Nicolas Rothwell
On 21st June 2007, the Australian government’s minister for indigenous affairs, Mal Brough, acting on reports of widespread child abuse in remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, declared a “national emergency response” and tore up a generation’s worth of social policies. The new programme unveiled by Brough and the long-serving conservative prime minister, John Howard, adopted a draconian approach to Australia’s most far-flung Aboriginal people and struck hard at a particular idealising vision of the indigenous world, unleashing a tide of moral indignation.
Brough’s programme was sprung as a surprise, without consultation with the affected communities, and without any notice given to the Labour government of the Northern Territory, the large and mostly desert region home to 60,000 of Australia’s Aborigines. If the “intervention” was initially sold to the public as a set of measures undertaken in defence of children at risk of abuse, it soon became clear that Brough and the federal government were stalking much bigger game. They proposed a complete overhaul of the remote communities: investments in infrastructure, a prohibition on alcohol consumption, a ban on pornography, medical checks on all children, compulsory acquisition of township leases and the abolition of the bizarre welfare system that had become entrenched over decades. John Howard, who had struggled throughout his 11 years in office to come to terms with indigenous issues, at last had a cause to fight. And his opponents had a cause to resist—which they did with fervour, Aboriginal affairs being, as throughout the past 200 years of European settlement, a distorting glass in which mainstream society sends out signals to itself.
The heart of the Brough revolution lies in its coercive approach to welfare reform. Not even the most dewy-eyed admirers of indigenous spirituality would argue that life in the average remote community is on the upswing: there are no jobs to speak of, illness, poverty and illiteracy are widespread and domestic violence near pandemic. Why, after so many years of costly social programmes? There are two broad schools of thought. One places the weight on the devastating effects of invasion and colonial disruption, and concludes that Aboriginal political powers need to be strengthened; the other holds that passive welfare, or “sit-down money,” has rotted away the heart of the remote indigenous domain. The former notion was generally dominant in the initial years after 1975, when Northern Territory Aboriginal people received land rights, a measure that eventually gave them control over 41 per cent of the territory. The second paradigm is now in the ascendant: it begins from the observation that the core activities in remote communities are gambling and the consumption of alcohol and marijuana, not to mention the introduced curse of kava, a potent non-alcoholic drink consumed throughout the western Pacific—and that these appetites are financed by welfare payments. Hence the element in the Brough plan to “quarantine” such payments; half the payments will now be made in the form of vouchers, for food and essential goods in local stores. The other key reform involves the phasing out of “community development employment projects”—make-work schemes that were a key aspect of life in the remote communities until one day, a few weeks into the intervention, when Brough canned them, declaring that “real jobs” would be provided instead.
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David Ritter
Every general election represents a contest over the national narrative. In Australia, John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition government was defeated in an argument over ideas about the nation. But Kevin Rudd’s Labor party managed to move the struggle over national identity away from cultural concerns and reframe it in economic terms—specifically workers’ rights. Equality was married to fraternity in a single phrase that came to dominate the campaign: “Australian working families.” Facing a government that had presided over high growth and employment, Labor retook the political heights of Australian nationalism through an emphasis on rights at work.
Since the 1970s, Labor has depended for its electoral success on an alliance between traditional labour and newer progressive movements, including identity-based interest groups. The Whitlam (1972-75), Hawke (1983-91) and Keating (1991-96) governments all relied on this sometimes uneasy association. By the mid-1990s, Paul Keating’s government had became deeply unpopular, at least in part because it was seen as preoccupied with identity politics and elite cultural concerns in the face of economic hardship. At the 1996 election, the tensions within the Labor coalition were exploited by John Howard, who used the discontent caused by economic adversity to reach out to the more conservative elements of Labor’s base.
Howard’s antagonism to Keating’s cultural rhetoric meant that the essential continuity of economic policy between the two governments often went unnoticed. And as the fiscal reforms that had been introduced by Keating’s government began to bear fruit, any popular impetus to change direction in economic policy rapidly subsided. The success of the economy, combined with Howard’s aggressive cultural politics, created a dilemma for Labor. Because the party had dropped mention of Keating after its hammering in 1996, Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, were able to claim all the credit for the subsequent boom. On the other hand, any attempt by Labor to differentiate itself from the Liberals on cultural issues would simply play into the hands of Howard, who could continue to portray the opposition as captive to cosmopolitan elites.
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Tim Soutphommasane
Throughout 2007, Australian political commentators argued that the election was Labor’s to lose. And despite a last-minute charge from John Howard’s governing Liberal party, Labor swept into power with a landslide victory, claiming 53 per cent of the vote and a majority of more than 20 seats in the 150-seat parliament. The win ends 11 years of Liberal-conservative rule and heralds a new era in Australian politics. But it has also disrupted the conventional antipodean political wisdom.
