focusing on similarities, the royal commission should have examined the differences upon its visit to America. Gordon was sounding a warning that Deakin had twisted the evidence to suit his thesis that Californian irrigation techniques should be emulated in Victoria:

[It is] inexplicable that Mr. Deakin should be led to the conclusion that the circumstances of States “do not appear to me more favourable to irrigation than those of Victoria”... to strain after a supposed similarity between Victoria and California ... and to look at these countries as the ... chief sources of useful information. (Gordon 1885, 111)

Gordon constantly criticised Deakin’s analysis for its exclusion of other countries’ older irrigation systems and for its bias towards California. As mentioned, a major point of contention between Gordon and Deakin was drainage. Gordon, who took issue with Deakin’s assessment that most of the American irrigators did not concern themselves with drainage, strongly advocated for drainage to go hand-in- hand with irrigation to ensure that sanitary conditions were maintained:

I think it is as criminal to encourage the saturation of the land with water without any provision for relieving it as it is to fill up the waste grounds of the towns with filthy rubbish, and then encourage the building of houses on them. (Gordon 1885, 121) 96 Chapter Five

In Gordon’s opinion, too much water was used in California, and the ground became waterlogged as a result. Had Deakin examined older irrigation systems in other countries, he would have realised the central role drainage played in the irrigation story. The resulting problems in Australia caused by salination continue to this day. To make his point, Gordon cited an article written by the journalist J. Dow who accompanied Deakin to America. Written on 4 July 1885 for The Age, Dow described a box with a movable division, which was used for measuring water in an irrigation scheme they had visited. Gordon believed this box was an almost exact replica of an ancient Moorish measure used in Spain, and he argued that it was further evidence of the need to review older settlements (Gordon 1885, 114). Gordon labelled the irrigation enthusiasts as “advocates of the heroic style of planning irrigation works” (Gordon 1885, 116) and was concerned that they would be inspired by Deakin’s report. Again, he prophetically warned against large-scale irrigation colonies being built under the mistaken belief that the greater the land mass developed the lower the cost per acre. Gordon believed that Deakin’s dismissal of any objections to irrigation was a serious misjudgement, as the objections were not to irrigation per se but to large, unsustainable schemes (Gordon 1885, 116). Indeed, this was the linchpin of Gordon’s argument. He even questioned the strong irrigationist contention that a river’s water was full of fertilising material, stating that “one cannot help thinking such water must be rather unwholesome to drink” (Gordon 1885, 122). He dismissed Deakin’s accusation that the Water Conservancy Board’s reports were fallacious in their premises, declaring that he chose to deliver his paper to the forum of engineering expertise where “I feel sure, my statements will receive fair and unbiased consideration, and where they will be subjected to professional criticism” (Gordon 1885, 123). Deakin responded to Gordon’s paper with a letter to be read to the convention by the secretary of the association. With a quizzical and amused tone, Deakin declared that there were no issues of contention between himself and Gordon and that he was at a loss to explain the “antagonistic tone” of Gordon’s report (Deakin letter 1885, 125). Deakin thought he may have been misinterpreted, but then launched into a defence of his concerns, denying he was adopting “a slavish copying of any foreign engineering practice” and was merely a “careful observer and impartial collater [sic] of facts ... If they clash with any theory I can only say so much the worse for the theory” (Deakin 1885a, 126). He signed off by satirically thanking Gordon for his complimentary tone. With his letter, Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 97

Deakin was being far too precious, which, when considering the forum, should have embraced a more considered air. Deakin was not an impartial observer, convinced as he had been by McColl’s lobbying prior to his journey to Western America. His overly long report and his similarly lengthy speech introducing his Bill to the House revealed his passion for, and personal commitment to, the development of irrigation. Gordon’s concerns deserved a more respectful response; the level of antagonism between the two men is evidence of the intense conflict between the evangelical irrigationists and the voices of caution. Also at this conference, a long speech was delivered by Captain Kelly, who described himself as the longest serving engineer in the Indian Irrigation Department, which he believed gave him a distinctive, disinterested perspective. He made two significant points: firstly, that irrigation was the most important question yet faced by settlers and, secondly, that the Californians themselves had been advised to look at India when establishing their own schemes. Kelly believed that India had the most superior irrigation works in the world (Kelly 1885, 129). He clearly took issue with Deakin’s assertion that he was an impartial observer, describing Deakin as a passionate advocate not only for irrigation but also for American irrigation. He was concerned that the American system would be transplanted to Australia based on “a short and hurried visit to America” (Kelly 1885, 131). Kelly questioned the validity of two reports produced in eleven years about American irrigation works, and expressed concern that the engineers involved were not irrigation engineers. Significantly, he declared that he did not believe that an American system of irrigation existed, as he had “failed to discover any trace of a distinct system in the reports of Mr. Deakin” (Kelly 1885, 132). He could see no reason to compare the soils, climates, and topographies of California and Victoria as, from his experience, no two irrigation schemes ever operated in the same way. Kelly’s analysis of Deakin’s and Berry’s American reports led him to believe that works in America were inferior to those of older countries such as India. He concluded that Gordon’s précis of the American reports was comprehensive and highly valuable. Given the weight of engineering evidence against Deakin’s pro- American irrigation stance, what led Deakin to be so confident that he was right? He had allowed his racist attitudes to mislead him, ignoring the older irrigation practices of India and parts of Europe. Although he went on to write studies of other older irrigation settlements, such as Egypt and India, he did so from a position of the racially superior observer seeking to justify his Californian bias. As Lake has established, Deakin was an eager student of the academic Charles Pearson who 98 Chapter Five formed a debating society in which Deakin was involved. Pearson was a strong advocate of maintaining the purity of the white race and keeping black and Asian races as subordinate (Lake 2007, 102). His ideas influenced many political players, including Deakin, and later influenced the thinking behind the Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901. As can be seen from the assertions of Gordon, Sankey, and Kelly, there was strong and reasoned opposition to Deakin’s irrigation push. Warnings were also raised in America, echoing the concern for population before irrigation, and the need to understand water as a finite resource. In 1873, an irrigation commission was formed to survey California and evaluate the San Joaquin and King River Canal proposal. Although three people headed this commission, George Davidson, in particular, was a major contributor to its findings. Davidson, who had a sound reputation as a scientist, was appointed an honorary professor of the University of California for his work and prolific publication record. He saw the immensity of the project proposed by the San Joaquin and King River Canal and Irrigation Company. Along with his colleagues, Davidson viewed the project from a scientific basis and did not recommend a government land grant to the company. The commission was concerned that the involvement of speculators driven by the imperative of profit would result in the works being poorly constructed. The commissioners advocated for the regulation of development, government supervision, and a professional hydrographical survey. There were more words of caution in the American engineering fraternity about irrigation. Davidson, considered the main author of the report, had strongly argued against large-scale irrigation settlements (Lee 1978, 511). He wrote: “Irrigation is but little understood in this country, either by our engineers, who must design, plan, layout and execute the works for that purpose or by the farmers who are to use the water when it is brought alongside their farms” (Davidson 1873, 80). In 1874, he travelled to the Orient, Egypt, and Europe, gathering irrigation data and writing about his investigations. In 1875, he reviewed irrigation works in India, Egypt, and Italy and published material about his research; although impressed by the Indian operations, he cautioned against such large-scale works in the comparatively sparsely populated arid regions of America (Lee 1978, 511). Also, William Hammond Hall who in 1878 was appointed California’s state engineer, a newly created position, said that ‘“irrigation must grow a gradual and a healthy growth. Great works do not make successful irrigation enterprises” (cited in Pisani 1984, 126).

Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 99

Conclusion

Despite all the advice and scientific evidence, large-scale irrigation won the day in Australia. Hall wrote to Deakin, criticising the future prime minister’s enthusiastic adoption of the Californian system:

I fear you have taken my recommendation for Californian state action, concerning construction of irrigation works, as a broader application than it is entitled to ... I fear also that you have placed too low an estimate on substantial work in irrigation—that is, you have accepted results in this country which are really temporary, as though they were final, and you are inclined to put too low an estimate on professional systemization of irrigation. You know much that has been regarded as successful in our state is now showing the elements of disaster. (Hall, 1885)

Ignoring Hall’s obvious alarm at Deakin’s proposals, Deakin forged ahead, apparently more confident in his own judgement than that of the distinguished engineer. This intellectual arrogance on the part of Deakin was to sow the seeds of widespread environmental damage. Deakin did not listen to those voices that did not support his vision of Australia as a country of irrigated acreages, similar to Western America. He maintained his ideal of the industrious yeomanry and the superior cultural societies they would create. Therefore, in 1886 when George Chaffey arrived in Australia from the successful irrigation colony of Ontario in California, Deakin, as minister of water supply, granted him 250,000 acres in north- western Victoria to develop an irrigation settlement. This was despite only a handful of people living in the area at the time of the grant, and despite the fact that Chaffey had developed only 3,000 acres in Ontario. Deakin ignored all of Gordon’s warnings about large-scale irrigation, the need for population before irrigation, and the essential nature of the Murray River as a drainage system. In the irrigationist fervour to proceed despite all reasonable criticisms, the voices of caution were drowned out and the wise counsel of Gordon and others overridden and finally ignored. The allure of the perfectly created orchard settlement was overwhelming, assisted by “Deakin and the irrigationists in press and Parliament [hailing] each new project as a victory for enlightened agriculture” (Powell 1989, 65). From Dods’s initial scheme in 1871, the irrigation mission had gained a meteoric velocity, championed by McColl, promoted by the press and, finally, legitimised by Deakin.

100 Chapter Five

Works Cited

Alexander, Joseph A. 1928. The Life of George Chaffey: A Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia, Melbourne: McMillan & Co. Bellanta, Melissa. 2008. “Engineering in the Kingdom of God: Irrigation, Science and the Social Christian Millennium, 1880–1914.” Journal of Religious Studies 32 (1): 1–15. Davidson, George, Barton S. Alexander, and Major George Mendell. 1873. Report of the Board of Commissioners on the Irrigation of the San Joaquin, Tulare, and Sacramento Valleys of the State of California, 1873. Referred to the Committee on the Public Lands and ordered to be printed March 24, 1874. Deakin, Alfred. 1885. Irrigation in Western America, so far as it has Relation to the Circumstances of Victoria: A Memorandum for the Members of the Royal Commission on Water Supply, Digital Collections – Manuscripts – item 10/355: Alfred Deakin, 1856–1919. —. 1885a. “Letter to the President of the Victorian Engineers Association.” Transactions and proceedings of the Victorian Engineers Association. Melbourne: Government Printer. Dods, Benjamin H. 1871. Grand North-Western Canal Company Prospectus. Melbourne: Walker, May & Co. —. 1880. “Letter to Grant.” In North-Western Canal Papers. Return to an Order of the Legislative Assembly, Dated 2 December 1880 (Mr. McColl). Ordered to be printed 29 March 1881. Gordon, George, and Andrew Black. 1882. Supply of Water to the Northern Plains: Irrigation, First Report. 22 September 1882. Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer. —. 1885. “American and Australian Irrigation.” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Engineers’ Association. Melbourne: Government Printer. Hall, Hammond, W. 1885. “Letter to Alfred Deakin 16 August.” Held at the University of California Library. Kelly, Capt. 1885. “Speech at Victorian Engineers’ Association Conference.” Transactions and Proceedings of the Victorian Engineers Association. Melbourne: Government Printer. Lake, Marilyn. 2007. “‘The Brightness of Eyes and Quiet Assurance that Seem to Say American’ Alfred Deakin’s Identification with Republican Manhood.” Australian Historical Studies 38 (129): 32–51. Lee, Lawrence. 1978. “100 Years of a Reclamation History.” Pacific Historical Review 47 (November): 507–64. Irrigation as Saviour: Transforming Arid Landscapes 101

Martin, Colin S. 1955. Irrigation and Closer Settlement in the Shepparton District, 1836–1906. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press North-Western Canal Papers. 1880. Return to an Order of the Legislative Assembly, dated 2 December 1880. Ordered to be printed 29 March 1881. Pisani, Donald J. 1984. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West 1850–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press. Powell, Joseph, M. 1989. Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria, 1834–1988. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Sankey, Richard H. 1880. “Report.” In North-Western Canal Papers. Return to an Order of the Legislative Assembly, Dated 2 December 1880 (Mr. McColl). Ordered to be printed 29 March 1881. Tyrrell, Ian. 1999. True Gardens of the Gods: Californian–Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. CHAPTER SIX

RE-ENACTING THE EXTREME: HISTORY, BODIES, AND MAWSON’S FEATS OF ENDURANCE

CATRIONA ELDER

In 2006, Australian adventurer Tim Jarvis went to the Antarctic with a television crew to re-enact a famous incident of Australian polar adventure. The historical event that Jarvis planned to revisit occurred during Sir Douglas Mawson’s 1911–1913 Antarctic expedition. Mawson led an expedition that landed at Cape Denison on Commonwealth Bay in early 1912. His intention was to explore as much as he could of that part of the Antarctic in order to discover the resources, if any, that existed there, with the idea of claiming the land for empire. Seven different parties carried out Mawson’s planned exploration. Mawson’s team, which went east, consisted of Xavier Mertz, Belgrave Ninnis, and Mawson himself. On the return leg of the team’s trek, disaster struck: Ninnis, his team of dogs, and the sledge with most of the team’s provisions fell into a crevasse. Though Mawson and Mertz spent hours at the lip of the crevasse, Ninnis could not be found. Mawson and Mertz now had to cover the hundreds of kilometres back to base camp with minimal rations and dog power. As many history buffs and Antarctic adventurers know, Mertz became quite ill on the return journey, and although Mawson did his best to nurse him, Mertz died en route, and Mawson had to continue unaccompanied. He made it back to camp after many more days alone— only to be faced with a new set of challenges. It was Mawson’s journey from the site of Ninnis’s death back to camp that the modern adventurer Tim Jarvis and fellow ice-man John Stoukalo set out to re-enact. Drawing on the re-enactment documentary in which Jarvis starred, Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica (2008), this chapter explores the type of history that is produced in the series Mawson where History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 103 traditional documentary techniques of archival footage and expert commentary are used, alongside historical dramatisation and a physical re- enactment of Mawson’s journey, and presented in a reality-television format. Further, the chapter analyses how bodies—in particular men’s bodies—are figured in this program and what work they do in producing history. The argument is that the re-enactment of the trek helps produce a type of national history of the Antarctic past: a history that centralises men’s activities as the site of the national and imperial past. What is novel and interesting about this history is that it brings together a broad- sweeping national history with an intimate micro history that sometimes challenges the standard “muscular” histories of imperial adventure. The television program is organised around the contrast of the open space of the ice continent and the domestic space of the men’s tent, between the men’s aim of marking, claiming, and mapping this—the large continent— as part of a national endeavour, and the everyday struggle to care for their bodies and for each other, and to stay alive. The intimate narrative that shows the process of the men’s bodies shrinking, disappearing, and decaying is in stark contrast to a reality-television style narrative of being set a challenge and achieving it. This chapter explores the type of history these contrasting narratives produce.

Antarctica: A Short History

Tom Griffiths has suggested that today “we inhabit the Antarctic moment” (Griffiths 2008, 6). As was demonstrated in earlier centuries with the scramble for Africa, the Americas, and Asia, continents can move quickly from the edge of the (Western) imagination to prominence: “The last century of world history has seen Antarctica move from the geographical periphery of our consciousness to the centre of our scientific and intellectual concerns (Griffiths 2008, 6). The reasons for this transformation were brought about by changes in technology that have made the southern continent more accessible and visible (Dibbern 2010; Headland 1989). The coming into being was also effected by the transfer of imperial discourses of discovery and conquest from Africa, Asia, and the Northern Polar region to the south (Dodds 2006). The emergence of new problems and understandings of the human–nature interface and ecology also raised the profile of Antarctica (Strange and Bashford 2008). In response to the past one hundred years of increased interest in Antarctica, a series of well-planned and effective legal and multilateral treaties has been established. This has meant that the unmapped nature of Antarctica has been politically, if not literally, overturned. The initial late- 104 Chapter Six nineteenth-century scramble that saw the continent divided into a series of national, and sometimes contested, territories was mitigated through a series of treaties and conventions that reframed Antarctica as a “zone of peace … and a place for scientific investigation and international collaboration” (Dodds and Hemmings 2010). The implications of this reframing were quite important for Australia, which claims sovereignty over 42 percent of the continent. For the past few decades, Australian governments have had to balance the state’s ongoing claim to territory alongside an evolving set of protocols that have resulted in more than forty countries claiming a stake in Antarctica (Dodds and Hemmings 2010). Antarctica is like no other place on earth. One of the most familiar representations is as a desolate, harsh, and empty place. There is no indigenous population in Antarctica, yet it is not un-peopled. At any time, thousands of people are on the ice. In 1957–58, the International Geophysical Year, 30,000 people went to Antarctica, and in the twenty- first century 10,000 or more tourists visit every year (Griffiths 2008, 7). However, Antarctica has not been colonised or settled in the way other continents have; the extreme weather and unique ecology of the place make this impossible. Antarctica lacks permanent residents; a fact that makes it a distinctive place, at the most basic and yet profound level. Added to this already unusual situation is the international endeavour to populate and use Antarctica in a non-national form—an endeavour that seeks to confound efforts to colonise the place. So, although Antarctica was subject to imperial projects, where “explorers trudge[d] even further into continental interiors, leaving behind them flags and of possession it has not moved on to be colonized or settled—the practice of spatial possession by occupation” (Collis 2009, 515). This imperial moment is part of the Australian Antarctic mythology. The legends of Douglas Mawson, Frank Hurley, Griffith Taylor, and Tannatt Edgeworth David have been the subject of books, films, and documentaries. Imperial conquest of the south continent is also a part of the national narratives of many other nations: Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton in Britain, Roald Armundsen in Norway, and Richard Byrd in the United States. As the representations of the combined exploits of these men suggest—reaching the pole, surviving disaster, flying over the continent, recording the environment—these were imperial pursuits. The colonial or settlement moment has not unfolded in Antarctica as it has so often in other spaces. As noted earlier, the Australian state lays claim to a significant part of this harsh continent as sovereign Australian land. Claims to sovereignty have historically rested on occupation and productive use of land. For example, this was the basis of the British claim to the continent of Australia History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 105

(Reynolds 1987). However, the unique environment of Antarctica has undermined this claim. People cannot live for extended periods in the Antarctic without serious health risks, and, at the moment, humans cannot make the space economically or agriculturally productive. The nature of this continent—as uninhabitable, unpossessed, and dominated by men—means that Antarctica is often seen as an ambivalent space, one that reinforces the ability to enact a type of colonial masculinity and yet potentially strips away humanness through its inhuman landscape. A common image of Antarctica is as outside “civilised” experience. The ice continent has often been represented as a place that would send a person mad. Living there is sometimes described with the same terminology as that used to portray living outside the Western world. Adventurers who stayed too long were referred to as “going native,” and the space was described as “no white man’s land” (Hains 1997, 157). As with the Australian desert and the outback, Antarctica is represented as unknown, unknowable, and a dangerous place where a person’s identity is easily lost. Paradoxically, Antarctica is also represented as a space where one can engage with new or under-explored aspects of one’s identity. It is this history that underpins the recent television re-enactment of imperial adventure on the ice.

Making History

This section considers the question of what type of history is produced in the program Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica (2008). More and more frequently, history is encountered through visual media. Increasingly larger quantities of this visual product are no longer in the form of straight documentary but in other forms, such as docudrama and re-enactment (Ashuri 2005; Lipkin 2011). In producing television history, Mawson draws on four distinct modes, or genres. The first is traditional television documentary. Mawson has sections that draw on this genre; it uses talking heads (experts on Antarctica and its history), excerpts from historical diaries, photographs, and film footage—all standard documentary techniques. These traditional documentary segments bookend the program. The second mode is historical dramatisation, and it is quite close to the documentary form. Indeed, historical dramatisation is becoming a common technique in contemporary television documentary (Agnew 2007). In these segments in Mawson, actors play the characters of Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz, acting out key scenes from the trek. These two actors do not speak in the program, but another actor (David Ritchie) provides a voice- over, reading pertinent extracts from the Mawson diary as an accompaniment 106 Chapter Six to each scene. The dramatisations present some of the more visceral moments in the program. These include scenes showing the decay of the men’s bodies, Mertz’s final illness, and Mawson’s care for him. Interestingly, it is these segments that produce the intimate historical narrative. Taking place mostly within the men’s tent, they create a sense of the domestic. Although there is a sense of medical horror as the men begin to die, there is also a feeling of familial care imbuing these scenes. The third mode, or genre, is that of reality television. Reality television is a maligned form sometimes understood as part of “post documentary” media culture (Corner 2000). Reality-television programs are often classified as “docu-soap” or “real-life soap” because their focus is the personal, the emotional, the everyday. Some of these soap techniques that shape reality television are used in Mawson. The fly-on-the-wall perspective used in the dramatisation scenes, where the viewer has the sense of seeing the private world of the two men in their tent, draws on a reality-television technique. The voice-over quoting the words of Mawson himself creates a narrative of the everyday life of the explorers, knitting the viewer into the minutiae of their lives in the enclosed world of the tent. As with the set-up in Big Brother (Endemol Productions) and Survivor (Mark Burnett/CBS), the participants in Mawson are isolated and forced to depend on each other. The montage of footage, carefully pieced together from the endless hours of film of the men caught in blizzards, sitting in the tent, and pulling the sledge, creates the “soap” narrative: What will happen next? Mawson draws on the templates used in a range of reality-television programs. Viewers who are familiar with series such as Survivor, Biggest Loser (Crackerjack Productions), and the Wall to Wall House productions (for example, Outback House) will find aspects of the format of Mawson familiar. For example, as the two re-enactors undertake their journey, pulling a sledge each, and eating limited calories, they begin to lose weight. As with the “weigh in” that features as a point of excitement on weight-loss programs such as Biggest Loser, the changing body size of the two men is carefully monitored by a medical team. However, much of the narrative in the program focuses on the minutiae of the men’s struggle to survive in an unfamiliar “past” and on the negotiation of everyday life— two men in a tent. Just as boredom and tetchiness with other housemates emerge as both problems and viewing highlights in Big Brother style shows, so do they in Mawson. Another reality-television technique used in Mawson is the setting of challenges or tasks for the participants to overcome or complete. In reality television, participants are often “subject to new and ever more challenging situations so that their surprise, incompetence and sense of dislocation History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 107

[can] be registered by the viewer” (Agnew 2007, 303). The type of task differs depending on the program. The Amazing Race (Earthview Inc.) has physical challenges, whereas The Farmer Wants a Wife (Fremantle Media) has romantic games, but the logic is always the same. In historical reality television, part of the interest for the viewer is watching the participants cope with their new lives in their new historical epoch. For example, even a task as simple as dressing becomes a challenge as participants try to master the intricacies of a pre-zipper, multilayered, clothing regime. In Mawson, the physical– historical challenge is to walk from Point A to Point B in the Antarctic on a very restricted diet with limited resources and technology. However, an important aspect of this challenge is its connection to Australian national history. Getting from place to place in The Amazing Race (Doganieri and van Munster) is about responding to random challenges from television producers. In Mawson, the trip and its challenges replicate a great moment in the Australian past. The producers state that part of the impetus for making Mawson was to investigate whether Mawson “ate” Mertz to survive. Implicit in this is a challenge to see what type of man or, more specifically, what type of Australian man Antarctica made, and to see what types of men it continues to make. In this sense, it is a program about being Australian. The fourth mode that is used in producing the history in Mawson is that of re-enactment. Here, two adventurers replicate Mawson and Mertz’s trek back to camp. Adventurer Tim Jarvis re-enacts the life of Mawson, and John Stoukalo plays the role of Mertz. There have been a number of re-enactments of Antarctic explorations, and they continue to be produced. For example, in 2001 the IMAX film Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure (Dir. George Butler) was released. It was based on archival footage and re- enactments of the ice-bound boat and team. The International Scott Centenary Expedition from Britain will re-enact Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s fateful expedition in 2012. Vanessa Agnew (2009, 297) argues that re-enactment allows re-enactors and viewers to weigh the evidence and judge the past. The blurb on the DVD cover for Mawson notes, “how he [Mawson] lived when others died has tantalised scientists, historians and explorers,” and quotes Jarvis as promising that his replication will demonstrate whether it was possible to travel the distance that Mawson did in 1912 on the rations he had. So, part of the logic of the Mawson re- enactment is to allow us, the viewers, to discover the truth of Australian history. 108 Chapter Six

Doing History Again

Agnew (2009, 297) has also argued that re-enactment brings history from somewhere temporally distant and spatially exotic into “the re-enactor’s back yard.” It takes the past and makes it present for the re-enactor. The re-enactor begins to feel what the past was like. Similarly, in engaging with Mawson, the viewer has to have access to these feelings. There needs to be some “sympathetic identification” with the participants, not just a detached interest in their travails (Agnew 2007, 305). So, viewers must be able to believe the re-enactors are facing and solving the same dilemmas as did the historical characters—that the re-enactors inhabit the past. Farley (2005, 240), writing about the re-enactment events that took place around the expeditions of Ernest Shackleton, noted that the word “Shackleton,” although naming a real historic person, also describes a subject position that others may occupy. One way to produce this empathy and to suggest that the past is still available is by making claim to truth and authenticity. In Mawson it is made clear to the viewer that in undertaking the re-enactment, the clothing, equipment, and food (quota and type) of the original explorers are all meticulously copied. For example, the producers source the Burberry outerwear that the explorers wore in 1912, and Stoukalo completes his part of the journey without waterproof trousers, as did Mertz. The tents, sleeping bags, and sledge are replicas of the original equipment. The authenticity of the material culture creates a sense of being as close to the past as possible. Interestingly, where the authenticity of the re-enactment ends—the audience is told that this is where the “line is drawn”—is the eating of dog flesh. Whereas Mertz and Mawson ate the remains of their dogs as the animals died, the re-enactors do not kill any animals en route, and the meat they eat is kangaroo jerky, rather than the meat of dogs. This decision marks a break with the past and reflects a tension in the program between the different modes: When should the program be an accurate documentary experiment that brings us into the other world of the past, and when should it be a popular television show that will not offend its audience? Because this is television, the past must be engaging. So, as is usual in reality television, in the Mawson program “[t]esting incidents” are used to give the show “dramatic shape” (Agnew 2007, 303). This dramatic shape is usually a narrative “arc” where the participants are made to feel estranged from the familiar present and deprived of all the usual resources they would use to cope. Then, the precipitation of a crisis occurs, followed by a resolution (or expulsion from the group), and, finally, reintegration History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 109 into the present to complete the arc (Agnew 2007, 303–4). In Mawson the estrangement begins when the men are dressed in their inadequate early- twentieth-century clothes and left on the ice with the sledges and dogs. The initial crisis is the food shortage, and then a series of scripted and unscripted incidents unfold to test the adventurers. Although the idea of re-enactment is to enter the past, the restaging of events can never be in the past; therefore, often the re-enactment will unfold differently and have a different outcome. An example of this is demonstrated in Mawson when Jarvis re-enacts Mawson’s fall into a crevasse in the final stages of his journey. Mawson managed to pull himself out of the hole where he hung on the end of his rope but, in the re- enactment, Jarvis does not. He is too weak and has to be helped out by the crew. Historians Nicholas Thomas and Mark Adams (cited in Agnew 2004) in a radical understanding of historical enactment, suggest that what happens here is that re-enactors and viewers engage with “multiple potentialities”; that is, viewers realise that something else could have happened. They suggest this might have the effect of destabilising dominant historical interpretations. A re-enactment can suggest other outcomes were, or are, possible. Anja Schwarz (2007, 435) argues that “the again-ness of performance’ offers new means of thinking about the relevance of historical events for the present.” If the past could have been different, then the present can be as well. What happens in Mawson is the development of a tension between the documenting of history and the re-enactment of history. In the re- enactment, other possibilities appear. A key theme in the program is the representation of the abject state of Mawson and Mertz’s bodies. For example, halfway through the journey John Stoukalo’s participation comes to an end. He is re-enacting the role of Xavier Mertz and it is at this point that his character dies. In the docu-dramatisation, the physical and mental deterioration of Mertz is represented quite explicitly. The audience is given a description, read from Mawson’s diary, of his final days and final hours. There is also a moving scene in the dramatisation where Mertz is buried by Mawson. This contrasts strikingly with the re-enactment footage of Stoukalo who is happy and relieved to have completed his part of the journey. He appears fit and healthy and is shown throwing down the harness that has connected him and Jarvis to the “wooden sarcophagus” they have dragged for days, and then posing, arms raised. His rude good health contrasts with the black-and-white dramatisation of the poisoned and delirious Mertz who is presumed to have died from toxic levels of vitamin A, released from the dog’s livers he had eaten. The re-enacting of the past through this physical act of traversing the Antarctic rewrites 110 Chapter Six

Australian history as one of triumphant masculine bodies, rather than as an abject history. The viewer has two versions of history: the first with two dying men and the second with two thin but healthy men. Even though the 1912 Mawson expedition was one of great tragedy, it is reproduced in a way that overlays this tragedy with the Survivor or Biggest Loser pleasure in triumph over adversity.

Re-doing Imperial Adventure

This section explores the effect of the re-enactment in reproducing a triumphant nationalist story about Australian men in the ice continent. In one sense, the program is part of a suite of representations, which have been produced since Australians first reached the south continent and which seek to reclaim the unpossessed Antarctic for Australia (AAE 1913; Hurley 1925; Parer 1983). This particular twenty-first-century narrative creates something slightly different. It re-envisions a story of imperial adventure and produces a type of national historical memory of the past. Christy Collis (1999, 22) argues that since it is nearly impossible for Australia to assert a claim to Antarctica physically or spatially, it needs to do so textually. That is, Australia’s claim to 42 percent of the southern continent is expressed through the reproduction and circulation of images and stories about Australian occupation of the Antarctic. This is a popular strategy used to reinforce a sense of spatial ownership by various claimants. Most claimant nations have artistic and cultural, as well as scientific, programs in Antarctica (Dean et al. 2008). Because the Antarctic cannot be fully populated, these textual assertions are even more important. There is a long history of the textual possession of Antarctica in Australian cultural production. The photographic and cinematic images of Frank Hurley are perhaps the most well-known set of scientific–artistic products. However, there is also a range of historical films and television series that dramatise various Australian Antarctic adventures. Popular fictional and autobiographical literature about visiting and wintering in Antarctica, particularly recently (Burns 2001; Chester, 1991; Gemmell 1997; Hall 1989), and exhibitions of art and historical memorabilia are all examples of this textual claim (DSEWPC 2007; Mawson’s Huts Foundation 2008; Roberts 2006; SAMM 2009). However, Australia cannot legitimately claim Antarctica simply by circulating pictures of Australians in Antarctica in the summer of 1930, or based on the existence of a well-maintained historical hut, or by publishing prize-winning books. The Australianness of the place needs to be asserted in other ways. These other ways include legal means and a real, physical History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 111 presence (Collis 2004, 4). The federal government funds scientific expeditions to Antarctica to document and map the life of this ice land and its geographical, biological, and geological intricacies. The knowledge gleaned from such expeditions and the evidence of time spent on the continent is then used by the government to help establish a legal case about Australia’s right to possession, based on the idea of original terra nullius and contemporary Australian exploration and interest. As a DVD, Mawson works as part of the general textual assertion of possession, drawing links between the past, present, and future of Australia in the Antarctica, but it also draws on a quasi-scientific (the experiment) discourse about survival and physical connection to the space. These assertions of belonging and of a physical presence are made more powerful by their links with national history. It is not that brave men individually wander and wonder about Antarctica; it is that men are doing the nation’s business. In this way, Mawson also contributes a small chapter to Australian national history. As a mixed-genre television program, Mawson works effectively to assert a postcolonial Australian ownership of the Antarctic. In its documentary mode, it presents the facts of the historical colonial claim to land undertaken by Mawson and his fellow expeditioners to re-present history. As in traditional documentaries, Mawson makes use of historical documents and experts to support the points made. There are also the voice-overs of Mawson’s diary, and historical photographs. Sometimes these archives work as illustration, at other times as evidence. The dramatisation and the re-enactment link the original land claims from the past with the right in the present to sovereignty. For example, at one point, academic historian Tom Griffiths explains the role of the 1912 land claims in Australian imperial–colonial land claims. The dramatisation reinforces Griffith’s point through a sepia-toned scene where an actor playing Mawson plants the Australian flag. The claim is given its third production in re-enactment: Tim Jarvis explains that he has flown the Australian flag at times throughout the expedition. In other scenes, the narrator reads Mawson’s diaries while images of Jarvis’s and Stoukalo’s bodies are filmed recrossing an “empty” space, reasserting the Australian claims to occupation. The narrative and the physical presence produce a “visionary narrative map” (Glasberg 2003, 254). The viewer is given an eagle’s eye- view of the physical space being crossed by Mawson and his sledge as Mawson narrates a story of the place he is claiming. The contemporary viewer is introduced to the geological formations—glaciers and sounds— that are brought into being by the simulacrum of Mawson’s and Jarvis’s 112 Chapter Six diaries of the trek. Overall, this creates a multilayered sense of ownership of the space. The re-enactment draws on the trope of the extreme challenge that is popular in some reality television, where the episode is framed by the need to achieve the challenge set by the program’s producers. By comparison, the docu-dramatisation’s purport to represent an historical truth is limited by the archive. Yet, these two tropes work together. The re-enactment works at the level of the modern, extreme, adventure challenge: where one sets oneself a personal goal and then achieves it (e.g. Survivor). The Antarctica exists in everyday discourse as a remote and inhospitable land. Therefore, it is a good place in which to try and “prove oneself.” By way of contrast, the docu-dramatisation works at the level of the mythological transformation of Mawson from “explorer” to “hero” (Farley 2005, 235). The re-narration of Mawson’s diary, framed as it is by a Survivor–Great Race challenge, enfolds Mawson into the pantheon of men and women who lose weight, build a bark hut, find the correct place on the map, and survive days and days alone in the snow. The Antarctic has long been seen as a place where imperial adventurers can prove their mettle and conquer new lands for their sovereign. In Mawson, the squalid messiness of the imperial desire for mastery is viewed as a sepia-toned, historical docudrama, over-written by a modern reality-television moment of triumph.

Re-enacting Men’s Bodies

Re-enactment is a “body based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience” (Agnew 2004, 330). It “is less concerned with events, processes or structures than with the individual’s physical and psychological experience (Agnew 2007, 301). Schwarz, again drawing on Taylor, suggests the efficacy of re-enactment “depends not so much on historical accuracy as on their ability to provoke recognition of the performed behavior as embodying “‘past-ness’” (Schwarz 2007, 435–6). Re-enactment television produces a milieu that mixes accuracy and affect. Viewers and participants want to feel as if they are in the past. These feelings of past-ness are produced through a sense of the body being in another space. This space creates the feeling of being in the past through the accurate restaging of the look of the past (food, clothes, technology, manners). Re-enactment can also favour a type of “visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment” (Cook 2004, 490). Drawing on Tivers, Stephen Hunt suggests that “living history reflects postmodern times conducive to a History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 113 performative culture where learning through experience is given more significance than learning through cognition (Hunt 2008, 463). Rebecca Farley notes that many scholars have emphasised the relationship between narrative, performance, and the material in re-enactment and how these combine to “provide sensory and visual stimuli to trigger imaginative engagement with the past” (Farley 2005, 241). Drawing on Geertz and Huizinga, Farley also notes that re-enactment as play enables a culture to spell out its values in what Geertz calls a “collective text” (Geertz 1972 cited in Farley 2005, 241). There is a contradiction at the heart of the different representations of the two historical figures of Mertz and Mawson. The dramatisation of the dying Mertz and the struggling Mawson produces a narrative of fragile intensity—a set of images at odds with the at times high-spirited re- enactment. The issue Jarvis hints at is about something more than cannibalism; it is about men’s bodies in extremis. Men’s bodies in this place are triumphant and transcendent, as well as decaying and vulnerable.

Extreme Adventure and Bodies

One way of understanding the representation of the men’s bodies in this re-enactment is in terms of reality television and extreme sports. Mawson brings together the logic of extreme sports and/or challenges and history. David Le Breton writes of extreme sports:

There is no struggle against a third party, only a commitment to reinforcing personal will-power and overcoming suffering by going right to the limit of a personally imposed demand. The physical limit has come to replace the moral limit that present day society no longer provides. (Le Breton 2000, 1)

Carla Willig (2008, 694) has summarised the feelings of those involved in extreme sports in terms of “test[ing] one’s limits” … it allows one to stretch oneself, to lift oneself to another level. As such, it forms part of a wider aspirational project, which is concerned with challenging and ultimately extending, one’s personal limitations.” One representation of Antarctica is as the ultimate adventure, the last adventure. Increasingly, the south continent is a place to which individuals travel outside the confines of the scientific and educational institutions that shaped the experiences of earlier visitors. The Antarctic now has the added dimension of being an adventure tourism destination. The historical figure of Mawson provides a script for an extreme-adventure experience (Farley 2005). Near the end of Mawson, Tim Jarvis speaks to camera, and notes: 114 Chapter Six

It may sound a bit trite but I really wanted to make it for Mawson. I didn’t want to think that he at the end of all this needed to have cannibalised anybody to have made it. I like to think that he just, he drew on these great resolves of inner strength that he had and did it with just what he had. Just as the story went.

Here, Jarvis enunciates the affective dimension familiar in re-enactment history: a desire for the past to be what you need it to be, for Mawson to have been “good.” But also, through his replaying of Mawson’s endurance, through pushing his body to the limit, Jarvis experiences the pleasure not only of recuperating Mawson’s reputation but also of finding out what his own body is capable of in extremis. Rafael Narvaez has argued (via Mauss and Halbwachs) that “the past can be kept in mind by habitual memory sedimented in the body” (Connerton 1989 cited in Narvaez 2006, 62). Narvaez argues that “bodies are mnemonic media for the social … vivifying [animating] the past through ritual and habit-oriented practices, so that the past can be organically ‘naturally’ tied to the present” (Narvaez 2006, 62). He goes on to write: “Twisting now Anderson’s famous phrase, I argue that communities are not only imagined, but can be also experienced and enacted through the body” (2006, 66). Jarvis’s body performs the role of promoting a cultural (national) memory about the values that are seen to underpin Australian Antarctic exploration (Barwell 2007, 347). However, the survival of Jarvis’s and Stoukalo’s bodies and their ability to endure also addresses more contemporary concerns about the pleasure in “extending” one’s limits. Haunting these rudely healthy bodies is the sepia-toned, seeping male body that reminds the viewer of the limits of masculine endurance and colonial adventure.

Conclusion

Jarvis and Stoukalo refer to the re-enactment as an experiment to discover if Mawson survived the lonely journey back to base camp in 1912 by cannibalising Mertz’s body. In testing this hypothesis, Mawson draws on the globalised reality-television format of the spectacle of a challenge, or a race, where conquering the Antarctic becomes like any other (post)modern adventure. The multi-genre nature of the program means that this extreme- adventure narrative of individual quests for personal bodily mastery interlaces with a nationalist project that seeks to recuperate Australian masculinity as non-feral. Mawson produces a specific history of imperial adventure of which the colonisation of Australia was one part and in which the exploration of the Antarctic continues. However, the vision presented History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 115 in the television program of abject male bodies also gestures to a contemporary rethinking, both of Antarctica and of men’s bodies as fragile and in need of care. Yet, Agnew suggests that although we often imagine re-enactment as a process of engaging with the past in order to promote cultural understanding in the present, this is not always what happens. She suggests that the result is that re-enactment works “more like an act of mastery, not one of confrontation with the past” (2007, 302). So, at a time when Australian national engagement with Antarctica is under challenge from other nations, the need to reassert a mastery over the place becomes more important, and yet this reassertion, as demonstrated by Mawson, can never be straightforward. It is inflected with aspects of the colonial past and with new visions of land, longing, and masculinity.

Works Cited

AAE. 1913. (Australian Antarctic Expedition/Frank Hurley). Home of the Blizzard. Frank Hurley Productions. Agnew, Vanessa. 2004. “Introduction: What is Re-enactment?” Criticism 46 (3): 327–39. —. 2007, “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 299–312. —. 2009. “Epilogue.” In Settler and Creole Re-enactment, edited by Vanessa Agnew and Jonathan Lamb with Daniel Spoth, 294–330. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ashuri, Tamar. 2005. “The Nation Remembers: National Identity and Shared Memory in Television Documentaries.” Nations and Nationalism 11 (3): 423–42. Barwell, Claire. 2007. “Frozen Memories: Unthawing Scott of the Antarctic in Cultural Memory.” Visual Communication 6 (3): 345–57. Burns, Robin. 2001. Just tell them I survived: Women in Antarctica. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Chester, Jonathan. 1991. Antarctica: Beauty in the Extreme. Melbourne: The Five Mile Press. Collis, Christy. 1999. “Mawson’s Hut: Emptying Post-Colonial Antarctica.” Journal of Australian Studies 23 (63): 22–9. —. 2009. “The Australian Antarctic Territory: A Man’s World?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 34 (3): 514–19. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 116 Chapter Six

Cook, Alexander. 2004. “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History. Criticism 46 (3): 487– 96. Corner, John. 2000. “What Can We Say About Documentary?” Media, Culture and Society 22 (5): 681–8. Dean, Katrina, Simon Naylor, Simone Turchetti and Martin Siegert. 2008. “Data in Antarctic Science and Politics.” Social Studies of Science 38 (4): 571–604. Dibbern, J. Stephen. 2010. “Fur seals, Whales and Tourists: A Commercial History of Deception Island Antarctica.” Polar Record 46 (238): 210– 21. Dodds, Klaus. 2006. “Post-colonial Antarctica: An Emerging Engagement.” Polar Record 42 (220): 59–70. Dodds, Klaus, and Alan D. Hemmings. 2009. “Frontier Vigilantism? Australia and Contemporary Representations of Australian Antarctic Territory.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 55 (4): 513–28. DSEWPC 2007. 2007. Antarctica—A Place in the Wilderness. Photographic exhibition. Canberra: Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Australian Antarctic Division. Farley, Rebecca. 2005. “‘By Endurance We Conquer’ Ernest Shackleton and Performances of White Male Hegemony.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2): 231–54. Gemmell, Nikki. 1997. Shiver: A Novel. Sydney: Vintage. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101 (1): 1–37. Glasberg, Elena. 2003. “The Intimate Sphere: National Strategies of Mapping and Embodiment.” Genre 36 (3&4): 251–70. Griffiths, Tom. 2008. “The Cultural Challenge of Antarctica: The 2007 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture.” The La Trobe Journal 82 (spring): 5–18. —. 2007. Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. Sydney: UNSW Press. Hains, Brigid. 1997. “Mawson of the Antarctic, Flynn of the Inland: Progressive Heroes on Australia’s Ecological Frontiers.” In Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, edited by Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, 154–66. Melbourne University Press. Hall, Lincoln. 1989. The Loneliest Mountain: The Dramatic Story of the First Expedition to Climb Mt Minto, Antarctica. Sydney: Simon & Schuster. History, Bodies, and Mawson’s Feats of Endurance 117

Headland, Robert. K. 1989. Chronological List of Antarctic Expeditions and Related Historical Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Stephen J. 2008. “But We’re Men Aren’t We! Living History as a Site of Masculine Identity Construction.” Men and Masculinities 10 (4): 460–83. Hurley, Frank. 1925. Argonauts of the South. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Le Breton, David. 2000. “Playing Symbolically with Death in Extreme Sports.” Body and Society 6 (1): 1–11. Lipkin, Steven N. 2011. Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films based on True Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica. 2008. Documentary history film, produced by Alex West and Richard Dennison. Sydney: Screen Australia/ABC. Mawson’s Huts Foundation. 2008. Mawson’s Huts: The Birthplace of Australia’s Antarctic Heritage. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Narvaez, Rafael F. 2006. “Embodiment, Collective Memory and Time.” Body and Society 12 (3): 51–73. Parer, Douglas. 1983. Douglas Mawson: The Survivor. Australian Broadcasting Commission. Sydney. Reynolds, Henry. 1987. The Law of the Land. Melbourne: Penguin. Roberts, Lisa. 2006. Just Ice? Antarctica is Melting. Exhibition of paintings by Lisa Roberts. Newtown NSW: Reverse Garbage. November. Schwarz, Anja. 2007. “‘Not this year!’ Reenacting Contested Pasts Aboard the Ship.” Rethinking History 11 (3): 427-46. SAMM (South Australian Maritime Museum). 2009. Quest for the South Magnetic Pole. Travelling exhibition. Adelaide SA: South Australian Museum and South Australian Maritime Museum. Strange, Carolyn and Alison Bashford. 2008. Griffith Taylor: Visionary, Environmentalist, Explorer. Canberra: National Library of Australia. Willig, Carla. 2008. “A Phenomenonlogical Investigation of the Experience of Taking Part in ‘Extreme Sports’.” Journal of Health Psychology 13 (5): 690–702. CHAPTER SEVEN

“YOU CALL THAT A KNIFE?” THE CROCODILE AS A SYMBOL OF AUSTRALIA

LINDA THOMPSON

Much to the chagrin of many Australian travellers, Mick “Crocodile” Dundee and “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin are understood internationally as undeniably “Australian.” Dundee even received the ultimate cultural- stereotype tick of approval: appearing in a Simpsons episode set in Australia. Turning up as an embittered drinker in a pub, Dundee challenges Bart Simpson’s pocketknife with a spoon: “You call that a knife? This is a knife!” Throughout the world, the crocodile is strongly associated with Australia’s image and Australians’ self-image. Despite the frequency of narratives about crocodiles and the consistency of responses to crocodile attacks, the crocodile was not considered symbolic of Australia until 1986—the year Dundee brought them to notice. Crocodiles were evidently “popular” before 1986, but they did not represent something unique about Australia: the crocodile was simply a commercially hunted product, a hazardous predator and, most of all, the subject of sensationally gruesome stories. Australians did not use the crocodile to reflect their own particular idea of nationhood but rather regarded the crocodile as simply another dangerous animal—albeit an incredibly interesting one. Although not a symbol of Australia before Crocodile Dundee (1986), the crocodile was not a neutral signifier. Rather, despite being found only in the Far North, the crocodile received significant and sensational (although sporadic) media attention across Australia—attention that created associations of danger, mystery, and abnormality. The crocodile was a distantly located and peculiar reptile, which entered the national consciousness only haphazardly and occasionally. This chapter explores the crocodile as a symbol of Australia, both at home and abroad, in relation to the watershed that was Crocodile Dundee. “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 119

It begins by assessing the extent (if at all) to which the crocodile was considered—within Australia—as a distinct symbol of Australia before the release of the film in 1986. This understanding of the crocodile is then compared with the post-Dundee era, when Australia’s international reputation became entangled with the deadly predator. The chapter argues that the transformation of the crocodile from simply a dangerous predator to a symbol of Australia was achieved via a three-stage process. Through this process, the crocodile became a malleable cultural artifact used by the media and the tourism industry, and in popular culture, to identify and project an “authentic” national character to the rest of the world. The process of dynamic interchange between local and global media is examined through an analysis of the changing media representations of the crocodile during the late twentieth century, with particular attention given to the turning point: the film Crocodile Dundee. Detailed descriptions and records of crocodiles and crocodile attacks were rarely kept before the reptile was marked for conservation in 1975. One of the few sources from which it is possible to monitor trends in the crocodile’s popularity is media reportage, but there are few reports prior to 1985. The veracity of reports is often questionable, and there has been a propensity within the media to sensationalise crocodile attacks. In the period after the Dundee films, the nature of media coverage changed, as did the situations where the crocodile was used. This chapter also looks at the Australian Government’s tourism campaigns at that time, in addition to references in popular culture. This chapter is limited to non-Indigenous understandings of the crocodile. Various groups of Indigenous Australians from the and Cape York have long revered the crocodile as a sacred animal. Within some Indigenous groups, the crocodile is believed to contain the spirits of the dead, and some exchange blood with (freshwater) crocodiles during initiation ceremonies (Edwards 1988, 89; Kelly 2006, 21ff; Webb and Manolis 1989, 128–9). In its discussion of popular media, this chapter does not presume to articulate this sacred relationship, originating in Dreamtime stories. These Aboriginal belief-systems deserve a fuller exposition than this chapter could offer. Additionally, although two species of crocodiles exist in Australia, this chapter focuses only on the Crocodylus porosus or saltwater crocodile (Richardson et al. 2002, 4– 9). This is because most crocodile accounts involve the larger “saltie,” rather than its harmless freshwater counterpart. 120 Chapter Seven

Peripheral Australia: The Pre-Crocodile Dundee Crocodile

From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the crocodile was primarily regarded as prey for big-game hunters. After the Second World War, 80 percent of the global crocodile-produce market originated in Queensland and the Northern Territory (Kelly 2006, 157). By the 1960s, saltwater crocodiles had been hunted almost to extinction, prompting calls for their conservation (Webb and Manolis 1989, 134). Against the wishes of numerous disgruntled residents of the Far North, crocodiles were declared a protected species in 1974 (Caldicott et al. 2005, 146). The geographic confinement of crocodiles to the northernmost limits of Australia (from Rockhampton on the east coast of North Queensland to Broome in Western Australia) meant that crocodiles held little daily relevance for residents living in the south, apart from specialised hunters. Nonetheless, and perhaps because of the peripheral nature of their existence, crocodiles held a particular kind of interest for many Australians (Highfield 2006, 127–9). Crocodiles usually received attention from the media only when an attack occurred, with the most bizarre attacks receiving the most coverage. Given that the majority of crocodile attacks are not fatal (Caldicott et al. 2005, 147), the level of public attention they received seems disproportionate. One example is Sweetheart, a crocodile weighing 780 kilograms and measuring more than 5 metres in length from Sweets Lookout Billabong in the Finniss River, who became a minor celebrity after attacking a number of boat motors between 1974 and 1978 (Edwards 1988, 79; Webb and Manolis 1989, 118). Sweetheart’s antics captivated national and international audiences, sparking various television programs and book projects (Stringer 2006). Similarly, Keith Adams (now called the “original crocodile hunter”) recorded his adventures in the North hunting crocodiles during the 1950s in the film Northern Safari (Adams 1956). The film screened with great success across Australia, the United States, Canada, England, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand (Adams 2000). In regional newspapers, these cases were celebrated for the recognition they brought to the region; nationally, Australians delighted in reading about the oddities of the untamed wilderness of the North.

