The ‘lucky country’s’ historic racism lingers, like a sun cancer, just below the skin

Published in The Independent, London, 14 December 2005

The race riots on Sydney’s beaches – Anglo-Australians (“Aussies”) versus Lebanese (“Lebs”) – have repercussions far beyond a drink fuelled punch-up on a sweltering summer week-end.

They have revealed that the “lucky country’s” historic racism lingers on, like a sun cancer just below the skin. Given the right circumstances all the advances of recent years – the abolition of the White Australia policy, the encouragement of a multi-cultural, multi-racial society with emphasis on tolerance and harmony – can apparently vanish overnight. There was time to act to avert trouble but no one had the will.

Two weekends ago, two surf lifesavers, icons in a leisure culture based on the beach, were assaulted by a group of Australians of Lebanese origin. The reasons for the assault are disputed but remarks by one side or the other about women appear to have played a part. Throughout last week the mobile telephone text network in Sydney ran hot as Anglo-Australians (they refer to themselves as “Aussies”) called for protest action. Australia’s top “shock jock”, Alan Jones of radio 2GB, took up the cause.

He said he “understood” the Aussies’ attitude and read the most inflammatory of the messages to his listeners. “Come to Cronulla [beach] this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and Wog bashing day.” He suggested to one caller: “We should encourage all the Pacific Island people to join in. “They don’t take any nonsense. They are proud to be here, all those Somoans and Fijians. They love being here and they say, ‘Uh huh. You step out of line and look out’.”

So on Sunday, thousands of people arrived at Cronulla and began fighting. The Aussies attacked anyone of Middle Eastern appearance, frequently shouting “terrorists”. The Lebanese retaliated. When the police tried to restore order, both sides attacked them in turn. Racist epithets were exchanged and later at a nearby beach an Australian flag was burned.

Race riots are not new to Australia. At the outbreak of the First World War mobs of Aussies in the major cities went looking for Germans to beat up. Unable to find groups of Germans worth attacking, they beat up Chinese instead. A popular slogan before the war had it “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. No more Chinamen in New South Wales”.

But in the late forties and fifties hundreds of thousands of war-shattered Europeans seeking a new and better life flooded to Australia. True, the first ones were chosen for their “Anglo” appearance (fair-hair and blue eyes were highly-favoured) but the net spread. Soon Christian Lebanese were making homes in Australia, then Turks. Egytians, North Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans, all adding their colour and culture to a new land.

In 2001, the one hundreth anniverary of the founding of Australia, I wrote: “Out of the unpromising contrast of jailers and their prisoners, augmented later by waves of migrants seeking a new life and then – in a make-over the speed of which surprised the world – new settlers from all over Asia, had grown a multi-cultural society which calls itself Australia.”

But while it is now clear that this is the picture any visitor to the heart of Sydney will see, out there in the suburbs are thousands of Aussies whose resentment of immigrants has been simmering away. This became apparent during the asylum seekers crisis.

Aussies and even recently arrived migrants from Europe supported the government’s hardline attitude to “boat people”, labelling them “queue-jumpers”. They contrasted their own often-lengthy and expensive efforts to get to Australia and backed the government’s harsh attitude to asylum seekers and its cruel detention centres.

The war on terror and its demonising of the Muslim community in Australia added to resentment, suspicion and hatred for Muslim migrants, especially from the Middle East. A high-profile rape case in which the victim was an Aussie and her assailants Lebanese Australians worsened matters As Alan Jones replied last week to one caller who had reported “derogatory remarks” made by Aussies to Middle Eastern people at Cronulla: “Let’s not get too carried away. We don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney.”

The Muslim community in Sydney is not entirely blameless. Pronouncements from various Muslim religious leaders, even making allowances for rhetorical exaggeration, have upset many Australians. And at the heart of the matter, especially in this case, are different cultural attitudes to women. Muslim men consider most Australian women immodest with lax sexual mores. Aussie men (and women) cannot understand how Muslim women allow their menfolk to dictate what they should wear and how little of their body they should be allowed to expose.

In a country where both climate and a sporting culture encourage the wearing of as little clothing as possible, these differences were bound to cause trouble sooner or later. But why did no one in authority see it coming? Why are there no laws in Australia to stop the provocative excesses of the media, especially the “shock jocks”?

Those Australians who are proud of their multi-cultural, “fair go” society – and I believe that they are still a big majority – now need to recognise that a nasty side to their fellow citizens is still there and fight to preserve the new Australia they thought they had already built

Phillip Knightley is the author of Australia: A Biography of a Nation (Vintage). He divides his time–and his loyalties– between Britain and Australia.

