Australia’s conservative myths are neither original nor unique. Here old foreign tragedies are regularly replayed as antipodean farce. Our myths, of the Right, like those of the Left, are dull and tepid, lacking fire, ingenuity, flair and style, though they do contain passages which are unconsciously and unbearably hilarious. But their demons and plots, their saints and salvations are as they appear to Australians, from a particular past and a particular physical situation—although newcomers bring their own haunted memories with them, and add to the stock of fear and fantasy.

These myths are strange concoctions. They have human if not always rational roots. They touch respectable political theory at one edge and sheer fantasy at the other. The mind of the more extreme Rightist is ridden by grand, spongy, inflated concepts, before which the empirical world dissolves. The understanding is bewitched by vast dichotomies and rigid abstractions, by bizarre fancies and wild suspicions, and by imaginary or exaggerated creatures, with whom the shadow-boxers of the Right fight unceasingly, though not always according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Life becomes a metaphysical thriller, featuring the forces of darkness and the forces of light, locked in mortal combat. That sense of the richness and complexity of human life and of the uncertainty and frailty of human efforts, which characterizes classical conservative philosophy, is altogether lost, and a counterfeit conservatism emerges from its ruins.