Speaker

James Curran

Speech Date

May 18, 2010

Issue

Issue 7

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

JAMES CURRAN

As Stuart has pointed out, Australia’s problem of finding a new set of civic rights and rituals in the wake of empire, of remodelling the national image, was manifest across a broad range of practices and policies. From the late 1960s, governments in Canberra invested substantial funding into the arts and culture, particularly film and television, as a means of projecting a new, more distinctively Australian image to the world beyond. Politicians and policy makers went in search of a new national anthem, introduced a new system of Australian Honours, and increased efforts to invest Australia Day with a greater degree of gravitas.

Australia had long been able to identify its own independent interests in world affairs, and to express its disagreement with its great and powerful friends

All of these are documented extensively in our book. But, with each case, a common dilemma emerged. The new rights and rituals were being invested with a weight and significance they could not bear. The lack of a self-sufficient mythological base, as well as the realities of new international circumstances, conspired to undermine any attempt at forging a new-found sense of the people. As Donald Horne expressed it at the time, how could people in a modern, industrialised 1960s affluent society “be expected to fabricate something so alarmingly old-fashioned as national symbols”? The task of locating a new footing for Australia’s post imperial image was also manifest in the field of foreign relations.

was in the realm of diplomacy that Australians were most immediately compelled to adapt to a post-imperial strategic and cultural inheritance.

But there’s an important difference here. Australia had long been able to identify its own independent interests in world affairs, and to express its disagreement with its great and powerful friends where it felt it was not being treated as an equal, or when it felt it wasn’t being adequately consulted in the making of policies which directly affected Australian interests. The expression of Australian nationalism as a community of interest had a much more robust tradition in Australia than did the habit of scratching around frantically for a new set of national symbols. The history of Australia’s foreign relations is replete with examples of where the nation’s particular geopolitical interests and anxieties brought it into sharp conflict with those of Britain and the United States. Yet despite this tradition there were still problems articulating a new sense of nationalism in Australia’s foreign affairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was one thing to designate Britain a “foreign country”, which John Gorton did in 1969, but it was quite another thing to put that label into practice. In short, the new nationalism could only provide hesitant and ambivalent guidance to the conduct of Australian foreign affairs.

facing up to these realities took the form of Whitlam’s determination to rid Australia of what he called “colonial relics”

It was in the realm of diplomacy that Australians were most immediately compelled to adapt to a post-imperial strategic and cultural inheritance. In this new era they faced an uncertain future in which all their assumptions about the world and about the capacity of great power protectors to provide for their security were proving to be illusory. The international system that had held sway since the end of World War II had undergone rapid and substantial change. Above all else, the British military retreat from South-East Asia and the American decision to withdraw from the Asian mainland following their defeat in Vietnam, invited deep reflections about Australia’s future diplomatic orientation. Indeed, by 1971, the Defence Committee was concluding, “that Australia’s two traditional political and military associations had overshadowed to some extent full regional appreciation of Australia’s capacity to maintain an independent stand”. In other words, the redefinition of these two relationships with Britain and America became something of a proving ground for the new nationalism.

Whitlam maintained that these changes were “in no way directed against Britain”

The most important dimension in facing up to these realities took the form of Whitlam’s determination to rid Australia of what he called “colonial relics”. Before his departure for his first visit to London in April 1973 the new Labor prime minister told a British journalist that Australia’s ties with the UK, for “geographic, historic and commercial reasons” were “less formal, less institutional” than they once were. This process of stripping away the formalities of the relationship, especially its residual constitutional “anachronisms”, became something of a crusade for Whitlam. Indeed his two visits to Britain as Prime Minister were almost wholly concerned with the task of bringing the institutional dimension of the relationship into line with the economic, defence and foreign policy changes that had already taken place.

Norman Hannah, the American Consul General in Sydney, observed that “Australians were very noisy in advertising their newfound independent superiority”

Whitlam wanted to abolish appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from the Supreme Courts of the States, amend the Royal Style and Titles Act so that the Queen would henceforth become “Queen of Australia”, omit the reference to the Queen in the oath of allegiance, institute a new national anthem and inaugurate a new system of Australian honours. All of these proposed changes were essentially designed to construct a new idea of nationality based on Australian, rather than British, citizenship.

From the very beginning, however, the British did not quite understand Whitlam’s zeal. Where the Australian leader saw natural, emblematic steps towards a more independent status for Australia, the British saw “constitutional minutiae” and a “selfish and narrowly nationalistic” Australian perception of its new world role. Morrice James speculated that Whitlam might have “sprung the catch previously restraining the emergence of an Australian national identity or point of view”. But after first meeting the new Labor Prime Minister, James thought Whitlam suffered “a presentational itch” and the “desire to appear as a dramatic innovator”.