“You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 121

Telling a Story: The Crocodile Narrative

Due to the popularity of these crocodile stories, the media created an almost standard narrative with which to recount the events. Part horror, part mystery, and part drama, “crocodile” became its own genre, providing predictability to sporadic occurrences and bolstering the idea that crocodiles were unusual, dangerous, and outside the normal Australian experience. The narrative had predictable stages: it would begin with a report of the mysterious disappearance of a person. Next, the media would report the “last sightings” of the victim, implying a sudden and unprovoked attack by a crocodile. Although these attacks usually occurred when the victims were swimming or wading in waterways known to be inhabited by saltwater crocodiles (Caldicott et al. 2005, 149), these occurrences were depicted as unexpected, surprising, and unnatural. Then macabre tales of confusion and intrigue would follow, with wildly inaccurate theories about the nature, number, or intent of the dangerous crocodile. The story would reach its finale with reports of vigilante activity and mass condemnation of the killer crocodile. With this conclusion, order would be restored, and the idea of the crocodile would retreat to lurk on the peripheries of popular consciousness until it was recalled by another attack story.

Stage One: Intrigue and Mystery on the Riverbank

As noted earlier, the transformation of the crocodile from simply a dangerous predator—as highlighted by the genre narratives—to a symbol of Australia occurred in stages. The attack on Beryl Wruck on 21 December 1985 epitomises this process. While splashing on the edge of the crocodile-infested Barratt Creek in the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland at night with friends, Wruck suddenly disappeared. The last person to see her alive was a fellow swimmer who was reported in local and national newspapers as recounting bemusedly that he was unsure what had happened, that “Beryl went up in the air and over and then she was gone. There was no sound, no scream. It was so quick” (Edwards 1988, 73). The swiftness and uncertainty of the attack led to mass speculation and accusations. Far from perceived as merely an unfortunate accident, Wruck’s death was sensationalised—like the crocodile, itself—as sinister, suspicious, and outside normal experience. Days before Wruck’s death, on the nearby Upper Daintree Road a man had been found executed, gangland style, with heroin in his pocket (Edwards 1988, 76). Rumours abounded in the press that Wruck had been a witness to the execution and was 122 Chapter Seven murdered to prevent her testifying. Some reports claimed that Wruck had been chopped into pieces with a chainsaw and fed to the crocodiles (Edwards 1988, 76). These rumours proved so pervasive that the then Queensland attorney general, Neville Harper, appeared in parliament almost two months after Wruck’s death to dismiss links between her death and the alleged drug execution (AAP 1986). To a certain extent, the ghoulish interest that surrounded the crocodile narrative before Crocodile Dundee was unavoidably created by the unfortunate behaviours of the reptiles themselves. Crocodiles remain submerged while tracking their prey and then, without warning, launch themselves from the water with explosive power, grabbing their victim swiftly (from land or water). They will often dismember their prey while eating, giving the corpse the appearance of having been sawed into pieces. Crocodiles also have a propensity to retain heavy objects in their stomachs, such as stones and, in some cases, bullets. This means that deducing the cause of death of victims can be highly problematic and can lead to mysterious scenarios of events (Caldicott et al. 2005, 145). Considering these behaviours, it is understandable that crocodiles provide the media with the raw material for exciting, gruesome, and dramatic news stories. By sidelining the instinctive behaviours of crocodiles in favour of sinister innuendo, however, these narratives demonstrate the desire within the popular consciousness to perceive crocodiles as something unnatural and contrary to normal life.

Stage Two: Fear and Loathing in the Outback

After proclaiming the sudden and sometimes mysterious circumstances of crocodile attacks, the media appeared to facilitate an outcry against crocodiles from victim’s families, local communities, and sometimes individuals completely disconnected from the area of the attack. One month after Wruck’s death (which remained front-page news), her partner, David Martin, in an article in , called for the killer crocodile to be destroyed, claiming to be speaking for all those who have had “friends, relatives, or acquaintances taken by crocs” (Martin 1986). As only five people had died between 1971 and 2001 in Queensland from crocodile attacks, Martin was apparently not speaking for many people at all (Caldicott et al. 2005, 148). However, the facts did not detract from the popularity of Martin’s evocative article, nor from his repeated suggestion that the crocodiles were merely biding their time before they could, with “a rush and a crash of those terrible jaws; a shattering of bone; [make] another life disappear” (Martin 1986). On this occasion, and quite frequently “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 123 in the crocodile narrative genre, the science concerning crocodiles was ignored in favour of providing a more shocking story; the instinctive behaviour of crocodiles was imbued with maliciousness. For example, crocodiles usually drown their prey using a “death roll,” spinning and disorienting their victims (Caldicott et al. 2005, 153). This is often conceived as crocodiles “flaunting” the dismembered corpse of their victim to the horrified survivors (Bevan 2003; Kent 2004; Shears 2006, 154). Attributing malevolent intent to crocodiles and exaggerating the risk of future attacks occurred in other media accounts. Although Wruck’s death was the first fatality in many years due to a crocodile attack in the area, the magazine New Idea published the story “Crocodile Fury” in its November 1987 edition in which Daintree resident Melva Osbourne “exclusively” revealed her “terro[r] [that] a crocodile is going to kill my husband Ian when he goes to round up our cattle.” Even in areas where no lives had been lost to crocodile attacks, panic was present. Following a (non-fatal) attack by Sweetheart, for example, the NT News ran a story on 18 September 1978 calling for the crocodile’s execution, the headline declaring “We Will Be the Bait!” Even after the release of the film Crocodile Dundee, the language of fear persisted in media reports about crocodiles. As late as 2010, the mother of the victim of an isolated crocodile attack told national newspapers: “We can’t walk down the road without the fear that there might be [a crocodile] … in a culvert or hiding in the grass because we’re surrounded” (Stewart 2010). This prosody of terror, fear, and risk moved the narrative of the deadly crocodile away from normal experience and placed it firmly in what Rod Giblett (2006) terms the realm of the “monstrous uncanny” for humans. This realm is filled with noxious vapours, hidden noises, and subverted reason (as humans are eaten) (Giblett 2006, 300). Although media exaggerations of both the frequency and the risk of crocodile attacks appear to run counter to the trend of perceiving crocodile attacks as an “unusual” experience, this hyperbole heightened the mysterious dangerousness of crocodiles. The impression to be gleaned from these media reports is that crocodiles are a constant risk: ominous and mysterious, they lurk on the periphery of our experience, waiting for the chance to end human life.

Stage Three: An Eye for an Eye (A Call to Order)

The narrative of most attack stories during this period concluded with a suggestion to act against the offending crocodile. Martin’s call for the destruction of the killer crocodile hit its mark; vigilantes took to the Daintree River over the next few months, attempting to eradicate not only 124 Chapter Seven the perpetrator but also all other crocodiles in the region (Cairns Post 1986). This revenge-culling phenomenon is a consistent marker in human– crocodile interaction. For example, while diving at Rainbow Cliffs on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory on 8 October 1979, 28-year-old Trevor Gaghan was killed by a crocodile (Edwards 1988, 111). Authorities were quick to hunt down the killer crocodile, openly declaring that their intention was to prevent the mass killing of crocodiles that would inevitably be provoked by the attack (Edwards 1988, 111). When people are denied the chance to participate in this revenge-culling phenomenon, it seems that the language of fear and risk returns to the crocodile narrative. When a 30-year-old Indigenous woman was killed at Cato River in Arnhem Land in July 1980, local Indigenous groups intervened to protect the crocodile (Edwards 1988, 111–12). They held ceremonies to appease the victim’s spirit and to convince their crocodile ancestor from the Dreaming not to attack at the waterhole again. The local newspaper objected to such leniency, suggesting that this attitude would lead to further killings and asking incredulously: “Who will be the next victim?” (Edwards 1988, 111). The common desire to react with vengeance to news of an attack may be considered as an attempt to mediate the violent fear aroused by crocodiles. David Caldicott et al. (2005, 144) posit that people have a “reflexive fear” of crocodiles caused by the crocodiles’ instinct to eat, rather than to merely bite, humans. Val Plumwood, a professor at Macquarie University who survived a crocodile attack in 1985, believes that crocodiles invoke a strong reaction because they transgress the divisions that “justify human mastery of the planet” (Plumwood 1995, 34). That is, by eating humans as prey, crocodiles transform the “sacred-human into the profane-natural” (Plumwood 1995, 34). Attempts to kill the offending crocodile after an attack could therefore be viewed as an attempt by locals to restore order and to force the crocodile back to the peripheries of the consciousness, where it belongs.

Crocodile Dundee: The Turning Point

The event that catalysed the transformation of the crocodile from the subject of an interesting story to a representative of Australia on the world stage was the release of the film Crocodile Dundee. This was the most successful Australian film ever made, grossing over US$360 million worldwide by 1987 and displacing Steven Spielberg’s E.T. as the most popular film ever screened in Australia (McFarlane 2005). From 1992, Steve Irwin built on the international fame of Crocodile Dundee with The “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 125

Crocodile Hunter series and later with the film version, reaching an audience of more than 500 million viewers in 163 countries (Shears 2006, 96). Crocodiles did not become a symbol of Australia simply through the growth in their popularity generated by Crocodile Dundee and The Crocodile Hunter series. Rather, this transformation came about by way of a two-tiered process. Firstly, the crocodile’s basic semiotic reference point (which may be termed as its position as a “sign”) was conceptually developed; that is, the image of crocodiles established through the media- led “crocodile narrative” had constructed the reptile as a dangerous creature at the peripheries of the Australian consciousness. Following Crocodile Dundee, this narrative was conceptually developed, the result being that crocodiles were identified and claimed as “an Australian” dangerous creature. This involved a process of protection; that is, an assertion that Australia held a more important relationship with the symbol than did other countries. This protective identification is an important step in the development of a national symbol (Edensor 2002, 23–5) as it ensures the symbol’s relevance to the population (Kerr 1999, 217). Secondly, once this special relationship was established, crocodiles became a metonymic signifier— their deadly attributes symbolising a uniquely Australian character.

As Aussie as : Claiming the Crocodile

Although numerous people disliked the image portrayed by Hogan and Irwin (particularly the latter), the two characters were successful in creating an unambiguous link between Australia and the deadly crocodile. The formation of this link was not an organic process, but one of deliberate manufacture by the Australian Government in its attempt to build Australia’s profile internationally. The campaign was facilitated mostly through the government’s tourism body, which applied what it termed a “single brand proposition” to crocodiles. (Tourism Australia 2006). This involved the deliberate use of a somatic marker or symbol to create a certain emotional response to a country (Lacy 2002, 15; Tourism Australia 2006). In this situation, the emotions that crocodiles had engendered locally, such as fear and excitement, were used to suggest a unique experience of nature, which could be experienced only in Australia. Realising the free publicity that Hogan and Irwin provided, the Australian Government began this process by ratifying the two actors’ “Australianness.” Both men became international tourist ambassadors for Australia (Greiner 2001). In 2003, Irwin became integrally linked with the 126 Chapter Seven

Howard government as Australia’s quarantine ambassador, Queensland’s honorary ambassador, and (in his most controversial role) regular barbecue guest of the then prime minister, John Howard. Irwin attended these international functions in his trademark short-shorts and khaki shirt (Shears 2006, 48–9). Tourism Australia at national and state levels also took steps to associate Australia more generally with crocodiles. The Northern Territory pavilion at World Expo ’88 was based on a crocodile theme, and a hotel shaped like a crocodile measuring 250 metres in length (with parking spaces designed to look like crocodile eggs) was commissioned in Kakadu (O’Regan 1988, 167; Reader 1988, 46). This tendency for dramatic “crocodile gestures” continued after The Crocodile Hunter series ceased. In 2003, the Northern Territory Tourism Commission began a A$1 million domestic advertising campaign based around a crocodile (Hinde 2003). This dialogue was adopted by enterprising businesses keen to cash in on the popularity of crocodiles. In 2004 an international regatta in Darwin promised competitors “free crocodile insurance” as a humorous attempt to boost participation and, in 2007 in the Northern Territory, a Visa credit card was released that was shaped and textured like a crocodile (Daily 2005; Sunday Territorian 2004; 2007). Considering the macabre past of the crocodile within the domestic consciousness, it seems peculiar that Tourism Australia would choose the crocodile to inspire positive feelings about Australia, especially given the availability of benevolent symbols of Australia, such as Vegemite or koalas. However, the government and media were tapping into the earlier narrative to generate what they believed would be a more compelling and exciting vision of Australia. Paul Hogan acknowledged this approach in an interview published in The Age. Responding to criticisms that Crocodile Dundee would create a misleading stereotype of Australia and Australians, Hogan said:

People are so dumb sometimes in Australia. What are we going to do, put a nice, sensible, hardworking accountant in a film, and say: “Here’s a typical Australian: hardworking, industrious.” Everybody would yawn and say: “Never go to Australia.” (Wilmoth 1986, 10)

Hogan, it appears, was right. It has been estimated that each crocodile attack in Australia boosts international tourism revenue by between A$10 million and A$20 million (Murdoch 2004, 2004a). Following the logic of the crocodile narrative, these attacks represent a unique and different experience—an event that occurs only at the extremes of existence. This fulfils the mandate to encourage tourism, as it suggests an authentic country where thrills are to be found. Northern Territory tour operator “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 127

Turner is brutally honest in this respect: “We don’t want to go around killing people. But [tourist deaths] gave [Australia] back its hard edge” (Hoy 2003, 12–25). Tourists are not discouraged by the threat of the so- called uniquely Australian terror of the crocodile, because Australia is considered primarily to be a safe and developed country. This allows potential visitors to distance themselves from physical harm (since they do not expect to become victims) and to have an authentic and thrilling story to tell other people (Tourism Australia 2006). Australian tourism campaigns self-consciously promote this perception; the crocodile is marketed as a deadly animal at the extremes of existence, which can be safely viewed “down under.” At World Expo ’88, for example, visitors were encouraged to “see eye to eye with a crocodile” while revelling in their safety by “tasting the meat from this ferocious creature” (World Expo ’88 1988, 67). Similar promotion occurs in regions such as Kakadu in the Northern Territory and Far North Queensland where tour operators advertise boat expeditions that allow visitors, free of danger, to get close to the predators as they feed. While Australia boasted internationally of its crocodile pedigree, there was a parallel domestic drive to protect crocodiles from international incursion. The media represented Australia as not simply connected with crocodiles but more connected with crocodiles than was any other country. Earlier crocodile narrative genre remained mostly nonchalant about the national identity of the victims of crocodile attacks; but, in this later period, when international tourists were attacked in preventable circumstances, they were consistently lampooned by the media for not “understanding the ways of Australia.” For example, Perth’s Daily News declared, “there isn’t a shred of sympathy in the Kimberley for Miss Meadows,” the American model who died while swimming in the crocodile-inhabited area (Edwards 1988, 34). Furthermore, when foolish behaviour was believed to be the sole cause of an attack, the foreign status of the victim was often emphasised. In November 2006, for example, a 24- year-old Belgian tourist was injured after wading into a crocodile- inhabited river at Cape Tribulation and slapping the water to encourage crocodiles to come closer for a photograph (Newcastle Herald 2006, 16). Echoing local sentiments, Dr Kelly Lash said that the tourist should win an award “for doing stupid … tourist … things” and that “the worst part is he didn’t get the photo” (Mancuso 2006, 14). Although the coverage of crocodile attacks on Australian “southerners” was condescending compared with the coverage of attacks on “real” Queenslanders and Territorians (Murdoch 2004, 14), this did not extend to the level of derision aimed at victims who were overseas tourists. The popularity of Crocodile Dundee 128 Chapter Seven and the corresponding success of The Crocodile Hunter established an emotive link between the crocodile—the representation of a uniquely dangerous animal—and the country of Australia. This self-conscious connection, which existed both within Australia and abroad, established the boundaries of the proto-symbol as being threatening, unique, and primarily Australian. These boundaries did not preclude variable interpretations of the crocodile (White 2005, 130 ff). This context merely dictated that the deadly crocodile, as a permeable and divergent symbol, represented Australia in some way. Crocodiles became floating signifiers anchored only by their dangerousness and Australianness, which could spark recognition within the population (White 2005, 130–1).

Attaching Meaning to the Crocodile: Gender-Neutral Bravery and Laconic Foolishness

Once the crocodile was established as a uniquely Australian creature, media stories of crocodile attacks began to be associated with various ideas about the Australian national character. In their relationship with the crocodile, Australians were frequently represented as brave (against all odds) with a laconic (if not bewildering) attitude to difficult situations. These traits are widely considered distinctively Australian. When these stereotypical masculine Australian traits began to be associated with the crocodile, the meaning of this reptile began to change. The sinister danger that crocodiles represented meant that to defeat or capture a crocodile was an achievement worthy of great acclaim. In Crocodile Dundee, this is inexorably bound up in a paradigm of masculine superiority. Indeed, the viewer need not watch the film closely to realise that only a male could defeat the crocodile and the harsh Australian wilderness. Mick Dundee, the protagonist, played by Paul Hogan, shamelessly says to Sue Charlton (his soon-to-be girlfriend from New York), that she won’t survive in Australia because it is a “man’s country” (Crocodile Dundee 1986). She dismisses his advice and, shortly after, she is attacked by a crocodile with such predictable timing that the reptile seems almost personally affronted by her confidence. When Dundee has killed the crocodile, a stunned Charlton says, “That croc was going to eat me alive!” Dundee (aligning himself with the masculine bravado of the crocodile) replies, “Oh, I wouldn’t hold that against him. Same thought crossed my mind once or twice.” Crocodiles appear to symbolise aggressive power, and, by extension, their defeat highlights the masculinity of the “victorious” Australian man—who resides in the historically male-dominated outback. This reflects what Tim Edensor described as “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 129 the danger in accumulating symbols from popular or mass culture, because the commercial allure often hides harmful suggestions (2002, 13). Fortunately, however, it seems that Australia’s media did not hold on to Crocodile Dundee’s stereotypical gender assignment. With the updated crocodile narrative, sexuality and gender roles appear to be mostly irrelevant; the focus is on applauding survivors. Accounts of crocodile attacks remain remarkably consistent in their treatment of male and female victims. When a woman heroically survives a crocodile attack, the media does not emphasise the victory of the feminine over the masculine. They simply report the event as an inspirational story of courage, emphasising the bravery of the Australian who survived the encounter. In October 2004, for example, 60-year-old Alicia Sorohan, who weighed just 55 kilograms, jumped on the head of a 300-kilogram crocodile near Cape Melville National Park to rescue her male friend as the crocodile was dragging him from his tent (MX Melbourne 2005, 8). In November 2003, in two separate incidents in the Northern Territory, a woman armed with a bag of mussels beat off a crocodile, and a 53-year-old woman rescued her nephew from the jaws of a 3-metre crocodile by punching it in the nose ( 2004, 4; 2005, 9; Koch 2005, 14).When a female fatality does occur, the media do not emphasise the vulnerability of the victim; rather, they comment on the risk that crocodiles pose to all Australians. See, for example, coverage of the death of an 8-year-old girl in Arnhem Land in July 2006 (NT News, 2006, 4; Wilson 2006, 5). Similarly, although Steve Irwin demonstrated “Dundee- esque” strength and dominance in his interaction with crocodiles, he did not conform to a masculine stereotype. He was unashamedly emotional, often declaring his love for his wife and children that sat comfortably with his abiding affection for crocodiles. Bindi, Irwin’s daughter, was often pictured with her father capturing crocodiles, and his wife, Terri, was instrumental in his wildlife adventures (Douglas and Stainton 2003). For Irwin, the defeat of a crocodile was an experience of self-confessed sorrow, as it showed the inability of humans and crocodiles to coexist (Douglas and Stainton 2003). In Crocodile Dundee, crocodiles are used to express the masculinity of the main character, Mick Dundee, but this is more a reflection of how women are portrayed in Australian adventure and action films than it is a comment on the crocodile as a symbol of Australian gender. If anything, crocodiles symbolise a gender-neutral bravery within the Australian psyche. The thrilling danger of encounters with crocodiles is a double-edged sword. When victims have not unnecessarily placed themselves at risk, the media represents their survival in terms of acting fearlessly and bravely 130 Chapter Seven against the sinister crocodile. However, when Australian victims are understood to have foolishly placed themselves at the mercy of such an adversary, the media (although superficially sympathetic) delight in the macabre details of the victim’s demise. In these accounts, there is often an emphasis on the stereotypical Australian behaviour of the victim. On 17 March 1987, for example, Kerry McLoughlin (a local of Kakadu), holding his fishing rod and beer, crossed the crocodile-infested East Alligator River to say “G’day” to his friends (or “mates”) on the opposite bank (Edwards 1988, 105–6). To the horror of watching American tourists, McLoughlin attempted to escape from an encroaching 5-metre crocodile by climbing the 4-metre high riverbank while still holding his beer (Webb and Manolis 1989, 123). He released his hold on the beer to throw the can at the jumping crocodile just moments before the reptile decapitated him (Howell 1998). Cassian Domoo, while fleeing from police officers who were seeking to breathalyse him, attempted to swim across the crocodile- infested Daly River, 360 kilometres south of Darwin (Adam 2007, 1). He was attacked by a crocodile, and then escaped into the waiting arms of the police. Crocodylus Park zoologist Charlie Manolis joked with the police in national coverage that for Domoo to escape with his life, he must have “tasted really bad” ( 2007, 2). The prevalence of attack stories involving people doing foolish things near crocodiles suggests an almost bizarre pride (and perhaps delight) in the stupidity of Australian citizens. Crocodiles occupy a unique position: their deadly status simultaneously signifies the extreme bravery of Australians and their humorous (and ultimately, gruesome) foolishness. These somewhat conflicting traits of bravery and foolishness are unexpectedly united in the carefree, reckless attitude portrayed in Crocodile Dundee—Mick Dundee is exceptionally brave and laconic to a fault. Dundee’s mauled leg is merely a “love bite” from a crocodile, and his response to a tentative question about whether a crocodile is dead is, “Well, if it isn’t, we’re gonna have a helluva job skinning the bastard.” Steve Irwin’s interactions with crocodiles also often appeared reckless with similarly understated and comical overtones. Moving calmly away from a crocodile viciously lunging at his legs, Irwin commented that the crocodile was “a bit naughty,” and that his broken ribs “feel good” (ABC 2006). Such gross understatement in the face of the world’s apex predator combines the two divergent representations of the national character; the traits exhibited are seemingly foolish yet unflinchingly brave. The media reserve the highest praise for crocodile attack stories that involve individuals who demonstrate these two character traits, remaining “You Call That a Knife?” The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia 131 laconically brave despite terrible adversity. For example, The Sydney Morning Herald and numerous other newspapers reported, with gratification, of 17-year-old crocodile-attack survivor Lachlan McGregor’s dismissal of his partially severed leg with “I’ll get over that stuff” (Murdoch 2004a, 11). Similar delight was expressed in the media when Peter Guivarra (mayor of the Mapoon community, north of Pormpuraaw in the Northern Territory) described how to manage a crocodile. The first step, he claimed, was to place the crocodile in a “headlock.” When asked about the next step, he replied simply, “Brother, don’t let the bugger go” (Koch 2005, 14). It is important to note that these “foolish-brave-laconic-Australian” character-based stories, which abounded following Crocodile Dundee, engage with pre-established narratives in Australian folklore. Various bush myths exist in Northern Australia that detail the unlucky plight of “Freshwater Admiral”, a man who (while under the influence of alcohol) was rumoured to have mistaken a crocodile for his canoe and tried to ride it across the McArthur River (Edwards 1988, 160–1; Kelly 2006, 21ff). Another crocodile hunter who reputedly worked naked (and often intoxicated) would write out “cheques” for rum on notepaper headed “Riverbank Unlimited”, redeeming the vouchers with crocodile skins (Webb and Manolis 1989, 161). In one of the earliest recorded cases of the Australian laconic wit, J. J. Stokes recounted his narrow escape from a crocodile while swimming in the Northern Territory in 1841. With understatement worthy of Dundee or Irwin, Stokes recalled that “an alligator rose close by, bringing his unpleasant countenance much closer … [to] the primitive state of nudity … to which I had reduced myself … than [was] agreeable” (Webb and Manolis 1989, 161). These stories do not prove that interactions between humans and crocodiles produced a deeply ingrained, truthful Australian character that has been forged through this history into a relaxed, fearless, and sometimes foolish identity. Rather, they demonstrate that symbols do not arise from a cultural vacuum. The success of the crocodile as a symbol lies in both its relevance to the present and its timelessness, allowing it to inhabit the national consciousness through justification of its historical authority.

Conclusion

The crocodile is part of a powerful and historical story of Australian identity organised around a series of characters—laconic, brave, and pragmatic citizens. Although the crocodile could not be considered a symbol of Australia before the release of the film Crocodile Dundee, the 132 Chapter Seven enthusiasm of governments, private organisations, and the media to engage with pre-established narratives and conceive of the reptile as uniquely dangerous and authentically Australian ensured its transformation into a stable signifier to which national meaning could then be attached. Through this process, the crocodile appears to have completed its transformation into a symbol of Australia, a symbol seemingly anchored in historical integrity. The success of Crocodile Dundee and, later, The Crocodile Hunter enabled Australians to elaborate upon this existing and powerful domestic story of identity in an international forum. When meaning is attached to the crocodile, that meaning should not be considered fixed, stable, or even reliable. It is only marginally relevant that Australians (apart from Irwin) do not wrestle crocodiles with laconic, reckless bravery. The success of the crocodile as a symbol arises instead from media representations that operate to reinforce (or sometimes undermine) dominant stories of Australian national identity. Having established its potential as an infinitely permeable signifier, the crocodile may indeed be considered a symbol of Australia.

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Murdoch, L. 2004. “When Man Kills Croc, It’s Bad News; When Croc Kills Man, It’s Good News.” The Age. 6 November. —. 2004a. “Crocs’ Taste for Tourists Lines Top End Pockets.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 6 November. MX Melbourne. 2005. “It’s Heads She Wins When a Croc Attacks.” 19 August. Newcastle Herald. 2006. “Slap Slap, Snap Snap.” 10 November. NT News. 2006. “Tests Confirm Croc Killed Girl.” 21 July 2006. O’Regan, T. 1988. “‘Fair Dinkum Fillums’: The Crocodile Dundee Phenomenon.” In The Imaginary Industry: Australian Films in the Late ’80s, edited by Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody, 155–75. Sydney: Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Plumwood, V. 1995. “Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey.” Quadrant 39 (3): 29–34. Reader, R. 1988. “In the Know.” Weekend Australian. 23–4 April. Richardson, K. C., G. J. W. Webb, and S. C. Manolis, 2002. Crocodiles, Inside Out: A Guide to Crocodilians and Their Functional Morphology, Australia: Surrey Beatty and Sons. Shears, R. 2006. Wildlife Warrior, Steve Irwin: 1962–2006. A Man Who Changed the World. Sydney: New Holland Publishers. Stewart, P. 2010. “We Live Every Day in Fear; Croc Victim’s Mother.” AAP, 23 March. Stringer, C. 2006. The Saga of Sweetheart. Marleston, SA: Gecko Books. Sunday Territorian. 2004. “Tasars Croc Safe.” 20 November. —. 2007. “Charge it with NT Croc Card.” 21 March. Tourism Australia. 2006. “A Uniquely Australian Invitation: The Experience Seeker.” Webb, G. and C. Manolis. 1989. Crocodiles of Australia. Sydney: Reed Books. White, R. 2005. “Symbols of Australia.” In Australia’s History: Themes and Debates, edited by M. Lyons and P. Russel, 116–33. Sydney: UNSW Press. Wilmoth, P. 1986 “Croc of Gold.” The Age: Entertainment Guide. 2 May, 10–11. Wilson, A. 2006. “Girl’s Death Spurs Crocodile Dispute.” The Australian. 11 July. World Expo 88. 1988. Official Souvenir Program. Sydney: Australian Consolidated Press. PART III:

NATION AND BELONGING

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HISTORY AND VALUES OF AUSTRALIAN CITIZENSHIP TESTING

MARIA CHISARI

During John Howard’s final year as prime minister of Australia, the introduced a formal test for migrants and refugees who wanted to become Australian citizens. Known as the Australian citizenship test, its purpose was to test the readiness of migrants and refugees to integrate into an Australian way of life. John Howard assured mainstream Australia that the test would ensure new citizens could adopt Australian culture and understand Australian history. Whether these outcomes had been achieved would be tested by the successful completion of twenty computer-based, randomly chosen, multiple-choice questions. The introduction of the Australian citizenship test indicated a new basis upon which citizenship was to be granted, and it demonstrated changing public opinions about what the conferral of Australian citizenship should mean. For Howard’s centre-right coalition government, Australian citizenship not only conferred political and legal status within Australia but also required a particular way of being an Australian citizen, epitomised by a set of core national values known as “Australian values.” These values, in turn, were purported to represent the characteristics of a unique national identity and their adoption was promoted as the means of successfully becoming a member of the Australian community. This chapter explores the ways in which the first iteration of the Australian citizenship test reflected the set of values espoused by the Howard government. Drawing on key speeches delivered by John Howard when prime minister and on the resources developed for the citizenship test, the chapter analyses how the reconfiguring of citizenship in the early twenty- first century re-established the prominence of British-Australian or “white” values. 138 Chapter Eight

While the Howard government claimed that the new citizenship test would give migrants and refugees a sense of belonging to the Australian community, it also admitted that it sought to restrict entry into the community to only those who indicated by their knowledge that they were not a threat to the so-called Australian way of life. This way of life, popularly referred to as “Australianness,” was described in Becoming an Australian Citizen1 (DIC 2007), the resource booklet upon which the test questions were based. In its 46 pages, this manifesto of Australianness shared many similarities with John Howard’s notion of Australianness, an Australianness he believed to be guided by the core national values developed from the nation’s British heritage. It was an Australianness that prospective citizens were expected to adopt. The Australian citizenship test can be viewed as the culmination of the Howard project, an initiative that reflected the nation’s preoccupation with defining the “real Australian” and determining how these so-called real Australians would decide who should be included as “proper” Australian citizens.

Genesis of a Test

In his address to the National Press Club in 2006, John Howard pondered over the “simple irony” that so many people come to Australia “because they want to be Australians” and yet there was no institution or code that laid down “a test of Australianness” (Howard 2006). The following month, Howard was joined by his treasurer, , in calling for migrants to “be Australian” and to integrate socially (quoted in Humphries 2006). Howard said, “When you come to this country, you become Australian,” and Costello said that “before becoming an Australian, you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values, don’t come to Australia” (quoted in Humphries 2006). By the end of that year, those values had been defined and incorporated into government policy. The results of the discussion paper Australian Citizenship: Much more than a Ceremony were released on the first anniversary of the Cronulla Beach riots: riots that had involved violent confrontations between Australian youth from Anglo and Lebanese backgrounds. The discussion paper explored the merits of introducing a formal test for migrants and refugees wanting to become Australian citizens. , then parliamentary secretary for the Department of Immigration, summarised the government’s position:

1 This chapter is based on the first edition of the booklet published in September 2007. The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 139

Australian citizenship is more than just a ceremony—citizenship lies at the heart of our national identity and gives us a strong sense of who we are and our place in the world. Australian citizenship is a privilege not a right … It is also critical that [immigrants] understand the Australian way of life and our shared values and demonstrate a commitment to contributing to that way of life and accepting those values. A formal citizenship test could be an important part of that process ensuring that people are ready and willing to fully participate in the Australian community. (DIMA 2006, 5)

The proposal received bipartisan support from the two major Australian political parties, and 60 percent of public submissions in response to the discussion paper were in favour of introducing a test for prospective citizens (DIMA 2006a). This outcome reflected the burgeoning nationwide mood among conservative political and media circles that allowing migrants to maintain their own diverse cultural practices did not create a cohesive Australian society but instead triggered migrant indifference towards the Australian rule of law, Australian national values, and the Australian way of life. Citizenship education in the form of a test, it was claimed, would address these problems.

The Retreat from Multiculturalism, the Return to Integration

As a migrant-settler nation, Australia’s ethnic diversity has been a constant and major preoccupation for colonial governments and ensuing federal governments. Indeed, one of the first Acts passed by the new federal parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The Act sought to restrict the entry of non-white immigrants so that Australia would remain British in every way. The White Australia policy, as the Act and its associated policies came to be known in popular discourse, remained in place until the early 1970s when the reformist Whitlam Labor government replaced it with a policy of multiculturalism (Tavan 2005). The new policy, which promoted maintenance of cultural diversity among Australia’s ethnic groups, influenced a broad spectrum of government policy, including education, employment, and immigration policy. Although controversial, the concept of multiculturalism became embedded in Australia’s public and political discourses. However, with the election of the Howard government, the policy of multiculturalism and its institutions endured many political attacks and, by the end of Howard’s term, the concept had almost disappeared from public rhetoric (Hart 2006). Howard had always expressed disdain for the concept of multiculturalism, believing it catered to minority and special interest groups 140 Chapter Eight and that it was a divisive tool threatening peace and unity in Australian society (Tate 2009). For instance, the Howard government claimed that migrants who maintained their cultural practices and lacked knowledge of Australian values were behind the gang rapes in Sydney and the Cronulla Beach riots (Hartcher, Coorey, and Brathwaite 2006). During this time of heightened anxiety about national security and social cohesion, Howard introduced his now familiar plea to the Australian community to emphasise “the things that unite us rather than the things that make us different” (SMH 2006). Howard believed that unity could be achieved only when migrants and refugees abandoned their cultural practices and integrated. Integration embodied the principles of sameness; it was based on the notion that equality in a community could be achieved if all citizens shared the same values and practices. Howard stated: “I prefer to talk of integration. I prefer to speak of a cohesive, integrated society” (SMH 2006). Howard believed that the new citizenship test would be “a positive way of ensuring that newcomers are more fully integrated into Australian society” (SMH 2006). This idea is not exclusive to Australian politics; it is widely held. The notion that a nation is based on a community of people united through their shared common values, customs, and history has not only been instrumental in forging government-sanctioned national identities but has also affected decisions about the direction a nation’s immigration policy should take (Koffman 2005). Yet, in the climate of globalisation, transnational migration, and decolonisation, this notion of a seemingly homogenous community living within clear national boundaries is becoming problematic, even for nations with perceived well-established traditions and cultures (Rubenstein 2006; Wakim 2006; Weedon 2004). Howard believed that through integration Australia would withstand the global attacks on civic nationalism. By re-embracing integration, Howard tapped into a crisis in citizenship that was not only a national concern but also an issue throughout much of the Western world. Violent occurrences, such as street riots in Leeds and Paris and terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid, Bali, and London, added support to the notion that social cohesion was being threatened by the migrant “other.” The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands were among the first of a growing number of nation-states to introduce citizenship tests with the aim of integration. As with Australia, these nations feared that social cohesion was under threat from the cultural differences of their newest citizens. In Australia, this fear of the “other” manifested into an invasion complex—a fear that Australian shores were under constant threat of The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 141 invasion by outsiders (Elder 2007; Morris 2006). Recently, asylum seekers have become the new demonised “other” (Burke 2008). When the Howard government denied entry to asylum seekers who had been rescued from a sinking boat by the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa off the Australian coast, it successfully tapped into this fear with minimal public protest (Marr and Wilkinson 2004). Indeed, Howard’s handling of what would later become known as “the Tampa affair” contributed to his victory at the 2001 federal election. By the time the Cronulla Beach riots occurred in December 2005, the Howard government clearly deemed the Australian community ready to support a citizenship test to ensure that migrants and refugees would address their values-deficits and commit to Australian nationhood. Yet before citizenship testing could commence, the government needed to prepare test resources. This was done in an ad hoc manner with immigration officials stating that the Adult Migrant Education Program, the educational body that had prepared the existing resource Let’s Participate: A Course in Australian Citizenship, would be involved in preparing a new booklet (SSCLCA 2007). Kevin Andrews, the minister for immigration and citizenship at the time, had also proposed “taking hands-on interest” in preparing “a short potted history of Australia” (quoted in Hart 2007).Ultimately, the government chose to employ historian John Hirst to draft the history in the new booklet Becoming an Australian Citizen (Hirst 2008) because Hirst adhered to the version of Australian history that complemented the Howard government’s prescribed Australian values.

From Rights to Privileges to Values

Discourse about Australian values came to dominate politics during the final years of the Howard government (Grattan 2005; Humphries 2006). Long before he was prime minister, Howard had championed the notion of Australians living by a set of defined core national values (Johnson 2007). Knowledge about these values became an integral component of the citizenship test. Howard further fuelled the values debate during his Australia Day 2006 address to the national press:

Australia’s ethnic diversity is one of the enduring strengths of our nation. Yet our celebration of diversity must not be at the expense of the common values that bind us together as one people—respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, a commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces tolerance, fair play and compassion for those in need. Nor should it be at the expense of ongoing pride in what are commonly regarded as the values, traditions and 142 Chapter Eight

accomplishments of the old Australia. A sense of shared values is our social cement. Without it, we risk becoming a society governed by coercion rather than consent. (Howard 2006)

In his address, Howard not only accentuated the values he believed were common to British Australians but also established a duality between old Australia and Australia’s ethnic diversity. He implied that people born in other countries have different values, which threaten “our values.” He proposed that a sense of shared values should be our social cement, that is, the solution to the crisis. Yet, implicit in Howard’s speech was the question: How can migrants share our values if we celebrate their diversity? The citizenship test was to be the solution; it would teach national values to migrant communities who would then willingly forgo their diversity, thus reducing the need for any future government to resort to coercive measures. Howard’s more recent focus on linking core values with Australian identity attempted to establish a citizen norm shaped by a particular kind of ethnicity, religion, and neo-liberal ideology into which all others were expected to integrate (Johnson 2007). This kind of discourse on citizenship featured in many narratives about being Australian and tended to be organised around notions of whiteness, whereby being white was understood by the nation as the norm (Elder 2007, 11). In Howard’s system, all citizens—whether new or Australian born—were measured against this norm and “the closer a citizen or potential citizen was to this norm the more likely they were to have access to the privileges of the state” (Elder 2007, 12). Howard articulated this norm in his Australia Day 2006 speech:

Most nations experience some level of cultural diversity while also having a dominant cultural pattern running through them. In Australia’s case, that dominant pattern comprises Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment and the institutions and values of British political culture. Its democratic and egalitarian temper also bears the imprint of distinct Irish and non-conformist traditions. (Howard 2006)

Similar sentiments (and, indeed, even similar phrasing) then found their way into the citizenship resource booklet, elaborating on Australian values:

These values and principles reflect strong influences on Australia’s history and culture. These include Judeo-Christian ethics, a British political heritage and the spirit of European Enlightenment. Distinct Irish and non- The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 143

conformist attitudes and sentiments have also been important. (DIC 2007, 5)

As with Howard’s address, what is most notable about this passage in the resource booklet is what is not included. It establishes an image of Australia as a nation where only Judeo-Christians with British, Irish, or European ancestry belong. For Howard, these particular religious and political heritages were the foundations of the Australian population as, for him, they described real Australians. By omitting Muslim beliefs, African experiences, and Asian influences, Howard (and the resource booklet) implied that these other cultural heritages do not contribute to the Australian identity. Howard’s view of the Australian identity does not include the multitude of cultural and social backgrounds that constitute the Australian population. However, values labelled in the resource booklet as Anglo-Celtic are values that many Western liberal-democratic societies have claimed as their unique national identity—they are promoted as neutral and universal. Scrutiny of these Australian values uncovers some contradictions, for instance the claim that the values promote religious tolerance and secular status:

Australia has a Judeo-Christian heritage … Religious laws are not recognised and have no legal status in Australia. Australia uses a Christian calendar. This means that days like Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day are public holidays. (DIC 2007, 13)

There is an inherent contradiction in the logic of neutral, universal, liberal- democratic Australian values. These values are neither neutral nor universal. They are Eurocentric, forged through colonialism, and they remain committed to maintaining Anglo-Celtic domination in stories of Australianness. What is interesting about this focus on values is their gradual evolution and re-conceptualisation. The rights and responsibilities articulated in Let’s Participate and taught to prospective citizens were redefined as “values.” This re-conceptualisation from rights to values paralleled a shift in the way citizenship was imagined. Citizenship, traditionally desired by many migrants for the legal rights and status it provided, such as voting rights and the right to an Australian passport, had become enmeshed with notions of national cultural identity and the need to live the Australian way of life. The shift from a language of rights to a language of values was significant, as it implied that some people have a legitimate claim to belong while others are merely tolerated. It indicated who was a “real citizen” and who must wait for recognition to become one. The shift from 144 Chapter Eight rights to values, which in turn led to citizenship being articulated as a privilege, reflected Howard’s belief that “we,”—those who hold Australian citizenship as a birthright—decide who comes to Australia and by what means. Rather than encouraging the integration that Howard claimed would be so beneficial to social cohesion, the shift from rights to values emphasised the differences between migrants and mainstream Australians, reinforcing migrants as the “other.” Former multicultural affairs commissioner Joseph Wakim argued that during Howard’s term, the focus shifted “from multiculturalism to citizenship to values” (Wakim 2006). The citizenship resource booklet reflected this shift in focus: multiple references to Australian values had replaced all references to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism—the word and the policy—was omitted from the booklet; it would no longer “undermine” the nation’s common values.

The Aboriginal People Were Not Without Friends

Becoming an Australian Citizen includes narratives not only about immigration and Australia but also about the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia. The resource booklet portrays early contact between white Australia and Indigenous peoples as relatively peaceful, with minimal conflict. Indigenous culture is described as an old culture belonging to the past, with minimal connections to the present. Pre-1788 is described as “pre-settlement”; terms such as “custodians,” “invasion,” and “colonisation” are not used. Reflecting the views of its author, the booklet presents Australian history from an exclusively white perspective with a positive portrayal of white pioneers:

The success of Australia was built on lands taken from Aboriginal people after European settlement in 1788. The British government did not consider that it had to make a treaty with the Aboriginal tribes, who seemed to them to have no firm attachment to the land and did not cultivate it. By contrast, [sic] America and New Zealand the British government did make treaties with Indigenous people. (DIC 2007, 32)

In the above passage, the phrases “seemed to them” and “no firm attachment” invoke the impression of a land belonging to no one or terra nullius, the legal concept applied by the British colonial government to legitimise the taking of Indigenous lands (Reynolds 1992). The narrative implies that the taking of Indigenous land was a necessary sacrifice for the good of the nation. There is no suggestion of dispossession. Instead, the booklet seeks to appease a deep-rooted national angst about the legitimacy The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 145 of British colonisation in Australia. Discussing the myth of terra nullius, Elder argues that land is the central issue in narratives about indigeneity and national identity and that it is only by eradicating Indigenous claims to the land that non-Indigenous Australians can make their claim (Elder 2007, 147). For this reason, Becoming an Australian Citizen concentrates on detailing the many achievements of white settlers on Australian soil, reinforcing the settlers’ connections to the land through progress and development. The fight for Indigenous land rights is not detailed but merely alluded to as a “separatist policy” culminating with the Mabo decision of 1992 (DIC 2007, 33). The significance of this landmark decision that challenged the concept of terra nullius is refuted in Becoming an Australian Citizen. Instead, the booklet alludes to the popular narrative of connecting Indigenous peoples with “traditional society” and the land, emphasising a fixed cultural identity located in the past rather than communities living in the present or the future. The version of history presented in Becoming an Australian Citizen is in stark contrast with the version in its predecessor, Let’s Participate:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived on this continent for more than 60,000 years. After British settlement their traditional ways of life were disrupted, and they suffered injustice, loss and disadvantage … Over the past few years, many Australians have come to support a movement towards Reconciliation between Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous Australians. (AMEP Research Centre 2006, 11)

When comparing the two publications, it is interesting to note the shift that occurred during the Howard government’s term in the way relations between white Australians and Indigenous Australians were portrayed. Mirroring the agenda of the Howard government and the works of John Hirst who rejected reconciliation and opposed the Mabo decision, Becoming an Australian Citizen does not refer to reconciliation (Hirst 2006). Becoming an Australian Citizen presents a conservative view of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in other ways. It points to disease as the primary cause for the decline in Aboriginal populations, presenting disease as evolutionary survival of the fittest and suggesting that the decline in Aboriginal populations was unpreventable and inevitable. Further, by failing to acknowledge that many of the diseases responsible for the deaths of Indigenous peoples were introduced by colonisers as a common practice of colonisation, the booklet permits British Australians, past and present, to distance themselves from this historical act and draws 146 Chapter Eight attention away from other causes of death, including massacres led by colonisers. Thus, the so-called British settlement of Australia (not colonisation) is presented as unproblematic. While some Aboriginal deaths are attributed to “frontier battles” (DIC 2007, 8), the use of the term “battles” alludes to an evenly matched opposition; that is, it presents an image of equal opponents equipped with similar weaponry and resources. In many of his other works, Hirst has also sought to project the image of the positive pioneering spirit of white settlers, but some historians have described Hirst’s interpretation as a “white blindfold” view of Australian history (Macintyre and Clark 2003). The narrative in Becoming an Australian Citizen aims to not only inform new citizens of Australia’s proud past but also the so-called real Australians that they and their ancestors have nothing to regret. Hirst was adamant that, in relation to claims of dispossession, contemporary Australians have nothing for which to apologise. For Hirst, conquest came with violence (Hirst 2006, 83), and he expressed this view in the resource booklet. When describing Indigenous peoples, Becoming an Australian Citizen usually presents them as foiling white Australians’ generous actions to help them. Indigenous peoples remain the “white man’s burden.” For example, missionaries and Governor Macquarie are credited with offering Aborigines assistance and friendship not always appreciated:

The Aboriginal people were not without friends … Missionaries attempted to convert them to Christianity but with only very limited success. Governor Macquarie … took a special interest in them, running a school for their children and offering them land for farming. But very few Aboriginal people were willing to move into European society; they were not very interested in what the Europeans had to offer. (DIC 2007, 32)

This passage is underpinned by many of the neo-liberal values embraced by the Howard government. It extols the virtues of Christianity and of white missionaries who tried to “civilise” Indigenous Australians through education and work. It blames individuals, in this case Indigenous peoples who had “limited success” and who were not interested in helping themselves. It implies that Indigenous Australians today are solely responsible for their status of marginalisation and that they are not part of the national image advocated by the citizenship test of a forward-moving, high-achieving nation. In contrast, the achievements of British Australians are described throughout the booklet. “Diggers,” “mates,” “battlers,” sports heroes, a racehorse, and a donkey depicted as a war hero are all praised for their Australianness, while historical massacres, mandatory detention of The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 147 refugees, and Aboriginal deaths in custody are omitted. The term “stolen generations” is not used in the booklet. Instead, the long-term practice of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families and homes is simply explained as “could have their children taken from them” and “there has been a great debate too on the intent of these policies” (DIC 2007, 33). Such a brief and insignificant description undermines the truth about the stolen generations; it also restructures the narratives of the past to reassure Australians that Indigenous peoples were protected.

