It’s nearly half a century since Humphrey McQueen published A New Britannia, his groundbreaking, transformative study of the complex entanglements of Australian nationalism and leftism over the course of a century — and of the way in which historians had conveyed them.
The book has many parts, and is a joy to read, but it has a simple core argument. The Australian left, including the Australian radical left, had for decades been drawing on a myth: that Australia was at heart a socialist and democratic polity, formed in the epic struggles of the last part of the 19th century, and that any departure from that — at the time, the gradual entry of American capital to local markets — was a fall, if not a Fall, away from our ideal state.
For McQueen, such conception of what was simply a capitalist state with distinct local features within a world system, condemned Australian leftism to a permanent state of nostalgia and mourning, and thus rendered a conservative and restorative movement. It was the overvaluing of a mythical past that made effective present action more difficult.
About a decade ago, leftist nostalgia appeared to be the least of our problems. The forgetting of any sort of history at all was the main issue, as cultural and identity politics began to come to the centre of what actually existing leftism was. But now something else has happened, and I think it’s time to remind ourselves of McQueen’s major point.
What’s happened is that this cultural/identity politics has fused with an overarching idea of Australia that has some features of the “New Britannia” model in calling on a mythical Australia to damn the present one. This is the chorus of people telling anyone who will listen that they are ashamed of their country, that Australia is a uniquely evil, racist nation, abolish the national day, they don’t deserve it, and so on. This in turn becomes a target for the right, and their kitsch about “western civilisation”, and then we get into what one might call the “Blainey calculus”, in which we keep a balance sheet of Aussie pros and cons: stump-jump plough, +5 points; Tasmanian genocide, -4 points, etc.
There is much being done by the Australian state and Australian agents to feel, for a moment, shame and disgust with, to be sure. For many of us, 40 and over, Australia today represents a fall away from a period — from the 1940s into the 1990s — when the general lean of the country was in a progressive, liberal and humane direction, whatever point it might have been starting from. As I’ve noted before, this phenomenon, across the world, was a long liberal arc, stemming from the collective struggle against radical evil that World War II had become, and continued by an alliance of a rising working class with a liberal section of the middle class on their way to becoming the knowledge class.
[This grinning racism doesn’t reflect ‘Australia’]
Yes, we are not that country now. Even if many institutions are more liberal now than they were then, they are so because of that process, and keeping them that way involves us in ceaseless defence tactics. In many other ways, we are cutting the other way. If Manus or Nauru had been tried in the way they are — the meting out of slow death and psychic torture — 30, 40 years ago, my God. There would be a union-wide ban on everything to do with it, marches in the streets, uproar in the government party, the works. If Channel Nine had bought Melbourne’s Gatwick Private Hotel after the residents had been turfed, and used it for a TV show, the Builders Labourers Federation would have green banned it, and done a concrete pour through the open window of the executive producer’s Mercedes, and the bastard would have deserved it. But these things wouldn’t have been tried — their grotesquery would have ruled them out.
The wearing away of that progressivism has been an effect of world shift — the atomisation via technology and a revived neoliberalism. But in Australia it has connected with elements that were already here, as part of a settler capitalist heritage. Thus we are no longer turning a blind eye to the “hunting party” massacres of Indigenous Australians that went into the 1930s — but our indifference to the disastrous gap in Indigenous and non-Indigenous health cuts with that grain. More money would ameliorate a lot of these problems in a trice. When remote-area white people got sick we invented the Royal Flying Doctor Service — how expensive was a goddamn house call in a plane? When black people get renal failure we can’t state-fund mobile dialysis. That is a racism of process pure and simple.
But to rend one’s garments over this and a hundred other things, and construct them as authored acts of evil is, perversely, to play the same game as the right — to construct an imaginary Australia of the “fair go”, uninfected by the real world, that we have fallen away from. Who are we worse than? European nations authoring total genocides within living memory? Sweden, inventor of biological racism? The US, which executes teen criminals? The UK, whose ruling class destroyed its cities to destroy working class politics? New Zealand — ok, we’re worse than New Zealand.
This has now become a counterproductive gotcha game in which white progressives outbid themselves in damning the place in a way that not only exaggerates malign political processes, but gives an entirely distorted picture of how they fit into larger world trends. To point that out is then held to be special pleading.
Quite aside from giving an incorrect picture of the world, the “shame” position — held programmatically, beyond momentary sentiment — is not one that can be sustained for long. The ego, whether individual or collective, must, to survive, reassert its autonomy, and that creates a reactive narcissism. That is exactly what has been happening on the Australian right now, and it would eventually happen on the progressive side, albeit in a different way.
