LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium 2004 Lecture

David Malouf

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I have been speaking here — directly about Australia by reflection about Canada — of the kind of forces — responses and adaptations to the particularity of place, imaginative leaps into the realm of social possibility — that have produced the very complex and original, but stable and secure societies we now enjoy.

There are continuities here, since history is not ‘the past’ but all that experience that has got us where we are, and which determines what we have as a guide now to dealing with the present.

The ease with which Australia has, in just a few years, moved on from being a basically British society to one that is complexly multi-ethnic, is only one more example of that adaptability and openness to change, to transformation, that was applied in the early days of the colony. And the same is true for an even larger shift we have made; from a nation that lived, as we used to say, off the sheep’s back, to one whose economy now is based on services — tourism and the hospitality industries, education, IT —or on such high-tech products as fibre optics and advanced medical techniques. In 2000 we earned more from education than from wool. This is not just an economic shift. It has also, especially for Australian men, been a psychological one that asks them to redefine the way they see themselves and their maleness. All these adaptations and transformations have had to be made, as they always are, on the run.

Societies are improvisatory affairs, made from moment to moment and by many hands: they are of their very nature open and unfinished. The question is whether that formal thing we call a nation can be open and improvisatory in the same way. It’s a question, it seems to me, that Australia and Canada have been exploring for most of their lives as nations, and given our very different conditions and history, in something like the same way.

When, after two decades of rather acrimonious argument, the Australian colonies decided, in 1901, to federate, they had a long history of separate existence and had their own very different styles of life. They had been founded at different times and by groups with very different notions of what they meant to be; had their own armies and navies, their own trade agreements with Britain and with the Colonial Office and the Privy Council, their own police forces (we have never had a national police force like your Mounties), their own systems of education, and their rail-systems had different gauges. That Australia was a single land mass did not necessarily mane, at that point, that the continent had a manifest destiny as a single nation. The first rather cautious exploration of a single Australian identity — rather appropriately we might think — came with the unified cricket and Rugby teams we sent to Britain in the 1870s. In the first draft of the Federation places were reserved for New Zealand and Fiji.

Federation was a choice — the people’s choice in a referendum — but a reluctant one. As the world’s fourth federation we looked to the US and to Canada as models and took something from each. Unlike Canada, we named the limited powers that would go to the Commonwealth — trade and external affairs — and the states retained the rest. The states, more than a hundred years later, remain separate and strong; wary of one another and even more wary of Canberra. Especially of Canberra’s tendency to argue, in its own interest, that our present three-tiered form of government is wasteful and inefficient, the push by Canberra policy-makers for a formalising Bill of Rights, and the signing by Canberra of UN declarations that impose laws on us that have not been put to the people’s representatives or to its courts.

It takes a particular temper in a people, a particular feeling for order, and flexibility or looseness, to make a successful federation; a willingness to forego the centering of authority in a single place to a recognition that there may, without the whole enterprise flying apart, be room for several centres in dialogue but also in argument with one another.

To be comfortable with federation demands a certain state of mind, and more importantly, encourages it. We learn to enjoy diversity and seek it out, to find interest in difference, to relish the curiosity it rouses in us, the surprise it brings, the originality it tempts us to in ourselves, the new forms we learn to create through mixing — or ‘fusion’ as Australians call it in the case of food. We were too mixed from the beginning to be tempted by notions of purity, though Australians did for a time, in the great heyday of nationalism in the late 19th century, have their own dream of a manifest destiny. It was that if Australian could be kept white, and remain predominantly Protestant, it might become the survival ground, when Britain itself failed, of British virtues and the British way of life. What is surprising now is not how strong the dream was, or how long it lasted, but how quickly it has faded and been forgotten.

Australia is not much held together by national sentiment. We still think of ourselves, except in sport or war, as Queenslanders, South Australians, Sydneysiders. We seldom fly the flag or sing the anthem, which was only decided on, by vote, in the 1980s, and most of us, after the first two lines, do not know the words. Those who do tend to scoff at them. It’s the kind of nation most Australians feel comfortable in. Regionally diverse, highly decentralised, though Canberra in recent decades has enormously increased its power in national affairs (the Federal Government has the exclusive right, for example, to raise taxes), it is loose, casual, off-handedly humorous towards the things that usually constitute nationhood, but is also in the event remarkably cohesive and has survived without disruption for more than a century. Australians are happy with this fragmentary and provisional embodiment of what we might be, a nation ‘in the making’. We get our clearest glimpses of it not on official occasions but when we find ourselves almost by accident in situations where we look about, see who is present, and say, ‘Ah, so that’s who we are!’