The Validity of the Australian Citizenship Test

The potted history of Australia presented in Becoming an Australian Citizen reflects the preferred narratives of historians and others who promote a celebratory view of Australian history. Blainey argues that many histories written post-1970s have focused excessively on the negative chapters in Australia’s history at the expense of acknowledging Australia’s achievements (Blainey 1993; Macintyre and Clark 2003). The resource booklet was written to address these concerns, presenting values and a past that are “relaxed and comfortable”—a phrase Howard used just prior to his first term as prime minister (Jackson 1996). The resource booklet declares with certainty that Australia has become “a nation at ease with the world and with itself” (DIC 2007, 7). John Howard’s former speechwriter John Kunkel believes that Howard shared these beliefs about Australia and that he understood the wishes of mainstream Australia. The Howard project, as Kunkel described it, championed a particular narrative, which Howard believed tapped “a new mood of national self-confidence” and “an Australia at ease with the world and with itself” (Kunkel 2008, 13). With a prime minister espousing this view of Australia and the Australian people, Hirst, who labelled multiculturalism an “absurdity” and condemned the “nonsense” that dominated discourses on reconciliation, was the obvious choice as official historian (Hirst 2006). Like Howard, Hirst preferred a national narrative that was British, Christian, and individualistic. The introduction of the Australian citizenship test reinstated the previous, long-standing stories of Australianness; multiculturalism of the 1960s and 70s was out, and integration, revamped to promote belonging, was in. With the introduction of Becoming an Australian Citizen, the Australian identity was reframed. The portrayal that had been presented in Let’s Participate was no longer relevant, and the banes of conservative governments, such as multiculturalism, reconciliation, and the stolen generations, were to be omitted from twenty-first-century discourses. 148 Chapter Eight

Many critics claimed Becoming an Australian Citizen promoted exclusion rather than belonging. Certainly, it is clear that the booklet privileges the nation’s British heritage through its exclusion of other values, cultures, and histories. But if exclusion was the overriding intention of the government, then neither the resource booklet nor the test has met its objectives. Although candidates from marginalised groups are the most likely to fail the test on their first attempt, statistics reveal that the uptake of citizenship has not declined since the introduction of the test (DIC 2009). Three questions remain: Why do our newest citizens need to know a particular sanitised version of Australian history? Can migrants and refugees engage with an historical narrative that ignores foreign voices and denies colonial injustices? Why is it considered important to define “the real Australia”? One way of approaching these questions is to think of the citizenship test as Howard’s way of ensuring the continuing strength of certain narratives and of shutting down debate around other issues (Johnson 2007). Taking this approach reveals that prospective citizens are not the focal point in the national debate about Australian identity and citizenship rights; they are merely instruments used to reassure mainstream white Australia of its innocence and its domination over people who do not live or understand the British-Australian way of life. The main purpose of a citizenship test that assesses good citizenship qualities for only those who desire to be citizens and not for those born as citizens is to reassure mainstream Australia that the government is acting to solve a crisis in citizenship. As Hage argues, this can be seen as a “ritual of white empowerment” where “white Australians renew the belief in their possession of the power to talk and make decisions” about non-white Australians by defining what Australianness means (Hage 1998, 241). This was the Howard project. The citizenship test, then, reassured John Howard’s old Australia that their lives will not change and that their position of prominence will prevail.

New Government, New Visions?

Since the election of the centre-left Labor in 2007, Howard’s citizenship test and the accompanying resources have been rewritten. The new test and booklet, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond, were introduced in October 2009. The new booklet reinstates concepts such as multiculturalism and reconciliation in Australia’s national identity, and the stolen generations and colonisation are acknowledged in Australia’s past. Australian history has now been relegated to the non- The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 149 testable section of the booklet (DIC 2009a). The focus has returned to the legal aspects of citizenship; Australian values have been replaced with a commitment to the pledge that new citizens must make. However, remaining unchallenged is the notion that citizenship is a privilege to be earned by migrants and refugees. Remaining unquestioned and unanswered is from whose perspective the national identity is being defined. The Rudd government declared that one of the main objective of the test was to “demonstrate to the general public that people applying for citizenship have satisfied the legislative requirements when making the Pledge of Commitment” (ACTRC 2008, 4). This implies that the general public (perhaps, Howard’s “mainstream Australia”) continue to need reassurance that its Australianness will prevail. The question remains: Will Australia, in Howard’s words, be a magnet for people “because of what it has become” (Howard 2006), or will Australia be “a work in progress, changing and evolving”? (ACTRC 2008, 1).

Works Cited

AMEP Research Centre. 2006. Let’s Participate: A Course in Australian Citizenship Elementary Workbook, Let’s Participate: A Course in Australian Citizenship. Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University. ACTRC. 2008. (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee). Moving Forward—Improving Pathways to Citizenship: A Report by the Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Commonwealth of Australia. Blainey, Geoffrey. 1993. “Drawing up a balance sheet of our history.” Quadrant (July–August): 10–15. Burke, A. 2008. Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DIC. 2007. (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Becoming an Australian Citizen: Citizenship, Your Commitment to Australia. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Commonwealth of Australia. —. 2009. (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Australian Citizenship Test: Snapshot Report July–September 2009. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Commonwealth of Australia. —. 2009a. (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. Belconnen, ACT: National 150 Chapter Eight

Communications Branch, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Commonwealth of Australia. DIMA. 2006.(Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs). Australian Citizenship: Much more than a Ceremony Discussion Paper. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. —. 2006a. (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs). Summary Report on the Outcomes of the Public Consultation of the Merits of Introducing a Formal Citizenship Test. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Commonwealth of Australia. Elder, Catriona. 2007. Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Grattan, Michelle. 2005. “Accept Australian Values or Get Out.” The Age. 25 August. Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press. Hart, Cath. 2006. “Multiculturalism is a Dirty Word.” The Australian. 4 November. —. 2007. “Booklet Delays Citizenship Test.” Weekend Australian. 31 March. Hartcher, Peter, Phillip Coorey, and David Brathwaite. 2006. “Sheik Falls on His Sword. Sydney Morning Herald. 31 October. Hirst, John, B. 2006. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History. Melbourne: Black Inc. —. 2008. “Australia: The Official History.” , 6 February. Howard, John. 2006. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” John Howard’s Australia Day Address to the National Press Club. AUSTRALIANPOLITICS.COM. Viewed 22 September 2011. . Humphries, David. 2006. “Live Here and Be Australian, Howard Declares.” Sydney Morning Herald. 25 February. Jackson, Liz. 1996. “An Average Australian Bloke.” Four Corners. Television program, ABC Television, Sydney. 19 February. Johnson, Carol. 2007. “John Howard’s ‘Values’ and Australian Identity.” Australian Journal of Political Science 42 (2): 195–209. Koffman, Eleonore. 2005. “Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity.” Citizenship Studies 9 (5): 453–67. Kunkel, John. 2008. “Reflections of the ‘Howard Project’.” IPA Review 60(2): 11–15. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clark. 2003. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. The History and Values of Australian Citizenship Testing 151

Marr David and . 2004. Dark Victory. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Morris, Meaghan. 2006. Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture. London: SAGE Publications. Reynolds, Henry. 1992. The Law of the Land. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. Rubenstein, Kim. 2006. Australian Citizenship: Discussion Paper on the Merits of Introducing a Formal Citizenship Test. ANU College of Law, Centre for International and Public Law. Viewed 31 August 2011. . SSCLCA. 2007. (Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs). Estimates (Additional Budget Estimates) 12 February. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. SMH. 2006. (Sydney Morning Herald). “‘Migrants Need to Learn Mateship’: PM.” 12 December. Tate, John. 2009. “John Howard’s ‘Nation’ and Citizenship Test: Multiculturalism, Citizenship and Identity.” The Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(1): 97–120. Tavan, Gwenda. 2005. The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. Carlton, Victoria: Scribe. Wakim, Joseph. 2006. “A New Lease of Life for White Australia.” The Age. 15 December. Weedon, Chris. 2004. Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

CHAPTER NINE

THE ILLUSORY EVERYDAY: CONSTRUCTING AUSTRALIAN NARRATIVES IN REALITY TV

EMMA PRICE

Since the turn of the millennium, the state of broadcasting on Australian television has been significantly altered by the evolution of reality TV. Audiences are now presented with portrayals of “ordinary” life and culture; however, the genre’s depiction of Australian experience and identity through constructed narrative formats presents new challenges to and new representations of the “everyday.” The popularity of reality TV indicates that audiences strongly engage with a form of program packaging that emphasises performance and spectacle. This format specifically invites viewer activity through expectations and identification. This leads to questions about the embodiment of this simulation by audiences. This chapter analyses the role of an illusory everyday in both the representation and reception of Australian narratives in reality TV, with reference to the genre and the local adaptation of global formats. Issues of reality, truth, spectacle, illusion, and the everyday are explored in relation to a case study of the ’s Border Security, a program set in an Australian airport that observes the interaction between airline passengers and customs officials. The chapter uses this local reality TV program to examine the implications of this new voice in television for Australian stories and identity, and to contribute to contemporary research on the television industry and audiences.

A National Genre Shift

The precise moment of the creation of reality TV is contested; however, it is generally agreed that the term “reality TV” came into use in the early Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 153

1990s, having developed from the “infotainment” era of the 1980s (Bonner 2003, 23–4). Pre-2000, reality TV formats typically revolved around on-the-job emergency services and drew on documentary conventions of immediacy, authenticity, and the appearance of minimal mediation. In these programs, the element of reality resulted from purporting to present actual events, albeit in the presence of a camera crew and with post-production. The millennium heralded a new emphasis in the representation of the everyday on television with the arrival of Survivor and Big Brother where anyone and anything could appear on television within format parameters. Viewers could now tune in to watch various characters within a range of settings and situations, occasionally with new developments of interactivity that allowed audiences to contribute to the progress of the program. The ongoing development of reality TV raises many questions about the nature of television representation and perceptions of authenticity. John Corner (2002, 260) suggests reality TV is part of a “post documentary” culture where entertainment is the main force behind self- aware and performative display as opposed to traditional notions of observation and realism. From this point of view, reality TV can be seen to have created new expectations for how the everyday is presented and viewed on television, re-addressing the questionable idea of actuality in broadcasting. However, a comparison to documentary is limiting and problematic in defining reality TV. Documentary is widely recognised and theorised as nonfiction, signifying fact and authenticity through naturalism as an “accurate and truthful portrayal” (Roscoe and Hight 2001, 6–7). In comparison, reality TV has been observed as a “debasement of the documentary tradition” (Beattie 2004, 183) and as easy entertainment and spectacle, leading to claims of it being “trash television” for viewing by the lowest common denominator. (Cummings 2002, xiii). However, this distinction between the two genres is unclear without some qualification, as both documentary and reality TV are televisual representations of the everyday. Neither can provide an “unmediated view of the world” (Roscoe and Hight, 8); both have purposes and contexts that are fluid, moving between entertainment and information; and both utilise similar conventions in order to represent reality. Distinctions within the industry reflect the more nuanced and amorphous nature of this programming type with a range of genre terms, such as “factual entertainment” and “structured documentary,” and format labels, such as “game-doc” or “docu-soap” (Murray and Ouellette 2004, 4–5). According to the executive producer of Border Security, Lyndal Marks, the term “reality” is used by the industry only for a specific format where the 154 Chapter Nine situation is manufactured and the participants “are set up to do something” (Marks 2009). Marks says that formats such as that of Border Security are classed within the industry as “factual,” where events happen and unfold “naturally in front of the cameras” (Marks 2009). Both approaches are similar in their post-production editing of narratives and addition of soundtracks and voice-overs; however, they are essentially different in the ways in which they record the subject matter, both in methods and contexts. In criticism and across audiences, these two styles —reality and factual—are included in the genre of reality TV, which has led to limitations in the considerations of the genre. Within this forum, the use of the term “reality” is construed as an indication of its value as authentic and truthful, often conveyed through documentary conventions. However, this is challenged by its packaging with entertainment techniques of narrative, characters, and spectacle, leading to its “trash” label. In order to further understand the genre, consideration needs to be given to its verisimilitude, where credibility in representation derives from viewers’ knowledge and cognition of television and cultural conventions. This is important in the current global market where television formats are adopted for local production. While subject matter may remain essentially the same, other details may often be tweaked to portray local values or cultures, and in this way the revised program “speaks to its local … audiences” (Roscoe 2001a, 475). Localising the format includes adding recognisable symbols and references, and an aspirational view of national ideals and values for viewer identification in the portrayal of the everyday. The umbrella term “reality TV” is used within this argument merely as a “container concept” (Biltereyst 2004, 7) of two general parameters: first, of representing an aspect of the lives of ordinary people and/or events for audience aspiration and, second, the use of narrative packaging to create jeopardy and maintain interest. Adopting this frame requires an evaluation of the influence of the culturally determined norms in local television. It also entails examination of what audiences interpret as authentic or entertaining, how this is achieved, and its effect on the engagement between the television industry and viewers. In this way, reality TV requires increased reflection on the role of subjectivity and reflexivity in the consideration of authenticity and “real” on television. The gamut of reality TV formats involves what Jane Roscoe terms the “performance of the subjective” (Roscoe 2001b, 11). Similarly, Bill Nichols argues that the “distinction between fact and fiction blurs when claims about reality get cast as narratives” and, therefore, the categories of documentary, reality, factual, and fiction defy simple and static definitions (Nichols 1994, ix–xiii). So, in this way, television Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 155 mediates that which is considered reality in all its genres and hybrids. This mediation has been further stretched in the production and related criticism of reality TV, given its focus on the subjective but within factual conventions. Additionally, within a media-saturated society, the norms of television are established through behaviour and are easily recognised by an audience; so the individual participant or viewer, as a television subject, understands how to perform according to the requirements of the format. For example, Roscoe discusses the role of performance in Big Brother, where the housemates agree to and are aware of being filmed and perform accordingly for the program (Roscoe 2001a, 482). The portrayed authenticity then takes on a Baudrillardian simulation, a hyper-reality modelling a real without origin: “the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV” (Baudrillard 1983, 55). Therefore, as the genre continues to develop and become more entrenched in broadcasting and viewing, the effect of this performance, both in its representation of Australian narratives and in its reception by audiences, needs to be explored. A prominent style in Australian reality TV is the docu-soap or factual format, in which the everyday has become sensationalised—where the beach, emergencies, hospitals, animal rescues, and so forth have become sites of entertaining television drama. As a result, the ordinary is packaged as spectacle and thus disconnected from its origins in the everyday. The unpredictability of the ordinary is contained within familiar structural plot points, following the story and characters within a televisual notion of reality. Viewing such formats can be pleasurable: it can affirm audience interests, values, culture, and sense of self; it can also permit the viewer, through identification, to lose the “self” in the format of the program. Pleasure, which is said to be the “primary imperative of most television production,” is generated through narratives and imagery and by influencing ideas of genres and reception (Corner 1999, 93). These ideas of viewing pleasure coincide with theories of active audiences and the possibility of polysemy where different pleasures can be provoked by different means for different viewers from a single program. What can be identified in these programs is an “illusory everyday,” essential both to the production and to audience expectations and cognition of the conventions of the genre. This illusion is neither deceitful nor negative; it does not seek to hide or reveal its mediated status, which is part of the program’s operations. Indeed, audiences are encouraged in their engagement to enjoy the moves between authenticity and construction. 156 Chapter Nine

Imagining Border Security: Australian Narratives

Border Security is a distinctive case study for current Australian reality TV broadcasting, centred, as it is, on the work of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service on location in airports, docks, and mail delivery centres. Several seasons of the program have been produced in Australia, and its audience ratings are consistently high—it is usually within the top ten most-watched programs each week. The episode chosen for this discussion is a repeat, broadcast on 21 April 2008, which ranked as the highest rating program that week, with 1.7 million viewers across Australia (OzTAM 2008). These figures alone suggest that there is a strong appeal for audiences in the format’s representation of the everyday occurrences in these government agencies. Border Security evolved from a variety of sources. Marks describes the process as involving “looking at figures of authority, and airports” as “popular locations, naturally lending themselves to situations of stress,” which was then moulded into a “formula that fitted for Australia” (Marks 2009). The Australian series screens in parts of the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia; the United States has subsequently produced its own local version. The tailoring of formats for local audiences is evident in the differences between the Australian and the US productions. Australia’s Border Security largely concentrates on the country’s strict customs and quarantine regulations at airports; the US version, which regularly focuses on patrols and checks along the US–Mexican border, uses the idea of a need for heightened security to build drama and intrigue. The US version proved less successful in gaining audiences in Australia, with ratings regularly lower than those of the Australian production (OzTam 2009), signalling audience preferences for local elements. In his book Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry (2007), Bob Burton comments on the evolution of Border Security in Australia and the importance of the John Howard coalition government in the development of the project. Burton writes that the program could proceed only with approval from several levels of administration and that the government agencies involved retain a right of veto over content. While this is partly due to the sensitivity of information recorded in production, Burton argues that this effectively makes Border Security a government-controlled program. As such, it can create a buffer of “good” stories to marginalise community ill will emerging from bad press at the time about, for example, wrongful deportation, issues of detention centres, and equine influenza. The program also plays a part in promoting government policy on national security (Burton 2007, 194). Therefore, it is Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 157 important to examine carefully the content of the program and the method of its portrayal, and their significance to the program’s claim that it reflects everyday Australia.

Producing Border Security

On the surface, Australia’s Border Security provides an informative depiction of specific government agencies that may or may not be familiar to viewers. The program highlights the practices and regulations involved in these different agencies. The locations and procedures televised create a link with the viewer’s own possible encounters or, alternatively, provide a view into situations that audiences have never experienced. Establishing shots, such as queues of passengers, planes taking off or landing, and baggage carousels, are often used in a quick montage as a bridge between events, with the addition of captions to identify the settings. The captioning style is that of a dossier—animated, complete with the sound effects of a typewriter—a technique also used in television drama series such as The X-Files or 24. This production element is part of a larger theme of intrigue, drama, and reality, introduced from the outset with the title sequence and theme music. The initial screen of every episode, which announces, “Thousands of men and women dedicate their lives to protecting Australia’s borders,” leads into theme music reminiscent of the spy genre. There is a central image consisting of the word “Target” over the shape of Australia, which is encircled by a reinforced border. These intertextual references of music and captions rely on the viewers’ understanding of genre conventions to recognise and follow the tone of the production. Televisual conventions of “fly-on-the-wall” filming add to the sense of immediacy and reality for viewers and give the audience a sense of being a witness to the events playing out. Filming techniques, including the use of hand-held cameras, wide frames, and doorways, position viewers as lurking, just off to the side of the action but still able to peer in to see what is taking place. Government officers from the different agencies are central to the episode narratives. Their authority is constantly emphasised through their appearance in official uniforms and their job titles provided in captions. However, this sense of authority and remoteness is diluted by the use of first names to introduce officers. This is most likely done in order to retain anonymity, but it also creates a sense of familiarity, which invites the audience to identify with the officials. The expertise of the government employees is highlighted through “talking head” segments, when the officers explain their investigation to the camera and away from 158 Chapter Nine the passenger who is under suspicion. This allows viewers to be privy to information within the investigation and to see the processes and protocols of the agencies. However, these “one-on-one” situations with officers would not occur if not for the presence of the camera and the requirements of the format. Although the investigations of the passengers arguably would have taken place regardless, the production’s need for explanation in the narrative necessitates this recording, hinting at Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy and suggesting that the camera influences the observed (Simon 2005, 186). In this way, the sense of authenticity is tempered by the production packaging.

Narrating Border Security

The narrative structure of each episode of Border Security is essential to engage audiences, create maximum suspense, and provide a resolution. In the episode analysed here, there are five different narrative strands interweaving throughout the episode, similar to soap-opera genre. Thus, Border Security is characteristic of works of the docu-soap sub-genre, which Keith Beattie describes as “character-centred works which develop multiple storylines based on factual material” (Beattie 2004, 190). Each narrative strand involves an individual investigation or scenario, such as discovering pornography, searching for a drug stash, or sorting through imported food. The transitions between the narrative strands create suspense by delaying information about “what happens next” and, in this way, aim to maintain the interest of audiences. For example, one of the narrative strands in the sample episode involves swabbing and scanning a passenger’s bags. The camera zooms in on a computer as it emits a beeping siren; on the monitor is the text, “Drugs Detected.” The episode then cuts to a commercial break. By creating suspense, the program encourages the audience to keep viewing throughout advertisement breaks and abrupt switches in narrative strands to learn the denouement of each story. Each time the program returns to a narrative, a summary is provided of the action to date (a common trait for the genre), effectively extending two minutes of footage to ten. Although the events portrayed may have occurred across weeks of filming, by packaging them into a 23-minute episode, the program creates the illusion of simultaneity between the interweaving narratives. This sense of the narrative unfolding across the length of the episode is also reinforced by the omniscient voice-over guiding the viewer between the stories. The narrator recaps the story shown so far, emphasises regulations, and speculates on the possible outcome for the passengers in Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 159 the story. The narrator also provides closure to the narratives by drawing out an epilogue accompanied by a title screen, quickly outlining the fate of the particular passenger rather than portraying the outcome of each story through footage. Overall, these elements weave the officers, passengers, and events captured into a narrative of intrigue and suspicion: Are these passengers carrying drugs? How much food have they not declared? Does his baggage contain contraband? The development and resolution of the stories are deliberately delayed; enigmas are slowly revealed to add to the mystery. There is little respite, even when all of that particular episode’s narratives are resolved, as the closing titles include a preview of the next episode with a “cliffhanger” to entice viewers back to the program the following week. Narrative events in Border Security take on a formulaic structure of exposition, development, and resolution familiar to audiences as a common television narrative technique. These conventions suggest a coherent, plausible, and transparent world linked by spatial and temporal continuity, described by Roland Barthes as a “reality effect” involving the “artistic orchestration of apparently inessential details as guarantors of authenticity” designed for verisimilitude (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman- Lewis 1992, 188). Barthes (1974, 75–6) argues in S/Z that the construction and possible reception of the narrative structure works through the multiplication of time and space resulting in narrative complication, partial answers, snares, and equivocation. This model of hermeneutic elements allows for an analysis not only of plot but also of the implantation, interaction, and resolution of multiple enigmas with the possibility of multivalent readings for audiences. Marks claims the success of the Border Security format is based on its “production value” in creating “additional entertainment” within its factual style. These narrative techniques are used to create a “mix” to ensure a “rollercoaster of emotions and mix of people” that is compelling for audiences (Marks 2009). The sample episode emphasises the everyday of these Australian agencies through the identification of ordinary protocols used for each investigation, which is particularly highlighted through a narrative strand concerning the fate of some seized goods. The deployment of agency regulations and processes establishes the banality of the subject matter, thus grounding the representation in a reality effect of authenticity. However, it is the selection and treatment of the banal events in the production style that provides an entertaining form open to viewers’ interpretations. While harnessing the unpredictability and “unforeseen messiness” of “reality,” the construction of a coherent, dramatic narrative also acts as a 160 Chapter Nine source of pleasure for audiences (Kozloff 1992, 74). The construction of crucial moments of suspense within the banality of the everyday, combined with narrative transformations and neat resolutions, work to maintain and fulfil audience expectations (Tincknell and Raghuram 2002, 201). In this way, audience pleasures in viewing reality TV can be understood in notions of affirmation and identification. The representation of the everyday seeks to produce a familiarity and recognition that audiences can relate to their personal experiences. Pleasure is negotiated through either affirming or opposing values, fears, and knowledge of the social and cultural contexts portrayed. In Border Security, an element of schadenfreude, that is, the pleasure in watching others’ misfortune, can be identified (Spears and Leach 2004, 338). The entertainment stems from the knowledge that the events are happening to “them” on screen, not to “us” watching. As the stories in Border Security play out, audiences follow the idiocy, deviance, or simple-mindedness of those investigated. For example, in the sample episode, one narrative strand follows the investigation of a passenger discovered to be carrying a substantial amount of pornography. As the investigation progresses, viewers are able to observe the passenger’s humiliation, cunning, or naivety, safe in their distance as spectators through television. Visual cues, such as the blurring of the passenger’s face, further signify guilt or shame, coupled with the ambiguity of anonymity.

Otherness at the Border

This representation of the “other” is further emphasised in the representation of difference in Border Security. All passenger investigations in the sample episode focus on suspicion of “foreigners,” which is a common trait in the series. This suggests the need for an analysis of the representation of power and stereotype within the everyday and the subsequent distinction between those who are Australian and those who are not. In episodes of Border Security, the camera often frames the passenger under investigation behind the customs or quarantine officers. This symbolically positions the audience with the authorities and against “them”—the passengers. Such positioning can be linked to the “be alert but not alarmed” catchcry of the Howard coalition government, the program harnessing the concepts of security, protection, and suspicion to add drama and interest. Dan Meenan, former executive producer of Border Security, argues that rather than building fear about the contentious political issue of national security, the program reassures audiences (Kalina 2006, 8). This presumption about the intended pleasures for audiences of Border Security Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 161 is closely linked to the identification and embodiment of the narrative. John Fiske describes identification as a process where the values of the dominant ideology are “naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual” and thus reproduced and continued (Fiske 1987, 170). Emotional responses, such as empathy with the characters or events, are part of this process and “a way of being in the text as well as a cognitive appreciation of its content” (Wilson 1993, 56). The narratives in the sample episode aim to give the viewers a sense of confidence in the aptitude and responsibleness of the agency officers, while producing emotions about the passengers that vacillate between suspicion and empathetic relief. In being invited to join the officers in the narrative arc of an investigation, the audience are really being asked to identify with the officers in their role as “ordinary” Australians working for the security and protection of the nation. The narrative in the sample episode, which concerns drug smuggling, emphasises the identification process through the determination of Australian Customs officers to discover the truth behind the passengers’ behaviour. The officers’ success is portrayed as success in protecting the nation’s borders. Simultaneously, however, the audience may experience empathy for the passengers and their minor infringements; for example, when a family forgets the food items when filling out their custom’s declaration. The family receive a warning only. This empathy is contingent upon the viewer’s positive experience of the format. It is equally likely that a viewer will question and negotiate the representation of the events and characters, particularly in relation to the political and social contexts. Such a scenario is argued by Stuart Hall (1980) in his discussion of “encoding/decoding” theory of preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. Within this paradigm, there are myriad ways for the audience to engage with this format involving degrees of subjective perception of the narrative, ranging from insight to propaganda, comedy to tragedy, reality to construct. In this regard, it is possible that audience engagement with Border Security around its various representations of a national everyday may shift between various reactions. For example, audiences may feel they are being granted a privileged view into the agencies—a view that can be negotiated for reassurance or dismay—or they may feel they are experiencing dramatic stories packaged for entertainment. Interestingly, until their resolution, it is common for the investigations to be based on a presumption of the passenger’s guilt; yet the resolution often involves the innocence of the passenger in question. Only one of the four narrative strands involving passengers in the sample episode results in 162 Chapter Nine a guilty finding. The entertainment value for audiences is debatable when the majority of the narratives progress through the development of high levels of suspense and then resolve with few findings of illegality. The inclusion of these “false positive” or character narratives are seen to be important to the production because they represent the processes as normal and give “validity to the stories” (Marks 2009). This mode may serve further in audience embodiment of narratives of suspicion and presumption of the “other” in which the apparent authenticity of narratives may emphasise the factual basis of the genre; however, the illusion is still very much present in its construction.

The Illusory Everyday

The consideration of narrative and audience engagement in a reality TV format highlights the essential role of production style and techniques in the representation of a national everyday. Although usually drawn from naturally occurring events, the mix constructed in post-production through editing and soundtrack results in an illusion, and this, in turn, can influence the audience’s engagement with the format and overall genre. This illusory everyday is a mirage and can be identified in terms of the hyper-real, which situates the postmodern role of the media as part of the origin and symptoms of a world of simulacra (Baudrillard 1983). The illusion of reality TV can be recognised within the fourth order of simulation (Baudrillard 1983, 11–12); it has no existence as portrayed on television but it is embodied by viewers as a fictive reality of entertainment. The construction of reality TV transforms the idea of ordinary life into a spectacular version of the everyday, as a virtual reality that is embodied to naturalise identity and experience (Baudrillard 1995, 97–9). Audiences are invited to identify with, and be immersed in, this dramatic construction of the government agencies portrayed in Border Security, to take on a “fictive identity” in the program as a kind of escapism (Barthes 1975, 62). Here, the reality of the day-to-day work of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service becomes a drama of the banal: narratives that are performed and packaged into an illusion of the “real,” intended as a pleasurable experience for audiences. This illusion is complicated further when constructed in relation to social, cultural, or political contexts. Border Security involves an official narrative of the serious work of the agencies. However, this is represented in the form of popular culture. National security, as a prominent, contemporary political issue, is underlined through the everyday that is portrayed, but ideas of national security are skewed by the production Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 163 choices. The time constraint of half-hour episodes allows for little contextualisation and forces decisions to be made about what is included and omitted, both between and within narratives. The sample episode is a good example of the creation of a symbolic, overarching narrative of inclusion and exclusion, for the creation of boundaries that are fundamental at a “collective and individual level [to] express, feel and embody a sense of national identity” (Edensor 2002, 24–5). Portraying the work of local authorities for local audiences is essential to tap into the pleasure and anxiety aroused by issues such as security and border protection in dominant national discourse. This construction and engagement of reality TV narratives can be identified through the notion of the “fictive we,” with the promotion of a direct relationship between the program’s events or characters and the audience (Stam 1983, 39). Border Security speaks to its Australian viewers of their need for security and protection within this particular part of their everyday. Similarities can be drawn between reality TV and Robert Stam’s examination of the construction of news discourse, in terms of their shared elements, such as direct address, verisimilitude, and coherence (Stam 1983, 32–9). Although in reality TV the material may be drawn from real events, its treatment is that of fiction, which exploits an entertainment- driven relationship with its audiences. Border Security narratives act as an illusion of actuality and draw on the audience’s egos, prejudices, fears, and senses of humour to create a national audience community. This is not to denigrate fans of this particular program but rather to emphasise how the reality narratives of Australia are being presented to viewers and how meanings are made from narratives represented as everyday. Previous study by Annette Hill (2005, 78) has indicated that contemporary viewers are media savvy and can identify the difference between actuality and artifice in television programs. At the same time, the saturation and dominance of reality programming raises questions about how individuals, or Australians collectively, enjoy seeing themselves represented. It is not only about showing things as they are but also about the sensational and the dramatic. Jon Dovey (2002, 13–15) suggests that reality TV promotes a subjective form of expression, which is “embodied, relative, particular and everyday” and where the experience of the self is “implicitly linked to a collective identity.” In Border Security, a distinct narrative of Australia is portrayed that is close to a set of contentious contemporary national values and politics shaped by a fear of invasion and asylum seekers. By taking pleasure in the format, viewers embody this narrative and become part of the “fictive we”—in this case, aligning with the authorities in suspecting the “other.” 164 Chapter Nine

The underlying question is how this shift in reality TV has affected not only the industry and audiences but also representations of Australia. Big Brother has disappeared from Australian screens, but it may be presumptuous to predict a decline in the programming of reality TV. Ratings indicate that viewers continue to enjoy the familiarity and unpredictability of reality formats. However, as in the case of Big Brother, once the audience ceases to maintain interest or pleasure, ratings fall and production of the program subsequently ceases. This indicates that both the industry and the audiences are equally important in ascertaining intentions and construction as well as cognition and embodiment. In the case of Border Security, the inclusion of recognisable cultural references allows local audiences a clear identificatory and aspirational link. This link relates the program to national values and ideals and aids in the “construction of community through the representation of narrativised relationships” (Turner 2005, 421). This would also indicate the importance of entertainment in the program’s engagement with and televisual construction of these government agencies, as well as in producing a sense of their importance as part of a continuing contemporary narrative of national security. As networks and production companies continue to develop and broadcast reality formats in Australia, it is important to take stock of the myriad representations involved. When everyday scenarios such as arriving at an airport, losing weight, and finding a partner—or even living in a house—are constructed into a televisual spectacle, it becomes a question of how successfully the idea of self or culture can be performed and narrativised for the greatest entertainment. The popularity of the genre indicates a strong audience engagement, but does this mean that reality TV is representative of Australians or merely that reality TV is what they like to watch? It would appear that it is not the viewing of the everyday that audiences find pleasurable in reality TV but, rather, its production as spectacle. Border Security viewers are presented with a version of everyday occurrences for the Australian Customs and Border Protection Services constructed through drama and intrigue. However, there will continue to be a distinct tension between the notion of reality TV as presenting the everyday and its construction and cognition. From this perspective, Australian narratives and identities in reality TV can be seen as performances of specific national values or ideals, naturalised through claims of authenticity and heightened in narrative coherence and drama. As reality TV formats become further entrenched in broadcasting schedules, these national narratives need careful consideration in their illusory and spectacular representations of the Australian everyday. Constructing Australian Narratives in Reality TV 165

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Nichols, Bill. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. OzTAM. 2008. “Viewing Reports 2008.” OzTAM. . —. 2009. “Viewing Reports 2009.” OzTAM. . Roscoe, Jane. 2001a. “Big Brother Australia: Performing the “Real” Twenty-Four Seven.” International Journal of Culture Studies 4 (4): 473–88. —. 2001b. “Real Entertainment: New Factual Hybrid Television.” Media International Australia 100 (Aug): 9–20. Roscoe, Jane, and Craig Hight. 2001. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Simon, Ron. 2005. “The Changing Definition of Reality Television.” In Thinking Outside the Box, edited by Gary Edgerton and Brian Rose, 179–200. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Spears, Russell and Colin W. Leach. 2004. “Intergroup Schadenfreude: Condition and Consequences.” In The Social Life of Emotions, edited by Larissa Tiedens and Colin Wayne Leach, 336–56. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stam, Robert. 1983. “Television News and its Spectator.” In Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 23–43 Frederick: University Publications of America. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. 1992. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. New York: Routledge. Tincknell, Estella and Parvati Raghuram. 2002. “Big Brother: Reconfiguring the “Active” Audience of Cultural Studies?” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2): 199–215. Turner, Graeme. 2005. “Cultural Identity, Soap Narrative and Reality TV.” Television and New Media 6 (4): 415–22. Wilson, Tony. 1993. Watching Television: Hermeneutics, Reception and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. CHAPTER TEN

PETITIONS FROM INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES IN AUSTRALIA: RECOVERING INHERITED VOICES AND PERSPECTIVES

CHIARA GAMBOZ

When the early settlers and colonial legislation introduced petitions and the right to petition in Australia, they ushered in a “political instrument” or “a form of political action” which, by then, had been used widely across the world (Lipp and Krempel 2001, 151, 155). Petitions can be individual or collective. They exist in different forms—some conform to standard formal models, others are closer in form to letters—but all are characterised by an earnest request. The request is usually inscribed in a narrative, which, in explaining and justifying the nature of the request, serves the aims of the petition: to have the request(s) granted. These features mean that petitions often portray the views of a collectivity or of individuals who belong to a group. This aspect of the petition assumes a particular importance in circumstances where there is an absence or paucity of other sources recording and representing these views. Petitions in Australia were collected for a range of issues; however, they are especially important as a historical record of the collective demands of Indigenous peoples. This chapter explores the role of petitions in the historical and contemporary life of Indigenous communities. It begins by briefly reviewing the existing literature on petitions from Australian Indigenous peoples, and then it locates Indigenous petitions within the theoretical framework developed by Charles W. Mills. The theory of group domination contract that Mills proposed, centred as it is on dominating and dominated collectivities, is a useful framework for interpreting the petitions under consideration, because it focuses on a dimension of the 168 Chapter Ten

“group” or “collectivity,” which is central to both collective and individual petitions that originate within a “dominated” group. The chapter then focuses on the process of writing petitions, assessing a number of critical issues that arise when considering petitions as texts portraying the views of a collectivity. The chapter discusses two petitions in detail. The first was written by Ellen Kropinyeri in 1923 in response to an Act of the Parliament of legalising the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. Kropinyeri’s petition exemplifies not only how petitions record moments of interaction between Indigenous peoples and governments, but also how these moments are remembered as significant and commemorated by Australian Indigenous peoples. The second petition, here published for the first time, originated in the Victorian Reserve of Lake Tyers in 1931 and is an example of how not only contemporary experiences and perspectives but also contemporary discourses, concepts and ideas, and Indigenous responses to them are embedded in the text of petitions. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the value of making more visible and accessible the perspectives contained in Australian Indigenous petitions.

Petitions and the Humanities in Australia

In the historical field a number of scholars have drawn attention to several distinct Indigenous petitions (Attwood 2003; Attwood and Markus 1999, 2004; Barwick 1998; Goodall 1996; Goodall and Cadzow 2009; Reynolds 2004). It is now possible to read the texts of petitions ranging from the 1846 petition to Queen Victoria and recorded oral instances of petitioning in the 1850s, to petitions from the mission stations of Coranderrk (Vic.), Maloga (NSW), Poonindie and Point Macleay (SA) in the 1880s and 1890s, and petitions from the 1920s through to the 1960s. These petitions include requests for land, for changes in the management of reserves and mission stations, for freedom of movement, for repeal or alteration of oppressive legislation, for reforms, for access to wages held in trust by the protector of Aborigines, for freedom of marriage and employment, for fair and proper treatment, and for representation in parliament (Attwood and Markus 1999). Jim Fletcher (1989a, 1989b) provides evidence of how petitioning was used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples as early as 1902 to request government assistance with the provision of schools—by non-Indigenous parents seeking a segregated school system and by Indigenous peoples opposing a segregated system. Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 169

In the literary domain, Penny van Toorn locates petitions within the history of early Aboriginal writing among the “broad range of written and printed textual forms” preceding and following the work of David Unaipon, the first recognised Aboriginal author (van Toorn 1996, 754; 2006). She observes the role of several factors in petition writing: traditional Indigenous authority structures; the entanglement of orality and literacy; the presence of scribes and mediators; signatories belonging to different original lands, age groups, and gender; and a certain strategic “performance of subordination” in petition writing (van Toorn 2006). Adam Shoemaker considers “the letter or petition” as:

one of the most significant and durable forms of Black Australian writing … enabling people who have always resisted their mistreatment to press their claims to a higher authority. (Shoemaker 1998, 16)

Shoemaker regards the community petition as “the dominant mode of such communication,” most often representing “a collective movement towards the assertion of strength as well as progress towards freedom.” (Shoemaker 1998, 16) Ivor Indyk (2009), in his review of The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Nicholas Jose, which features several Indigenous petitions1, writes of:

… the constant counterpoint [to traditional forms of literature] provided by this kind of writing, which is often untutored, and of course makes no claim to literary status, but which has great emotional power … and where the petitioner asks, again and again, simply to be treated with human dignity.

Ravi de Costa (2006), in examining the global movement of Indigenous peoples, considers petitions within the processes of identity formation. He stresses the interactions at play between the identity of the petitioner and the authority being petitioned as well as the moral dimension that underpins such documents. To de Costa, petitions are “implicit descriptions of the moral worlds in which particular claims are made sensible and legitimate,” and they “act to articulate the identity and status of the petitioner and that of authority in a shared moral world” (de Costa 2006, 670). Geoffrey Stokes, who shares with de Costa the focus on notions of identity, considers the claims and arguments made in petitions

1 See also The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter in 2008. 170 Chapter Ten as sources, among others, to trace Aboriginal political thought (Stokes 1997, 159). In a parallel way, petitions submitted by Indigenous Australians are now mentioned or reproduced on the websites of most state libraries and national and state archives. The recent use of several petitions to illustrate the fight for land and freedom of many Indigenous Australians in the documentary First Australians (Perkins 2008; Perkins and Langton 2008) as well as on websites such as Mission Voices (Koorie Heritage Trust 2004), testify to a growing interest in early Australian Indigenous petitions as a window to the past.

A Contractarian Framework

Charles W. Mills (2007) posits a theory of group domination contract which rejects the assumptions inherent in classical mainstream contract theories in which a “contract” is conceived as consensual, inclusive, and centred on the value of equality. He highlights instead the coercive and exclusionary nature of the contract and its basis in inequality, be it of class, gender, or race (Mills 1997). He describes the group domination contract as:

a theory of group domination in which one group imposes its will on the subordinate group, placing explanatory emphasis upon coercion and the likely ideologically-generated character of the latter’s “consent.” (Mills 2000, 446)

It is therefore an exclusionary contract in that certain social groups are included in the polity as unequal (Mills 2000). By operating within an “overarching framework [of] non-ideal theory,” which “seeks to adjudicate what corrective or rectificatory justice would require in societies that are unjust,” the domination contract acknowledges “crucial social realities” and issues of social subordination not registered by mainstream contract theory (Mills 2007, 94, 86). It registers the role of collective human causality in the shaping of society in the course of history (Mills 2007), and in this sense, it is “explicitly predicated on human collectivities, dominating and dominated” (Mills 2000, 446). Non-ideal theory and the domination contract theory mirror the concerns and the motivations behind many petitions that seek to urge and achieve a corrective justice. The fundamental role attributed to groups or collectivities endorses the collaborative textual production of petitions, and this collaboration shows the fluidity and mobility of these collectivities when it involves those belonging to a different group (non-Indigenous peoples for instance). Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 171

Within this perspective, the presentation of petitions by Indigenous peoples in Australia can be interpreted as an attempt (among others) to interact with the “pre-existing structures of power” identified in the domination contract as the result of previous human causality (Mills 2000, 446). The petitioners, as a collectivity of individuals are not crystallised in the role of “victims” of the domination contract, and seek change. They approach the sources of decisions, policies, and legislation experienced as unjust, and, if not in the position of “freely contracting parties,” they actively engage with the terms of the contract that do not represent their will. The collectivity of “unequal[s],” or the “subordinate group,” petitions the higher levels of the “dominating group” so that their perspectives might be considered. A contractarian framework makes it possible to conceptualise the nature of petitions and to account for their collective dimension.

Australian Indigenous Voices and Collaboration in the Writing Process

The views of Indigenous peoples in Australia, especially in the first periods of contact with non-Indigenous people, were represented mostly in the written form in records left by non-Indigenous people, and they often suffered from authorial inferences and interpretations. When literacy and the command of English began to spread so did the knowledge of written forms of communication between people and the authorities. Letters and petitions to government authorities then offered a way in which Indigenous individuals and collectivities could express and communicate their views in writing. Whether such petitions can be considered as texts produced by Indigenous peoples themselves that present their historical subjectivity in writing is crucial in assessing the role and status of these documents. The collaborative production of the texts of petitions has often been discussed when determining their authenticity and validity (Mudrooroo 1997; van Toorn 2006). However, collaboration can be considered positively in that it was aimed at presenting the perspectives of a group of people for consideration. Historians stress that the act of voicing a request itself is significant (van Voss 2001). Therefore, notwithstanding the discussion about which voice is being expressed and therefore heard in collective petitions, petitions can be regarded as valuable sources of information on the perspectives of a collectivity. A revealing instance of collaboration in the making of a petition can be observed in the petition addressed to Queen Victoria in 1846 by 172 Chapter Ten representatives of the Pallawah people then residing on Flinders Island. Producing the petition’s text involved a number of individuals, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and occurred in different stages (Reynolds 2004; see also Arthur 1846). The process of writing this petition, which requested that a former superintendent not be reinstated, shows the petitioners’ initiative in organising the petition and in requesting (non- Indigenous) clerical assistance in order to prepare it. Simultaneously, it highlights the main reasons for soliciting such assistance, ranging from the benefits of enlisting someone with the knowledge and ability to draw up a petition, to the strategic importance of giving authority to the petition and the statements it contained (see van Toorn 2006, 121–2). Although it is true that different levels of constraint might be at play during the process of writing a petition, these can be viewed as part of the political nature of petitions, particularly when they are written by groups considered “subaltern” or subordinated. Groups in a non-subaltern position would also need to write strategically in order to have their requests considered. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that petition writers within a “dominated collectivity” would generally experience a higher level of risk and possible repercussions —as well as logistic difficulties—than would people within the dominant culture.2 A difficulty in analysing the process of writing a petition is that the steps and method often remain obscured because of the absence of records documenting the procedure in its entirety, or even partially. Nevertheless, careful consideration of the context in which each petition was written and signed, reflection on the motivations behind it, examination of contemporary documents, and attention to possible subdivisions of the writing process may help in assessing the genuine nature of the documents and their portrayal of Indigenous views. A petition from the leaders of the Gurindji people, among whom was Vincent Lingiari, addressed to Governor-General Lord Casey on 19 April 1967, offers a more recent case in which to observe collaboration in the writing process. The petition, about the “earnest desire to regain tenure of ... tribal lands in the Wave Hill Limbunya area of the Northern Territory,” ends with the following lines: “These are our wishes, which have been written down for us by our undersigned white friends, as we had no opportunity to learn to write English” (Attwood and Markus 1999, 224–5). The role of “white friends” as scribes is specified, together with the fact

2 Walter George Arthur, the main signatory and proponent of the petition, was in fact jailed for seventeen days for writing the petition, and he and the other signatories were threatened on different occasions (Attwood and Markus 1999, 39– 40; Reynolds 2004). Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 173 that the words of the petition are indeed the wishes of the Indigenous petitioners. The reference to the reason why non-Indigenous people had helped with writing the petition illustrates the difficulties Indigenous Australians still faced in the late 1960s in accessing literacy. Further, their request, within a domination contract theory framework, still speaks of an engagement with existing authority structures. The petitioners still feel the need to state, “We beg of you to hear our voices” (Attwood and Markus 1999, 224). These two instances of writing collaborations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous people show how collaboration itself does not invalidate the petition’s content a priori and can provide a basis for identifying petitions from Indigenous communities as sources of Indigenous perspectives. Although it is necessary to take into account possible constraints of different types impinging on, restraining, or modulating such perspectives, they can still provide some valuable information on Indigenous experiences, concerns, and wishes.

