Opting out of Utopia

PERSONAL COLUMN ROBERT HUGHES

I was born in Sydney and have lived there most of my life. It throws up images which distance cannot efface. The disconcerting thing is how many of them correspond to the standard image of Australia as a heat-soaked bourgeois paradise cut off from history—the harbour, with its flat glitter of sun among the striped spinnakers; the long yellow beaches, carpeted with roasting Australians; the featureless sense of well-being which nothing could disturb.

As it happened, I left Australia in the last year of its political virginity, 1964, just as its politicians were galvanising the old bogey of the yellow peril into life in order to justify our bribe to the Americans, conscription for .Vietnam. Future historians, no doubt, will see Vietnam as a basic pivot in Australian politi- cal language: the moment when we stopped thinking about Asia _ as the Far East, realised that it was the Near North, and shamefully panicked. Very little of this occurred to us before; we had it all taped. Australians felt protected by their openness. The size of Aus- tralia and its distance from anything that happened 'overseas' had a cushioning effect on us, like zero gravity on astronauts. One floated, and watched the distant world spin.

Nearly everything that has been written about Australia has started with its isolation—a polite word for provinciality. Rightly so; it is, as Australians never tire of repeating, a young country; it was not colonised until the end of the eighteenth century, and most of the political agonies of the nineteenth and twentieth_passed it by. Thus, Australia has never had a civil war, a revolution or a dictator. It has never been on the losing side in a' world war, and in its whole history there have only been two enemy actions against its mainland—if you can discount the genocide of aborigines which our ancestors so efficiently accomplished in the nineteenth cen- tury. The first of these attacks was the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1941; the second, when two Japanese submarines crept into Sydney Harbour, sunk a ferry, and were in turn sunk as they shelled the Royal Sydney Golf Club, under the delusion that it was an ammunition depot.

Not even World War 11 ruptured the spell of Australian isolation. When Australians were killed, they died away from home; survivors, returning from Burma or North Africa, knew they were coming back to the one continent, other than America, which had not been violated. Australia remained a comfy womb, a refuge from history, which would never again expel its children into the acrid air of the world outside. And the effect of this feeling—which soon hardened into a resolution—was incalcul- able. By 1955, most Australians were ready to accept the myth that their society was the paradise of the average man. It was homo- geneous—no niggers or chows, thanks to the White Australia policy—and so had no racial tension; even the postwar immigrants from Europe were expected to submerge their national characteristics in the suburban com- monwealth, and were called, significantly, 'New Australians' instead of the old term, 'reffos,' which implied both contempt and a suspicion that they might want to keep their original

social behaviour intact. Australia was pros- perous, egalitarian and free: so ran the inscrip- tions. The mass immigration to Australia after the war confirmed, in Australian eyes, that ours was the best of all possible worlds; we were Panglosses to the last clerk; the Calabresi and Baits who crammed the converted aircraft carriers looked like wise rats, leaving the sinking ship of Europe.

And thus Australia's vision of itself as the ideal society—so ironically close to pre- depression America's narcissistic belief in itself as an ideal—had tvSo interesting effects. First, it caused Australians to mythologise themselves. The Australian myth of freedom occludes the oppressiveness of its censorship, the brutality of its police force and the dis- advantages of its unplanned, monopoly-ridden economy. The myth of equality—which meant, in Australian terms, that you could call the boss 'mate' without ever being allowed to forget who was boss—allows Australians to practise, undisturbed, the rituals of snobbery normal in wealthy societies. Because they take their freedom for granted, Australians seldom examine it; with the result that it is daily - eroded by the growing rigidity of their society. The aim of Utopia is the end of history, and, because a great many Australians believe that they are living in Utopia, they are puzzled that history does not end; that it should persist in grinding on outside, messy with revolutions, dissent, civil war and economic crises.