Whitlam maintained that these changes were “in no way directed against Britain”. They were:

solely intended to put our relationship on a more mature and contemporary basis and to reflect the development of a more independent Australian identity in the world. Indeed what the Australian government is seeking to achieve in its relations not only with Britain but also with a number of other countries – the United States, China, Canada, and our Asian neighbours – is to give formal recognition to what has already happened, as the necessary foundation for a realistic, more independent, more mature foreign policy. What we seek to do is no artificial convulsion of contrived nationalism.

The prototype remained on show in a glass case in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade until a new building was officially opened in 1997. And it hasn’t been sighted since.

Malcolm Fraser, although he reinstated God Save the Queen and brought back Imperial honours, did not unpick the Whitlam changes. There was no lurch back to Kiplingesque sentimentalism. Indeed in his first dispatch to London upon becoming the new British High Commissioner to Australia, Donald Tebbit observed that “For a man from the Menzies stable, Mr Fraser is quite unemotional about the British-Australian relationship”. And he lamented at the end of 1976 that “Britain has not so far featured on Mr Fraser’s calling list”. Reflecting on the state of the relationship, Tebbit conceded that while the “cultural bonds will continue to be enjoyed and the spiritual affinities will endure”, they would “not automatically cut political ice”.

While there’s every indication that Australians were slow to adjust to the idea of embracing Asia in this period, they were also slow to adjust to the idea of treating Britain and the United states as foreigners. Indeed, in a widely circulated memorandum of March 1974 – sent to all American diplomats in Asia and in Washington – Norman Hannah, the American Consul General in Sydney, observed that “Australians were very noisy in advertising their newfound independent superiority”. But, he added, “underneath the noise they don’t really believe it” and mused that Australians would continue to be “uncoordinated, even contradictory, in government, opposition, academia and in business before a distinctive Australian role in the world would be established”.

One thing was very clear to the Americans. Where once they had thought of their junior ally as “kith and kin”, they must, Hannah added, now “treat Australia as another foreign country – friendly but foreign”. Hannah had recognised, too, that there was something to be said for the image of a disoriented people grasping in every direction for a firm foothold in a post-imperial world. Rendering the great powers foreign was fundamental to this process, and it as clearly more of a wrench for some than for others.

There were some who wanted to flaunt this new outlook in a more flamboyant fashion, literally. In July 1974, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, proposed that Australian diplomats should wear a new diplomatic uniform when appearing at formal functions in Canberra and abroad. Renouf’s foray into haute couture was no mere flight of fancy. Prototypes were commissioned and fashion parades held, albeit for internal departmental consumption only. The suits were reported to be the Mao-Nehru style, single breasted and with high choker collars that were embroidered with golden sprigs of wattle. They were to be navy blue for those serving in cold climates and white for those in the tropics.

there was a perception that the Labor leader was not only moving too fast but into uncertain, uncharted and unfamiliar waters.

Renouf’s twofold justification for the proposal drew on familiar themes. First, that Australian diplomats had become pale imitations of the Americans and British on the world stage; second, that Australian representatives should stand out from the envoys of other nations at official functions. The proposal was greeted, as you can imagine, with a shower of scorn and sarcasm. The Sydney Morning Herald likened it to the sartorial catastrophes that adorned Australian sporting teams abroad, and even editorialised that this “phony, unnatural and thoroughly un-Australian fancy dress would arouse deep misgivings”. The Herald did not dispute that diplomats should seek to stand out, but they would not do so by, they said “making sartorial asses of themselves, as if to say, Look, I’m an Australian!”

Other commentators ran riot. The Bulletin’s David McNichol thought the whole idea was whacko for bonza Bazza Renouf. And, while he was sure the idea would be rejected by the Minister, he wondered what might come in its place. Would, he said, there be an instruction to ambassadors that they must greet arriving guests with cries of Cooee? Serve witchetty grubs at receptions and arrange didgeridoo recitals as standard embassy entertainment. In The Australian, another columnist took great pleasure in proposing his own style of dinky-di dress for diplomats, compete with a barbeque apron covered in a witty remark motif.

The diplomatic uniform may have been swiftly laughed off the national stage but its brief appearance stemmed from the same nagging tension that plagued much of Australia’s new national horizons. The desire to sooth the presentational itch vied with a more pressing need to sketch out a more independent policy stance in the world. Renouf clearly desired that Australians be treated with equal respect on the world stage, taking the idea of a nation free from the apron strings of its “great and powerful friends” from the briefing paper to the studied gaze of the embassy circuit. But in the end it was dismissed as ugly and synthetic. The prototype remained on show in a glass case in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade until a new building was officially opened in 1997. And it hasn’t been sighted since.

