WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.160 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this session. 2 00:00:02.320 --> 00:00:05.040 I'm Peter Travers, I'll be chairing this session. 3 00:00:05.580 --> 00:00:07.860 And our speaker is Peter Beilharts. 4 00:00:08.360 --> 00:00:11.720 He's already appeared on two platforms, 5 00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:15.180 and many, if not all of you, will have heard him there, 6 00:00:15.300 --> 00:00:17.640 and the fact that you're here now means that you liked him. 7 00:00:17.740 --> 00:00:20.600 Or maybe you didn't like him, and therefore you want to pursue him. 8 00:00:22.240 --> 00:00:24.100 Peter is Professor of Sociology 9 00:00:24.100 --> 00:00:27.880 and Director of the Thesis 11 Centre 10 00:00:27.880 --> 00:00:30.600 for Critical Theory at La Trobe University. 11 00:00:31.460 --> 00:00:34.000 He was born in Melbourne in 1953 12 00:00:34.860 --> 00:00:36.860 to a German family from Palestine 13 00:00:36.860 --> 00:00:41.280 who were interned in Tatura, the camp in Victoria, 14 00:00:41.560 --> 00:00:42.800 during the Second World War. 15 00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:46.640 He is author or editor of 16 books, 16 00:00:46.820 --> 00:00:49.040 including Labour's Utopias, 17 00:00:49.900 --> 00:00:52.700 Transforming Labour, Postmodern Socialism, 18 00:00:53.460 --> 00:00:54.700 Imagining the Antipodes, 19 00:00:55.040 --> 00:00:56.960 and Zygmunt Bauman, 20 00:00:57.760 --> 00:00:57.860 Diagnosis, 21 00:00:57.880 --> 00:01:00.100 and Dialectic of Modernity is his most recent book. 22 00:01:01.080 --> 00:01:03.920 He is at present working on a study of Australia 23 00:01:03.920 --> 00:01:07.700 across the 20th century called The Unhappy Country. 24 00:01:08.280 --> 00:01:11.900 However, he does hope to pursue 25 00:01:12.720 --> 00:01:15.080 counterintuitive research at Coriol. 26 00:01:16.120 --> 00:01:17.460 That's our Coriol. 27 00:01:17.680 --> 00:01:22.400 And there will undoubtedly be a postscript to the study 28 00:01:22.400 --> 00:01:23.640 as a result of that. 29 00:01:25.100 --> 00:01:27.860 Peter has a strong interest in the history of antiquity 30 00:01:27.860 --> 00:01:29.620 and ideas and cultural traffic. 31 00:01:30.160 --> 00:01:33.180 We do not simply import ideas, they move. 32 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:38.180 So we will now hear Peter speaking on his topic, 33 00:01:38.340 --> 00:01:39.380 Rewriting Australia, 34 00:01:40.540 --> 00:01:43.100 the way we talk about our fears and hopes. 35 00:01:43.380 --> 00:01:45.180 So he'll speak for roughly 50 minutes 36 00:01:45.180 --> 00:01:47.480 and there'll be some time for questions after that. 37 00:01:48.880 --> 00:01:49.860 Thank you. 38 00:01:50.580 --> 00:01:51.180 APPLAUSE 39 00:01:58.540 --> 00:01:59.120 ! 40 00:02:03.180 --> 00:02:06.660 It means a great deal to me to be here. 41 00:02:07.680 --> 00:02:08.460 Thank you. 42 00:02:11.920 --> 00:02:15.220 What I have to say will necessarily disappoint you. 43 00:02:17.380 --> 00:02:21.000 With these words, the great German sociologist, 44 00:02:21.740 --> 00:02:23.760 Max Weber, opened his lectures 45 00:02:23.760 --> 00:02:26.960 on politics and science as a vocation. 46 00:02:27.860 --> 00:02:29.740 In Munich in 1918. 47 00:02:32.140 --> 00:02:36.040 What I have to say will necessarily disappoint you. 48 00:02:36.820 --> 00:02:38.960 This on two grounds at least. 49 00:02:40.820 --> 00:02:44.020 The first is that I'm not going to tell you anything 50 00:02:44.020 --> 00:02:45.540 that you do not already know. 51 00:02:47.060 --> 00:02:49.820 Though I may be able to offer a different spin 52 00:02:49.820 --> 00:02:51.580 on common concerns. 