Published in The Daily Mail, 7 September 2005

It does not matter whether England or Australia triumphs in the fifth Test which begins at the Oval tomorrow–the significance of this clash of two cricketing titans has already been established. England is again a power in the game and Australia is the struggling underdog. I see this this an early sign that England and Australia are trading places, not just in sport but in other walks of life as well.

England has been regarded as a class-ridden, arrogant, unreliable, condescending nation, in mourning for its lost greatness. Its sporting efforts have invariably ended in disappointment. Australia was the young, forward-looking, egalitarian country and its many sporting triumphs a symbol of its confidence.

Suddenly it is the other way round. Australia has become a harsher, less friendly and open nation, uncertain of where it is heading or where its best interests lie. It has tied itself politically and militarily to the United States, but its economic future lies with China, Japan and South-East Asia. Its politicians vacilate and its people are divided.I England is now seen as sure of itself, a vibrant, dynamic place, on the cusp of all the exciting things that happen in the world.

The beginning of the change of places probably goes back to England’s triumph in the Rugby World Cup two years ago. The Wallabies had been thrashing England for years. Seeking enlightenment, a British sports writer asked the former Australian Rugby coach coach, Alan Jones, why Australia played exciting Rugby and England played such boring Rugby. Jones replied, “Because Australia is an exciting nation and England is a boring one.”

That view went right out the window when England won the Cup with some of the most exhilarating Rugby seen for years. And now the Wallabies have clocked up four straight test defeats, their worst run since 1972, while the nation’s Rugby League team and Australian Rules teams have been plagued with British football- style sex scandals.

But it is no accident that it is through cricket, that most political of all sports (it has never been just a game) that the two nations have been working out their rapidly changing relationship. As political commentator Mike Marqusee wrote: “The imperialists who had always presided at Lord’s, who once preached the gospel of cricket’s civilising mission, now grit their teeth in rage as ex-colonial countries transform cricket into an instrument of national assertion.”

One of these ex-colonial countries has, of course, been Australia. Her main enemy on the field has always been England—“The only cricketing nation that can stir up our old colonial inferiority complex,” says Australian novelist and cricket fan Malcolm Knox. “That is, their presence re-asserts our identity”.

Australian author Tom Keneally explains why. “Our only history was European history. Poetry cut out at Tennyson. If we spoke of literary figures, we spoke of Englishmen. Cricket was a great way out of Australian cultural ignominy for, while no Australian had written ‘Paradise Lost’, Don Bradman had made a hundred before lunch at Lord’s.”

Yet surely the past 16 years when Australia has held the Ashes and England’s attempts to regain them were marked by its team’s timidity and excuses for failure, put an end to Australia’s colonial inferiority complex?

Not a bit of it. It turned out that those fiendishly-clever Pommies had a fall-back position. “Even as we beat the English, however, we still served their purpose,” says Knox. “Their solace was, and is, that defeat in sport only confirms their broader human superiority. By confining themselves to playing games for fun, rather than for life and death, the English were allowing us to have our jollies. Being such gracious losers liberated them to to admire the tourist monkeys and indeed to fall in love with Warne, for he is everything an Englishman thinks an Aussie should be–their master at the game and their inferior in everything else in life.”

So there is a lot of Australian resentment to cope with before this swapping of roles is completed. Let’s consider its origins. An Australian backpacker I know was asked by the immigration officer at Heathrow what was the purpose of his visit. He said he was a tourist. For a few minutes the officer chatted with him in a friendly manner and elicited the information that the Australian was a keen amateur actor.

*You never know your luck in London,” the officer said cheerily. “Why don’t you go to a few auditions in the West End. You might get a part.” “Thanks for the tip,” the Australian said. “I will.” The officer immediately pounced: “I’m denying you entry to Britain on the grounds that you intend to seek employment here.”

“You tricked me,” the Australian said. The officer replied, “I’m just doing my job.” The Australian glared at him for a moment and then hit back in the most hurtful manner he could think of: “It may be your job—but it’s not cricket.”

There are more important English acts that Australians considered were “not cricket”. A director of the Bank of England recommended in the middle of the Great Depression that to force Australia to repay its London loans, Australians” “natural optimism, their belief that something would always turn up” had to be destroyed.