In closing, let me just note briefly that it isn’t only British officials that expressed some hesitation at the whirlwind of policy at this time, especially coming from Whitlam. The changes were so sudden, and implemented with such speed, that they caused more than a few heads to spin. The first commemoration of ANZAC Day under the new Labor government prompted some broader reflections on the nature and extent of changes in Australia’s world position. The Sydney Morning Herald detected in Whitlam’s changes not the welcome reveille of revived independence but rather what it called “the discordant tones of an uncertain trumpet”. And where once ANZAC day had been cause to celebrate cooperation with great and powerful friends, it had now become “the first time that the Australian nationalism forged at Gallipoli showed signs of being equated with isolationism by its latter-day interpreters in Canberra. We were at odds with Britain, estranged from the United States, upon which our Federal ministers heap abuse and insult”. This referred to Clyde Cameron and other Labor ministers describing the Nixon White House as “maniacs” following the Christmas bombings of December 1972. It all added to the sense of a world turned upside down: “the only countries our government seemed concerned to conciliate with, and befriend, are the communist states of China, East Germany, North Vietnam and North Korea. Those electors that agreed it was time for a change were getting it with a vengeance”.

Beside the self confident decisiveness of Whitlam, there was a perception that the Labor leader was not only moving too fast but into uncertain, uncharted and unfamiliar waters. Here was a diagnosis which suggested that far from transforming the country into an outward looking and proudly independent nation it was instead retreating into the sphere of self-satisfied indulgence. Two years later the Herald repeated the dose, lamenting that the new nationalism was turning Australia away from old alliances. In those days of “common cause and unquestioned purpose”, it said, “the acknowledgement of alliances and their obligations, of blood ties and a shared inheritance of values seemed no derogation of national identity and independence”.

That Whitlam’s goal should have generated so much fierce criticism and misunderstanding, both at home and abroad, and the fact that his changes invited the suspicion of brash indulgence suggests that the new nationalism was not the ideal rhetorical platform for Australia’s new diplomatic posture.

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 such 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. Our culture has been tainted with the idea of independence, another term conspicuously absent in the Australian lexicon. Those that wave the banner of nationalism have a tendency to come unstuck. Whether it be political nationalists, like Jack Lang, or a cultural nationalist, like P R Stephenson in the 1930s. Stephenson was 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 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”. But somehow, in Australia, the idea of nationalism carried a sense of something angry, something potentially destabilising. So, 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 vocal 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 60s. 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. It can also be seen, in this context, as a journey into the unknown. One of the reasons the idea of the nation was so difficult at the time was that the global sweep of decolonisation that swept the European imperial order aside from post 1945. In addition, there was 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 is met rhetorically, at the level of political language and some of the ideas that enter 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 filter 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 try to forge a new idea of Australia in practice.

From the late 1950s and 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 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 has talked about a “perpetual seminar” going on about the Australian identity. Certainly it’s an idea of which many people have become very tired and well-worn. Yet it’s not widely understood just how novel the term “the national identity” is. Unlike the terms “national character” and “nationalism”, that have a deeper nineteenth century lineage, and even older in French, globally the idea is only about 50 years old. Australians, alongside Canadians, are among the pioneers of its usage. Identity itself was borrowed in the 1950s from the realm of psychoanalysis. The idea of identity is something that referred to innate characteristics, an outlook, behaviour, and so forth. It was pioneered by Eric Erikson, who popularised its modern usage in his 1950 book Childhood and Society.

Erikson wasn’t really interested in national identities, but he was 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 Canada and Australia that you see the forefront of this development. Why is that? It seems to be that the metaphorical use of identity seemed to work for Canada and Australia where nations were seeking to wean themselves off 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”, or national identity in the Australian context; and Bill Sneddon, as Minister for Immigration, was the first minister to use the term in a Cabinet submission. Sneddon was referring to the need to take the word “British” off Australian passports. Why? Because our national identity was becoming more apparent than it had been. And, in the way the term is used, what distinguishes it from other forms of nomenclature is the very palpable sense of uncertainty that underpins 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 and 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 begin to jostle for attention. In a remarkably similar post-imperial context these came about from responding to the same 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 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. That Australians need to claim these things as their very own. But, like the notion of identity, Hasluck’s patriotism was couched in the future tense and had a grasping, even fumbling, quality to it.

Most tellingly of all, Hasluck declared, “Patriotism and loyalty are our own thing.” When you think about it, that is an extraordinary thing 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 begins 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 hard 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 rather 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 because of the peculiar, post imperial tension that infuses our language.

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 nationalism referred implicitly to the business of extracting Australian civic culture from the sinews of empire. It was precisely this that was new about the new nationalism.

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, the resurrection of the dormant Australian film industry, the Nobel Prize to Patrick White was somehow understood within this context, new theatre companies. The iron ore nationalism that was associated with the minerals boom and Rex Connor in particular. But the underlying logic and cohesion of this catch-all phrase, new nationalism, remained hazy and confused. Particularly in its political manifestations, 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.