53 00:02:55.180 --> 00:02:56.160 The second, 54 00:02:56.160 --> 00:02:59.480 even if two out of three aren't bad, 55 00:02:59.640 --> 00:03:03.440 I shall talk here only really about two things. 56 00:03:05.200 --> 00:03:08.040 Historically, I'll talk about writing Australia. 57 00:03:09.340 --> 00:03:12.420 And sociologically, I'll talk about the culture of fear. 58 00:03:14.300 --> 00:03:16.760 I have little to say on hope, 59 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:19.720 though I have not given up on it. 60 00:03:20.600 --> 00:03:22.600 And I suspect that you have not either. 61 00:03:24.600 --> 00:03:25.720 We live in hope. 62 00:03:25.780 --> 00:03:26.140 We live in hope. 63 00:03:26.160 --> 00:03:27.280 We know that we can do better. 64 00:03:28.860 --> 00:03:32.060 And this is a point to which I shall return moreover 65 00:03:32.060 --> 00:03:35.140 because the hopes and fears that we inhabit 66 00:03:36.200 --> 00:03:37.440 are divisive 67 00:03:37.440 --> 00:03:40.040 and mutually constitutive. 68 00:03:42.260 --> 00:03:43.800 Some people's hopes, 69 00:03:44.740 --> 00:03:47.140 like globalisation or multiculturalism, 70 00:03:47.160 --> 00:03:48.420 are other people's fears. 71 00:03:49.720 --> 00:03:51.800 And this should serve to remind us that 72 00:03:51.800 --> 00:03:54.160 we are necessarily, as a people, 73 00:03:54.360 --> 00:03:55.900 we are necessarily divided. 74 00:03:57.740 --> 00:03:59.740 This division runs right back, 75 00:04:00.680 --> 00:04:02.220 at least into the 19th century, 76 00:04:03.200 --> 00:04:06.400 even if it was often latent rather than manifest. 77 00:04:08.940 --> 00:04:13.520 Social division becomes more manifest after the 1960s, 78 00:04:14.160 --> 00:04:16.060 which raises the difficult question 79 00:04:17.080 --> 00:04:19.540 whether hope corresponds to abundance 80 00:04:20.440 --> 00:04:22.380 or at least to security. 81 00:04:24.300 --> 00:04:26.140 In any case, we need to look at hope. 82 00:04:26.160 --> 00:04:28.260 We need to learn to live with difference, 83 00:04:29.620 --> 00:04:31.520 with the fact that at any moment, 84 00:04:32.140 --> 00:04:34.040 half the population might disagree with us, 85 00:04:35.860 --> 00:04:38.840 and fear for what we might hold in hope. 86 00:04:40.080 --> 00:04:42.940 These are difficult and divisive times, 87 00:04:43.120 --> 00:04:46.680 and this condition is unlikely to leave us. 88 00:04:51.220 --> 00:04:52.180 Rewriting Australia. 89 00:04:54.240 --> 00:04:56.140 Why should we rewrite Australia? 90 00:04:56.140 --> 00:05:00.320 Is this not the kind of imperative 91 00:05:00.320 --> 00:05:03.120 that would be urged on us 92 00:05:03.120 --> 00:05:04.920 with compulsive enthusiasm 93 00:05:06.120 --> 00:05:09.200 by those intellectuals who David Landis describes 94 00:05:09.200 --> 00:05:11.160 as the semiotically aroused? 95 00:05:14.280 --> 00:05:17.620 Is not Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Manhattan 96 00:05:17.620 --> 00:05:20.420 always in a process of rewriting? 97 00:05:21.960 --> 00:05:24.220 Can there ever be a singular narrative 98 00:05:24.220 --> 00:05:26.120 which, even if it's not a singular narrative, 99 00:05:26.120 --> 00:05:27.380 even in its contingency, 100 00:05:28.720 --> 00:05:31.260 forecloses on the babel of other stories 101 00:05:31.260 --> 00:05:34.060 about place, origin, destiny? 102 00:05:36.020 --> 00:05:38.460 Do we not, as intellectuals, 103 00:05:38.460 --> 00:05:42.300 at the very least take ideas, words, too seriously? 104 00:05:44.900 --> 00:05:46.140 I don't think so. 105 00:05:47.120 --> 00:05:48.320 Ideas have consequences. 