There was Britain’s plan in 1942 to abandon Australia to the Japanese if necessary so as to concentrate on the war against Germany. There was the decision to join EEC and end Commonwealth trade arrangements. And, most painful of all, the 1971 Immigration Act ended at a stroke the right Australians had enjoyed since the founding of their country in 1788, that of free entry into Britain and full equality there with their kith and kin.

A more general resentment was that the English preferred to believe all the old stereotypes about Australians instead of keeping an open mind.

In a match at Lord’s some years ago, Australian fast bowler Mervyn Hughes (he of the big handle-bar moustache), was fielding near the boundary. Between overs he signalled to the dressing room with two fingers raised.

In a mock Aussie accent, an Englishman in the crowd offered the caption, “Two Foster’s, mate.” The England fans roared: it was well-known that Australians were big beer boozers. Today it is England that has a binge-drinking problem while Australians have moved on from swill beer drinking to the civilised sipping of their fine wines. And, incidentally, the use of “mate: as a term of friendship and familiarity is now more prevalent in England than in Australia.

Then there’s politics. A few days after Tony Blair become Prime Minister in 1997, Martin Kettle, a leading British political commentator, received a call from an Australian friend of Blair’s offering advice on what made Blair tick. “You’ve got to realise that Blair’s not English at all,” he said. “He’s Australian.”

Kettle decided this Australian friend was onto something. “Blair is not in awe of the past. He is not intimidated by class. He is a meritocrat, a doer and a practical, problem-solving politician. He is not particular about where he gets his ideas from. He is simply happy making his own history. He is not inhibited by history or deference from changing what needs to be changed.” Even accents are swapping places; a letter in the Spectator reader suggested that Blair had stopped talking ’posh’ and had gone in for the sounds of the post-’Neighbours’ generation.

Knox points out that 2005 is England’s first fully Blair-era team. He says they are not gentlemen, they are not yob yuppies. They are a stock of likeable, classless professionals from the provinces. They seem strangely classless. There’s something Australian about them.

And–dare I say it as an Aussie–perhaps that explains their success..

Phillip Knightley is the author of Australia: A Biography of a Nation (Vintage). He divides his time–and his loyalties– between Britain and Australia.

Published in The Daily Mail, 24 November 2003

The Rugby World Cup has ended with sweet, sweet victory for England and mortification for Australia. For weeks the Aussies have been accusing the Poms of being “smug” and “arrogant”, of playing “boring and unimaginative” rugby, of being “miserable people living in a cold, old country”. Will England now justifiably rub the Australians’ faces in the mud? And will relations between the two countries never be the same again?

Of course not. Nothing will change. England has been gracious in victory. The team paid tribute to Australia’s gallant effort. English supporters joined Australians in singing “Waltzing Matilda in the stands after the match. Yes, the Australian press reported the result under the headline “Read This And Weep”– and many did. But they were often consoled by English fans who know only too well what it is like to be “gutted” by your team’s defeat.

And all over Australia, as the shock wore off, came the admission, sometimes grudging it is true, that England deserved victory. “Biggest event in the Pom’s history since 1066,” said one Sydneysider, getting the date wrong but not the sentiment.

The happy truth is that the ties of language, culture, blood, a shared history in peace and war, business and trade, are more important than any Rugby grudge match. More than a million English people live in Australia. Millions of Australians have relatives, no matter how distant, in the “Old Country”. Australians have been pouring into Britain since the early 1950s–Peter Finch, Shirley Abicair, Dick Bentley, Bill Kerr, Keith Michell, Leo McKern, Joan Sutherland, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Jack Brabham, Frank Ifield, Rolf Harris–the list is endless.

Some were undoubtedly escaping authoritarian Australia, some had been unsettled by the war, some had strong personal reasons. But the majority left because they were ambitious and wanted to make their mark in a wider world and Britain was the place to do it. I know because I was one of them.
Australians felt so at home here that they were able to slip into a new life so smoothly that after a while hardly anyone remembered that they were Australians. (Who would ever have said “the Australian, Robert Helpmann”?)

At the same time the British were heading the other way. On the high seas between the two countries a shipload of Australians bound for London would often pass a shipload of English heading for Australia, part of the flow of “£10 Poms” of the early postwar years. (The Australian government offered migration papers, temporary housing on arrival and a berth on a liner to Australia for only £10.)

Many who made the trip recall it as as one of the high points of their life, a leisurely journey by sea that induced a sense of both loss and rebirth, that emphasized the enormous physical distance between the two countries, but also the close emotional ties between the two peoples.

