Nationhood Before Gough Whitlam: Australia in the 1960s – Stuart Ward

Dr James Curran, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, specialises in twentieth century Australian political culture. Dr Stuart Ward held the Keith Cameron Chair of Australian History at University College Dublin (2008-9) and teaches Australian studies and Imperial history at the University of Copenhagen. Stuart Ward and James Curran are the co-authors of The Unknown Nation – Australia after Empire. They say they were inspired to investigate this subject by the ongoing hand wringing over the question of “Australianness”, and the token debates that arise every Anzac Day and Australia Day but never get resolved. Stuart Ward and James Curran addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 18 May 2010

NATIONHOOD BEFORE GOUGH WHITLAM: AUSTRALIA IN THE 1960S

STUART WARD

Nationalism has had an unusual history in Australia. It’s an idea that had a profound influence in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and played an instrumental role in the politics of decolonisation the world over in the second half of the twentieth century. But it has tended to have an ambivalent resonance in Australia.

The word itself – nationalism – was never entirely at home here. Talk of a national character or a national spirit can certainly be traced all the way back to the colonial era, but nationalism has not been so prominent in our political culture. Those that waved the banner of nationalism had a tendency to come unstuck, whether it be economic nationalists, like Jack Lang, or a cultural nationalist, like P R Stephenson in the 1930s. Lang of course was sacked as Premier of NSW and Stephenson was ultimately locked up as a traitor during the Second World War.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm once defined nationalism, very simply, as the idea that the national and the political unit ought to be congruent. This definition provides a clue as to the discordant resonance of nationalism in Australian political language for the best part of a century and a half. In Australia, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the political unit or state, whether colonial or federal, tended not to function as the conduit of a self sufficient, self validating, exclusive, cultural nationalism.

When Henry Parkes spoke of a “crimson thread of kinship that runs through us all”, he was not invoking an exclusive Australian ethnicity, a cultural idea that could make sense in its own terms. Parkes was speaking at a time when all of the classic criteria for nineteenth century nationalism – race, ethnicity, common language, shared history, heritage, community of culture and so forth – tended to promote a wider sense of kinship with the British world. He invoked a global thread of kinship in its Australian setting.

This idea of Australians as a British people helped to define the categories of inclusion and exclusion in Australia – who was in and who was out. In classic, nationalist terms these categories were vigorously, even fiercely, upheld. But these categories also rendered the vocabulary of nationalism somehow dissonant, out of harmony with Australian experience. Historian Keith Hancock defended his concept of “independent Australian Britons” as something far more honourable, more dignified, and certainly far less dangerous than what he termed “the snarling nationalisms” of Europe. Somehow, in Australia, the idea of nationalism carried a sense of something angry, something potentially destabilising. So, at the level of civil and political culture, the language of empire and Britishness tended to perform the function that nationalism fulfilled elsewhere. Even as the political unit was defined in more narrow, more local terms.

Our book, The Unknown Nation, is fundamentally about what happens to the idea of nationalism in Australia when the superstructure of British imperialism, the material, strategic, economic props of Britishness, are rapidly swept aside in the 1950s and 1960s. When Australians find they have to reorient themselves in a radically re-ordered world. It is here, at this time, that Australian civil culture is faced with something of a dilemma. How to reconstitute the nation in a more self sufficient, self-validating way? It’s this fundamental problem that gives way to an entire generation of self reflection, debate, discord and public hand wringing about the national civic essence.

We have an era, the 1960s and into the 1970s, which is so often regarded in terms of national liberation, so often remembered as a time of new opportunities and new departures. But it can also be seen as a journey into the unknown. One of the reasons the idea of nationalism was so difficult at this time was because of the unprecedented adjustments occasioned by the global sweep of decolonisation, and Britain’s hesitant political and economic embrace of Europe.

These were processes that Australians had neither sought, nor particularly welcomed, certainly not unanimously so. As a result, they could not fall back on a myth of self-deliverance from empire, not in the way that underpinned the post-colonial, legitimating myths of places like India, Kenya, Ghana and so forth. And this raises a great question mark, grappled with by an entire generation of politicians, public servants, public intellectuals, artists, film makers, anthem composers, flag designers and all kinds of people. Once you recognise the obsolescence of being British – what next?

I want to talk briefly about how this challenge was met rhetorically, at the level of political language and some of the ideas that entered into public discourse to fill the void. Having done so, I’m going to hand over to James, who’s going to look at the way these ideas filtered into the business of governance, to the level of policy, and the way in which Australian political leaders in late 1960s and particularly into the 1970s tried to forge a new idea of Australia in practice.

From the late 1950s and early 1960s, we can see Australian public intellectuals grasping for a new nomenclature, a new way of talking about the collective civic idea. In 1958, Russell Ward published his celebrated The Australian Legend. While Ward used older, established concepts like “national character”, ideas that have a robust, deeper resonance, he also looked for new ideas. He talked about the national ethos, the national mystique. Ward was clearly grasping for a new way of making sense of a new Australia. It’s also in the early 1960s that we see the first appearance of the idea of Australian identity.

