The Meaning of Recognition (31 page)

John Button’s fond reminiscence of John Gorton, ‘A Knockabout Bloke’, continues the good work of adding nuance to Australia’s political past. After Paul Hasluck and
Diamond Jim McClelland, we are no longer surprised that there should be politicians who know how to write for the page as well as they shout from the stump or characterize the Right Honourable
Member for Woopwoop as a galah. But once again subsequent riches make it hard to imagine the initial poverty. Donald Horne, when he personally inaugurated the modern tradition of wide-ranging
political commentary with his book
The Lucky Country
in 1964, took it for granted that Australia’s politicians had always been a second-rate, semi-articulate bunch at best. There was
reason even at the time to think that he had misstated the case. Whatever Menzies’ prose style lacked, it wasn’t a literate background, and right back at the beginning of the federated
nation stood Deakin, one of the most learned public men of his time. But Horne was pretty much correct about the confinement of the political mind to politics itself, as if the practical business
of running for office and keeping it could have no general resonance in the surrounding culture. Written in a fruitful retirement, the example of McClelland’s newspaper column was enough to
show that things needn’t be that way, and now here we have Button bringing out Gorton’s complexity – and by extension the complexity of the interchange between the parties and the
factions – in a book review of Ian Hancock’s book on Gorton that adds a lot to the book. In calling such a book review by its right name, an essay, and in placing it where we can all
see it, this collection is doing exactly the kind of work that it should be doing. Whether it should be doing more is reduced to a side issue.

Apart from the politicians and activists, the political commentators are present and, where appropriate, incorrect. Mungo MacCallum celebrates Gorton too, with an enchantingly tasteless account
of his funeral. ‘For sensitive organisations such as the Mafia, or even the Labor Party, it might have seemed a bit uncouth.’ Just how couth MacCallum is might seem to be in question,
but in fact he operates in a tradition that stretches back to Alfred Kerr in Berlin in the 1890s. On a bad night in the theatre Kerr would review the audience. Showing a similar gift for facing the
wrong way at the illuminating moment, Mungo, louche bearer of a laurelled surname, brings out the all too human in the all too political. If only there were room, we could probably stand a bit more
of that approach. After four annual volumes Patrick Cooke has not yet turned up, yet I can think of at least a dozen of his
Bulletin
columns that went through a current political
contretemps like an angle grinder through balsa. I suppose there are better reasons for shutting out Bob Ellis. It could be said that his elephantine compendia of bits and pieces, far from
subverting the conventions of reasoned discourse, are intent on their final destruction. But all his books are in my shelves beside me as I write this, and I have followed his personal saga with
guilty fascination. The guilt comes from the way he has never been tempted to clean up his act, whereas the rest of us who started off with him at Sydney University in the late 1950s have been glad
enough to be gazetted as official Establishment figures. Somehow he saw a cold future on the way, and refused to join it. It was instructive, however, that when politicians in Canberra suffered
from aching conscience in the night, they would join him.

Craven might say that his time for the no-hopers is limited by the abundance of the distinguished. Ably representing the big-name commentators on the wing of what Pearson would like to call the
progressivist intellectual middle stratum – I wish he would call it something snappier, but I can’t think of a better name either – Robert Manne is here to spell out the blatant
iniquity of the Howard government’s policy towards asylum seekers. Those of us who were puzzled at the time that the iniquity was not quite blatant enough to inspire the Beazley opposition to
notably different policies might still be puzzled now, but there can be no doubt about the forcefulness with which Manne puts the case. The bloggers might pounce on his position for what they think
to be its reflexive assumptions, but they find it less easy to mock his style. Margo Kingston, not here this time, has always been a softer target in that regard. In the 2000 volume her essay
‘Hansonism Then and Now’ yielded a paragraph that sharply pointed up the dangers she runs by letting her notions of the self-evident rule her syntax. I marked its first two sentences
with an exclamation mark in the margin.

On first reading, the ‘It’ at the start of the second sentence seems to refer to the one-world government. On second reading, it seems more likely to be connected with Howard’s
downgrading of our commitment. But a second reading is a big thing for a writer to ask for, and it should never be asked for on grounds of sense alone. Making sense straight away should be the
first aim, and the more so the more your argument aspires to nuance. Paul Sheehan is probably our best example of how to do it properly. Before the Referendum, I thought the best-seller status of
his book
Among the Barbarians
was an important checking move in the rush to republicanism of the progressivist intellectual middle stratum. (What the hell are we going to call it, us on
the old social-democratic left who don’t want to be forcibly enlisted on the Darwinian right? And what are we going to call ourselves?) By bringing out in detail Australia’s rich debt
to the colonial past, Sheehan made the visions of those who repudiated it look crass. He did this so well that I thought he was against the republican programme himself, and I was quite surprised,
when I met him during the Sydney Olympics, to discover that he was for it. Discovering that, I realized on the spot that a republic might indeed be on the way, because when a line of thought
achieves the capacity to generate and contain criticism of its own weaknesses, it begins to be strong. In sharp contrast to Margo Kingston’s piece, Sheehan’s ‘The Parties are
Over’ in the 2000 volume remains an enduringly effective example of the constructively subversive essay, buttressing a position by taking account of its attendant difficulties. In the latest
volume Sheehan is talking about something other than politics: ‘Miracle at Bert’s’ deals with a magic water that sounds as if it might confer eternal life. I would be in the
market for a crate of it, if only to buy more time in which to read Sheehan. I don’t agree with him about the course that Australia’s future will necessarily take, but I wouldn’t
want an Australian future without writers like him in it. Luckily that prospect is no longer in view.