One of the £10 Poms, John Shaw of Canberra, recalls: “The journey was a last glimpse of the glories of a great maritime Empire slipping reluctantly into the twilight. I felt I was on my way to a newly-born country to hand over the best of the old.” And he did. Like thousands of others, he married an Australian girl and the Shaw family’s total contribution so far to the population of Australia is 15. Anglo-Australians, Aussie-Brits, Pommified-Ozs–call them what you will they are an essential part of modern Australia and a solid plank in the bridge between the two nations.

Although many nationalist Australians deplored the immaturity implied in the phrase “the Mother country”, it was literally true and although, like any family, there have been fallings-out, come the crunch the family members have always rallied around.

Hundreds of thousands of young Brits back-pack their way around Australia in their gap year or as part of their education. (Young Prince Harry is out there now.) They strike up friendships that last a lifetime and many of them marry Australians and return there to settle.

Even Australian republicans agree that links like these do not fade overnight. Since the arrival of cheap air travel, half the Anglo population of Australia has made the pilgrimage to Britain to see where they originally came from–and, of course, hoping to teach a new generation of Poms a thing or two about literature, art, music, theatre, film, TV, journalism, business and life in general.

Margaret Fink, the film producer (“My Brilliant Career”), a quintessential Australian, was here this summer to visit the family origins in the Lake District. Who took time off to drive her there: her old Aussie mate, Dr. Germaine Greer?

Where did they go for dinner in London one night? To the Royal Overseas League, that imposing, caught-in-a-time-warp club in St. James’s that celebrates the bonds of the old Commonwealth countries–and not just the white, English-speaking ones. I know, because I invited them there. Both would find the suggestion that a Rugby match would alter Anglo-Australia relations as ludicrous as it is insulting.

We have withstood tougher sporting challenges than than this. Take the infamous “Bodyline” Test series between England and Australia in the season of 1932/33. England’s captain, Douglas Jardine, and the English cricketing establishment were coldly determined to win. (Sound familiar?)

Jardine let loose on the Australian batsmen his two big, fast bowlers, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, both from Nottinghamshire, with orders to try to hit the Australians hard by bowling at the body rather than the wicket. It worked. The Australian sporting journalists complained that England had sunk to an all-time low. The English sporting journalists told Australia to stop its undignified snivelling and learn to be good losers. (Sound familiar?)

When Jardine complained to the former Australian captain, Victor Richardson, that one player had called him “a Pommy bastard”. Richardson summoned the Australian team and in front of Jardine asked: “All right, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?” Relations sank so low there was talk in the press of the whole tour being called off.

Yet how did it all end? In Sydney in the last Test of the “Bodyline” tour, Larwood, the man who had tormented Australia, a bowler and therefore not expected to make runs, scored 98. The Australian crowd rose to its feet as one and cheered him all the way back to the pavilion.

So why the fuss over a little needling this time around? My view is that we are all the victims of the marketing gurus from the Rugby Football Union. In a few short years they have transformed a cash-strapped minority game into one from which the RFU now stands to make some £60 million annually.

But at first it did not look as if the “dream final” between England and Australia was going to happen. Australia was a long-odds fourth among the final four. And if England thought the Australia media had it in for them, they should have looked a little more closely about what the Australian press was saying about their own team, the Wallabies. “Too slow, too old . . . totally lacking in imagination . . . with a coach who had never had an original idea in his life.”

Then when it became apparent that dream final was a real probability, the Australian sporting press, ably helped by their “abuse columnists” and “shock jocks”–the most virulent in the world–turned up the blast against England. The English media retaliated and instead of trying to dampen it down, the RFU marketing gurus realised they were on to a winner. Prices for black-market tickets soared and sponsorship interest intensified.

Have we therefore placed too much emphasis on the role that sport plays in the life of these two great nations? In Britain, certainly in the heyday of Empire, sport had both a character-building role and a political one. You only have to read Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada, known to every English schoolboy–and, incidentally, to many an Australian one–with its exhortation, “Play up, play up, and play the game”, to understand that playing a game in the right spirit was a metaphor for life, that there was more at stake than “a ribboned coat” or “the selfish hope of a season’s fame”, and that how you played and comported yourself while playing were even more important than winning.

So sport was seen as one way of teaching the Empire what British values embodied. Learn to play cricket and rugby and we will understand each other better. And it worked. British historian Peter Clarke says that sport has proved a more lasting legacy for Commonwealth unity than “anything Joe Chamberlain achieved”.

