TIME EUROPE
September 25, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 13
The Real Australia
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We are absolutely not a threat to anyone. But this does us no good in the media. Practically nothing in Australia is considered worth reporting. In all the 30 years I have lived in New York City, I doubt that I have seen as many front-page stories about my country in the New York Times as you'd get about Israel in a month. Why would Americans want to know about us? We don't rock their boat or export much that they or the rest of the world are interested in, except for our admirable wines, a steady supply of sports figures and a few actors like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
Historically, Australia felt little resentment about its colonial control by Britain and its sovereign. Its population was heavy with Irishmen and Irishwomen, but the resentments their ancestors had brought with them soon mellowed into ineffectuality in the antipodean sun, not much more than folk costume, once the chains of convictry were abolished. As a colony, we were content peaceably to fulfill our natural destiny, which was to supply Britain with cheap wheat and wool and (when required) with cannon fodder for wars against the Boer or the Hun.
In these, we had little or no perceptible stake of our own. Britain, with grim enthusiasm, condemned us to assist in the creation of dead colonial heroes. In World War I, Australia lost 59,258 young men out of a total of 330,000 sent abroad. Both as a proportion of troops killed or missing and as a proportion of national population, this was the highest figure for any Allied state. It left us in the 1920s as a psychically devastated nation of widows, spinsters and orphans. This enormous death toll was rationalized as a cleansing, an erasure of the inherited stain of convictry. Winston Churchill, who sent our grandfathers to die on the implacable slopes of Gallipoli, was by no means the only Englishman to think they came from "tainted" stock.
Australia still had a largely colonial mentality when I was born, in 1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be the head of state of Australia. That role is reserved for the King or Queen of England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected foreigner: the office of the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsor family. This appreciably narrows the field of talent.
According to the Australian constitution — a document written for us by the English at the turn of the century — it is ultimately the English monarch who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the Governor-General. This official may be Australian or may not. He may, on behalf of the Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out the government and call for new elections. Or he may not. In practice he almost never does. The last and only time he did was in 1975, when the G-G, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam. This caused shock and resentment. Millions of Australians felt that Whitlam, their hero, the great reformer of government policy in the domains of race, immigration, foreign policy and the arts, had been stolen from them. There are still plenty of people around who regard this as not far from a coup d'état.
The firing of Whitlam made many Australians sit up with a jerk. It had never occurred to them before that the Queen had the raw constitutional power to do such a thing. It cranked up the long-dormant impulse toward republicanism. Until the 1970s this had been an issue only for intellectuals and a few left-wing workers whose vehemence earned them an undeserved reputation as ratbags (obsessed eccentrics). The problem was democratizing the republican issue while detaching it from the ownership of the Australian left. And it did slowly broaden, though its main political instrument, the Australian Republican Movement (a.r.m.), didn't come into existence until the 1980s.
The growth of republican feeling in Australia coincided with, and was strongly encouraged by, the prime ministership (1991-96) of Paul Keating, a brilliant and abrasive Laborite much feared for his insults ("pansies" and "unrepresentative swill" were among the milder epithets he launched at his foes in parliamentary debate) and greatly misunderstood for his tastes: given his passions for antique French clocks and Georgian furniture, Keating was the most cultivated Australian ever to serve as Prime Minister. The movement's chief unelected backer was a formidable young merchant banker named Malcolm Turnbull. (Full disclosure obliges me to say that Turnbull is married to my niece Lucy, herself the deputy lord mayor of Sydney.) Despite Keating's defeat in the 1996 elections, Turnbull and his fellow republicans were able to bring the republic issue to a nationwide vote in 1999.
The result was a triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters (55% to 45%) decided that to have an Australian President appointed by a democratically elected government was élitist and unsafe, whereas to have an immensely rich hereditary monarch as their head of state was somehow democratic and good. To understand how this weird inversion could occur, one must be aware that Australians are highly skeptical about the character of their "pollies," though they have little reason to be: the level of serious political graft in Australia is extremely low.
In the end the monarchists won the referendum, not because Australians were devoted to the Queen and her successors but because feuding republicans couldn't agree on which model of republic to uphold. Should the new-style head of state, an Australian President, be appointed by Parliament? Or elected in a national campaign, in the American manner? The a.r.m. wanted the former, but Australians hated the idea of an American-style republic-or — American-style anything — in their public life. This split the republican vote, to the boundless relief of the monarchists, who could never have carried the issue on their own. (Pollsters thought that about 70% of Australians were for a republic of some kind.)
Soon after the referendum, Elizabeth II and her cold fish of a consort, Prince Phillip, toured Australia. The crowds were small and more curious than enthusiastic; the media, polite but indifferent. The romantic, near mystical Queen worship that had surrounded her tour in 1954 was gone forever. Being smarter than the monarchists, Elizabeth II could easily read the signs. She openly acknowledged (and was scrupulously careful not to attack) the possibility of a stable republic in Australia. The current Prime Minister, John Howard, is an obdurate monarchist. But the next in line as head of Howard's conservative Liberal Party, Peter Costello, is a republican. The Australian Labor Party is republican through and through. It is only a matter of time before the less reactionary and nostalgic Liberal politicians can come out of the closet, and then Australian monarchy will be finished.
It is hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our national antiélitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the most frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens, wasn't much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not only of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity but also of shared folk heroes. You can count them on less than two hands. Two are alive — the great cricketer Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom still live, are invested with a collective heroism. The other heroes are dead. They include a racehorse, Phar Lap; and a criminal, the bushranger, Irish nationalist and protorepublican Ned Kelly, hanged for theft and murder in Melbourne in 1880.
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo- Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian or black descent could settle in Australia, was abandoned in the 1960s, never to be revived. Whole suburbs, like Cabramatta in western Sydney, have become Southeast Asian enclaves. Though Australia admits only some 85,000 legal immigrants a year, a minuscule fraction of its population, the Asian component, is very visible and it excites xenophobia. The role of the Queen as head of state has a calming effect, suggesting that the "old" Anglo-Australia is still notionally within reach.
Compared with their older selves, Australians — especially the younger ones — are a tolerant people. Few of the extreme emotions set off in the U.S. by the idea of multiculturalism have been awakened by its Australian version. We are, in fact, one of the world's most successful multicultural democracies, and this is an ethical triumph of no small consequence. Australians on the whole realize that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of one's own. They realize, quite naturally and instinctively, that the desire to "give people a fair go," which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian life, also applies to immigrants, including those of a different color.
This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culti has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culti in the 1980s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.
Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work. It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British Empire has gone. The British Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive linkage between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union, and will act in accordance with its interests there, giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British because they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer "be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are too far apart.
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September 25, 2000
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