A strong economy with low unemployment should have augured well for a fifth Howard term. Labor’s victory has much to do with prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd. A 50-year-old former diplomat and Queensland state government bureaucrat, Rudd seized the leadership from Kim Beazley—a two-time loser against Howard in 1998 and 2001—last December. Within just six months, Labor’s resurgence was such that Howard was warning his parliamentary caucus that it was facing not merely defeat but annihilation at the ballot box. Rudd’s emphasis on the struggles of “working families” resonated with an electorate concerned with the unfairness of the Howard government’s radical WorkChoices industrial relations reforms, and with rising interest rates.
In many ways, Rudd’s political leadership remains a work in progress. Having been in parliament for only nine years, he has not had the long period of grooming on the national stage common among Australian prime ministers—Howard was an MP for 33 years. Rudd won national prominence as Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman and through his dogged prosecution of the Australian Wheat Board scandal of 2005-06 (the board offered kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime in return for the Iraqi purchase of wheat exports). But upon assuming the Labor leadership, Rudd’s views were little known, apart from those expressed in a pair of essays for “The Monthly” magazine on the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (”the man I admire most in the history of the 20th century”) and on the battle between free market fundamentalism and social democracy (an unrestrained market is “blind and indifferent to its social consequences”).
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Stella Tillyard
Every Move You Make by David Malouf
(Chatto & Windus, £14.99)
An angel of death hovers over David Malouf’s new collection of short stories, Every Move You Make. Perhaps it is inevitable: Malouf has just turned 73, and the horizon where the known world joins the unknown is getting closer. “Death is the big event,” he said in a recent interview. “You’d be pretty foolish to ignore it.” In these beautiful stories, death sometimes arrives abruptly in suburban lives and draws the living towards it. But sometimes it seems not so much an end, or even a translation, as an encounter with the magical, bright mystery that complements and makes sense of life.
In “Mrs Porter and the Rock,” Dulcie Porter is fragmenting; dementia is breaking up her mind. Death, which she has managed to forget since her childhood, is filling up the spaces, leaving her son baffled and furious. Yet Mrs Porter takes her transformation lightly, chuckling as she goes. The unnamed woman in “Towards Midnight,” the best of the stories in this book, welcomes the angelic swimmer in the pool of her Tuscan villa, too. She feels his arrival in the silvery midnight as a vibration of wings, and sees “streamers of light at his shoulders” as he beats up and down. Although he is probably a migrant worker who has found his way in, she knows he is a herald of her own departure, the moment when she will, with relief, “pass the weight of her body… to some other agency.”
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Rachel Cooke
Things I Didn’t Know by Robert Hughes
(Harvill Secker, £25)
Robert Hughes’s memoir, an account of the years before he went to the US to be the art critic of Time, is a magisterial feat of inquiry, verve and style. In the age of the blog, everyone is a critic and all opinions are equally valid. Hughes disdains this noisy hum: “I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive.” This robust attitude has never seemed more necessary.
Perhaps this is why his opening chapter, in which he describes the car accident that nearly killed him in 1999, is so affecting. On a coastal road in Western Australia, Hughes’s car collided with another, containing three drug addicts, one of whom later tried to extort money from him. The result was a spectacular mashing of his body (when he saw his car later, he “couldn’t see how a cockroach could have survived that wreck”). But he faced down death—or, at any rate, a series of phantasms of “Daliesque vividness”—and his fractured bones were stuck back together. He was then prosecuted for dangerous driving, but the case was thrown out of court.
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Nicolas Rothwell
How harsh the lot of the celebrity expatriate, condemned to wander constantly between two worlds – shining with brilliant, well polished ease amid the codes of an adopted country while yearning, in some secret mental recess, for the familiar simplicities of home.
All the key figures among the mid-century “great generation” of Australian expatriates betray a certain tension in their relations with their country of origin. Barry Humphries has built a career on mockery of Australian ways, while Clive James has spent half a lifetime in dazzling, polylingual overcompensation for his antipodean background. Phillip Knightley, perhaps the most illustrious of Australia’s journalistic exports to Fleet Street, recently wrote a definitive, affectionate yet barbed millennial portrait of his own country (Australia: A Biography of a Nation). Ur-feminist Germaine Greer is, in some circles, the best known of this group of Australians abroad, and she has her own distinctive take on the homeland.
Her polemical arguments are brought together in Whitefella Jump Up, a thin essay which first appeared in Australia last year, and is now published in Britain as a book. Greer believes there is something gravely amiss with Australia, something that might begin to be set right by the simplest of remedies. Her view, widely shared by modern Australia’s professional classes, is that the country was founded upon an act of territorial expropriation whose consequences echo to the present day. But rather than merely lament this fact, she believes an active process of engagement and correction should be pursued. Australians should acknowledge that they are not, in any simple sense, “at home.” Indeed, they should look in the mirror, and say to themselves: “I live in an Aboriginal country.” Even the obvious, Greer suggests, “cannot be recognised as true until somebody says it.” There is a rhyme here with the controversy that has raged in Australia over the question of an apology to the Aboriginal population (the present conservative government is resolutely against this). Greer, though, doesn’t want just to apologise; she wishes to acknowledge Aboriginal priority and primogeniture.