Let’s agree on the importance of sport and admit that the Rugby World Cup has been a wonderful occasion. In a year of war, terrorism, hunger and despair, it has brightened our lives. In Britain people who had never once watched a Rugby match got up before dawn to turn on their TV to see matches between countries many did not know even existed.

Yes, the cross of St George flies on those bastions of Australian nationalism–Bondi and Manly beaches and the English fans have taken over Sydney They draw a reluctant “Good on yers” from Australians. The English team is heading home for a ticker-tape welcome and a reception at 10 Downing Street. And the Australians are reminding themselves that sport’s like life–there’s always another chance.

Phillip Knightley is the author of Australia: A Biography of a Nation (Vintage). He divides his time–and his loyalties– between Britain and Australia.

Published in The Bulletin, November 2003

Black Kettle and Full Moon
Daily Life in a Vanished Australia
by Geoffrey Blainey
Penguin Viking
484pp

This is history at its sparkling best–interesting, enlightening, painstaking and objective. If you want to know about prime ministers and politicians, wars and class, economics and production, religion and sport, then look elsewhere. This is a book about people, ordinary Australians, and how they organised their daily life a long while ago.

It describes where they lived, how they shopped, what they ate and how they cooked it, what they drank and why. It tell us how they kept warm and cool, how they lit their houses, what they wore and where they bought it. It begins in the middle of the 19th century when there were less than half a million white Australians and ends with the First World War when there were five million.

It was an era of plenty–in the 1880’s Australia probably had the highest standard of living in the world. It was an era of optimism and contentment. “Sail up Sydney Harbour, ride over a Queensland plain, watch the gathering of an Adelaide harvest, or mingle with the orderly crowd which throngs to a Melbourne Cup race,” wrote the English-born novelist Marcus Clarke, “And deny, if you can, that there is here the making of a great nation.”

Yet Australians of today, although they may have read about about the broad historical and political trends of the period, do not know how their ancestors coped with life. Blainey himself became aware of how little even historians knew about the everyday when citizens who set up folk and regional museums asked him questions about candles, tobacco tins, matches, bottles, jars, jam-making, shoelaces and billy cans.

“In a spasmodic way I began to collect the evidence in this book long before I decided to write the book,” he says. But where did he find the information? Sometimes living Australians could remember something a great-grandparent had told them. Newspapers of the period proved a gold mine. A report of a fire which destroyed a shop would list all its contents. Shipping notes listed cargoes, catalogues for trade fairs showed what was on sale, paintings revealed much when you knew what you were seeking, someone from a family of butchers would remember what was traditionally used in sausages as colouring and preservative.

So the book is fascinating in its detail. Prepare to have a lot of your cherished beliefs and prejudices shattered. Garlic was in common use in Australia long before the first Italian and Greeks immigrants arrived. Most Australian men did not drink beer but spirits, especially rum.

The favourite drink of everyone was tea. It was taken black, sweet and piping hot and more was drunk in Australia that in all of Continental Europe, far more than even the teeming population of India could down.
It was drunk morning, noon and night, with meals and in between. The meals were, of course, meat, meat and more meat. Before refrigeration there was no export market for meat so Australians had to eat the lot themselves. They tucked in with vigour. To know the full taste of meat was to be an Australian.

And not just beef and mutton. Butchers sold pig’s trotters, tripe, kidneys, brains and tongues, dripping and lard, flaps of mutton, sausages and saveloys and corned beef. Until state governments stepped in and passed protection laws, Australians also ate a wide variety of native birds, from swans to emus.

Blainey writes: “Visitors were less surprised by the vote than by the meat. That every man could vote was interesting. That nearly every man and woman could eat meat at nearly every meal was astonishing.”

Some parts of everyday life were more efficient than they are today. In Sydney in the 1880s you could post a letter early in the morning and receive a reply before sunset. Blainey modestly admits that after three decades as an historian, some of his discoveries suprised even him. “I did not know that each locality in Australia at one period kept a different time on its clocks.” When it was noon in Sydney, it was already two minutes past noon in Newcastle.

There is a lot more along these lines: you could have ice in your summer drinks but the ice was not from the local ice-works (they came later). It was cut from winter ponds near Boston and packed in straw brought as cargo on sailing ships to Australian ports.

And did you know that Australia had a distinctive odour? “We are near Australia,” said sailors as the ship approached land at the end of one long voyage. “Can’t you smell the flowers?” It was worth reading this excellent book just for that line.

