The University is Closed for Open Day: Australia in the Twenty-first Century

By Stephen Knight

Where is analysis in this age of banal tweets and narcissistic comments? Stephen Knight turns his modernly analytical and historically aware mind to current attitudes and actions in need of serious examination.

What is the impact of the bush myth on the national consciousness of Australian fiction? What of the modern shift in writing about Indigenous issues, from white writers to First Peoples? What has suddenly happened to Australian crime fiction?

Other essays look at unravelling travelling, the tiny machines that obsess us, then those bizarrely flourishing modern identity-enhancers & tattoos and personalised number plates; and of course, the state of the contemporary university.

Here is 21st century national complexity, its origins and its international connections, explored in a socially referential and almost always serious way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522874686

Stephen Knight

Stephen Knight was a journalist and the author of ‘Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution’ and ‘The Killing of Justice Godfrey’. He also wrote a novel, ‘Requiem at Rogano’. Stephen Knight was the writing name of Swami Puja Debal, a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He died in 1985.

Book preview

Stephen Knight is a professor of literature who worked for twenty-five years at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, becoming well known as an international scholar of the byways of literature, such as medieval romance and modern crime fiction. His published works include The Politics of Myth (2015) and Australian Crime Fiction: A 200-Year History (2018). He is now an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne.

THE

UNIVERSITY

IS

CLOSED

FOR

OPEN DAY

Themes and Scenes from 21st-Century Australia

STEPHEN KNIGHT

For Margaret, as ever.

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2019

Text © Stephen Knight, 2019

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2019

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Peter Long

Typeset in 11.5pt Baskerville by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522874679 (paperback)

9780522874686 (ebook)

Contents

Preface

Part I Presenting the Past

1Did Matilda Want to Waltz?

Fiction Before the Bush Myth

2White Australia or Fair Australia?

Indigenous Fiction Tells the Story

Part II Habits and Identities

3Unravelling Travelling and Its Environments

4Marksism Today

Do You Think the Tattoos Will Last?

5I’m Driving Myself

The Poetry of Car Plates and Names

6Modern Machines and Machinations

Part III Modernity and Traditions

7The Clues Were There All the Time

The Mystery of Australian Crime Fiction

8The University Is Closed for Open Day

Preface

Each weekend we have glossy magazines in the newspapers which present and elaborately illustrate clothes, food and holidays. Each day people exchange electronic messages about how they are feeling, both about themselves and the irritatingly exciting world, especially in terms of politics and sport. The television news has become a series of interviews with some talking head commenting on the need for solutions to previously unnoticed problems, and celebrating their own possible success. At school and in higher education increasing stress is laid on skills, but they only relate to human interaction in the present and at work, not to any deeper understanding of people and society.

What is missing in all this trite, personal, celebratory interaction is any extended analysis based on careful study, or what used to be called research, the sort of thing that was in the past routinely practised by skilled journalists and professional commentators, trained and often still working at major universities. Now, if anyone from a university does comment, it is briefly, in a newspaper or electronic outlet, and the opinions are closely tied to some current event or politician-oriented possibility, rather than to a theme or structure extending through time and space. This new quasi-intellectual process is on campus called ‘engagement’—substantial energy is now being devoted there to the process of talking generally, briefly and vaguely to the public and to those school students who used to be judged pre-tertiary. Perhaps at best stimulating a few people in the street or the school to think further, the engagement mode is not able, indeed not meant, to develop the extensive critical insights long associated with academic thinking. That was an intellectual marriage, and the politicians and businesspeople don’t want that these days—just brief and successive engagements.

As this world of vague general chat flourishes and moves to reshape politics, with banal ideologues like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson thriving, even dominating, and pretending to have policies, it seems of considerable value to bring the traditions and techniques of research and extended critique, including secondary reference and socio-historical contextualisation, to bear on some of the features of the ultra-modern and extra-disturbing world. That is the purpose of this collection of essays, which offer close observation and detailed analysis of phenomena evident in contemporary Australia. The essays also recurrently, as a necessary part of full analysis, go back into the past to trace the origins, meanings and complexities of modern activities and events: comparative and critical historical understanding is also strikingly absent from the contemporary world of comment. As a result of such analysis, the essays can at times be amused by, as well as critical of, the follies and fantasies they find, in the past and the present.

