A Pom's Fair Go
Introduction to The Lucky Culture And The Rise of an Australian Ruling Class, by Nick Cater (HarperCollins, 2013).
The only keys in my pocket were the ones that unlocked our suitcases.
The house and car had been sold, the furniture dispatched and here we were at Sydney airport with spent one-way tickets as souvenirs. At the age of 31, I was unemployed and homeless in a country I had bought off the plan, feeling exhilarated and terrified in equal measure.
You don’t have to be Protestant to possess the work ethic in Australia, you just have to be an immigrant, for no one starting a new life can afford the luxury of failure. The first duty of migrants is to justify their fateful decision to family, friends and, most importantly, to themselves. They must prove that this is a better place, even if they have to make it so themselves. They will be given every opportunity, since Australian playing fields are level, and old and new Australians are accorded equal respect.
For those who grew up in the British class system, there is something particularly refreshing in the breeze of egalitarianism that hits you as soon as you step off the plane. Customs and immigration officers command respect, not because they are wearing uniform, but because they are earning an honest living, just like the taxi driver you sit next to, not behind. Here is no recourse to status, and therein lies the promise, repeated so often that it ought to be a cliché: in this country everybody gets a fair go. There are no institutional barriers to success; the only restraints are personal deficits of imagination, energy and courage.
Within a fortnight I found myself in the editor’s office at The Advertiser trying to persuade Piers Akerman to give me a job. The conversation started badly; Piers appeared impatient with an applicant who had never worked on a newspaper, couldn’t write shorthand and whose nearest journalistic contact was 18,000 kilometres away. He looked at me suspiciously, head tilted forwards, eyebrows lowered, an expression I was to become familiar with over the years.
I suspect that that would have been the end of it had he not asked about the kids. Anna had missed out on her first birthday because her feckless father had booked a flight, on that day of all days, across the Pacific dateline. Robert, aged three, had been sick all night, and was asking when we were going home. Beneath Piers’s austere expression, I could sense a heart was beating. “You can start on Monday,’ he said, ‘and we’ll see how you go..”
After the bureaucracy of the BBC and the pomposity of everyday British life, it was a refreshing introduction to the Australian workplace. It was clear, however, that “a start” in the Australia vernacular was different from “a job,” and what happened next, for better or worse, was entirely up to me.
I grew up in Hythe, an enclave of the working and lower middle classes situated on the muddy fringes of Southampton Water, halfway between the oil refinery and the docks. The local comprehensive school I attended was consistently mediocre, a place where pupils aspired to be fair to middling, a place where the smart and the dumb were treated with equal disdain. It was not until I arrived at Exeter University that, for the first time. I came across people who had been to a private school. They pronounced all their syllables, exaggerated their vowels and had rather hoped to go to Oxford with their chums. We called them wellies, because they dressed like gentlemen and lady farmers in Wellington boots and Barbour jackets. We mocked their accents and pretensions, they mocked ours, and when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, it seemed to me to be all their fault. It was some years before I discovered that the people who put Maggie in power, not just once but three times, were the people I had grown up with: the socially conservative working and lower middle classes.
I spent a gap year as a volunteer community worker in the West Midlands, trying to repair failed social experiments. In the evenings we ran a shelter for the homeless and by day we would lend assistance to the re-homed, the people who had been moved from the slums to welfare-churning, concrete council estates half an hour by bus from the city centre. The estates had been built from large, prefabricated concrete slabs, slotted together around a metal frame and held together by gravity, a technique known as plattenbau in Communist East Germany, the only other place it took off. These days we would call our clients “victims”, and in a sense they were; the homeless were afficted by alcoholism and mental illness while the homed suffered from leaking windows and hubristic central planning. The errors of the postwar progressive project were catalogued each week on the pages of New Society, a magazine I had subscribed to since the age of fourteen. At the time, we blamed simple errors of design, expecting social engineers to fix socially engineered mistakes. It took years for me to come to the reluctant conclusion that the entire edifice of the welfare state, in which we had invested our hopes for a better Britain, was a monumental, multi-storey mistake.