Buy Black Kettle and Full Moon — US | UK

Published in The Times, 11 October 2003

We can handle six weeks of World Cup rugby but can we survive six weeks of Australia? Here’s a country just a little over 100 years old, and with only 20 million people, that is a world leader in so many fields, and not afraid to boast about it. Six weeks of seeing and hearing confident, optimistic Australians enjoying their life in their Spring sunshine as our winter closes in may be too much even for Rugby fans.

What is it about Australia? It dominates just about every sport it chooses to play. It seems to have succeeded in creating a recession proof economy. The New York Times, no less, says three Australian novelists are “indisputably world class”. Its actors, musicians, singers and film-makers are known around the world. Its wine is sensational and many of its chefs original and brilliant. Its restaurants are stunning yet cheap. Its scenery is spectacular and its youthful citizens have made the pursuit of pleasure not only respectable but obligatory.

When Brian MacArthur, an associate editor of The Times, a quintessential Englishman, can begin a travel article on Australia by begging God to bring him back next time as an Aussie, we have to ask: “What’s the secret?” How could a country with such an unpromising beginning–its first citizens were criminals and their gaolers–turn out so well? Are there any lessons for Britain? There were indications early on that something different was going on Down Under. “Sail up Sydney Harbour, ride over a Queensland plain, watch the gathering of an Adelaide harvest, or mingle with the orderly crowd which throngs to a Melbourne Cup race,” wrote the English-born novelist Marcus Clarke 130 YEARS AGO, “And deny, if you can, that there is here the makings of a great nation.”

Clarke was writing at the time of the gold rushes when the population was only about half a million spread over six colonies governed from London. There was little national feeling. Not only did different states have different rail gauges but every town had its own time–when it was noon in Sydney it was five past noon in a town only a hundred or so miles away.

The standard of living then was arguably the highest in the world. Visitors from London were amazed at how well ordinary people ate. Large portions of meat three times a day was common. Settlers from Ireland and the industrial cities of Britain wrote home praising Australia and more and more immigrants poured in. In many ways they were some of the best of British–adventurous and hard-working and they helped make Australia the country it is today.

But they could so easily have turned it into a nation of Poms Down Under, suppressing their longings for England’s green and shaded lanes, miserable that “Home” was so far away. Australia could have become, as one Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, himself born in London, hoped “as much a part of England as Middlesex”. Instead something different happened, almost as if the land made the people.

The new arrivals in Australia soon tackled the age-old question–how should we order our affairs so as to get the best out of our brief life on this planet? Their reasoning was simple. Australia is a new country of limitless potential. If we want to create a new society, to leave behind the class divisions of the Old World, to avoid servility and poverty, then we should divide everything in a fair and reasonable manner. So “fair and reasonable” became the touchstone of the Australian way of life.

As a result, in a manner unprecedented anywhere in the world, the Australians passed law after law to improve the welfare of its citizens. Votes for women (18 years ahead of the United States, 16 years ahead of Britain, and 70 years ahead of Switzerland); the secret ballot, free and compulsory education for all children; old age an invalid pensions; safety at work; fixed working hours and minimum wages. A country often criticised for its lack of culture passed a law in 1908 providing a pension of £1 a week for distressed authors.

The journey was not always smooth. The debate over whether the country should become a republic revived some of the sectarian enmity between Irish Catholics (republicans) and Anglo-Australian loyalists that disfigured Australian life for so many years. And the recent harsh treatment of asylum seekers showed that the racist sentiments that everyone hoped had died when Australia abandoned the White Australia policy, still linger.

And yes, there are classes in Australia but they are not defined by what school you went to, what accent you have, or what work you do, but by how much you earn. And even this is not that important because on Bondi beach, free and open to all, there is no way of distinguishing the merchant banker earning $300,000 a year from the labourer earning $30,000–they are both there for a swim.

A few days after Tony Blair had become Prime Minister in 1997, an Australian rang a British political commentator offfering advice on what made Blair tick. “You’ve got to realise that Tony’s not British at all,” he said. “He’s Australian.” Ponmdering what this meant, the commentator eventually got it “Blair is not in awe of the past. He is not intimidated by class. He is a meritocrat, a doer and a practical, problem-solving politician. He is not particular about where he gets his ideas from. He is not inhibited by history or deference from changing what needs to be changed. If this makes him an Australian, then it sounds like a pretty good compliment.”