Petitions as Memorials

At one time, petitions were often called memorials. Petitioners were memorialists, and their requests brought the questions they raised to the attention and, indeed, to the memory of the addressee(s). The term “memorial” has several meanings. A memorial can be something that keeps remembrance alive, such as a commemorative monument, ceremony, or speech. It can also be a record, a memoir or, as above, synonymous with petition. A petition synthesises these three connotations of memorial: it is a piece of writing with the potential to keep alive the remembrance of what it presents and represents, it is a written record in which moments of the past are inscribed, and it is a formal written statement of facts addressed to an organised body. Memory studies offer several points of reflection when considering Indigenous petitions in Australia. In terms of remembering, Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (2007, 5) note how “as the [twentieth] century drew to a close, there was an increasing concern with how best to remember the traumatic instances that had punctuated its history.” In Australia, Indigenous peoples have felt the need to participate in this act of remembering their history, itself punctuated by many traumatic events, and they did so in many ways, including commemorating the presentation of a petition. On 17 December 2003, Ellen Trevorrow wrote to the then governor of South Australia, H. E. Marjorie Jackson-Nelson. In her letter, Trevorrow 174 Chapter Ten asked that a petition, which had been presented 80 years earlier by three Ngarrinjeri elders, among whom was Trevorrow’s great-great-grandfather William Rankine, “at last in truth and justice be placed on the public record for posterity” [my emphasis] (Trevorrow 2007). Trevorrow’s request was accompanied by a commemorative walk in Adelaide, and a delegation of Ngarrinjeri elders re-enacted the presentation of the 1923 petition, which was received and acknowledged by the governor (see Figure 10-1). These events invite reflection on the significance of Australian public records, the losses and misplacements therein and the wish to rectify them. They highlight both the desire of Indigenous peoples to record and echo the past attempts to achieve justice and the significance of public records for posterity.

Figure 10-1. Commemorative walk in Adelaide, December 2003 (Trevorrow 2007). Courtesy of the Ngarrinjeri Heritage Committee Inc.

The petition commemorated in 2003 is particularly significant because the original was written in response to the enactment of South Australia’s Aborigines (Training of Children) Act 1923. The Act authorised the chief protector of Aborigines in South Australia to:

commit any aboriginal child to any institution ... to be there detained or otherwise dealt with under the said Act [State Children Act, 1895] until such child attains the age of eighteen years. (Aborigines (Training of Children) Act 1923, s. 6.1)

The petition was written by Ellen Kropinyeri from Point Macleay Aboriginal Mission, the mission where David Unaipon was born and spent Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 175 part of his life. David Unaipon, together with Matthew Kropinyeri, was among those who had given evidence to the 1913 royal commission on “the Aborigines” (Chesterman and Galligan 1997, 139–40). Matthew Kropinyeri, in particular, had specified his position on the removal of children for training purposes in an addendum to his evidence:

In regard to the taking of our children in hand by the state to learn trades, &c., our people would gladly embrace the opportunity of betterment for our children; but to be subjected to complete alienation from our children is to say the least an unequalled act of injustice, and no parent worthy of the name would either yield to or urge such a measure. (quoted in SA Memory 2010)

Ten years after the Act was passed, a deputation from Point McLeay, comprising John Stanley, Willy Rankine, and Leonard Campbell, went to Adelaide to petition the government to repeal the Act and presented Ellen Kropinyeri’s petition. The petition was reproduced on the pages of South Australia’s first newspaper, the Register, on 21 December 1923 in an article titled: “Give us our Children. The Aborigines Plea. Opposition to New Act” (Attwood and Markus 1999, 109–11). It reads:

A Remarkable Petition PORT MACLEAY. December 16. The hon. members of Parliament of South Australia.

Dear Sirs, The Bill has passed, legalising the Act of taking away the children from their parents. This Act, like a mysterious creature of ill omen, is casting a gloom over this one little mission home. Yes, this Bill has passed at last, and the passing of it provides food for serious consideration. And the first that presents itself to the mind, is the fact that, an Act, which, hitherto had been illegal and I believe, punished by law, is now legal and supported by law, which produces a reverse effect upon the past legal law, as for instance, in the past any one taking a child away from its parents without their consent, will be liable to punishment by law. But to-day, any desiring to return and live with their parents, will be dealt with by the laws contained in the Act. Here we have a queer conglomeration of laws, through some unaccountable way, the wild cat of confusion, has effected or gained an entrance into the dovecote of legal harmony, and caused such utter confusion among the inmates, to such an extent, that some, if not all, of them cannot with any degree of accuracy, claim each their respective relationship either to the legal, or illegal origin. However this is not the matter on which I wish to write. It is mother’s love, its claims, its rights, its demands. Now it is understood that a refusal to comply with the demands of an ultimatum of one nation to another, is an 176 Chapter Ten

acceptance of condition of warfare whatever those conditions may lead to, so the passing of that Bill is a declaration of war between right and wrong. And there is only one right, and only one wrong, which of the two contending party [sic] is right. We will see presently. Mark well, the two forces, arrayed against each other. There stands the advocates, and supporters of the Bill that has passed, strongly fortified, their guns of “intellect” trained and ready for action, they represent “Right.” There, on the opposite and facing them is the rank of the enemy, strongly opposing the Bill, a very strange army, possessing no weapons of war, no intellectual powers, no Parliamentary eloquence, not a grain of science in the whole body, that makes the army of motherhood. The only piece of artillery which that army possesses is the weapon called love. And thus equipped, the army of motherhood has taken up their position in opposition to the Bill. The invader of those Godgiven and therefore sacred dominions of mother’s love is its claims, its rights, its demands, a possessin [sic] voted for them in the parliament of heaven, sealed with the image and superstition of His Majesty, whose name is “Love.” This army also represents Right. Thus we see the two contending forces each striving for precedence in their claim of Right, and we ask, who is going to win the day? And the reply comes from the ranks of Intellect, “victory is ours,” and relying on their weapon of attack, Intellect, they thunder forth their intellectual arguments again and again, propelled by the full force of scientific facts. Poor motherhood, how are you going to retain the beauties and glorious possession of motherhood, the right, the claims, the demands of love amid such fearful intellectual bombardment as this, and seeing that you are armed with nothing more than the crude and primitive weapon, love, the invention of which dates back in the past eternity. It is true we are indeed poorly equipped, and we know not how we are going to fare in this fearful struggle, but – and just then a thin spurt of smoke is seen issuing from the ranks of motherhood, and we knew that love, motherhood’s weapon spoke, and that its claims, its demands, and its rights, in their threefold unity is speeding its unerring way to the ranks of the foe, bearing the seal, the hallmark, and the mandate of the majesty on high (the majesty of love). Hon. members (jurymen). The question is asked, Who wins? The bar of eternal justice, truth and righteousness awaits your verdict! What say you?

This petition is significant because it conveys how the 1923 Act was perceived by those who were to be affected by it: “an Act, which, hitherto had been illegal and I believe, punished by law, is now legal and supported by law.” Its focus on motherhood—“mother’s love ... its claims, its rights, its demands”—emphasises an aspect of life that Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous people share. Its appeal to the members of parliament to respond to “the bar of eternal justice, truth and righteousness,” calls the attention of those responsible for Australian Indigenous policies at the Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 177 time to values that, in their “eternal” aspect, should transcend “scientific arguments” and “intellectual arguments”. The dichotomies—intellect/love, science/love, well equipped/poorly equipped—reflect contemporary discourses relevant to an understanding of the period and illuminate how Indigenous peoples felt they were perceived by non-Indigenous people and how they themselves perceived non-Indigenous people. Despite the 1923 deputation and the memorial, the Act remained in force. However, the response to the Act marks an important moment of interaction with the state authorities responsible for the legislation. Moreover, the 2003 remembrance of this response highlights the will to remember, commemorate, and memorialise official moments of resistance to policies that shaped the identity, past, and present of many Indigenous Australians.

Contemporary Experiences, Perspectives, and Discourses

In many cases, petitioners called attention to the ways in which coercion exercised through legislation affected their social group. The following petition, which asks for the reinstatement of a former superintendent, exemplifies another type of concern and relationship to power. Here, the interaction with the pre-existing structures of power aims to maintain within those same structures particular non-Indigenous individuals who were able to shift domination contractarian terms towards more egalitarian ones. This petition also illustrates how petitions can simultaneously reflect contemporary experiences, concerns, and discourses. The petition, reproduced below, was written in 1931 at Lake Tyers, a reserve today known as Bung Yarnda in Victoria’s Gippsland region. Established in 1861 by Reverend John Bulmer, missionary of the Church of England, Lake Tyers became a government station in 1908. In line with a policy to reduce the number of reserves, Lake Tyers became the station where many residents from Ramahyuck, Lake Condah, and Coranderrk were relocated after their stations were closed in 1906, 1919, and 1924 respectively. Petitioning had occurred in all three reserves, especially in Coranderrk during the 1870s and 1880s (Attwood and Markus 1999, 41–51; Barwick 1998; van Toorn 2006). Among the surnames of the ninety-two men and women signatories of the 1931 petition from Lake Tyers, at least eight appear in a petition from Lake Condah in 1907 (van Toorn 2006, 171–2). This suggests a direct or indirect familiarity of at least part of the community with this medium of protest and negotiation. The petition reads:

178 Chapter Ten

Lake Tyers Athletic Club Lake Tyers, 6th June 1931 To Aborigines Board Victoria Gentleman We the undersigned residents of Lake Tyers Aborigines Station, wish to attract your most keen consideration to our appeal on behalf of our humane friend Captain Newman who has resigned from this Station and sadly missed from amongst the sick, on behalf of our most humane friend Captain Newman, we extend our token of appreciation concerning his brief and untiring labour amongst us in sickness, our moral mental, physical, and social conditions, Captain Newman has appointed Patrols and Committes [committees] to regulate the moral condition of the Station which has never been since the founding of Aborigines Reserve in Victoria to great success [...] Our Football and Cricket competitions in the East Gippsland association, our introduction In the public as sporting people, We beg to state also concerning the founding of the Aborigines Reserve throughout Victoria, Captain Newman excels all managers in his prescriptions concerning the sick and his untiring labour And sleepless nights in attending to the sick we can safely say without hesitation, Captain Newman understood our disposition to the extreme, this humane person Captain Newman in his compassion for the Aborigines (Trained two nurses) for the welfare of the sick; erected a hospital for maternity purposes and other serious illness for the inmates of Lake Tyers to the satisfaction of Doctors Davey our (Government Doctor) We also wish to bring under your keen consideration, the Aborigines Board may search this Island Continent of ours (Australia) to equal Captain Newman but to no effect, Captain Newman has raised us up from our degraded state to what we are today, we were without a word of a doubt, classed as the lowest beings on the scales of humanity, this humane link which has been unlossed, it is our earnest desire if possible in getting Captain Newman reinstated amongst us again, Sir, hoping you will kindly consider our appeal and place same before the Board, Sir, we will render you our sincere thanks Lake Tyers Inmates Aborigines, Lake Tyers3

This petition functions primarily by highlighting Captain Newman’s positive contribution to the Lake Tyers community. Captain Newman, who managed the station from 1929 to 1931, is remembered in oral tradition as a good manager who “introduced many economic and material

3 Public Records Office of Victoria, Vprs 1694/P/0000, unit 11, (type A1P), items 5–7.

Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 179 improvements and encouraged the people to direct their internal affairs themselves” (Broome 1995, 142–3; Broome 2005, 221–8). The narrative outlining his work follows the civilising principles espoused by the Board for the Protection of Aborigines: the improvement of the “moral[,] mental, physical, and social conditions” of the Aboriginals. Although the mental condition is not dealt with specifically, the other conditions are addressed in a way that is telling of both contemporary experiences and contemporary humanitarian and racial discourses. Considering the contemporary experiences the petition records, the numerous mentions of “the sick” or “sickness” are reminders of the problematic health conditions that Indigenous peoples experienced and which still remain well below national standards (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2011). The reference to training professional personnel and to erecting facilities for the sick invokes the difficulties Indigenous Australians experience in accessing health care. The petition mentions sport’s positive effects on the social and physical aspects of life. The “introduction [of the community] in the public as sporting people” indicates the contemporary distance between Indigenous and non- Indigenous communities in Australia, but also illustrates that when this distance was reduced through public sporting events it was felt as a positive achievement. Observing the Indigenous perspectives portrayed in this petition, the definition of Australia as “this Island Continent of ours” seems to point to how the community felt about their land: not as alienated but still theirs. Further, the repeated presentation of Captain Newman as the community’s “humane friend,” “our most humane friend,” highlights the choice of the petitioners to emphasise his humanity over his whiteness, or his race, in a context where race was still an influential concept (see among others, Carter 2006, 45–6; McGregor 1997). Indeed, the end of the petition foregrounds contemporary racial discourses based on the belief in inherent racial attributes, connected to the concept of the Great Chain of Being and a philosophy of progress Indigenous peoples were expected to embrace. The words preceding the final request are significant in more than one way:

Captain Newman has raised us up from our degraded state to what we are today, we were without a word of a doubt, classed as the lowest beings on the scales of humanity, this humane link which has been unlossed

Whether they were written by Indigenous peoples and/or non- Indigenous people, these lines record the extent of the diffusion and affects of the ideas of the hierarchical ordering of races on a scale of worth 180 Chapter Ten present in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (McGregor 1997, 1–10; see also Broome 1995, 144; see also Johnston and Anderson 2005, 71). In this petition, these words seem to illustrate two points. First, that although the “classification” had taken place in line with contemporary scientific practices of hierarchical ordering and it had spread widely, it was merely a classification, not a reality with which the petitioners identified. The petitioners note that “we were ... classed as ... the lowest” rather than “we were ... the lowest.” Second, by asserting that a change had occurred in the state of things driving that classification (“... Captain Newman has raised us up from our degraded state to what we are today”), the petitioners respond to the civilising discourse of progress, and “uplift,” used by the dominating collectivity to justify their dominating position. Here, the discourse itself is not questioned. On the one hand, the positive changes brought about by Captain Newman support the community’s request for his return; on the other hand, they invite a reassessment of the classification, responding to those who thought Indigenous peoples could not be civilised.

Conclusion

Although when reading petitions one must be cautious and consider the context in which each petition was written, such as the possible influences of a scribe and/or authorities who might have had particular interests, petitions represent a valuable site for reflections on Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australia. Recovering the voices and perspectives embodied in petitions can be a process of discovery or rediscovery, not only of the requests of a collectivity but also of the time in which such perspectives formed and of the experiences of that collectivity. Such a process can correct the under-representation of the group’s views and illuminate historical moments of interaction between Indigenous peoples and non- Indigenous people in Australia. An increased knowledge of petitions from Australian Indigenous communities could contribute to “raising awareness and knowledge of Indigenous history,” as delineated in the objectives of reconciliation (Reconciliation Australia 2010). Further, it would increase knowledge of the racial, scientific, and intellectual discourses that influenced policies and attitudes affecting Indigenous Australians. Improving the visibility and accessibility of the voices contained within these petitions furthers the processes of investigating Australia’s past and remembering the efforts of many who, by voicing their views, tried to improve their own lives. Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 181

Works Cited

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. Johnston, Judith, and Monica Anderson. 2005. Australia Imagined. Views from the British Periodical Press, 1800–1900. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Lipp, Carola, and Lothar Krempel. 2001. “Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centred Network Analysis.” In Petitions in Social History (International Review of Social History Supplements 9), edited by Lex Heerma van Voss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGregor, Russell. 1997. Imagined Destinies. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mills, Charles, W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —. 2000. “Race and the Social Contract Tradition.” Social Identities 6 (4): 441–62. —. 2007. “The domination contract.” In Contract and Domination, edited by Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mudrooroo. 1997. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House. Perkins, Rachel. 2008. “First Australians.” Special Broadcasting Service. . Perkins, Rachel, and . 2008. First Australians. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. Reconciliation Australia. 2010. “What is Reconciliation?” Reconciliation Australia. . Reynolds, Henry. 2004. Fate of a Free People. Rev. ed. Melbourne: Penguin. Rossington, Michael, and Anne Whitehead. 2007. Theories of Memory: A Reader. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Shoemaker, Adam. 1998. “White on Black/Black on Black” and “Tracking Black Australian Stories: Contemporary Indigenous Literature.” In The Oxford Literary History of Australia, edited by B. Bennett and J. Strauss, 9–20, 332–47. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. SA Memory. 2010. “Aboriginal Rights Page 3, Aboriginal Response.” Government of South Australia. Accessed 18 November 2011. . Stokes, Geoffrey. 1997. “Citizenship and Aboriginality: Two Conceptions of Identity in Aboriginal Political Thought.” In The Politics of Identity Petitions from Indigenous Communities in Australia 183

in Australia, edited by G. Stokes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevorrow, Tom, Christine Finnimore, Steven Hemming, George Trevorrow, Matt Rigney, Veronica Brodie and Ellen Trevorrow. 2007. They Took Our Land and Then Our Children. Meningie, SA: Ngarrindjeri Lands and Progress Association. van Toorn, Penny. 1996. “Early Aboriginal Writing and the Discipline of Literary Studies.” Meanjin 55 (4): 754–65. —. 2006. Writing Never Arrives Naked. Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. van Voss, Lex Heerma. 2001. Petitions in Social History (International Review of Social History, Supplement 9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART IV:

POLITICS AND THE PUBLIC

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“GOT SO MANY BAD HABITS”: FEDERAL POLITICIANS, THE PUBLIC, AND MEDIA

STEPHEN ALOMES

Reading the tabloid media, it would appear that Australian politicians have—in the words of the Billy Field popular song—“got so many bad habits.” However, it could be that the bad habits are those of the press, the media as a whole and even, perhaps, of the public—as bloggers, talkback callers, and writers of letters to the editor. Not all new voices or new visions of the world are useful or accurate. A popular assumption is that politicians are the most distrusted of all professionals, but this is not necessarily true. In the 2009 Roy Morgan Image of Professions survey, 19 percent of respondents rated federal members of parliament as “very high” or “high” for ethics and honesty. The highest rating of 89 percent went to nurses, while the lowest was awarded to car salespeople at 3 percent (Roy Morgan Research 2009). People’s negative perceptions of politicians frequently arise from bad publicity and political scandals. The lowest rating given to federal politicians in a Roy Morgan survey was 7 percent in 1998, a time of substantial publicity about the so-called travel rorts of members of parliament. The level of public distrust of politicians can also be related to general levels of distrust of political institutions (Jones 2005; Leigh 2002, 45; McAllister 2000; McAllister and Clark 2008, 25). Many of the apparently deeply held beliefs about politicians’ lack of sincerity and honesty appear to be based on fairly trivial concerns—perks of office, salary rates, name-calling in parliament—rather than on instances of actual dishonesty or corruption. It should also be noted that, when commenting on the conduct of politicians, the media and the public do not often distinguish between state and federal parliamentarians. In headlines, 188 Chapter Eleven letters to the editor, blogs—the terms “state” or “federal” are rarely used.1 The emphasis in the media on the “misbehaviour” of politicians has grown as the print media, in particular, struggle for readership (Tiffen and Gittins 2004, 183). Significantly, although the media focus on minor forms of indulgence attributed to politicians and public servants, they undertake little detailed analysis of the patterns of serious and continuing corruption in business and government, a subject all too briefly reported in the business pages. Corruption is under-researched by the academy also (Perry 2001). This chapter explores the effects of changes in the way the media report news about the misbehaviour of Australian politicians, developing the analysis to consider the reporting of corporate or white-collar corruption. It analyses the ways in which the “gossip” approach that shapes the tabloid stories of the private lives of celebrities has begun to influence the way in which political news is reported.

The Distorted Polity of the Media

The media, partly reflecting the contemporary liberal capitalist democratic hegemony and partly offering readers and viewers what they find interesting, prefer both the trivial and the scandalous to the substantial. They privilege gossip about people above news exploring substantial social, economic, and political issues. This tendency has been compounded by the rise of internet media and the 24-hour news cycle. The most popular stories on the websites of tabloid media, such as ninemsn, The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, as well as the websites of broadsheet media, including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian, are about sex and/or crime or are gossip stories about the celebrities of Hollywood, music, television, and sport. The news cycle of the first and second weeks of December 2009 provides a good example. That month, as the Copenhagen climate change conference sought solutions for the effects of global warming, including the inundation of several Pacific mini-states, the news media focused on the marital infidelities of the American golfer Tiger Woods, a story that gained momentum when the number of “acquaintances” reported rose towards twenty. The media’s approach to the Tiger Woods story was discussed, seriously, on 9 December on the Melbourne sports radio station SEN. Breakfast panel member Tim Watson, also a sports newsreader for television, noted that the 24-hour news cycle had resulted in media outlets

1 A different study than this one might pursue the higher levels of corruption in state politics. “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 189 racing to run stories, with little fact-checking. John Rothfield (“Dr Turf”) was horrified that the Herald Sun had run an unsubstantiated front-page story about a suspected overdose in his hospital admission record without first establishing the facts. “Making up stories” has traditionally been the staple of American gossip rag the National Enquirer, the Truth, and the so-called women’s magazines, sometimes leading to redress through law suits. It had not been the stuff of a respectable—albeit tabloid—Australian daily newspaper. A later discussion on SEN’s afternoon talkback show involved a presenter defending the decision of SEN news to cover the Tiger Woods story on the grounds that since the story had been reported worldwide it had arguably moved from gossip to fact. The space devoted to these stories suggests that the general media are equally as interested in sexual scandal as in serious news. Gossip stories about the private lives of sports people or celebrities are, by nature, trivial. However, what happens when a public official whose public action as an elected representative, which should be subject to review, is treated as gossip? It might be argued that the treatment of allegations of political corruption has been similarly corrupted by a focus on the trivial over the substantial. It can be suggested that the “bad habits” of the media now extend to a failure to report the hard news. The flipside to exaggerated reporting of trivial matters about politicians is a lack of scrutiny about important issues. Sustained analysis, reporting, and appropriate prominence of complicated stories about other forms of corruption in public life and in the capitalist economy are now often overlooked. Gossip about the private lives of politicians presented as front-page news was apparent in newspaper stories published across Australia in November 2009, which suggested that the South Australian premier, , had been romantically involved with a former parliamentary dining- room waitress. Newspapers that seldom covered any South Australian political news, talk radio stations, and internet news sites were temporarily obsessed with this lurid story. The coverage continued even after the premier declared that the allegations were false and that he would sue both Channel 7’s so-called current-affairs program Sunday Night, which had run the story after paying the woman, and the women’s magazine New Idea, which had published an article. The situation for politicians in the twenty-first century contrasts sharply with that of politicians of the past when indiscretions were not reported due to the convention that, in politics and in sport, what was private remained private. This was the case for 1940s Australian prime ministers, for former prime minister , and for former US president John F. Kennedy. However, the new reality 190 Chapter Eleven was that everything, and everyone, was fair game. Significantly, there was no room for the word “allegations” in most newspaper headlines reporting the Mike Rann story (which Channel 7 later retracted, with an apology). This sordid trend has spread throughout the developed world, not only in Australia. Similarly, the coverage of the foibles of politicians and public servants (the latter referred to as “bureaucrats” by the media) focuses on the accumulation of frequent flier points by the former and pot plants and massages to improve workplace morale and productivity for the latter. Such coverage has been given disproportionate prominence in tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Tabloid headlines from the Melbourne Herald Sun in 2009–10 included: “MPs’ Rorts Scam Rocks Canberra”; “The Gravy Train Rolls Out of Canberra” (13August 2009); “MPs Get Back in Trough” (16 December 2009); “Gold Pass Travel Fiasco” (page 1, 31 January 2010) and “Caught with Hand in Perk Barrel” (1 February 2010). Milder headlines in The Age included: “Ministers Spend Up on Travel” (18–19 December 2009); and “Abbott Denies Book Selling Junket” (22 December 2009). The tabloids ran such stories, which also covered “excesses” and “indulgences” and “undue luxury” by municipal councillors as well as by state and federal politicians, in their news pages. In contrast, well hidden in the business news sections of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers were frequent stories of corruption in business and, sometimes, in government. Only when these stories involved a finance company or a bank swindling a “little person” or a “battler” were they covered in the tabloid television current-affairs programs: Channel 9’s A Current Affair or Channel 7’s Today Tonight. Massive corruption stories, covered to a degree in the press, have included: deceiving investors, which ran from 2008 to 2010; Storm Financial encouraging customers to invest the entire value of their home; a price-fixing scandal in the courier and transport services between 1990 and 1994 reported from 2008 to 2009; price-fixing in the cardboard industry by the company Visy, under Richard Pratt, and AMCOR in the last decade; and insider share-trading, a crime that rarely leads to charges, except in 2005 when the case against high-profile entertainment businessman Steve Vizard gave the crime notoriety. Other extensively reported corruption stories included the WA Inc. scandal involving Bond Corporation, other corporate vehicles, and the Western Australian state premier at the time, Brian Bourke, which was a big news story in the 1980s; and, in the same decade, cases of tax evasion through tax havens, including Switzerland, Jersey, the Cook Islands, and the Bahamas. There is a difference between corporate and political corruption “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 191 in that only political corruption involves elected officials; however, both involve criminal behaviour of highly placed citizens who hold positions of trust. Also, the case of WA Inc. demonstrates the possibility of overlap. Apart from the WA Inc., Vizard, and Visy/Pratt cases, there were several occasions when reports of serious corruption or deceit were given prominence in the news pages. Cases of corruption involving government and government agencies that were given significant media attention include the Australian Wheat Board paying Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq to ensure sales of Australian wheat (Bartos 2006) and the entrepreneurial arm of the Australian Mint’s note-printing branch, Securency International, making payments to obtain contracts in Vietnam and Nigeria. Another widely reported story involving government or political connections with corruption or deception was the story in 2009 about the Liberal Party Opposition and its leader at the time, , embroiled in a scandal about a faked email alleging government corruption. These examples of media scrutiny of corruption might suggest the general media are committed to serious news. However, the fact that this relatively short list covers more than two decades suggests that the news is more often focused on other aspects of politicians.

Bad Habits

The “bad habits” of politicians that exercise the media are frequently not very bad at all. The media often refer to the language and demeanour of politicians in parliament as evidence that politicians are badly behaved and childish. So widespread is the assumption that parliament is a “bearpit” (Collins 2000; Inglis 1996) that an advertisement for a series of debates sponsored by The Wheeler Centre, the St James Ethics Centre, The Age newspaper and IQ2 Australia (an offshoot of a British organisation, Intelligence2) in December 2009 was headed, “Debates like they have in parliament but with grown-ups” (IQ2 Australia 2009). It continued:

In recent times the parliament has done for the noble art of debating what Henry Kissinger did for the Nobel Peace Prize. Oratory takes a back seat to invective. Debaters play the man, leaving the ball to gather dust under well-upholstered green benches. More mud is slung than by a four-wheel drive in a cow paddock.

However the “unparliamentary” demeanour on which most public and media focus falls occurs during question time in the federal parliament. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) began televising question time in the Senate in 1990 and in the House of Representatives in 1991. 192 Chapter Eleven

Murray Goot (2002, 4) and Julianne Schultz (2007, 73) have both suggested that this may have contributed to a decline in the reputation of parliament and politicians. However, visitors to federal or state parliament, viewers of the proceedings of a Senate or House committee on A-PAC TV, or listeners of News Radio broadcasts of parliament are unlikely to see or hear anything like the relatively rare bad behaviour of question time. Poor parliamentary language and behaviour are not the only topics of negative reporting and debate. Politicians’ salary rates are also targeted. One of the great democratic achievements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was payment for members of parliament. Payment for parliamentarians meant that working-class people could enter parliament; it also removed at least one of the temptations for corruption that had existed when parliamentary positions were purely voluntary. Yet, the fact that parliamentarians are paid appears to be regarded by parts of the popular media as the most damning evidence of their venality and corruption. Parliamentary salary rises (often referred to as “grabs”) are traditionally the subject of public disapproval (Jones 2007). The salaries of federal members of parliament are now set by the Remuneration Tribunal, and most state parliamentary salaries are linked to federal salaries. Indeed, parliamentary salaries and allowances in Australian parliaments are strictly regulated and open to public scrutiny (Manthorpe, Madden, and McKeown 2009). Even so, the popular media has continued to make plain their disapproval. In February 2008, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, announced that in recognition of the need for restraint in tough economic times, parliamentary salaries would be frozen until mid-2009, regardless of any decision of the Remuneration Tribunal. When the 2009 salary increase was implemented, increasing backbenchers’ annual salaries to A$131,040, the and the independent Senator wasted no time in condemning it, although the 3 percent increase was less than the 3.9 percent average wage increase across the economy to June 2009 (Hawley 2009). At times in media discourse, politicians’ allowances or “perks” are more controversial than are their salaries. One online opinion poll in 2009 posed the question: “Are politicians paid a fair salary?” Of the respondents, 19 percent agreed, “Yes, they work hard for their money”; 33 percent disagreed, “No, they are paid too much and don’t do enough”; while 47 percent chose the third option, “It’s all the extra perks that bother me” ( 2009). Perks are perceived to include travel allowances—a source of public concern ever since the travel rorts affair of the 1990s—and superannuation benefits, which were reduced in 2004 to levels similar to those of the rest of the community. Various electorate “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 193 allowances and entitlements attracted less public attention until the Australian National Audit Office issued a report on such entitlements in September 2009 (ANAO 2009). According to many media outlets, there is another type of bad habit: a “political scandal.” This term is often used by the media; its scope is wide and its subject matter difficult to contain. John Thompson (2000, 13) defines scandals as “actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response.” That is, an action or an event is not a scandal until it is known. Thompson suggests that there are three types of political scandals: sex scandals, financial scandals, and scandals involving the abuse of political power. Until recent years, there had been few sex scandals in Australian politics. Journalist Stephen Matchett (2006, 27), writing in 2006, indicated that private lives were “always off the record— except when a politician’s behaviour puts them into play.” One of the few exceptions occurred when a politician falsely claimed travel expenses that were linked to an affair with a member of the politician’s staff (Dore 1998, 3). Another was the revelation in 2002 by journalist that when Gareth Evans of the (ALP) recruited Cheryl Kernot, then leader of the Australian Democrats, into the ALP in 1997 the two were having an affair. Oakes argued that he chose to reveal the affair because Kernot had omitted all mention of it from her autobiography, which she purported told the full story of her defection. More recently, news stories about the alleged sexual relationships of politicians in New South Wales and South Australia appear to have gained little ground and had no effect on public opinion. In both cases the alleged relationships had no political or public-interest significance. It seems that sex alone is not sufficient to create a scandal; there must be political implications. Scandals involving the abuse of political power are also relatively rare. In the Godwin Grech affair, the alleged scandal rebounded on the then leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, when it became clear that he was relying on forged emails (invented by Mr Grech, a senior Treasury official) that suggested a constituent in the prime minister’s electorate had received favours from Treasury.

Gresham’s Law and the Dumbing Down of the Media

Negative perceptions of “pollies” should also be placed within the context of a changing media. Simons (2007, 95–7) has identified three models for the delivery of commercial media in Australia today. The first model is commercial free-to-air, which is funded through advertising and the 194 Chapter Eleven content is free to consumers. Commercial television and radio, most suburban and some regional newspapers, and the free newspapers distributed to commuters in some capital cities fall into the free-to-air category. The second model, pay-per-view, is less common; with this model consumers pay for the content, ideally leaving it free of advertising. The third and most common model is one where consumers pay a cover price or subscription fee but advertising also contributes to covering the cost of the content. National and metropolitan newspapers fall into this third model. The ABC is publicly funded and provides content free to consumers. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is also publicly funded but runs advertising. There are now additional digital television stations catering to special interest groups (such as sports fans or children), websites that are either offshoots of news companies or independent, and blogs too numerous to mention. Simons (2007, 59) reported that by the end of 2006, 22 percent of internet users had downloaded news and 26 percent of homes had subscription television. There has been a decline in the quality and number of current-affairs programs on Australian commercial television (Turner 2005) and a tendency to incorporate public relations and promotions into all aspects of the media (Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000). Celebrity gossip and stories about consumer “rip-offs” dominate tabloid television programs, such as Today Tonight and A Current Affair. At times, television presenters themselves have been the story, having been discovered drunk outside a nightclub (Andrew O’Keefe, host of Channel 7’s Deal or No Deal in 2008) or the subject of slurs from a celebrity guest, as in the case of TV chef Gordon Ramsay’s abusive remarks about A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw in June 2009. The number and diversity of alternative sources of news and current affairs have resulted in a “dumbing down” of the media and of public debate and pressure on the media to produce continuous news stories. This situation is not unique to Australia. Taniguchi (2007, 164) has described the “infotain- isation” of political reports on Japanese television. John Lloyd (2004) has written of the decline of current affairs on United Kingdom (UK) television, Ellis Cashmore (2006, 208–26) has discussed the relationship between celebrity and politics, and Tom Fenton (2005) has written of the decline of reporting in the United States. This general decline suggests a kind of Gresham’s law, the dictum (named after a sixteenth-century banker) that “bad currency drives out good.” In other words, in the context of this topic, the downward spiralling race of the media for readership and ratings results in a decline in quality. “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 195

The decline in the quality of current-affairs programs does not, however, suggest a decline in the number of news stories about politicians. The increasing number and diversity of news outlets builds demand for content. The decline in current-affairs programs is not a decline in the amount of content but in the quality of political news—a turn to gossip and the trivial. Central to the problem is the implicit argument that form determines content. The trivialisation of media reporting exists either in production of stories that focus on the reporter as a personality or in news and commentary that concentrates on the “political game,” that is, the race for power or the contest between two personalities within or between parties (Alomes 1991). Often the primary focus of media reports is on how the politician and their image are “travelling” in the opinion polls, which effectively supplants any serious discussion of policy. Another negative consequence of trivialisation is a preference for the drama of scandal over the substance of policy. Roger Bolton, writing about the UK, argues:

In some ways television can encourage a superficial approach to political television. A “scandal” is more attractive than a complex and difficult argument. For example, it is much easier to make a moving short film about the closure of a hospital (usually attributed to “grey unfeeling bureaucrats”) with understandably angry parents and moving pictures of child patients, than to explain the conflict of priorities in a declining economy. (Bolton 1986, 94)

The inadequacies in the media’s coverage of politics are significantly shaped by the image and story or the “moving pictures” values of television. They are then compounded by the increasing influence of spin doctors (Bolton 1986, 104–5) who manage debate, minimise damage, and create media events, stunts, and moments that “theatricalise” and “infantilise” politics (Meyer and Hinchman 2002, 32–5). Thus, an era of “politainment” has emerged in which celebrities not only endorse politicians but themselves become members of the legislature or the executive. This has been most dramatically demonstrated in the United States with actor Ronald Reagan who became president; actor and muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger who became a governor; and professional wrestler Jess Ventura who also became a governor. In Australia, less dramatically, several celebrity candidates have entered parliament, including millionaire merchant-banker Malcolm Turnbull, rock star and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation , skier Kirstie Marshall, and television presenter Maxine McKew. 196 Chapter Eleven

Whereas political reporting was once largely understood as predominantly neutral, contemporary media owners—who value the market highly—have encouraged an openly biased media, an example being ’s in the United States (Lloyd 2004, 121). The scandal-prone and eventually sacked former British Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson has argued that the media has lost courtesy in its approach to politics (Lloyd 2004, 114–5). This is relevant to any discussion about media reporting of misconduct by politicians. Fox commentators, such as Bill O’Reilly (Alexandra 2005), and the shock jocks of talkback radio, such as Rush Limbaugh, provide examples of this approach to news. In Australia, talkback radio hosts Alan Jones and in Sydney and Howard Sattler in Perth have been able to affect the policies and actions of governments that fear the repercussions of disapproval from these radio hosts (Adams and Burton 1997; Masters 2006). Radio talk-show presenters argue that it is their job to scrutinise politicians, a process described in the vernacular by an ABC politics reporter some years ago in a confidential conversation as “to stick it right up them.” However, most of the radio talk-show presenters, certainly Jones and Sattler, are beating “Right” drums, as are the Murdoch tabloids, such as The Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, with their key columnists, including Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt.

Media Bad Habits—Sins of Omission

In contrast with Australian federal politics there has been serious political corruption in several countries, including in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Examples include the 2009 scandals of widespread allowance corruption by politicians in Britain leading to charges against four members of parliament in 2010, and rigged elections and more widespread economic corruption in many developing countries, from China to Indonesia. The Australian media rarely take an interest in financial deception by finance and investment companies and financial advisers— some of whom were paid bonuses of 230 percent by (Washington 2009)—and in insider-trading, oligopoly, and corrupt practices (failure to report difficulties) in the corporate sector. With some exceptions, the Australian media do not prioritise stories about major corruption in the business and private sectors. A key problem affecting the reporting of major corruption stories is the media’s lack of resources for ongoing investigative reporting. News websites—which have no resources except for “bottom feeding” from other organs—and tabloid television find such stories too complex, too “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 197 difficult, and lacking in public and personality appeal. While titillating stories, including reports and photos by so-called citizen journalists who are actually no more than “citizen paparazzi,” sell newspapers and attract viewers, financial and economic investigations are briefly reported by business reporters, or not at all. The 2009 case of a jailed minister of the Crown in Queensland, Gordon Nuttall, with further charges in 2010, and the case of Australia’s second richest man, Richard Pratt, facing charges for insider-trading are rare exceptions. Serious questions of public and private corruption are “small beer” for the news media in contrast to the usually trivial allegations of politicians staying in five-star hotels or having expense allowances to communicate with their constituents. Business corruption, like white-collar crime in general, was also seen as a soft offence by the law until 2009 when there were important changes to the criminalisation of cartel conduct and price- fixing, with jail terms doubled to ten years, maximum fines for lying increased from A$20,000 to A$500,000, and corporate insider-trading fines increased to A$1 million (Age 2010). Because the relatively small misdeeds of politicians, such as misuse of printing and telephone allowances and travel expenses, tend to be white-collar crimes, politicians have tended to benefit from the general lack of interest from the media in following up this type of corruption.

Blurring the Boundaries

There is a special category of bad habits associated with politicians—a type of misconduct that the media associates with greed and venality. This is clearly seen in the negative and scornful responses in the media, and from the public, to parliamentarians’ pay increases. However, such responses can blur the boundaries between an actual crime and the sense of politicians as self-serving to the point where, for both the media and their audiences, a pay rise is comparable to a crime. The question is: Which comes first? Are the media shaping public attitudes about politicians and politics, or do the media merely reflect these attitudes? This question is raised in other contexts in the social sciences, including in psychology, sociology, and education, with issues such as the influence of the media on violence, dietary habits, behaviour, and social and political attitudes (Pennell and Browne 1999; Strasburger 2004). The “Which comes first?” question is almost impossible to resolve. However, certain patterns in media reporting are significant. One pattern is the rise of opinion and its dominance over reporting in newspapers and even more so in talkback radio and current-affairs television. This 198 Chapter Eleven skewed—or mediated—reality in which opinion shapes news inverts the claim of American Fox News: “We Report, You Decide.” The role of the newspaper as a journal of record is in decline, and the rise of opinion media and the role of citizens in television news are on the rise. Interestingly, this abbreviated mode of news, with its preference for the “7-second grab,” is usually the most trusted form of news according to opinion polls (Roy Morgan Research 2007). Accusations of bad habits are not new and are probably inescapable for politicians. However, politics has changed due to several factors, some of which have occurred within the structures of parliament, others within the interface between politics and the media, and between policies and voters. There has been an expansion, an elaboration, of resources and activities: more parliamentary and party staff; spin doctors; focus groups; major polling companies with weekly polls during election campaigns; scripted campaigns with politicians “on message” and unwilling to depart from the script; and government funding for election campaigning and parliamentarians’ allowances. There has also been increased scrutiny of politicians—their performances and their entitlements. Geoff Gallop, former premier of Western Australia, in discussing the 2007 federal election campaign compared the constant scrutiny of political leaders to a “pressure cooker” where the media are always waiting for a mistake (Jones 2007a). He later left parliament due to personal pressures that may have been compounded by this intense media scrutiny. A contemporary media and cultural phenomenon that provides a significant context within which politicians are judged is that of the media and celebrity. It can be asked whether all prominent public figures (sports stars, millionaires, radio and television personalities, business and community leaders, and politicians) are all now judged within the frame once applied only to celebrities of film, music, and glittering international “society.” The media’s formulaic treatment of celebrities involves celebration of success, so-called confidential gossip, and accounts of failed or failing relationships. Since politicians inevitably face a cycle of rise and fall over time, they are seen as suitable subjects for this characteristic media treatment, although the gossip and accounts of their relationships are less common. This treatment offers a further variation on the media depiction of politicians as fatally flawed and as members of an elite capable of misconduct. In the media and in public perceptions today (arguably in the past also), the distinction between conduct that is dishonest, corrupt, or illegal and conduct that is merely political bad behaviour is often blurred. In Australia politicians are under attack, not so much for their actions as for “Got So Many Bad Habits”: Federal Politicians, the Public, and Media 199 their existence. Media attacks on politicians’ bad habits do not necessarily confirm that something bad is happening. They do, however, arise from and exacerbate a lack of trust in the institutions of government engendered by the media which, paradoxically, offers more dramatic coverage combined with less analysis or understanding.

Epilogue: “Shock! Horror!” Double Disillusionment

During 2010, negative attitudes towards politicians as a class were transformed from an undercurrent in Australian public life to a tsunami of criticism. Several adverse perceptions of politicians and political behaviour coalesced, reaching a crescendo during the July federal election campaign. The recurring negative attitudes towards politicians discussed here were reinforced by popular reaction against the limitations of the two major parties. They were condemned for several shared patterns of political behaviour: “me too-ism” in policies in the era of neo-liberal economic consensus; political leaders succumbing to popular fears of “boat people”; policies and speeches shaped by focus-group feedback and by minders’ instructions rather than by leadership; and, above all, negative election advertising, adopted from the US model. Political journalist and commentator Mungo MacCallum (2010) has summarised the electorate’s alienation from politics. Other practical expressions of such attitudes during what was ironically termed the “double disillusionment” election included a low voter turnout, a higher than usual informal vote and, arguably, a populist vote for the Australian Greens as an idealist party and an alternative to the traditional Labor and Liberal parties. Alienation from the two mainstream leaders, Prime Minister (who was seen as having stabbed her predecessor Kevin Rudd in the back) and (a “macho” leader who had himself supplanted his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull) compounded the popular angst. In Australia, perhaps not for the first time, both major political parties and their leaders were “on the nose” with voters. What was even more shocking and horrific than the limitations of the political leaders was the lack of trust in the institution of government, partly engendered by the media. 200 Chapter Eleven

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MEDIA AND PUBLIC DEBATE: THE CASE OF PETER HOLLINGWORTH

SAMANTHA GREEN

During almost two years between 2001 and 2003, the Right Reverend Dr Peter Hollingworth’s tenure as Australia’s twenty-third governor-general significantly shaped Australia’s media and political agenda. Within six months of taking office, Hollingworth was confronted with allegations relating to his previous position as Anglican archbishop of Brisbane. It was claimed that by not appropriately responding to accusations against clergy and Anglican school staff of child sexual abuse, Hollingworth had failed in his duty of care to the victims and failed to ensure that the crimes were effectively dealt with. The claims against Hollingworth emerged during a case in the Supreme Court concerning child abuse in the 1990s at a school owned by the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane. The claims were repeatedly and pervasively reported in the media, creating a situation in which urgent resolution of the controversy became a critical political issue. In turn, questions about the media’s performance were raised: some claimed that the media were fulfilling their proclaimed role as protectors of public morality, while others suggested that the media’s reporting of the episode was sensationalist, misleading, adversarial, and litigious. These various voices—some clamorous and shrill, some defensive, but all passionate—created a new type of scandal in Australian public life, a scandal that demonstrates some of the fractures in Australian politics and the way the media shape ideas about Australian values. This chapter examines the media’s role in this episode and considers the interplay between media practices and political strategies, which heightened and sustained media and public attention on the crisis. Drawing on media theories that explore the emergence of moral panics and scandal, the chapter examines the media’s framing of the episode and argues that the key approach in reporting the episode was to frame a very complex 204 Chapter Twelve situation as a simple morality play. The chapter explores the ways in which the media juxtaposed community expectations of governor-general with Dr Hollingworth’s alleged moral turpitude and betrayal of public confidence. This framing fuelled public anxiety about the purported risk to community values and reservations about the standards required of national institutions. This sense of moral panic further empowered the media and encouraged advocacy groups and political organisations to take up the cause against Hollingworth, arguably increasing the gravity of the scandal’s consequences. Importantly, this chapter explores an episode in recent Australian political history in which the interplay between the media’s central role in informing public opinion and political survival resting upon positive public opinion significantly contributed to the first resignation from office of an Australian head of state.

Methodology

The key methodological approach taken in this study was content and discourse analyses of the media coverage of Dr Hollingworth’s appointment and tenure as governor-general (the period 22 April 2001 to 28 May 2003). Content analysis involved measuring the quantity of newspaper reports of the scandal, identifying the key themes and tone, and establishing which perspectives were publicised and/or suppressed in the coverage. Discourse analysis revealed the patterns in themes and language in the media coverage. Together they allowed an analysis of the form and meaning of the coverage. The newspaper titles selected for examination and analysis were The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier-Mail, The Canberra Times, and The Australian Financial Review. Such scope ensured that coverage by key media outlets relevant to the case was scrutinised and allowed for consideration of variations in coverage. From these six newspapers, 1,420 articles were initially selected for analysis, representing all articles that mention Dr Hollingworth in the period from his appointment to his resignation. This sample was culled to 458 articles for final analysis: eighty-nine articles about the announcement of his appointment, and 369 articles concentrating on three cases widely reported and identified by surveyed media as important catalysts in Dr Hollingworth’s resignation. The chapter also briefly examines two television productions: Sunday presented on Channel 9 on 17 February 2002 and Australian Story that aired on ABC Television on 18 February 2002, both of which generated broad print-media coverage and arguably altered the direction of the scandal. Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 205

In addition, interviews were conducted with Dr Hollingworth and former senior members of Government House staff who had been involved in devising strategies for rebuttals and responses to allegations. Also, written statements were provided by journalists who had reported the scandal as it unfolded in the public domain. Material gathered through interviews and written statements can supply authenticity and perspective, as well as deeper insight, into media practices and political strategies at times of crisis. Given the sensitivities involved in the case and the need for confidentiality in making known relevant but previously undisclosed material, some interview participants elected to remain anonymous. The provision for anonymity allowed for a more candid discussion of the episode and for more relevant data to be collected.