A dispiriting year with the Brummies, followed by an undergraduate course in sociology, proved the perfect cure for youthful idealism. The downside was that I was, to all intents and purposes, unemployable; though I was not without ambition, and I began applying for traineeships at the BBC. Undaunted by the selection panel’s blindness to my journalistic potential, I drove laundry vans for a year while the corporation’s glacial personnel department considered if I were capable of being trained to run a radio studio. By this circuitous route, I began my professional broadcasting career turning a bakelite knob on a prewar control panel in Bush House at 2.00 am, trying to lower my voice an octave as I made my first station announcement: “This is the External Service of the BBC. The following program is in Mandarin Chinese.”
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After two years doing my bit towards fighting the Cold War and the battle for the Falklands from basement studios in the Strand, I was offered a job by Paul Lyneham, who was then Channel Seven’s correspondent in London. It was a crash course in stump jumping: the Australian art of overcoming obstacles to get the job done. We found the back way up a fire escape at the race track at Longchamps to stand on the creaking grandstand roof and capture the Australian thoroughbred Strawberry Road finishing fifth in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe; we commandeered a Paris taxi to drive the 300 kilometres to Brussels in the middle of the night to get to the Heysel Stadium, the scene of a terrible disaster in May 1985. We hired a BMW and conned our way onto the route of the Tour de France, nudging our way alongside the peloton to interview Phil Anderson as he rode over the Alps. We climbed the shores of Gallipoli, literally – colleague Alan Dent carrying the camera, and I the recorder, to capture the experience of the diggers. We interviewed men in their late 80s and 90s who had made that climb 70 years before, men in tears as they embraced Turkish veterans they had fought against. I was beginning to feel Australian.
I returned to the BBC a journalist, and spent my last two years in Thatcher’s rust belt covering the closing of shipyards and rising unemployment. My first assignment was in Middlesbrough, where the steel fabrication yards that had rolled out girders for the Sydney Harbour Bridge were empty, decaying shells. My cameraman gave me a quick guide to the city. “If you think of the River Tees as the arsehole of England,” he told me, “then Middlesbrough is five miles up it.”
By a stroke of good fortune, I scored a break from the northern winter in January 1988 to fly to Sydney to report on the bicentenary. It was my second visit to Australia, and again I found its egalitarianism much as D.H. Lawrence had described it 65 years earlier in his novel, Kangaroo:
They ran their city very well, as far as he could see. Everything was very easy, and there was no fuss … No real authority – no superior classes – hardly even any boss. And everything rolling along as easily as a full river, to all appearances … In Australia nobody is supposed to rule, and nobody does rule, so the distinction falls to the ground. The proletariat appoints men to administer the law, not to rule. These ministers are not really responsible, any more than a housemaid is responsible. The proletariat is all the time responsible, the only source of authority … ministers are merest instruments.
Back in England, I sent for the immigration forms. In a choice for preferred prime minister, Bob Hawke had my vote over Maggie. I had met Hawke briefly in a press conference in Brussels in the early eighties, and had been completely taken aback by his informality. If I recall correctly, he used the word bugger, which seemed to me to be me to be the right word for a prime minister to use when answering questions about the European Economic Community, the institution that became the European Union, and later the European Crisis.
At The Advertiser, I quickly became immersed in South Australian politics and discovered, to my delight, that just as Lawrence described there was no ruling class as such, even in Adelaide. Within weeks of stepping off the plane, I was sent at short notice to interview a man named Des Corcoran, for a series called Where Are They Now? I framed my first apologetic question: ‘I know this is a bit rude, but I’ve only just arrived. Could you tell me where were you then?’ Mr Corcoran, it turned out, had once been premier and a soldier in the Korean War. He invited me onto his back deck, where he offered me a beer and a helpful two-hour tutorial in Labor politics.
Politicians did not seem to hide behind press secretaries as they did in Britain; when I rang then Premier John Bannon’s minder, Chris Willis, for a quote one Sunday afternoon, he seemed mildly irritated at having his weekend disturbed and suggested I should drive round to Mr Bannon’s house to ask him, since he was not answering the phone. I discovered that the premier of South Australia was building a compost heap, and he answered the door in gardening gloves to give me a polite ‘no comment’. Lawrence was right, it seemed to me: ‘Demos was here his own master.’ I was beginning to think about being British in the smug way ex-smokers think about cigarettes: why had it taken me so long to give up?