The essays fall into three groups. The first pair, ‘Presenting the Past’, explore at some length previous patterns in order to show how present ideas about the bush myth, and also continuing practices in the treatment of Indigenous people, are remarkably ignorant about what actually happened and was written in the past—and so it is possible, even essential, to critique continuing ideas and errors in both areas. The four essays in the second group, ‘Habits and Identities’, look at recent phenomena that seem so far to be without serious analysis, apart from being photographed and sent to ‘followers’ in the modern mechanical mode of analysis-free electronic conversation. Analysed here and also historicised are habits of travel, tattoos and their meanings, personalised car plates and names, and modern machines—including the allegedly ‘smart’ phones themselves. The last section, ‘Modernity and Traditions’, explores, in the context of their understudied history, two Australian formations that have notably developed and historically changed their nature in the last decades—for good in the case of crime fiction, for decided ill at the universities.

I have given references at the end of all these essays to sources that are quoted or discussed in detail, but not to novels and non-fiction books which are more generally mentioned. There are many other comparable domains of practice and ignorance that it would be interesting to write about but which could not be encompassed here. Notes already exist on issues ranging from the strange, like the weird anti-smart fashionability in clothing and furniture of shabby chic, to the widely practised but generally misunderstood, as with the recent growth of environmentalism, expressing as it does both an admiration for, and also a wish to appropriate personally, the natural world. Equally tempting would be to research areas combining human aspiration and competition, like ‘sport at school’, and with even more cheating and bad temper, ‘the behaviour of politicians’. Not unrelated combinations of self-expression and negativity might have flourished under the titles ‘walking the dog’ and ‘motoring behaviour’; most wretched of all might have been ‘publicising your book’.

Perhaps another set of thick files and saved internet items will be developed on those and other topics to continue to present a scholarly-style examination of understudied and less-than-comprehended phenomena in modern Australia. If that should be the case, there will be continuing reason to be grateful to people like those who have so nobly, and so serviceably, supported me in this project, such as publisher Louise Adler, editors Cathryn Smith and Paul Smitz, proofreader Richard McGregor, historian Stuart Macintyre, co-researcher and adviser Lucy Sussex, and my indispensable familial electronicists—son David Knight and daughter Elizabeth Thompson, with her sagely charming daughter Rosa, provider of illustrations to stick on the computer. Of course in this, as in all else, there has been the tolerant, supportive, often amused, sometimes editorial presence of my wife Margaret.

PART I

PRESENTING THE PAST

CHAPTER 1

DID MATILDA WANT TO WALTZ?

Fiction Before the Bush Myth

The Bush Today

Australia is deeply enmeshed with the myth of the bush, which is nevertheless an elusive place to describe. It might be rural, even hilly, terrain not very far from the coast; it might be flatter and dryer and further inland, where it can also be called the outback; it can even be, and in some sense centrally is, the huge arid spaces of the continental centre that have been collectively named the ‘never-never’, regions that seem beyond time. Essentially, the bush is not urban, though it may contain occasional far-separated small cohabitations. What it is not is a city or a town. Yet by the late nineteenth century, when the bush myth developed, already two-thirds of Australians lived in large urban areas, and theirs is now a very highly urbanised country: the bush myth is not in reality based on a nationally dominant formation.

Nevertheless, the myth dominates major Australian cultural successes, local and international. The two highest-earning Australian films include Crocodile Dundee (1986), a comic, America-oriented hymn to the all-male, humorous hero of the ultimate northern outback, with both crocodiles and a huge hyper-manly knife. Then there is Australia (2008), an unsubtly titled epic about a huge cattle station deep in the never-never, at least varied by having a capable, if improbably glamorous, owner played by Nicole Kidman.