The Case of Peter Hollingworth

The Right Reverend Dr Peter Hollingworth was appointed Australia’s twenty-third governor-general in April 2001 while serving as archbishop of the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane. It was the first time a cleric had served as Australia’s governor-general. In appointing Hollingworth, the prime minister observed that “neither religious conviction nor involvement in a particular church is a prerequisite for the role of governor-general” (G. Henderson 2001). Prior to his appointment, Hollingworth was well known in the community for his many years of work with the charitable organisation the Brotherhood of St Laurence. Hollingworth was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1976 and an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1988 for his service to the community. In 1987, he was named Father of the Year; in 1991, ; and in 1998 he was named one of Australia’s national living treasures. Media coverage of his appointment as governor-general focused primarily on the moral dimensions of the role and his commendable capacity to fulfil them; it was a role described by politicians and the media as providing the nation’s “moral leadership” (Stott Despoja 2001), as “interpreting the nation to itself” (Charlton 2001), and as “the moral conscience of the nation” (Charlton 2001). The Age reported that Hollingworth’s appointment was “as welcome as it is surprising” (Age 2001). The Australian was similarly positive, describing Hollingworth as “well equipped to perform the vital task of exhibiting moral guidance and upholding [Australia’s] national values” (Australian, 23 April 2001a). Hollingworth’s appointment received endorsement from the major political parties, the prime minister describing him as a person “who has 206 Chapter Twelve actively and compassionately involved himself in the ... life of the nation, [and the leader of the Opposition praising him as] ... a man of very distinguished background” (I. Henderson 2001). This shared political support for the appointment prompted some journalists to describe Hollingworth as “someone [the] prime minister … can feel relaxed and comfortable about” (Atkins 2001) and to predict that the prime minister’s “decision [was] one he should not regret” (Australian, 23 April 2001a). Within six months of taking office, Hollingworth was confronted by allegations relating to his previous position as the Anglican archbishop of Brisbane: claims that in response to accusations of child sexual abuse against clergy and Anglican school staff, he had failed both in his duty of care to the victims and in making certain that the crimes were effectively dealt with. In a case before the Supreme Court concerning the abuse of children by a boarding master at Preparatory School, the court heard that Hollingworth had not only known that the school principal and school council had attempted to cover up the allegations against the boarding master but had also failed to support or cooperate with parents in their efforts to “force the school to implement a protocol for dealing with accusations of sexual abuse” (Gearing, Cole, and Franklin 2001). In the wake of these allegations, Hollingworth and the diocese maintained that Hollingworth had only nominally been president of the school council:

no more than an ex-officio role … without a vote [and with] … no involvement in the normal conduct of the affairs of the school [and] … no knowledge … of anything untoward at the school … [until] some days [after the accused] … was charged by police. (Governor-General 2001)

The Supreme Court heard evidence that it was the school council, rather than the diocese, that had taken responsibility for the care and counselling of those involved. The diocese maintained that the council had made a “decision on legal and insurance advice that it should ... say nothing publicly, but privately care for the students ... to protect them ... from publicity and any further anguish ... [and] that the council had advised the diocese and Hollingworth ‘not to intervene and to make no public comment’” (Anglican Diocese of Brisbane 2001). Similarly, Hollingworth had stated that the council’s attitude was one of “we can handle this, this is our issue.”1 Consistent with Rodney Tiffen’s research, which suggests that “political scandals [often] emerge … through the launching of judicial proceedings” (Tiffen 1999, 46), the proceedings and findings of the Supreme Court case

1 Interview between Dr Hollingworth and the author, 8 August 2007. Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 207 were widely reported in all media surveyed. The tacit authority and credibility of the judicial system allowed the media to report details of the case routinely and without fear of legal penalty. Media coverage highlighted the most publicly comprehensible—often the moral aspects— of the story, focusing upon Hollingworth’s role as the head of the diocese that owned the school and claiming that he “bore corporate … [and] personal responsibility as the principal pastor of the diocese” (Porter 2003, 21). It was alleged that Hollingworth “personally received complaints about abuse at the school and did not take any action” (Gearing, Cole, and Franklin 2001). Headlines such as “Letter to Prelate Told of Cover-Up” (Gearing 2001) and “Hollingworth Failed to Help Abused Girls” (Canberra Times 2001) portrayed Hollingworth as unsympathetic to the victims of child sexual abuse. Nearly 85 percent of surveyed newspaper articles relating to the case contrasted Hollingworth’s alleged failing in his duty of care to the victims with his established reputation as an advocate for the underprivileged and the community expectations of the governor-general. This supports previous research that controversy is considered most newsworthy when it “runs against [the] … established persona [of the accused] … [and] involves public institutions … [and] important moral themes” (Gans 1980, 149; see also Tiffen 2002, 136). Similarly, more than 70 percent of articles highlighted the court’s decision to award the victim an additional A$400,000 in exemplary damages, implying that this was verification of Hollingworth’s inaction and neglect and evidence of his betrayal of societal values and public confidence. This coverage plainly provides evidence for Critcher’s opinion that an “episode, institution [or] person … [when] defined as a threat to societal norms, [receives] … condemnation, and sensational and stereotyped treatment by the media, including the construction of a ‘folk devil’” (Critcher 2002, 527). The media’s portrayal of Hollingworth as the “villain” in the story, accompanied by expressions of outrage at the horror and trauma of child sexual abuse, was critical in creating condemnation of him in the public sphere. The media coverage fuelled community concern about the values purported by the governor-general and anxiety about what was happening to children in community institutions. This rising sense of public anxiety and moral panic sanctioned the media’s condemnation of Hollingworth and encouraged advocacy groups to take up the cause against him. Scandal in a political context is more than an individual act of wrongdoing; it is, as Veronique Pujas claims, the public exposure of a “transgression of social expectations … a betrayal of public … morality … and confidence … in political institutions” (Pujas 2002, 52). 208 Chapter Twelve

The deepening sense of crisis and the increasing media coverage impelled neither Hollingworth nor a spokesperson for Government House to publicly comment on the controversy. This was due partly to a lack of agreement among senior Government House staff over whether the institution:

should have any involvement [in refuting incorrect accusations; some considering that the crisis was] wholly to do with Dr Hollingworth in a former capacity … [and] for the diocese and Dr Hollingworth personally to respond to.2

As well, and in step with Tiffen’s findings, a refusal to comment is often adopted early on in “the hope that the rebuttal of allegations will not be required” (Tiffen 1999, 128), Both Hollingworth and the staff at Government House believed that if “left alone ... the crisis would pass … and media coverage reduce.”3 On the contrary, their silence prompted media to observe that “sexual abuse was not an issue of sufficient gravity to be given the then archbishop’s, and now governor-general’s, immediate attention, and that his silence further implicated him in what could be seen as a cover-up” (Bantick 2001). Hetty Johnston, child protection advocate and executive director of Bravehearts, an organisation dedicated to fighting child sexual abuse, joined media commentators in arguing that “there is never a time to be silent about [the] sexual abuse of children” (Australian 2001b). In forty-five of the forty-six articles quoting her opinion of the circumstances in Toowoomba, Johnston’s comments complemented claims by journalists that Hollingworth had failed to protect children in the care of the Anglican Church. The media upheld Johnston’s comments as proof of Hollingworth’s mishandling of child- abuse allegations. Several organisations of which Hollingworth was patron—some devoted to helping victims of abuse—asked Hollingworth to relinquish his role. Coverage highlighted the loss of confidence in Hollingworth and in the Office of Governor-General by well-known, highly reputable organisations. Commentators suggested that in setting themselves apart from Hollingworth, the organisations were showing enlightened and proactive attitudes towards child sexual abuse and, in so doing, firmly securing their own ongoing public support. Commentators praised the “courage [of the organisations in] … doing what the Prime

2 Interview between a Government House staff member and the author, 6 August 2007. 3 Interview between a Government House staff member and the author, 6 August 2007. Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 209

Minister … [would] not [that is] … dismiss Dr Hollingworth” (Grattan and Allard 2002). Using language evoking risk, anxiety, and concerns about safety, the media upheld the actions taken by the organisations as evidence that Hollingworth was unsuitable for the role of governor-general and as validation of preceding media reporting. This steady supply of new information and opinion, over which Hollingworth and Government House lacked control, increased media and public attention on the crisis and, together with Hollingworth’s refusal to respond to allegations, denied Government House an early chance to influence the content of media coverage and the direction and pace at which the crisis developed. With increasing calls for Hollingworth to explain his role in the Toowoomba Preparatory School case, the prime minister, who publicly supported Hollingworth, advised him to respond to the allegations. Hollingworth issued a written statement expressing his concern:

some people would use [his] silence not only to draw into controversy the standing of the Office of Governor-General, but also to make completely unfounded allegations against [him] … personally. [He expressed his] absolute abhorrence of all forms of child abuse … [and] express[ed] profound sympathy to all victims of child sexual abuse … including those who [had] suffered … [at] Toowoomba Preparatory School. (Governor- General 2001)

However, Hollingworth’s failure to apologise to the victims of abuse and his admission that “legal and insurance considerations [had] … inhibited [the diocese and school council] … taking a more active role, and more overtly expressing concern for the physical, emotional, and spiritual welfare of those affected” (Governor-General 2001) further increased his moral culpability in the eyes of media commentators, the Opposition, and child protection groups. Media commentators endorsed the opinion of these groups that without a more satisfactory account of events and an “acknowledgment of wrongdoing … [Hollingworth’s] fitness to continue as governor-general would be in question … [and the] Office of Governor-General … tarnished” (Mottram, Farouque, and Szego 2001; Shanahan 2001; Shanahan et al. 2001). Coverage highlighted the Opposition’s claim that the prime minister had not exercised good judgement and integrity in his appointment of Hollingworth alongside the prime minister’s assertion that “suggestion of the governor-general’s involvement in a cover-up … was ridiculous” (Lawson 2001). Commentators speculated that the prime minister, in assuming various responsibilities traditionally the function of the governor-general, was “relishing … [his] 210 Chapter Twelve newly defined role” (Shanahan 2001) in which he could “speak for the nation [and] represent all Australians” (Lawson 2001), inferring that the prime minister’s support of Hollingworth was motivated only by personal aspirations of a more presidential-style prime-ministership. The media’s focus on the political debate and on the weakening bipartisan support for Hollingworth cast the story as an issue of mounting political controversy. This gave the crisis greater legitimacy in the public sphere and strengthened arguments about the risk to community values and standards upheld by national institutions. Media coverage of the case soon prompted more victims of abuse to come forward. In February 2002, it was alleged that Hollingworth had allowed a retired to continue to minister despite allegations that the bishop had abused a schoolgirl during the 1950s. In 1995, when the woman informed the Brisbane diocese of the abuse, mediation attempts were organised at which, according to the victim, the bishop offered to resign his permission to officiate but was refused by Hollingworth. According to reports in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, the woman in question had seen coverage of the Toowoomba Preparatory School case and, wanting to “make sure that the truth [came] … out about Dr Hollingworth” (Age 2002a), contacted a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald. The journalist, feeling that the woman “was sincere, [and with] … never any reason to disbelieve her, [accepted the woman’s perspective uncritically]. Having obtained [the woman’s] ... trust, [the journalist] secured exclusive media access to her … and reported her [alleged] story that [Dr] Hollingworth had over several years ignored her demands for action”4. The journalist claimed that Hollingworth was dismissive of the woman’s complaints, suggesting that Hollingworth believed that “the two of them were at fault; [not] believ[ing] at any stage that the bishop was primarily responsible”5, and labelled the woman’s ignored demands for justice a “disgrace, and a continuation of the abuse, which began many years ago with [Hollingworth’s] … colleague’s criminal behaviour” (Roberts 2002). In portraying the story as a morality tale and adopting the role of victim advocate, The Sydney Morning Herald subordinated media autonomy in favour of emotional involvement, reinforcing and legitimising what it supposed were dominant societal values. This prompted other media outlets surveyed to repeat the Sydney Morning Herald’s claims and

4 Statement made by journalist to the author, 22 August 2007. (It was agreed at the time of the statement that the journalist’s identity would remain anonymous). 5 Statement made by journalist to the author, 22 August 2007. (It was agreed at the time of the statement that the journalist’s identity would remain anonymous). Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 211 commentary, with most adding further opinion and conjecture and creating what seemed a common media opinion. In fact, only 38 percent of newspaper articles relating to the case were written by the journalist to whom the woman had told her story, suggesting that editors and journalists are keen consumers of each other’s news and verifying Pujas’s opinion that “saturation coverage [and the corresponding sense of crisis is] … beyond the control of any one media organisation” (Pujas 2002, 63). Days after the publication of the woman’s story, Hollingworth gave an interview to ABC Television’s Australian Story. At the interview, having previously told the producer he believed the girl to have been sixteen or seventeen, Hollingworth said:

this is something that happened [between] a young priest and a young woman, in a church-run hostel in the country, my belief is that this was not sex abuse, there was no suggestion of rape or anything like that, quite the contrary. My information is that it was rather the other way around, and I don’t want to say any more than that, but I can tell you that we made every effort we could to try and find a professional mediation … I feel deeply sad for the woman concerned. (Grasswill 2005, 91)

However, the Sydney Morning Herald report had claimed the girl had been fourteen. In order to address this discrepancy, Hollingworth revised his previous answer, saying:

the great tragedy about this situation is that … it occurred between a young priest and a teenage girl who was under the age of consent. I believe she was more than fourteen and I also understand that many years later in adult life their relationship resumed and it was partly a pastoral relationship and it was partly something more. (Grasswill 2005, 91)

The interview transcript shows that, prior to recording the second answer, the producer suggested that they “do the whole thing again”6 giving Hollingworth and Government House staff the impression that the first answer was to be discarded in favour of the second. However, despite this, the producer maintained that “there was neither an undertaking nor any request to delete or discard the substance of the original response” (Grasswill 2005, 92) and that providing such an undertaking would, indeed, be contrary to ABC policy, which states that all data, from the time of recording, is the property of the ABC. When the program aired, the edited version of Hollingworth’s answer clearly connected the teenager’s

6 Transcript was sighted in interview between Dr Hollingworth and the author, 8 August 2007. 212 Chapter Twelve minority status with his claim that this was not a case of sexual abuse, a connection not made in his revised answer. Moreover, the edited version seemingly validated earlier media representations of Hollingworth as society’s “villain,” depicting him as apparently confirming, in his own words, his questionable personal attitudes to child sexual abuse and betrayal of community values:

the great tragedy about this situation is that … it occurred between a young priest and a teenage girl who was under the age of consent. I believe she was more than fourteen years old and I also understand that many years later in adult life, their relationship resumed and it was partly a pastoral relationship and it was partly something more. My belief is that this was not sex abuse. There was no suggestion of rape or anything like that. Quite the contrary, my information is that it was rather the other way around. And I don’t want to say any more than that. (Grasswill 2005, 94)

At the same time, Hollingworth released a written statement of defence, alleging that there were “serious distortions in the way the issues [had been] … projected in the media generally” (Governor-General 2002a). Unaware of the impending media and public outrage over his comments broadcast on Australian Story, Hollingworth did not acknowledge or apologise for his seeming indifference to the victim and poor understanding of the issue of child sexual abuse. Instead, in a detailed response to allegations and in an apparent attempt to minimise the importance of his role in the case, Hollingworth provided much complex detail about the structure of the Anglican Church and its governance procedures. Hollingworth endeavoured to reaffirm his own inherent morality and accordance with community values, expressing the view that the “sexual abuse of children [was] totally abhorrent … one of the most repugnant and serious of crimes, [and one that] can never be condoned or excused, [and maintaining that he had worked] … to address [the] issue to the best of his ability over forty years in [his] various roles in the community” (Governor-General 2002a). Yet the muddle of complicated detail, self-interested claims, and unresolved allegations only further compounded allegations, with subsequent reporting strongly focusing and commenting on Hollingworth’s remarks broadcast on Australian Story. The few articles that reported Hollingworth’s written response ran the message immediately following a rehashing of his supposed wrongdoing. In fact, media coverage upheld Hollingworth’s attempted defence, including his lack of apology, as proof that he lacked compassion for victims of child sexual abuse, giving evidence to Tiffen’s claim that poorly devised and directed strategies can Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 213

“provide … ammunition to discredit an [individual] … or an institution on an issue of public morality, [and can often] … cause [further] damage to the public image of the accused” (Tiffen 1999, 6). Media coverage continued to contrast Hollingworth’s alleged misconduct, and dubious personal views, with the suffering of the victim and the moral leadership expected of a governor-general, evidenced in statements such as “Dr Hollingworth has demonstrated a lack of judgement … a callous disregard for victims of abuse” (McGillion 2002) and “the governor-general should be a symbol of national unity, a rallying point, especially in times of trouble … [and have] a personal background as free from controversy as it is possible to have” (Sydney Morning Herald 2002). Media commentators called for Hollingworth’s resignation or dismissal, contending that as “accusations [had] … reached such critical mass, [the] … increasing damage to his personal standing and that of the office, [made] Dr Hollingworth’s position … untenable” (Grattan 2002; Walker 2002a). Indeed, more than 73 percent of newspaper articles published after the broadcasting of the Australian Story program and the subsequent written statement included assertions that Hollingworth must resign or be dismissed from office, made clear in headlines such as “It’s Time Now for Honourable and Decent Action” (Walker 2002b), and “Standing Down Only Way to Save Office” (Steketee 2002). Days later, and in response to media and public indignation over his comments made on air, Hollingworth gave an impromptu interview to media gathered outside the gates of Government House. He claimed that he had not “properly heard the question posed to him in the Australian Story interview, and was concerned that his answer gave the impression that he condoned child sexual abuse” (Grasswill 2005, 96). He maintained that he had been speaking about the adult relationship between the bishop and the woman, not the abuse of her as a teenager, and he offered “an unreserved apology to the woman … and the whole of the Australian public” (Gray and Dodson 2002). He went on to repeat an apology made the previous day in which he stated that “there are no circumstances under which any blame can be attached to any underage person involved in such an incident” (Governor-General 2002b). Despite Hollingworth’s public apologies, other media outlets pressured the ABC to make public the unedited tapes. On viewing these, including the producer’s directive to re- record an answer from Hollingworth, 70 percent of subsequent articles pertaining to the Australian Story program agreed that the tapes “showed … that he was talking directly, and only, about the abuse at [the boarding school]” (Grasswill 2005, 97). The media’s denunciation of Hollingworth confirmed that moral culpability had by now been clearly determined and 214 Chapter Twelve reinforced public condemnation of Hollingworth illustrated by news polls showing that “up to 77 percent of respondents believed that he should no longer occupy the office” (Age 2002b; Age 2002c; Lewis 2002). Another allegation, first aired in February 2002 on Channel 9’s Sunday claimed that Hollingworth had allowed a priest to continue ministering despite knowing that the priest had a history of paedophilia. Interestingly, this claim was not subject to intense media scrutiny until May 2003 when the Report of the Board of Inquiry into Past Handling of Complaints of Sexual Abuse in the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane was released. Having examined Hollingworth’s written evidence to the inquiry, the board concluded that he “had no recollection of the true facts [and had, as a result] … engaged in the reconstruction of events” (O’Callaghan and Briggs 2003, 418). The inquiry submitted that “Dr Hollingworth’s decision to allow a known paedophile to continue as a … priest was untenable” (O’Callaghan and Briggs 2003, 418). However, contrary to media coverage of the Toowoomba Preparatory School case, the inquiry found “no evidence of … [Hollingworth’s] response to claims of abuse [in that situation being] … ‘unreasonable or inadequate’” (O’Callaghan and Briggs 2003, 318). Notably, the inquiry observed that a “great deal of publicity [regarding the case] was incorrect … exaggerated [and] … sensationalist ... [and] promote[ed] an inaccurate representation of the case among members of the public” (O’Callaghan and Briggs 2003, 253). The inquiry also acknowledged Hollingworth’s “efforts to resolve the dispute [between the bishop and the woman] by mediation as appropriate and reasonable” (O’Callaghan and Briggs, 2003, 318, 338) and recognised that in both cases, “legal and insurance considerations … [prevented Hollingworth] mak[ing] any comment to complainants that acknowledged allegations as true” (O’Callaghan and Briggs 2003, 338). On immediate release of the inquiry’s findings, Hollingworth issued another written statement conceding that he had made a “serious error of judgement [in allowing a known paedophile to continue ministering, and] … would reach a different conclusion today” (Walker 2003). He expressed his “regret at the handling of [the] matter and apologise[d] to the complainant and his family” (Governor-General 2003a). Media coverage gave little attention to the facts of the inquiry’s more positive findings and again overlooked Hollingworth’s apology. Instead, reporting focused upon Hollingworth’s decision to allow a known paedophile to continue ministering and his failure to accurately recount and inform the inquiry of important details, evidenced in headlines such as “G-G Protected Sex Abuser” (Wilson and Emerson 2003), and “Sex Inquiry Shames G-G: Hollingworth Told False Story” (Parnell 2003). Moreover, nearly 40 percent Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 215 of articles referring to the inquiry rehashed and made further comment on Hollingworth’s handling of allegations of abuse in Toowoomba and the alleged abuse of the woman by the bishop despite the inquiry’s endorsement of Hollingworth’s actions in these cases. The media, in its assumed role as protector of public morality, claimed legitimacy in judging what was and was not reasonable behaviour in the circumstances. Coverage drew attention to the continuing political storm, reaffirming calls by the Australian Labor Party for a royal commission into the sexual abuse of children, arguing that it would “provide national and consistent standards to improve the way public institutions deal with the issue of child sexual abuse” (Banham 2003; Grattan 2003). Although the prime minister reiterated his support for Hollingworth, the media speculated that their established allegiance was coming apart at the seams and that the governor-general’s tenure was soon to be over, qualifying that Hollingworth had done nothing to warrant dismissal “while in office” (Peake 2003). A week after the findings of the May 2003 inquiry were released, it was revealed that a woman, who has since committed suicide, had launched a civil action against Hollingworth, alleging that he had raped her at a youth camp nearly forty years earlier and was seeking damages. In view of the gravity of the allegation, Hollingworth stepped down from office temporarily while the legitimacy of the case could be determined. Days later, and despite the rape allegation being wholly and unconditionally dismissed, Hollingworth resigned from office, saying that the “continuing controversy surrounding [him] … made the effective discharge of [his] … community role very difficult to fulfil” (Governor-General 2003b). He claimed that the controversy had not weakened the Office of the Governor-General and refuted suggestions that his resignation was a result of misconduct. Unsurprisingly, the media portrayed Hollingworth’s departure from office as a long-awaited admission of guilt and speculated that his decision was a political necessity, driven by the prime minister’s concerns about his and his government’s reputation given that Hollingworth’s supposed betrayal of community values was not in step with the government’s often-espoused endorsement of family values. Hollingworth’s moral culpability—in the media and public spheres— and consequent resignation from office can be attributed not only to media coverage but also to the defence strategies used by Hollingworth and Government House to scurry through the crisis. The media’s frenzied desire for news throughout the prolonged life of the scandal clearly elicited inconsistent attempts at defence, which shifted from refusing to comment to giving detailed explanations of events, from downplaying 216 Chapter Twelve

Hollingworth’s individual role in particular cases to reaffirming his inherent morality and decency. Government House senior staff claim that their shifting efforts to refute allegations was partly due to receiving little information from either Hollingworth or the Anglican Church’s Brisbane diocese concerning allegations made and those which might ensue. In “not knowing what was coming over the hill … [Government House staff were unable] to produce a strategy to combat … stories that came out in the media” (Interview with Government House staff member “X,” 30 August 2007) and, consequently, were unable to determine the direction and the pace of the scandal. Hollingworth claimed that he, too, was not fully informed of all relevant details concerning the cases of abuse but maintained, also, that Government House staff, while experienced in their own fields, had little familiarity with the cut and thrust of crisis management and were “ill-equipped to handle the controversy.”7 Moreover, often dissatisfied with advice from staff, Hollingworth commonly sought guidance from family and friends and, towards the end of the scandal, hired a public relations and media specialist whose instructions to him were frequently at odds with those of his staff. Hollingworth’s inclination to consider and act on the advice of many added to the overall media and crisis-management strategy being fundamentally ad hoc and entirely unsuccessful in rebutting the layer of allegations. With the scandal generating few lasting political or personal consequences for anyone other than Hollingworth, it seems Tiffen is correct in claiming that the “primary impact [of a scandal] is [most often] … the public shaming of the accused” (Tiffen 1999, 185). The political debate was significant in that it escalated the intensity of the scandal in the media and public spheres, both the leader of the Australian Labor Party and the leader of the Australian Democrats publicly expressed their reservations about the prime minister’s integrity and judgement, and there were suggestions that the prime minister was responsible for the crisis and its resolution. However, the political debate did not result in lasting harm to the reputation of the prime minister nor in a significant drop in his government’s popularity. Similarly, the media’s assumed role as defender of public morality and advocate for victims meant that extensive debate about the issue of child sexual abuse or the procedures of institutions in handling claims of abuse were not thoroughly explored or debated. The scandal did not result in any significant development of national standards to ensure public institutions handle the issue of child sexual abuse more appropriately, supporting Pujas’s research, which suggests a “shifting and

7 Interview between Dr Hollingworth and the author, 8 August 2007.

Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 217 unpredictable connection between the media’s representation of a scandal and the implementation of corrective policy reform” (Pujas 2002, 55). With few enduring outcomes, it seems evident that the intensity the scandal assumed and the corresponding ruin of Hollingworth’s moral standing in public life was disproportionate to his moral breach. In fact, the episode illustrates Tiffen’s claim that it is not “the seriousness of the offence itself … [which determines] the prominence … a scandal achieves … [and] the severity of its consequences” (Tiffen 1999, 5); rather, it is the interplay between media practices and political strategies that operate to different purposes but share a common focus in “the production of information and interpretation of words and events” (Pujas 2002, 55).

Works Cited

Age. 2001. “A Fine Choice for Governor-General.” 23 April. —. 2002a. “Speak Out on Sex Abuse, Group Urges.” 17 February. —. 2002b. “Sunday Poll.” 24 February. —. 2002c. “Snapshot of Opinion on Hollingworth.” 25 February. Atkins, Dennis. 2001. “PM at Ease with His Choice.” Courier-Mail. 23 April. Anglican Diocese of Brisbane 2001. “Statement by the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane.” 19 December. . Australian. 2001a. “Hollingworth: Wise Choice for a Difficult Job.” 23 April. —. 2001b. “Hollingworth Must Heal Wounds of Abuse.” 12 December. —. 2001c. “Hollingworth to Break his Silence.” 18 December. Banham, Cynthia. 2003. “Governor-General Cut Loose.” Sydney Morning Herald. 5 May. Bantick, Christopher. 2001. “Continued Silence Speaks Volumes.” Australian. 18 December. Canberra Times. 2001. “Hollingworth Failed to Help Abused Girls.” 15 December. Charlton, Peter. 2001. “A Man of Moderation.” Courier-Mail. 24 April. Critcher, Chas. 2002. “Media, Government and Moral Panic: The Politics of Paedophilia in Britain 2000–1.” Journalism Studies 3: 521–35. Gans, Herbert J. 1980. Deciding What’s News. London: Constable and Co. Publishers. Gearing, Amanda. 2001. “Letter to Prelate Told of Cover-Up”. Courier- Mail. 22 November. 218 Chapter Twelve

Gearing, Amanda, Malcolm Cole, and Matthew Franklin. 2001. “Former State Law Chief Told Hollingworth of Abuse Fears.” Courier-Mail. 11 December. Governor-General. 2001. “Toowoomba Preparatory School.” Media release. 19 December. . —. 2002a. “Statement by the Governor-General.” Media release. 20 February. . —. 2002b. “Statement by the Official Secretary to the Governor-General.” 24 February. —. 2003a “Statement by the Governor-General.” Media release. 1 May. . —. 2003b. “Statement to the Nation.” 28 May. . Grasswill, Helen. 2005. “The Gilded Cage.” In Australian Story: Behind the Scenes, edited by Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 91–102. Sydney: ABC Books. Grattan, Michelle. 2002a. “It May Be Time for Him to Go for the Sake of the Office.” Sydney Morning Herald. 18 February. —. 2003. “A Damaging Defence of the Indefensible.” Age. 4 May. Grattan, Michelle, and Tom Allard. 2002. “Hollingworth Regrets, but Fate Now Rests with Howard.” Sydney Morning Herald. 21 February. Gray, Darren and Louise Dodson. 2002. “Hollingworth Clings to Office before Royal Tour.” Age. 25 February. Henderson, Gerard. 2001. “Good Man, Bad Choice.” Age. 24 April. Henderson, Ian. 2001. “Archbishop the Next G-G.” Australian. 23 April. Lawson, Kirsten. 2001. “Crisis Threat to G-G’s Term.” Canberra Times. 22 December. Lewis, Steve. 2002. “Poll Finds 60pc Against.” Australian Financial Review. 22 February. McGillion, Chris. 2002. “A Better G-G Perhaps than Man of the Cloth.” Sydney Morning Herald. 19 February. Mottram, Murray, Farah Farouque, and Julie Szego. 2001. “G-G Faces Further Scrutiny.” Age. 21 December. O’Callaghan, Peter and . 2003. Report of the Board of Inquiry into Past Handling of Complaints of Sexual Abuse in the Anglican Diocese of Brisbane. Brisbane: Anglican Church Brisbane Diocese. Parnell, Sean. 2003. “Sex Inquiry Shames G-G: Hollingworth Told False Story.” Courier-Mail. 2 May. Peake, Ross. 2003. “No New Endorsement from PM as More Tell Hollingworth to Go.” Canberra Times. 8 May. Porter, Muriel. 2003. Sex, Power and the Church. Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books. Media and Public Debate: The Case of Peter Hollingworth 219

Pujas, Veronique. 2002. “Explaining the Wave of Scandal: The Exposure of Corruption in Italy, France and Spain.” In Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices, edited by Raymond Kuhn, and Erik Neveu, 52–65. London: Routledge. Roberts, Greg. 2002. “Hollingworth Had Final Word on Abuse, Victim Told.” Sydney Morning Herald. 26 February. Shanahan, Dennis. 2001. “This Leaves the Office Tarnished, the Man Diminished.” Australian. 20 December. Shanahan, Dennis, Brian Woodley, Ashleigh Wilson, and Adrian McGregor. 2001. “Labor Turns Heat on G-G.” Australian. 21 December. Steketee, Mike. 2002. “Standing Down the Only Way to Save Office.” Australian. 22 February. Stott Despoja, Natasha. 2001. “The Last Governor-General.” Australian Financial Review. 26 April. Sydney Morning Herald. 2002. “A Dysfunctional Governor-General.” 20 February. Tiffen, Rodney. 1999. Scandals: Media, Politics and Corruption in Contemporary Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. —. 2002. “Media Escalation and the Political Anti-Climax in Australia’s ‘Cash for Comment Scandal’.” In Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices, edited by Raymond Kuhn, Raymond and Erik Neveu, 135–42. London: Routledge. Walker, Jamie. 2003. “G-G Admits Error of Judgement.” Australian. 2 May. Walker, Tony. 2002a. “Australia May Soon Be Looking for Another G- G.” Australian Financial Review. 18 February. —. 2002b. “It’s Time Now for Honourable and Decent Action.” Australian Financial Review. 22 February. Wilson, Ashleigh and Scott Emerson. 2003. “G-G Protected Sex Abuser.” Australian. 2 May. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BUYING THE GOOD SOCIETY: THE RISE OF AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL CONSUMERISM

ARIADNE VROMEN AND RODNEY SMITH

Traditional forms of citizen engagement and participation have declined in Western democracies, such as Australia. Simultaneously, new types of citizen engagement have emerged, which are not yet well understood. These include political consumerism where citizens make decisions to either buy or boycott goods and services for ethical and political reasons, such as environmental or human-rights concerns. Introductory analysis of the type of citizens who engage in this growing form of political participation is provided here. This chapter argues that political consumerism in Australia is distinctive in that it is not centred on fair trade and issues of social justice as it is in Europe. Instead, campaigns in Australia are underpinned by four distinct goals: (1) social justice (e.g. fair trade and buying indigenous foods), (2) environmental sustainability (e.g. changing energy sources), (3) animal rights (e.g. boycotting fur, buying free-range eggs), and (4) communal identity (e.g. buying Australian or buying locally). Political consumerism is a contentious idea. A typical definition is provided by Deitlind Stolle, Marc Hooghe and Michelle Micheletti:

[P]olitical consumerism … can be defined as consumer choice of producers and products based on political or ethical considerations, or both. Political consumers choose particular producers or products because they want to change institutional or market practices. (Stolle et al. 2005, 246)

This definition is elaborated upon in Table 13-1, adapted from the work of Jørgen Goul Andersen and Mette Tobiasen (2004). The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 221

Table 13-1. Delineation between political and non-political consumerism

Political consumerism: Non-political consumerism: To influence other actors To satisfy personal need or toward a collective to comply with religious outcome. and/or personal norm.

1. 2. 3. 4. Collective/ Individual/ Normative Utilitarian organised unorganised

Abstaining Mobilised Individual e.g. Religious from buying boycott political or prohibition (negative) actions ethical or ethical boycott choice actions Ordinary consumption Deliberately Mobilised Individual e.g. Ethnic buying “buycott”/ political solidarity (positive) solidarity or ethical actions purchases Source: Adapted from Goul Andersen and Tobiasen (2004, 204).

The definition and Table 13-1 are helpful. They indicate that political consumerism can include “buycotting”—as well as boycotting—goods and services; it can be action taken on an individual’s initiative or as part of a wider campaign to mobilise consumers, and it can stem from a range of possible political or ethical motivations. Nonetheless, the definition and figure are ambiguous about the boundary between “ethical”—or “normative”—consumerism that is non-political and ethical consumerism that is political. Later, this chapter notes for example that nationalist anxiety about “jobs going overseas” is among the concerns associated with higher-than-average levels of political consumerism among Australians. While buying Australian out of “ethnic solidarity” would not count as political consumerism for Andersen and Tobiasen, it can be suggested that such consumption does, apparently, have a political dimension. Ethical consumerism is political whenever it is intended to help bring about collective change. As the example of the nationalist Buy Australia campaign suggests, boycotts and buycotts may be conservative as well as progressive. 222 Chapter Thirteen

Australian Political Consumerism: From the Margins to the Mainstream

In Australia, as in other Western capitalist democracies, political consumerism has become a “new, independent form of political participation and channel of political influence” (Goul Andersen and Tobiasen 2004, 203). The 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (ASSA) asked 1,914 respondents whether they had or would engage in a range of political activities (Wilson et al. 2007).1 About one-third of the Australians surveyed had, in the words of the ASSA questionnaire item, “boycotted, or deliberately bought, certain products for political, ethical, or environmental reasons” within the past year, while about half had done so at some stage in their lives. As Table 13-2 illustrates, political consumerism was the second most prevalent political activity; the first was signing a petition (see also Bean and Denemark 2007, 63–4). Boycotts and buycotts have not always loomed so large in Australian political culture. Survey evidence from the 1980s and the 2000s suggests that during the past two decades political consumerism has increased from a minority fringe activity to one engaged in by about 50 percent of the population (see Table 13-3). In the mid-1980s, from 5 percent to 10 percent of Australians had boycotted products. In the mid-2000s, 50 percent of Australians had boycotted or bought products for political, ethical, or environmental reasons. The proportion of Australians for whom political consumerism was untenable fell from about 50 percent to 16 percent during the same period. Although traditional forms of democratic participation have stagnated in Australia, (as elsewhere; see Hay 2007), the popularity of political consumerism has grown considerably. In the early 1990s, Ian McAllister’s (1992, 63–5) bracketing of boycotts and demonstrations as unconventional politics, distinct from “orthodox” or “conventional” forms of political participation such as contacting public officials, seemed reasonable. However, in recent years, political consumerism has become part of the mainstream, and attending demonstrations has remained a more peripheral form of Australian political activity.

1 Shaun Wilson et al., Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, 2005 [computer file], Canberra, Australian Social Science Data Archive, The Australian National University, 2007. The data were made available through the Australian Social Science Data Archive. Those who carried out the original analysis and collection of the data bear no responsibility for our analysis or interpretation of the data. The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 223

Table 13-2. Political activity of Australians, 2005

Australians (cumulative) Activity %

Done activity in Done activity in Might do activity past year more distant past

Signed petition 42 83 94 Boycotted or 36 54 82 bought products Donated or 25 43 67 raised money Contacted public 13 33 78 official Attended 5 22 60 meeting or rally Attended 5 20 60 demonstration Contacted media 5 14 57 Joined internet 2 3 31 forum Source: Wilson et al. 2007

A matching pattern of growth can be found in organised Australian political consumerism. Australian consumer groups and organisations, such as the Australian Housewives’ Associations (1915–) and the Australian Consumers’ Association (1959–), existed prior to the 1970s. The tactics of the Australian Housewives’ Associations originally included boycotts; however, by the 1930s they had repudiated boycotts in favour of other, less “warlike,” forms of consumer pressure (Smart 2006). From its beginnings, the Australian Consumers’ Association did not see involvement in boycotts or protests as part of its role (McLeod 2008). However, by the early 1970s, Australia’s emerging new social movements included consumer activists inspired by figures such as the American Ralph Nader who toured Australia in this period (Elliott 1975; Horne 1980, Chapter 4). What Michelle Micheletti and Deitlind Stolle (2007, 168) would later term “episodic boycotts” were taken up against particular targets by some of the radical social movements that formed from the late 1960s onwards. Examples include boycotts of South African products organised by anti-apartheid activists (Jennett 1989, 123, 130, 224 Chapter Thirteen

143–4) and boycotts of French goods to protest France’s nuclear testing in the Pacific (Thornton et al. 1997, 160–1).The mid-1980s saw the growth in

Table 13-3. Trends in political consumerism compared with other forms of political activity, 1980s–2000s

Activity Done the activity Would never do the % activity %

1983–7 2005 1983–7 2005 Signed petition 70 a–72b 82d 5 a–9b 4d

Contacted official 37c 33d N/A 21d

Attended demonstration 12a–13b 20d 43 a–54b 38d

Joined boycott 5 a –9b 54d 44b–56 a 16d Sources: a Australian Values Survey 1983 (see Edgar et al. 1986) b Australian Election Study 1987 (see McAllister and Mughan 1987) c Australian National Social Science Survey 1984 (see Kelley, Cushing, and Headey 1987) d ASSA 2005 (see Wilson et al. 2007) Note: The items on petitions and demonstrations were essentially the same across the surveys. The items on boycotts and contacting officials differed between surveys. The 1980s’ surveys asked respondents about “joining in boycotts,” while the ASSA 2005 asked whether respondents had “boycotted, or deliberately bought, certain products for political, ethical, or environmental reasons” or would do so. Australian National Social Science Survey 1984 asked: “Have you or anyone in your family living here ever contacted a government official about some need or problem concerning the community as a whole?” The ASSA 2005 asked whether respondents had “contacted, or attempted to contact, a politician or a public servant to express your views.”

Australia of political-consumerism campaigns that were characterised by broader, more abstract transformative social goals than earlier episodic boycotts. Micheletti and Stolle (2007, 169) characterise this kind of boycotting and buycotting as “thematically framed” political consumerism. It can be argued that more recent Australian political consumerism has became framed around four distinct goals: (1) social justice (e.g. fair trade and buying indigenous foods), (2) environmental sustainability (e.g. changing energy sources), (3) animal rights (e.g. boycotting fur and buying The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 225 free-range eggs) and (4) communal identity (e.g. buying Australian, or buying locally). All of the campaigns based on these goals have been associated with developing networks of old and new pressure groups and community organisations. For example, the fair-trade movement has been built on alliances between trade unions, church groups, aid groups, development groups, and environmental groups.

Why the Growth and Change in Australian Political Consumerism?

The 2005 ASSA results indicate that Australians who engage in boycotts and buycotts tend to be more affluent, have higher levels of education, be middle-aged, and be non-religious (for similar results for 2003, see Western and Tranter 2005, 94–7). These socio-economic patterns have long been found among Australians who participate in political action (see Bean and Denemark 2007; McAllister 1992; Smith 2001). Existing analyses cannot tell us why Australians have shifted towards using consumerism as a point of political pressure. One possible explanation is growing concern about general levels of consumption in Australian society. In recent public debates, authors such as Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss (2005) have warned of an Australian “affluenza,” which leads to “unthinking consumerism, fractured relationships, psychological disorders, and mountains of waste.” Hamilton and Denniss’s prescription for curing this malaise involves “conscious consumption,” reducing purchases to necessary goods and services (2005, 186–94). Similar themes can be found in Michael Pusey’s (2003, Chapter 4) studies of the concerns of urban middle-class Australians. The 2005 ASSA suggests that general misgivings about affluenza have not translated strongly into political consumerism. For example, when asked to identify their most important personal aim, respondents whose aims indicated a pursuit of material improvement (57 percent of those choosing a higher income) were just as likely to have engaged in political consumerism as those whose response suggested a desire to “downshift” (50 percent of those wanting to spend more time with family and friends). The personal aim that was associated with the highest level of political consumerism (71 percent) was increased activity around community or social issues. The suggestion here is that concern for specific social issues is more important than a general questioning of consumption in prompting acts of political consumerism. What might these social issues be? The 2005 ASSA asked respondents to nominate the most important and the second most important issues from a list of eighteen. The six issues 226 Chapter Thirteen associated with higher-than-average levels of political consumerism are presented in Table 13-4. The remaining twelve issues, which were associated with levels of political consumerism on or below the sample mean, were moral values; public transport; government corruption; drugs; health; terrorism; aging population; taxes; red tape; crime; housing; and minorities. Determining exactly what the issues associated with higher- than-average political consumerism meant to individual respondents is difficult. Nonetheless, it is striking that Australians who gave high priority to environmental damage as an issue were significantly more likely than Australians nominating other issues to engage in boycotts or buycotts. This suggests a distinct environmental element to Australian political consumerism. Environmental concerns are part of the drive behind political consumerism in Europe and North America (see Friedman 1999, Chapter 8; Micheletti et al. 2004), but they appear to play a greater role in Australian boycotts and buycotts, as they do in Australian political activism more generally (see Norris 2002, 207). Of the other issues in Table 13-4 associated with higher-than-average levels of political consumerism, three relate to social justice, either domestic or international (Aboriginal reconciliation, refugees, and the rich–poor gap). The remaining two centre on issues of nationalism (Australian military intervention, and jobs going to other countries). The 2005 ASSA did not include issues related to the treatment of animals. Even so, an obvious interpretation of these figures is that Australians whose specific concerns coincide with those of the post-1980s Australian boycott and buycott campaigns discussed elsewhere in this chapter are more likely to engage in political consumerism than are Australians who are primarily concerned with other issues, such as health or housing. The coincidence of the concerns of individuals who are more likely to be political consumers with the themes of the post-1980s boycott and buycott campaigns suggests that although some Australian political consumerism is spontaneous and individual, much is mobilised, gaining its direction through the collective efforts of networks of Australian and international groups engaged in campaigning. The next sections of this chapter provide a preliminary map of these Australian campaigns around social justice, environmental sustainability, animal rights, and communal identities. The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 227

Table 13-4. The six issues associated with the highest levels of political consumerism

Issue Political consumers selecting issue as the most important % Environmental damage 81

Not enough progress towards Aboriginal 80 reconciliation Australian involvement in military conflicts 77 overseas Gap between rich and poor 69

Refugees and asylum seekers 64

Australian jobs going to other countries 61

Source: Wilson et al. 2007

Conceptualising Political-Consumerism Campaigns

A focus on political-consumerism campaigns recognises both the political context and the collective action that underpin apparently individualised boycotting or buycotting actions. Monroe Friedman (1996) differentiates between two types of buycotts: “calls for buycotts,” which are direct or indirect public pleas made by individuals or not-for-profit organisations requesting that consumers purchase a product or service, and “actual buycotts,” which extend beyond published lists or seals of approval to a launch and maintenance of organised buying campaigns (Friedman 1996, 442–3). For Friedman, the Buy Australian Made campaign, funded and organised by the Australian Government, would be an actual buycott, whereas a campaign that mainly promotes a label or trademark without accompanying collective action, such as Choose Cruelty Free, would fit the call for buycotts category. Micheletti and Stolle (2007) suggest two frames for analysing the approach of political consumerist collective-action campaigns—episodic and thematic:

228 Chapter Thirteen

Episodic campaigns focus on particular issues and put responsibility claims on specific wrongdoers. They aim at triggering consumers to take immediate action. Thematic campaigns penetrate the underlying mechanisms leading to social-justice responsibility vacuums, and they depict the problem more broadly and abstractly by embedding it in the larger context of the pervasive role of consumption in our lives. They aim at changing consumer thinking about consumer society and culture. (Micheletti and Stole 2007, 168)

They acknowledge that most political-consumerism campaigning is episodic (2007, 169) as it relies on consumers participating in time-limited campaigns. Actions can include emailing, writing letters and petitioning, fair-trade shopping (especially around annual events such as Christmas and Easter), participating in annual Buy Nothing Day, and participating in demonstrations outside stores or at sporting events (especially targeting Nike). Thematic framing of movement action is seen when there is a shift beyond episodic individualised actions towards a thematic focus that “challenges corporations” and consumers’ worldviews. As an example of this shift, Micheletti and Stolle use the move of AdBusters away from culture jamming to establishing Blackspot Anticorporation—“a sweat-free shoe manufacturing operation to ‘reassert consumer sovereignty over capitalism’” (2007, 169). The thematic frame can also be seen in ideas such as the certification of Fairtrade towns and cities, occurring predominantly in the United Kingdom (see Malpass et al. 2007). The next section of this chapter applies these concepts to Australian political-consumerism campaigns. Although in the international context most political-consumerism research has focused on social-justice issues, the chapter identifies four different campaign trajectories and goals in Australia. These are: (1) social justice, (2) environmental sustainability, (3) animal rights, and (4) communal identity.