In 2009, I was working as editor of The Weekend Australian when I received a News Limited corporate watch, and realised that twenty years had elapsed since we had disembarked from a Canadian Airlines DC10, with a visa marked unrestricted. Incredibly, by the end of 2012, I had occupied Australia for almost a tenth of its settled history. It was bigger and better in almost every respect from the country I signed up to join at the end of the 1980s, magnificent as it seemed to me then. It is a nation that is confident of its place in the world, one that looks less frequently to Europe or the United States for its lead, and is increasingly at home in its region. Technology and economic growth have broken the tyranny of distance; Australians made a mere 85 million overseas phone calls in 1989, fewer than six per person. We wrote letters instead: the average Australian posted ten items of overseas mail in the year I arrived; twenty years later they sent just four. Passengers on international flights have more than trebled; the cost of flying from Sydney to London has halved in real terms. We had five television channels then; now there are too many to count, even before we contemplate the arrival of the Internet.
It seemed, however, that while the communications gap closed, a cultural divide was driving Australians further apart. Paradoxically, at a time when technology was supposed to be bringing people together, Australian society seemed more polarised than when I arrived. The first decade of the twenty-first century was a testing time for public debate; on the issues of Aboriginal Reconciliation, asylum seeker policy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, later, climate change, it was impossible to sit on the fence. Australia was still one tribe, but there were two distinct clans rallying around different totems: the insiders and the outsiders.
There had always been divisions in Australian society: convicts and soldiers; Catholic and Protestant; city and country; rich and poor; Left and Right.
This, however, was of a different order; for the first time there were people who did not simply feel better off but better than their fellow Australians. They were cosmopolitan and sophisticated, well read (or so they would have us believe) and politically aware. Their presumption of virtue set them apart from the common herd: they were neither racist nor sexist, claimed to be indifferent to material wealth, ate healthily, drank in moderation and, if they were not gay themselves, made vicarious claims to gayness by having lots of friends who were. Their compassion knew no bounds: the vulnerable of the world could rely on their support, in principle at least. They were plastic bag refuseniks and tickers of carbon offset boxes, for they knew what the science was saying, and it could not be denied. People like them should be running the country, they thought, or more accurately, ruling it.
Anyone who had behaved like this in the Australia I arrived in would have been told, bluntly, to pull their head in. Their ridiculousness would have been ridiculed, their pretensions pilloried and their conjectures countered by common sense. Today, however, they call the shots, since their voices represent the majority view in the media, education, the law and the political class. On an ABC TV discussion program, dissenting voices are sometimes outnumbered five to one; unpopular panellists face jeers and boos from the inner city studio audience as mocking tweets scroll across the bottom of the screen. This was not the classless country I had signed up to join; it was split into two, with one side showing troubling aristocratic ambitions.
This was not the egalitarian Australia, where everyone who earned an honest living was worthy of equal respect, where manual and non-manual workers stood as equals in the front bar and the wisdom of the cloisters was matched by the wisdom of the paddock.
Sneering was taboo in the Australia I arrived in; today it is ubiquitous. The ocker and the larrikin of 1989 were street-wise underdogs who commanded respect; in the insiders’ imagination, the bogans and rednecks of today are vulgar, vacuous materialists. The proletariat has gone from needy to greedy in the space of a generation. Once they were the victims of capitalism, now they are its mercenary agents, spending their ill-gotten gains to expand their carbon footprint. The oppressed of the earth have become its oppressors.
Industrialists who were once courted by premiers and prime ministers as the creators of common wealth are today assumed to be roguish and unscrupulous. The assumption that growth follows investment as sure as night follows day, and that a growing economy would pay dividends to all, has been abandoned. Contemporary industrialists are portrayed as grasping creatures intent on pocketing everything for themselves. Corpulent capitalists and blubbery blackguards are stripped of their dignity and placed in the stocks.
