A Tale of Two Legends

On the parched landscape of the Australian arts in 2008, the movie Australia was the country’s Uluru: enormous, iconic and recognisable for its six-for-the-price-of-one populist aesthetic. From its initial set-scouting in the north-west Kimberly to its Sydney premiere, the scale of the film was as big as the allusions contained in its title. The budget was Packeresque: the production cost the equivalent of 80 per cent of the Australia Council’s entire annual grants funding for the same year. Of more interest than the pre-release shenanigans, though, was what came afterwards. By tackling a subject so dear to our hearts—one that includes 7,617,930 square kilometres of land, 60,000 years of history and 23 million cattle—Baz (can we call him Bazza now?) Luhrmann ensured that the real entertainment began after the credits rolled, as everyone from Germaine Greer to former treasurer Peter Costello felt entitled to turn their hands to the business of reviewing the movie. Most of the commentary was predictable: for those incapable of viewing history outside the prism of contemporary politics, the stolen generations theme provided an irresistible opportunity for cooption as another front of the nation’s still-simmering ‘history wars’.

In his Sydney Morning Herald film review of December last year, ex-treasurer Costello held himself short of contesting—as Andrew Bolt and others might—whether indigenous children were ever taken away from their families as a matter of policy. When Costello derided Luhrmann for his ‘lofty ambition’ of ‘telling the story of indigenous Australia’ in the movie, he failed to recognise that there are as many stories of indigenous Australia as there are indigenous Australians. Costello seemed to be hoping for a narrative that catered to his own political position. Notwithstanding its Herculean attempt, Lurhmann’s production house had no chance of weaving in a storyline to suit each of the movie’s millions of prospective viewers.

Like all policy, the assimilationist doctrine of the mid twentieth century that created the stolen generations was general in its conception and particular in its application. The broad outline of the story involving the boy Nullah in the film—that of an accidentally drowned mother, murderously destructive white father, interfering, well-meaning step-mother—is no more improbable in its particulars than the dozens I consider every day. The stolen generation clients I serve as a caseworker in the federally funded Link-Up program are long tired of others denying or contesting the reality of their experiences—something Lurhmann could not be accused of. Costello might like to know that regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of ‘the story of Indigenous Australia’ contained in Lurhmann’s script, there were a few quiet tears shed by some elderly ‘stolen gen’ members of the audience at Australia’s first screening in Alice Springs.

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In a nation obsessed by the contrasting aspects of its own identity, the movie Australia confirmed that the most popular interpretation of our own character was the one advanced by my father Russel Ward in his book The Australian Legend half a century ago. He argued that the qualities that comprise ‘the Legend’ arose from the unique set of circumstances that Australia’s new itinerant workers experienced in the bush. It is typically Australian, he argued, to value ‘a fair go’ and equality, to practise mutual support and endeavour and hold an attitude to life that manifests both in a stoic mockery and begrudging acceptance of fate, self, and pretension in others. At the time, it didn’t need repeating that these larrikin values had their origins among the radical nationalist circles that spawned the Australian Labor Party in the 1890s. They are now scattered through our public discourse and are familiar, more or less consciously, to just about all of us. Hugh Jackman’s ‘Drover’ is a gym-buffed reflection of this rough gem.

In January 2008, Amanda Hooton wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend:

Not all Australians are calm and competent and tough and generous, as the myth tells us they must be. It’s easy to end up, as I did, believing that despite a life of high heels and takeaway food and traffic fumes, you are, deep down, the sort of person who can winch a truck out of a river, or break a wild horse, or bring a thousand head of cattle safely home. If Australians have a cultural cliché that is uniquely ours, this is it: that even here, in the dusty dirty city, we all secretly believe we are Clancy of the Overflow.

There is also a belief that Australians are somehow different, that they possess a special quality that sets them apart. The journalist Chris Masters reported on the Australian armed forces’ contribution to the agony of Afghanistan in December 2007 in the Monthly magazine. He concluded:

Through curiosity, sign language and a Pashtun phrasebook, these young soldiers—some of whom have come from farms back home—are taking an interest. Although it is difficult to define, there is something in their manner that may be as important to the success of their mission as any space-age weaponry.

Arguments about the nature of that ‘something that is difficult to define’, with its origins mysteriously linked to the Australian bush, have been batted back and forth since ‘the Legend’ was published in1958.

Although the values of the Legend have been traditionally monopolised by the Left, part of John Howard’s popular appeal was his ability to reach out to ‘the ordinary Australian’—possibly a first for that deceit to be executed successfully by the Liberal party. In her Quarterly Essay ‘Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia’ (no. 19, 2005), Judith Brett drew attention to the number of times that John Howard made appeals to Australian values or characteristics during his years in power. In all his quivering, pseudo-earnest devotion, Howard found opportunity to identify himself with the typically Australian values of the Legend: ‘Being Australian embodies real notions of decency and pragmatism in a classless society which lives up to its creed of practical mateship’ (p. 34). The ‘man-of-steel’ mateship offered to George Bush, presumably. Even the following, from the author of ‘the Pacific solution’: ‘The openness and unpretentious character of Australians has given us a well-deserved reputation for tolerance and hospitality’ (p. 34).