106 00:05:51.160 --> 00:05:54.200 I've not come here to rewrite Australia 107 00:05:54.200 --> 00:05:55.640 for the sake of the world. 108 00:05:55.640 --> 00:05:58.420 For it has, in any case, already been rewritten 109 00:05:59.560 --> 00:06:03.980 in the form of a renewed narrative of fear and insecurity 110 00:06:03.980 --> 00:06:07.640 which looks, for the moment, to be enduring. 111 00:06:09.940 --> 00:06:11.820 Instead, I take three steps. 112 00:06:13.780 --> 00:06:18.300 First, I indicate some of the main tropes or frames 113 00:06:18.300 --> 00:06:21.020 or images within which Australian history 114 00:06:21.020 --> 00:06:22.540 has been constructed. 115 00:06:25.640 --> 00:06:27.740 Second, I shift to the present, 116 00:06:28.720 --> 00:06:31.720 to the new liberal populism of the Howard government 117 00:06:31.720 --> 00:06:35.940 and its capture of the dominant narrative ground. 118 00:06:38.020 --> 00:06:41.660 The extraordinary hegemony of Howard's view of Australia 119 00:06:41.660 --> 00:06:44.100 combines its own novelties 120 00:06:44.100 --> 00:06:48.840 with a series of motifs that stretch back a century. 121 00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:54.980 Where Australians are egalitarian among themselves, 122 00:06:56.120 --> 00:06:58.260 and just possibly towards others, 123 00:06:59.320 --> 00:07:00.600 real or imaginary, 124 00:07:01.660 --> 00:07:03.380 where we might still be mates 125 00:07:03.380 --> 00:07:05.280 rather than citizens of the planet, 126 00:07:06.620 --> 00:07:09.080 where the best approach to the external environment 127 00:07:09.080 --> 00:07:10.280 is to keep it out. 128 00:07:12.320 --> 00:07:15.020 This is a culture of exclusion and fear. 129 00:07:17.580 --> 00:07:19.000 Third, then, and finally, 130 00:07:19.900 --> 00:07:22.720 I close with some remarks on populism and fear. 131 00:07:25.640 --> 00:07:29.420 So, to begin, how have we, or our historians, 132 00:07:30.580 --> 00:07:32.800 seen us, and how has this changed? 133 00:07:34.500 --> 00:07:37.540 I turn first to the main frames or tropes 134 00:07:37.540 --> 00:07:39.800 within which Australian history has been written 135 00:07:39.800 --> 00:07:41.400 across the 20th century. 136 00:07:43.640 --> 00:07:46.640 It seems to me that, to simplify, 137 00:07:47.700 --> 00:07:52.500 there are five dominant tropes of Australian history writing 138 00:07:52.500 --> 00:07:54.760 since, say, 1900. 139 00:07:57.580 --> 00:08:00.220 The first is the image of the social laboratory 140 00:08:00.220 --> 00:08:02.420 and the working men's paradise, 141 00:08:03.800 --> 00:08:06.860 which might date 1900 to 1920. 142 00:08:09.180 --> 00:08:12.760 The second and the most enduring image of Australian history 143 00:08:12.760 --> 00:08:16.580 is Labour-left nationalism and egalitarianism, 144 00:08:17.340 --> 00:08:20.340 which you might date from 1940 to 1970. 145 00:08:22.940 --> 00:08:25.100 The third seems to me, 146 00:08:25.640 --> 00:08:31.000 is the radical left-wing denial of Australian egalitarianism, 147 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:33.200 which opens around 1970. 148 00:08:36.780 --> 00:08:41.000 The fourth is that of left-wing social history 149 00:08:41.000 --> 00:08:44.740 and social sciences from the period around 1980. 150 00:08:47.400 --> 00:08:51.620 And the fifth involves the recognition 151 00:08:51.620 --> 00:08:54.640 of the centrality of racial exclusion. 152 00:08:55.640 --> 00:08:57.000 From about 1990 onwards. 153 00:08:59.660 --> 00:09:04.080 Now, these are predominantly left-wing tropes or frames 154 00:09:04.080 --> 00:09:05.800 or ways of thinking. 155 00:09:06.680 --> 00:09:09.140 And this reflects the fact that intellectual culture 156 00:09:09.140 --> 00:09:13.660 in Australia was, for the most of the 20th century, 157 00:09:13.760 --> 00:09:16.440 dominated by left or Labourist interpretation. 