Collectivism, team spirit, one for all and all for one–call it what you will–defines Australians. Mark Taylor, the former Australian cricket captain puts it best. “One season I hadn’t played any worse throughout my career, yet I was still a winner. I was a loser personally, but the team was winning. What better lesson can you get for living than that? That although you’re not doing well yourself, if you can just hang in and play your part, you can still be a winner.”

Published in The Independent, 16 September 2000

Review of Australia: a biography of a nation by Jan Morris

This book is a grand encapsulation of all Australia, past and present. It evokes in me just the emotions Australia itself evokes. It astonishes me, it shocks me, it entertains me, it saddens me, it bewilders me, it makes me think there’s rather too much of it and it makes me proud – for who could not be proud for Australia, who has seen the Southern Cross flying floodlit at midnight on Sydney Harbour Bridge?

This book could only have been written by an Australian journalist who has spent much of his life abroad – an Australian, because no outsider could write about the country with the same wry affection, a journalist because the book is sharp, racy and irreverent, and an expatriate because there is nothing insular to it. Phillip Knightley was born for the job. This book is the crown of a distinguished career, and its sub-title is apt: it really is the intimate life-story of a community, from squalling birth to charismatic middle-age, by way of many ambivalences.

There is nowhere like Australia. Its place on the map, its history, its flora and fauna, its landscapes, all are peculiar to itself, and everyone’s first response must surely be astonishment. Knightley loves its astonishments, and is excellent at enumerating them (though he is wrong to declare Perth the most isolated of all big cities; Honolulu is much lonelier).

Did you know, for example, that Australia’s dingo fence, running clean across the country to keep the wild dogs checked, is two and half times as long as the Great Wall of China? Or that cattle drives sometimes took three years to get from one place to another? Or that crocodiles have two muscles to open their mouths, but 40 to close them? Or that cockatoos like the electric tingle they get from pecking microwave dishes? Or that Don Bradman had a lifetime test-match batting average of 99.44? Or that Australians eat (or used to eat) cold spaghetti sandwiches?

The scale and nature of everything is phenomenal, but all too often the affairs of Australia have been mean and petty, and Knightley pulls no punches. He spares us most of the all-too-familiar flogging-and-manacles stuff; in fact, he tells us that when in 1787 a couple of convicts on the First Fleet found their baggage had been lost en voyage, they sued the ship’s captain and got £15 damages. But he relentlessly exposes the later scams and squalors of Australian history.

It may be the Luckiest Country now, but it has got there the hard way. We read of vicious political feuds and conspiracies, of Irish shenanigans and English snobberies, of sordid poverty and endemic corruption. We learn that before the first world war a Dr John Gilruth planned to make the Northern Territory an independent British colony, with himself as Viceroy, and that in the 1950s the Federal Government had a contingency plan to send all Communist sympathisers into internment camps. Twice at least Australia has nearly come to civil war, and there is a theory that Harold Holt, the PM who vanished for ever in 1967, was whisked away on a submarine by his Chinese spy-masters.

It took Australia many years to get over the depression of the 1930s. There, as in Britain, scabs and strikes and means tests entered the national consciousness, and even now many of the Lucky People still live poorly enough, In some city districts the night-cart went its stinking round of outdoor lavatories until 1998 (“although I called very early in the morning”, says a sewage collector, “I still surprised some people on the throne… they were all very nice about it and apologised for keeping me waiting”). Spies, crooked policemen, greedy capitalists, bent politicians and drug rings all figure in this book and, squalidly, there runs through its pages a miserable leitmotif: Australia’s treatment of its Aborigines.

Knightley deals skilfully and generously with all the great issues his country has faced: two world wars, the weakening of the British link, relations with America and Asia, the transformation of society by multi-ethnic immigration. The greatest of Australian themes, though – the nation’s tragedy and we hope its triumph – has been the national attitude towards the indigenes. By now most of us know the awful story of their persecution – there were murderous punitive expeditions even in the 1920s – but Australians themselves may be taken aback to be reminded here, in unforgiving detail, of the thousands of half-caste children officially kidnapped in the pursuit of generic purity.

Thank God, the book can also record the noble stirring of national conscience that has occurred in our own time. It will necessarily be a slow process. White Australia has been a principle ingrained in the national psyche, and the just sorting-out of land rights demands Solomonic wisdom.

But enlightenment has undoubtedly set in. Knightley sees the great change beginning in 1975, when the Gough Whitlam the Prime Minister restored 2,000 square kilometres of land to the Gurundji tribespeople of the north – “to you and your children for ever”.