Social Justice

In Europe, the most developed forms of political consumerism are associated with the global-justice social movement (della Porta 2007, 11– 12; Forno 2006; Micheletti 2003; Micheletti et al. 2004). A key focus of this movement is ensuring that workers and producers in poor countries receive a fair return for products exported to consumers in rich countries. As a political practice, fair trade is commonly understood as “market- driven ethical consumerism” and the fair-trade movement as one that “seeks to harness the mechanisms of the market to address socio-economic The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 229 inequalities and environmental harms associated with the global economic system” (Clarke et al 2007, 583). The international fair-trade movement began after the Second World War, when aid organisations such as Oxfam in the United Kingdom began importing and selling goods made in disadvantaged countries. A further development occurred in the 1980s, when labelling coffee as “fair trade” became institutionalised within the Netherlands. The spread of fair-trade coffee throughout Europe led to the formation of the International Fairtrade Labelling Organisation in 1997. This body now coordinates standards setting, certification, and producer links for Fairtrade products. Its requirements include guaranteeing a minimum price considered fair to producers and setting standards of social, economic, and environmental development. Twenty-one member countries now use the system of Fairtrade labelling for products (Lamb 2008, 230–3). Although the targeting of specific products such as coffee might suggest that fair trade is primarily an “episodic” campaign, it contains some thematic elements that aim to change consumers’ broader thinking about their societies and cultures. In part, this is because the campaign has broadened to incorporate a wide range of products available in supermarkets and stores. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 3,000 individual products have been labelled Fairtrade. These include beer, wine and spirits, biscuits and cakes, flowers, fresh fruits and vegetables, ice- cream, spices, jams, sugar, soft drinks, cotton goods, clothing, and sports balls (see Fairtrade Foundation 2010). Rather than having to search in specialist stores for a few Fairtrade products, European consumers are confronted with fair-trade choices in their everyday shopping. An extension of this thematic campaign into public administration and public policy can be seen in the emerging certification of Fairtrade towns and cities. In the United Kingdom more than four hundred communities are certified by the Fairtrade Foundation, an independent non-government organisation (see Lamb 2008, 40-52; Malpass et al. 2007). To be certified as Fairtrade, cities or towns must meet five criteria: they must pass a council resolution supporting Fairtrade; serve Fairtrade products at council events; ensure Fairtrade products are readily available in local businesses, workplaces, and community groups; publicly promote Fairtrade through the media and public events; and maintain a representative Fairtrade steering group (see Fairtrade Foundation 2010). A campaign to meet these criteria can raise the political consciousness of citizens. Writing about the establishment of Bristol as a Fairtrade city, Alice Malpass, Paul Cloke, Clive Barnett and Nick Clarke (2007, 635) argue that it provides an example of how the “politics of solidarity may turn what is previously 230 Chapter Thirteen constituted as ‘aid’ or ‘charity’ into political acts of obligation” and challenge and change a city’s external and internal relationships of identity and place. Although the geneses of international social-justice consumerism in Australia and Europe were similar, Australian social-justice political consumerism has remained more episodic and limited than is the case in Europe. In Australia in 1965, Community Aid Abroad shops opened under the banner of Trade Action to support trade and export opportunities for developing countries. Today, the company operates as Oxfam Australia Trading, incorporating seventeen shops nationally, mail order and online operations, and a wholesale division in Adelaide (see Oxfam Australia 2010). By the 1980s, fair-trade tea and coffee, under labels such as Trade Winds, was sold through community groups. The Fairtrade Association of Australia and New Zealand (FTAANZ) was founded in 2003, in the same year that products carrying the Fairtrade label became available in Australia. FTAANZ is predominantly funded by Oxfam (see FTAANZ 2008), with additional support from the New Zealand-based non-government organisation TradeAid and the New Zealand Government’s International Aid and Development Agency. FTAANZ’s hope is that Fairtrade will become independent as its market share and revenue increase. The local branch of the International Fairtrade Labelling organisation started in 2005 (Lamb 2008, 211). Other prominent networks active in Australian social-justice campaigns include the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), Make Poverty History, and Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA. AFTINET is a national network of more than ninety community organisations and many individuals concerned about trade and investment policy, who seek greater accountability on the part of the Australian Government for its role in the World Trade Organization and bilateral trade agreements (see AFTINET 2010). Make Poverty History is a coalition of more than seventy aid agencies, community groups, and religious organisations in Australia. It is a secular campaign but works closely with a church-based campaign known as Micah Challenge, which seeks to mobilise Australian Christians against poverty. Make Poverty History aims to ensure that the Australian Government forms policies for more and better aid, debt relief, fairer trade, government accountability, climate change, and the Millennium Development Goals (see Make Poverty History 2010). Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA was established to contribute directly to countries and regions of the world where workers are disadvantaged: through poverty; a lack of workplace, labour and human rights; civil conflict; and war. Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA builds self- The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 231 reliance by supporting educational and training projects for local workers and is an active campaign participant in fair-trade campaigns. Most fair-trade-oriented buycotting in Australia is episodic and based on information campaigns that seek to educate the public about the Fairtrade label and ethical purchasing in general. These include annual events, petition campaigns, and lobbying of organisations to change their procurement and production practices. Annual events include Fairtrade Fortnight, which began in Australia in May 2005. It consists of local events, such as tastings of fair-trade coffee and chocolate, movie screenings of Black Gold—a documentary about the international trade in coffee beans—and church groups hosting fair-trade stalls. Petition campaigns include Australian support for the international Big Noise Petition conducted in 2006, which aimed to make trade fair (Oxfam International, 2010). Although there has arguably been an increase in public awareness and purchasing of Fairtrade produce in Australia in the last few years, by December 2008 only about sixty Australian companies distributed Fairtrade goods, and these were largely limited to coffee, chocolate, cocoa, and tea (see FTAANZ 2008). The process of Fairtrade certification for organisations and local councils in Australia is similar to that in the United Kingdom, although the narrower range of available products simplifies Australian certification. Despite this, certification is largely restricted to a growing number of religious bodies, schools, universities, and small businesses. Only a few large companies, such as Medibank Private, and two local councils (Yarra in Victoria and Manly in New South Wales) had gained certification by early 2010 (FTAANZ 2010). Despite the well- established and active Australian social-justice networks described above, Fairtrade labelling and certification has progressed at a much slower rate in Australia than in Europe. In addition to their international goals, Australian social-justice networks have pursued political-consumerism campaigns focusing primarily on domestic workers. A major example is the FairWear campaign launched in Melbourne in December 1996. It grew into a coalition of churches, community organisations, and unions addressing the exploitation of an estimated 300,000 Australian workers who make clothing at home, commonly called “outworkers.” The FairWear campaign can be understood as an example of social movement unionism, or union–community organising (see Tattersall 2010). The Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) began researching the conditions of outworkers in 1994. In 1995, the TCFUA published the report The Hidden Cost of Fashion, which exposed 232 Chapter Thirteen the issue through the media to the public, governments, and employers. The TCFUA then began talking to groups to establish the FairWear campaign to support outworkers to improve their conditions. The goal of the FairWear campaign was to eliminate the exploitation of home-based clothing workers and to assist them to achieve a living wage and safe, healthy work environments (see FairWear 2010). Campaign tactics have included “name-and-shame” campaigns against specific clothing manufacturers and retailers. FairWear presented itself as a buycotting campaign, informing consumers about the sweatshop nature of much clothes manufacturing and asking consumers to lobby retailers to sign up to the Home Workers Code of Practice and to make ethical purchases from retail outlets that had signed up to the code. An explicit boycott and protest dimension emerged early in the campaign with demonstrations outside major retailers, such as Myer and Sportsgirl, in 1997. More recently, protests and boycotts have ceased, with FairWear expressing ambivalence about the use of protest as a dimension of its campaign (see FairWear 2010). Instead, the main ongoing focus of the campaign is the accreditation process through the Home Workers Code of Practice, coupled with reliance on individual consumer choices rather than on collective action.

Environmental Sustainability

In most advanced democracies discussion of the human effect on climate change and environmental sustainability includes a dimension on the role of individual consumers and campaigns in creating change. For example, there are advanced regulatory frameworks in Europe and North America for “green” labelling and certification of products (Boström and Klintman 2008). Environmentally based boycott campaigns have become prominent due to their targeting of the media (see Friedman 1999, 200). Well-known campaigns include on dolphin-safe tuna, use of tropical timber, and recycled oil (Friedman 1999, 185). In contrast to the situation in Europe and North America, where social-justice campaigns have been central, in Australia environmental sustainability has arguably been the dominant strand within political consumerism. Australians have adopted limited approaches to environmentally sustainable consumption, largely in response to high- profile campaigns by non-government organisations. For example, while more than 40 percent of Australians have bought organic products, just 10 percent of Australians account for the majority of the organic market (Lockie et al. 2006, 128). There has also been growth in the involvement The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 233 of government agencies in promoting environmentally friendly consumption and product certification. Australian political consumerism for environmental sustainability remains largely episodic in character, but it is developing a more institutionalised profile than is social-justice consumerism. Several high-profile environmental non-government organisations, such as Greenpeace, have run campaigns encouraging consumers to reduce their overall consumption and to make purchasing decisions that demonstrate an awareness of the environmental consequences (Greenpeace 2010). The recurring theme in such campaigns is “sustainable living” expressed through choices such as using energy-efficient appliances, switching to renewable energy, buying organic foods, avoiding genetically modified foods, purchasing recycled materials, and avoiding products that are produced using hazardous substances or that result in hazardous waste. Sustainable living can thus be seen as a variation of the “compassionate living” approach of many animal-rights campaigns (see Animal Rights, below) and is also typical of Friedman’s “call to buycott” political consumerism, because environmental organisations rely on consumers to make considered individual choices in their everyday lives to bring about change. While environmental-sustainability consumerism has the potential to develop into a thematic campaign extending to virtually all purchases and consumption, its most popular and prominent expressions in Australia remain episodic. One recent example of a well-known episodic approach is Earth Hour, which began in Sydney in 2007. Earth Hour’s major organiser is the environmental non-government organisation WWF. The promoters of Earth Hour simply request that individuals and organisations turn off their lights for one hour to make a collective symbolic statement on environmental sustainability and climate change. This celebratory event has become increasingly supported by businesses and government. By 2009, Earth Hour had spread to seventy-four countries when it was linked to the broad sustainability agenda being addressed at the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change (see Earth Hour 2010). At the level of institutional politics, Australian federal and state governments have introduced a range of schemes that encourage environmentally positive consumption. For example, consumers in some states can choose to pay a tariff to purchase their electricity from renewable sources, can receive rebates for buying energy-efficient household appliances and installing solar panels, and can sell the excess energy produced by their solar panels back to the electricity grid. This Australian focus on household consumption and predominantly 234 Chapter Thirteen technological fixes has been labelled “weak” sustainable development or “eco-modernisation” (Hobson 2006, 319–20). However, international research suggests that green consumption of this type is linked to wider commitments to creating a sustainable lifestyle (see Gilg et al. 2005).

Animal Rights

Internationally, animal-rights movements and campaigns have adopted a range of strategic approaches to creating political and social change. In his summary of these strategies, Lyal Munro (2005, 78) describes his “non- cooperative” strategies as including the political-consumerism actions of boycotting and ethical vegetarianism. Successful boycotts have drawn attention to the use and sale of animal-fur products as well as widespread animal testing in the cosmetics industry (Friedman 1999, 186). The Farm Animal Reform Movement in the Unites States ran a prominent episodic- type campaign with the Great American Meatout, which focused on positive messages about vegetarian lifestyles (Munro 2005, 86). Vegan movements have presented a whole-of-lifestyle and broader thematic challenge to society and corporations (Cherry 2006). The animal-rights strand of Australian political consumerism ranges from limited ideas of compassionate living—exemplified by protection of companion animals and consumption of food produced with minimal cruelty to animals—through to direct-protest action and the all- encompassing lifestyle change of veganism. While compassionate living rests on limited episodic boycotting and buycotting (for example, avoiding wearing fur), thematic animal-rights activism radically challenges the status quo. In contrast to the campaigns of social-justice consumerism and environmental political consumerism in Australia, animal-rights campaigns occur through protest, name-and-shame boycotts, and the use of celebrity endorsements. Animal-rights campaigns have not yet developed celebratory boycott and buycott periods akin to Fairtrade Fortnight or Earth Hour. The compassionate-living element in animal-rights campaigns is more widespread. For example, Animals Australia has active campaigns on factory-farmed pigs, live exports, factory-farmed chickens (battery hens), and animal protection legislation (see Animals Australia 2010). Similar themes are found in the campaigns of Australian animal-rights organisations, including Voiceless, the RSPCA, WSPA, and Choose Cruelty Free. These organisations’ political-consumerism campaigns meet the defining criteria of Friedman’s call to buycott. The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 235

More thematic and protest-oriented campaigns have been mounted by the five separate, autonomous Animal Liberation organisations operating in Australian states and territories, inspired by Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation. The five organisations have broadly similar campaigns around factory farming, fur, and live exports. The Victorian group is among the more radical. Its website states that the “underlying goal of ALV (Animal Liberation Victoria) is to abolish the property status of animals.” It auspices the Animal Rescue Team, which enters private property to rescue animals and to film abuses of animals on factory farms. This team is linked with an international direct-action movement called Open Rescue (see ALV 2010). A position located between episodic compassionate-living campaigning and thematic radical campaigning is taken by the US-based organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which has an Asia– Pacific branch. One of its recent, well-known campaigns, Save the Sheep, has opposed the practice of sheep mulesing by the Australian wool industry (see PETA Asia–Pacific 2010). As well as using direct action in promoting boycotts against particular producers, PETA also subscribes to the compassionate-living ethic of other animal-rights organisations by providing buycott shopping guides to consumers, especially for clothing (see PETA 2010).

Communal Identity

As noted earlier in this chapter, consumer campaigns based on communal identities have been noted in international research but have generally not been considered part of political consumerism. Perhaps the most widely noted element of communal-identity consumerism outside of Australia is the “slow food” movement, which grew around local and regional identity in Italy (but, somewhat ironically, has become a globalised tourism phenomenon) (see Pietrykowski 2004). Australian communal-identity consumerism has had local and regional elements, with campaigns to buy at local shops rather than at internationally owned grocery chains a feature, particularly of rural Australian consumer activism. In addition, state-based campaigns have developed. For example, South Australia Great’s Buy South Australia campaign attempts to promote jobs, creativity, and exports from South Australia. South Australia Great is a not-for-profit membership-based organisation, and the campaign’s latest slogan is “Buy South Australian. It’s Better for You.” The South Australia Great website helps South Australians identify local products and allows local producers, growers, 236 Chapter Thirteen and manufacturers to register their locally made products (see South Australia Great 2010). State-based identity campaigns such as these are modelled on the Buy Australian Made campaign, which began in 1986. It was initially sponsored by the Australian Government, but has been run by private organisations (Alomes 1988, 274–9; Alomes and Jones 1991, 384–5; Fischer and Byron 1995). The campaign features the Australian Made (1986–) and Australian Grown (2007–) trademarks to help consumers identify Australian products and produce. The campaign website has a searchable database, which identifies the businesses and approximately 10,000 products that are permitted to use the Australian Made or Australian Grown logos (see Australian Made 2010). The campaign also promotes Australian products abroad. Initially run by the Advance Australia Federation, the campaign has been administered since 1999 by Australian Made Campaign Limited (AMCL), a not-for-profit public company founded by Australian chambers of commerce and industry. Existing research suggests that the Buy Australian Made campaigns have been more successful in generating support for buying Australian food than in developing support for Australian manufactured and processed goods (see Elliot et al. 2001; Fischer and Byron 1995; Lyons et al. 2001). One explanation for this may be variable perceptions of quality across Australian products; another may be the centrality of farming and “the bush” in Australian identity.

Conclusion

The growth of political consumerism in an era in which political and community activism has declined is intriguing. This form of political action has become popular in Australia while general attitudes to politics have remained sceptical and cynical, and other forms of political participation have either declined or not grown to the same extent. This chapter has suggested that political consumerism appeals most to individuals who have financial and educational resources to exercise market choices that reflect their political beliefs. Further, because political consumerism can be achieved without interacting with traditional Australian political institutions, it is an attractive form of participation for citizens whose trust in political parties, parliamentarians, and the political system in general has eroded. However, political consumerism should not be understood as based only on the individual political actions of boycotting or buycotting market goods; it is also based on extensive networking and campaigns that bring together new coalitions around The Rise of Australian Political Consumerism 237 shared concerns. This contemporary type of network activity between organisations that may not have ready influence on the state appears to be mobilising growing numbers of Australians to take everyday actions around causes of social justice, sustainability, animal rights, and communal identities.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DISOBEDIENT CITIZENS: PRESS DEPICTIONS OF STRIKING SCHOOL TEACHERS IN NSW AND ANTI-VIETNAM WAR DEMONSTRATORS IN NSW AND VICTORIA IN 1968

KEITH MOORE

Across Australia in 1968, students demonstrating against the Vietnam War engaged in confrontational behaviour. The metropolitan daily newspapers, the most important source of news for most people, enthusiastically reported the scenes. The demonstrations were exciting. Sensational headlines and photographs captured the interest of readers and influenced their opinions. But radical opposition to government policies at the time was not limited to university students opposing the Vietnam War. Teachers had become increasingly critical of conditions in schools, with Victorian secondary school teachers having stopped work on a number of occasions since 1965 (Mitchell 1973, 249). In October 1968, both primary and secondary school teachers in New South Wales participated in eastern Australia’s first state-wide teachers’ strike. As Sydney’s Sun commented on 1 October 1968, “The teachers’ strike threw the ... education system into chaos ... A huge proportion of the State’s 2764 schools were silent and empty.” Similarities with the anti-war demonstrations were obvious. Although not as confrontational, the New South Wales teachers’ strike was a publicity-seeking action. This examination of the teachers’ more restrained, but more effective, approach to challenging government policies provides a new voice and vision to our understandings of the diverse nature of radicalism in Australia in the 1960s. Disobedient Citizens 243

Media Bias

In the 1960s, newspapers were an important source of information for Australian citizens. In mid-1962 in New South Wales, an average of one newspaper was sold for every 3.2 people in the state. Newspapers were even more popular in Victoria, with newsagents and others selling an average of one newspaper per 2.4 people (Mayer 1968, 39). Of course, it needs to be kept in mind that several people could read a single issue, and the above statistics would also include children. A survey by J. S. Western and Colin A. Hughes (1967, 189) found that 84 percent of enrolled voters read at least one newspaper per day, and 26 percent read two or more. Further, the comparison of respondents’ ratings of newspapers, television, and radio emphasised the importance of newspapers, with 50 percent of voters surveyed stating that newspapers gave the most complete news, 29 percent suggesting that television did so, and only 15 percent nominating radio. However, in response to a question asking respondents which form of media presented the fairest, most unbiased news, 32 percent nominated television, 20 percent selected radio, and only 17 percent felt that newspapers were the least biased (Western and Hughes 1967, 195). The results of these surveys suggest that the principal in the 1960s were both indoctrinatory and influential. In Australia’s Media Monopolies, Humphrey McQueen argues that the media in Australia constantly reinforces a “pro-capitalist view of social reality” with “advertising ... the key link” (McQueen 1978, 9). McQueen asserts that journalists conform because they seek employment security and promotion. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky agree. In discussing the press and television in the United States, they assert that it is the function of mass media to:

amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda. (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 1)

Andrew Calcutt and Philip Hammond (2011, 100) similarly reject the view that newsworthiness is the sole determinant of inclusion or exclusion by newspaper journalists and editors. They assert that “judgements are shaped by the demands of news-production convention, ethnocentric cultural bias and pre-existing expectations about the world.” Citing from Daniel Hallin’s 1986 study, The Uncensored War, the pair reject the view that in the United States the news coverage of the Vietnam War on 244 Chapter Fourteen television and in the press strengthened the anti-war movement. They continue:

As Hallin demonstrates, the US news media tended to mirror the official view rather than to challenge it, relying on Washington officials and US military personnel as their main sources of information while presenting a largely negative view of the anti-war movement.

Moreover, as Calcutt and Hammond explain, although “most of the reporting ... ‘just gave the facts’ ... they were not just any facts. They were official facts” (2011, 102).

Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne

In 1968, Australian newspapers gave the Vietnam War saturation coverage. Press headlines, photographs, and articles promoted the view that participation was indisputably in Australia’s interests, with student anti- war demonstrations usually portrayed negatively. The Australian, the country’s only national newspaper, argued that the war was unwinnable, but with the capital city newspapers totalling a combined circulation average of more than three million per day, The Australian, with a circulation average of 105,000, represented a mere 3 percent of newspaper sales. And even so, The Australian newspaper did not portray the students’ behaviour positively (Davies 1970, 538). Students had been engaging in small anti–Vietnam War protests regularly during 1968, but the demonstrations that occurred in Sydney on 2 July and in Melbourne two days later were substantial and received front-page leading-story status in most newspapers. On 2 July, the front- page headline of Sydney’s Daily Mirror shouted: “Gorton Brawl, Boots, Fists Fly.” The Daily Mirror elaborated that, at Martin Place earlier in the day, police, fearing for the prime minister’s safety, attacked anti-war protesters, holding one by the throat against a wall and throwing another onto the footpath. The Sydney Sun also on 2 July reported the breaking news under the headline, “Students Seized.” The next morning, under the main front-page headline of “Students, Police in Violent Clash,” The Sydney Morning Herald explained that the “most violent student demonstration since President Johnson’s visit” had occurred in Martin Place. Readers learnt that two hundred anti-conscription students had clashed with eighty police. A reporter’s glasses were broken and his elbow and knee injured when police “flung [him] hard on to the roadway.” Disobedient Citizens 245

Photographs of demonstrators struggling with the police added interest to the story. The Daily Telegraph reported on the confrontation on 3 July. Beside a photograph of police carrying a student off “bodily,” the article explained that the police “formed into two flying wedges” and then “charged the students.” The article continued: “The two groups merged in a seething mass of flailing arms and legs.” The Martin Place confrontation was also the front-page leading story in The Australian on 3 July. “Student Violence over Gorton—At Least 30 Arrested” the leading headline stated, with one of the photographs depicting an officer holding a demonstrator “by the throat.” Victoria’s metropolitan newspapers informed readers about the demonstration. Melbourne’s Sun News-Pictorial gave it front-page coverage on 3 July under the headline, “Students Rock PM’s Car in Riot.” The newspaper estimated the number of demonstrators at two hundred and fifty. In The Age on the same day, the demonstration was the newspaper’s front-page main story, too. On 2 July, Melbourne’s Herald had given the breaking story front-page status. The next evening in The Herald, the incident was again front-page news under the headline, “Cool Those Demos.” Dr Jim Cairns, a member of the House of Representatives at the time and a leading anti-war figure, stated that violence was harming the demonstrators’ cause. He elaborated that “violent demonstrations generally did little more than strengthen conservatism [and] reinforce the strength of the police.” The leading editorial in the same issue blamed the students for the violence, warning that they were “On A Dangerous Path” according to the editorial’s headline. On 4 July, America’s Independence Day, it was Melbourne’s turn. “Troopers Ride Down Anti-War Rioters,” The Age leading front-page headline stated the next morning, adding “Wild mobs storm US consulate.” Mounted troopers rode into the protestors, mainly university students. “The horses rearing and frothing from fright sent men and women reeling to the bitumen.” Later, five hundred of the demonstrators attempted to occupy the city’s principal police headquarters. News of the demonstration, including a large photograph of a police officer dragging a student demonstrator to the city watch house, occupied 80 percent of the front page. The Sun News-Pictorial on 5 July also devoted much of its front page to a photograph of police arresting a demonstrating student. Under the headline “Wild City Riot,” readers learnt that “more than 50 people were arrested and 30 hurt during [the] hour-long battle.” In addition, the newspaper dedicated most of page 3 and a middle-page spread to the demonstration. The Australian on 5 July also gave the demonstrators front-page leading-story coverage under the headline, 246 Chapter Fourteen

“Horses Charge Student Rioters.” A large photograph depicted a police horse trampling into the crowd of one thousand demonstrators. Similarly, The Sydney Morning Herald on the same day gave the demonstration front-page coverage with the headline “Mounted Charge Ends Mass Student Riot,” while Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on the confrontation under the headline “56 Arrested as Students Fight Police.” The Telegraph on 5 July commented, “At the height of the fighting, four mounted police troopers charged into the seething crowd.” On 5 July, the Melbourne Herald’s leading front-page story reported Chief Secretary Sir Arthur Rylah’s view that the police handled the United States Consulate “situation with tolerance—perhaps too much tolerance.” The headline stated: “Rylah to Police: You Must Get Tough.” The next morning, The Sydney Morning Herald under its leading headline relayed the prime minister’s announcement that he would not permit “lawlessness, violence and destruction.” The Daily Telegraph, in its leading front-page report on 6 July, also stated that the federal government was going to “crack down sharply on student violence.” Three days later, on 9 July, The Daily Telegraph editorialised under the headline “‘Protest’ and the Right to Hurt Others”:

If the students ... try to repeat the scenes witnessed in Sydney and Melbourne last week (involving violence, explosives, smoke bombs, razor blades and rock throwing), the public will stand behind anything that is done to check them. The right to protest does not mean the right to disturb or injure other people.

Criticism of the protestors continued in editorials and in letters to the editor. On 5 July in the Telegraph, the leading letter to the editor stated:

If these kids are scared or unwilling to go to Vietnam, that’s a matter between themselves and the law. Let them keep their squeals to themselves ... Louts, like children, should be seen and not heard.

In the same issue, a Bondi resident contributed:

The most troublesome ones are of course, the leaders ... The smug looks and other histrionics of these “Little Caesars,” “Little Napoleons” or “Little Hitlers,” call them what you will, as they harangue their followers, deceive no one except themselves.

W. Norman of Penshurst no doubt agreed, stating in the 5 July issue of the Telegraph:

Disobedient Citizens 247

I wish to express my disgust at the behaviour of university students over the last few months. Their “sit-ins” and loutish behaviour reflect the general standard of students and it’s time the Government gave the police the authority to crush a few heads ... How brave would these anti-Vietnam demonstrators be if we marched them into the Showground and marched a company of returned soldiers in from the other end and locked all the exits?

The previous day, on 4 July, the leading letter to the editor in the Melbourne Herald suggested stopping all grants and scholarships to “‘mob rule’ students.” The writer continued: “There are enough gangs of uneducated louts around without starting a new breed of educated (?) ones.” On 8 July in The Daily Telegraph, Edward Martin of Strathfield agreed, stating under the headline “Student Idiots”:

We pay taxes to support our universities. I fail to see why public money should be wasted on parasites such as those who took part in Tuesday’s demonstration.

But, also on 8 July, a writer to The Australian complained about the police removing their badges and “committing breaches of the law with impunity” and of being “Gestapo men.” Sean Scalmer (2002, 4–5) reflects that in 1965 relatively unimaginative and minor anti–Vietnam War demonstrations could receive prominent publicity because their occurrence was novel. When, in 1966, Wayne Haylen and others became the first Australians to burn their draft cards, the incident received front-page newspaper coverage, which inspired others to mimic their initiative. As Scalmer (2002, 63) comments, “in 1965 a peace vigil was disruptive and newsworthy to the Australian press. By 1967, this was no longer the case.” In 1968, “an explosion of radical, sometimes apparently revolutionary, actions broke out” across the world with students prominently represented. “The role of the disruptive demonstrator, the disobedient citizen, [became] increasingly popular” (Scalmer 2002, 51–3). Many opponents of war became progressively more radical with some threatening to carry out terrorist activities. That the campaigning had begun to resemble international political events generated more public interest in Australian anti-war demonstrations. However, as many conservative politicians were aware, in Australia the press had successfully labelled the anti-war student protestors as irresponsible and their cause as unworthy of serious consideration. Nicholas Economou and Stephen Tanner (2008, 177) suggest that in the United States the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968 marked “the 248 Chapter Fourteen beginning of the period in which public support for the war would plummet.” But, in Australia, this did not happen. In the United States, the media’s role in promoting support for withdrawal is debatable. Some see the screening of uncensored television footage as a persuasive anti-war influence, but as Economou and Tanner (2008, 174) state, others, including Herman and Chomsky, argue that newspapers and even television “continued to give editorial and opinion succour to American foreign policy despite the obvious failures being highlighted by the media themselves”. In Australia, the views of Herman and Chomsky have greater relevance. Journalist Douglas Wilke considered that the “crisis of conscience” in the United States following the Tet Offensive was attributable to the “idealism and puritan ethic” of US citizens, but he argued that in Australia that shift in attitude was not significant due to the prevalence of more pragmatic attitudes (Wilke 1969). A public opinion poll in 1969 revealed that 67 percent of Australians supported Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam by conscripted and/or volunteer soldiers, 12 percent supported advisers only, and just 12 percent felt that Australia should “stay out altogether.” This had not changed significantly from a survey conducted two years previously (Aitken 1982, 223). In fact, The Sun News-Pictorial on 17 October reported that , then leader of the Opposition, complained that the US military had used Australia’s support for the war to defer de-escalation and to continue bombing North Vietnam. In the federal election of October 1969, Prime Minister , leading a divided party, lost a mere 7 percent of the vote against Whitlam—the articulate, confident leader of the Australian Labor Party—who supported gradual withdrawal. However, Whitlam did not make participation in the Vietnam War a central election issue, possibly because opinion polls suggested that withdrawal was not a winning issue (Hancock 2002, 241). As journalist Douglas Wilke (1969) asserted and Don Aitken (1982, 219) confirmed, social welfare, health, education, and the leadership qualities of Gorton and Whitlam were the principal election issues in 1969.

Education Neglect and Industrial Action

In the latter half of the 1960s, Australian governments were spending a mere 4.5 percent of gross national product on education; this was at a time when comparable countries were spending between 7 and 9 percent (Bessant and Spaull 1972, vi). At the same time, a substantial expansion in student numbers had occurred at government high schools. Factors contributing to this expansion included the large numbers of people Disobedient Citizens 249 delaying having children until after the Second World War, and increasing marriage rates (Appleyard 1970, 7). The favourable economic conditions during the post–Second World War period encouraged working-class families to aspire to middle-class occupational futures for their children, with enhanced levels of schooling facilitating this aspiration (Barcan 1988, 235). Consequently, a staffing crisis in schools erupted. The Australian editorialised on 13 August 1966: “Most of our teachers are under-trained, many of them untrained.” The newspaper went on to assert that the country’s schools were both understaffed and overcrowded, with governments finding “it all but impossible to afford to build new ones,” and adding, “the education shortcomings have reached crisis dimensions.” On 9 July 1968, in The Australian under the headline “It’s Time We Had A Classroom Revolution,” educationalist Henry Schoenheimer elaborated that “the key questions in Australian education today are: How can we most rapidly increase the quantity and improve the quality of the teaching force”? Angered by the employment of underqualified teachers and the high incidence of large class sizes, Schoenheimer believed that through influencing public opinion via media coverage, individuals could challenge governments’ neglect of education. Traditionally, the public viewed teachers “as a moderate, dedicated and conservative section of the workforce” (Bessant and Spaull 1972, v). Encouraged by the states’ educational administrators, many teachers embraced this view under the guise of “professionalism.” As Bessant and D’Cruz (1989, 26) explain:

to teach ... was to have a vocation or mission as distinct from a career, with the prospect of personal development and material reward. Teachers ... were bestowed with a sacred trust they were privileged to possess.

But in the latter half of the 1960s, teachers, seeking “to establish educational systems which would befit an advanced and expanding industrial society” increasingly challenged government and administrative neglect (Bessant and Spaull 1972, vi). For more than one hundred years, labour unions had represented government school teachers. As Andrew Spaull (1992, 11) states:

since the 1920s, most Australian teachers’ unions have enjoyed the right to represent all public school teachers in their particular state, the formal right to collective bargaining, and the legal right to strike.

A three-week teachers’ strike, the first in Australia’s history, had occurred in Western Australia in 1920 (De Vyver 1965, 282), but the 250 Chapter Fourteen sector had remained strike-free for a further forty-five years, until July 1965, when secondary school teachers in Victoria went out on strike over salaries. The action eroded respect for the profession in Victoria, especially when strikes over salaries continued to occur (Bassett 1995, 65). The mainstream press uniformly opposed union power and industrial action by workers. As Humphrey McQueen (1978, 50–1) asserts:

The easiest thing to show about the media is their opposition to strikes ... Perhaps the hardest thing to find ... is even one example of them supporting even one strike in defence of people’s rights and livelihood.

McQueen (1978, 198) elaborates further that “millions of news items—of little things—have built up into a picture of strikes ... as fundamentally bad things ... Strikes become unreasonable and unnecessary.”

The New South Wales Teachers’ Strike

Michelle Moses (2007, 152) argues that the media should perform a valuable role “as educators of the public so as to foster autonomous deliberation over controversial issues.” In particular, Moses particularly wishes that citizens, through exposure to press debate and analysis, would be able to “engage meaningfully with competing claims, values, and arguments concerning moral and political disagreements before making an informed decision and voting” in parliamentary elections. Moses warns:

it is misleading if the public is told only part of the story or if issues are presented through only one political lens ... When only selective bits of information are disclosed, the reader does not get a complete enough picture of a given issue. (Moses 2007, 155–6)

As McQueen (1978) asserts, most Australian newspapers in 1968 negatively presented strikes, regardless of the cause. Teachers were aware that by adopting strike action, they were jeopardising community goodwill towards their profession. Following its launch in 1964, The Australian revealed an editorial concern for education. To a greater extent than its metropolitan competitors, The Australian provided its readers with an opportunity for thoughtful and autonomous deliberation on this issue. On 3 February 1968, The Australian brought to the public’s notice the problem of insufficient numbers of adequately trained teachers in New South Wales schools. As the article related, at a mass meeting of teachers, New South Wales Teachers’ Federation President Jack Whalan condemned the state Disobedient Citizens 251 government’s rejection of thousands of worthy teacher-training studentship applicants. The numbers of trainees had actually dropped, Whalan asserted. He then introduced his audience to scores of “clean-cut youths” and girls with high-school pass grades or above whom the state government had rejected. One-by-one, they approached the microphone to state their high-school grades and reflect upon the destruction of their dreams. Whalan then addressed his audience: “To lose these ... is a crime against the state.” While conveying to readers the disadvantaged state of education in New South Wales high schools, The Australian promoted a respectful attitude towards both the New South Wales Education Department and government. This was apparent on 21 February 1968, when The Australian reported that Director-General of Education Dr Harold Wyndham attributed staffing inadequacies to increased numbers of students in New South Wales secondary schools. In 1952, only 13 percent of children had continued to their fourth year of secondary schooling. By 1964, this figure had increased to 31 percent; in 1966, it had reached 48 percent; and in 1967, 53 percent, Wyndham explained. The Sydney Morning Herald promoted the New South Wales government’s viewpoint more strongly. The articles, under the headlines: “600 More Teacher Trainees This Year” on 21 March; “Department to Discuss Relief Teacher Issue” on 25 April; and “Three Trainee Colleges to Cost $20m” on 4 July 1968 presented the government’s management of education in New South Wales positively. The Sydney Morning Herald also expressed its concern about teachers’ increasingly strident stance over staffing issues. On 15 March, under the headline, “300 Teachers Refuse Relief Duty,” The Sydney Morning Herald explained that teachers in eight Wollongong and district high schools had refused to teach classes on behalf of colleagues who had been absent for more than five days. Three months later, on 22 June, under the headlines “Teachers Warn of Action on Shortage” and “Can’t Take Much More,’’ The Sydney Morning Herald warned:

The N.S.W. Teachers’ Federation said yesterday that it was under steadily increasing pressure to take militant action because of the shortage of teachers and relief teachers in N.S.W. State schools.

In the following months, the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation council supported the scheduling of out-of-hours mass meetings across the state to agitate for improved staff–student ratios, additional relief staff, new teachers’ colleges, three years of training for teachers, and teachers college scholarships for qualified candidates (Education 1968). 252 Chapter Fourteen

On 25 September, New South Wales Premier Robert Askin delivered his Budget speech. He undertook to increase the numbers of teachers in training by 25 percent over the following two years, increase the number of teachers college scholarships at the beginning of 1969 by 10 percent, and increase government expenditure on school buildings by A$22.8 million. However, on 26 September The Sydney Morning Herald reported that many teachers considered the offers inadequate. At mass meetings held by the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation on the day after Askin delivered the Budget, teachers recommended “refraining from duty for one day” to promote their claims, with 7,372 in favour and 2,398 opposing the proposal. “Teachers Vote for A Strike,” The Sydney Morning Herald’s front-page headline announced on 27 September. Criticising the teachers’ stance, The Sydney Morning Herald stated that the decision would “come as a shock to many parents.” The editor continued:

Direct action by a section of the community not usually given to industrial action will disturb others who regard teaching as a profession ... A work stoppage would not only be a deplorable and illegal action; it would also be quite pointless.

On the same day, The Daily Mirror was even stronger in its denunciation:

The teachers can talk all they like about higher motives behind their proposed strike. It won’t fool anyone. Take away all the bluster about staff shortages and classroom inadequacies and the strike comes down to just one issue: Money ... It will deprive the State’s children of one day of learning and it will severely damage the reputation of an honourable profession.

Also on 27 September, under the headline “Deplorable Lesson from the Teachers,” The Daily Telegraph stated:

The ... schoolteachers who voted to “refrain from duty” yesterday ... showed that the teaching community ... can be as irresponsible as any wildcat union in Australia ... Their tears for the children (whom they plan to rob of a day’s education) will not impress the public.

A letter in the same newspaper the following day condemned the teachers’ “blackmail-by-strike tactics” and another criticised the union’s “crocodile tears” over “the pupils ... not getting a fair go.” The New South Wales Industrial Commission condemned the proposed strike but, towards the conclusion of a stormy meeting on Saturday 28 Disobedient Citizens 253

September, a majority of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation council ignored the commission’s order with an overwhelming vote of 114 in favour to twenty-four against (Bessant and Spaull 1972, 79). The next morning, the banner headline on the front page of The Sun-Herald stated “Teachers Will Strike Tuesday,” and under it: “It will throw into chaos school arrangements for 750,000 primary and secondary school children in 2,670 State schools.” Across its front page, the Sunday edition of Sydney’s Sun announced “32,000 Teachers Strike Tuesday.” The proposed action had achieved considerable public awareness of the issue. On 30 September, the day before the strike, The Australian related that school principals had “no idea” of the extent to which the action would affect the state’s three-quarters of a million schoolchildren. However, the newspaper conveyed the concern of the president of the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations of New South Wales that the strike would disadvantage students educationally, “especially so close to the time for examinations.” On Tuesday 1 October, more than 20,000 teachers representing 65 percent of the federation’s membership went out on strike. The main issue was the size of teaching loads for secondary school teachers (Bessant and Spaull 1972, 79). The Sun, an evening newspaper, under the headline “Schools Empty,” emphasised on the day of the strike the chaos caused and the number of schools closed with “most of the 750,000 students enjoy[ing] an unauthorised holiday.” Further inflaming matters, in an adjoining article, Minister for Education Charles Cutler accused the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation leadership of “downright lying” in stating that he had refused to discuss the problems that had caused the strike. The Daily Mirror, Sydney’s other evening newspaper, published a debate between a Teachers’ Federation official and a mother of six children in its 1 October issue. “To my mind you’re resorting to anarchy” the mother asserted; whereas the union representative claimed that the teachers were “the champions of Education.” The next morning The Daily Telegraph stated that the “teachers had given children a blackboard demonstration of irresponsibility”; while The Sydney Morning Herald announced that “the teachers’ strike would disturb others who regarded teaching as a profession” (O’Brien 1987, 142–3). However, in its editorial on the morning following the strike, The Canberra Times refrained from castigating the teachers but expressed concern that the dispute would “almost certainly degenerate into an argument over the right to strike and where the money [was] to come from.” 254 Chapter Fourteen

The strike alarmed many newspaper readers in Victoria. The leading headline on the front page of Melbourne’s Herald on 1 October stated: “7000 Teachers March—Strikers Tangle Sydney Traffic.” The text below the headline read:

Sydney—Thousands of demonstrating school teachers marched on Parliament House this afternoon. They stopped traffic in Macquarie St. and chanted: “We want Askin!” … “We want Askin!” … One policeman and a teacher threatened to fight when the teacher objected to being pushed.

The Sun News-Pictorial also focused negatively on the strike in its 2 October issue. Under the headline: “Teachers Halt Traffic in City,” readers learnt that the striking teachers:

clambered on to railings outside Parliament House and jeered as police moved in ... Men and women teachers blocked inner city traffic … for more than 50 minutes.

The Age, too, on 2 October, informed its readers that “disgruntled teachers” held “one of the biggest demonstrations ever staged outside [the NSW] Parliament House.” The Australian, like The Canberra Times, did not condemn the teachers. Instead it emphasised the magnitude of the strike. On 2 October, the national newspaper published the federation’s estimate that 27,000 primary and secondary school teachers had participated, with 4,000 of them roaring, “Cutler resign!” outside Parliament House. The Australian continued: “There was an almost blanket strike of teachers at secondary schools in the South Coast, in Sydney’s western suburbs and in the Newcastle area.” The federation claimed that 6,000 trainee teachers also participated. Having rejected the directive to abandon strike action, the federation was fined by the Industrial Commission. However, according to Bessant and Spaull (1972, 79), “the strike brought immediate results” including A$1 million for urgent capital works, the institution of a three-year teacher-training course for primary school teachers, and an inquiry into class sizes in high schools. Nevertheless, for some people, the strike generated strong resentment, as the venom in A. C. Foster’s letter to The Daily Telegraph on 1 October suggested:

The impudent strike by state school teachers surely reveals them as pestiferous ingrates. They work a six hour day, five days a week with three months holiday a year. Yet they are now striking for more pay and better working conditions! For years these impertinent pedagogues have been in Disobedient Citizens 255

the habit of publishing as full-page advertisements pompous and pontifical pronouncements on just about every subject under the sun, as though their piffling opinions were of immense importance to the world. The community has put up with it for the sake of amicable pupil–teacher relations, but there is no longer any need for pretence. If the teachers are half a step ahead of their pupils in knowledge, their strike reveals them as half a mile behind in commonsense.

Conclusion

The young anti-war demonstrators were unpredictable, visually exciting, and newsworthy. As The Age, under the headline “Dissent and Violence” editorialised on 6 May 1969:

Every student of revolutionary handbooks knows that the successful demonstration is the one which provokes an excessive response ... One incident of “police brutality” is worth any number of banners.

But despite the interest and excitement generated, the demonstrations were largely ineffectual with pro-involvement newspaper editors confident that coverage did not diminish support for the war, particularly if presented in a sensational and alarmist manner. As Henry Mayer argued in The Australian on 11 October, “Even the most optimistic student political demonstrators in Australia seldom believe that their protests have a direct impact on government policy.” Mayer elaborated that some students sought to “impress some of the younger public,” others hoped to create a minor ripple in people’s consciousness that would spread, still others saw “protest action as necessary to uphold the abstract right to dissent.” On the other hand, newspaper editors were aware that moral panics concerning youth were newsworthy, and portraying the confrontations negatively had the support of most people. To again cite Mayer, “the bulk of Australians including the under 30s is basically intolerant and authoritarian.” Asked in a Gallup poll whether the police were “usually too hard, about right, or not hard enough,” when dealing with university students and other demonstrators, only a small percentage of respondents replied “too hard,” Mayer related (The Australian, 11 October 1968). Enduring the penalty of lost wages and harbouring the fear of inspectorial retribution, the teachers’ decision to stop work in 1968 was courageous. Unlike the anti–Vietnam War demonstrators, their orderly strike meetings had the support of many parents. The Canberra Times with a large public servant readership backed the teachers, and The Australian was largely uncommitted. The four metropolitan Sydney newspapers 256 Chapter Fourteen expressed anger and disappointment as did the Victorian newspapers, but their support would have been contrary to their established practices. Nevertheless, the editors and journalists treated the striking teachers respectfully—in most instances, at least—especially because the motivation for the strike was the desire to improve educational standards for students. Mayer, writing in The Australian on 11 October 1968, suggested that to be successful, protestors should be well-dressed and have moderate demands “which fit in with the establishment.” The New South Wales teachers had challenged the view that teachers should be submissive and obsequious. Further, many parents shared the teachers’ concerns, and the government, recognising this, had substantially met the teachers’ requests. Gerster and Bassett (1991, 44) confirm that popular memory associates the latter half of the 1960s with demonstrating university students and opposition to the Vietnam War. They state that “Rebellion was always the province of a highly vocal, highly visible student minority.” They add: “Few people want to read a sixties memoir entitled ‘I Was Not an Anti- War Demonstrator’.” Judith Bessant (1995, 15) also comments upon the dominance of “the protesting students and ... the anti-war and peace movements” in sixties mythology. The 24,000 striking New South Wales teachers were substantially greater in numbers, and the disruption they caused was far greater than that generated by the hundreds who protested in Sydney’s Martin Place or outside Melbourne’s United States Consulate, and yet the teachers are overlooked in popular memory. The threat of communism has ceased to be a concern for governments, conscription no longer exists, and current wars have not captured the public’s attention in the way in which the Vietnam War did. Notwithstanding their high profile, the anti–Vietnam War demonstrators no longer have direct relevance to today’s society—unlike teachers. Today, education remains underfunded, and governments and the press continue to expect schoolteachers to be uncomplaining. The 1968 New South Wales teachers’ strike exemplifies the benefits of teachers uniting to attain reasonable goals. The teachers, like the anti-war agitators, were willing to publicly demonstrate against injustice. Both groups received prominent press coverage, but the teachers’ strike in New South Wales involved huge numbers and caused considerable disruption throughout the state, with most schools affected, whereas the student anti-war demonstrations, as exemplified in Martin Place and outside the United States Consulate in mid-1968, were small-scale but breached what most people considered to be acceptable behaviour. The press welcomed this misbehaviour; it sold Disobedient Citizens 257 newspapers and reinforced conservatism at a time when traditional values were under threat in many parts of the world. The disproportionate press publicity the student anti-war demonstrators received in 1968 has left a legacy—for most, they define the decade—but the teachers’ substantial display of defiance has been all but forgotten.

Works Cited

Aitken, Don. 1982. Stability and Change in Australian Politics. Second edition, Canberra: ANU Press. Appleyard, Reginald T. 1970. “The Population.” In Australian Society—A Sociological Introduction, edited by Alan F. Davies and Solomon Encel, 3–15. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire. Barcan, Alan. 1988. Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales. Sydney: UNSW Press. Bassett, Jan. 1995. ‘Matters of Conscience’—A History of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association. Melbourne: PenFolk. Bessant, Bob and Andrew D. Spaull. 1972. Teachers in Conflict. Melbourne: MUP. Bessant, Judith. 1995. “‘Hanging around the Street’: Australian Rockers, Sharpies and Skinheads of the 1960s and early 1970s.” Journal of Australian Studies 45 (June): 15–31. Bessant, Judith, and J. Vin D’Cruz. 1989. “When Nurses and Teachers Strike: Public Perceptions of ‘The Betrayal’.” The Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing 6 (3): 26–33. Calcutt Andrew and Philip Hammond. 2011. Journalism Studies—A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Davies, Alan F. 1970. “Mass Communication.” In Australian Society—A Sociological Introduction, edited by A. F. Davies and S. Encel. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire: 516-539. De Vyver, Frank. T. 1965. “The 1920 Civil Service and Teachers’ Strike in Western Australia.” The Journal of Industrial Relations 7 (3): 281– 97. Economou, Nicholas and Stephen Tanner. 2008. Media, Power and Politics in Australia. Sydney: Pearson Education. Education. 1968. Education—Journal of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation. 11 September. Gerster, Robin and Jan Bassett. 1991. Seizures of Youth—The Sixties and Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House. Hancock, Ian. 2002. John Gorton, He Did it His Way. Sydney: Hodder Headline. 258 Chapter Fourteen

Herman, Edward. S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent– The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Mayer, Henry. 1968. The Press in Australia. Melbourne: Landsdowne Press. McQueen, Humphrey. 1978. Australia’s Media Monopolies. Melbourne: Visa. Mitchell, Bruce. 1973. “In the Public Interest? The New South Wales Teachers’ Strike of 1968.” In Strikes—Studies in Twentieth Century Australian Social History, edited by John Iremonger, John Merritt and Graeme Osborne. Sydney: Angus and Robertson in association with The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: 249–265. Moses, Michelle S. 2007. “The Media as Educators, Educational Research, and Autonomous Deliberation.” Peabody Journal of Education 82 (1): 150–65. O’Brien, John. 1987. Divided Unity—Politics of N.S.W. Teacher Militancy since 1945. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Scalmer, Sean. 2002. Dissent Events—Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. Spaull, Andrew. 1992. “Australia.” In Labor Relations in Education—An International Perspective, edited by Bruce S. Cooper, 11–25. London: Greenwood Press. Western, John Stuart and Colin A. Hughes. 1967. “The Mass Media in Australia: A Preliminary Report.” Australian Journal of Political Science 11 (2): 186–99. Wilke, Douglas. 1969. “Vietnam, Apathy and Obsession.” Sun News- Pictorial. 16 October. PART V:

SEXUALITY, GENDER AND THE REGIONAL

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“STAN THE MAN”: REGIONAL RADIO AND REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY

KATE AMES

In the mid-1990s, as part of a study into Australian regional radio and community, I interviewed youth living in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, about how the introduction of national broadcaster Triple J had affected their lives. In a series of focus groups, the young people indicated that the worldview of the Triple J presenters helped them feel included in a broader sense of community (Ames 1997). In the interviews, interviewees made specific reference to issues such as being homosexual in a regional town. Young men, in particular, indicated that they appreciated being able to participate in a virtual world different from the real world confronting them every day in Rockhampton. Some thirteen years later, I revisited the topic, shifting my focus to masculinity, homosexuality, regionality, and the radio worldview. Although links between masculinity, homosexuality, and regionality are not new in scholarship, evidence and analysis of their relationship to (and with) the media and radio audiences in particular has been neglected in media studies in Australia. Further, the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 mandates that regional radio must address matters of local significance. To date, specific academic research into regional radio has been limited. As such, questions remain as to the ways in which significant local matters are addressed and what constitutes “local” in a regional environment. Given the social responsibilities that accompany a broadcast license in Australia, questions about any social consequences that may arise from limited media choices in regional areas also need addressing. This chapter attempts to address these issues and answer these questions by examining instances of radio talk on regional commercial 262 Chapter Fifteen radio. In an attempt to add to knowledge about regional identity, and how it is reinforced by regional radio presenters when they communicate with their audience, this chapter looks at four instances of radio talk that visited the topic of homosexuality. Data for the analysis were drawn from breakfast programs on two commercial stations broadcasting into Rockhampton and Gladstone: Sea FM and Hot FM. The programs were taped for one month (May–June 2006) between 7.15 a.m. and 8.45 a.m. Monday to Friday. The four transcripts analysed are from Sea FM broadcasts (“Stan the Man” and “Queer Beer”) and one Hot FM broadcast (“Sharif”). These transcripts are significant because homosexuality was specifically referred to, directly or indirectly, during the taped periods. The study of representations in radio has suffered as a poor cousin to similar studies in television, and detailed analyses of radio conversations outside radio talk (“talkback”) context are still quite rare:

Perhaps because of its ubiquity, talk as a broadcasting activity in its own right has largely been ignored, or more strictly, taken for granted by media analysts. No doubt this is also due to the fact that the activity of talking is often seen as a trivial phenomenon, one which has nothing much to do with more pressing issues such as the nature of media bias, persuasion, or the portrayal of violence. (Hutchby 2006, 3)

This chapter examines how this particular topic—homosexuality—is made relevant by hosts in radio talk in a regional environment and considers the implications of the way in which this topic is handled for listeners in regional Australia.