158 00:09:18.660 --> 00:09:24.760 You could add a sixth non-Labour trope, in parenthesis, 159 00:09:26.140 --> 00:09:28.220 for which the history of white Australia 160 00:09:28.220 --> 00:09:29.720 is one of military virtue. 161 00:09:33.020 --> 00:09:35.940 This might extend from the work of C.E.W. Bean 162 00:09:36.600 --> 00:09:41.640 through to the enthusiasm of the newspaper The Australian 163 00:09:42.540 --> 00:09:46.680 for the reiteration of military senses of national identity. 164 00:09:48.380 --> 00:09:49.840 I put that to one side. 165 00:09:51.500 --> 00:09:54.060 I want to suggest that there are five dominant tropes 166 00:09:54.060 --> 00:09:55.480 and these can be... 167 00:09:55.640 --> 00:09:56.580 detailed as follows. 168 00:09:59.180 --> 00:10:03.460 The first, the tropal frame of the antipodes 169 00:10:03.460 --> 00:10:06.100 of the social laboratory, 170 00:10:07.620 --> 00:10:09.960 is as clear a case of cultural traffic 171 00:10:09.960 --> 00:10:13.320 from south to north as you could imagine. 172 00:10:16.120 --> 00:10:17.880 The influence of this thinking 173 00:10:17.880 --> 00:10:20.280 and of its project in Australia 174 00:10:20.280 --> 00:10:22.120 is clear but partial. 175 00:10:24.340 --> 00:10:25.620 Across the antipodes, 176 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:27.320 across Australia and New Zealand, 177 00:10:28.140 --> 00:10:28.900 Aotearoa, 178 00:10:29.800 --> 00:10:31.360 Fabians or new liberals, 179 00:10:31.480 --> 00:10:34.960 such as William Pember Reeves and H.B. Higgins, 180 00:10:35.640 --> 00:10:37.560 sought openly to civilise capitalism, 181 00:10:38.500 --> 00:10:42.560 not least through the use of institutions such as arbitration, 182 00:10:43.800 --> 00:10:47.720 where the just wage was to be decided not by markets 183 00:10:47.720 --> 00:10:49.740 or by capitalist criteria, 184 00:10:50.720 --> 00:10:53.880 but by needs or Labour criteria. 185 00:10:54.860 --> 00:10:55.620 And this is a very important point. 186 00:10:56.280 --> 00:10:58.380 If the rate ofarla rate ofarla 187 00:11:09.700 --> 00:11:10.340 were 50 percent 50 percent 50 percent 50 percent 50 percent 50 percent 50 percent 188 00:11:10.340 --> 00:11:18.900 Depression, but it revives and peaks in the period of post-war reconstruction in its labourist form. 189 00:11:20.440 --> 00:11:26.380 It's given a final expanded spin by the Whitlam government between 1972 and 1975, 190 00:11:27.640 --> 00:11:36.260 when the ambit of citizenship is opened and the historically racist profile of the parliamentary 191 00:11:36.260 --> 00:11:39.520 wing of labour is further distanced. 192 00:11:42.060 --> 00:11:47.020 Probably it's fair to say that the power of the image of Australia as a social laboratory 193 00:11:47.020 --> 00:11:54.540 is overcome by its own success, or at least by the widely shared relative prosperity of 194 00:11:54.540 --> 00:11:55.420 the post-war boom. 195 00:11:57.980 --> 00:12:04.960 For through all this longer period, from 1900 to 1950 and after, Australian political economy 196 00:12:04.960 --> 00:12:06.140 remains based on 197 00:12:06.140 --> 00:12:14.980 primary export commodities, moderated by a degree of later import substitution in automobiles 198 00:12:14.980 --> 00:12:17.380 and hard consumer durables like white goods. 199 00:12:19.660 --> 00:12:26.380 Into the 1960s, that's to say, Australia becomes known, not least to itself, as the lucky country. 200 00:12:27.460 --> 00:12:31.860 This captured famously in the title of Donald Horne's 1964 book. 201 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.940 So here came the post-war consumerist version. 