John Howard once talked wearily about a “perpetual seminar” about the Australian identity. Certainly it’s an idea of which for many people has become very tired and well-worn. Yet it’s not widely understood just how novel the term “national identity” is. Unlike the terms “national character” and “nationalism”, that have a deeper nineteenth century lineage, the notion of national identity is only about 50 years old. Australians, alongside Canadians, were among the pioneers of its usage. The term was borrowed in the 1950s from the realm of psychoanalysis, where it had been popularised by Eric Erikson in his book Childhood and Society.

Erikson wasn’t really interested in national identities – he was far more interested in children and adolescents grasping for a sense of themselves in relation to the world around them. What’s interesting is that by the 1950s this sense of the term “identity”, borrowed from psychoanalysis, was being built in to the civic discourse about collective identity. But it’s in places like Canada and Australia that you see the forefront of this development. Why is that? It seems that the metaphorical use of identity somehow worked for Canada and Australia where nations were seeking to wean themselves from the imperial embrace, or were trying to find a new purchase on a post-British self in a new era.

Harold Holt was the first Australian prime minister to use the term “Australian identity”; and Bill Snedden, as Minister for Immigration, was the first minister to use the term in a Cabinet submission. Snedden was referring to the need to remove the word “British” from Australian passports. Why? Because “our national identity had become more manifest” than it had once been. Yet, what distinguished the term from other forms of nomenclature was the very palpable sense of uncertainty that underpinned it. So it’s no wonder that the quest for national identity has been seen ever since as inherently problematic, the subject of much rhetorical searching, questing, longing, striving and so on.

While all this pondering and probing of the national identity was making headway in the 1960s, towards the end of that decade other ideas about national self-definition began to jostle for attention. This occurred in response to a similar set of problems and dilemmas. In his elevated role as Governor General, Paul Hasluck took every opportunity to exhort his fellow Australians to embrace the idea of Australian patriotism. In one of his annual televised addresses as Governor General, Hasluck announced “our patriotism has to be a patriotism for an Australia that exists, not to an Australia of a different kind, that no longer exists”. Here, the long shadow of imperial patriotism needed no spelling out, but it lurked as the subtext of his every utterance. But, like the notion of identity, Hasluck’s patriotism was couched in the future tense and had a grasping, even fumbling, quality to it. This was most clearly in evidence when Hasluck declared, “Patriotism and loyalty are our own thing.” What an extraordinary thing for our Head of State to say to the Australian people? It’s hard to conceive of a French President or an American President telling the people, “Our patriotism is ours, ours alone.”

Perhaps most interesting of all for our purposes, the idea of nationalism itself began to make new headway in the late 1960s. And it was not Edward Gough Whitlam, but John Gorton, who was the first Australian prime minister to run with this new language of nationalism. In 1968 Gorton announced, “I hope you will join me in the years ahead to foster a feeling of real nationalism.” By invoking this unusual concept of “real nationalism”, Gorton ushered in the era of the redundant adjective. Real nationalism. Distinctively Australian. Uniquely Australian. Truly Australian. Proudly Australian. All of these extraordinary adjectives seemed to make sense because of the peculiar, post imperial tension that infused our experience of nationalism.

Gorton embodied the problem of disentangling Australia from wider networks of British belonging. Particularly when he described himself on one occasion as “Australian to my boot heels”, clearly seeking to distance himself from the now dubious taint of Robert Menzies’ British bootstraps. And all this talk of nationalism was picked up by the press. Donald Horne, commenting on Gorton’s political style, dubbed it “the new nationalism” – the “new” referring implicitly to the business of extracting Australian civic culture from the sinews of empire.

The term was widely embraced in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was used by Donald Horne, Robert Drewe, Manning Clarke, Geoffrey Searle, Miriam Dixon and became particularly associated with the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam. It captured a mood – the youthful exuberance of the Vietnam protest movement, the boom in book publishing in Australia, new theatre companies, the resurrection of the dormant Australian film industry, the Nobel Prize to Patrick White and so forth, were all somehow understood within this context,. The “iron ore nationalism” that was associated with the minerals boom and Rex Connor in particular were further manifestations of the same basic idea. But the underlying logic and cohesion of this catch-all phrase, new nationalism, remained hazy and confused, particularly in its political application – in the kinds of politics, policies and projects that it underpinned.

I’ll conclude by making three points in general about the new nationalism. Firstly, what we’re arguing in the book is that the new nationalism was not what it purported to be: a spontaneous feeling arising out of the bosom of the people, claiming their birthright. Instead it was a reaction to events unfolding elsewhere. Events that tended to rob Australians of any meaningful purchase on the civic culture of being British. Secondly, the new nationalism was neither as robust, nor as self assured, as it sometimes seems in retrospect, and certainly as it is sometimes fondly remembered. We document in the book the many opponents of the new nationalism. There were many people who were deeply against this kind of logic and direction for Australia. Interestingly, even the chief advocates of the new nationalism – from Donald Horne to Gough Whitlam – were torn on the question of nationalism itself. They were vexed by the compromised history of nationalism, with two world wars and a holocaust behind it. Thirdly, the new nationalism tended to falter when it came to devising viable solutions. The consensus around the need for something new tended to break down into internal squabbling and discord when it came to putting these ideas into practice, agreeing on alternatives. As such, it ultimately failed by its own standards, as something that would provide a logic, a self-sufficient national myth and a guide to action and policy. It’s on this note on the new nationalism in action that I hand you over to James Curran.