AUSTRALIA FAIR Realities and Banalities of Nation in the Howard Era

Overland lecture | MARY KALANTZIS AUSTRALIA FAIR Realities and Banalities of Nation in the Howard Era TO TELL THE TRUTH, I was startled when I was But presumptuous I am going to be. And yes, invited by Nathan Hollier, the editor of Overland, indeed I carry baggage. I was born in rural Greece to present the end of 2004 lecture. He ran through at a time when it was torn apart by a civil war. The the list of luminaries who had this honour before resistance fighters who had helped expel the Nazis, me—Stuart Macintyre, Mark Davis, Amanda previously supported by the Western powers, were Lohrey, Marcia Langton, Bob Connell, Bob Ellis, now the enemy within, hunted down for fear a new Linda Jaivin and David Marr—all icons of the Aus- Greek Government might align with the Commun- tralian intelligentsia. ist East. Mainly, it was the British who intervened on I said, “about what?” and he suggested I talk on the side of the Right, so little wonder that, in Aus- “nationalism in Australia during the Howard era, tralia, I was shaped by a heritage of ambivalence perhaps with an eye on the future”. I hesitated, rat- towards all that was ‘English’, as well as a nostalgic tled by the expectation. He reassured me that I would sense of a distant homeland, a European sensibility not have to deliver the lecture until after the elec- about the ‘social’ and a fervent curiosity about the tion and things would be clearer then. The elec- country in which I grew up and to which I had been tion’s over now, and when it comes to the question introduced (literally) as an alien. There is no remov- of nation, I am not sure whether things are any clearer. ing the effects of experience and subjectivity from My mind instantly flashed back to an Australian our thinking. No amount of scholarship or expertise sage who had said, in a review of something I had can erase life’s agendas when it comes to history written many years ago, that my views on the nature and its telling, let alone imagining the future. of nation in Australia came from the “Donald Horne In my professional life, I have done three things, School of breathless optimism”. It just happens that and each of these things connects back powerfully this man’s wife had earlier examined my PhD the- to my life’s concerns. First, I have done history, in- sis in Australian history. It was improper of me to vestigating and telling the interrelated stories of centre tell grand narratives about Australia, she had said, and margin that shaped people and events. At the not only because grand narratives were themselves risk of looking as if I’m treading into the domain of improper, but because my expertise was in “eth- grand narrative, I have tried not to do a nicity”. I should really have stuck to doing a his- compartmentalised history, or even one with dis- tory of migration and settlement. Instead, I had crete chapters, neatly separating out the Indigenous, interrogated the ideas and realities of Australian na- immigrants and nation. Rather, I have tried to tell tionhood, assuming a role well beyond my station. the tangled story of the way we, as a nation, made Such are the inconsequential barbs that lurk in the each other, consciously and unconsciously.1 Only big depths of one’s consciousness. The request from picture history can do that. Overland made me anxious again. Here I am again, Second, in the spirit of our times, I have engaged the daughter of immigrants, presumptuously try- in critique. Those who don’t find this palatable call it ing to talk about Australian nation and national- ‘political correctness’. Over the course of the twen- ism—past, present and future. tieth century Australia became a very different place OVERLAND 178 2005 5 to what it had been at its official birth at Federation alongside ‘God Save the Queen’. It was first used as in 1901. It has been a symbolic and practical meta- the National Anthem at the Los Angeles Olympics morphosis, and one that is still far from complete. in 1984. The nationalism of 1901 was not remarkable for its Australia’s sons, let us rejoice, times or unique in its character. As a British colony, For we are young and free;2 being white and British was its defining feature, and with this came economic and military ties to the These were the opening lines of the song, written by motherland. Indigenous peoples were located out- Glasgow-born Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878. side of the imagination of the ambitious newcomers, When it became the national anthem a century later, eager to take up the resources of the new land and the opening words of the first line were changed from make something of them in exchange for its much- ‘Australia’s sons . .’, to ‘Australians all . .’ Such vaunted hardships. This resulted in systematic forms political correctness is more than wanton moralis- of exclusion, of Indigenous peoples within and un- ing. Something profound had happened to gender acceptable aliens beyond the borders of the new na- relations in the intervening century: real and signifi- tion. As the century moved on, the antidotes to this cant even if that something remains incomplete. legacy were multiculturalism, Indigenous self-deter- The first public performance was at the St mination, reconciliation—all the stuff of ‘political Andrew’s Day concert of the Highland Society on correctness’ in the eyes of those whose sensibilities 30 November 1878. McCormick was a prominent are still rooted in an older version of nation. member of the Presbyterian Church in Australia, Third (and I daresay this is where I belong to and one of his better known musical works was ‘The what my critic called the ‘Donald Horne School’), I Bonnie Banks of Clyde’. Only a Scot would have have maintained an active appreciation of the strain granted the Celtic margins of England—and its first of inclusiveness that has, even in the darker mo- colonies—a part in the Australian story, as he did in ments, run alongside the tendencies to exclude. The the third stanza: other side of the Australian spirit has always imag- From English soil and Fatherland, ined that, in this Great South Land, an egalitarian Scotia and Erin fair, haven could be built, a place airier and lighter than Let all combine with heart and hand the stifling, class-rigid, uncaring kingdoms the mi- To advance Australia fair. grants had left behind. This was a place where, ahead of anywhere else in the world, a woman could vote He was, nevertheless, a Scot fully reconciled to and social security would underpin the basic wage. Empire. How else would the song have become such It was a place built on the ethos of the ‘fair go’. And, a huge success, even in McCormick’s own lifetime? extending these principles not too much further, When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d, couldn’t that also be the case for immigrants of non- To trace wide oceans o’er; Anglophone origins, non-white immigrants and the True British courage bore him on, Indigenous peoples of this continent? Despite our Till he landed on our shore; anxieties today, despite moments where ‘fairness’ is, Then here he raised Old England’s flag, once again, for them and not for us, there has been The standard of the brave; a shift in the big picture. The principles of “With all her faults we love her still inclusiveness that underpinned the Australian nation Britannia rules the wave.” at its foundation have been so extended as to under- In joyful strains then let us sing mine profoundly the exclusive tendencies upon which Advance Australia fair. it was also underwritten. I want to concentrate, however, on the word ‘fair’. MAKING A NATION If Australia at Federation was to be anything, it was Let me go back to the beginnings of nation. Then, to be ‘fair’, to be a place which aspired, if not to the national anthem was one-and-the-same as the equality, then a more limited promise of equity— Imperial Anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’. And so it equal chances for all to share in its material benefits. remained until 1976 when the Fraser Government This, surely, was the aspiration to which McCormick set ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as the national song was referring in the song, a promise that arose in the 6 OVERLAND 178 2005 settlement of the great conflict of class and the emer- and then the man who has become our second long- gence of trade unions and the Labor Party in the est serving Prime Minister, John Howard. Both, at closing decades of the nineteenth century. But a first glance, seem men who are true to the exclusivist promise to whom? For whom? And at the expense rhetoric of Federation. Neither man, however, was of whom? true to his own times. In both cases their exclusivist Take, for instance, the Chinese, who had been rhetoric proved to be increasingly anachronistic. Both coming to Australia in large numbers since the gold men followed more than they led, and insofar as rushes in the mid nineteenth century. This is Edmund they led, changing realities proved both wrong. This Barton’s view of what was ‘fair’, our first Prime Min- is the enduring irony captured in Donald Horne’s ister, speaking here to the first Australian Parliament: notion of the ‘Lucky Country’: The fear of Chinese immigration which the Austral- Australia is a country run mainly by second-rate peo- ian democracy cherishes .

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