AUSTRALIA TAKES TO THE WATER
Robert Haupt sees the sun
save the bicentenary from its disastrous preparations
Sydney FOR weeks, things had been falling. A police helicopter into Sydney Harbour, half of an aerobatics team into the sea at Melbourne (in an accident which, because it was filmed, was replayed endlessly on television), skydivers with unopened para- chutes, a UFO over the Nullarbor Plain. It was as if the laws of gravity had just been promulgated, catching Australian aviators off guard.
This was in keeping with the quality of disaster that from the beginning had attended the preparations for the Austra- lian bicentenary — 'Our Ultimate Party', as one newspaper, apparently without irony, put it. Those in charge of planning the celebrations resigned, amid charges of extravagance in the department that pro- vides Australia with so many of its scan- dals: overseas travel. The First Fleet re- enactment (treated as an orphan by the authorities) ran out of money in Rio de Janeiro and had to be rescued by public subscription. And then there was the threat by Aboriginal activists to visit their remembered anger at the arrival of white settlers in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, on the heads of those who dared to celebrate it 200 years later. The augury was all wrong.
But it is one of the strengths of an unreflective people to be impervious to doubts and portents of a cerebral kind. So the Aboriginal clamour ('Our 40,000 years', declared Aboriginal leader Galarr- wuy Yunipingu in his Australia Day speech, 'makes 200 years look like a shit') was either ignored or, more hypocritically, incorporated in the celebrations them- selves. 'Today we recognise clearer than before', a typical speech went, 'that the traditional owners of this land were dispos- sessed of that land. Nineteen eighty-eight offers the opportunity to alleviate . . . (blah, blah)'. The question of whether this might be the wrong anniversary to cele- brate — the centenary of nationhood is on 1 January 2001 — was raised, briefly considered, and forgotten.
Free from intellectual scruples of this kind, Australians (including Australian in- tellectuals) were able to follow their in- stincts. And just as an American will organise a parade once the mood to celebrate takes hold and an African will begin to dance, an Australian will, without a moment's thought, begin to pack refresh- ments into a portable cooler known as an Esky and plan his route to the water. The fact that the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove by sea and did not, for instance, land on the northern coast, convert its ships into drays and traverse the continent, is wholly incidental. Australians don't celebrate the land — it's too hot and horrible in there, two thirds dust and flies and one third disappointment. Australians celebrate the shore. After all (experiments like Canber- ra excepted), that's where Australians live.
For all the omens and bungles and controversy, the success of Australia's bicentennial celebration was always assured since in its central event it relied only on the populace doing what comes naturally — and what, on a gloriously fine day such as 26 January turned out to be, many thousands of them would have been doing anyway: sitting by, or on, the water with a beer and some prawns and your family if you have one and your mates if you don't, generally keeping an eye on things and avoiding 'aggro'. A rough, hand-lettered sign on a yacht declared the ethos: 'No Wucking Furries'!
At this point in an account of an Australia Day on Sydney Harbour, after noting the boats cruising around with bare-breasted goddesses on their bows, the near-misses, the boozing and the roister- ing, the essayist generally finds it impossi- ble to resist the opening for a sermon. Australians are particularly keen on lectur- ing each other about the folly of their materialist ways, the loss of the will to work and the evils of the beach culture: the whole hedonism-in-the-sand approach.
It can hardly be by accident that as the national economic performance comes into question, the foreign debt rises and the value of the currency slumps, an intensive advertising campaign should be held link- ing the Australian birthright, a place in the sun, to skin cancer. An ocker dad fries himself into a lobster, the first intimation of his metamorphosis coming when he lifts the 'tinny' (can of beer) to his lips in a giant claw. As the carapace envelops him, his wife gives the look of contempt and disgust reserved by Australian womanhood for errant husbands and the giggling children call, 'Come on in, Dad, the water's boil- ing.' Not far beneath the cheerful injunc- tions concerning hats and sun-screen lo- tions is the message, 'Don't just lie there. Get to world' None of the sermonising has the slightest effect on the national pattern of conduct, but everyone feels better for having been chastised. For all the low-key humour and elaborate casualness in Australians' rela- tions with each other, nagging is a constant in their lives: wives do it to husbands, parents to children, politicians to electors. Henry Lawson (who would know) once declared that he thought as much harm was done in this country by women nagging as by men drinking.
Bicentenaries are supposed to be epic events, ranking with wars and the deaths of heroes in helping a people define itself. On the eve of this Australia Day, a 'bicenten- nial concert', broadcast nationally on tele- vision, showed the heir to the British throne being serenaded by an American country singer with a hymn to the Rocky Mountains. Is this what my newspaper means when it tells me that the bicentenary 'made us think about what it means to be Australian'?
But that's the old confusion of identity: the location of the national self-image on some foggy, mid-Atlantic shoal, half-Brit, half-Yank. The new one is seen in the reminders that have crept in to the Austra- lian National Sermon that, even should Australians not want to smarten up for each other, it is their duty to do so for the tourists. The cabin attendants of an Au- stralian airline, we were informed admir- ingly the other day, have acquired the skill of bowing deeply, in the proper Japanese fashion, the better to welcome the owners of the admirable yen. It wasn't the news that was surprising — particularly in Queensland, the Japanese are acquiring land rights that Australia's Aborigines can only dream of — it was the reaction: one mildly questioning letter to the papers, which in this country of strident argument amounts to nothing.
'There remains one vital factor in the answer to the question: "Who is an Austra- lian?" And that factor is a commitment to Australia and to its future.' So said Bob Hawke, in his rise-and-fall, lay-preacher tones. A banality, you might say, preceded by a fatuity. But when you think about Australia, struggling home from the beach in time to serve dinner to young Mr Nobutaka and his blushing bride from Osaka on their package-tour honeymoon — and this, of all the futures Australians can contemplate, is the most likely — you look at the Prime Minister's words in a new light. My God, you begin to think, what if he's right!
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