LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium 2004 Lecture

David Malouf

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This is the work of a particular kind of country. One created by settlers who have first to discover it on the globe and then in their consciousness: one, in our case, and in yours, that was already possessed and fully imagined and inhabited before we came to it, so that as well as the form we have conceived for it there exists an older and parallel one that is haunting, mysterious, and perhaps finally unknowable to us, but is also an assurance, if we needed one, that the work can be done.

Australians took a long time to recognise this as the real work of settlement. Till our country, in 1942 was in imminent danger of being taken from us. On February 24, 1942, 13000 of our men, two whole divisions, went into captivity at Singapore; four days later Darwin was bombed and over 300 killed; the Japanese were in East Timor. We saw then, and for the first time most of us, what it might be that we had taken custody of, and had to ask ourselves what we had made of it that was worth the preserving; whether in fact it was really ours. It was the moment, perhaps, when we learned to see at last how native peoples possessed it and what we might have to learn from their experience: how to possess the place inwardly, and so subtly, so much as part of our life-blood that even if the land was stolen from us we could not be dispossessed.

So then, beginnings.

Precisely where the venture we call Canada began must be almost impossible to determine; like deciding at what point all the sources and little tributary streams of a river come together to make a single course that can be identified and named.

One significant moment, no doubt, was when the two men who give their names to this lecture series, Lafontaine and Baldwin, bringing with them their people, their language groups and the experience they represented, made common cause to win responsible government.

Equally decisive was the reaction of the Lafontaine-Baldwin administration to the burning of Parliament in 1848.

The very year, 1848, offers a dozen examples across Europe of how violent challenge to authority might have been met. Your authorities chose to go against conventional wisdom and practice, and by a bold act of imagination and faith in the people lay down a new law. In this place violence will not be met with violence because authority here is to be founded on something other than force. Let’s see how that works, since we know already that the other does not. What was being established was the temper of a new world — one different not only from Europe but from also, as would soon be demonstrated, from the United States.

The beginning in our case is easier to establish. It has an hour and a day: the evening of January 26th 1788, when the male convicts of the First Fleet and their marine guards came ashore — the women would remain at Botany Bay for another ten days or so — the Union Jack was raised, and the King’s health drunk. The argument in our case is what it was exactly that was being founded: a penal colony under naval administration and within the control of the East India Company to take the overflow of English jails, or — as seems more likely considering the huge cost, at £65 per convict — a naval station to supply a new and faster route to India and to be a watchful presence in the South Pacific against the French.

Either way, the notion was to create a transported version of the motherland where men and women who had been delinquent in one hemisphere, and in their first life, would be remade as good citizens in another. An Enlightenment experiment in the reformation of criminals and the creation, on the dark side of the planet, of a new Britain where the darkness would be illuminated by British know-how, Protestant order and decency, and the law.

A risky venture, but one that worked — though only just. The conditions were harsher than expected, the climate and seedtimes were unpredictable, the natives did not practice agriculture and could not help. What was essential to the experiment was adaptability, resourcefulness, and since old rules, old habits and traditions were useless in the place, a devotion to the principle of ‘whatever works’ — all qualities that were highly developed in the practiced criminals who made up the majority of the new inhabitants, but were also qualities of the peculiar Anglo-Saxon ‘turn of mind’.

It was the particularities of the place itself that determined what must be done — and in response to them, and in interaction with the contingencies they threw up, this very particular society, which quite soon in no way resembled the one it was supposed to mirror ‘at home’.

This was a complex and diverse society, as all societies are, divided by tensions that were local and particular. Think of your own world here in the first half of the nineteenth century, out of which some kind of non-violent civil society had to emerge from the conflicting views of reformists like Baldwin and Lafontaine, the Chateau Clique, merchants, railway barons, loyalist Orange Lodges that were anti-American, anti-Catholic, anti-French.

The tensions in Australia were of their own kind. Between the native born and the immigrants; between free settlers and emancipists, that is, convicts who had completed their sentence and now wanted the right to serve on juries and stand for elected office; Catholics, largely Irish, and Protestants who were also divided between Anglicans and non-Conformists; and between big landowners, ‘squatters’, on the one hand, who saw themselves as an emergent aristocracy and smallholders and city workers on the other. Because even convicts had from the start been granted Crown land — fifty acres to a man on a completion of his sentence, thirty to his wife and to each child — land in Australia represented currency and the surest way to respectability and status.

As a child of Empire, my vision of Canada — Our Lady of the Snows, Kipling called it in one of his imperial odes — derived from the tales of the rugged outdoors I read in Boys Own Annuals and form an advertisement on Australian radio. Out of a roaring blizzard came a voice intoning: for coughs and colds, do as the Mounties do in the frozen wastes of the Canadian North. Take Buckley’s Canadiol Mixture.