Regional Australia

Regional Australia is a mysterious place. Its identity is relative; that is, regional Australia is defined by what it is not, rather than by what it is. Regional Australia is not metropolitan, although some regional cities are urban, and regional Australia is not simply rural, which traditionally implies a primary reliance on agriculture and has long-associated links with masculinity and isolation (Gray and Lawrence 2001; Lockie and Bourke 2001). Regionality emerged as a specific category of interest in Australia during the 1990s, occurring in response to the economic focus of the nation turning to the cities when life in rural areas became more difficult to sustain (White and Wyn 2008). Further, regional Australia is increasingly understood as dynamic, complex, and diverse. Its residents include miners, farmers, fishermen, government employees, small-business owners, and, increasingly, “tree changers,” “sea changers,” and retirees Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 263

(White and Wyn 2008). Regional Australia is unique in its relationship with rural and metropolitan Australia because, in many cases, regional cities provide the link between rural residents and the metropolis. Therefore, regional Australia and the people who live in regional Australia depend on metropolitan Australia (Gerritsen 2000; Gray and Lawrence 2001). By not being either distinctly rural or distinctly urban, people living in regional Australia exist in a marginal space. The regions exist on the fringes: a regional city is the “other” type of city, not quite diverse and open enough to be cosmopolitan (see Malpass 2008), nor indifferent and large enough to be metropolitan. Significantly, many people who live in regional Australia see themselves as rural (Mules, Schirato and Wigman 1995). The “otherness” of being regional can extend beyond the physical isolation that comes with regionality in Australia. Living in regional Australia can be socially isolating and difficult for anyone, let alone for someone who is “different.” Historically, radio has played an important role in the lives of rural and regional Australians. Notions of “the region” and the needs of regional audiences have been, and continue to be, firmly entrenched in broadcasting policy development, which has its traditions in expansionist development policies of early federal governments. Regional radio in Australia has been subject to consolidated media ownership and has demonstrated considerable resilience to pressure from other media forms, including television, the internet, and wireless communication (Berryman 1999). This is true of radio in Central Queensland.

Being Gay in a Town like Rockhampton

Central Queensland is a region of Australia’s north-east, which includes three provincial cities—Rockhampton, Gladstone, and Mackay—and a number of smaller towns. The area is renowned for its mix of business, agriculture, and industry (mining and manufacturing). The three cities are very different. Rockhampton is primarily an agricultural, business, and education service centre. Gladstone is one of the main industrial centres in Queensland. Mackay is renowned for its sugar industry but, more recently, has benefited from the mining boom. Central Queensland is considered regional rather than rural because the populations cluster around the cities, but there remains a “widespread self-perception in the community of rural identity” (Mules, Schirato and Wigman 1995, 241). Masculinity, regionality, and homosexuality in Central Queensland, and more specifically in Rockhampton, have been analysed previously in academic publications. Dennis Altman (2000, 37) reflected on the 264 Chapter Fifteen complexities of being gay in Rockhampton. Altman commented on Rockhampton’s cultural and physical isolation (an eight-hour drive to its nearest metropolitan neighbour, Brisbane), its history as a rich pastoral centre (and the types of masculinity associated with this culture), and the “triple marginalisation of being gay in a provincial town in the Antipodes.” Altman argued that marginality was a “central part of Australian self-definition,” and that the cultural cringe in intellectual circles was alive and well. The picture Altman painted was of provincial Australia as hegemonically white and male and where to be a man was to be a “masculine,” heterosexual male (see also Mules, Schirato and Wigman 1995). However, at the time, Altman was optimistic about the potential of globalisation and the opportunities for gay people in regional Australia, despite their marginalisation. Warwick Mules, in a later discussion about culture in Australia’s regional areas, argued that there was potential for creativity to flourish in such places: “Life lived in the regions is a life lived in resistance, against a centre of authority that beams in from the “hinterland or powerful metrocentres” (Mules 2005). In discussing the limitations for gay and lesbian culture to flourish in a provincial city, Altman said that visiting Rockhampton reminded him that social change is “always uneven, that aspects of the old continue to co-exist with the new” (Altman 2000, 44). The four transcripts of radio talk discussed here highlight the continuing relevance of Altman’s comments and support the idea that regional identity is complex. The data provide evidence of an understanding of homosexuality as an acceptable (if difficult) choice. Yet they also provide evidence of feminine and gay men continuing to be marginalised because they are considered undesirable—a belief supported by the “dominance of the heterosexual hegemony outside the big-cities” (Altman 2000, 45).

“Stan the Man” 25 May, Sea FM

During the taping period, Sea FM targeted a predominantly male, adult audience (24–39 years) with an all-male presenting team (“Smithy and Blunty” and “Smithy and Chooky”). Its music ranged between latest hits and adult rock. The worldview established by the all-male presenting team on Sea FM was one of a “boys’ club”: topics frequently included football, fishing, and alcohol, and most of the callers to topics were male. The “maleness” of the listening audience, and the masculine topics, can be linked to the male–male combination of the host team and the programming orientation (Ames 2004; Wollman 1998). On this particular Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 265 station, there were three instances where homosexuality or gender preference and/or identification were at the core of banter between presenters with the aim of being humorous. In the instance recounted below, hosts Smithy and Blunty are in the throes of celebrating Blunty’s final week, which they refer to as “the best of Blunty week.” Smithy and Blunty reveal to their audience that Blunty was the man behind the character of “Stan,” a regular on the morning show. Stan is a man in touch with his feminine side. After revealing that Blunty and the character Stan are the same person, the hosts play an interview that Stan had conducted with the Australian rock star Diesel. Smithy opens the conversation about the Diesel interview by referring to Blunty as “coming out.” The conversation takes on the tone of a confessional:

SMITHY: Now Blunts (.) you’ve done a lot of things, but (.) I think it’s time to come out (.) time to admit something that you haven’t admitted for the last three years1

The use of the term “come out” so early in the interaction is significant. The phrase has been traditionally associated with homosexuality, referring to the decision to change from being a homosexual in private to making the status known publicly (Plunkett 2009), and it has been the dominant topic in gay radio (Beck 2006). Smithy’s opinion in relation to this topic is established: he thinks it is time for Blunty to be honest with the audience—to confess. Blunty concurs:

BLUNTY: oooh look (.) for those that may have heard ahh me when I first started here at Sea FM (.) >I had issues< SMITHY: Hmmm BLUNTY: and ah I had an alter ego that was just bursting to come out SMITHY: Hmmm BLUNTY: and come out he did (.) Stan

Blunty reveals that he has an alter ego, and the term “come out” is again used. Smithy’s use of “hmmm” is a prompt for Blunty to keep talking and is commonly used in this manner in counselling settings (Danby, Butler and Emmison 2009). While “hmmm” is an acknowledgement

1 Extracts were transcribed using the Jefferson Transcription method, developed by Gail Jefferson, commonly used within Conversation Analysis (Jefferson 2004). This system uses standard punctuation to mark intonation, rather than syntax, and allows the transcriber to make note of emphasis, silence, laughter, and aspiration as heard. 266 Chapter Fifteen of Blunty’s statement that he has issues, it also serves to reinforce Smithy’s opinion that Blunty needs to be honest, and thus it builds on his opening. The tone of Smithy’s “hmmms” also indicates that Smithy considers the topic—coming out—to be serious. As a confessional, one of the speakers has a “problem.” This is made evident when Blunty introduces the listeners to Stan; he makes a particular point of distancing himself from this alter ego:

SMITHY: Stan was ↑you? BLUNTY: Stan was meant to be (0.5) a well a man who was in touch with his feminine side SMITHY: Well let’s just say tha:t he he he I think that’s safest to say BLUNTY: Yeah ah and Stan and I aaah I mean you know we were we really were polar opposites I’d like to say on the record straight away SMITHY: Yeah so so you’re your alter ego was completely different

Both Smithy and Blunty explicitly refer to the “feminine male” as being problematic. Blunty attempts to “categorise himself out of a topic relationship” (Fitzgerald 1999, 114). He offers disclaimers to being a “man in touch with his feminine side” in order to explicitly establish that he is not camp or feminine. He establishes that Stan is an “alter ego,” or second self. He “sets the record straight” by stating that he and Stan were “polar opposites.” When saying he had issues, Blunty is referring to the period prior to Stan coming out, inferring that the issues were in relation to sharing a physical identity with Stan. Smithy also acknowledges that it has taken Blunty three years to “admit” that he is the character Stan. At this stage, any reference to homosexuality is inferred. There is a possible reference by Smithy, who suggests that referring to Stan as a man in touch with his feminine side was the “safest” way to put it. There is evidence here of reliance on the audience’s broader knowledge and a particular understanding of sexuality and homosexuality: if the safe way to describe Stan is as “a man in touch with his feminine side,” the implication is that the alternatives must be more dangerous. This initial conversation introduces the longer interview between Stan and Diesel. Diesel is a rock star, and in the scenario Stan is playing the role of a journalist, but Stan remains the camp/feminine male; this is reinforced by action and is prioritised over his role as the journalist in this scenario:

STAN: ((feminine male voice – highly camp)) Diesel, hello Diesel DIESEL: Hiya STAN: I love the smell of Diesel but I love your smell even more Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 267

DIESEL: he he STAN: Can I have a sniff (.) just another sniff? DIESEL: (.) No STAN: Hey just a couple of questions for you um

Here, the link between feminine male and homosexuality is established when Stan indicates that he loves the smell of Diesel. This calls on the audience’s commonsense knowledge: it is not “normal” in this context for a man to say that he likes the smell of another man and to ask permission to “sniff” that person, and this male–male desire is linked to homosexuality. Diesel hasn’t established himself as a masculine male at this stage, but his status as non-homosexual emerges when he rejects Stan’s request. At this point, Stan takes up his role as a journalist, which is to ask questions. Stan’s high-camp voice is the only indicator here that he is a “feminine male”; his questions with frequent indirect references to sexual activity indicate that he is sexually knowledgeable:

STAN: You sang that song I Don’t Need Love? What about a mild dose of lust? How’s that? DIESEL: (0.5) If that’s what you want (.) you know (.) whatever flirts your boat (.) man (.) [whatever floats your boat] STAN: [OK, OK] Being a rock and roller (.) you must get the groupies (.) what’s your favourite type of groupie (0.2) what do you look for? DIESEL: Uu::m (.) ones that ah ones with one head are usually good, one head unknown female [ha he] STAN: [Yes, OK↑] What about leg hair and back hair↑ Is that a good thing or a bad thing for a groupie? DIESEL: Aaahh definitely waxed I reckon (.) get rid of that stuff yeah STAN: OK, lovely (.). So, I’m looking at one of your CDs here (.) Um there’s man alive tip of my tongue, too much of a good thing, ah Get Lucky (.) now I’m sensing a theme DIESEL: It’s ah it’s not ah yeah I know where you’re going with this STAN: What about Battleworn? What’s going on there? DIESEL: ((clears throat)) I know where you’re going with this thing and it’s not what you think STAN: Ohh come on (.) what’s your room number come on (.) you know you want to? DIESEL: [he he] ((softly)) Yeah here it is yeah.

There is further direct reference to Stan being a homosexual in the latter stages of this transcript when Stan asks Diesel for his room number; again, a man asking another man for his room number calls on commonsense knowledge and understanding of sexual relationships. It is also evident that although this is a conversation, it is also a performance, 268 Chapter Fifteen and Diesel appears to play along with Stan, who is acting. The interaction conforms to established stereotypes of gay men promoted in the mainstream media: the effeminate man with a high-camp voice, concern with appearances, and an emphasis on the male body (references to body hair, tongue, and smell) (Beck 2006). Finally, when the conversation reverts to dialogue between the two hosts, the internal conflict between the feminine Stan and the non- feminine Blunty returns when Smithy asserts that maybe Stan and Blunty are, in fact, not dissimilar. Smithy suggests directly that Blunty is confused about his sexuality:

BLUNTY: Diesel (.) Stan SMITHY: You say it’s an alter ego but it sounds what like you really like (.) YOU LOVE DIESEL BLUNTY: Oh he’s a very nice a very nice guy SMITHY: Did you wax for him? BLUNTY: Only (.) where he wanted me to ((Both laugh))

Interestingly in this interaction, after the initial pretence of shock on Smithy’s behalf—“YOU LOVE DIESEL”—which is affirmed indirectly by Blunty, Smithy’s immediate response is complete acceptance—“Did you wax for him?” However, the final laughter closing the conversation is significant. Both hosts laugh: they are both in on the joke and this brief acceptance of Blunty as a “feminine male” is thus extinguished. During this conversation, there is no direct speech establishing Blunty as a masculine male; rather, the language establishes that he is not feminine and explicitly rejects the association with the category of feminine male. Smithy plays the role of counsellor: initially urging Blunty to “come out,” and finally prompting Blunty to confess that he does in fact think Diesel is a “very nice guy.” The feminine male is posed as a problem and is associated with internal conflict, the need to confess, homosexuality, and sexual knowledge/experience/deviance. The story of internal conflict, albeit as a performance, between Blunty and Stan is the site of humour. In this, it is reliant on an acceptance by the audience of heterosexual norms. This reliance on these norms is further demonstrated by the following example.

“Queer Beer” 24 May, Sea FM

During this next conversation, Smithy and Blunty assume roles in a mock advertisement about a product called Queer Beer. The advertisement involves a performance by Blunty, who takes on the persona of a feminine Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 269 man (not Stan), and Smithy, who has a short part using a very deep male voice. Prior to playing the advertisement, the two hosts introduce the scene:

BLUNTY: Probably one of the bigger ones though (.) that was on the international stage (.) .hhh was one of the popular shows over the last couple of years has been Queer Eye (.) for the Straight Guy SMITHY: A show you related to BLUNTY: Oh yes, it it certainly appealed to my feminine side (.) but it was ah he (.) it was also a show that ah made popular the expression Queer (.) even amongst ah the homosexual population are happy with the use of the word Queer (.) and one company > a brewing company in fact< launched a product called Que::er Be:er SMITHY: specially targeted at the ga:y community

During this introductory sequence, the hosts establish themselves as authorities on homosexuality through the use of firm statements of “fact”: “it was also a show that made popular the expression queer” and “the homosexual population are happy with.” Blunty refers to his feminine side; although, this time there is no Stan and no attempt to reject this association. While again, there is no specific mention of the fact that Blunty’s character is gay, and indeed he may not be, the role play directly calls on the listener’s knowledge or familiarity with gendered stereotypes of the feminine gay man interested in things traditionally associated with women:

BLUNTY: And so ahh we ahh were asked to >put together a little ad for them< ((Smithy and Blunty now get into role)) BLUNTY: ((feminine voice)) By now everybody knows that a hard earned thirst means a big cold bee:r (.) but what if your thirst wasn’t the result of hard ↑labour? What if you prefe:rred the air-conditioned comfort of a hair salon to driving a truck into a coal mine? Well now there’s a beer for you (.) It’s Queer Beer (.) so if you’re not very hairy and talk like a fairy (.) if you love Princess Di and Channel Ten’s Queer Eye (.) the best beer for queers (.) is the one and only QUEER BEER. SMITHY: ((Very deep “masculine” voice)) You’ll always get nice head with Queer Beer BLUNTY: hhhhh ah yes (.) hhhh ((breathless)) I’m having one now ((Smithy and Blunty break into laughter)) SMITHY: I’d forgotten how bad that was

The use of the personal pronoun “you” is significant in this interaction, because it speaks directly to the listening audience. It asks the audience to 270 Chapter Fifteen become involved in the interaction and to define for themselves whether they are queer or otherwise, albeit with very stereotyped characteristics: “If you’re not very hairy and talk like a fairy.” The final lines of the advertisement reinforce traditional notions of the gay man as highly sexual: reference to getting “nice head,” and Blunty’s breathy response, which replicates someone trying to speak while having a sexual orgasm. This again refers to gay sexual acts and sexual orientations to which the hosts are ambivalent (Beck 2006). The direct link between the characters and homosexuality is established through the use of the word “queer.” Direct references are made to Central Queensland: coalmines, the tropical climate, and the need for air-conditioning. The comedy is reliant on a common understanding of normative masculine (driving a truck in a hot coalmine) or feminine (sitting in an air-conditioned hair salon) in the region. Ultimately, Smithy’s “I’d forgotten how bad that was” does briefly establish for the audience that the hosts acknowledge the potentially troublesome nature of the interaction, but this is fleeting. These Sea FM transcripts provide evidence to support Beck’s (2006) argument that the foundations of gender constructions in radio rely on erotic ambivalence and suggestions of sexual deviance. The Sea FM representations of the gay or feminine man are of a bitchy, effeminate male, and reveal that this type of man provides some discomfort to heterosexual men. For example, in the interaction with Diesel, the attempts by Stan to draw Diesel into a sexual conversation were all humorously but directly rejected by Diesel. Beck (2006) also argues that coming out is the dominant topic in gay radio. While Sea FM is not gay radio, coming out was also a dominant theme, emerging in two of the three occasions homosexuality was a topic. This suggests that the trope of coming out has some purchase in the “straight” community as well. Coming out is also evident as a theme in the following Hot FM transcript, but it is dealt with quite differently.

“Sharif” 2 June, Hot FM

The final radio-talk interaction analysed is from Hot FM, which broadcasts into the same area as Sea FM. During the period analysed, Hot FM targeted a younger demographic (17–35 years) than did Sea FM. Its music featured latest hits and was predominantly pop-oriented. The Hot FM team had a male–female combination (“Will and Jess”) and the worldview was one that generally challenged assumptions stereotypically associated with its broadcast area: women were important, activities such as pig-hunting were not necessarily “cool,” and it was okay to not like football. The Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 271 presenters, Will and Jess, made frequent references to popular culture: events, shows, and celebrities. Only one interaction addressed homosexuality; it occurred between the presenters and a gay male. At this time, a participant in the recent Big Brother television series—David, a farmer— had gained popularity as a potential winner. David was very open about his homosexuality. In the following excerpt, Jess and Will talk to David’s partner, Sharif:

WILL: If you’re a fan of David from Big Brother you know that he has revealed he has ahh got himself a partner in the outside world and we speak exclusively now on Hot FM (.) Sharif welcome (.) SHARIF: Helloo how are you? WILL: [Very good] JESS: [VERY GOOD] ↑You’re a big SECRET and I thought this whole series of Big Brother was to have (.) single people in the house SHARIF: Ahhh I’m not sure about that (.) You would have to ask Big Brother ha ha

Coming out is not specifically referred to in this introduction, but it is inferred. Terms such as “revealed he has ahh got himself a partner in the outside world” and “You’re a big secret” infer that Sharif and David’s relationship was hidden. In this interaction, the presenters make no reference to homosexuality. They introduce David’s partner who is a male called Sharif. It would be evident to listeners that David is gay, if they are not already aware of it given the prominence of his homosexual identity within the Big Brother context. It is not until more than halfway into the conversation that Sharif raises the fact that he and David are gay. Up until this moment, Will and Jess’s conversation with Sharif identifies him only as a partner, and their questions probe how he, as a partner, feels about David being inside the Big Brother house. When Sharif does discuss homosexuality, he refers to it in the context of a social issue:

SHARIF: hhh ummm Look I was quite happy to just stay in ahh the shadow of it but if I can do anything that can support David to stay in the house ahhh I have absolutely no problem doing that and that’s basically why I agreed to give the story to ahh New Idea WILL: [Yeah] JESS: [Uh huh] SHARIF: And err like the most important thing that I want to support David on is the message that he’s trying to give out (.) which is it’s OK to be gay especially if you are out in the country (.) .hhh and one of the reasons that David is very concerned about it is because he knows a lot of people are committing suicide because of it 272 Chapter Fifteen

JESS: Yeah (.) Now we we are in regional Queensland (.) What would you say to um (.) to those guys and girls living in regional Queensland that perhaps are gay or think they might be what and don’t quite know where to go (.) what would you suggest for them to do. SHARIF: hhhh ahh I don’t have much experience about how it is in rural Queensland but I would base my experience about being .ahh Lebanese because it’s ahh equally hard to be gay in a country like Lebanon and being Lebanese ummm hmmm and basically just live your life (.) accept yourself for who you are and .ahhh the people who are around you (.) if they really love you for who you are will accept you no matter what

Sharif’s role as David’s partner is to support David’s attempt to stay in the Big Brother house. Sharif adds that he also supports David’s mission of highlighting the plight of gay men in regional and rural Australia, but this comes after he has set himself up as the concerned partner at home who is proud of David’s achievements in the Big Brother house. It is Jess who raises regionality, flagging that the listeners are from a regional area and asking Sharif to provide some advice for listeners who may be having issues with their homosexuality. Sharif’s response reveals that although he has not had specific experience of being gay in “rural Queensland,” he is Lebanese, and he equates Queensland with Lebanon—“it’s equally hard to be gay in a country like Lebanon and being Lebanese.” This explains for the listener the origins of both Sharif’s accent and name, and it directly acknowledges the difficulties associated with being gay. Ultimately, in this interaction, Will and Jess focus on Sharif more as a partner than as a gay man. Sharif’s response reinforces his role as a partner; his discussion about homosexuality and associated social issues occurs after his emotions as a partner have been discussed. Although this interaction was the only time Hot FM dealt with homosexuality in the survey period, it does indicate that the station treats homosexuality as quite normal and explicit. The gay men in this exchange are not represented as the “other,” and they are not defined in relation to heterosexuality. Sharif and David are explicitly gay—self-identified—and the presenters, Will and Jess, make no inference about characteristics that can be attributed to their homosexuality. The difficulties associated with being gay in regional areas are addressed directly by Sharif and acknowledged by a question from Jess. While this interaction acknowledges that being gay in rural Australia is different and potentially difficult, the gay subject (Sharif and, in reference, David) is not the object of stereotype and humour. This interaction addresses gay people in the audience, acknowledging some of the difficulties associated with being gay or Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 273 lesbian as opposed to excluding them or objectifying them as a source of humour or ridicule. This is the most significant point of difference between the transcripts. The Hot FM extract is an example of conversation regarding homosexuality that includes consideration of social or political contexts, while the Sea FM depiction of gay or effeminate males is devoid of any reference to social or political implications relating to homosexuality. Another difference is the presence of “real” or “out” gay people. At Sea FM the gayness is performed; at Hot FM it is lived. Gay characters are usually depicted as being devoid of social or political contexts in the media (Shugart 2003) and, in this particular regional area, there are social and political implications associated with coming out (Altman 2000). Further, because radio relies on a listening-only audience, presenters can either reinforce stereotypes or foster understanding through talk. Therefore, a mainstream audience that is predominantly white, male, and heterosexual, as is the case with Sea FM in particular, can only hear representations of “gayness”, and these, as Stan demonstrated, are based around one type of feminine male (see Clarkson 2005). What messages are the radio presenters in these transcripts sending to a predominantly white male audience in regional Queensland? The Sea FM conversations reinforce a heterosexual masculine norm established by the presenters, effectively relegating the effeminate, possibly or probably gay man to the fringes (it makes him the “other”). The “girly” (gay) male they perform is useful to the presenters for comedy, but they (and perhaps their audience) do not want to be like him. Therefore, the listener who does share characteristics with Stan or with the effeminate man in the Queer Beer advertisement is excluded: he is not “normal” according to the Sea FM community and, as is probably the case in his real life, he is treated as something different and possibly challenging to the status quo. In contrast, the Hot FM interaction speaks directly to social issues involving gay people (male and female), and focuses on Sharif’s role as a partner rather than as a homosexual. Problems associated with being gay in a regional area are acknowledged, and any gay members of the audience are included and acknowledged as part of the interaction.

Conclusion

Homosexuality emerged as a theme in conversations on Sea FM and Hot FM during the survey period. Differences between the worldviews promoted by the stations’ hosting teams affected the ways in which masculinity and homosexuality were addressed. In contrast to a 274 Chapter Fifteen heterosexual boys’ club to which the Sea FM presenters were pitching their conversations, the Hot FM presenters were pitching to a slightly younger audience who view homosexuality as normal. Hot FM represented homosexuality as problematic but discussed those problems within the context of relationships, not sexuality. Ultimately, this chapter highlights that “heterocentric discourses of sexuality as mediated through mass-circulation news and entertainment media” (Cover 2002, 110) are not always simplistic. The two radio stations analysed have the same owners, broadcast in the same regional area, have commercial imperatives at the heart of their operations, and share similar demographics. With the increasing visibility of lesbian and gay sexuality in popular culture, both radio stations at times focused on sexuality as a topic. Yet they took very different approaches to representing gay lives. These differing radio conversations confirm Altman’s (2000) view that the old can coexist with the new and that although social change may be uneven there is indeed evidence of social change afoot if the Hot FM worldview can be promoted in a place like Rockhampton.

Works Cited

Altman, Dennis. 2000. “Marginality on the Tropic.” In De-centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations beyond the Metropolis, edited by R. Phillips, D. Watt, and D. Shuttleton, 37–48. London: Routledge. Ames, Kate. 1997. “Connection or Corruption? Triple J and Regional Youth.” Master’s thesis. Rockhampton, Qld: Central Queensland University. —. 2004. “Girls Get a Voice on Regional Radio: A Rockhampton Case Study.” Ejournalist 4 (1): 1–21. Available at . Beck, Alan. 2006. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away: Gay Radio, Past and Present.” In More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-Media World, edited by A. Crisell, 127–44. New York: Berghahn Books. Berryman, Bruce. 1999. “Converging Signals: Digital Radio and Program Associated Data.” Media International Australia 91 (May): 43–54. Clarkson, Jay. 2005. “Contesting Masculinity’s Makeover: Queer Eye, Consumer Masculinity, and ‘Straight-Acting’ Gays.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 29 (3): 235–55. Regional Radio And Representations of Homosexuality 275

Cover, Rob. 2002. “Re-Sourcing Queer Subjectivities: Sexual Identity and Lesbian/Gay Print Media.” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 103 (May): 109-23. Danby, Susan, Carly W. Butler, and Michael Emmison. 2009. “When ‘Listeners Can’t Talk’: Comparing Active Listening in Opening Sequences of Telephone and Online Counselling.” Australian Journal of Communication 36 (3): 91–113. Fitzgerald, Richard. 1999. “Method in Media Interaction: An Ethnomethodological Analysis of a Radio Phone-In.” PhD thesis. Bangor: University of Wales. Gerritsen, Rolf. 2000. “The Management of Government and its Consequences for Service Delivery in Regional Australia.” In Land of Discontent: The Dynamics of Change in Rural and Regional Australia, edited by P. McManus and B. Pritchard, 123–40. Sydney: UNSW Press. Gray, Ian, and Geoffrey Lawrence. 2001. A Future for Regional Australia: Escaping Global Misfortunes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchby, Ian. 2006. Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Berkshire: Open University Press. Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies From the First Generation, edited by Gene Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lockie, Stewart, and Lisa Bourke. 2001. Rurality Bites. Sydney: Pluto Press. Malpass, J. 2008. “Cosmopolitanism, Branding, and the Public Realm.” In Branding Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Parochialism, edited by S. Donald, E. Kofman, and C. Kevin, 189–98. New York: Routledge. Mules, Warwick, Tony Schirato, and Bert Wigman. 1995. “Rural Identity within the Symbolic Order: Media Representations of the Drought.” In Communication and Culture in Rural Areas, edited by Perry Share, 239–57. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Rural Social Research, Charles Sturt University. Mules, Warwick. 2005. “The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular.” Transformations 12 (December 2005). . Plunkett, Reece. 2009. “Fashioning the Feasible: Categorisation and Social Change.” Australian Journal of Communication 36 (3): 23–44. 276 Chapter Fifteen

Shugart, Helene. 2003. “Reinventing Privilege: The New (Gay) Man in Contemporary Popular Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (1): 67–91. White, Rob, and Johanna Wyn. 2008. Youth and Society: Exploring the Social Dynamics of the Youth Experience. South Melbourne: Oxford Press. Wollman, Elizabeth L. 1998. “Men, Music, and Marketing at Q104.3 (WAXQ-FM New York)” Popular Music and Society 22 (4): 23.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“FEMININE WOMEN”: REGIONAL AUSTRALIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AUSTRALIAN FEMININITY

FIONA GILL

Women have played a critical part in the development and expression of the Australian nation, and today there is more recognition of this historical contribution. However, the most frequently portrayed national figure is a male, a type characterised by the stockman, the bushranger, or the ANZAC soldier. This masculine Australian national type relies on a feminine figure to complement it. This chapter examines the historical emergence of this particular type of Australian femininity, exploring the ways in which it adopted the egalitarian logic that underpins the mythical male figure. Drawing on representations of young rural women in popular fiction from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, this chapter traces how this Australian femininity emerged in regional, or rural, spaces and was often juxtaposed with British or urban forms of femininity. The chapter also makes linkages between this Australian femininity and the lives of women living on farms in twenty-first-century Australia. Contemporary feminist scholars of rural Australia have declared the existence of what they see as a specific country woman who is a not too feminine but not too masculine identity (Pini 2005). This chapter charts its development in some classic bush novels. The importance of regional Australia and “the outback” in the imaginings of the Australian nation is reflected in the representations of Australians as people who are comfortable in a rugged and inhospitable land. This representation of ruggedness is linked to stories about the arrival of British colonists and their convict charges in 1788 and of the early days of the Australian nation. Australia’s convict and penal heritage 278 Chapter Sixteen is seen as the origins of the Australian character traits of independence and resistance to authority. Further, the Australian national myth, most clearly articulated by Russel Ward (1958), also represents a colonial society where survival depended on the people being tough and resourceful. However, the reality of contemporary Australia is somewhat different, rendering these imaginings as wistful thinking rather than as a portrayal of reality. Australia is one of the most urbanised societies in the world. Clustered along the fringes of the continent, most Australians do not venture inland; the country’s vast interior is largely uninhabited. The sparseness of the population in the outback has contributed to its mystique. Though occupied by and familiar to Indigenous communities, the outback is largely unfamiliar to the majority of the Australian population. As a result, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people inhabiting this space of the outback have taken on some of its mythical characteristics. For non- Indigenous Australians, the lives of non-Indigenous people in particular represent a temporal link back to the origins of settler Australian society, when white Australians lived on the margins and struggled to survive. These myths have produced a specific notion of rurality in which hardship, distance from cities and—by extension—“civilisation,” and men and masculinity predominate. Yet, frequently these myths do not reflect the lived reality experienced by those living in rural Australia often referred to by Australians as “the bush” (Little and Panelli 2007). The predominance of these masculine narratives shapes the way women who live in the bush are understood. The mystique informs Australian discourses surrounding hegemonic gender roles and identities (Pini 2005). The masculine figure remains central in Australian history, and the masculine body is the body against which all others are compared. Masculinity in this context revolves around the physical mastery of a hostile environment, tying in with narratives of colonialism, civilisation, and “taming” Nature (Little and Panelli 2007). Working with this dominant discourse of masculinity and the bush, this chapter examines the development and expression of forms of Australian femininity and understandings of Australian womanhood as represented in rural life. The two novels that are the focus of this chapter were written during the early period of Australian nationhood (1901). The depiction of rural Australian women in these novels illustrates a set of femininities that existed by the twentieth century—regional femininity, egalitarian femininity, feminised femininity—alongside an emerging type of Australian womanhood: the masculine femininity. Mary Grant Bruce’s (1980) Billabong series, first published in 1911, traced the fortunes of an Australian squatter family in Gippsland, Victoria, through the main protagonist, Norah Linton. As the Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity 279 daughter of a landowner, Norah represented an ideal type of middle- to upper-class Australian femininity. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s (1985) Coonardoo, first published in 1929, told the story of the relationship between a white station owner and Coonardoo, an Aboriginal woman born on the station. Although Coonardoo told a broader tale of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in northern Western Australia, both Coonardoo and the Billabong series portrayed Australian femininity as existing in regional spaces, as opposed to urban, and illustrated clearly that Australian womanhood was regarded as white, with little thought given to non-white Australian women. The picture of Australian femininity that emerged in these two texts, and others of the era, was of women who were practical, who blended the masculine with the feminine, and who conveyed a sense of classlessness and whiteness.

British and Australian Femininities

One of the first non-Indigenous, or white, Australian femininities arrived with the British and reflected British ideals. White women came to Australia as helpmeets for men; gender roles were understood to be complementary, and the feminine was constructed in opposition to the masculine (Summers 1994). This was also reflected in attempts by British settlers to familiarise themselves with the landscape, which was generally perceived as an alien and inhospitable environment. The role of men was to conquer this apparently limitless space; for women, the challenge was to “civilise” it. This process of civilisation was cultural and social—women reminded men of the importance of domesticity, sobriety, and industry— but it was engraved on the physical. Thus the process of civilisation was undertaken through the construction of gardens and landscapes replicating those of Britain and “home.” Roses, willows, and other British plants were introduced in opposition to native flora. These exotics formed a physical boundary, stamping these spaces as home, civilised, and controlled by the women, in contrast with the men’s work beyond the domestic. Analyses of writing by women settlers from the 1830s illustrate that they perceived their role in the new colony to be that of civilisers and moral guardians. Civilisation in this sense was strongly linked to notions of Britishness and resulted in an explicit correlation between Australian and British identity and femininity. This link endured to the early twentieth century, as reflected in Henry Lawson’s Black Bonnet, first published in 1916:

280 Chapter Sixteen

She came out in the Early Days (Green seas, and blue – and grey) – The village fair, and English ways, Seemed worlds and worlds away. She fought the haunting loneliness Where brooding gum-trees stood; And won through sickness and distress As Englishwomen could. (Lawson 1979)

As Henry Lawson’s poem illustrates, this type of femininity was to be found in those British women who worked beside their husbands outside the house but who simultaneously provided comfort and culture within the home. The ability to withstand environmental hardship and social isolation with grace and fortitude placed these women in positions of considerable moral and cultural power. It was their role to provide succour and support for their husbands. In time, women came to embody the nation; although, in this case, it was the British nation and empire that Australian women embodied. Women represented a social and cultural link to the geographically distant “home.” They also represented a physical link, as it was through their bodies that the fledgling state and the reigning empire would be reproduced (Farrell 2001; Yuval-Davis 1996). For women, the focus of life was as wives and mothers rather than as independent agents and, as such, women provided a moral compass for their household and for society at large (Farrell 2001). Remnants of this discourse have endured and are found in many different spheres of contemporary Australian life. For example, they are reflected in discussions regarding women’s roles on farms today (Alston 2006; Brandth and Haugen 1997; Bryant 1999; Gill 2008; Liepins 1998; Little and Panelli 2007; Pini 2005; Pini 2007). As it became clear that attempts by “colonials” to replicate British society were doomed to failure, this version of Anglo-domestic femininity receded and now appears only as a charade or caricature of the lives and femininity performed in Australia. Although the version of femininity that later emerged continued to be circumscribed by relationships with men (fathers and husbands in particular) and to situate women within the home and family, there were new elements.

The Development an Australian Femininity

The emergence of distinct forms of Australian femininity reflected the growing confidence of the new nation and its increasing independence from Britain. It was also borne of a sense that Australians needed to Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity 281 differentiate themselves from other “non-white” colonials (Lake 1994). The three main attributes of this new form of femininity were its emphasis on egalitarianism, its connection to the bush (“regionality”), and its incorporation of some masculine traits. The incorporation of masculinity and the egalitarianism was often articulated by an emphasis, particularly for upper-class women, on the performance of manual labour. In this representation, the mistress of the house—whether wealthy or poor—was expected to be able to lend a hand where necessary. In the literature of the era, this new form of femininity was often represented by plots involving the arrival in the bush of a “city” person and the attempts by this character to impose “correct” gender behaviour on those living in the bush. The heroine of the Billabong series, Norah Linton, exemplified all of the desirable characteristics of this new Australian femininity. Living on a cattle station, Norah, the adored only-daughter of a widowed squatter, was without formal education until the age of twelve years. Norah’s main influences were her father and brother, with only the housekeeper and occasionally other servants to provide a feminine perspective. This resulted in the development and performance of a femininity and sensibility that Bruce represented as “Australian.” The suggestion was that in this space class differences were largely ignored, as all women were expected to be able to “turn a hand” to whatever household tasks needed to be done. This marked a significant difference from the expected behaviour of a lady from the city. A conversation between Norah and her city cousin illustrated this tension. Norah noted that she would always help the maids with the “extra cleaning and rubbing up before Christmas” and “cart[s] tea to the servants”:

“Can’t say I like the idea of a lady in the kitchen,” quoth Cecil loftily. “Can’t say I’d like to be one who was scared of it,” Norah said. “And I guess you’d get very bored if you had to go without your dinner!” … “Why don’t you let one of the girls do this?” he asked. “Sarah or Mary? Oh, they’re just as busy as ever they can be,” explained Norah. “We always do a lot of extra cleaning and rubbing up before Christmas, and they haven’t a moment … They’re the nicest girls; I’m going to take them tea as soon as I get my cake out!”

Norah’s cousin Cecil responded:

“A lady shouldn’t lower herself.” “Dad says a lady can’t lower herself by work,” retorted Norah. “Anyhow, if taking tea to dear old Brownie’s going to lower me, it’ll have to, that’s all!” 282 Chapter Sixteen

“You don’t understand,” said Cecil. “A lady has her own place, and to get on terms of familiarity with the lower classes is bad for both her and them.” (Bruce 1980)

Grant’s notion of the ideal Australian woman was someone competent within the home, with or without servants. The division between mistress and servant was recognised, but this hierarchy was not maintained through a strict division of labour. The need to work together in regional Australia developed a femininity that was based on independence and hard work. The precarious nature of some aspects of life in the bush generated camaraderie between men and women that required women to lend a hand outside their traditional class or gendered sphere. Further, it was accepted that a “proper” woman, or a “lady,” could preserve—if not enhance—her essential femininity through work. This was a marked contrast to urban or British ideals of femininity where femininity and power was demonstrated through feminine passivity. Prichard’s Coonardoo provides another example of a story where the egalitarian and city/rural dichotomy of the new Australian femininity were illustrated, but in this novel the issue of gender relations and women’s class relationships was complicated by the issue of race. In Coonardoo the new wife, Mollie, has moved from a town where she had been a maid to live on a station in the far north-west of Western Australia. Mollie was “elated” to find that she had a house and servants of her own. She was keen on “doing things properly” and showing her husband “Hugh how a house should be run, and the gins too” (Prichard 1985):

And fancy having so many servants! Elated at the thought of her dignity, Mollie bustled the gins about as Mrs Armstrong had bustled her about so often. On the whole she was rather glad Mrs Armstrong had bustled her; insisted on her doing things properly. She would show Hugh how a house should be run, and the gins too, Mollie promised herself. (Prichard 1985 )

These servants—referred to as “gins”—were Aboriginal workers living on the station. Their relationship with Mrs Bessie, Hugh’s deceased mother, had been not so much that of mistress and servant as of individual negotiation: they worked at their own pace but still did what they were told. By insisting the servants call her “ma’am,” Mollie was in conflict with the way in which life had always operated on the station. Mollie’s husband told her, “The whole countryside will have a fit.” He explained: “I’ve grown up with most of them … besides, I don’t know any man in the Nor’-West who works his own place doesn’t like to be called his Christian Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity 283 name by the blacks.” He made it clear that for him, “these people are not servants”:

not in the ordinary way. We don’t pay them, except in food, tobacco, clothing. Treat them generously, feed them well … But you must never work them too hard – specially gins. They’re not made for hard work, can’t stand it. (Prichard 1985)

That hierarchies did exist is evident, and the position of the Aboriginal workers on this station was not left in doubt, but the hierarchy was not as simple as mistress–servant or owner–slave. Rather, the hierarchy was managed in a place-specific fashion through mutually agreed behaviours and language. This brought the urban wife Molly into direct conflict with the existing social norms of femininity, as her city ideas did not make sense in the rural setting. One of the ways Mollie sought to establish her position as mistress was through the use of appropriate titles. “Ma’am” was rejected as it seemed to impose an explicit hierarchy on the relationship between servant and mistress; either kinship titles or first names were considered more appropriate. Management of the house and its workers was important, but this had to be done in a way that appeared egalitarian. Authority came not through the assumption of a title but through the relationship between the two parties, where the mistress had shown she was able to lead effectively. Despite the existence of social structures that shaped relationships through class, race, and gender, authority was imagined to be rooted in the individual, and earned. By showing oneself to be capable, an individual showed oneself to be worthy of respect. However, this performance of capability was also ingrained through explicit class-based expectations. The blurring of class and racial boundaries and a discourse of egalitarianism was also articulated in the examination of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in areas other than work. Although many relationships between mistresses and domestic workers were exploitative, akin to slavery in some instances (Haskins 2005), it is not true to say that negotiation and learning between women did not occur. In these instances, Indigenous women became close friends with non- Indigenous women, sharing similar experiences of childbirth and raising families, in addition to occupying the same landscape. In such cases, although the racial hierarchy was preserved, the intimate relationships between these women allowed the hierarchy to be temporarily and privately suspended (Hughes 2005; Standish 2008). The rejection of “ma’am” as an appropriate way to address the owner’s wife, in addition to other class-based titles, and the insistence on the use of first names 284 Chapter Sixteen emphasised the egalitarianism, the importance of work, and the difference between the city and the regional in the new Australian femininity. However, it is important to note that Mollie’s understanding of femininity was based not only in her urban upbringing but also in her class background. As a working-class woman marrying into an upper-class family, Mollie’s expectations of rank and her understanding of the importance of titles and the formality of relationships between servants and those being served differed from those of Hugh and his mother. Whereas upper-class station owners and their wives accepted negotiation and the lack of acknowledgement of the power differences between servant and mistress, Mollie expected these to be formalised and reinforced through ritual. This was important for Molly possibly because she understood her own social position to be precarious and potentially closer to that of her servants than to that of her husband.

New Australian Femininity and the Masculine

The new Australian femininity not only emphasised that all women, regardless of class, would work within the house together but also that women would work outside the house. This partly reflects the colonial history of Australia, where non-Indigenous women could become property holders and farmers in their own right, not simply as an adjunct to a man (Farrell 2001). Although it was critical that the Australian woman be capable of working outside the home, it was not expected that men would work within the home. For example, in the Billabong series of books, Norah Linton was encouraged to master the more masculine, less suitable pursuits. In the first book of the series, Norah was introduced to the reader as being “bored” by other little girls who “skip … dress up and ‘play ladies’,” whereas she enjoyed “cutting out cattle or coursing hares” (Bruce 1981). Through Norah, Bruce presented a type of femininity that straddled the divide between the inside and the outside, between male and female. Norah was described as her father’s “mate”—a masculine term. Norah was a partner to men, and this was a critical part of her femininity and identity. The representation of this type of femininity was not confined to Grant Bruce’s heroine. Pritchard’s Coonardoo also celebrated this type of femininity in the character of Mrs Bessie, the hero’s mother, who had run the station single-handedly from the time of her husband’s death until her son, Hugh, could take over. Her nickname, “Mumae,” was derived from her son’s use of the term “Mummy” but was also the word for father in the local Aboriginal dialect, making Mrs Bessie both male and female in the eyes of her station hands. This competence in a “man’s world” was Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity 285 illustrated in Mrs Bessie having been invited to witness Indigenous ceremonies forbidden to women (Prichard 1985). However, her hybrid identity was also respected off the station by her white neighbours. Prichard represented Mrs Bessie as dressing like a man, working like a man, and as handing over her property intact to her son. Further, she was portrayed as physically taming the environment by riding over it, mustering stock, and changing its very features through improvements. Norah and Mrs Bessie, as representations of the new Australian femininity, were understood to be feminine while doing men’s work. This hybrid form of femininity represented by Mrs Bessie was a form that encompassed masculine and feminine activities and dispositions. The esteem with which the authors held this type of femininity was also reflected in the derogatory way in which conventional femininity was treated in the novels. Mollie attempted to impose her authority in the home—her domain—in the conventional way: she competed with her dead mother-in-law by attempting to establish herself as the “better” housekeeper. However, Mollie’s attempts were quickly undermined, and Prichard charted the slow disintegration of Mollie’s relationship with her husband, Hugh, as she failed to adapt to the needs of the station. This drove Hugh into the arms of the Aboriginal woman Coonardoo who better represented the idealised new hybrid form of Australian femininity because she was both a nurturing woman and a capable business partner. Although this relationship was doomed to failure due to its cross-racial nature, Coonardoo remained throughout the novel a strong female figure, representing this hybrid born of the bush. Understood as one of the original inhabitants of the land, Coonardoo was represented as a sensual, complex character—submissively female within doors, relaxed and masculine outdoors.