Shame is an invitation to withdraw from collective national life altogether, into a class/group narcissism. The energy that would flow into politics is then reflowed into art, private life, self-cultivation. I suspect we have already seen the beginnings of this, and it explains various disjunctive events: many thousands of people marching down from their million dollar homes in Northcote and Brunswick to a January 26 abolish Australia Day rally, and cheering someone calling to “burn Australia down”, before going off to a $30 breakfast and a film at the Nova, would be an example.
The failure of “New Britannia” in the 19th century led a group of radicals to decamp for Paraguay and create “New Australia”. That is where many progressives are today; their own private Paraguay, taking their disengagement from their own nation as both a necessary and sufficient political act; an expression of virtue.
It ain’t, and Australia ain’t a uniquely evil place either — how many people, I wonder, have tweeted such sentiments from bloody Berlin, Melbourne North? We work with the progressive currents of our history, against its particular failings, make small advances where we can, and seize what opportunities for big initiatives come along. In pursuing that in a clear-eyed and reflexive fashion, the last thing we can afford is the luxury and self-flattery of shame.
Guy you seem to have assumed that the shame is entirely introverted: Australians confessing shame to fellow Australians. Yet you probably have international friends and colleagues, as I do.
If you ever try to explain what on earth Australia is doing, it defies any simple account: a nation economically dependent on exports to Asia and multicultural immigration nevertheless acting like a belligerent xenophobe? A nation that can only export minerals and services, thus dependant on quality public education, yet maintaining the myth of a blue collar backbone? Constantly rattling sabres in the shadows of other nations yet hesitant to assert sovereignty to the benefit of its own citizens? Outraged by the atrocities of churches and banks yet nigh incapable of regulating their behaviour? Declaiming freedom of speech, yet concentrating its media into Tom Bowler sized kidney-stones of yellow journalism? A land of the morbidly obese enthralled by sport, yet tolerant of wife-beating footballers and cricket cheats?
I’d have to say that acknowledging shame isn’t a terrible way to begin a conversation about modern Australian culture, but I’d agree with you that it’s not a constructive place to end that conversation. You’ve now posted two consecutive articles saying as much without saying what you think the priorities should be, and why in that order.
Time to cough up and be more constructive maybe?
“A land of the morbidly obese enthralled by sport, yet tolerant of wife-beating footballers and cricket cheats?”
This right here. Just one of the many examples of a left demanding change but only if it doesn’t affect their simple interests. Just like punks calling out rapists while cheering along to songs about raping celebrities.
Great comment Ruv.
This article comes across like a slightly better argued Helen Razer piece. There’s a vein of underlying cynicism we’re accustomed to hearing from the Right, implying that all progressivism simply amounts to virtue signalling.
Spicelab wrote: This article comes across like a slightly better argued Helen Razer piece.
I hear ya. 🙂 A common line of argument from Helen goes something like ‘I don’t know that far-left socialism is sufficient to elevate the human condition; therefore I know anything that’s not far-left socialism must be utterly ineffective.’ (A secular version of: ‘I can’t know my faith to be true, therefore I know all other faiths to be false.’)
But Guy hasn’t argued that directly. Instead he’s leveled a veiled ad-hominem that he never fully owns or justifies: all progressives ever want to do is complain (presumably because they already know their ideas to be utterly ineffective?)
But then he refutes that by saying: well, doing what you can when you can is sufficient.
(And isn’t that social democracy anyway? The poster-child of many progressives?)
But ‘do what you can’ could also apply to anything else just as easily — Senators Christensen and Leyonhjelm could quote it as sincerely as (say) Senators Cameron and Hanson-Young.
I understand being sick of the blame and shame treadmill. But I also get why we’re seeing so much of it: our politicians are fractious, corporately homogenised and intellectually paralysed by the breathtaking rate of economic and social change; our mainstream media are a cynical and embattled plutocracy; our citizenry swamped in distracting information yet starved for constructive discourse. What kinds of conversations do we expect that’ll produce?
Good point. I’ve cancelled my ticket. Tell me, where should I go now?
Just stand up in public, using your real name, say what you think, clearly and as coherently as you can, without irony or satire or an outrage arms race or faux modesty or contrived self-deprecation or any info-game-playing,, preferably looking the person you disagree most with warmly in the eye, and preferably via a forum grounded in the material world, with all the practical, outcome-driven demands that come with them: a political party, a union, an NGO, a charity…a material world organisation of some kind.