202 00:12:35.940 --> 00:12:38.360 The post-war consumerist version of D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo. 203 00:12:40.360 --> 00:12:48.180 Australians were hopeless, lazy, lethargic and extremely lucky, blessed by the terms of trade. 204 00:12:49.540 --> 00:12:56.420 Australia was a mindless, hedonistic utopia based on endless consumption of beer and ice cream. 205 00:13:00.520 --> 00:13:05.240 Now, like the lucky country, the earlier period titled by William Lane, 206 00:13:05.280 --> 00:13:05.920 The Working Man, 207 00:13:05.940 --> 00:13:11.080 The Working Man's Paradise, 1888, was in fact ironic in its intent. 208 00:13:13.680 --> 00:13:19.980 Horne wanted to insist that our natural good fortune would come our unluck. 209 00:13:21.500 --> 00:13:25.040 When the primary commodity export boom collapsed, as of course it did, 210 00:13:26.140 --> 00:13:31.940 William Lane, for his part, wanted to make the point that Australia was no paradise for workers at all. 211 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:35.480 In the 1890s, 212 00:13:35.480 --> 00:13:40.000 times were so tough that they were forced, against their own good nature, 213 00:13:40.720 --> 00:13:41.740 to form a Labor Party, 214 00:13:42.760 --> 00:13:44.140 to enter the state, 215 00:13:45.260 --> 00:13:48.920 while Lane fled, not to London, but to Paraguay, 216 00:13:49.520 --> 00:13:55.840 to set up a new utopia, which, significantly, he called New Australia, 217 00:13:57.360 --> 00:14:01.140 having decided that the old Australia already was beyond redemption, 218 00:14:02.620 --> 00:14:05.460 even before Federation, 100 years ago. 219 00:14:08.420 --> 00:14:13.660 William Lane's new Australia, in the bush of Paraguay, failed. 220 00:14:15.560 --> 00:14:22.520 The image, or vista, of the social engineering project is logically urban, 221 00:14:23.500 --> 00:14:30.680 though its implications in Australia, as say in the USA with the Tennessee Valley Association, 222 00:14:31.280 --> 00:14:34.980 were also often rural, or regional. 223 00:14:37.280 --> 00:14:42.460 It connected to the dreams and often bitter disappointments of soldier farm settlements, 224 00:14:43.080 --> 00:14:47.720 and later to the national developmental project of the Snowy Mountains scheme, 225 00:14:48.520 --> 00:14:53.040 where the post-war face of Labor was often from southern or eastern Europe. 226 00:14:55.100 --> 00:15:00.020 The image of the proletarian in historical writing, however, remained white. 227 00:15:01.420 --> 00:15:03.480 Descendants of the convicts, or bush rangers. 228 00:15:05.480 --> 00:15:09.800 Rather than a new Australia, in William Lane's utopia in Paraguay, 229 00:15:10.760 --> 00:15:15.620 we created migrants, people like my parents, new Australians. 230 00:15:18.980 --> 00:15:25.220 The second trope, or image, of Australian history writing into the post-war period 231 00:15:25.220 --> 00:15:29.680 was nationalist, left-wing, and laborist. 232 00:15:31.180 --> 00:15:35.460 It fed back into the bush legend, which had been invented by urbanists, 233 00:15:35.480 --> 00:15:36.980 and poets like Henry Lawson, 234 00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:42.620 who located the essence of Australia not in the land or landscape, 235 00:15:43.560 --> 00:15:50.180 but in the rural stoicism of the laborers who worked with nature and against it. 236 00:15:52.720 --> 00:15:58.220 The greatest expression of this mythology was Russell Ward's book, The Australian Legend, 1957. 