Other cultural forms join the worship of distance, notably two best-known, best-selling novels. Colleen McCullough’s itself enormous The Thorn Birds (1977) is set again on a huge property hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. The decidedly more artistic Voss (1957) by Patrick White is based on the far-travelling explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. Before that, White’s work was praised overseas but largely disliked in Australia: this, winning the first Miles Franklin Award to be bestowed, was his national breakthrough, apparently because of its link with exploration and the mythical inland. It also has modern subtlety, doubling Voss’s life with that of a city-based young woman, her own struggles and aspirations, but both title and public reception underrate her significance.

Art too has a role. As the bush myth itself developed at the end of the nineteenth century, Tom Roberts made potent images of the rural male with his heroic Shearing the Rams (1890) and his rather courteous-looking bushrangers in Bailed Up (1895), while his colleagues Frederick McCubbin with Bush Idyll (1893) and Arthur Streeton in Golden Summer, Eaglehawk (1889) employed French plein-air impressionism to brilliant effect to realise local landscapes, nature-orienting them fully. This was unlike the early artists who celebrated in paint, watercolour and engravings the new colonial urban presence in a land both enormous and actually inhabited by Indigenous people—who would often lurk, engaged in their ancient practices, in a bottom corner of the scene. As Rebecca Edwards shows, these early artists, following the French master Claude Lorraine, combined intense nature with elements of developed civilisation, in order to ‘outwardly legitimise their claim to the land’ (page 177). That early non-bush tradition, like the settler/squatter novel discussed below, reached its height in the 1850s, but the power of visual images has been an equally potent part of the later bush myth. According to the National Gallery of Australia, by far the most popular of Sidney Nolan’s 1940s Ned Kelly paintings is the one where, helmeted and on his horse, with his back to us, Kelly stares out across a flat, bright, sunbaked plain. But Kelly operated in rainy, hilly, north-eastern Victoria: here he has been brilliantly, irresistibly, mythicised to become himself a never-never phenomenon.

The development of the bush myth was identified as fictional during the high period of national critical historicism in the 1970s and 1980s. The leftist historian Russel Ward had, in his book The Australian Legend (1958), insisted throughout that what he called ‘this national mystique’ (page 1, his italics) actually started as ‘the ethos of the Australian pastoral workers’ (page 238). Then, he claimed, it was radicalised and strengthened by the gold-diggers, and in the 1890s given literary canonisation in the weekly magazine The Bulletin, notably by Henry Lawson and Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Ward’s widely persuasive idea, linking the bush myth with early populist and democratic energy, is shown in a major essay by historian Graeme Davison (1978) to be itself mythic. Davison argues in detail how writers in the new Bulletin, feeling hostile to the conservative property owners, linked them to England and colonialism, but were also themselves anxious about the stresses of their own modern city life, so found a value that could be at once politically radical and attractively rural in the noble bushman himself.

The major practitioners of the new myth drew energy and the power to convince from their own essentially contradictory positions. Henry Lawson, the son of a gold-digger, came to the city with his mother Louisa, who had left her husband and would become an active writer and feminist. He remembered the bush as a place of hardship and pain, and on the one occasion in 1892 when as an adult he visited the outback near Bourke (sent by The Bulletin), he found it quite unpleasant: later he would even write in The Bulletin about ‘the awful desolation of the outback’ (27 February 1897). His early work mixed republican statements and urban poetry, but as he increasingly wrote articles urging decentralisation and land reform to free the wretched city people, those themes led to his bush-myth realisations.

