In search of a new identity
Adam Watson
Surprisingly, Australia today is a nation in search of identity. The image of the swagman in the outback camping by a billabong, the craggy Dominioner who fought at Gallipoli and Tobruk, Sir Keith Hancock's formula of Independent Australian Britons, all belong to a past that seems more distant than it is. What is to be put in its place? 'God Save the Queen' is by now a quite inappropriate anthem to play when an Austrpan wins a medal at the Olympic Games: so we have a competition for a new one. Perhaps, people say, we'd better have a new flag too: or at least take the Union Jack off the blue duster. And indeed it seems more than a little odd to see the Union Jack flying beside the Australian flag on formal occasions. America was never a substitute. But while'it is easy to say what Australia is no longer, it is hard for Australians to say what they now are, or what they want to be.
Australians like to tell each other that 90 per cent of them live in towns, that 90 per cent of them live within ten miles of the sea, that 90 per cent of them have as much money in their pockets as they feel they need. It creates a new image, not so much urbanised as suburbanised, a world where people do not live in tenements but every family in a little detached house of their own, sprawled many miles from the centres of cities like Sydney or Melbourne, with a car and the sun and the beach — the demos, as Lawrence rightly observed, without a master, the way it likes to be. And above all, in spite of the closeness of one box to the next, still a sense of room, which breeds the easygoing feeling that she's right mate. Perhaps the Greeks and Italians, some of them, still work like Europeans, keep their shops open at the weekend, urge their children up the school ladder and on into the uni, save what they do not have to spend, because that is what they came here to do. They will soften, they will learn, as the Germans and others who have been here longer have learnt. But a surf culture is not an identity.
Which brings me to politics. The party which has always sought a distinctive Australian identity, and insisted on the difference between this new country and the Britain that the immigrants had left behind, is the Australian Labour Party. By Australian standards it is a party with a long history and a strong personality. The Liberals, the Country Party, the splinter groups, are more recent and more fluid political formations. They have seen Australia in terms of loyalties and partnerships, profitable junior membership of the Empire and Commonwealth and the American Alliance, bringing in the capital and where necessary the labour, developing the mines as their fathers developed the wool and the wheat. It is a caricature, but a recognisable one, to say that if the ALP is giving the country a national identity, the LiberalCountry coalition has made it something worth giving an identity to. The Coalition was twenty-three years in office: and although normally it is not office but lack of it that makes democratic politicians unfit to govern, since the great days of Menzies the leadership had degenerated to pathetic inadequacy. Life went on comfortably enough, but thinking Australians before the last election accepted that it was time for a change, and not least because the outside world had changed. In particular, my impression is that the trauma, both here and in New Zealand, of Britain's entry into the Common Market with such preoccupied indifference to the Antipodes was greater than people like to admit to themselves. It is interesting that in Australia, where voting is obligatory, immigrants from the United Kingdom vote labour two to one.
The ALP is fortunate in having a leader of considerable stature. Gough Whitlam is a big man physically, and beside the other politicians in the Parliament here he is a big man in other ways also. Not all Labour voters, and certainly not his rivals in the party, like his silver spoon background, his sense of specific purpose rather than devotion to doctrine, his continually paraded ability to see more than one side of a question. His air of superiority in the House is galling: I have met ex-Ministers in the corridor really angrY after some exceptional display of arrogance. In his own house I have found him glad to relax and say what he has left out of his calculated public statements. In this he is helped by his big breezy wife with a style of her own. After the adoring Lady Menzies and Mr Gorton's extramarital sheilas, it is something to have a consort battleship with guns that fire.
The identity which Mr Whitlam wants to give Australia is more independent, more master in its own house, less of a quarry for Japan owned by overseas interests; in hls words "a distinctive, tolerant, co-operative and well regarded nation." An Australia, also. with a no-nonsense personality, as good as the next bunch, no longer willing to touch the cap to the great allies and protectors. He and some of his close associates, in the party point to Sweden, not as a model, but as an example of a moderate, civilised, socialist and above all genuinely independent country, of about the same size and the same capacities. Australia is likely to become more Scandinavian, if you can have a Mediterranean Scandinavia.
Whitlam's trouble is that though he can dominate the House, he does not dominate his own party. He not only has to accept In his cabinet men who are rivals rather than colleagues, he lacks the power to enforce coherence or even collective decisions on the policies they pursue. The ALP has been bred on opposition: it would be luck if many of the leaders had a gitt for team administration, So the Attorney General, the outrageous Lionel Murphy, raids his own secret service offices.
fails to pass on information from the Yugoslay Ambassador about executions of Austra
lians there, and breaks the pairing arrange' ments to save himself from a Senate censure;
and so the Minister for Foreign Trade, Jim Cairns, pursues a line of doctrinaire Marxisrn and intervenes in foreign affairs to wage the dead cold war again from the other side, Even the more co-operative Clyde Cameron, the Minister of Labour, declared recently that he could see no reason why wage increases should lead to higher prices. The Prime Minis' ter goes round picking up the crockery his Ministers break, but holding up each piece for the public to note before dropping it into the bag. The big battles are still to come. They concern emotional issues like the American alliance, which Whitlam stoutly defends, and issues affecting the pocket like inflation. The budgets will have to be tougher. The' next showdown between administration and what is here called the gut reaction will be the party conference in July. Whitlam has announced that his government will not be bound by any majority vote at Surfers Paradise, a symbolically named Blackpool In Queensland.
The opposition parties will take a while to find new roles for a new context. At the federal level the Liberal leadership seems even to its supporters to offer little but the desire to keep things as they were. But in Victoria the local Prime Minister, Hamer, has increased his majority against the tide by a progressive alternative to socialism designed to win the marginal Billericay-type constituencies. Further to the right the personable Doug Anthony, the leader of the Country Party, Is pulling together the smaller right wing parties round his own brand of thoughtful conservatism. If the Liberals move towards the centre, Anthony will pick up right wing vote,5 from them. In a country with too little tract'.
lion, searching for identity, it is particularlY necessary to conserve what is valuable and build it into the future. The pity is that, from the right, it is hard to see how Anthony can hope to offer himself as an alternative Prime Minister: that ticket must go to the much larger Liberal Party, which will have to carrY the marginal seats. Meanwhile the incredibly beautiful parrots fly about the wide parklands, the water Jet spurts up to the blue sky, and even in Can'
berra whose business is politics there is Money in people's pockets and none of it seems to matter very much. I asked one Canberra woman recently if she approved of the Policy of preserving the tribal culture of the aborigines, which some people say is like keeping them on game reserves. "Oh yes, I 3,4pose so," she said. "After all, it's the only nistory we have except the ball and chain."
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