237 00:16:00.940 --> 00:16:02.660 Ward was a smart man. 238 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:05.460 He knew that the idea of a country, a country of the past, was a very important one. 239 00:16:05.460 --> 00:16:09.280 The idea of the legend was ambivalent and ironic as well. 240 00:16:10.660 --> 00:16:16.620 But the popular version of the motif dropped out this complexity. 241 00:16:18.300 --> 00:16:25.720 The resulting myth indicated that the results of rural adversity in everyday life 242 00:16:25.720 --> 00:16:30.320 included an unusually cooperative ethos of mateship. 243 00:16:31.380 --> 00:16:35.340 Working against F.J. Turner's American Frontier thesis, 244 00:16:36.760 --> 00:16:42.040 Ward argued that Australian adversity bred a kind of local socialism. 245 00:16:43.580 --> 00:16:47.620 Other peoples on this account may have been cooperative, 246 00:16:47.860 --> 00:16:50.040 but in the outback there was no choice. 247 00:16:51.320 --> 00:16:52.960 Survival depended on cooperation. 248 00:16:54.960 --> 00:16:58.180 Class might matter here, but status meant little. 249 00:17:00.340 --> 00:17:04.040 Jack was better than his master because he was smarter, more adaptable, 250 00:17:04.140 --> 00:17:05.440 more practical. 251 00:17:05.460 --> 00:17:05.700 He was more pragmatic. 252 00:17:06.340 --> 00:17:08.400 Thorim a priest of number eight wire and he could fix anything. 253 00:17:09.620 --> 00:17:14.520 The aristocracy was absent elsewhere in the London Savoy or the Ritz. 254 00:17:15.360 --> 00:17:17.100 The bourgeoisie was elsewhere. 255 00:17:18.580 --> 00:17:21.260 Here, the rural proletariat ruled. 256 00:17:22.740 --> 00:17:24.240 And there is some degree of truth in this. 257 00:17:25.740 --> 00:17:32.280 One striking peculiarity of the path of development in the history of Australian settler capitalism 258 00:17:32.280 --> 00:17:35.320 concerns the absence of a virile, 259 00:17:35.460 --> 00:17:35.820 industrial, 260 00:17:36.960 --> 00:17:38.240 modernist bourgeoisie. 261 00:17:40.400 --> 00:17:45.520 Labor has taken on a strong sense of presence in Australian society until recently. 262 00:17:46.580 --> 00:17:50.220 And labor has been the natural constituency of the intellectuals. 263 00:17:50.380 --> 00:17:57.140 Up until recently you could count on one hand the number of historians who were prepared to associate with the right, 264 00:17:57.940 --> 00:18:05.280 which of course served to reinforce the orthodoxy and complacency of the left intelligentsia itself. 265 00:18:05.280 --> 00:18:11.260 To the point that they have now been supplanted not by other competing intellectuals 266 00:18:11.260 --> 00:18:13.460 but by the prime Ministers vision itself. 267 00:18:17.300 --> 00:18:20.160 Russell Ward's work was criticised for his romanticism. 268 00:18:20.260 --> 00:18:21.820 A charge he anticipated 269 00:18:21.820 --> 00:18:22.400 and he 270 00:18:22.400 --> 00:18:22.840 rejected. 271 00:18:24.040 --> 00:18:24.660 He 272 00:18:24.660 --> 00:18:24.740 had 273 00:18:24.740 --> 00:18:24.940 read 274 00:18:24.940 --> 00:18:25.480 Rousseau 275 00:18:26.280 --> 00:18:26.900 he 276 00:18:26.900 --> 00:18:27.800 was 277 00:18:27.800 --> 00:18:27.900 in 278 00:18:27.900 --> 00:18:28.340 conversation 279 00:18:28.340 --> 00:18:28.620 in 280 00:18:28.620 --> 00:18:28.980 Canberra 281 00:18:28.980 --> 00:18:29.140 with 282 00:18:29.140 --> 00:18:29.440 Bern 283 00:18:29.440 --> 00:18:29.620 ard 284 00:18:29.620 --> 00:18:29.800 Smith 285 00:18:29.800 --> 00:18:29.920 he 286 00:18:29.920 --> 00:18:30.100 had 287 00:18:30.100 --> 00:18:30.520 no 288 00:18:30.520 --> 00:18:30.780 desire 289 00:18:30.780 --> 00:18:31.060 to 290 00:18:31.060 --> 00:18:31.300 portray 291 00:18:31.300 --> 00:18:31.480 the 292 00:18:31.480 --> 00:18:31.840 bush 293 00:18:31.840 --> 00:18:32.120 workers 294 00:18:32.120 --> 00:18:32.240 workers 295 00:18:32.240 --> 00:18:33.340 as 296 00:18:33.340 --> 00:18:34.080 noble 297 00:18:34.080 --> 00:18:35.260 savages 298 00:18:35.260 --> 00:18:38.040 Viewed sociologically, there remains something interesting, 299 00:18:39.100 --> 00:18:40.820 nevertheless, in the idea that cooperation 300 00:18:40.820 --> 00:18:43.380 is environmentally triggered 301 00:18:43.380 --> 00:18:46.280 rather than biologically inherent. 