Abstract
A First Place
by John Uhr
Australian writer David Malouf is famously 80 years old this year. He has been celebrated often, with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation treating him like the public intellectual we need to have. Most of these celebrations are about what we as a community value in Malouf the writer: author of many volumes of poetry, short stories, novels and even opera libretti. But what happens if we turn the pages around and wonder what Malouf values in us as members of the Australian community – and what Malouf as a public intellectual thinks of the public culture evolving in Australia and how that public culture relates to wider global interests?
A First Place is a collection of Malouf’s occasional pieces from 1984-2010. There are thirteen chapters, none of which is numbered so that readers open up a large book of 350 pages which includes some of Malouf’s quiet lengthy essays such as A Spirit of Play, his 1998 Boyer Lectures (pp124-228); and his Quarterly Essay entitled Made in England from 2003 (pp252-333). Each of these two pieces is over one hundred pages, allowing Malouf to give his readers here a rare opportunity to note and compare some of his major public commentaries. Some of the pieces appear to be published for the first time: such as the 1984 essay on ‘My Multicultural Life’; and ‘The One Day’ originally given as an Anzac Day address in Washington, DC in 2003. Malouf is a writer whose best works are probably his novels. In this book, he is a public writer speaking more about the public than about private or invented characters. Of these thirteen pieces, four were originally presented as speeches – an art-form taken seriously by Malouf who is a performer even when speaking in public about social events and cultural attitudes. The term ‘performer’ is a term of praise for a public intellectual who sees the power of spoken words to influence private thoughts of those hearing or later reading his speeches.
Malouf states that many of his poems and novels are ‘written out of inner necessity’ and are ‘entirely personal’; these essays are different in that they were written on invitation and were prepared as works ‘of analysis, and of open opinion and discourse’. The essays are, however, personal in that they reflect the author as ‘conscious and considered’. Part of Malouf’s conscious consideration is the use of ‘The Traveller’s Tale’ from 1992 as the opening essay, after which the dozen following essays appear in order of date of original presentation from 1984 through to 2010. The opening essay is about leaving home and about tales told by travellers as they ‘return to the homeland or hearth’. This essay acknowledges, in one wonderful sentence of some twenty lines, that leaving ‘a first place’ is now a commonplace for so many who never really return home but who become ‘settlers’ – as many have in Australia. In this opening essay, a second reference to ‘a first place’ describes how we as settlers ‘remake ourselves’ in new places. Malouf frames this collection with this invocation of settlement, inviting readers to listen to Malouf’s own story of voyage and resettlement and of Australia as a place for settlers.
Indigenous Australians are the original settlers. Malouf does not have an essay solely on indigenous themes, yet references to indigenous issues recur through the book. In ways largely unstated, Australian indigenous peoples are model settlers, adapting and reinventing their communities according to the blessings of locality and the grimness of white governmentality. Malouf notes nineteenth century poet Kendall’s lament about ‘the last of his tribe’; confronts us with his own account of dispossession in north Queensland; regrets Cook’s misguided notion of terra nullius; and observes black armed struggles against white settlers. There is no simple beginning or tidy end in Malouf’s repeated anxiety about indigenous peoples in Australia.
The book’s title comes from a university lecture from 1984 where Malouf reflects on his own first place: Brisbane. The theme is the remarkable natural environment (the lay of the land, the hills, the river) which is a defining feature of getting to know Australia or the many ‘Australias’ one might encounter. Malouf asks us to wonder ‘what habits of mind’ a city like Brisbane might encourage through its dispersed geography – and this question holds for Australia more generally as a continent of so many places, with so many geographies and so many local stories. Malouf notes that Australians have many ‘different histories’, with each state producing ‘different political forms’, so that ‘Australia is not one place’. Different topographies can generate a different ‘style of mind’ with the result that Malouf can ask us to let go, if only provisionally, of ‘notions of what is typically Australian’ so that we can begin to discover the diversity across Australia.
The essay on ‘My Multicultural Life’ advances this theme of diversity. Malouf examines ‘the myth’ of the assumed Australian uniformity or ‘general Australian type’. Uniformity emerges when ‘the power of the word’ is held by ‘a single group’ who can impose a story about singularity on top of the underlying reality of difference and diversity. Each citizen assembles their own cultural mix of ‘the many moralities the society offers’, and Malouf uses his own example as a case in point about the general rule that each citizen pieces together their own multicultural mixture to reflect their own judgment about their preferred Australian identity. The essay ‘As Happy as This’ brings to life the family history Malouf remembers from Brisbane, with many family examples of transitions from one cultural mode to another in the years between the two wars. The multicultural essay documents Malouf’s schooling, with precise attention to the codes of conduct implicit in the extensive set of common readings detailed here. The final two pages of this essay challenge the belief that Australia must discover its own national uniqueness in order to develop its own national culture; Malouf responds that every society mixes and matches elements from local and international culture by importing and often distorting ideas into local use, in ways that each generation of Australian settlers have rediscovered.