As Brett pointed out, ‘The character traits of the Australian Legend were always more politically protean than Ward or Labor recognised’ (p. 35). A foolish naivety by the historians of the old left perhaps, but times, courtesy largely of Howard, have changed. The intellectual sleight of hand, sheer cynicism and ahistorical ignorance required for the consumption of Howard’s entreaties by the Australian people would have been completely unimaginable to the Marxist intellectuals of 1950s Australia. Such a trick would never have occurred to Howard’s hero, ‘Ming the Merciless’ Menzies. When Howard uttered his words, I’m sure the soil moved perceptibly over dad’s New England grave.

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In 2001 I was drawn, like my father in 1939 and Baz Lurhmann in 2006, to move away from the urbanised south of the country and search for some of the realities that prefigure the symbols and common interpretations of Australia. Three years later I found myself in the shadow cast by the old bow-legged Gurindji stockmen of Wave Hill station. Like the semi-mythical Wild Colonial Boy, Vincent Lingiari, leader of the Indigenous industrial action of 1966 known as the Wave Hill walk-off, offers a prime example of the imploded heroism charted by The Australian Legend. Lingiari is widely admired in Aboriginal Australia, and has been eulogised in song by bards such as Ted Egan and Paul Kelly. He has also been recently granted a spot in Reconciliation Place in Canberra’s parliamentary triangle. He is thought of fondly by a great many Australians, and there the matter might lie, but for the fact that seemingly all of them are hangers on and stirrers of the left. If evidence of this is needed, at the 40th Anniversary celebrations of the walk-off, held in Kalkaringi in 2006, a great many prominent Australians were invited to attend. But the large VIP contingent that arrived was not representative of the invitation list. Not a single scout of either the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party or the federal coalition found time to acknowledge the Gurindjis’ big day.

This is an incidental back-country example of a political dynamic with more far-reaching consequences: the seeming inability of many political conservatives to acknowledge—let alone embrace—the indigenous contribution to national affairs. Intellectual contortions and denial characterise a great many responses of the Liberal Party—and their cultural apologists—to ‘symbolic’ (read moral) issues in indigenous affairs. As Robert Manne has cogently argued, the treatment of the stolen generations provides a case in point, from the initial Bringing Them Home report in 1997 to the Rudd government’s 2008 apology. Broadly polarising the community along political lines—acknowledge or deny, carrot or whip—the debate serves to highlight a fascinating disconnect in the Australian polity around attitudes to indigenous Australians and our treatment of home-grown heroism.

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The first imported myth to take root in this country—of an older bloodline than the Australian Legend—was the Legend of the Pioneer. The Pioneer Legend, as historian John Hirst has indicated, was transplanted: cut from a Eurocentric, hegemonic cloth patterned by the Enlightenment, and imposed upon every colony there ever was. Now plagued by the complications of post-structuralism, the primary role of the Pioneer Legend was to inform the social and psychological currents necessary to sustain immigrant populations through the unavoidable hardships of settlement. In Australia it centrally positions the early explorers and station-owners—the settlers of the land—as heroes essential to the establishment of our nation. This is a far cry from the terms of heroism, if it can be called that, found in The Australian Legend.

Building on a Marxist analysis, Legend never attempted to address the clear materialist aspirations of many of the new settlers. Emphasising an egalitarian ethos, the values of the Australian Legend are collective, downplaying differences in social rank and personal ability. Its heroes are those whose achievements benefit the oppressed and who may apparently gain nothing or perish in tragic circumstances, such as Ned Kelly, secular martyr. Beating one’s own drum is seen as a fault rather than a virtue.

Notwithstanding the influence of the Pioneer Legend, which is common to all postcolonial societies, and the recent grafting of American-style ‘Idol’ culture onto our media landscape, there is still something as levelling as the ubiquitous rolling plains in the Australian treatment of celebrity. Our subtle social codes boost the underdog and hobble the odds-on favourite whatever the race. It is the tall poppy syndrome as a science. Fame is preferred as a fleeting novelty, and anyone with pretensions to heroism must be promptly knocked off their pedestal. Our celebrities, those who weather fame for the long haul, must be—or at least keep their touch with—‘ordinary blokes’.

Australians have cohabited with the tension between the values implicit in these two stories since the 1890s when the ‘bush scribes’ of the Bulletin first gave the Australian Legend popular form. The tension between the two has revolved through the political landscape of the twentieth century. It was in the 1960s, though, that the industrial action of the Gurindji—on the remote frontier of a broader social revisionism—challenged conservative Australia by graciously and steadfastly confronting the country over its self-styled egalitarianism.

