The Uncertain Smile of Australia

By CRAIG MCGREGOR HE slimmest men's ties in the world today I are sold in Australia. It's as handy a symbol as any of just how much with it the country is determined to be, and just how much it has changed in the last five years.

When I went back to Australia recently after years of expatriatism I didn't notice much change at first: the streets seemed to be full of the old familiar figures wearing open-necked sports shirts and a chip on the shoulder. But the struc- ture of Down Under society has been trans- formed, and it didn't take long to feel it. The change wasn't just in the glossy new skyscrapers in Sydney and Melbourne, nor the slim jim ties and sharp lightweight suits in the shop windows. Nor was it the two-tone Hoidens jammed bumper to bumper at the parking meters, the local rock idols and syrup-voiced disc jocks and gaudy espresso bars and high-pressure TV commercials. It was more that at every party I went to the men wore dark suits, nearly every bus carried expensively dressed women shoppers, nearly every pub had its quota of white-collar men. Australia today is no longer the land of the workers; it is the land of the businessman.

The change has been going on for long enough. The post-war boom years have broken down the old egalitarian society, which was a hangover from the pioneering and colonial days and became rigidified by the depression of the Thirties. (The tired old hacks of the State Labour Parties still talk this archaic language of the class war, while their sons listen to Dave Brubeck and buy Volkswagens on the never-never and wonder what Dad's talking about.) It was dominated by the working man: tough, loud- mouthed and individualistic, the beer-and-races Philistine with his ex-serviceman's badge in the lapel of his cardigan who is depicted in Alan Seymour's recent Stratford play The One Day of the Year. Today this society is being rapidly changed into a predominantly middle-class one in which wealth and status distinctions have re- Placed the old class divisions and which shows every sign of developing the brash materialism of contemporary America. The typical Australian today is a youngish business executive with nice button-down shirts, last year's Holden, a first- name acquaintance with the local bank ac- countant and a wife in the suburbs.

So far, so good; many English observers, such as Norman Mackenzie, have noticed this. But they have also concluded that this means the end of Australia's egalitarianism, the end of the democratic myth of `mateship' which Australians have given to the world. Are they right? Will Sydney become just another affluent society like, say, Orpington?

Much of the evidence is on their side. Pri- vate schools (the equivalent of English public schools) have never been so popular; one of the few genuine snobs I've met was a young oil- company trainee from Melbourne who had been taken in by all the guff about prefects and leadership and discipline and seriously believed that old boys of private schools were instantly recognisable as 'a cut above' Stile pupils. A dis- proportionate percentage of professional and business men come from well-regarded private schools. It's suddenly become important to live in the 'right' suburb, and land values have soared. The newspapers publish page after page of society gossip and photographs; it becomes imperative for smart young things to have their coming-out parties, engagements, weddings and first births in the women's magazines and Sun- day papers. The successive stages of status snob- bery, from coloured toilet-paper to American car to exclusive ski club to power launch to a maid in the mansion, are becoming more and more important. Australians seem to be dis- covering the delights of exclusiveness.

All this means the end of an era. The huge success of a book like They're a Weird Mob, which nostalgically defines the working man as the dinkum Aussie, depends upon the image being outdated—like Andy Capp here.

Also, as the nation becomes more commer- cialised the Australian finds he has to keep up with his peers, not because he wants to, but because it's important to his job. The traditional pressure towards conformity at home means that conditions are ideal for producing a nation of slick-suited, empty-souled organisation men.

Will this happen? I don't think so. During my stay in Sydney I found that Australians are already sceptical of the new role in which they have been cast; it's no accident, for instance, that Feiffer and the 'Mad' cult are so popular.

The basic reasons, however, reach back to those same social forces which should prevent Aus- tralia becoming just another shoddy imitation of the American (or English) image.

The first of these is the purposeful hedonism of Australians, especially the younger ones. My headmaster used to reflect darkly upon the way beaches, sunshine and a predilection for public holidays gave Australians a picnic-day attitude to life; a friend of mine suggests All the Fine Young Hedonists or The Beach Generation as titles for his contemporaries. They are both close to an important truth: in the end Australians prefer having a good time to anything else. Most of them are quite content to work hard for what they consider the necessities of life—a car, a home, a TV set—and then leave the coronaries to some other silly bastard. Even most or the So, you see, folks. whereas ordinary dog food failed to lure this grieving poochie from the grave of his departed master, GUNKLES Kibble, on the other hand . aspiring young professional men I know are frank materialists who want money more than success or prestige. It seems possible that Aus- tralian society will always be pleasure-directed rather than status-directed.