Readers need to think about why Malouf thinks that we can learn from what he knows about his own family history. He provides pages of detail about the assembly of European and Australian links, the middle eastern and Australian phases, the different religious inventions and transformations from Anglican, Catholic and Jewish faiths, and the endless alteration of Australian mores as the family grows in comfort in their new land. Readers can learn a lot about Malouf’s own family history as a model of multiculturalism well before the formal arrival of this high-sounding doctrine. But readers can also learn much about the wealth of diversity within the Australian past, with his family signalling an inventiveness which makes Australia more interesting as a network of relatives who make their own best judgment about what it means to become Australian.
The more public side of Malouf’s reflections begins in the period leading to the 1988 bicentenary, with the US review of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore. Malouf notes the original English aim of using Australia as a penitentiary and relishes Hughes’s account of how effectively so many former convicts emerged as citizens of rank. The aim of using Australia as ‘a Terror’ to punish criminals produced the horrors of Port Arthur but also the slow but steady release of ‘emancipists’. A lengthy article for The Age newspaper gets us into the bicentenary itself. The article is called ‘Putting Ourselves on the Map’ which might also be the alternative title for the book as a whole. Space matters to Malouf: Australia is a land where space is the key to what people experience, honour, remember, long for. Many commentators prefer time over space, complete with periods around ‘significant events’; Malouf prefers an invisible history of many small events scattered across a huge landscape of space. What we have gained and what we have lost and what we have learned from the land makes Australia, or at least white Australia. The result is a kind of ‘rootlessness in us’, related to the sense of isolation we have as a helpless nation in need of a great power to protect us.
On the 1999 constitutional debate over the republic, Malouf simply notes that the case for the change ‘had no strong feeling’ – the proposed change did not relate to the feelings of loyalty citizens do and should feel for one another but was instead ‘a monarchy in disguise’, all about loyalty to a head of state. One conclusion Malouf makes is ‘that theories, even the most beautiful and idealistic, are for angels of the imagination, not real men and women’. What about Anzac Day as one example of a sustainable public value? Malouf’s Washington lecture again opens with an eleven line sentence forcing his audience to compare Anzac Day to Australia Day, seen as an official day with little popular respect. Australia is very much a secular society says Malouf, noting that religion and the churches have little to do with the formalities of Anzac Day. But the military and even the serving government have little more to contribute to the event. The day is a civic event marked by civic as distinct from religious or military or even political values. Malouf notes that Australians, when they celebrate Anzac Day, tend to act ‘out of neighbourliness’, with our secular voluntary service becoming ‘the good works of a secular religion among us’.
Another issue for reinterpretation is federalism which appears in the final essay on ‘The States of the Nation’. This essay contrasts the economic theories about reforming governance with popular interest in locality as a value ignored or misunderstood in the theories of public management. Again geography is the prevailing theme, with locality as one important way of navigating the terrain. Malouf sees the Australian constitution framers as decent but pragmatic. A federation is not the only model of a nation; Australia need not succumb to ‘a tidy uniformity’ often favoured by theorists of public management.
We have yet to say anything about the two one-hundred page essays: ‘A Spirit of Play’ and ‘Made in England’. Both are unusual in that they resemble Malouf’s larger works. Both deserve very close scrutiny by readers who want to see Malouf spend more time clarifying his thoughts about Australia. The Boyer Lectures are more programmatic; the England essay is more selective. The Boyer Lectures are subtitled ‘the making of Australian consciousness’ and should provide a wealth of valuable reflection on Australianness. The six lectures are very detailed in their sources and references, making it difficult to unearth a pithy lesson. Yet one lesson might be that Australia does exercise ‘the demands of neighbourliness’ over the loyalties expected of ‘clan or sect or family’: ‘what we owe to the res publica or Commonwealth’ often trumps sectionalism, reflecting the ‘lightness and good humour’ favoured by citizens in Australia, regardless of their country of origin.
The Boyer Lectures include important discussions of the impact of the United States on Australian development. The England essay is subtitled ‘Australia’s British Inheritance’ which suggests a more focused analysis of the Britishness of Australian public culture: a core feature but not necessarily a defining feature. Each portion of each essay could provide readers with deeper insights into Malouf’s reflection about the nature of Australianess. Malouf makes it hard to dig into any single portion to locate a key insight about the writer’s insight – forcing readers to take the longer road of reading each portion in the context of the larger whole and each essay in the even larger context of the book as a whole. The ‘Englishness’ he identifies is an historical hope that one day Australia would measure up, and that mature Australians would always measure themselves as ‘English’ . Malouf is capturing an historical mood, knowing that readers might mistake his intentions and think that he too is a supporter of that mood. Only a close re-reading of his carefully crafted public speech will reveal what kind of Australian consciousness Malouf really supports. A First Place invites such a re-reading.
John Uhr, Director of the Centre for the Study of Australian Politics, ANU
23 June 2014