Until then, administrators and armchair observers alike believed that the Aboriginal race was destined to die out. The burden of this knowledge was ameliorated as the process was hastened by the assimilationist policies of government. In their view, the ‘problem’ that the Aboriginal presence posed to the fantasy of terra nullius would soon resolve itself. At a time when the civil rights movement of the United States was in full swing and the world was beginning to awaken to the injustice of apartheid in South Africa, the Gurindji strike—alongside the call for recognition of Yolngu land rights from Arnhem Land and the ‘Freedom Rides’ in New South Wales—reminded urban Australians that far from disappearing, Aboriginal people were languishing in a third world of their own. This reinsertion of the indigenous issue into the national conscience between 1965 and 1975 has ensured that in the intervening thirty-odd years, the volubility of indigenous affairs discourse has hardly varied. The constant, enervating political debates characterising this discourse, and the recent ‘culture wars’, though, are a result of the contradictory political attitudes that our heterogeneous legends—Australian and Pioneer—encapsulate towards our past.

As C.G. Jung made plain, myths and archetypes exist throughout time. While the Pioneer Legend may have been most often and most loudly evoked on the shifting frontier of settlement, it is not a historic curio but remains central in informing the relationship of many Australians towards their country. For proponents of this myth it is difficult to acknowledge the difficulties of many Aborigines today while concurrently celebrating the achievements of the nation’s pioneers. The uncomfortable truth is that Aborigines were displaced at best, and at worst brutally slaughtered to enable many of those achievements to occur. For those non-indigenes who derive a sense of pride from the colonial record of their ancestors, there is a perception that remembering the effect of that record on the Aboriginal population would incur shame in regard to their own historic ledger. If we are to judge by the unremitting racism and misrepresentation currently meted out from some quarters towards Aborigines, the effort required to avoid the shame that may result from reframing the historic narrative more honestly is extreme.

For decades, Australian policy in indigenous affairs has been hobbled and partially paralysed by this dynamic, delaying improvement in several key indicators, which are well behind gains made in the United States, Canada and New Zealand. If current efforts to ‘close the gap’ are to succeed it is necessary to resolve this attitudinal impasse underlying our handling of the Indigenous issue. Until then, our efforts at redress will consist of clumsy and ham-fisted double-signalling—as with the ongoing federal intervention in the Northern Territory; or embarrassingly paternal and erosive largesse (through decades of unaccountable welfarism, for example).

The soul-searching, tongue-tied performances of the post-Howard Liberal cabinet on the apology issue are but the most recent, public example of this syndrome. They and other potential subscribers to what has been ungraciously dubbed the ‘white blindfold’ view of our history were publicly caught between a rock and a hard place. Costello’s movie review also exposes him as victim of the same double bind. The national apology offered everyone a lifeline from this impasse, and a significant opportunity to offer a gesture encapsulating the best of contemporary Australianness.

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After half a century of civic service, ‘mateship and a fair go’ have become tired battle horses: leached of substance, reduced through overuse to merely symbolise the symbolic. Populist song and dance about the bush, real blokes, mateship, and the ANZAC spirit has nurtured our narcissism while boring witless our indigenous and migrant communities. It is surprising then, that when the armchair spruikers of the Legend are stripped of their macho blustering, bullshit and homophobia, we find some simple, beautiful and, let it be said, spiritual ideas at its core—treat everyone as a friend; if you have more than others, share with them, and offer them of your own. This is the nuts and bolts of Australian mateship at its unenunciated best.

In a country in which collective identity remains an open question, on the brink of transition from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, it is worth dusting off and examining the identifying indicators we have already accrued. The social-relationship tenets contained in ‘the Legend’ are both secular and spiritual. Though humanist in origin, they come close to the creed practised by true Christians, but could as easily paraphrase key Buddhist or Islamic teachings. In a highly developed and relatively economically stable country that also harbours its own ancient, profoundly spiritual cultures, there is substantial potential for their realisation in integrative and sustaining new forms.

There is far to go. For ‘the Legend’ to retain its relevance in another fifty years, we must extend the mandates of a ‘fair go’ and mateship beyond their symbolic association with white men and their history; beyond official, anaemic signifiers of ‘mutual obligation’ and whittled-down legislative safeguards. We must bring them into the foreground of our most challenging interactions, particularly with those outside our myopic concepts of cultural, political or national identity.

Despite, or even because of experience, it would be wonderfully Australian to offer all denialists and nay-sayers the same simple and profound courtesies being extended through our rural towns and new suburbs to recent arrivals from Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Beyond ‘us and them’ visions of our history: a welcome to a much welcome, welcoming Australia.