“Such mirthless, illiberal and intolerant behaviour would not have been allowed in the country in which I arrived in 1989 yet, like swearing in front of women and children, the moratorium has been lifted on the sneer, the open denigration of one’s fellow Australians”
Like the middle-class ascendancies of earlier ages, they are inclined towards puritanism, although this time without divine authority. They cast a censorious eye on the lifestyles of their fellow Australians, sternly admonishing any lapses of judgment in a manner that would only have been acceptable from the pulpit or the teacher’s desk half a century ago. For the most part, the grazers at McDonald’s are considered to be as clueless as the cattle slaughtered for their sustenance; they cannot be expected to know better. A few, however, who show outward signs of intelligence, can only be taking a contrarian stance out of malevolence. The distinction between mutton-heads, who are merely demeaned, and the malevolent, who are detested, can be seen in the attitude to body mass. The suburban classes have been ravaged by an obesity epidemic that torments them much as their ancestors were stricken by typhoid and cholera. The others are considered to be downright gluttonous; stout entrepreneurs, portly politicians and paunchy power-brokers deserve nothing but the deepest contempt.
Such mirthless, illiberal and intolerant behaviour would not have been allowed in the country in which I arrived in 1989 yet, like swearing in front of women and children, the moratorium has been lifted on the sneer, the open denigration of one’s fellow Australians. It is a display of prejudice we once reserved for foreigners: lazy Mediterraneans, warring Tartars and inscrutable Orientals, before race-based expressions of patriotism became unfashionable. With the arrival of Twitter, the sneer has gone viral, an expression that, like the obesity epidemic, absolves anyone of any responsibility.
The Australians I admired from afar from childhood were outspoken, witty people, unencumbered by the stiffing politeness of British society. I marvelled at the verbal dexterity in the deployment of the word “bastard”. It was a profanity that could not be uttered in an English family home, ranking marginally behind the four-letter words in its capacity to shock. In Australia, there were heaps of bastards; you could be a lucky bastard or a bloody bastard, and even a bad bastard could be good. Naturally, there was no excuse for an act of bastardy, but as a blunt term of endearment, bastard seemed to be an adornment to the lexicon of a people courageous enough to fall out with one another and then square it up later at the pub, rather than hiding behind the cowardly and insidious sneer. At times I feel as if I am back at comprehensive school, averaging out my thoughts and opinions to avoid losing friends.
In August 2010, I listened to Frank Furedi at a Centre for Independent Studies conference as he discussed the rise of Europe’s new moral guardians. Cosmopolitan sophisticates from London to Helsinki were absorbed with the transnational European project, out of touch and out of patience with the majority of their compatriots.
They seemed the identical cousins of our own putative ruling class, and if the crumbling Euro-project was a portent of where we were headed, it was time to start taking them seriously. Over lunch in Sydney later that month, and in subsequent email exchanges and Skype conversations, Frank encouraged me to dig deeper into the origins and nature of our emerging aristocracy, and the idea for The Lucky Culture was formed.
It remains to be seen if Australia can rise above this new global intellectual hegemony. The anointing of a self-appointed ruling class of sophisticates would, however, be an unnatural development among a people skilled at lopping poppies. To describe the Australian habit of cutting the pompous down to size as the tall poppy syndrome is to imply it is undesirable. To me, it seems to be a natural enforcement mechanism for egalitarianism; nobody is allowed to have tickets on themselves or presumptions of privileged status. The flattened social landscape has its critics, of course, the most common argument against it being that egalitarianism leads inevitably towards mediocrity. It is an argument that is defeated once a year on the first Tuesday in November as several tonnes of precious thoroughbred flesh laps the Flemington Racecourse. The Melbourne Cup is powered by the energy of egalitarianism; mass participation, shattened odds and the handicapper’s lead in their saddle bags do nothing to curb the thoroughbred industry’s eternal quest for excellence; in fact, they are its motivation. There are 24 runners at the starting gate and hope rides on every one of them, not because they are equal, but because they have been given a chance. Australia’s dynamism begins with the understanding that since everyone has an equal chance in life, everyone should have a go. Cultures that permit favouritism are prone to fatalism; the perception that the odds are stacked against you stifles ambition and leads to stagnation.