Then there is the prosperity of the Australian worker. Wealth is the paramount arbiter of social position at home, and so long as the skilled tradesman earns as much as, and perhaps more than, the white-collar worker, the other distinc- tions between middle class and working class seem trivial. (There is no upper class, only degrees of middleness.) The traditional prole- tariat has never really existed; there has never been that huge mass of industrial workers which forms the mainstay of the fish-and-chips, Billy Butlin, picture-postcard, Blackpool, cloth-cap and mass-newspaper industries in Great Britain. The Australian worker has always been more independent, more aggressive, more ambitious; he has always been an incipient bourgeois. The only thing which could upset the status quo would be a serious depression. That is why the Menzies Government nearly lost the last elec- tion (it retains power by two seats): the social position of the ordinary Australian depends upon high living standards, and for the first time since the war he saw this position seriously threatened.

Finally, the tradition of equality is so strong in Australia that it would take decades of more intensive class stratification than is now going on to wipe it out altogether. Nations live by the myths they believe in, and few people have yet questioned the national myth of mateship and Jack's-as-good-as-his-master. Most Austra- lians aren't sardonic, suntanned stockmen or easy-going lifesavers, but that is the image they cling to. Australians just take it for granted that they are friendly, unsnobbish blokes with no bullshit about them; because they believe it, they usually are.

These, perhaps, are negative considerations.- Are there any forces combating the nation's crumbling egalitarianism?

There are a few. The State education systems are in the main progressive and unbedevilled by the hypocrisies of Britain's three-grade system; entrance to the universities is easy. (Any school- boy with ability can get a government scholar- ship; one in nine gets tertiary education, compared to one in twenty-two here.) The elite which is slowly emerging from this background could well reflect its unprivileged origins.

The lessening isolation of the nation has also made a difference: whereas Australia has been emotionally radical and intellectually conserv- ative, the influx of migrants and new ideas has made the people more receptive to intellectual nonconformity. There have even been Ban-the- Bomb marches on Canberra and the start of New Left groups in the cities! On a more prosaic level, most of the hundreds of thousands of Aus- tralians who come overseas (and there arc enough in London alone to stock a small town) go home determined not to let the furled- umbrella pettinesses of English society become established there.

But in the end Australia's egalitarianism will depend upon the vitality of the tradition itself, upon how deeply people feel about it. It's too soon to say there's been any basic change in attitude; perhaps in another twenty years, if Australia escapes a European nuclear holocaust, we'll know.

The other change which has occurred in the last five years is subtler and harder to diagnose; it has something to do with the increasing sophis- tication of Australian life. There is a feeling of old moulds cracking, the stale and insular moulds which have kept the nation a backwater of late- Victorian culture for so long. Australia has sud- denly become part of the Western world, and ;t feels like it. Striptease clubs, late pub-closing, art cinemas, expressways, continental restaurants, coffee bars with abstracts on the walls, night- clubs, intellectual magazines, foreign-policy headlines, the hectic pace of life in Sydney— whether you like these things or not, they indi- cate a change. The days of the wowser have gone for ever.

The most obvious sign of this new maturity, however, is what has been rather optimistically called the Australian 'cultural renaissance.' The judgment is optimistic because nobody knows how permanent this artistic explosion is; the ex- perience of the 1890s makes Australians cautious of false dawns. Explosion, however, there has been. In the last few years the country has pro- duced Patrick White in the novel, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd in painting, Joan Sutherland in opera, Judith Wright and A. D. Hope in poetry, Ray Lawler in drama: an impressive list, and it could easily be lengthened. But much more significant has been the prolific creativity in all the arts which has made these individual achievements possible.

Painting is a good example. Nolan is very highly regarded overseas at the moment, but most of the best artists prefer to work in Aus- tralia itself : Russell Drysdale, Eric Smith, Clifton Pugh, William Dobell and others. Be- hind them come hundreds of younger or lesser artists who are continually holding exhibitions, contributing to international shows, entering for contests and selling to the local businessmen. They have created a climate of activity which is both remarkable and exciting; in Melbourne and Sydney there are scores of young artists who live in communities, exhibit in local coffee bars and manage to live by their painting.

This creativity has begun to extend to other fields, though industry in general has yet to be won over. Australia is now producing first-class potters and poster-painters, architects and stage designers; the newspaper cartoonists have im- proved considerably; some Tasmanian furniture is almost Danish in its purity of line. The in- tellectual magazines have also begun to appear, in the form of Nation, a high-class fortnightly, and the Bulletin, now a reinvigorated and lively weekly.

All this is but a beginning. It remains to be seen whether a creative and intellectual tradi- tion can be built up which will consistently modify and direct the materialist one. Perhaps a hopeful sign is that although Australians still have to make their reputations overseas, most of them now return home. Once they would have settled in London and become anglicised, like one writer I know who left home eight years ago and still talks of Australia as 'un- civilised.' He's a little like the spade ties everyone wore before the slim jirns came in: old- fashioned.