And so the second effect of Australia's un- easy narcissism is that it has rendered most Australians unable to see why anyone born there should wish to live anywhere else. The simple act of preferring England, or France, or for that matter the Laccadive Islands, is apt to be interpreted as criticism: Australians have proved notoriously touchy about what their expatriates think of them. Five or six years ago, an Australian painter, grown famous in London, made a visit to Sydney. Squads of journalists and two Tv crews met him at Kingsford Smith Airport, and turned on him that bloodshot stare, compounded of eagerness, curiosity and paranoia, which Australia reserves for such as pop in and out but do not return. How long was he staying? (Only three months?) Did he think of himself as some kind of Pom? If not, why the house in London? —and so on. Finally, one reporter asked: 'Do you ever think about Australia at all?'

To which the painter, with a smile of saurian innocence, replied, 'Oh yes. Every night.'

To any Australian living in Europe, this has tilt.' same ring of masterly ambiguity as de Gaulle's remark to the cheering crowd in Algiers—Ve volts ai cornpris.' For the painter had understood his audience. He knew that it would be professional hara-kiri to say that he

preferred England to Australia, that he found it more congenial and stimulating. At the same time, he knew that no Australian, however nationalistic, would swallow a tale of how, despite the gravity-pull of patriotism, he had

resolved—with a tear of loss in his eye—to

stay in London in order to carry forward the banner of Strine culture against the decadent

complexities of Europe. He therefore plumped for exactly the right answer, implying a nos- talgia which, though questioned by the fact of his residence abroad, was proved by his visiting Australia at all.

, For the curious thing is that, although Aus- tralians tend to suspect their expatriates, They wish to be loved by them; to be assured that the European alternative has failed and that Utopia remains intact. This dichotomy runs deep in Australia. On one side, you have its cultural nationalism, the trumpeting appeals in the review columns for an Australian literature, an Australian art, a self-sufficient hive of paint- ing, writing and thought which, encased in the vitality of its own distance, will be able to show those jaded Europeans and decadent English establishmentarians a thing or two. On the

other, there is the nagging—and correct—

suspicion that, the local gods will not do; Oedipus's efforts to kill the cultural father collapse against the fact of an international culture which has not fully penetrated Aus- tralia. The critic proclaiming that Kevin Strine, novelist, is the Dostoievsky of Sydney, and the Vaucluse hostess besotted by the prospect of getting an English celebrity, for lunch, are both trapped by the same malaise.

'The inhabitants of this Country,' wrote Australia's first European visitor, a seventeenth- century Dutchman, 'are the miserablest People on earth. The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are gentlemen to these . . . and, leaving aside their Human Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.' This disenchanted view is echoed, with some precision, by most Australians I have met

who, aged more than forty, live in Europe; they are apt to see themselves as heroic deracines,

refugees from Australian culture. It is an illusion which few Australian expatriates under forty share. One leaves through professional necessity (in my case, lack of 'paintings to write about), or, at most, boredom. Nothing is more comforting than the pretence that you have been driven out by the philistines, waving their cans of Foster's; but, like all postures of martyrdom, it is an odious fiction. What dominates is neither resentment nor patriotism; the old convict couplet: True patriots all, for be it understood, We left our country for our country's good does not hold true in reverse, though some Australians would like it to. One is left with an affectionate indifference to problems which one no longer wishes to share; and this makes it excessively hard to go back. Sun, surf and gums, those memorable anodynes, cannot solve the rootlessness which writers feel in a coun- try where the word 'intellectual' always re- ceives the prefix 'pseudo-'; where half the cul- ture is busy apologising for its lack of Poussins while the rest obsessively proclaims that Poussin is not needed in Australia. The ex- patriate's distance grows as the political links between Australia and Europe stretch and weaken.

The most flattering thing that could have happened to Australian self-esteem, and one of the factors likely to prove crucial to Aus- tralia's future history, is Lyndon Johnson's belief that Australia is the Last Frontier, a sort of Texas; one broad and caricatured simplicity bellows to its mate, longhorn to shorthorn, across the Pacific ditch. The Australian living in America is not an expatriate in the eyes of hi.; friends at home; he only becomes so if he moves to Italy, or Germany, or, in the last few years, to England. For in the former case he has not opted out of Utopia, whereas in the latter he has.