The nature of today’s presumptive ruling class that claims authority not by wealth or force, but by moral superiority, endows it with a deeply illiberal streak harmful to civic debate. Since it claims to possess a more virtuous outlook on life, the playing field in the contest of ideas is tilted in its favour. A class that claims the moral high ground will be tempted, sooner or later, to resort to censorship, since notions that challenge good ideas are, by necessity, bad. To allow that the idea might be better is to surrender their post. !e shutting down of debate, the threat to regulate the press and the curtailment of the right to free speech through whatever means are available are new and disturbing tendencies.
Emphatically, The Lucky Culture is not a political history, for we are more than just political animals. I am indebted, therefore, to Professor Furedi for rekindling my interest in the discipline of sociology, enabling me to step beyond the imagined divisions between Left and Right. The seating arrangements of pre-revolutionary French government are an untrustworthy guide to the cultural topography of contemporary Australia and to suggest that people behave in a certain way because they are neo-liberals, greenies, communists, Hayekians or Keynsians is to dodge the intellectual heavy lifting. Only the freakish few are genuinely driven by ideology; the rest of us are obliged to look for more mundane excuses for our actions.
The Lucky Culture is also, in part, a study in history. As I read more about events in Australia before 1989, the year of my arrival, it became glaringly apparent that there were substantial gaps in the narrative. It is hardly surprising that a forward-looking people, little given to nostalgia or raking over the past, has small appetite for history. Yet if we consider the shortage of nourishing history as a deficiency in our intellectual diet, it might account for the listlessness of current debate, the pallid shades of many of its arguments and the choleric temper of many of its proponents. Too much of our history has been written with a political narrative; I share Niall Ferguson’s conviction that broad-based economic and cultural history is often more informative.
“Australia is a country that thrives on discussion, a true democracy in which everyone, or nearly everyone, considers it their business to discuss the affairs of the day”
I therefore hope to make a modest contribution to the field of cultural archaeology, if there is such a discipline. It is hard enough to understand what is going on in the heads of our contemporaries, let alone our forebears. Yet hundreds of millions of cultural artefacts are preserved in our libraries and museums: the contemporaneous written word, or ideas otherwise recorded, that paint a rich picture of the lost intellectual worlds of the past. There has never been a better time to mine these treasure-troves; digital technology has brought an exponential increase in the information available from the past as well as the present. !e digitisation of newspapers, books and other documents has made great strides, and the ability to word-search vast quantities of material in a matter of micro-seconds has opened new oceans for the curious scholar to explore.
The last thing the Australian publishing industry needs is another polemic, and our civic debate needs one even less. If offence is taken at an ill-chosen adjective, or a lazily constructed argument, it was not intended. Ideas should be held lightly between the fingers, and with that in mind, The Lucky Culture comes with an open invitation to disagree. Australia is a country that thrives on discussion, a true democracy in which everyone, or nearly everyone, considers it their business to discuss the affairs of the day. In that spirit, I do not expect anyone to agree with everything I have to say, and I sincerely hope that vigorous debate will ensue.
Outside the inner clique that dominates politics, academia and the media, the Australian spirit remains strong. It is not, I would suggest, the spirit of the frontier but the spirit of the front bar: pragmatic, personable and above all generous. It is the spirit I found alive and well at the Imperial Hotel in Ravenswood, Queensland, where I spent two weeks in August 2012, putting the final touches to this book. It gave me courage that I was on the right track, that intelligent life in Australia does not disappear ten kilometres from the CBD, and it is from the essential virtue of its people that I draw my optimism for the future.
Over beers at the Imperial’s front bar, I discovered abundant reserves of human energy and ingenuity, Australia’s great renewable resources. We expect to find them in every native-born Australian, but we look for them especially in migrants and are seldom disappointed. No one comes to Australia for an easy time, they come here for a future. They do not seek deliverance, they seek the opportunity to deliver. This is not the promised land or the island of the blessed, but it is a land of promise that offers the chance of redemption.
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