In from outback
James Morris
Hammond Innes introduces Australia (Andre Deutsch £2.25) Land of Fortune Jonathan Aitken (Seeker and Warburg £2.75) Nine or ten years ago, soon after my first arrival in Australia, an alarming thing happened to me. I had proposed the toast at an Australia Day dinner, and found Myself answered by an eminent Australian Who was not only a general, but a judge too. To my horror I discovered that this daunting figure and I, though we spoke the same syntax and shared the same Queen, had no fundamentals in common at all. We were not merely foreign to each other, we were irrevocably antipathetic. Nothing I could say would amuse him; nothing about him sparked me; when I laughed he Spluttered; when he emoted I scoffed. My speech, which was meant to be urbanely affectionate, struck him as impertinently rude; and in a reply somewhat longer than the original, and very much more violent, he answered its every footling sally blow by blow.
"We shoulduv toldyer," sympathisers said, " yer can't get awye with good clean fun on Austrylia Dye" — and they were understating the case. Ten years ago there ran through the whole of Australian life,. Establishment to taxi-rank, a streak of such prickly resentment that the eagerest pilgrim Down Under all too often came away rebuffed, and the most harmless after-dinner epigrammist found himself savaged on behalf of his hosts. Australia was an intensely urban country even then, but it was an urbanism of backstreet and suburb: touchy, cramped, either harking back interminably to a military past, or bragging preposterously about a philistine present.
Ten years later I went back to Australia, and a queer miracle had occurred. I had changed myself, of course, but Australia had changed far more. I could not quite grasp the nature of this renaissance, nor find any single explanation for it; but this time I left Australia bewitched — puzzled Still, as Australia's guests have always been, but with a special bewilderment. France was a land, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, England was a people, but America possessed the quality of an idea. Australia's founding purpose, also, was a bad idea, and one of the Australian puzzles now is to define the national conviction. What do the Australians want for their country? What kind of people do they wish to be? Will they settle for peace of mind, or do they pine for power?
These questions are only half-answered in Hammond Innes Introduces Australia, and not answered by Mr Innes at all, whose brief introductory essay is a disgraceful exercise in literary idleness and publishers' deception. The book is an agreeable but rag-bag collection of views, styles and intentions, from Mr Vincent Serventy the conservationist at one extreme, who knows all about kangaroos, to Mr Max Harris the critic at the other, who writes of cliques and minstrelsy. Mr J. C. Horsfall Is frank and fair about foreign investment, Mr Osmar White is outspoken about the delusions of rural development, and Mr Donald Horne uses the word 'rhetoric' fourteen times in an eleven-page essay on Australian nationhood.
But the general effect is curiously unrevealing. The best of the essays deal with old Australian aspects — Australian humour, Australian sport, the conquest of distance and loneliness, ballads, slang and Ned Kelly. The more resolutely contemporary pieces, especially those about the arts, seem oddly half-hearted and derivative, even a little old-fashioned, and we are left at the end with a feeling of void: an old Australian feeling too, but now expressed in a different form — no longer a void of environment, certainly not of ability, but a vacuity perhaps of vision.
For •the truth is, it seems, that the nature of the Australians' rebirth is no more apparent to them than it is to us. Their sense of destiny seems distinctly undeveloped. Now as always, in fact, nobody senses the Australian condition more quickly, or reacts to it more instinctively, than that old fall-guy of Australian life and legend, your true-blue Pom.
Such an observer, I suppose, is Mr Jonathan Aitken who, though he may have colonial strains to his own inheritance, is at least Eton, Christ Church and Mr Selwyn Lloyd's ex-secretary. Though internal evidence suggests that in Land of Fortune he is writing largely for Americans, still Mr Aitken is, in his maddening Pommy way, more instructive than any of Mr 1nnes's contributors about the new state of Australia. He is fired, like everyone else, by the excitement of the Australian moment, and responds in kind to the ambitions and pretensions of the young Australian sophisticates: but he sniffs danger too, and through his not very sensitive prose there runs a line of wariness.
Success is Australia's first danger. One of the glories of the Australian style is a traditional disrespect for it. As the stevedore says to his mate in a famous Australian cartoon, as one hangs by the other's fast-slipping trousers to a very high girder indeed, "For Gorsake stop laughing — this is serious." Almost nothing has been beyond a chuckle in Australia; the general national attitude has been one of good-natured satire, and the truest popular slogan is " She'll be all right, sport." This indolent irreverence, essentially a working-class attitude of protest, is half the charm of Australia, but it is obviously incompatible with national success in the current sense of the phrase. Excellence demands more than genial slipshod, and if the Australian revolution is to be more than a passing gleam of Camelot, then I suppose those stevedores have got to stop laughing.
The second danger is cosmopolitanism. It long ago became an act of liberal duty to wish Australia more cosmopolitan, and to welcome the New Australians who were such super cooks and navvies. It was, as everyone kept saying, the very variety of America which had made that country great. It remains true, I suppose, that if Australia too wishes one day to be a Great Power then she must admit immigrants of all sorts in vast numbers, to make another America of herself: but somehow the allure has left the prospect, the ideal is soured, and added to the other uncertainties of Australia is the greatest uncertainty of all: whether even Down Under, even at such a moment of hope, man can change his tiresome nature.
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