LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium 2004 Lecture

David Malouf

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But myths and stereotypes apart, our experience of space, our need to accept that there are areas within the worlds we inhabit that must remain forever beyond knowledge or control, has profoundly affected our view of Nature and our place in it. In ways, too, that are essentially un-European.

For us nature does not offer that comfortable reassurance of human centrality and power that in Europe comes, quite literally, with the territory. At worst hostile, at best indifferent, it does not offer us moral consolation or make itself available as a mirror of human existence: there are no sermons in these stones. What it does is raise questions about what necessary place we humans might have in a world that exists quite well on its own and which has in the end no need of us. Now there’s a challenge! To recognise and accept this and live, not too uneasily, with the sense of limitation it imposes. To accept too that the presence among us of native peoples with a very different view of man’s responsibility towards the earth — his right to use and change and shape it — tends to limit any belief we might have that our own Western way of dealing with things is the only way that is right and human.

And the experience of space shaped us in another way. It existed in the mind of even the most confined city-dweller as the one commodity in a poor country — which is what we were, both of us, till fifty years ago — that was always in large supply. Space as room. Room to breathe, room to move, and a belief that we could afford to be generous in making room for others. It didn’t always work, and we need to recall the lapses of this spirit of openness in us: in our case the hostility in the nineteenth century to the Chinese, and in the 1920s to Southern Europeans, our treatment of aliens, even if they were naturalised, in both wars, and of asylum-seekers now. But for most of our history a sense of physical space, and its reflection in us as psychological space, has made us open to possibility both in the society at large and in ourselves and encouraged us to be open as well to others.

We are such rich places now that it takes a small exercise of retrieval to recall that for most of our history it was struggle and heartbreak that shaped what we have of a national character and our notions of what a good and just society might look like.

It was hardship, isolation in the bush, grinding poverty in city slums, that created the hard-bitten stoicism of Australians, their scepticism towards every sort of utopian promise, their frugality, their dry humour, their tendency to cut down tall poppies and resent outsiders — overseas bankers, immigrants who might become a pool of cheap labour, theorists, ideologues, the bearers of modernism, and, as the other side of all this, that spirit of mutual regard and help we call mateship.

The idea of the battler dies hard in Australia, even among conservatives. There is no shame for us in needing a helping hand — in the bush you could not do without it, and it has always been accepted in Australia that if we are to get by and live decently it is the business of government to readjust, so far as it is possible, the inequalities that come from bad luck, lack of opportunity or the many other factors in a complex world that might bring a man down. There has never existed in Australia that fundamental distrust of government and resentment of government interference that was there in America from the beginning. Jefferson’s proposition, that the tree of liberty is watered with blood, like the American right to bear arms, has no place in our world. We see government as an arm of our will. We give governments money so that the poor, the sick, the old, the disabled, the unemployed, can live in a way that will not, as neighbours, shame us.

The one word that sums up what Australians demand of society, and of one another, is fairness, a good plain word that grounds its meaning in the contingencies of daily living. It is our version of liberty, equality, fraternity and includes everything that is intended by those grand abstractions and something more: the idea of natural justice, for instance. It’s about as far as most Australians would want to go in the enunciation of a principle.

We have no equivalent of your Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the attempt on the centenary of Federation, in 2001, to produce a new Preamble to our Constitution resulted in little more than pious generalisations. There is some agitation for a Bill of Rights, largely as a way of enshrining rights for indigenous people, but it shows small sign of being implemented. Perhaps it is our preference for precedent our principle that makes us cling hard to experience rather than written codes as our guide to choice.

The appeal to fairness, for example, — ‘it’s not fair!’ is one of the earliest formulations a small child discovers to express a recognition that life is a game that ought to have rules — immediately sets a question that might be difficult to argue in purely abstract terms, in a context where we are forced to recognise the subject of the question as another like ourselves; as if we stood where he stands and the subject was ourself. It is on these grounds that such questions were resolved — and most of them, by world standards, very early — as who in the new worlds we were creating should get the vote. All men, including those who did not own property? Catholics? Jews? All women? Aborigines? The real question was, what argument for unfairness would have to be mounted to make exclusion possible?