These were stories often grimly noble and poems that were simplistic/romantic but also heroic: in an influential move in the mid-1890s, Lawson insisted on using a capital letter for ‘Bush’. Paterson became a successful Sydney lawyer, but he also mythicised the bush as an appealing alternative to what he saw as the degraded city—he was also brought up rurally, but at the settler level, socially higher and in attitude and education more politically conservative than Lawson. When Paterson was visiting Queensland, a former girlfriend played a tune he liked, and the property owner he was staying with told him about the murder of an active shearers’ unionist by local squatters: Paterson created the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’ from the two sources. A ‘matilda’ was a swagman’s backpack, and the political murder became a bushman nobly drowning himself to evade the hostilities of the law—and so, somehow eluding his own politics, dancing to death with his feminised swag.

The development of the new bush myth is linked by historian Stuart Macintyre (2004, page 130) to the social conflicts, economic depression and even the drought of the 1890s:

… from these disasters arose a national legend that maintained a powerful hold on succeeding generations. It was created by a new generation of writers and artists who adapted received techniques into consciously local idioms. In their search for what was distinctively Australian, they turned inwards, away from the city with its derivative forms to an idealised countryside.

In this process, Lawson and Paterson made central what Macintyre calls ‘the nomad bushman’ who represented ‘fierce independence, fortitude, irreverence for authority, egalitarianism and mateship’ (page 130).

Whether radically populist like Lawson or conservatively melodramatic as with Paterson, the bush myth thrived and was developed by later popular writers like Vance Palmer and eventually academically quasi-validated by Ward. No weakness arose from its inauthenticity—the early crime fiction stories in Australia, discussed in Chapter 7, show that convicts and gold-diggers did share strong views, but they are anti-governmental, not romantically bush-oriented. And there were also the overlooked women to consider. After Davison, an equally revealing statement was made by the literary critic Susan Sheridan in an essay that outgrew the context in which it appeared: an Australian studies journal from Denmark. She showed that the bush myth had quite occluded the popularity and importance of women writers: some of the later ones, like Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed and Jessie Huybers nee Couvreur (writing as ‘Tasma’) were, as Sheridan commented (1985, page 57), all dismissed by The Bulletin as ‘lady writers’: gender politics and alleged radicalism combined in masculine distaste, a theme Sheridan had already strongly developed in an essay on Ada Cambridge (1982). The pattern she observed has continued to operate: Richard White’s widely read, slightly earlier Inventing Australia (1981) does not give any of the women writers Sheridan mentions any place in developing ideologies, though he does recognise that Cambridge and her contemporaries were dismissed by The Bulletin. Through that continuingly narrow focus, they are not mentioned in Kay Schaffer’s Woman and the Bush (1988), though Barbara Baynton is given a chapter as a dissident rural author.

The Bulletin long survived, but when it was purchased by Sir Frank Packer in 1961 its own politics changed—and not all for the bad: at least the racist, sexist masthead slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’ was removed. It was closed in 2008 but the impact The Bulletin had as the medium for the bush myth has not faded. Looking in a large city bookshop when preparing this chapter, the only nineteenth-century author discussed here whom I could find was Henry Lawson, and the book was of course Bush Stories. The rows of Penguin Classics were rich with English nineteenth-century materials from Austen to Trollope.

The English are not perfect in their own memoriality: you never see a copy of a novel by the man who wrote thirty-six of them and famously outsold Dickens, the radical George Reynolds. But some English-style early reminiscence is much needed in Australia, as a survey of the quite recently developed genre of local literary history indicates. Geoffrey Dutton’s breakthrough Penguin The Literature of Australia (1964) has a single essay by John Barnes on ‘Australian Fiction to 1920’: forty-six pages, less than a twelfth of the total, cover some two-thirds of the time involved. This seems typical. Ken Goodwin’s 1986 A History of Australian Literature gives ‘The First 100 Years’ just twenty-seven pages, a tenth of the book. The Cambridge Companion of 2000, edited by Elizabeth Webby, offers twenty pages, just a twelfth, for the same period. Laurie Hergenhan’s bicentennial 1988 history, with a more discursive approach, has only twenty-four pages on the earlier material—a twentieth of this large book. The best to be found is 1998’s extensive Oxford Literary History edited by Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss, where two good essays by Delys Bird and Elizabeth Perkins provide forty-five pages: this one-ninth of the total is the fullest coverage the earlier material has received—which still seems seriously limited.