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David Herman
Book: Human Accomplishment
Author: Charles Murray
Price: HarperCollins, ?16.35
There is something wrong with Charles Murray’s huge book on the history of human intellectual achievement. It is not its ambition, which is admirable, nor the writing, which is mostly clear and lucid. It is not even the book’s arguments, which although predictable are at times stimulating. But there is, running right through this book, a set of misconceptions about art and criticism which render the whole project almost completely worthless.
The book is actually two books in one. It starts out with a thoroughly readable history of human civilisation from 800BC to 1950 ending in an interesting evocation of three cities: 2nd-century Rome, medieval Hangzhou and Georgian London. It is not quite clear what these opening 50 pages have to do with the rest of the book, but it is marvellous storytelling, full of vivid detail.
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Kate Kellaway
English literature has been a mixed blessing for Australia. In his essay "Made in England," David Malouf, one of Australia’s most distinguished novelists, argues that from the early decades of the 19th century onwards, there was an imbalance between Australia and England. Australians found their country "thin and insubstantial" and English books were partly to blame. Australians were most likely to read literature set in England – with the belief that "what happened in books was the way life really was" and because there were "no real books that were Australian," Australia became an absence, a "not here."
When Peter Conrad (currently an English don at Christ Church, Oxford) left Tasmania in the 1950s, he was in flight from this literary emptiness. In his tea chest were English books that were his "entitlement to a place in an imaginary England, where I had actually been living ever since I learned to read." He goes further than Malouf – in mixed tribute and grumble – "It was English literature that alienated me from Australia."
If Conrad were growing up in Australia today, his trunk would be full of Australian novels – if he needed to pack at all. In the last 50 years, Australian literature has become a force to be reckoned with; now it is the motherland’s turn to feel insecure. Australian novelists are outwriting us, they tweak the Booker prize out of our hands (Peter Carey has won it twice, Thomas Keneally once, Tim Winton has been shortlisted twice and 2003’s winner, DBC Pierre, is Australian by birth). And there is a flotilla of younger Antipodean writers coming on stream: Kate Grenville (winner of the 2001 Orange prize) and Elliot Perlman (my own nominee for the future) among them. None of these show any lingering deference to England. If writing novels were a sport, the winning side would be Australian.
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Virginia Marsh
The governor-general is a woman. So too are the prime minister and her predecessor, the chief justice, attorney general, head of the largest company, a third of the cabinet, and until recently, the leader of the opposition and the mayor of the biggest town. Why have women in New Zealand led the western world in breaking through to the top?
There are many theories. Some talk about the kind of toughness required in a small “frontier” country, others say it is a coincidence and that women will not always predominate.
Those that believe historical factors are relevant point to the fact that New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote, back in 1893, at a time when pioneer women worked alongside their men in the early decades of European colonisation. Christine Fletcher, a former minister, believes in “inspirational grandmothers… who travelled to the other side of world, often as young women or girls, and proved their worth.” But, if the legacy of the pioneers is an important factor, why haven’t women in Australia-which has never had a woman prime minister, governor-general or leader of the opposition-fared better?
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Alexander Linklater
If, for much of its formative history, Australia feared becoming the runt continent of the world then Tasmania, the diminutive island at its southeastern corner, imagined itself as the Australian orphan-a footnote to an addendum. The island has long endured mockery, even from Irishmen. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift placed it somewhere in the vicinity of Lilliput, as if it bordered on unreality. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce riddled it as “tossmania”-a nasty winter ailment.
What gets up Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s crack, though, is not so much old world scorn as the mainland Australian intelligentsia and its Europhiliac notions of high art; and more particularly, its lickspittle reverence for American culture. “There’s been an ongoing debate in Australia about how we should write books like the Americans,” says Flanagan, while on a US booksigning tour, “as if we should be writing novels like Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, which is just a tedious rehash of Sinclair Lewis novels of the 1920s with some contemporary toning. Why should we want to write books like that?”
The culprits, says Flanagan, are merely Australian underdogs who need someone even more abject than themselves to lift a leg at-Tasmania being a favoured lamp-post. Flanagan’s offshore homeland gives him splendid leverage to vent spleen against a legacy of mainland snobs and their attitude to Tasmania: “For two centuries, the people of my island were defined by them and their leprous ilk-as stupid, rednecked, inbred, racist, two-headed convict bastards. For two centuries, we were a metaphor for everything Australians hated about themselves.”
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