302 00:18:48.580 --> 00:18:52.340 The more difficult aspect of the Australian legends argument 303 00:18:52.340 --> 00:18:55.920 concerns, rather, its generalisability 304 00:18:55.920 --> 00:18:58.040 across space and time. 305 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:02.340 Cooperation might be a local trait 306 00:19:02.340 --> 00:19:05.860 without becoming the core characteristic 307 00:19:05.860 --> 00:19:06.860 of national identity, 308 00:19:07.880 --> 00:19:09.640 if indeed there is such a thing. 309 00:19:10.840 --> 00:19:13.080 And while there may well be a case 310 00:19:13.080 --> 00:19:15.840 for such a claim in the 1890s, 311 00:19:16.500 --> 00:19:18.120 there's no reason to presume 312 00:19:18.120 --> 00:19:20.420 it will travel across decades 313 00:19:20.420 --> 00:19:23.360 of increasing complexity and mobility. 314 00:19:25.700 --> 00:19:28.100 In the city, alienation rules. 315 00:19:29.440 --> 00:19:30.480 Alienation and money. 316 00:19:32.340 --> 00:19:33.360 More generally, again, 317 00:19:33.460 --> 00:19:36.280 the idea that character might be connected to environment 318 00:19:36.280 --> 00:19:38.140 needs to be taken seriously, 319 00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:42.820 but detached from the older, romantic 320 00:19:42.820 --> 00:19:47.060 and conservative privileging of place as character, 321 00:19:48.200 --> 00:19:49.720 where character comes from the soil 322 00:19:49.720 --> 00:19:51.840 rather than from cultural traffic. 323 00:19:54.500 --> 00:19:55.800 Plainly place matters, 324 00:19:56.580 --> 00:20:00.880 which is what led, in the hands of a different non-Labour historian, 325 00:20:01.220 --> 00:20:02.180 to the idea, 326 00:20:02.340 --> 00:20:04.140 that Australian history was a result 327 00:20:04.140 --> 00:20:05.780 of the tyranny of distance. 328 00:20:07.520 --> 00:20:09.620 That sense of distance still matters, 329 00:20:10.420 --> 00:20:13.700 and it still helps fuel the desire for isolation 330 00:20:13.700 --> 00:20:16.700 from a world nastier and dirtier 331 00:20:16.700 --> 00:20:18.920 and more dangerous than ours. 332 00:20:21.360 --> 00:20:23.800 The Twin Towers are or were 333 00:20:23.800 --> 00:20:25.280 a long way from Australians, 334 00:20:26.280 --> 00:20:28.160 who seem to be pleased of this 335 00:20:28.160 --> 00:20:30.000 and their relative isolation 336 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:32.240 from other people's routine troubles. 337 00:20:34.060 --> 00:20:36.480 The effect of the Bali bombing in this regard 338 00:20:36.480 --> 00:20:39.520 was to apparently heighten Australian fears 339 00:20:39.520 --> 00:20:42.800 that Al-Qaeda's primary target was us 340 00:20:42.800 --> 00:20:44.380 and not the Americans. 341 00:20:46.080 --> 00:20:48.340 The Australian response, at least in public, 342 00:20:48.400 --> 00:20:49.940 has been to shoot the messengers, 343 00:20:50.560 --> 00:20:52.220 or at least to detain them. 344 00:20:53.780 --> 00:20:55.600 Perhaps Jeremy Bentham was right. 345 00:20:55.980 --> 00:20:59.340 The image of Australia as a prison persists. 346 00:21:00.340 --> 00:21:02.320 It does not capture all our experience, 347 00:21:02.340 --> 00:21:04.380 but it bites. 