In other words: just be politically engaged. Engage. Get engaged, in material politics. Talk less. Act more.
Superb article.
Nice work Jack. It can be the small acts that you have control over that define you. Me, I’m busy just trying not to become a bitter old bastard, and trying to help the people around me, especially the younger work colleagues who really do have something to be glum about.
Civility and respect is my personal form of civil disobedience. Can’t quite get around to using my real name here or elsewhere, still being employed is a small problem in that regard.
Hear Hear for civility and respect as a form of civil disobedience! Whenever I hear or see behaviours I deplore I remind myself to “be the change you wish to see in the world”…. its easier said than done!
Fair enough, Dogs’, I know I do get a bee in my bonnet about anonymity, possibly unrealistically. But…to be honest, when it comes to combatting extremism, and extreme inflammatory language, authorial materiality is about our most potent weapon.
Chrs.
‘If Channel Nine had bought Melbourne’s Gatwick Private Hotel after the residents had been turfed, and used it for a TV show, the Builders Labourers Federation would have green banned it, and done a concrete pour through the open window of the executive producer’s Mercedes, and the bastard would have deserved it.’
Whenever I inadvertently see a promo for this piece of televisual crappery Rundle’s wonderful image will serve to placate. Where’s Jack Mundey when the nation needs him…?
Beat me to it Zut. Jack Mundey is sorely missed.
Hell, I’d happily forgive Norm Gallagher his many foibles, for the sight of a quick concrete pour through the Merc’s window. 🙂
And remember the fantastic campaign run by Leigh Hubbard out of Trades Hall twenty years ago in defense of the East Timorese?
Mr Rundle while I agree with some of your sentiments, I think much of your article is an example of some of the most prime, indulgent rubbish available in Australian media today. It offers no way forward, just criticism of a group of people for expressing a perfectly valid position. I agree with Ruv Draba. Shame is a reasonable place to start a conversation although not a good place to end it. I could care less about your opinion of left leaning people in the past. Likewise I could care less about how Australia compares with other countries. I don’t live in those multiple theres. I live here, in Australia. For me it is about integrity and doing the right thing, even when no-one is watching. If you must write an opinion piece, I would prefer to see your view of what can be done to change the Australia trajectory of the Australia of today.
Good response to a conflicting piece.
another rather pointless angst riddled rant about nothing of value believed by no one of any insight or experience beyond cafe / uni/ metro culture.
A ”Progressive” left is non-existent; its a hoard of obnoxious arseholes who believe they are fighting the good fight for their fellow man; just as long as they don’t have to ”DO” anything; they do nothing that actually constitutes progress.
The modern left, is too busy ”raising awareness” to actually achieve anything of even temporary significance.
Look at the current state of trade unions, favour seeking, money grubbing do nothing labor preselection wannabees sucking the $$ from workers paypackets while exploiting their position for personal gain.
You should feel ashamed more about what you lack as a human rather than being an Australian, emigrate if your so offended, you are unable to change anything as you do nothing of value in the community.
The ”Progressive right are no better, if such a thing even exists.
GJB,
It looks to me that you have fallen for the LNP Party line from your comments.
Your comments on the sins of the Unions is straight out of the Big Business, IPA and LNP disinformation playbook.
Remember that the Industrial Relations laws have been so altered as to make union activity on behalf of workers almost impossible. The same applies to the members themselves by both their employer who is protected by the current laws and the LNG Govt. Some are prepared to go to jail in pursuing that end.
DO NOT believe the line from those who have the most to gain by demonizing the workers Unions. MOST Union Officials are honest, hardworking and dedicated to the support of their members. Yes there have been some bad or corrupt Union leaders. They have been VERY much in the minority.
Unfortunately Human Beings are fallible, and some will become corrupt in whatevever walk of life.
Actually I’m well aware of the LNP /BCA tactics to curtail any union pressure being applied to employers, they are the opposition it is expected they will be greedy self serving arseholes in any dispute. My issue is the lack of real representation for union members when there is a sniff of labor preselection about.
I would like the name of any union official who has gone to goal in defending workers rights and conditions this century?
I can tell you the names of a dozen who should have been goaled for misuse of union funds or exploiting their position for personal gain.
Good question but there are some who could be said to have kicked the odd goal.
Anything like hard time nah, not so much and it would be noted in a shit sheet, first by their enemies – envious colleagues as well as tuther side.