There is little sign that literary professionals want to look back beyond the rural bush-myth fable and its aftermath. The confidently titled The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination (2002) by Richard Nile begins Chapter 1 in 1914 with the young Katharine Susannah Prichard. She would go on to write The Pioneers (1915), a convict-settler novel; produce a ‘Goldfields Trilogy’ set in late nineteenth-century Western Australia (1921–50); and deal with the feelings, and the treatment, of Indigenous people in Coonardoo (1928): she herself does cover the early ground, but in this merely continues a century of previous fiction that the book ignores.

The lack of interest in exploring the variety, riches and ongoing possibilities of fiction not satisfied to waltz to death with Matilda is still structural. A few years ago a large grant application from Melbourne University entitled ‘Narratives of Australian Settlement from 1818 to 1872’, a well-theorised and pre-researched scheme with highly rated researchers involved, was rejected by the Australian Research Council and described as being in the bottom third of applications in terms of quality. But the subject remains important, in spite of, and because of, public inattention to the period and the literature.

Settler Fiction

The first books produced about the new colony were accounts of exploration and descriptions of the convict settlement. Some of them, like Captain Watkin Tench’s A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793), are interesting and well written. Then in 1826 a House of Commons committee encouraged emigration to be official government policy as a means of disposing of ‘the hardened unemployed and destitute’ (Lansbury, page 31), and increasing numbers of ‘free settlers’ began to arrive in what was still usually called New Holland. There was support for this in Britain as a way of reducing the numbers of urban unemployed and rural poor in a period of growing economic difficulty and, probably more important to the legislators, related growing social dissent in England. Through this period, personal accounts of life in the distant colony were popular, such as those by the transportee-turned-writer George Barrington (1795) and James Hardy Vaux (1819)—Vaux’s memoirs were regularly reprinted in London. The Australian-born WC Wentworth’s very detailed A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of New South Wales (1819)—the full title takes up four lines—was widely read and highly influential.

Fiction soon began to realise the attitudes and interests of the non-convict settlers, with a viewpoint quite different from that to be found later in the bush myth. An early story about emigration—not seen from London, where it was published, as ‘immigration’—is Charles Rowcroft’s Tales of the Colonies (1843), in its first edition anonymous, with the title page stating ‘edited by a late colonial magistrate’. Educated at Eton, Rowcroft worked for a couple of years as a justice of the peace in Hobart (not in fact a ‘magistrate’) but left after four years when his father, a British diplomat, was shot in Peru in 1824 during the Simón Bolivar–focused troubles. He settled back in England in 1826, bought a school, ran a newspaper, and after some years published Tales of the Colonies, his first novel. As what the publisher’s preface to the ‘new and cheaper edition’ calls ‘the journal of a settler’ (1856, unpaginated), it offers overt guidance and encouragement to those thinking of moving to Australia, discusses farming methods and possible profits, and towards the end gives a lengthy list of items to be brought out, like seeds, axe-heads and plastering equipment.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography finds it a worthwhile account of emigration and early farming on which ‘has been superimposed a sensational and melodramatic tale of blacks, bushrangers and white settlers’ (Hadgraft and Horner, page 402), but the narrative in fact gives a rich account of the early situation. William Thornley, an English farmer, and his wife move across the world: unlike in many later migration novels, little stress is laid on the voyage and Thornley is soon farming in richly described country near Hobart. The excitements and alarms of living in Van Diemen’s Land soon emerge. While helping to pursue sheep stealers, Thornley meets some Indigenous people and is astonished by their powers in tracking. There is a robbery by bushrangers, who are escaped or time-served convicts, and the locals chase them too, with limited success. Things grow grimmer when they find three stock-keepers dead—two killed in conflict with Indigenous people and one burnt to death in the hut where he took shelter. Later Thornley himself is similarly attacked and is about to be burnt when tied to a tree, but his friends