THE UNCERTAIN SMILE OF AUSTRALIA
SIR,—One of Australia's misfortunes is to be sub- jected regularly by her countrymen to home thoughts from abroad. Usually they come back to us in the cables ('Aussies Feel Failures, Britons Told'). Not that we mind if the information about us is wrong; nowadays we merely hope it will be original. Craig McGregor's article (April 27)--a mixture of generalisations littered with the worst clichés of popular sociology—seems to fail on both counts.
Clothing looms rather large in Mr. McGregor's scheme of things. 'Typical Australians' have 'nice button-down shirts' and wear slim ties; organisation men are 'slick-suited' and some people at parties wear dark suits. Women on buses are 'expensively dressed.' All of which means, I suppose, that fashions change from time to time and that Australians have more to spend on their clothing.
After telling us that it has suddenly become im- portant to live in the right suburb (when has it not been?) and that newspapers publish society gossip (when have they not?), Mr. McGregor gives it as an 'important truth' that Australians 'prefer having a good time to anything else.' I doubt if even the wowser--whose days, we are told, have gone for ever, despite the most restrictive drinking laws, the sternest sabbatarian traditions and one of the most backward systems of book and film cen- sorships in the Western world—would disagree with
this. -
Mr. McGregor's evidence of a 'change' in the character of Australian life is utterly superficial. Indeed, like all Western countries, we are more prosperous—thanks to a flood of overseas capital and a rousing hire-purchase debt. But Mr. McGregor tells us that this post-war boom (accompanied, by the way, by poverty-stricken public services) has 'broken down the old egalitarian society.' It is true that the gap between richest and poorest has never been greater, but for most of society the reverse has been true—social mobility has increased, as it has in most societies, with money in more plentiful supply. Mr. McGregor may consider sales of coloured toilet paper as indicating something more than extra money and argue that 'status dis- tinctions' are quite different from class distinctions. I consider them much the same; the gradings may be less steep, but they are much more numerous and just as bad. As a sign of our maturity, Mr. McGregor offers us 'what has been rather optimistically called the Australian "cultural renaissance." ' As far as I know, only Mr. McGregor and Australian corre-. spondents 'in London have called it this. True, we have some fine poets and painters, who have become
more plentiful with the growth of a literate market. But oddly we have always had some good poets and painters. Unfortunately, before button-down shirts came in, they were `dominated'—like society itself, as Mr. McGregor reminds us—`by the working man.' Yet how can this be, for the 'traditional proletariat has never really existed'? And this in a country where the 'tired old hacks of the State Labour Parties' still poll a majority of the popular vote. Perhaps Mr. McGregor should come home for a while and have another look in our shop windows.
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