I have confined this notice to politics because it is the field in which I have most needed instruction, and the
Best Australian Essays
series has done a lot to provide it. When my
generation of expatriates went sailing to adventure, most of us believed that what we were leaving behind was a political backwater. In fact it was one of the most highly developed liberal
democracies on earth, a fitting framework for the cultural expansion that has since made it the envy of nations many times its size. Part of the cultural expansion has been the discursive writing
devoted to an explanation of how the liberal democracy developed in the first place. The landmark books made an obvious difference. Paul Kelly, for example, wrote a shelf of them, and although I
have never been able to agree with the general drift of his opinions, I would have to admit that a good part of the detail in my own contrary opinions I got from him. Behind the books, however,
lurks a less obvious determining factor: the proliferation of the essay. Up until World War II, the Australian essay was best exemplified by Walter Murdoch, whose belletrist treatment of a set
theme would have been no surprise to Sir Roger de Coverley. The war correspondents, with the omnivorously curious Alan Moorehead to the fore, made the breakthrough that adapted journalism to
complex subjects. Post-war, and in a multiplicity of genres, the essay made its exponential advance to the wealth of commentary we enjoy now, and enjoy all the more because the commentators are
often commentating on each other. I didn’t have to wait for Watson’s book on Keating before I realized that I had made a bad mistake in belittling Keating’s capacity to improve
his mind, if not his language. Essays from various hands convinced me that his sensitivity to culture went far beyond his covetous admiration for an ormolu clock or a teak table. I still think it a
pity – and a pity for his beloved country, not just for himself – that he got his vision of Australia’s modern history from people who got theirs from Manning Clarke. But I
won’t be guilty again of abetting a view of Keating that leaves out an essential nuance.

The word ‘nuance’ is worth repeating because it is not just an attribute of the essay, it is the essay’s reason for being: the essential characteristic that separates a mere
performance from a real contribution. In this volume, the essays on culture
tout court
are mostly as subtle and illuminating as we have come to expect, spoiled for choice as we now are. To
take one for the many, Helen Garner’s piece on journal-writing, called simply ‘
I
’, demonstrates all over again why her presence among the essayists so precisely echoes
the presence of the late Gwen Harwood among the poets: the responsible intellectual instrument of a feminist who has loved men, her scrupulous reasoning is always looking for the weak point in her
own position and accepting it as a further opportunity. Peter Porter’s memories of his reading when young in Queensland add up to a valuable example of what is becoming a characteristic
expatriate theme: the mental journey home into the old Australian school system that taught its pupils to parse a sentence. That prescriptive training was the real secret behind the Australian
expatriate wave of world conquest, and is the real secret behind Peter Conrad’s inclusion in this volume, even though he is only writing about Britney Spears, and dwells on the subject of the
pop diva’s all-American boobs without a single mention of Kylie’s all-Aussie behind. Craven wasn’t going to miss out on a piece as well written as that.

*

The same poser will probably emerge in the next volume, when the editor will have to choose between a home-grown piece about Charles Conder – there was a fine one, by
Angus Trumble, in the March issue of this magazine – and the stunning
tour de force
Barry Humphries turned in for the
TLS
. As a
prosateur
, it should hardly need
saying, Humphries is talented to the point of genius, but he would be less able to prove it if he had not once, long ago, been obliged to sit still at a scarred desk and prove that he knew how a
relative clause worked before he was given an early mark. Just as a living culture will attach itself only to a functional democratic structure, so the nuances will attach themselves only to a
grammatical framework. There can be no real freedom without its underlying discipline. These volumes – and what an elegantly hefty set they make, all lined up – are encouraging evidence
that the real freedom has somehow been preserved, despite the enthusiastically misdirected egalitarianism of the (wait for it) progressivist intellectual middle stratum. Strangely dedicated to
assaulting the very idea of elitism in a nation of which to be a citizen is already to be a member of an elite, it is a stratum whose members, as I have already grown sick of saying, need a more
portable name. In his book
L’Imparfait du présent
, Alain Finkielkraut thought of one. He called them the negligent vigilantes. I might pinch that for my next essay, if Noel
Pearson doesn’t pinch it first.

Australian Book Review
, May 2003

Postscript

Patriotically thrilled, I permitted myself to go overboard – not about the book, which really was full of good things, but in my tacit suggestion that there was a wealth
of other good things that had been left out. The truth about the Australian essay as a form of expression is that the general standard could go a lot higher yet and still be unremarkable. Apart
from a widely shared inability to detect a counterfeit phrase before it is committed to paper, the main fault is conformity, especially among non-conformists. There is a massed choir of lone voices
who draw inspiration from, instead of being put on the alert by, their ability to sing in unison. The result is a confident reliance on orthodoxy, as if it were a body of proven fact. Sadly, this
is more likely to happen on the Left than on the Right, because the Right can still be relied on to produce the greater number of dedicated cranks willing to spoil one another’s party,
whereas the Left regards its shared opinions as simply the normal configuration of rational thought. In newspaper think-pieces about grand politics, this normalization of ideological opinion is
carried to such a degree that no authorities need be referred to except phantoms. Writing in the weekend edition of the
Sydney Morning Herald
for 8–9 September 2001, the respected
political analyst Louise Williams wrote the following paragraph.

In the less symmetrical world of recalcitrant fact, Howard’s handling of the
Tampa
incident raised no serious questions ‘overseas’ except among people who shared the
views of Louise Williams. The only serious question raised anywhere was why Kim Beazley, at that time leading the Federal opposition, had no policies about illegal immigration that were notably
different from Howard’s. But here comes another paragraph, leading on from the phantom overseas scrutineers of serious questions to another set of ghosts, the ‘experts’ and
‘insiders’ who seem to have no precise location, but are evenly distributed throughout the universe, connected through time and space by a strangely intense telepathic concern with
Australian politics.