Conclusion

Contemporary work on regional Australian femininity has highlighted a type of femininity particular to the bush. I would argue that this hybrid femininity—what Barbara Pini (2005) calls the “third sex”—is not a wholly new form of gender identity. Rather, it constitutes a continuation of a gender discourse that has existed alongside the hegemonic “hyper” femininity of home and family. These analyses of gender relations and gender identities in regional Australia have undoubtedly been important in bringing to light the variety and importance of women’s contributions to regional Australia. They have demonstrated the contributions women have made in areas such as the establishment and support for the Country 286 Chapter Sixteen

Women’s Association and other bodies, which have organised emotional and financial support for women and families in crisis, to the lobbying of boards and committees for female representation (Cameron and Gibson 1998). These activities have resulted in a gradual improvement in women’s position and status in regional Australia and better recognition of their roles beyond the home. This is reflected in the increasing numbers of women sitting on governing boards and bodies within agricultural industries. These women have visibly performed an alternative femininity, the hybrid femininity discussed in this chapter. Pini suggests that the performance of this identity is a high-stakes and socially dangerous balancing act, wherein women must be masculine but not too masculine, feminine but not too feminine (Pini 2005). The successful management of this balancing act, Pini suggests, differentiates these women not only from the men on the farms but also from other women, implying that these women perform a third gender (Pini 2005). This chapter has suggested that women have been performing this balancing act for some time now. The historical presence of this type of femininity has been largely overlooked by scholars. This chapter has demonstrated the link between the narratives of rural life produced by women authors in early-twentieth- century Australia and the forms of femininity that many regional women exhibit today. As with the earlier form, the contemporary form of regional femininity involves a combination of both masculine and feminine gender traits and includes women taking on roles in the physical and managerial aspects of farming in addition to assuming leadership positions within the industry. In examining the development of this type of regional Australian femininity, the complementarity of this version of Australian femininity and the dominant images of Australian masculinity has been made. This form of masculinity is understood as practical, tough, irreverent, egalitarian, and dominating of the natural environment; the new Australian femininity is likewise seen as tough and practical. These women display competence both indoors and outdoors. The femininity celebrated by Mary Grant Bruce and Susannah Prichard fitted this; it was a form of femininity that involved abandoning the existing gender roles and embracing the new, a role which included the ability to work alongside people of all classes. Women—both fictional and real—who could undertake physical work alongside men as well as display their competence within the home were admired. It could be argued that this femininity has not necessarily translated into social power; nonetheless, the “true” Australian woman is one who is comfortable in both the masculine and feminine social domain. Regional Australia and the Construction of Australian Femininity 287

Works Cited

Alston, Margaret. 2006. “‘I’d Like to Just Walk Out of Here’: Australian Women’s Experiences of Drought.” Sociologia Ruralis 46 (2): 154–70. Brandth, Berit and Marit S. Haugen. 1997. “Rural Women, Feminism and the Politics of Identity.” Sociologia Ruralis 37 (3): 325–44. Bruce, Mary Grant. 1980. Mates at Billabong. London: Ward Lock Limited.First published in 1911. —. 1981. A Little Bush Maid. London: Ward Lock Limited. First published in 1911. Bryant, Lia. 1999. “The Detraditionalization of Occupational Identities in Farming in South Australia.” Sociologia Ruralis 39 (2): 236–61. Cameron, Jenny and Katherine Gibson. 1998. “Land and Place.” In Australian Feminism: A Companion edited by Barbara Caine and Moira Gatens, 174–77. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Farrell, Rita. 2001. “Women and Citizenship in Colonial Australia”. In Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories, edited by P. Crawford and P. Maddern, 115–40. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Gill, Fiona. 2008. “Moving to the ‘Big’ House: Power and Accommodation in Inter-Generational Farming Families.” Rural Society 18 (2): 83–94. Haskins, Victoria. 2005. “A Devotion I Hope I May Fully Repay: Joan Kingsley-Strack.” In Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, edited by Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, and Fiona Paisley, 57– 79. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Hughes, Karen. 2005. “Same Bodies, Different Skin: Ruth Heathcock.” In Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, edited by Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley, 83–106. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Lake, Marilyn. 1994. “Between Old World ‘Barbarism’ and Stone Age ‘Primitivism’: The Double Difference of the White Australian Feminist.” In Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought, edited by Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns, 59–69. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lawson, Henry. 1979. Poetical Works. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Publishers. First published 1933. Liepins, Ruth. 1998. “The Gendering of Farming and Agricultural Politics: A Matter of Discourse and Power.” Australian Geographer 29 (3): 371–88. 288 Chapter Sixteen

Little, Jo and Ruth Panelli. 2007. “‘Outback’ Romance? A Reading of Nature and Heterosexuality in Rural Australia.” Sociologia Ruralis 47 (3): 173–88. Pini, Barbara. 2005. “The Third Sex: Women Leaders in Australian Agriculture.” Gender, Work and Organization 12 (1): 73–88. —. 2007. “Always an Outlaw: Daughters-In-Law on Australian Family Farms.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30 (1): 40–47. Prichard, Katherine Susannah. 1985. Coonardoo. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Publishers. First published 1929. Standish, Ann. 2008. Australia Through Women’s Eyes. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Summers, Anne. 1994. Damned Whores and God’s Police. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia. Ward, Russel. 1958. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1996. “Women and the Biological Reproduction of ‘the Nation’.” Women’s Studies International Forum 19 (1/2): 17–24.

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephen Alomes is an adjunct professor at the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University. His published books in Australian and comparative studies include A Nation at Last (1988), Australian Nationalism (1991), When London Calls (1999), and Islands in the Stream: Australia and Japan Face Globalisation (2005). He is interested in the intersection of the social and cultural with the political in contemporary globalising society.

Kate Ames lectures in professional communication at Central Queensland University. Her professional experience in communication and media industries include magazine editing, photography, film-making, radio production, corporate writing, and journalism. Her research interest lies in regional media and communication, specifically radio. She is a public affairs officer in the in her spare time, and is in the process of completing her PhD from the University of Sydney examining the relationship between commercial radio presenters and their regional listeners.

John Atwood currently works for the Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in Canberra. He was formerly a post-graduate student at QUT, receiving excellent examiners’ reports for his thesis titled, “The Transformation of Byron Bay through Tourism 1962–1973.” John has also completed a Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and has undertaken studies in public policy and political institutions at the ANU. John has had articles published in the Age and Metro film magazine. He also had a short story about his time working for Australian racing legend published in the RMIT publication The Words Have Eyes (1998).

Maria Chisari is a PhD candidate with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. Using the perspectives of governmentality and genealogy, her thesis explores how the concept of becoming an Australian citizen is produced in and through the discourses around the Australian citizenship test. She has published in the fields of linguistics and cultural studies. Maria’s teaching experience and research 290 Contributors interests are interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of cultural studies, sociology, TESOL, migration studies, and Australian history.

Catriona Elder’s research is in the broad area of race, gender, national identity, and belonging, with a focus on non-Indigenous identity in Australia. She is interested in theory building in the field of critical whiteness studies. More specific projects focus on popular historical drama on television; assimilation, government immigration and Indigenous policy in the 1950s and 1960s; (post)reconciliation Australia; nationalism and sexuality; and women and non-professional work during the 1950s and 1960s. Her key scholarly publications are Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity (2007) and Dreams and Nightmares of a White Australia (2009).

Chiara Gamboz is completing her PhD on Australian Indigenous petitions at the School of English, Media, and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). She has taught at both UNSW and the University of Western Sydney. Educated in Japan and Italy, she graduated in English literature from the University of Trieste, and her article “Yeats and his Use of Masks for Cuchulain” was published in Prospero 9 (2002).

Fiona Gill is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney where she researches across the fields of sociological methods and subjectivity, particularly the management and performance of ambiguous identities. She has published widely on gender, identity, and sport, as well as gender and rural identities.

Samantha Green completed a Master of International Studies at the University of Melbourne for which a longer version of this paper was submitted as a thesis. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the connections between sport, the “migrant experience,” and policies of multiculturalism; community engagement and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Samantha’s professional experience includes working as the aide to the Governor of Queensland and the aide to the Governor-General—her experience in this latter role prompting the writing of this paper—and more recently managing climate change adaptation programs in local government.

New Voices, New Visions 291

Jennifer Hamilton-McKenzie studied at the in her undergraduate years, and undertook post-graduate research at the James Cook University. She completed her doctorate at La Trobe University where she has been teaching in the history program since 2003. Her research interests include Australian regional history; the history of water management and irrigation; rural women’s history; and rural political campaigns. Jennifer is also interested in tertiary teaching issues that affect the lives of rural women, and she is working on a collaborative project in this area with fellow academics.

Lesley Hawkes is a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology. Her current areas of research are spatial belonging and literary tourism. She has published numerous articles on Australian literature, belonging, and travel. Her book chapter “Spaces of Hybridity: Creating a Sense of Belonging through Spatial Awareness” was recently published in Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature.

Cindy Lane completed her PhD in history at the University of Western Australia. Her doctoral thesis re-examined Australian colonial history through the texts of travelling writers. Also using travellers’ observations, she had earlier attained first class honours writing on Cornwall and the Industrial Revolution, and her findings were published in Cornish Studies: Thirteen. She has presented papers at international conferences, expanding on her research in travel writing as a form of historical investigation. As well as Australian studies, Cindy’s research interests include British and European history, imperial and colonial history, and social and cultural belonging.

Francis Maravillas is an associate researcher at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney. His current research interests include contemporary art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, curatorial practice and international exhibitions, and art in urban spaces. His work on Asian art in Australia appears in various journals and exhibition catalogues as well as in recent edited collections, including Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence (2009), Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (2007) and In the Eye of the Beholder: Reception and Audience for Modern Asian Art (2006). He is a previous board member of the 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney (2004–2007).

292 Contributors

Keith Moore is a senior lecturer and coordinator of history (discipline) in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology. He teaches Australian and European history. Keith’s research interests lie in Australian history and in the history of . His publications include The Other Rebellion: Attacking Ignorance and Vice on the Ballarat Goldfield (Peter Lang) and The Federation Mirror: Queensland 1901–2001 (together with ) (UQP). He has also published book chapters, articles, and papers on bodgies, widgies and moral panic, the Beatles, the Vietnam War, and beach culture in the 1960s.

Emma Price completed her PhD at , Melbourne, where she has taught for several years in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Her research on narratives of pleasure in the “illusory everyday” of reality TV derives from her former work as coordinator for factual entertainment development at the BBC in London.

Rodney Smith is currently researching in the areas of Australian political parties and elections, political ethics and corruption, and religion and politics in liberal democracies. His key books are Against the Machines (2006), Keywords in Australian Politics (co-authored, 2006), and Australian Political Culture (2001). He is currently part of a team completing a major study of public sector whistleblowers in Australia, funded by the Australia Research Council.

Linda Thompson graduated from Sydney University with first class honours in history and art history and theory, and first class honours in law. Her thesis “Roamin’ Holiday” discussed post-war travel and Australian art. She has published works on the kangaroo and the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Linda currently lives in London and is working as a lawyer.

Ariadne Vromen’s research interests are in the field of political sociology and include political participation, social movements, community organisations, political parties, internet politics, and young people and politics. Ariadne’s latest research project explores the changing approaches to citizen engagement in Australia, the UK, and Denmark. She is the co-author of Powerscape: Contemporary Australian Politics (2009) and Keywords in Australian Politics (2006). INDEX

Abbott, Tony, 190,199 Alexandra, Kitty, 196 Aboriginal, 5, 7, 147 Alison, Archibald, 78 children, 10, 168, 176 Allard, Tom, 209 Coonardoo, 279, 282–85 Allen, James, 1, 2 Dreamtime, 119 Alomes, Stephen, 8, 9, 187–199, Gurindji people, 172 236 massacres, 146 Alston, Margaret, 280 memorials, 173–77 Altman, Dennis, 263–64, 273–74 mission, 168, 175 Amazing Race, 107 mythology, 33 America, 3, 7, 56, 87–89, 92–99, Ngarrinjeri elders, 174 103, 127, 130, 144, 188–89, Pallawah people, 172 198, 223, 226, 232, 234, 245, people, 144, 146 248 reconciliation, 23, 145, 147– 48, Ames, Kate, 4, 6, 9, 10, 262–74 226–27 Andersen, Jørgen Goul, 220–22 stolen generations, 147–48 Anderson, Monica, 180 workers, 282 Andrews, Kevin, 141 writing, 169 Andrews, Malcolm, 79 Adam, N., 130 Ang, Ien, 4 Adams, Keith, 120 Anglican, 8, 203 Adams, Mark, 109 Church, 208, 212, 216 Adams, Phillip, 196 Diocese of Brisbane, 203, 205– Adelaide, 174–75 06, 214 Advance Australia Federation, 236 Anglo-Celtic, 3, 143 adventure tourism, 7, 113 Anglo-Saxon, 93–94 Afghan camel drivers, 82 animal rights, 220, 224, 226, 228, Africa, 103 233–34, 237 African-American rights, 56 animal-fur products, 234 African experiences, 143 animal Liberation, 235 Age, 96, 126, 188, 190–91, 204–05, battery hens, 234 210, 245, 254–55 PETA, 235 Age of Aquarius, 60 Antarctic, 4, 7, 8, 102–15 Agnew, Vanessa, 105, 107–09, 112, Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, 115 8–9, 242–48, 254–57 Ahmed, Sarah, 18 ANZAC, 277 Aitken, Don, 248 Apennines, 79 Akerman, Piers, 196 Appleyard, Reginald, 249 Albany, 73, 75, 77, 81 Arendt, Hannah, 51 Alexander, Joseph, 87 arid landscapes, 86–99 294 Index

Armundsen, Roald, 104 baby boomers, 50 Arnhem Land, 124, 129 Bahamas, 190 Arthur, Paul Longley, 71 Bali, 140 Arthur, Walter George, 172 Banham, Cynthia, 215 Ashuri, Tamar, 105 Bantick, Christopher, 208 Ashworth, H. P. C., 40 Barcan, Alan, 249 Asia, 3, 5, 17–19, 23–32, 34, 98, 103 Barcan, Ruth, 70 artists, 27–28 Barnett, Clive, 229 asianisation, 30 Barratt Creek, 121 diaspora, 27–30 Barthes, Roland, 159, 162 influences, 145 Bartos, Stephen, 191 Asia–Pacific, 24 Barwick, Diane, 168, 177 Asylum seeker, 4, 141, 163, 227 Bashford, Alison, 103 Atkins, Dennis, 206 Bassett, Jan, 250, 256 Attwood, Bain, 172–73, 175, 177 battlers, 146 Atwood, John, 4–6, 50–63 Baudrillard, Jean, 155, 162 Australia Day, 138, 141–42 Bay of Naples, 82 Australian, 25–26, 188, 204–06, beach, 50–63 208, 244–45, 247, 249–251, Bean, Clive, 222, 225 253–56 Beatlemania, 52 Australian citizenship, 10 Beattie, Keith, 153, 158 Citizenship test, 10, 137–49 Beck, Alan, 265, 268, 270 Australian Conservation Bellanta, Melissa, 87 Foundation, 195 Bendigo, 88 Australian Consumers’ Association, Bennett, Jill, 31 223 Bennett, Samuel, 1 Australian customs, 11, 152, 156, Berkley, California, 63 161–64 Berkley Tribe, 55 Australian Democrats, 193, 216 Berry government, 90 Australian Federal Parliament, 22, Berryman, Bruce, 263 25, 139 Bessant, Bob, 248–49, 253–54 Australian Financial Review, 204 Bessant, Judith, 249, 256 Australian Greens, 192, 199 Bevan, E., 123 Australian Labor Party, 193, 215– Beverley, 75 16, 248 Biber, Katherine, 4 Australian landscape, 6–7, 69–70, Big Brother, 106, 153, 155, 164, 76 271–72 Australian Legend, 4 Biggest Loser, 106, 110 Australian National Audit Office, Billabong series, 278–79, 281, 284 193 Biltereyst, Daniel, 154 Australian of the Year, 205 Black, Andrew, 90–91 Australian Story, 211–13 black armband, 22 Australian values, 10, 52, 137–49, Blainey, Geoffrey, 147 203, 224 Bligh, Captain William, 1–4, 8, 11 Australian Wheat Board, 191 Governor William, 1–4, 8, 11 Avoca, 90 bloke, 4–5, 59 New Voices, New Visions 295 boat people, 199 heritage, 138 Bolt, Andrew, 196 plants, 279 Bolton, Geoffrey, 75–76 Broome, 120 Bolton, Roger, 195 Broome, Lady Mary Anne, 71– Bond Corporation, 190 72, 78 Bondi, 246 Broome, Richard, 179–80 Bonner, Frances, 153, 194 Brotherhood of St Laurence, 205 Bonyhady, Tim, 78 Browne, Kevin, 197 Booth, Douglas, 53–55 Bruce, Mary Grant, 278, 281–82, Border Security, 11, 152–54, 156– 284, 286 64 Brunswick and Byron Advocate, 55, Boström, Magnus, 232 58–59 Boulder, 80 Bryant, Lia, 280 Bounty¸ 1–3, 11 Buchanan, Ian, 70 Bourke, Brian, 190 Bulmer, Reverend John, 177 Bourke, Lisa, 262 Bung Yarnda, 177 Brandth, Berit, 280 Burgoyne, Robert, 159 Brassey, Lady Annie, 71–73, Burke, Anthony, 4, 141 76–77 Burns, Robin, 110 Brathwaite, David, 140 Burton, Bob, 156 Bravehearts, 208 Burton, L., 196 Bridgetown, 79 Butler, Carly, 265 Briggs, Freda, 214 Butler, George, 107 Brisbane, 5, 37, 40, 42–43 Byron Bay, 6, 50–63 City Botanic Gardens, 42 abattoirs, 51 Eagle Farm, 43 Councillor Hargraves, 58 Eagle Street, 42 Councillor James, 58 fire of 1864, 43 Councillor Kibblewhite, 54 Hungry Jack’s, 5, 37–47 Literary Institute, 51 Myer Centre, 43 Palm Valley, 54, 58–59 penal colony, 42–43 sand-mining, 51 Queen Adelaide Building, 42 Wategos Beach, 62 Queen Street, 43 Byron Bay – Bangalow Beacon, 51 Queen Street Mall, 5, 37, 42, 43, Byron Express, 55, 60, 62 45–46 Byron, Lord, 2 River, 42 Byron News, 60–62 Riverside Expressway, 42 Byron, Peter, 236 Sportsgirl, 42 Byron Shire Echo, 55 World Expo ’88, 43, 126–27 Byrd, Richard, 104 Bristol, 229 Britain, 24, 104, 107, 196 Cadzow, Allison, 168 British, 1, 3, 69, 78, 93–94, 104, Cairns, Dr Jim, 245 137–39, 142–149, 191, 196, Cairns Post, 122, 124 205, 277, 279–80, 282 Calcutt, Andrew, 243–44 Australian, 142 Caldicott, D., 120–24 Empire, 205 Californian, 7, 89, 93–99 296 Index

Calvert, Albert, 74–75, 81 Clement, Russell, 2, 3 Cameron, Jenny, 286 clocks, 5, 37, 40, 42, 45 Campbell, Leonard, 175 Cloke, Paul, 229 Canada, 7, 120, 140 Cock, Peter, 56 Canadian, 87 Cole, Malcolm, 206–7 Canberra, 190 Coliban and Geelong Water Canberra Times, 204, 207, 253– Supply Scheme, 88 55 Collins, Peter, 191 cannibalism, 113 Collis, Christy, 104, 110–11 Cape Denison, 100 Commonwealth Bay, 102 Cape Melville National Park, 129 communism, 52, 256 Cape Tribulation, 127 consumerism, 220–37 Cape York, 119 Australian Made, 227, 236 Carey, Zac, 46 boycotts, 221–26, 232, 234–35 Carter, David, 179 Buy Australia Campaign, 227, Carter, Paul, 15, 20–21, 69–70, 78, 236 80–82 buycotts, 221, 222, 225–27, cartoons, 18, 22–24, 26, 56, 59– 60, 231–35, 236 62 coffee, 229–31 Casey, James, 89 demonstrations, 222, 224, 228, Cashmore, Ellis, 194 232 Castells, Manuel, 38, 45, 48 Fairtrade, 228–31, 234 Cato River, 124 FairWear Campaign, 231–32 Centenary of Federation, 22 free-range eggs, 220, 225 Chaffey, George, 87, 99 genetically modified food, 233 Charlton, Peter, 205 organic products, 57, 61, 114, Charlton, Sue, 128 232 Chateaubriand, Francois Auguste political, 9, 220–37 Rene, 70 shoppers, 40, 46 Cherry, Elizabeth, 234 social justice, 220, 224, 226, Chester, Jonathan, 110 228 Chesterman, John, 175 consumption, 202, 221, 225, China, 196 228, 232–34 Chinese, 29, 52, 93 convict, 42, 277 red dragon, 33 Conway-Herron, Janie, 61 Chisari, Maria, 10–11, 137–49 Cook, Alexander, 112 Chomsky, Noam, 243, 248 Cook, Captain 59 Christianity, 146 Cook Islands, 190 values of, 52, 70, 74–75, 83, Coolgardie, 80–81 142, 143 Coonardoo, 279, 282, 284 Christian, Fletcher, 1–3 Coorey, Phillip, 140 church groups, 225, 231 Copenhagen, 189, 233 Clark, Anna, 21, 146–47 Coranderrk, 168, 177 Clark, J., 187 Corner, John, 106, 153, 155 Clarke, Nick, 229 Costello, Peter, 138 Clarkson, Jay, 273 counter culture, 55, 61, 62 New Voices, New Visions 297

Courier-Mail, 204 Denniss, Richard, 225 Cover, Rob, 274 Department of Immigration, 138 Crang, Mike, 44 Derrida, Jacques, 32 Critcher, Chas, 207 diaspora, 27–30 crocodiles, 4, 7–8, 118–32 Dibbern, J. Stephen, 103 attacks, 119 Diesel, 265–70 salt-water, 119 Digger, 55–56, 59 Cronulla Beach riots, 138, 140– diggers, 146 41 Dodds, Klaus, 103–4 Crowley, Frank, 60 Dods, Benjamin H., 88–89, 99 Cummings, Doolan, 153 Dodson, John, 77 Current Affair, 190, 194 Dodson, Louise, 213 Cushing, Robert, 224 Domoo, Cassian, 130 Cutler, Charles, 253–54 Donaldson, Mike, 4 Dore, C., 193 Daily Mirror, 244, 252–53 Douglas, W., 129 Daily News, 127 Dourish, Paul, 6 Daily Telegraph, 126, 188, 196, Dovey, Jon, 163 245–47, 252–54 Dow, J., 96 Daintree Rainforest, 121 Drew, Philip, 50, 52, 54 Daintree River, 123 drugs, 56–57, 60, 158–59, 226 Daly River, 130 Duffy Government, 88 Danby, Susan, 265 Dundee, Mick “Crocodile”, 118–32 Dang, Dacchi, 30–32 Darwin, 126, 130 Earth Garden, 57 Davey, Doctor, 178 Economou, Nicholas, 247–48 David, Tannatt Edgeworth, 104 Edensor, T., 125, 128, 163 Davidson, George, 98 Edgar, Don, 224 Davidson, Jim, 53 Edwards, H., 119–22, 124, 127, Davies, Alan, 244 130–31 Davis, Jane, 74 Egypt, 97–98 de Certeau, Michel, 7, 20, 41–42, Elder, Catriona, 1–11, 102–15, 142, 44–45 145 de Costa, Ravi, 169 Elliot, Greg, 236 de Vries, Susanna, 42 Elliott, Barry, 223 De Vyver, Frank, 249 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94 Deakin, Alfred, 7, 86–87, 90, 92–99 Emerson, Scott, 214 Deal or No Deal, 194 Emmison, Michael, 265 Dean, Katrina, 110 England, 73, 120 D’Cruz, J. Vin, 249 English countryside, 69 della Porta, Donatella, 228 Enlightenment, 70, 74–75, 77–78, demonstrators 83, 142 Vietnam, 8–9, 242–57 environment, 56, 71, 75–77, 79, Dempsey, Kenneth, 52 104–105, 261–62, 278, 285–86 Denemark, David, 222, 225 climate change, 188, 230, 232– Dening, Greg, 3 33 298 Index

damage, 99, 226–29 Franklin, Matthew, 206–7 Earth Hour, 233–34 Fraser Coast Chronicle, 192 energy-efficient, 233 French nuclear testing, 224 groups, 225 French Renaissance, 40 solar panels, 233 French Revolution, 55 sustainability, 219, 224, 226, Friedman, Munro, 226–27, 232–34 228, 232–33, 237 Frow, John, 19 sustainable living, 233 E.T., 124 Gable, Clark, 3 ethical choice, 221 Gaghan, Trevor, 124 Europe, 5, 6, 18, 20, 23, 71, 75–77, Galligan, Brian, 175 97–98, 156, 219, 226, 228–32 Gallop, Geoff, 198 European, 7, 20, 52, 70–71, 73–83, Gamboz, Chiara, 10–11, 167–80 92–93, 142–44, 146, 229 Gans, Herbert, 207 Evans, Gareth, 193 Garner, Billy, 61 Falcon, Captain Robert, 107 Garrett, Peter, 195 Farley, Rebecca, 108, 112–13 Gascoigne, John, 74 farmers, 6, 61, 98, 262, 284 gayness, 5, 9–10, 263–65, 268–74 Farmer Wants a Wife, 107 Gearing, Amanda, 206–7 Farouque, Farah, 209 Geelong Advertiser, 129 Farrell, Rita, 280, 284 Geertz, Clifford, 113 Fawcett, James, 40 Gemmell, Nikki, 110 federation, 22, 86 gender, 4, 39, 129, 169–70, 259, femininity, 4, 277–86 265, 270–71, 281–83, 285–86 Fenton, Tom, 194 Genesis, 75, 138 Field, Billy, 187 Gentilli, J. G., 81 film, 3, 8, 11, 104–7, 110–11, 119– Germany, 196 20, 123, 124–26, 128– 129, 131, Gerritsen, Rolf, 263 155, 157–58, 195, 198, 235 Gerster, Robin, 256 Finniss River, 120 Giblett, Rod, 123 Fischer, Wolfgang Chr, 236 Gibson, Katherine, 286 fish-market, 40 Gibson, Ross, 5 Fiske, John, 54, 161 Gilg, Andrew, 234 Fitzgerald, Richard, 266 Gill, Fiona, 4, 276–86 Flannery, Tim, 77 Gillard, Julia, 199 Fletcher, Jim, 168 Gilpin, William, 78 Flinders Island, 172 Gippsland, 177–78, 278 Flinders Street Railway Station, 5, Gittins, R., 189 37–48 Gladstone, 262–63 Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy, 159 Glasberg, Elena, 111 Flynn, Errol, 3 gold, 3, 73, 80–83, 93 Forno, Francesca, 228 Gold Coast, 50 Forrest, Sir John, 74 Gold Coast Bulletin, 129 Foster, A. C., 254 Gombrich, Ernst Hans, 25 Foucault, Michel, 39, 44 Goodall, Heather, 168 France, 90, 93, 196, 224 Good Times, 55 New Voices, New Visions 299

Goodwin, Ken, 46 Hartcher, Peter, 140 Goot, Murray, 192 Haskins, Victoria, 283 Gordon, George, 87–99 Hasluck, Alexandra, 72, 78 Gorton, J., 244–45, 248 Haugen, Marit, 280 gossip, 8, 188–89, 194–95, 198 Hawke, Bob, 189 Goulburn, 90 Hawkes, Lesley, 5, 6, 37–48 Goulburn River, 88, 91, 95 Hawley, Samantha, 192 Gove Peninsula, 124 Hay, Colin, 222 Governor-General Lord Casey, 172 Hayden, Bill, 59–60 Grand Victorian North-Western Haylen, Wayne, 247 Canal Company, 88, 90 Headey, Bruce, 224 Grant, James, 88–89 Headland, Robert K., 103 Grasswill, Helen, 211–13 health-food shops, 61 Grattan, Michelle, 141, 209, 213, Hein, Steve, 57 215 Heiss, Anita, 169 Gray, Darren, 213 Hemmings, Alan D., 104 Gray, Ian, 262–63 Henderson, Gerard, 205 Great Depression, 52 Henderson, Ian, 206 Great South Land, 70–71, 73 Henderson, Margaret, 55 Grech, Godwin, 193 Herald (Melbourne), 245–47, 254 Greenpeace, 233 Herald Sun, 130, 188–90, 196 Green, Samantha, 8, 9, 203–17 Herman, Edward, 243, 248 Greer, Germaine, 56 Hetherington, Michelle, 71 Gregg, Melissa, 18 Highfield, J., 120 Greiner, A., 125 Hight, Craig, 153 Grellier, Jane, 74 Hill, Annette, 163 Gresham’s Law, 193–94 Hinchman, L., 195 Griffiths, Tom, 103–4, 111 Hinde, S., 126 Grimshaw, Tracy, 194 hippies, 4, 50–63 Guivarra, Peter, 131 Hirst, John, 141, 145–47 gymnasium, 40 History of Education Quarterly, 57 History Wars, 5, 21 Hage, Ghassan, 148 Hobson, Kersty, 234 Hains, Brigid, 105 Hodge, Bob, 54 Hall, Lincoln, 118 Hogan, Paul, 4, 125–28 Hall, Stuart, 28, 161 Hollingworth, Peter: Anglican Hall, William Hammond, 98–99 Archbishop, Governor-General, Hallin, Daniel, 243–44 8, 203–17 Hamilton, Clive, 225 Hollywood, 3, 188 Hamilton-McKenzie, Jennifer, 6–7, Holt-Jensen, Arid, 41 86–99 homosexuality, 62, 261–74 Hammond, Phillip, 243–44 Hooghe, Marc, 220 Hancock, Ian, 258 Hookey, Gordon, 33 Hannan’s, 82 Horne, Donald, 52–53, 223 Harper, Neville, 122 Horne, Julia, 79 Hart, Cath, 139, 141 300 Index

Howard, John, 10, 22, 26–27, 126, Japan, 196 137–44, 146–49 Jarvis, Tim, 102, 107, 109, 111, government, 126, 137–41, 145–46 113–14 Howell, W., 130 Jefferson, Gail, 265 Hoy, A., 127 Jennett, Christine, 223 Hughes, Colin, A., 243 Jersey, 190 Hughes, E. A., 1 Jones, Alan, 196 Hughes, Karen, 283 Jones, Catherine, 236 Humphries, David, 138, 141 Jones, Kate, 186 Hungry Jack’s, Brisbane, 5, 37– 48 Jones, T., 192, 198 Hunt, Stephen, 112–13 Johnson, Carol, 141–42, 148 Hurley, Frank, 104, 110 Johnson, President, 244 Hussein, Saddam, 191 Johnston, Hetty, 208 Johnston, Judith, 180 India, 25, 72, 88–91, 93, 97–98 Jose, Nicholas, 169 Indigenous people, 3, 5, 10, 22, 33, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 39, 47 72, 76, 79–80, 144–47, 163–80, Judeo-Christianity, 142–43 278, 285–86 artifacts, 73 Kahn, Miriam, 70 communities, 167–80 Kakadu, 126–27, 130 fire-stick farming, 76 Kalgoorlie, 82 food, 220, 224 Kalina, Paul, 160 land, 30, 144–45 kangaroos, 71–72, 108 perspectives, 173, 179 Karier, Clarence, 57 petitions, 167–80 Keating, Paul, 24, 27 rights, 11 Kellerberrin, 75 Indonesia, 25–26, 196 Kelley, Jonathan, 224 Indyk, Ivor, 169 Kelly, Captain, 97–98 Inglis, Ken, 191 Kelly, L., 119–20, 131 insider-trading, 196–97 Kennedy, John F., 189 International Scott Centenary Kent, M., 123 Expedition, 107 Kernot, Cheryl, 193 IQ2 Australia, 191 Kerr, J., 125 Irish, 142–43 Keynesianism, 23 irrigation, 6–7, 86–99 Keys, Garry, 56 Irwin: Kissinger, Henry, 191 Steve, 4, 118, 124–26, 129–32 Klintman, Mikael, 232 Bindi, 129 Knight, Richard Payne, 78 Crocodile Hunter, 118 koalas, 126 Terri, 129 Koch, T., 129, 131 Islam, 25 Koffman, Eleonore, 140 Italy, 89–93, 98, 196, 235 Kojonup, 76, 79 Po Valley, 91 Koori Floor, 33 Kozloff, Sarah, 160 Jackson, Liz, 147 Krempel, Lothar, 165 Jackson-Nelson, H. E. Marjorie, 173 Kropinyeri, Ellen, 10, 168, 174–75 New Voices, New Visions 301

Kropinyeri, Matthew, 175 McArthur River, 131 Kunkel, John, 147 McColl, Hugh, 87–92, 97, 99 Kushing, Robert, 224 McFarlane, B., 124 McGillion, Chris, 213 Lacy, M., 125 McGregor, Craig, 50–54 Lake Condah, 177 McGregor, Lachlan, 131 Lake, Marilyn, 4, 87, 94, 97–98, McGregor, Russell, 179–80 281 McKeown, D., 192 Lake Tyers, 10, 168, 177–78 McKew, Maxine, 195 Lamb, Harriet, 229–30 McLeod, Amanda, 223 Lane, Cindy, 6, 7, 69–83 McLoughlin, Kerry, 130 Langton, Marcia, 170 McQueen, Humphrey, 243, 250 Larsen, A. Dean, 2, 3 McTavish, Maxine, 55 Lash, Kelly, 127 Mabo, 145 Laughton, Charles, 3 Macintyre, Stuart, 21, 146–47 Lawrence, Geoffrey, 262–63 Mackay, 263 Laws, John, 196 Macquarie, Governor, 146 Lawson, Henry, 279–80 Macquarie University, 124 Black Bonnet, 279 Madden, C., 192 Lawson, Kirsten, 209–10 Madrid, 140 Leach, Colin W., 160 Make Poverty History, 230 Le Breton, David, 113 mallee scrub, 91 Lebanese, 138, 272 Maloga, 168 Leeds, 140 Malpass, Alice, 228–29 Lee, Lawrence, 98 Malpass, J., 263 lesbianism, 10, 264, 273–74 Mancuso, R., 127 Lewis, John, 55 Mandelson, Peter, 196 Lewis, Steve, 214 Manly, 231 Liberal Party, 191, 193 Manolis, C., 119–20, 130–31 Liepins, Ruth, 280 Manthorpe, Leanne, 192 Limbaugh, Rush, 196 Mapoon, 131 Lingiari, Vincent, 172 maps, 19–20, 29, 41–43, 45–47 Linton, Norah, 278, 281, 284 Maravillas, Francis, 5, 6, 11, 17–34 Lipkin, Steven, 105 marijuana, 56 Lipp, Carola, 167 Marks, Lyndal, 153–54, 156, 159, Little, Jo, 278, 280 162 lizards, 71 Markus, Andrew, 168, 172–73, 175, Lloyd, John, 194, 196 177 Lockie, Stewart, 232, 262 Marr, David, 141 loitering, 45, 47 Marshall, Kirstie, 195 London, 2, 37, 73, 140 Marshall, P. D., 194 Luna Park, 40, 43 Martin, Colin, 88, 90, 92 Lyons, Kristen, 236 Martin, David, 122–23 Martin, Edward, 247 MacCallum, Mungo, 199 Martin Place, 244–45, 256, 247 McAllister, Ian, 185, 222, 224–25 Martin, Stephen, 77 302 Index masculinity, 4–5, 10, 105, 114–15, Minter, Peter, 169 128–29, 261–64, 273, 278, 281, missionaries, 146 286 Mitchell, Bruce, 242 Massey, Doreen, 6, 9 Moore, Keith, 1–11, 52, 242–57 Matchett, Stephen, 193 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 3 mates, 130, 146 Morgan, Roy, 187, 198 Mawson, 102–15 Morris, Meaghan, 18–19, 21, 23–24, Mawson, Sir Douglas, 7, 102–15 26–27, 141 Mawson’s Huts Foundation, 110 Moses, Michelle, 250 Mayer, Henry, 243, 255–56 Mottram, Murray, 209 meadows, 69 Mudrooroo, 171 Meadows, Miss, 127 Mughan, Anthony, 224 media, 3–4, 6, 8–11, 105–7, 114, Mules, Warwick, 263–64 118–23, 125–32, 139, 162–63, Mullumbimby, 57, 61 187–99, 203–17, 223, 229, 232, multiculturalism, 10, 25, 139, 144, 243–44, 249–50, 261–63, 268, 147–48 273–74 multinational corporations, 9 bias, 243, 262 Munro-Clarke, Margaret, 57 newspapers, 7, 51–52, 54–56, Munro, Lyal, 234 58, 120–21, 123, 131, 189– Murdoch, L., 124–26, 131 90, 194, 197–198, 204, 242– Murdoch, Rupert, 196 45, 248, 250, 254, 256–57 Murray-Darling Basin, 7, 86 Medibank Private, 231 Murray River, 95, 99 Meenan, Dan, 160 Murray, Susan, 153 Melbourne, 55, 63, 75, 129, 188, Muslims, 25, 143 190, 231, 244–46 mutiny, 1–3, 11 Federation Square, 47 Mutiny on the Bounty, 3 Flinders Street Railway Station, MX Melbourne, 129 5, 37–47 Myer, 232 Flinders Street Railway Station ballroom, 40 Nader, Ralph, 223 United States Consulate, 246, Narvaez, Rafael, 114 256 National Enquirer, 189 Mertz, Xavier, 102, 105–9, 113–14 Netherlands, 140, 229 Meyer, Thomas, 195 Newcastle, 254 Mexicans, 94 Newcastle Herald, 127 US–Mexican border, 156 New Idea, 123, 189, 271 Micheletti, Michelle, 220, 223–24, Newman, Captain, 178–80 226–28 New South Wales, 1–2, 8, 11, 51, migrants, 10–11, 137–44, 148–49 61, 193, 231, 242–43, 250–53, Mildura, 87 256 military conflict, 227 New York, 128, 140 Miller, Paul, 81 New Zealand, 2, 120, 144, 230 Miller, Captain Henry, 42 Nichols, Bill, 154 Millner, Jacqueline, 33 Nicholson, Peter, 25–26, 59 Mills, Charles W., 167, 170–71 Nigeria, 191 New Voices, New Visions 303

Nike, 228 Parliament of South Australia, 168 Nimbin, 57, 60–61 Parnell, Sean, 214 Aquarius Festival, 60–61 Peake, Ross, 215 Ninnis, Belgrave, 102 Pearson, Charles, 97 Nobel Peace Prize, 191 pelicans, 71 Norman, W., 246 Pennell, Amanda, 197 Norris, Pippa, 226 Penshurst, 246 North Coast Pilot, 51–52 Perera, Suvendrini, 3, 23 Northern Safari, 120 Perkins, Rachel, 170 Northern Star, 54, 60–61 Perry, Peter, 188 Northern Territory, 119–20, 124, Pietrykowski, Bruce, 235 126–27, 131, 172 Pini, Barbara, 277–78, 280, 285–86 Northern Territory Tourism Pisani, Donald, 98 Commission, 126 platypus, 71 North, Marianne, 69, 72–73, 76–77, Plumwood, Val, 124 79 Plunkett, Reece, 265 Norway, 104 Point Macleay, 168, 174 Norwegian, 141 politicians, 8–9, 187–199, 205, 224, NSW corps, 2 247 NT News, 123, 129 Poonindie, 168 Nugent, Maria, 70 Pormpuraaw, 131 nursery, 40 pornography, 158, 160 Nuttall, Gordon, 197 Porter, Muriel, 207 postcoloniality, 17–34 O’Brien, John, 253 Powell, Jocelyn M, 71, 74 O’Callaghan, Peter, 214 Powell, Joseph Michael, 86, 88, 93, 99 O’Keefe, Andrew, 194 Powerhouse, Sydney, 32–33 O’Regan, T., 126 Pratt, Richard, 190–91, 197 O’Reilly, Bill, 196 Price, Emma, 11, 152–64 Oakes, Laurie, 193 Price, Julius, 74–75, 77–78, 80–82 OECD, 25 Price, Uvedale, 78 On Dit, 55 Prichard, Katherine Susannah, 279, Ontario, 99 282–86 Order of Australia, 205 Probyn, Elspeth, 18 Order of the British Empire, 205 propaganda, 161, 243 Osbourne, Ian, 123 Protector of Aborigines, 168, 174 Osbourne, Melva, 123 public servants, 8, 189, 190 Ouellette, Laurie, 153 Pujas, Veronique, 207, 211, 216–17 Outback House, 106 puritanism, 52 Oxfam, 229–31 Pusey, Michael, 225 paedophilia, 214 quarantine, 11, 126, 156, 160 Panelli, Ruth, 278, 280 Queensland, 10, 43, 50, 55, 120–22, paparazzi, 197 126–28, 197, 261, 263, 270, Parer, Douglas, 110 272–73 Paris, 140 sugar industry, 263 304 Index

Queen Victoria, 168, 171 Royce, Josiah, 94 Roy Morgan Research, 187, 198 race, 4, 7, 39, 53, 93–94, 98, 170, Rubenstein, Kim, 140 179, 282–83 Rudd, Kevin, 24–25, 192, 199 racism, 86, 97 government, 148–49 radio, 4, 9–10, 188–89, 192, 194, Rudé, George, 55 196–98, 243, 261–74 rule of law, 10, 139, 141 DJ, 5 rural women, 277 Hot FM, 10, 262, 270–74 Ruskin, John, 77 Sea FM, 262, 264–66, 268, 270, Ryan, Simon, 70 273–74 Rylah, Sir Arthur, 246 Stan the Man, 261–74 talk-shows, 196 salination, 96 Triple J, 261 San Joaquin and King River Canal Will and Jess, 270–72 proposal, 98 Raghuram, Parvati, 160 San Joaquin Valley, 89 Rainbow Serpent, 33 Sankey, Lieutenant-Colonel, 86, Ramahyuck, 177 88–89, 98 Ramsay, Gordon, 194 Sattler, Howard, 196 Rankine, William, 174–75 Scalmer, Sean, 247 Rann, Mike, 189–90 schadenfruede, 160 rapprochement, 26 Schirato, Tony, 263–64 Reader, R., 126 Schoenheimer, Henry, 249 Read, Peter, 21 school teachers, 242–57 Reagan, Ronald, 195 class sizes, 249, 254 Regent Theatre, 46 colleges, 251–52 regional Australia, 262–64 NSW Teachers’ Federation, women, 277–86 251–54 Revolution, 55–57 strike, 8–9, 242–57 Reynolds, Henry, 105, 144, 168, training, 251–52, 254 172 Schultz, Julianne, 192 Rhodesia, 120 Schwarz, Anja, 109, 112 Richardson, John, 38 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 195 Richardson, K. C., 119 Scott, Robert, 104 Ritchie, David, 105 Scott, Stuart, 55 Robb, Andrew, 138 Second World War, 37, 43, 50, 120, Roberts, Greg, 210 229, 249 Roberts, Lisa, 110 Seigworth, Gregory, 18 Rockhampton, 9, 120, 261–64, 274 sexual abuse, 203–17 Rodney, 91 Shackleton, Ernest, 104, 108 Rogoff, Irit, 27 Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, romantic movement, 71, 77, 83 107 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 94 Shanahan, Dennis, 209 Rossington, Michael, 173 Shears, R., 123, 125–26 Rothfield, John, 189 Shoemaker, Adam, 169 Royal Australian Navy, 4 Shugart, Helene, 273 New Voices, New Visions 305

Simon, Ron, 158 Sunday Territorian, 126 Simons, Margaret, 193–194 Sun-Herald, 253 Simpson, J., 52 Sun News-Pictorial, 245, 248, 254 Simpsons, 118 surfies, 4, 50–63 Bart, 118 Surfing World, 54 Singer, Peter, 235 Survivor, 106, 110, 112, 153 Sligo, Norman, 80, 82 Sutherland, Alexander, 2 Smart, Judith, 223 Switzerland, 79, 190 Smith, Mick, 18 Swiss Alps, 7, 79 Smith, Rodney, 9, 220–37 Sydney, 31–33, 140, 196, 233, 244, South Africa, 120, 223 246, 253–56 anti-apartheid activists, 223 Sydney Morning Herald, 131, 188, South Australia, 168, 173–75, 189, 204, 210–11, 213, 233, 244, 193, 235–36 246, 251–253 Southern Cross, 81 Szego, Julie, 209 South Pacific, 1 Spain, 90, 93, 96 Spaull, Andrew, 248–49, 253–54 Tahiti, 2, 3 Spearritt, Peter, 53 Taj Mahal, 40 Spears, Russell, 160 Tampa, 3, 141 Spielberg, Steven, 124 Taniguchi, Masaki, 194 Sportsgirl, 232 Tanner, Stephen, 247–48 Stainton, J., 129 Tate, John, 140 Stam, Robert, 159, 163 Tattersall, Amanda, 231 Standish, Ann, 284 Tavan, Gwenda, 139 Stanley, John, 175 Taylor, A. J. P, 50 Star Advocate, 51, 54 Taylor, Griffith, 104 Stewart, Kathleen, 18 television, 3, 7–8, 11, 102–3, 105– Stewart, P., 123 8, 110–15, 120, 152–64, 188– Stokes, Geoffrey, 169 90, 194–198, 204, 211, 243–44, Stokes, J. J., 131 248, 262, 271 Stolle, Deitlind, 220, 223–24, 227– ABC, 130, 191, 194, 196, 204, 28 211, 213 Storm Financial, 190 Channel Nine, 190, 204, 214 Stott Despoja, Natasha, 205 Crackerjack Productions, 106 Stoukalo, John, 102, 107–9, 111, Doganieri and Van Munster, 114 107 Strange, Carolyn, 103 Earthview Inc, 107 Strasburger, Victor, 197 Endemol Productions, 106 Strathfield, 247 Fremantle Media, 107 Stringer, C., 120 Fox News, 196, 198 subcultures, 39 Japanese, 194 Summers, Anne, 279 Mark Burnett/CBS, 106 Sun (Sydney), 242, 244, 253 reality, 11, 103, 106–8, 112–14, Sunday, 204, 214 152–64 Sunday Night, 189 306 Index

re-enactment, 7, 102–3. 105, van Toorn, Penny, 169, 171–72, 177 107–15 van Voss, Lex Heerma, 171 SBS, 194 veganism, 234 terra incognita, 19–20 vegemite, 125–26 terra nullius, 20, 111, 144–45 Ventura, Jess, 195 Textile, Clothing and Footwear vertigo, 5, 17–34 Union, 231 Vesuvius, 82 Thomas, Nicholas, 109 Victor, Suzann, 32–33 Thompson, Linda, 4, 7, 9, 118–132 Victoria, 10, 39–40, 86–95, 97, 99, Thompson, John, 193 177–178, 231, 235, 242–45, 250 Thomsen, Stephen, 4 Victoria Station, London, 37 Thornton, Phil, 224 Vietnam, 191 Thrift, Nigel, 39, 45 anti-war demonstrations, 8–9, Tiffen, Rod, 189, 206–08, 212–13, 242–48, 255–57 216–17 conscription, 9, 56, 244, 256 Tincknell, Estella, 160 Tet Offensive, 248 Tobiasen, Mette, 220–22 War, 51, 56–59, 63, 242–44 Today Tonight, 190, 194 Vietnamese, 30 Toowoomba, 208, 215 Village Voice, 56 Preparatory School, 206, 209– Vizard, Steve, 190–91 210, 214 Vromen, Ariadne, 9, 220–37 Torres Strait Islander people, 145 Wakim, Joseph, 140, 144 Tourism Australia, 125–27 Walding, Murray, 55 tourists, 6, 37, 40, 50, 58–59, 79, Walker, Jamie, 213–14 104, 125–27, 130 Walker, Tony, 213 Tracks, 55–56, 59 Ward, Andrew, 40 trade unions, 225 Ward, Russel, 4, 278 travel writing, 69–83 Washington, 140, 244 Truth, 189 Washington, Stuart, 196 Trevorrow, Ellen, 173–74 Watson, Judy, 33 Trevorrow, Tom, 174 Watson, Tim, 188 Turnbull, Malcolm, 191, 193, 195, Wave Hill, 172 199 Webb, G., 119–20, 130–31 Turner, Graeme, 54, 164, 194 Weedon, Chris, 140 Tyler, Robert, 73 Wei, Guan, 29 Tyrrell, Ian, 87 Weltman, Sharon, 77 Western Australia, 6, 7, 69–83, 120, Unaipon, David, 169, 174–75 190, 198, 249, 279, 282 United Kingdom, 3, 140, 156, 194, goldfields, 73, 80–81 228–29, 231 Perth, 72, 75, 81, 127, 196 United States Consulate, 246, 256 WA Inc., 190–91 United States of America, 7, 24–25, wildflowers, 76 55–57, 104, 120, 140, 156, 194– Western, J. S., 243 95, 243, 246–48, 256 Western, Mark, 225 University of California, 98 Westpac, 196 New Voices, New Visions 307

Whalan, Jack, 250–51 Wollman, Elizabeth, 264 White Australia policy, 30, 86, 139 women’s liberation, 56 white-collar crime, 197 Woods, Tiger, 188 Whitehead, Anne, 173 Wright, Judith, 5, 17, 21 whiteness, 7, 142, 179, 219 Wruck, Beryl, 121–23 White, Richard, 128 Wyndham, Dr Harold, 251 White, Rob, 262 Wyn, Johanna, 262 Whitlam, Gough, 248 government, 139 Xenophon, Nick, 192 Wigman, Bert, 263–64 X-Files, 157 Wilke, Douglas, 248 Wilkinson, Marian, 141 Yarra, 231 Williams, Raymond, 18 yeoman, 87, 89, 99 Willig, Carla, 113 York, 78 Wilmoth, P., 126 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang, 25– Wilson, A., 129 26 Wilson, Ashleigh, 214 Yue, Audrey, 28 Wilson, Shaun, 222–24, 227 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 280 Wilson, Tony, 161 Wiseman, John, 23 Zunini, Leopoldo, 75–77, 79 Witzig, John, 54