348 00:21:08.560 --> 00:21:10.440 Number three, my third trope 349 00:21:10.440 --> 00:21:11.740 in the writing of Australian history 350 00:21:11.740 --> 00:21:13.220 is posited in 1970 351 00:21:13.220 --> 00:21:16.660 in the exemplary work of Humphrey McQueen, 352 00:21:16.840 --> 00:21:18.800 who you can hear elsewhere in these proceedings. 353 00:21:19.200 --> 00:21:21.480 A famous book, of course, called The New Britannia. 354 00:21:23.720 --> 00:21:26.160 What happens here is that McQueen, in effect, 355 00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:30.240 reverses everything that the previous two images stand for. 356 00:21:30.640 --> 00:21:31.760 Ideas of progress, 357 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:32.320 success, 358 00:21:32.340 --> 00:21:33.120 civilising capitalism, 359 00:21:34.380 --> 00:21:35.900 the egalitarian myth of labour, 360 00:21:36.060 --> 00:21:36.760 mateship, 361 00:21:37.960 --> 00:21:39.720 the image of some kind of natural socialism 362 00:21:40.460 --> 00:21:43.080 generated in response to environment and so on. 363 00:21:43.740 --> 00:21:46.740 The new prospects of Australia for McQueen 364 00:21:46.740 --> 00:21:48.780 are hollow illusions. 365 00:21:50.440 --> 00:21:53.200 We are individualistic and self-seeking, 366 00:21:54.500 --> 00:21:57.040 petty bourgeois rather than proletarian, 367 00:21:57.760 --> 00:22:01.020 and so is both the labour movement and the Labour Party. 368 00:22:03.620 --> 00:22:05.140 In this kind of reading, 369 00:22:05.280 --> 00:22:08.100 we are framed by fears rather than hopes. 370 00:22:10.900 --> 00:22:12.280 McQueen's Marxist rejection 371 00:22:12.280 --> 00:22:15.420 of everything that labour stood for, however, 372 00:22:15.460 --> 00:22:17.520 was disastrous in its timing 373 00:22:18.320 --> 00:22:22.320 and expressive of a larger ultra-left refusal 374 00:22:22.320 --> 00:22:23.700 of the Labour Party 375 00:22:23.700 --> 00:22:25.200 at the one moment 376 00:22:25.200 --> 00:22:27.940 when it needed intellectual support and direction. 377 00:22:29.900 --> 00:22:31.280 For the Whitlam government, 378 00:22:31.500 --> 00:22:31.920 in 1972, 379 00:22:31.920 --> 00:22:32.300 in 1975, 380 00:22:32.700 --> 00:22:34.420 was the first and last opportunity 381 00:22:34.420 --> 00:22:36.380 to expand social democracy 382 00:22:37.340 --> 00:22:38.360 institutionally in Australia. 383 00:22:40.020 --> 00:22:42.400 I have to remind you, unfortunately, 384 00:22:42.540 --> 00:22:44.180 that an influential tandem work 385 00:22:44.180 --> 00:22:46.120 was published out of Adelaide around this period, 386 00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:47.960 Catley and McFarlane's 387 00:22:47.960 --> 00:22:49.400 From Tweedledum to Tweedledee, 388 00:22:50.280 --> 00:22:52.380 which argued, as its title implied, 389 00:22:52.540 --> 00:22:55.020 that the two major parties were practically identical 390 00:22:56.020 --> 00:22:58.000 at the very moment when the Whitlam government 391 00:22:58.000 --> 00:22:59.440 was about to establish the difference. 392 00:23:01.920 --> 00:23:04.760 The consequences of this ultra-left dismissal 393 00:23:04.760 --> 00:23:06.000 of labour were dramatic. 394 00:23:07.520 --> 00:23:10.340 By the time labour returned to power in 1983, 395 00:23:11.760 --> 00:23:13.540 prefiguring new labour in Britain, 396 00:23:14.360 --> 00:23:16.520 it had transformed its platform 397 00:23:16.520 --> 00:23:18.520 into economic liberalism 398 00:23:18.520 --> 00:23:21.660 with a welfarist gloss in social policy. 399 00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:25.820 The revolutionary Marxists of the 1970s 400 00:23:25.820 --> 00:23:28.280 then reappeared among its policy ranks 401 00:23:28.280 --> 00:23:30.560