The Gurundji leader responded historically. “We are all right now”, he told the PM, and the nation. “We are all friendly. We are all mates”. Australia is a marvellous place, brave and big and funny and clever, but if there is one thing it has traditionally seemed to lack, it is kindness. I would far rather have a stroke in the streets of Manhattan than on Circular Quay in Sydney and, well into our own times, an Australian Aborigine was not much better off than a Jew in Nazi Germany.

It is a new Australia now, though, peopled by another generation, more ready to listen to the wise simplicity of a Gurundji. If in its maturity it can add public kindness to the brilliant roster of its national characteristics, that flag on Sydney Harbour Bridge will make the whole world proud indeed.

The scene is familiar to everyone who has watched a Hollywood Western. The lone cowboy has just made camp and is heating his beans and brewing his coffee when a cloud of dust on the horizon or the distance sound of hoofbeats indicates that someone is approaching. The cowboy douses his fire and immediately reaches for his gun.

Transpose that same scene to the Australian outback. It simply does not work. Any Aussie station hand seeing a horseman approaching would think, “Ah, someone to talk to,” and go out to greet him.

And there we have the essential difference between a nation like the United States, where a gun culture is deeply embedded in the national psyche, and Australia where it is not, and where–if we are careful–it never will be.

Of course guns have played a big part in Australian history. The repeating rifle enabled White Australia to defeat the Aboriginals in the 19th century. (An Aboriginal warrior could throw at least two spears in the time it took to reload a musket, but he stood no chance against the repeating rifle.) The old .303 army rifle and then the Owen sub-machine gun helped win two World Wars.

Yes, bushrangers went armed and criminals down the years have managed to get hold of guns. But they used them largely on each other, so we have had the odd gangland execution in Australia but no St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

Fortunately, we are not a nation in love with guns while America, because of its history, is. The Indian wars–more deadly and more prolonged than the frontier clashes in Australia–followed by the land grabs of the 18th and 19th centuries forced Americans to defend themselves not only against the original inhabitants but also against their neighbours.

This produced a society that is basically anti-social where to own and carry a gun is commonplace, where children are taught by parents how to use firearms and, as recent school massacres show, have no hesitation in using them against fellow pupils. It is easy to overlook how common guns are in the United States and how often they are fired.

I was a passenger in a car in Los Angeles recently when another motorist obscenely abused the woman who was driving me. I began to remonstrate with him but my woman associate hastily drove off. “Never, never get into an argument with a driver in Los Angeles,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how many people carry a hand gun in a holster fixed to the steering column. That guy could’ve shot you.”

In contrast, Australians are basically a social people and have developed a car culture rather than a gun one. (The great Australian mythic western, Mad Max, is more about cars than about guns.)

Guns in Australia have been traditionally farmers’ tools. You don’t find glass-fronted gun cabinets in Australian suburban houses. There are no gun fairs, pistol mail order catalogues, revolvers in bedside table drawers, “Saturday night specials” on sale in pubs, little chromed “ladies’ automatics” in purses at Tupperware parties. (A Washington-based journalists told me, “You’d be shocked at how many young women here carry a pistol in their purse.”)

This is not the way Australia wants to go. Australia does not need a gun culture. When a disturbed young man ran amok and killed (HOW MANY) people at Port Arthur in 1996 the Federal government had the courage to implement national gun control laws that limited access to firearms.

But limiting access is not enough. it is also necessary to avoid making guns appear glamorous. Yet surely the excitement of firing a gun is behind the government move to allow teenage cadets to be taught how to use a weapon.

The government says that teaching teenagers how to fire military weapons is a constructive move that will give them new skills, self-discipline and improved concentration. This is an unconving argument and one might ask how, in the end, will these weapon-trained teenage soldiers differ in their acquired gun mentality from the child soldiers of war ravaged African states?

A much more likely train of logic behind the new scheme goes like this: the Australian Defence Force needs more recruits. Cadets are a traditional source, but being a cadet has lost its appeal. Could this appeal be restored by promising cadets a chance to use a firearm?

If this is official thinking then a great opportunity has been lost. Why not ignore gun culture and attract cadets by offering them traditional Australian skills–riding, orienteering, outback survival skills.

It is also a dangerous development. Anything that even indirectly encourages a gun culture should be discouraged. Australians are a sociable people with little inclination to shoot each other. Let’s keep it that way.